El Sitio del Entierro de Michael Jackson

Holly Terrace, el sección del Gran Mausoleo que guarda el cuerpo del cantante.

 http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-09-01/michaels-foreverland/

El artista “Prince,” tambien conodico al mundo con el titulo “Rey del Pop,” ahora es enterrado en una manera tan regal como su nombre. Las catacumbas que guardar su cuerpo estan abajo de un castillo.

La tumba final de Michael Jackson es en Forest Lawn Cemetery cerca de Los Angeles, California, una propiedad de casi un media milla 2. Hubert Eaton lo compró temprano en el siglo 20, pero los residentes mas permanentes tienen sus propias historias. El mármol Gran Mausoleo es el hogar de 13 niveles de cadáveres bajo de lo de Jackson, incluyendo Satanistas ancianos, Gypsies y un mil urnos de las cenizas de personas descinocidas. Otros partes del propiedad guardan los cuerpos de celebridades, como los “Three Stooges” y “Marx Brothers“.

Las cenizas de Walt Disney tambien estan ocultado en un rincón menos conocido de los cerros.

Las detallas de las catacumbas son mas oscuras, ambos porque son ocultados y tambien porque son, francamente, extraño. Primera, el portavoz ha negado los leyendes de los cultos del diablo en los pisos bajo del Mausoleo sino las guardas y obreros han describidolo en detalle. Los testimonios de obreron quien han hablado de los sentidos de dedos tochando el detras de sus cuellos en los cuartos mas bajos son tan dificil probar.

Como planeado, el cuerpo de Michael estaba enterrado el 3 de Siptiembre, en un servicio simple con su familia.

Los posesiones de Michael Jackson, a valor de $500 millon dólares (alrededor de 280 billón pesos) ahora son controlado de los Fideicomisarios del Michael Jackson Family Trust.  La familia y ex-marida del cantante no van a recibir nada de la inmensa fortuna.

Katherine Jackson, el madre de Michael, tiene custodia de sus tres hijos, Michael Jr., Paris y Prince.   Los cuatros, y benefícas sin nombres, recibirán el dinero y recursos del Family Trust durante todas sus vidas.

My Family No Longer Has Swine Flu

This update exists to inform any concerned citizens that both my Chilean host family siblings recovered within a week of the preceeding article. Neither has suffered any long-term effects.

As of today, the Chilean Ministry of Health´s Warden has e-mailed me and informed me that 10,491 cases of H101 have been conformed in Chile. Considering that this continent has nearly a thirtieth the population of the United States (which has only confirmed a similar figure), the disease seems more prominent here.

I have noted masks being worn as protective measures, but I noticed more extreme measures taken in the Argentinian city of Mendoza. In addition to masks, themajority of the city´s bars remained closed on a Saturday Night.

My Family Has Swine Flu

The number of swine flu cases in the world was counted at tens of thousands just a month ago. Those were the confirmed cases. Now the Center for Disease Control speculates a million people are currently infected in the U.S.

More cases were expected to occurr in the winter; but in the Southern Hemisphere, winter has just begun. Two of my siblins have been diagnosed with it.

My knowledge of the disease is limited by my Spanish in this part of the world. A week after I began my studies here in Chile, two of the children in my host family– Max and Macarena, ages 14 and 17– became infected, as did many in their schools. Symptoms include headaches, immense physical weakness, and occasional vomiting. Both are bed-bound.

The doctors have distributed pills of some kind to the family to prevent further infections. We have told to go about our lives as normal, though the victims now wear facial masks and are not to leave the house.

Gabriela, another of my host siblings (at 19 years of age), began experiencing migraines last night.

Despite the doctor´s advice, I´m not sure which is safer: leaving the house and risking infecting others if I carry it, or staying indoors and risking exposure in every room.  The disease is less contagious than seasonal flu, fortunately, reports the CDC.

Since the disease has such a low mortality rate– hardly 1 percent and only among the elderly, most of my readers need not worry.  The only risk is incapacitation by a disease scientists have not yet created a vaccine for.

