Pattern Recognition

Though the novel itself cannot be vouchsafed, the 2011 film on which it is adapted, The Descendents, might have been a godsend for this blog's topicality, if it wasn't otherwise just another remix for Clooney, variations on the same motifs as Up In The Air and Michael Clayton. George, the ultra-guilty blue blood, is in subtext, saying goodbye to his A-list zenith. (No one cares about Sudanese centuries old failure at statehood, kick it back to Egypt.) It is wrapped up, this life as methodical compartmentalization. This sentiment is not to detract from Payne's efforts. Like the sixty plus years older Niagara, heavily dependent on location, Hawaii becomes a foil within Clooney's narrative framework that brackets the dramatic tension of the story. Enforcing disability law statues, in our free societies, may simply come down to how closely you wish to be aligned with federal oversight, but humans with minimal awareness of their environment pose the most disruptive challenge to our norms, whether it is in the Iranian desert, or Ben Carson moving his barometer from a minority medical elite who loses Persian conjoined twins in an operatic theater, to a quixotic political aberration (who's side am I on again?), or a stainless steel stark episode of Criminal Intent, or this movie, persistent vegetative states always say more about the affect of those trying to cope than it does about the absence of presence, except that here, Patricia Hastle's Elizabeth, while not having much to do except to keep her training focused on not having any pretend awareness of what's going on, as her biological breakdown defeats mechanics-- not easy, presumably, her dead alive memory has a stranglehold on the Kings, and a rippling impact of disclosure and discovery on her community. Perhaps the author might scoff, and you too, if I also see this story as a complex allegory for the disappointed expectations of the Obama era. Yes, I'm extrapolating from the fact that Obama was born in Hawaii, and even if the birthers one day uncover irrefutable evidence that Barack was a Manchurian conspiracy of some sort-- what isn't, anymore, with our empire crumbling and the world not exactly serene about giving China a snow job because they are multitude and India, it's closest dialectal rival in that regard, doesn't offer liberty all that much assurance--Obama's legitimacy as a citizen was never really an issue. The issue was his mother, a radical leftist who was too young, perhaps, to be caught in the red panic under Eisenhower, and whether or not she and her children contravened core American beliefs. Given the current 2017 state of affairs in the Beltway, the dowager supposes this must be answered in the affirmative: We see multiculturalism as double-edged, and backlashed, and Payne has very carefully perforated this in his gemstone of directorial care. It's written into the tensions with the natives, in Scottie's acting out, in the back story of the King family. Even mixed race arranged marriages, and progressive largesse, and Clooney's fame, insofar as that goes, cannot overcome indigenous oppression versus the privilege of conquest. I hate being a quadriplegic, even though it is miraculous I have survived this long, traveled on my own, flamed out a career; I hate it, and there is nothing any ideology can do about it. The only thing really driving me now is I want to hurt the left as much as possible, and if I could dismantle the city of Philadelphia as a sovereign municipality, I would. Tall order. It would take an insurrection against our republican system to do it, but I would. I'm never going to have the economic freedom of white privilege, and ?I believed, into my early forties, it was something I could do, that by now, I'd have husband, friends. I am just a stag. The disabled activists I knew are dead, rejected, impotent, or turned on me, and those who aren't I can't really relate to, and they don't like me, in turn, however much ?I cross paths with cripland online. I lack familiarity of friendships I once had, all because of stupid choices, domestic violence, urban crime. I don't really have people I like who like me. Successful writers don't present that as a public face.
 Thus, I am debating myself whether I should flip it, and load my strongest poetry manuscript as a vanity, and market my non-fiction conventionally. The poetry collection is relatively intact, and has been what it is for a long time, and the genre is so insulated, what's the difference if a midlist press sells me for 5 dollars and change or I put my published work up myself for 2.75?

