Bush telling the American people that we have to end our dependence on foreign oil is like...
...a pimp railing against prostitution.

Never have the big oil companies had a better friend in the White House than they do now. After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita we've supposedly been in a bit of an oil crisis, yet Exxon reports record profits of over 11 billion dollars. If we're in an actual crisis then shouldn't they have reported losses or, at the very least, minimal profits? I've asked this before, but the matter begs further attention. The government should have stepped in and done something to prevent these companies from gouging, gouging, GOUGING the American consumers.

Maybe it's a strategy, though. Perhaps Bush is clever enough to know (NOTE: I don't really believe he is) that the only way to get the American people to accept things that are inconvenient is to wait until situations get so unpleasant that they/we realize that there is no other choice.

Can you imagine the pre-9/11 public putting up with the increased airport security restrictions that were put in place if the World Trade Center and Pentagon hadn't been attacked? No. It takes a major event or an effect on our pocketbooks to get us to accept major change.

So, maybe Bushie is letting gas prices go up so that we'll be so fed up that we'll all realize that we have to do something about oil consumption and dependence. If gas prices were to go up to $5, $8, $12 a gallon I'm sure that people would be a little more willing to trade their gas guzzlers in for something fuel-efficient and practical to get them from Point A to Point B.

Our lawmakers don't pass laws until we the people force their hands. Do you think that they willingly passed labor laws that would be very costly to the wealthy business barons who got them elected? Of course they didn't. It was only after so many children died in the workplace, women burned in hazardous sweatshops, and people got sick and tired (literally) of working 14 hour days, 7 days a week that anything was ever done by the lawmakers. In the early 1900's they were so afraid of the possibility that Marxism could spread and threaten their positions that they gave in just enough to satisfy the people.

The rich people who run the country don't make concessions to the little people out of kindness or because it's the right thing to do. They only act when they know that it's too dangerous not to. The same kind of pressure will be required to effect any change concerning our dependence on foreign oil, tax cuts that are fair to the lower and middle classes and don't favor the wealthiest 1% of society, social security reform, health care benefits for everyone, etc. Things only get accomplished when "the people" demand it and the oligarchs who lead this plutocratic corporatocracy of ours are frightened enough to give in just enough to calm us down.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was correct when he said, "It just wasn't credible to hear him talk about making America more secure and honoring our troops or making America energy independent or making health care more affordable without hearing him explain why he's done just the opposite for the last five years."

Bush will say some things because he knows that many people will believe that he means what he says, but his actions (or inactions) prove otherwise. But some people will give him points just for saying that we have to end our dependence on foreign oil, meanwhile he won't do one thing to follow through on the sentiment. When Jimmy Carter said basically the same thing almost 30 years ago the man meant it, but was unable to do anything about it. This guy says it, and he could probably do something about it if he really wanted to, but he has no intention to do diddly-squat.

The difference between "boy-toy" and "toy-boy" (yes, there is a difference)
Even with made up words and phrases there should be rules of usage. I was reading Ted Casablanca's "Awful Truth" column at eonline.com today and noticed that he refers to Ashlee Simpson's boyfriend as a boy-toy.

Anyone who remembers the 80's should know that a boy-toy is a girl, not a boy. Madonna popularized the term circa 1984 when she sported a belt buckle with her nickname, Boy Toy, on it. She herself was the boy-toy; a toy that is played with by boys. Boy-toy: the toy of a boy.

A toy-boy, on the other hand, is a boy who is played with like a toy. Toy-boy: a boy that is a toy.

Toy-boy commonly refers to go-go boys and/or the younger date-mates who keep older women or men company.

Since boys can certainly be the toys of other boys it's not necessarily incorrect to call a young guy a boy-toy, but you should only use this term if the boy in question is being played with by another boy. If he's being played with by a girl (like Ashlee Simpson), then he's a girl-toy (this term doesn't have the same cache, so I don't expect it to catch on).

If what I've laid out here before you isn't an official rule, it should be. If it has never been written down before for posterity, it has now.