One man killed, 300 million prides wounded

James Von Brunn, 88-year old white supremacist, may receive the death penalty for the killing of security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns.

The events of this Wednesday are rippling the nation the way many public killings do. An issue we thought was gone in a place we thought was safe resurfaces, and millions of people can feel the tension now.

The following day, a note was found in Von Brunn’s vehicle. “You want my weapons – this is how you’ll get them,” read part.  “The Holocaust is a lie… Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do.”

It’s an old ideology we’ve seen surface in our nation before.  For decades now we’ve been sick of it, as we should be whenever it rears its head.  Moments like this, like when two skinheads in Tennessee announced their plans to kill the President-Elect, are when we remember that we are united by something other than war.  After all our shock shown towards Holocaust-deniers in the Arab world, we’re forced to admit that this time the attacks came from us.

I can’t say for certain how America has reacted to this.  Jewish Journal now writes that the shooter’s Judaism-centered conspiracy is widely believed, albeit by less violent individuals.  But I haven’t heard or read one word, not even so much as a Facebook status or wall post, acknowledging that this happened.

His ex-wife and son Erik, who had known about his online involvement in anti-semitic and Neo-Nazi groups, expressed their disdain for the path that he’d gone down.  “He was eaten alive like a cancer with his hatred of Jews and blacks,” she told news networks.

The man wasn’t unstable, and it is assumed he worked alone.  He had spent 6.5 years in prison after attempting to “arrest” the Federal Reserve Board of Governors with weapons lining his trench coat.  He later claimed that the Board of Governors was a secret means of Jews controlling government.  The conspiracy theory, which he mapped out in his disseminated but unpublished books years ago, held that Jews controlled much of the world and plans to “destroy the white gene pool.”

James Von Brunn had no history of mental illness, leaving us with the frustrating conclusion that “killers” like himself aren’t “crazy.”  Though his conspiratorial beliefs and racial discrimination may be unfounded, they led him to rally for his causes throughout most of his life.

More recently, a judge has announced that Von Brunn is too critically injured to appear in court.

Knowing Von Brunn’s background and crime, I might call the judge’s verdict ridiculous.  Perhaps we’d like to see a quick sentencing, or even vigilante justice, so we can leave this whole anti-Semitism issue alone for a few more years.  I strongly advise the strictest possible case of the former.

But while he remains in the spotlight, let us take note while we can.  This misdirected theory of blame will be present in America long after we die.  But that doesn’t mean we, as individuals, can’t nip every bud of prejudice we see.  Investigations into Von Brunn’s life are now showing early signs of his ideology, in instances in his childhood when he first began blaming his problems on Jews and racial minorities.  Someone could have spoken to him then.  One instance alone may not have saved the life of Stephen T. Johns, but enough good influences could have saved Von Brunn’s own mind.

It is not a crime to leave a child to his own devices.  The crimes he goes on to commit, however, will be.

.

Stephen Tyrone Johns: 1970-2009

“Land of the Lost” and Other Contorted Classics

I understand perfectly well the heart-clutching horror of watching a timeless classic be turned into a horrible movie. All the depth, plot and character richness that went into years of a book, TV show, comic book series or even another movie can be cruelly eviscerated before our very eyes. Friends may watch on and laugh feebly at the crude jokes (which the source material never would have stopped to) and superfluous HD action shots which detract from the meaning the lower-budget prequel held so dearly, but it is a sad loss to society for us.

To name the biggest, this year I count Watchmen, Wolverine, Transformers, Harry Potter, Twilight, and an Early 70’s TV series about a clustered dimension filled with oddies from every place in time and space: Land of the Lost.  I have seen it and have become a changed man.

It was cheesier than SNL before the 2008 Elections.  And I’m willing to stake my Journalist’s License (a figurative badge of legitimacy that all reporters hold close to their hearts and next to their breast-pocket ballpoint pens) in saying that the original show had fewer dirty gags.  Most of it was meant to be ridiculous– a main character is an australopithecus who only the team’s all-around scientist can understand– so no legitimacy was lost in letting Will Farrell make friends with an Allosaurus.

