Innocent Bystander

So, I have this mailman...

Let me start this post by stating in all honesty and without any sarcasm usually associated with...well, at least SOME of my missives herein: I firmly believe the United States Postal Service is one of the great things about this country.

Seriously...you can mail a package across the country with Priority Mail in 2-3 days for like $4.00. That's amazing. And I use it all the time, since I do eBay selling all the time. That delivery confirmation thing they do has saved me a number of times from unscrupulous purchasers who email me and write "I never got my package." I whip out that little receipt, type in its number on the USPS website and voila! I can tell the douchebag liar when it was delivered.

So when it comes to sending packages, I have no complaints with the Post Office.

Receiving packages...well, not so much.

I have this mailman. He was the mailman for our building for a long time, and he's a real crotchety bastard, never saying hello when spoken to, always carrying with him a boom box in his letter carrier cart thingie, on which he plays opera. Yes. OPERA. In all caps.

He has a thing about delivering packages to our building. Well, it's not really a thing. He just doesn't do it. When I get a package, as I did Monday and today, he puts a little pink slip into my mailbox, which tells me he tried to deliver it, but gosh, gee, he just couldn't, and it's back at the local Post Office, and I can go pick it up if I want, or he can redeliver it.

But I know he'll never redeliver it, so why bother? Because I've figured out what he does. Using Amazon.com's delivery tracker and geometric logic, I know that my packages NEVER. LEAVE. THE. POST. OFFICE.

Yep. That's his trick. Before he loads up his mail cart and cranks up the opera music, he sits down in the PO and checks all the packages he's SUPPOSED to deliver as part of his JOB, and fills out his little pink slips. Then he brings all the mail he WANTS to carry, and drops off the slips for the packages he DOES NOT WANT to carry. And I know this because I check Amazon, and you can tell when the delivery was "attempted." It's always around 10:30am. And in all the years he's been a mail delivery person here, he never shows up in the building to actually deliver mail until AFTER 2:00pm.

I'm told Opera Mailman is going to retire soon. He was taken off this route for a while--I'm hoping because of complaints--but now he's back on this week. The other mail delivery people actually BRING our packages and drop them off in the downstairs office, which is open weekdays from about 9 to 5, minus lunch breaks. Tomorrow morning I will detour to the downtown Post Office to pick up my package before I go to work. I will feed the meter quarters, since the meters last 12 minutes only per 25 cents, and I will walk into the Post Office that time forgot, where sometimes you can stand for a half-hour waiting to even approach a window and hand over the fabled pink slip.

Last holiday season, I did this trip into Purgatory 11 out of 13 times to pick-up packages. The kicker is these are packages I paid delivery charges on, which to me at least, means they are supposed to come to MY HOME ADDRESS. I am stymied by the whims of a crazy mailman (this is a quote from one of his colleagues, told to a friend of mine in the building, not merely an observation of mine) who refuses to do his job and instead delivers pink slips asking us to do his job for him.

I have a nice pink slip for him. I hope the Post Office does, too.

The Best American Crime Reporting 2009

It's become a seasonal event for me: the Fall purchase and reading of the new volume of The Best American Crime Reporting 2009. The book--edited by Jeffrey Toobin, with series editors Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook--is published each year by Ecco (an imprint of HarperCollins). And each year it's one of the most eagerly anticipated purchases around the Innocent Bystander compound.

Collecting the very best of true crime articles from around the country (mainly from magazines, but there's one lone alt newspaper included, OC Weekly), this treasure trove of fascinating tales is great this year. Although I had read two of the stories before (Mark Arax's "The Zankou Chicken Murders" from Los Angeles magazine, and Stephen Rodrick's "Dead Man's Float" from New York magazine), I eagerly re-read them. Both stories are excellent tales of family life gone wrong--Zankou about the killing of a mother and sister by their brother, Dead Man about a husband/big-time hedge fund investor dying under mysterious circumstances. Other stories include one of the attending physicians present when President John F. Kennedy was brought into Parkland Hospital in Dallas on that fateful day in November 1963; the rise of Somali gangs in--of all places--Minneapolis and St. Paul; a big heist in England, pulled off by a UFC mixed martial arts fighter; the horrifying tale of body snatching in both Philadelphia and New York City, where unscrupulous funeral directors sold bodies scheduled for cremation that were scavenged into parts and sold; the sad skinny teenager who took 8 lives in a mall shooting in Omaha, Nebraska; and many more. 