"Teabag" is a four-letter word
Amy Sedaris was on "The Late Show with David Letterman" last Friday night and at the end of her segment she mentioned that she's recently added new "bite-sized blue-balls... with cheeses, and butters, and nuts, and such" to her cheeseball making repertoire.

Then she reminisced about how when she was growing up, sometimes supermarkets would give little extra gifts with some products and that these gifts usually had some tenuous connection to the purchased product itself: "Syrup would come with tape, because they're both sticky, or a glass with detergent... One time I remember my dad buying a bag of dog food and it came with a pair of knee-highs. What is that connection? I'm serious."

Well, she told Dave that she wants to think of some little gift to include with her bite-sized blue balls and she asked him for suggestions before offering one herself.

I know how Amy thinks, plus I could read her lips, so I knew that she said "teabags", but CBS censored the word!

People have been able to say "bitch", "damn", and "hell" on network television in prime-time for decades now, but you can't say the word "teabag" after midnight.

I guess the problem for the network censors is that Amy used the word "teabag" in conjunction with talk about her "bite-sized blue balls", but anyone who knows anything about the slang expression "teabagging" probably wouldn't be offended by it, and 98% of viewers probably wouldn't have gotten the reference at all.

Hi-LA-rious!

English as a second language
Maybe someday in the not-too-distant future we'll all be speaking English as a second language. Or maybe tvguide.com posted this news item just to point out how futile the efforts to save "Arrested Development", my current favorite TV comedy, might be:

Contra Viento y Marea (with 4.8 million viewers) bested Arrested Development's savage send-up of its struggles with Fox by about 500,000 viewers, while Alborada improved on that at 9 o'clock by drawing a full 4.9 million viewers. Did I mention that Univision programming is now included in the Nielsen's? S?!

Now, many of you know that I love my telenovelas, and "Contra Viento y Marea" happens to be the one that I'm currently watching every night, but it's a shame that what is arguably the best show on network television can't even beat a soap opera on a foreign language cable channel.

Movie madness
I spent the Christmas holiday weekend watching movies. I saw Brokeback Mountain, King Kong, The Producers, and Casanova in theaters, and watched the DVD of Dark City three times (the DVD has two commentary tracks that I wanted to hear after my initial viewing). I'm glad to report that I enjoyed everything that I saw.

Brokeback Mountain featured great performances by Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, and Michelle Williams.

King Kong was quite a cinematic achievement. I think that Peter Jackson could have cut out some of the many encounters with frightening creatures on Skull Island, though. It's a long movie, so we could have done without at least one or two of those scenes. Each scene was impressively crafted, but there were so many of them that it got to be a little exhausting after a while. Plus, these scenes didn't really do anything to move the plot forward at all.

The Producers was a lot of fun. Some people might not like the fact that it's very old-fashioned, but I loved that it was a throwback to the big-screen musicals of old Hollywood. I'll almost certainly never get an opportunity to see Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane reprise their roles onstage, so at the very least this film captures their great, but ephemeral, Broadway performances on film for generations to come.

After The Producers ended I sneaked into the theater that was about to show Casanova. The cast was great, and the story was frothy fun, but for me the real star was Venice itself. I'll see any movie that is set in Venice, but it's always a nice bonus to see something that also happens to be enjoyable.

And as for Dark City, it's been a favorite film of mine since it premiered in 1998 and I just wanted to see it again, so I borrowed the DVD from a co-worker.

Over the long weekend I also watched the 13-episode HBO series, "Epitafios", in a couple marathon sessions. It was filmed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for HBO's Latin market, but was so well-done and so well-received that they decided to show it on their regular plain-old HBO channel (it seems like there are about 50 different HBO channels now). I was able to watch it via HBO On Demand (yet another HBO option). [Note: "Epitafios" is currently being shown on the HBO Signature channel on Wednesday nights at 9:00pm EST.]

This show was exceptional. I only wish that I'd seen it when it was originally aired. For some reason they left episode #7 out of the On Demand queue, but at least I got to see the rest of them.