So why would I dream of supporting something so degrading to the classics?  Two reasons:

1) I’ve watched some Land of the Lost (1971-76) myself, and it really isn’t that good.  Some classics almost don’t deserve defending.  I will defend David Carradine’s “Kung Fu” and scrutinize any future attempt to Hollywood-ize his work.  But the show was choppy, badly-animated, unrealistic even for something about anything-can-happen pocket dimension, and tragically not amusing.

And in this case, I hold it responsible for the advent of special-effects-y, ridiculously-energetic kids’ programs.  No show before their time would have made an allosaurus (puppet) that wants to eat them in virtually every episode.  So when I saw this overstuffed children’s classic brought to the funeral pyre of Modern Cinema, I shed no tears of sympathy for it.

2) I hate to be the one to confess this, but if there hadn’t been a movie about it this decade, I never would’ve looked for the original.Novel-based movies such as Watchmen and I, Robot have had that effect on me, and both come from simply awesome fields of literature.  I investigated The Da Vinci Code after its movie release.  I learned the Yo Ho Yo Ho song long after seeing Pirates of the Caribbean.  So much cultural richness can come from nostalgia (especially if you weren’t born yet when it was popular), and unless you actually think your parents are cool, you might never stumble across it without a movie version.

But now, I must forever live with the sad mantle of “being the expert.”  Knowing that the original was supposed to be about a family on vacation who fell down a dimensional well for absolutely no reason.  Not, repeat, not a misunderstood lunatic scientist, his No. 1 fan, and a pervy rocker running an amusement park in the desert!   Numerous other things never happened which I won’t spoil, though I suppose every director gets a creative license which supercedes that Journalist’s License of mine.  Unnecessary sleaze aside, there is ONE betrayal of the show that I cannot take without standing against it and inserting an exclamation point:

(SPOILER ALERT)

Cha-ka the Paku monkey-boy never had a harem of 7000 topless, non-hairy ladies!

(End SPOILER ALERT)

If the raunchiness drizzled thickly over a children’s considerably-better-budgeted classic doesn’t bother you, by all means, see it.  Some bits were a bit gratuitous (‘Sweet Mother of… are they really going to go there in this scene?’), but I guiltily deem it hilarious.

How the Environmentalists Want to Control America. No, really.

Americans will always have an enemy to rally against in the name of freedom. First the British, then the North/South, then the Germans, then the banks, then the Germans again, not to mention the Japanese. The past century has seen enemies ranging from Communism to The Government, Hippies and Republicans. More recently we’ve rallied against China, the banks once again, and some group or groups of people in the Middle East, though most Americans weren’t exactly sure who these Terrorists were. In every decade, someone has always been diligently out to take America away from the people.

This time, it’s those nonprofit organizers and the crooked politicians down at the Green Party– the menaces seen by Steven Milloy in his shocking exposé, “Green Hell.”

This isn't what the book cover itself looks like; this is just my visual interpretation of its contents.

Done being afraid of the Red Scare? Well, arm yourself quick against the radicals within our own borders and government, because we now live under the Green Scare.

In all seriousness, the cover. (Complete with text too small to read; don’t worry, I transcribe it further down.)

The book intones from the front cover: “How the Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them”. Milloy foreshadows from his website that “Going Green is no longer a Choice; it’s a Government Mandate.” “The Greens” under President Obama seek to control “every aspect of your life and home,” but they are “a looming threat to the economy, our civil liberties, and the entire American way of life.”

The book, released back on March 23rd, has stirred a bit of hullabaloo in its time. In an interview with Newsmax TV, Milloy revealed that the environmentalist movement isn’t even about the environment: it’s a facade for the Greens to advance of their “left-wing, socialist, totalitarian agenda.”

“Even if there was an environmental problem that I could agree with them on, their solution is always going to be more government control.”