Overall, this is the best compendium in years. I've been reading them since 2006, (the series has been published since 2002), and while each year has been good, this year is really excellent. If you're at all interested in the true crime genre, this is a great yearly book to check out.

More with the freakin' closet?! JEEZ...

It is a very sad state of affairs when all I can think of writing about is my "new" closet. It's even sadder that the thorough weekend cleaning of said closet is the most monumental thing I've done in the past few months. There are moments when I find myself compelled to just go and turn the light on and admire it, but I've stopped myself short of making a meat sandwich and going in there with a lawn chair and acting like I'm on vacation someplace else.

My body doesn't like the closet cleaning mention either because it still aches in places I haven't used in years (like Poughkeepsie). My lower back hurts and my calves tighten up every time I lay down, but that might be something else.

Surely, I ask myself--because there's no one else here to ask--there MUST be something else to write about than the freakin' closet. Perhaps Jenna Elfman's horrible new sitcom, Accidentally on Purpose, which is on right now, albeit mercifully muted, while I type this very missive. Ms. Elfman just announced she's pregnant in real life (with her second child) while playing the sitcom pregnant woman. Think Knocked Up meets...well, Knocked Up. Yeah, it's a rip-off of a mediocre Judd Apatow movie with those two most mediocre of current movie stars, Seth Rogen and the sitcom-bound Katharine Heigl. Okay in their defense, they also added in she's older, he's younger, thus pre-empting Courtney Cox's horrible new sitcom, Cougar Town. Mr. Elfman need not worry about mixing reality with fantasy, though...as bad as this show is, I'm sure she'll be out of a job by the time baby #2 is ready to ask for his or her close-up, Mr. DeMille, either accidentally or on purpose.

With so much new awful TV on (don't get me started on Jay Leno's The Early Tonight Show on NBC 25 hours a week. What? It's only on 5?) is it any wonder I spent most of my weekend cleaning my freakin' closet?

A day in my closet...

Here's how I spent my warm, sunny San Diego Saturday: In my closet.

My closet had gotten to be a veritable no man's land over the past few months. Late one night, while I was dozing off, I heard this loud crash and went in to find that one of the shelves (which were in there when I moved in) had collapsed, dumping the contents of the top of it on the floor. It was one of those grated shelves, designed to hang things from, like coats and pants. And they were all at a precarious angle. Since it was June or so and my July is as full and busy as one of those boats crammed with Cuban refugees (Remember those? Ahhhh...good times.), I knew it would be a while until I got to it.

And because of that little disaster, the rest of the closet--which is a very large walk-in affair, almost another (albeit very narrow) room--slowly slipped away from me. It had been about 5 years since I last gave it a thorough going-through and had become a classic case of "out of sight, out of mind," except I had to go in it every day to get stuff. And each time it made my skin crawl. I imagined little creatures camping in there, scurrying around. Unfortunately, they didn't take the time to straighten up.

Lately it had become almost hazardous to go in, as the piles of stuff--but no little creatures, don't worry, I live in a nice building--got bigger and more precarious. I found myself laying awake at night, wondering what my plan of attack to tackle the thing would be. And today, for some strange reason, I woke up around 8:00am and dove right in.

And it was an all-day affair, except for one large trip to a nearby Goodwill Store with bags and bags of clothes (why do I have so much crap I never wore or wore so seldom?) and various and sundry other items. Equally voluminous was the number of trips to the trash room. I think I deep-sixed about 15 bags of stuff with 2 more still sitting here. I also have another trip to Goodwill to make, this one with electronics stuff and books.

So, anyway, the closet now looks like I just moved in. There's lots of room to walk, I can get to my (much smaller) stacks of clothes on the shelves at the other end, and I'm going to ask the maintenance guy to come in next week and fix the broken shelf, because now I don't have to fear that someone other than me will go in there and never come out again.

That rope around my waist really helped.

Friday Foto #97...

Photo shoot, Santa Monica Beach. I love taking photos of people taking photos. To see more of my photos, Friday or otherwise, click here!

The Fall TV Season: Cougar Town and Modern Family...

If Walt Disney was still alive--in other words, if that whole cryogenic thing worked out--and he had purchased the ABC TV network, just like the Walt Disney Co. did without him, I'm sure that when some producer pitched him a show called Cougar Town, visions of cute little cougar cubs cavorting in a wildlife setting would have gotten an immediate thumbs up from him. Courtney Cox as an over-the-hill and horribly over-the-top horny divorcee on the prowl for young studs would have put him back in the freezer.

