Two quick things tonight. Not a lot of time to write, because I have a HUGE audition tomorrow (Monday) for a supercool miniseries. So I have a lot of homework to do.
Speaking of homework, here’s yours:
Read this, and get involved.
Read this, and laugh your ass off at one of the coolest things, ever.
My wife and I were driving home from Nolan’s soccer game this morning.
Let me pause here and say how much I love getting up at 6AM on a Saturday, so I can go sit in wet grass and watch overachiever parents scream at their terrified 10 year olds that they’re doing everything wrong. Oh, and I especially love when the assistant coach of the freaking team gets so pissed at the kids for making a mistake that he takes off his hat, throws it to the ground, and stomps on it. For reals. And if that wasn’t enough, when one of the kids missed a fairly easy goal (maybe he was distracred by his father screaming at him to “Kick it, Brandon! Kick it! KICK THE DAMN BALL!”), he actually dropped to the ground in a ball, and pounded his fists against the ground, like Kirk in Wrath of Khan.
Fortunately, Nolan is a phenomenal soccer player, and he doesn’t get yelled at by any of his parents, or the head coach, who happens to be his dad.
But my favorite is the guy who can’t even sit down, beacuse he’s pacing the whole time, screaming at his kid, “David! Get back! NO! Get up! NO! Cover your guy! NUMBER 4 DAVID! COVER NUMBER 4! NO! Don’t look at me!!! NOOOO!!!” Pace. Pace. Smoke. Smoke.
Running a close second is the guy who yelled at his kid, “Alberto! Alberto! You just cost your team a goal! What did we talk about?! WHAT DID WE TALK ABOUT?!”
I have two pieces of advice for those parents:
1) Get a life. They’re 10. It’s not that important.
2) For the benefit of the kids, and all the parents around you, please stay the fuck away from the field, okay? Drop your future Maradona off, go home, and come back when the game is over.
Read the AYSO guide of conduct, recently, guys? I didn’t think so.
What a tool.
Anyway, I’m on the way home with Anne, and this really wussy song comes on the radio, and she says, “Is this The Crash Test Dummies?” (One of the wussiest bands in history, for those of you scoring at home)
“No, it’s Metallica.” I told her.
So if any of you were wondering if Metallica has completey lost it, there you are. I can’t believe that the guys who croak out “Until It Sleeps” are the same guys who gave me whiplash in 95 listening to “Damage Incorporated” and “Master of Puppets”
“Napster bad!”
So are formerly cool metal bands who wuss out.
A change of pace?
Am I the only person who is at once really tired of, yet unable to pull myself away from, the wall to wall converage of the WTC bombing? Apparently not.
But KCBS Channel 2 here in LA has finally stopped running their coverage (I am convinced now that Dan Rather is not a person, but a very complex robot who can stay awake for hundreds of hours in a row. That or he’s a series of clever clones, like in that Droopy cartoon).
The only thing is, they’ve replaced the constant replays of horror and suffering and destruction with…a marathon of Judge Judy.
What?
Belly Buttons
I think that there are few things in this world that are sexier than a flat tummy, in one of those midriff shirts, with a subtle piercing and NO FUCKING WAIST BRACELET. Waist bracelets belong one place, and one place only, and that is on strippers. So if you’re not a stripper, please, please, puh-leeeze. Just say no. You’ll be glad you did.
Anyway, I turn on something like VH1 or something, and they’re playing that Levi’s commercial, where the belly buttons are singing, “I’m coming out”. You know the one. Does that give anyone else the creeps? Somehow, they made those belly buttons look the opposite of sexy. They made them scary. I mean, they made them clown scary.
Clown scary, Chet. Clown scary.
This is making its way all around, and, sadly, I don’t think the people who really need to read it are capable of that. But, please read it, if you haven’t already, and spend a moment to reflect. It comes to me from Loren.
“I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about “bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age.” Ronn Owens, on KGO Talk Radio today, allowed that this would mean killing innocent people, people who had nothing to do with this atrocity, but “we’re at war, we have to accept collateral damage. What else can we do?” Minutes later I heard some TV pundit discussing whether we “have the belly to do what must be done.”
And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I’ve lived here for 35 years I’ve never lost track of what’s going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I’m standing.
I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.
But the Taliban and Ben Laden are not Afghanistan. They’re not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think “the people of Afghanistan” think “the Jews in the concentration camps.” It’s not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.
Some say, why don’t the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they’re starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering.
A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan–a country with no economy, no food.
There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying thesewidows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with land mines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.
We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that’s been done. The Soviets took care of it already.
Make the Afghans suffer? They’re already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.
New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today’s Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They’d slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don’t move too fast, they don’t even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn’t really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban–by raping once again the people they’ve been raping all this time
So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of “having the belly to do what needs to be done” they’re thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people. Let’s pull our heads out of the sand. What’s actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden’s hideout. It’s much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we’d have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I’m going. We’re flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.
And guess what: that’s Bin Laden’s program. That’s exactly what he wants. That’s why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It’s all right there. He really believes Islam would beat the west. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he’s got a billion soldiers. If the west wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that’s a billion people with nothing left to lose, that’s even better from Bin Laden’s point of view. He’s probably wrong, in the end the west would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?”
–Tamim Amsary