I wish I could say he were right.

It’s funny to be labeled the Antichrist by someone, only to find out that, without all their demeaning adjectives– “energy chaos,” “buzzwords,” “wealthy (green) elite”– they present quite a fine argument for yourself.  Government control over energy sources doesn’t bother me.   It’s what I grew up with, but in the opposite direction.  I saw economic policies favorable to oil companies, and I saw ExxonMobil’s profits quadruple in six years, during an oil crisis at that.  I watched it break its own world record for the highest profits an oil company had ever earned, with $45.2 billion in the last year of the previous Admimistration.

In another sense, our energy economy has long come from government already– foreign governments.  Hotspots and occasionally militant regions such as Russia, the Middle East and Canada control the world’s oil reserves.  The members of OPEC, for instance, were not elected by U.S. voters, whereas in a U.S-run energy economy they would be.

As someone who’s seen a lack of government control fail, and who’s lost over $100 grand in property values as a result, I don’t mind putting the energy market in the government’s hands either.  The name “Enron” comes to mind.

But if the Greens have an agenda driving their sensationalism, Steven J. Milloy has several backing his.  The majority of the think tanks he works alongside are funded in part by oil companies.

He also makes his living as Fox News’ “junk science” commentator and founder of JunkScience.com, whose role in the news network is to debunk scientific research and to label it “junk.”  Perhaps there’s a reason he doesn’t think there’s an environmental problem.  As Socialist Upton Sinclair said, quoted ironically in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”

(Thank goodness I don’t work for someone who pays for me to support their consistent viewpoint.)

That’s all for tonight; you may now return to your respective views.

College Student Solves Gun Debate, Saves Lives

The purpose of this blog has long been to espouse oddball views– things that no self-respecting Congressman would so much as make reference to lest it haunt him when his opponents allude to his absurdity cone re-election, but thing that would work.

Today we take on gun control, which hasn’t been much debated since the “Obama wants to take my guns away” caused a spike in ammunition sales nationwide following the November Elections.

The problem with gun laws could be solved simply– with nonlethal guns.

Replace now-legal Uzi’s with Snoozi’s, load semi-automatics with pepper spray balls (prototypes were used briefly by U.S. police and referenced by Popular Science earlier this year), and no one would die of gun violence again.  That is, unless aimed at the eyes.  Power tool violence often encounters this problem anyway, as does writing utensil violence (see The Dark Knight for examples).  It would offer the gun rights and self-defense wanted by the NRA (which never has openly endorsed gun use for homicides), and the gun safety wanted by anti-casualty groups, or those who oppose the proliferation of lethal wounds.

As it turns out, much of this is completely possible.  Today, DefenseDevices.com offered a mace pistol with a range of 25 feet for $55, and for the empowered woman with real class, a $299 Taser that shoots 15 feet and comes with a variety of stylish holsters.  A1 Self-Defense products now offers something that looks like a razor for combatting 5:00 shadow, except that it delivers 1.8 million volts: get it now for $99.95.  Just don’t leave it in the bathroom cabinet near the aftershave.

The Obama Administration’s Defense budget promises more research on the way– though like most military research, it will not be released for commercial use unless Blackwater dumps it at the nearest shooting range.  Tentative research on everything from pulse-energy projectiles, to entanglement devices, to slippery goos to fire on ground surfaces has been released.

After all, how often do we ever need to fire a metal projectile through a person’s epidermal layer in order to protect ourselves?  Temporarily blinding them would work all right: they won’t get far.

In short, all Americans have to do is compromise– an influx of weapons for a reduction in firearm-related deaths.  We don’t have a particularly rich history of willing compromises, but it certainly would be worth a shot.

A shot of tranquilizer fluid, in this case.

No End Insight

Woohoo, an Electric Car!…
or rather, the 22nd Hybrid on the market now.
Yes, I mean the Honda Insight, which looks like a Prius with a facelift, a tummy tuck, and less of a caboose, but otherwise a similar-enough build to get compliments from other people in the lot.
http://www.hybridcarblog.com

Happy Mothre’s Day

Disclaimer: That spelling change was a throwback to the Happy Easter post, but the word Mothre is just a French last name.