"Epitafios" was a very stylish thriller that gave me a genuine sense that anything could happen and that any characters could die at any moment. Usually when I watch a psychological drama about the hunt for a psychopathic serial killer I don't really worry very much about the main protagonists because of my certainty that they wouldn't/couldn't kill off a main character. But with "Epitafios" I didn't really have any such comfort at any point of the entire miniseries. It kept me on edge from the beginning of the first episode to the closing scene of the finale.

I have to admit that the killings are a bit Byzantine in the elaborate planning and details that would be required, and it's rather unbelievable that anyone could be so accurate at predicting the actions and reactions of the other parties involved, but if you suspend a little of your disbelief you'll be able to enjoy the ride. There's one trait of the killer (besides being a homicidal maniac) that bothers me because it's been done in movies and on TV cop shows too many times before [Hint: the folks at GLAAD could give you a list of movies that have gone down this road before], but I didn't let that color my opinion about the show's many merits.

Be warned that if you can't handle The Silence of the Lambs or any other movies that have Hannibal Lechter-like characters, you might have to look away from the screen at least once in each episode. This killer adds a sick sense of poetry to his murders, making them into macabre art installations with cryptic meanings.

Bravo to the writers, directors, cast, and crew! And thanks to HBO. I just heard that they're going to order a second season. I don't know how they'll manage it (perhaps a copycat killer), but when they've figured it all out and get it back on the air, I am so there!

Long time no write
I know, it's been a while since I've posted any entries. I wish I could say I've had better things to do, but other than a nice trip to Connecticut at Thanksgiving time I haven't really done much of anything.

I'm not sending out any Christmas cards (or cards of any other holiday variety, for that matter) so don't wait by your mailboxes for one. I'm thinking of writing up a "year in review" thingie that I'll probably post here at the ol' bloggarino, but that'll probably be it. We'll see. Amy Sedaris just told me that she's doing the same thing, so I don't feel so bad.

There's not much to watch on TV lately, so I'm glad that "Project Runway" is back on BRAVO. Man, that Santino is a total dick! I liked him in the first episode, but he is just so full of himself. He acts like such a child when anyone else is chosen as the best of the week's challenge.

I was quite annoyed last night, though, when the judges found some merit in Daniel Franco's lingerie garments (even though they thought that his three items were all too similar to each other) and didn't like Santino's garments at all (not to mention that they realized that his team leadership was lacking and that he was a bad sport), yet they still chose to say auf wiedersehen to Daniel and keep the creep with the King Kong-sized ego. Despite the fact that he is a talented designer, I think that they're just keeping Santino around for the potential drama. I can't think of any other reason why they'd allow him to get away with speaking to Nina the way that he does (but, in a way, it is fun to see someone give Nina a little 'tude).

Changing the subject...

Right now I'm reading "Lost Christianities" by Bart Ehrman, which is a really interesting look at how various ancient "apocryphal" scriptures, Gospels, Acts, and Letters either made it into the official canon of "orthodox" Christianity or were suppressed, hidden, or destroyed.

The reason I bring this up here is because in one part of the book Ehrman discusses how some of these early writings, especially the Acts of Paul and the Acts of Thecla, resembled the overarching storytelling themes of ancient Greek romances like Chareas and Callirhoe or Leucippe and Cleitophon. And in reading about the plots of these ancient Greek novels I've learned that their storytelling wasn't much different from the kind that I see on Univision when I watch my latest Mexican novela, "Contra Viento y Marea". A couple meets, falls in love, is separated by various machinations of numerous villains and by fate itself, and is ultimately reunited against all odds.

I have to tell you that the early Christian writings didn't have the same narrative objective of letting love conquer all, however. The Acts of Paul and of Thecla actually do the opposite and try to convince people to abstain from any forms of physical love, even between married people. I've only mentioned them because I wanted to explain how I came to be reading about the Greek novels. My telenovelas would be pretty boring if they cut out all of the romance and just told stories of people struggling to retain their purity.

Is it Backwards Day?
As I was walking to Georgetown (to see “The Legend of Zorro”) this morning I looked down at the headlines on some of the newspapers that were in the vending machines on a street corner along the way, and imagine my surprise when I learned that Exxon and other big oil companies recorded historic profits for the most recent quarter!