Milo Refurbished, No Fecal Orifice Required

"If we find green alien goo or Spock's phaser, we'll let you know." --Joe Spano, recycling The X-Files, still soggy about the ears

While I am here, feeling guilty for wanting to stream another hyped black thriller to take a break, but not to worry, budget put it in a chastity lock, I thought of a wickedly explosive piece, which, if I could pull it off, might shine Trumpian flashlights in my direction, and break off some of Mile's glacier fury my way, but I have to pull it off first, and I remain uncertain that I can. We'll see. I could always post it here and be made fun of, [cf Masculine Culture, who shares an affinity with Tom Earle for the liberal call of "get involved," unless we're liable, then it's fuck off]. All I wanted to know from these boys is why they followed me, that's all. I was nice to a digital designing globe trotter, tweeted her respectfully when she found me. She bailed anyway. Hesitated, then booted her account, and then took Culture a bit sorely. If Libertarians follow me, I expect allegiance despite my stoking steam engine. It is here for all to read, and account holders run, shrieking for the hills, antagonizing some of us in turn. If I cannot sell it too, this tantalizing attack, I can always test poor Niume. Chuckle. Insofar as I am aware, I have no issues with Niume users, nor have any desire to poke pointy sticks. I put one mental in her place, sternly. But I am much like Bannon, from what I can infer, and Niume will have to weigh this eventually. I will speak my mind. The kids will gawk, get quite upset, report me. I caused a hugely divisive battle at Poet & Writers even before I decided murder and genocide were still a form of philosophical argument, before I openly claimed racism and homosexual hate my own.

For this evening, I am only going to rough the idea; I am working other things. 

Humanist Bound

I figure, if I am getting blocked without being able to pinpoint either the user or the rationale, it must be because I put too much heart in saying "look, here is the end of the road!" I have little to no idea how Carson will change section 202 policies by the beginning of April, but by any reasonable standard, I am non-complaint, and my interior is not orderly, nor clean. Eight year old carpet needs section replacement, etcetera, yet shame is the least of my concerns, as I sat here attempting a minor note of eloquence to Sheldon Novick, his a learned mind of wonderfully constructed explanations of our best achievements. Henry James as a collector of social culture. Legal theory that turned constitutional law into the progressive victory whose zenith culminated, and started its process of erosion, under Lyndon Johnson, and I, in my worst moments, the stoking troll with charcoal eyes whose rage, when she is really tired, really tired, is beyond reason in its destructive cruelty. His social media metrics are sterile, Sheldon's, though I alternate with my distance of address from him, one one formal, "Dr Novick," which feels pretentious. He is neither colleague nor instructor, we are not socially familiar, and my numbers, not huge by any margin, yet more dynamic than his, My private message failed because the Toshiba cursor bounces and I lost the window. Sheldon would not care and I'll try another day. He's been extremely generous with me, and I feel traces of guilt. How can I froth with genocidal pathology and appreciate his scholarly arguments in the same brain mind dualism? There are ways to defend libertarian freedom and deplore Donald Trump simultaneously. I'm getting there but I'm not superhuman, and if I give this building manager her victory, go out into a cruel world into an environment where many people my age are strapped, I at the very least, need a destination. At the same time, I am too overwrought. But I am not doing what I plan to because of libertarian theory. Last time I checked, we all live once, and I need to get the fuck out of here, and the wreckage of my past in the gait of Jimmi Shrode's indignation, his partner's virtually zombie dead body with catheter tubes. Erik is a literal figure out of Shakespeare's supernatural.

Gladiator Emasculation, Fabricated Sheaths

"She doesn't do anything to make herself attractive," Kathleen Ann Quinlan, in foil against a serial poisoner

Jane Campion aims for  piercing through feminine pain in her 2003 In the Cut, a film which miscasts Meg Ryan as a poet teacher and does  an abominable disservice to my favorite novel. Writers tend to have detached personalities, but Meg Ryan’s teacher is a swishing slut, pale and effervescent in comparison to her younger supporting lead in Flesh and Bone, taken aback by the metropolitan brutality in which she deigns to thrive, in a narrative with an otherwise predictable bait and switch, with Ruffalo’s edginess lacking the requisite ambiguity for suspense. Why Bacon was cast as the jilted boyfriend is beyond this blogger’s ability to enter into, in reference to Nicole Kidman’s verve as the producer; he may represent a generalized post-9/11 anxiety, in addition to serving as the typical supporting character for misdirected suspicion, but the repugnant turgid aspect to his role doesn’t quite  ratchet up the audience sympathy for the imperiled heroine. Damici spoils everything as the Detective Richie long gone into section 8 territory, more meatball than methodical predator.

Despite these posterior impediments, Campion does manage to break past the battery of inured defenses. The lack of a musical score concentrates the sickening stench of the body butchery which hypersexualizes Ruffalo’s Malloy for Ryan’s Avery. Kidman’s iciness cues the damsel backstory, with a nod to the snow white feline sauntering along the alleyway, and Ruffalo cannot save the girl because the girl offered the recognition of the tattoo she recognized to the wrong player. Homage to Doris Day’s Que Sera, as the title track, sears the breasts of every woman who necessarily has to be disappointed with patriarchal dominance, settling for ineffectual decency.