Mother’s Day, like Easter, was a Pagan tradition first (the Greeks were honoring Rhea, mother of the gods), then a Christian tradition (honoring Mary, the mother of the son of God but not necessarily God’s lawfully wedded wife, seeing as the Holy Spirit came upon her instead of the Father Himself), and became a holiday for Mothers later on. Then it was dropped by the colonists (“because of lack of time”), and reinvented as a day for “mothers for peace” in 1872.  There was a touching scene with a Philadelphia town honoring a mother named Ann Jarvis, and in 1914, her daughter convinced President Wilson to make it a national holiday.  But at the same time, a new force began to grow that would expand to become the face of Mother’s Day greeting cards today: in 1910, Hallmark was born.

So which one do we celebrate?  Rhea is short on worshippers, and Mary is at a status above sainthood in the Catholic Church (and most of us think she’s nice).  It’s no longer religious, though doves and pastel colors (a la Easter) are prevalent on this day.

Mothers for peace– someone should have told me it was for peace.  I could work with that.

The last never officially happened– but neither did the tradition of Halloween’s unconditional surrender to Party City, Hollywood cosplays and costumes with “sexy” thrown in the name.  What was once mother-based social activism for peace is now a form of love and pink Valentines-like merchandise we buy and drop off at their house with a two-minute phone call.

Some of us do it right.  Regardless of the holiday’s original intentions, some of us rally together to give mothers a day off– of no work, and of the very indulgences they prepared for us over years of her unquestioning labor of love.  Breakfast in bed, personal presents from the kids, maybe a note in a nice card. A trip to someplace special.

Maybe it’s a holiday we’ve each had to invent ourselves.

But quite frankly, it’s been about important mothers in our lives from the beginning.  Celebrating and appreciating them.  Giving them the day of their lives.

All historical analyses aside, are you doing that today?

The Old Man and the Scene, Part 1

I’ve rarely been a fan of classics.  Growing up homeschooled (I did for a while), I stomached historical fiction for my mother’s sake: if it had a solver or gold stamp of Excellence on the cover, I guaranteed that one would be a slow, dry read.  The words were flimsy and unreal, the plots sketchy, the action remote and unexciting. King Harold pulled an arrow out of his own eye socket at the battle of Hastings, and the pages were so parched and lifeless that even that wasn’t exciting.

But my grandmother handed me a skinny little thing to read, close to a year ago.  She had too many old books on the shelf, I suppose.  I can’t imagine why I opened it.

I’ll tell you this: nothing else like it exists.

Hemingway’s last work, The Old Man and the Sea,was simple.  His writing was that of calm, daily life, even in the mad moments of a shark thrashing and biting as the old man lashed out at it with a broken blade.

Santiago had been a fisherman all his life on the coasts of Cuba.  His wife had passed away, and his glory days sailing the coasts of Africa were decades behind him.  Alone in his shack, his only comfort was the boy, who brought him the newspaper and listened to him talk about the past, or about whatever was in the news.  The old man hadn’t caught anything in nearly three months.  The men in the village thought he was daft, but Santiago went out again each day, dropping his lines.

This day, his line catches something… something he can feel is huge long before he can see it.Someone told me it was written as a metaphor for a man’s life: lowering his lines, its first tug, hanging onto his dreams through the blood, sweat and years while hardly ever seeing it, and having it at last for a short, perfect stretch of his life.  But in far shorter a time, it’s all taken away from him, leaving nothing but memories and a souvenir others brag about him having more than he does himself.  And with a life well lived, he comes back to his old home and dreams, back to the slow peace from which he came.

Summer vacation is almost upon me: for you it might be another month, but that’s for the best.  Every time I read it, during the school year, it gave me peace of mind.  The story was just over 100 pages, on pages justtwice the size of my cellphone.  Savor it.