You might wonder why was this surprising to me. Well, I don’t drive my car very often, maybe once or twice a month, so this should actually be more offensive to the people around the country who need their vehicles to get to work and have had to pay upwards of three dollars per gallon of gas when they went to fill their tanks. The “oil crisis” won’t personally affect me until the prices of food and other goods are raised to offset the collateral rising transportation costs, so until then I really couldn’t care less if gas prices go beyond seven dollars a gallon. But most other Americans have to care. Many people need to drive, and others just enjoy the sense of freedom that their vehicles give them. [We’ve loved our cars ever since Henry Ford first made the Model T available to the masses in the early 1900’s. And that love of the automobile spread farther and wider in the 1950’s, during the Cold War, when construction of the nation’s highway system became a priority because of the need to make it easier for military vehicles to be mobilized in the event of a war with Russia. This practical need also made it possible for the average American to get from starting point to destination, whether for a family vacation, a romantic weekend in the country, or a shopping trip to a cluster of outlet stores in the suburbs.]

From everything we’ve read in our newspapers and heard on our nightly news broadcasts, the oil industry has been going through tough times, primarily because of a little war we’ve got going on in the Middle East and the repeated damage done to refineries and pipelines caused by two of the (record-setting number of) hurricanes that have struck our Gulf Coast this year. Let’s not even get started on the ecological root causes of this particular aspect of the situation that I’m currently discussing here today.

Can you think of any other industry in which a corporation could go through what they’ve portrayed publicly to be a (very) rough patch and still end up with record-setting profits? If your C.E.O. informed you and your coworkers that the company you work for is having a difficult quarter or a bad year, wouldn’t you expect that the quarterly or annual report would demonstrate proof of this hardship by showing losses?

It seems to me that these big oil companies themselves haven’t actually been going through hard times at all. They’ve passed their difficulties directly to their customers. Is it a coincidence that the man in the White House was once an oil man and he still has many close associates who are in the oil industry? Why doesn’t the government step in and regulate these record-setting profits? If we’re really having an oil crisis, then shouldn’t it be considered treasonous for these companies not to absorb any of the hardship? The right-wingers who control the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of our government (yes, all three) love to talk about their “family values,” but they don’t seem to care that it’s getting more and more difficult for American families to pay for the gasoline they need to get to their jobs, nor does it seem to concern them that when transportation expenses increase, these same families will be having a much harder time putting food on their tables.

As you’d expect, your company would be reporting either minimal profits or no profits at all during bad times. But more likely, your company’s stockholders, employees, and the world at large would be notified that there was actually a deficit! Yes, as strange as it may seem, other companies that go through difficult periods will actually report that they’ve suffered losses, perhaps even record-setting losses. The last thing you’d expect would be for them to tout their “historic profits,” unless you work in the health-care industry, perhaps. But that’s another matter for another time…

Do we really care about fighting this "terrorism" thing?
As this latest terror attack in Bali demonstrates, the terrorists are smart enough to attack countries where it hurts most, in their money belts. An attack like this one is clearly supposed to have an effect on the tourism industry, which would do a lot of damage to the economy.

It may sound simplistic, but we could put the terrorists out of business if we made it our priority to end our dependence on their oil. Without our money, which we give them so freely, they'd have to go back to living in tents across their vast wastelands that they're so intent to expel us from. They hate our Western culture, but they certainly don't mind taking our money and living in cities that resemble our decadent, evil society.

In this day and age we should be able to put our scientists to work on developing vehicles that are powered by alternative fuels or, even better, on an efficient and powerful non-combustion engine (which would also do wonders for the environment in addition to putting the terrorists out of business).

Yes, I know that this will probably not happen until things get so bad that there's no other choice. That's usually the only way that any real progress ever gets made. There are too many friends of too many powerful people who make a lot of money from the oil industry in this country. We live not in a democracy, but in a corporatocracy. What the big business leaders want/need, the big business leaders get. Every member of Congress has gotten there with the money and support from big business, especially the oil industry and pharmaceutical companies.