The new show--produced by Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence--is so incredibly bad that I was amazed it even made it on the air. Scrubs has been dying a slow, painful death over the past few years (amazingly ABC still has it on life support, with a return from its own cryogenic freezer sometime soon). Everything that made it great--its originality, its off-the-wall characters, its penchant for flying off on wild tangents--started to grate after around season five or so. Cougar Town grates from episode one. Cox, who is also a producer on the show, is so obnoxiously out there as a real estate agent trying to cope with her age and what she fears is her fading sexual appeal (truth be told, she looks great, except she looks like she may have collagened her lips, a stunt she makes fun of during the first episode). Her ex-husband is a cartoon, her friends are cartoons, only her poor high school age son seems relatively normal. And speaking of that son...the comment by mom about his penis was the epitome of creepy. It's okay for mom to be a hot MILF type, only not with her son. Or an eighth grader who steals all her sexy real estate signs around town. Or the young boy on the bicycle she flashes. Eew. Walt, are you still spinning?

And then there's her neighbor, played by Christa Miller, who happens to be producer Bill Lawrence's wife. Christa, what happened to you? You were so wonderful on The Drew Carey Show as the gal pal of the guys. Now you're the poster child for what not to do with plastic surgery. Seriously, it's your face, you can do what you want, but there's something radically wrong here, so smooth, so...well, where's the left corner of your mouth? Where did that go? But I digress...

I watched all of Cougar Town. Cox was likable at one point on Friends, neurotic, sweet, quirky and real, so I almost felt I owed her enough to at least give her new show a chance. But here she's just shrill and hammy. I only made it through 10 minutes of the other new ABC comedy series premiere last night, Modern Family. I like Ed O'Neill and Julie Bowen, but I hated this show. It's getting some decent reviews, but I found it unwatchable. Another bunch of cartoon characters with nary a sympathetic person in the bunch. That's the one thing missing from a lot of the sit-coms on TV these days: There's no one to like. They're all so caustic and conniving and cartoonish. I'm using that word a lot. Watch both these shows next week on ABC and you'll see what I mean. If anything, they keep the Disney cartoon legacy alive, but not in a way Walt would appreciate.

Wednesday is new comics day!

This week's trip to the comic shop netted the start of a new super mini-series and the ending of another, plus the final chapter in a special story arc.

Let's start there, with Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's conclusion to their "Old Man Logan" storyline, that ran through Wolverine for 7 issues and then jumped into Giant Size Wolverine Old Man Logan for its 8th and final part, due to deadline concerns. This story started out to be as memorable as Millar's last arc on the character, the "Enemy of the State" story (the best Wolverine tale I've read since Chris Claremont and Frank Miller's 4-issue mini in the 1980s). Old Man Logan showed us Wolvie in an apocalyptic future (is there any other kind in comics these days?) where all the super-heroes are dead and the United States is divided up into a series of super-villain run fiefdoms. Wolverine (refusing to pop his claws) and a blind Hawkeye do a desperate run across country. That was pretty much the first 7 issues, and they were great, with McNiven's art reaching a new high. Now the Giant Size part comes along and...meh. It's violent and ugly and McNiven's art...well, it's like Geoff Darrow on crack (and I refer to the Geoff Darrow art on Hard-Boiled). Millar stumbled here, I think, with the story, which becomes just page after page of gore and Wolvie's violent retribution on the Banner family who killed his own family. You think Kick-Ass is raw? This is worse, and no mature content warning to boot (I guess Kick-Ass gets it for language, not the blood, guts, brain matter, and gore that's on even more prominent display here). This is the second time Millar has fumbled at the goal line to lose the game, as far as I'm concerned. 1985 started out great and lost it by issue #6. With Kick-Ass about to end, I'm hoping his dropsy period doesn't continue.

DC's Wednesday Comics came to an end today also with issue #12. The broadsheet newspaper experiment in Sunday comics story-telling has mixed results as far as I'm concerned. Yes, it was very cool. Yes, it had some amazing team-ups of talent. No, it didn't really succeed in emulating the Sunday comics of yore, except in size and format. With the possible exception of Kurt Busiek, I felt none of the talent involved with this seemed to be doing a Sunday kind of comics continuity story-telling. Maybe it's because I've just read volumes of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant, Leonard Starr's On Stage, and Stan Drake's The Heart of Juliet Jones, and the art of day-to-day (or week-to-week) storytelling is so readily on display in those books, but it's sadly missing in Wednesday Comics. Yeah, I bought all 12 issues. Yeah, I tried to read them all, but gave up quickly on a few of them (Wonder Woman, Teen Titans, and Demon/Catwoman). I'd like to maybe see this reprinted (actually in a more manageable size and in sequence by story, i.e., all 12 Batman in a row, etc.) and see how it reads, but in its current format, it read like a 12-page story presented a page at a time, not as an ongoing continuity that told a story over time. I know that sounds like semantics, but it isn't. It's a very fine line to walk, and I think Wednesday Comics failed at it. Still, kudos to DC for trying something like this, and bucking the usual retailer philosophy of it having to be a certain size to sell to the collectors.

