Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

I was up at my my sister and brother-in-law's over the holiday weekend.   Good liberals in a small conservative town and we decided to head to the small art-house cinema see a movie.   The movie, 50/50  , is based on a true story of a young man's brush with an unexpected cancer.  It's funny; the chemistry between the two main characters:  Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Adam) and Seth Rogen (Kyle) was good.   But what struck me and surprisingly didn't strike my brother-in-law, who's a doctor in a medical marijuana state, is how "normalized" they chose to show the pot smoking.   Adam doesn't drink or smoke and his first dosage of medicinal marijuana is in the macaroons offered by Phillip Baker Hall (Alan) to deal with the nausea caused by chemotherapy.   From there, the filmmakers actually show Adam stoned, smoking with Kyle, and even socializing with Mitch (Matt Frewer) and Alan and smoking again.   I...

I guess I'm glad I don't let labels tell me what I should like anymore.   Of course, I'd be lying if I tried to hide behind the old cliche, "I like what I like" or "I think there's really only 2 kinds of music:  good music and bad music," cause I do think labels are important.   Not that I use the label to help me decide if I like it or not, but I do use it to try and understand it.   Thus, even though I've known many of his songs, I probably wouldn't have seen John Prine in concert just a few short years ago. When I went to concerts, I wanted them to do something different than what I might get from listening to their work on the stereo, and most concerts just simply don't do that.   One of my earlier concerts, The Cars during their Heartbeat City tour reinforced that position early on.   Why would I want to pay to basically hear the album?   So, my choice of concerts was carefully screened:   would they d...

Released via the internet on 11-11-11, I decided I'd sit back and give the movie  a viewing.   Foster Gamble (of the Proctor and Gamble fortune) is the narrator and basically walks you through different types of "discoveries" that he's arrived it in his effort to understand what it would take for human beings to "thrive."  Of course, what the movie does is package all the traditional conspiracies together: Nikolai Tesla & Free Energy----------------------------------------------------Check Alien visitation & Crop Circles--------------------------------------------------Check The Rothchilds, Rockefellers, Morgans and the Illuminati------------------------Check Federal Reserve ponzi scheme--------------------------------------------------Check. Control of food production as population control--------------------------------Check Eye in the Pyramid on the dollar bill----------------------------------------------Check Real Purpose of the Pyr...

To call Norman Spinrad's He Walked Among Us Science Fiction is really stretching the genre.  True, Spinrad is one of the elder statesmen of SciFi, but this work is more important than sadly the genre would allow. At times a critique on our media obsessed culture, the book deftly follows the trajectory of a comic (Ralf), claiming to be from the future 500 years from now as he rises to become a small time cable television star modified and cultivated by his agent, "Texas Jimmy" Balaban, science fiction author, Dexter Lampkin, and new age networker, Amanda Robin.   The book also acts as a critique of the SciFi/Comic Con convention business where hoards of loyal fans dress up as their favorite character from StarTrek, World of Warcraft, etc. and parade in hotel conference rooms hooking up, drinking, and talking all the while thinking that this is all somehow making a difference when they are really only being manipulated by the publishing industry for financial gain. In ...