I don't see alternative fuels or non-combustion engines as a big threat to the auto industry, though. Somebody would have to make these new vehicles, so it might as well be the corporations that already exist. Our oil barons could still supply our need for fuel to use in heating homes and its other pursposes, like making plastics. Perhaps we produce enough oil within our own borders, and in other countries like Venezuela, to keep our oil company executives fat and satisfied.

El Gran Final de "La Madrastra"
So the final episodes of "La Madrastra" aired Monday night and we finally learned who "el verdadero asesino de Patricia" was. It turned out to be that creepy perv Demetrio Rivero, Esteban's attorney.

But apparently the writers didn't think that having him be an attorney was bad enough for their villain. They also made him be a child molester (of his former stepdaughter, Ana Rosa, who is his current wife's niece), a cross-dresser (this detail was thrown in near the end of the series), a worshipper of La Santissima Muerte (the Most Holy Death), and the murderer of at least five people (Patricia, Servando, Luciano, the bellboy in Aruba, and Ana Rosa).

Good old Deme gets his comeuppance in the end, but some people at the "La Madrastra" forum actually felt sorry for him. I think that they were just upset that Alba, the über-bitch, didn't suffer in the end. She just couldn't understand why everyone else thought it was wrong that she was in love with her own nephew, so she jumped from the roof of the San Román family's home in one of last week's episodes, then she got to die a quick death. Yes, we all wanted to see Alba suffer more than she did—she got away with way too much twisted stuff—but sometimes that's just how things go in novela land.

All that's left now of "La Madrastra" is the follow-up special that will air this Sunday night (September 11), "La Madrastra: Cinco Años Después", which will show us what the characters' lives are like five years later. I can tell you that none of the characters will look any older. Hey, they haven't aged at all from the mid-1980s till today, so why should they start now? They must've found that fountain of youth that Ponce de Leon was looking for. And then on Monday night, the 12th, the cast will appear on the Latin equivalent of Oprah's talk show, "Cristina".

Ain't it grand?
I may have mentioned this before, but if you're talking about the siblings of your grandparents, you should use the terms grandaunt and granduncle, not great-aunt and great-uncle. The same goes for the children of your nieces and nephews: they are your grandnieces and grandnephews, not your great-nieces and great-nephews.

When I was a kid I used to get confused as to why the sister of my great-grandmother was called my great-great-aunt. Why did the first have one "great" and the second have two "greats"? I thought that it would be much easier if each generation used the same number of "greats", and it turns out that I was correct. Unfortunately, it has become so common for people to use the wrong terms that some dictionaries actually seem to prefer the "greats" over the "grands". I understand that language is supposed to be fluid and should evolve, but it only makes sense to me for this to happen when the word change is something that seems logical and makes speech easier.

When going back a few generations, the easiest way to remember the correct terms and to determine the correct number of "greats" is simply to use the same number of greats for the aunts and uncles that you'd use for your direct ancestors. For example, if you're talking about the sibling of a grandparent, then you're talking about a grandaunt or granduncle. If you're talking about the sibling of a great-grandparent, then you're talking about a great-grandaunt or great-granduncle. If you're talking about the sibling of a great-great-grandparent, then you're talking about a great-great-grandaunt or great-great-granduncle. Et cetera, and so on.

It's not like you call your mother's parents your great-parents or your great-mother and great-father, right? So why would you leave the "grand" out for aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews? The answer is, you shouldn't. The only time you should use "great" with an aunt, uncle, niece, or nephew is when that family member really is great: very large, very generous, very loving, very accomplished, very interesting, etc.

It's all quite simple, really, but if you insist on using the great-aunt/great-uncle/great-nephew/great-niece terminology, then you should be consistent and then use great-great-uncle, great-great-great-aunt, etc. for subsequent generations. But some people use the term great-aunt and then, referring to the next generation back, say great-grandaunt. If you choose to leave the "grand" off for your grandparents' siblings, then leave it off for your great-grandparents' siblings, and so on. You should say great-great-aunt, since you've decided not to follow the logical progression of "greats" and "grands". Don't leave the "grand" off for one generation and then use it for another. That is neither great nor grand.