The first issue of Geoff Johns and Gary Frank's Superman: Secret Origin came out today, too, and it proves once again that when it comes to DC's icons, Johns knows exactly what do with them. This first issue shows Clark Kent's burgeoning powers (wisely tied to puberty...I don't think Mort Weisinger ever thought of that one, but it certainly gets rid of the whole Superbaby kills Ma and Pa Kent while hugging them scenario) and his introduction to his Kryptonian parents, Lex Luthor, and his familiar costume. It's a bravura performance by both Johns and Frank, whose switch to the Superman books (he did Action Comics with Johns before tackling this mini-series) from those awful Squadron Supreme books at Marvel has had an amazing effect on his art. His Clark/Superman is a little too Chris Reeve looking for me, but I recognize the sentiment behind that. This looks to be a great retelling of the Superman origin story, with Johns adding to the mythos like he did with Green Lantern. I hope he does the same for the Flash once the Barry Allen regular series is up and running. (Yes. Pun intended.)

All these books should be available at your friendly neighborhood comic book shop right now.

Why doesn't that line up?

I just finished straightening a stack of ads laying on my desk at work. They're different sizes. Some of them are black and white, some color. The stack is now divided into its color content. It sits neatly on my side worktable, perfectly in-line with the right-angle corners of the desk, and...

Sigh. Why am I like this? I mean seriously. I've been OCD all my life, but it seems to be getting worse as I get older. I'm not a neat freak (if you know me, you know this), but my apartment is very neat, a place for everything and every thing in its place, as the old adage goes.

I'm not sure where this comes from. My brother is a slob. My parents weren't neat freaks, but my mom kept a tidy house. I worked at a comics shop for a year and the equally OCD-damaged owner taught me the value of making sure all your money faced the same direction. Not just face up, but east to west, too. Consequently, my wallet is always very tidy.

This really is a curse, but I don't want to add any more drugs to my current arsenal to help control it, no matter how touchy-feely and smiley they may make me (which might be a welcome change...again if you know me, you know this). If anything this slight disorder keeps my place nice. It is a bit of a bitch though to find myself straightening stacks of books in Borders and re-alphabetizing the shelves. Did you know they kind of frown on that? I didn't.

NOT Live-blogging the Emmys...

Is it just me or does the "61st Prime Time Emmy Awards" feel like there's been more years of awards than there has of television?

I mean, TV has been viable since the 1930s, but it didn't really click until after World War II, and the networks didn't stretch coast to coast until 1951, which is (help me with the math please) only 58 years ago. So, my question is did they start giving out awards before they started broadcasting shows? Well, of course, no, but doesn't it seem that way, and doesn't it also seem like it's typical entertainment biz fashion? Which came first the medium or the awards?

Regardless, I enjoyed at least the first hour of tonight's Emmy broadcast, and liked the format of divvying up the genres, until the much-hated--at least in this non-Nielsen household--reality shows came up for awards (in a mercifully short segment, thank God). I firmly and steadfastly believe that the reality genre is a creation of the major networks (and all those crappy little cable stations) to save money and circumvent union rules. You can keep all your "Amazing Dancing with the Biggest Survivors of American Idol Make 8"s, 'cause I ain't interested and never will be.

Anyway, this was the most enjoyable awards show I've seen in years. I'm almost sorry I didn't live-blog it. And I think Neil Patrick Harris was a great host. I'm almost tempted to say give him the Oscars, too, but I think his involvement with the Harold and Kumar movies precludes him from that, under penalty of law. My only would suggestion would be next year do all the reality awards elsewhere, like Bora-Bora, maybe. Or Bravo. Same difference, as least as far as I'm concerned. They're both distant lands I'll never visit.

Today's Tip o' the Day...

If you watch The Big Bang Theory Season 2 on DVD and you pause at the end of each episode to read Chuck Lorre's "vanity card" comments, when you hit "play" and the DVD resumes, the last beat of the music sounds like a fart.