This is an incontrovertibly modern movie, understating drama for a stark view of new century difference, a template perhaps not consciously but certainly genetically related to the 2009 Personal Effects. Hollander may have intended this ensemble view of murder victims to be a marquee vehicle for Ashton Kutchner, but the bad aftertaste Vancouver leaves in our mouths is a sad testament to the fact that studio executives insist audiences have to accept mediocre actors as celebrities. Kutchner doesn’t have Charlie Sheen’s ability to make the camera love him, and the screenplay relegates the disabled to indigestible burdens: the honorable retarded man a scapegoated casualty due to the need to assign blame, a fatherless deaf boy indulging in homicidal impulses to salve his losses. Kutchner may be the duty driven protector, but his cruelty surpasses boundaries, both to the retarded suspect, who he calls “a man like that,” and to his ostensible lover’s deaf son, with whom he deliberately maintains fences. Hollander takes so many shots of the megabird costume he might have well marketed this flick to Henson’s muppet market. Being well made doesn’t always translate into being responsible for your end product, which may or may not be the problem with Ben Carson’s candidacy. I am not the first person to suspect the minority with miracle hands might be gaming the nominating process.

In USA today he calls the racism of the Charleston shooter a disease, and then turns around and associates Sunni extremism with rabies. I don’t necessarily disagree with his rhetoric there, but do acknowledge the sand pit in which he’s trapped himself. Racism is not a disease. It may corrode, and with pronounced virulence, may be symptomatic of physiological decline, but in and of itself, prejudice is not equivalent to illness. To his credit, and despite the mote in my eye, as it stands, he is the only GOP candidate who fascinates me as a journalist in pursuit of a subject, the only one who ignites any semblance of a motivation, but surgeons aren’t generally inclined to be tea party absolutists, as those who administer the brutality of the medical model the disabled have to live, and if Carson isn’t the victim of conflicting mental impulses in his own right, perhaps he is running in the top tier so he can die a black millionaire. Powell did the same thing after he left the Bush administration, but kept it within the confines of accepted parameters. Carson is not, and that is fine, but it may also indicate the death of the American two party system. The lunatic fringe is catering to a hunger for flamboyance, and the democratic left, even if Hillary Clinton prevails, is weak. If Xi Jinping sucks this into his vacuum cleaner, like any good opportunist, I’ll join in with the violinists. With some thinking, I may wedge in a more impassioned post to the doctor later. A long post like this may attest to a spastic with no life, but a power chair turned torture chamber makes a poverty sunken mattress a haven of resignation, with which both Hollander and Campion conclude their problematic dramas.

All Eyes on the Neurosurgeon

The 2009 Surrogates has tracer elements. Part deconstruction of Bruce Willis as the Die Hard action figure, part terminator, and playing a bit on Keanu Reeves angst with The Matrix, and the carnage of Terminator, the dowager confesses she only caught approximately 50 minutes of the second half, unaware that it was scheduled as a Saturday afternoon matinee. While not retracting that certain aspects of the narrative were nonsensical, spastic has flagged it as a non eating up my usage review, noting the shock value of its human operator cinematography juxtaposed against the perfect grooming of the androids providing the perfect vicarious extensions. Does anyone believe Dr. Ben Carson can defeat Hillary?

Spastic agrees with much of what the man says in public, despite previous spurious use of simian epithet in previous post. It was the hesitation behind the bigotry of disaffection, not that this woman has the inside skinny on which of the remaining GOP candidates will prevail. Twenty percent of me which remains committed to advocacy might wish to throw my lot behind this man, despite dowager's impoverishment. I'll have a longer post on this soon. I've come to prefer writing out my posts on Word and then augmenting them in the window, particularly when I wish to push, but like the good doctor, I have my serious, impassioned side, and truly believe, despite Tony Blair's observation about "power shifting rapidly West to East," that the time for comprehensive military engagement has come. Sometimes, civilization has its price. When Islamic State was on the rise, some of us looked on it with muted respect, but never envisioned this yellow liveried barbarity of cowardice this paramilitary force has subsequently displayed. The Iraq War may have helped IS to rise, but the Sunni's need to be punished, the Iranians defanged, and NATO needs to act, and stop playing patsy. Empathy, much as vaunted, fragile, civil liberties, isn't a suicide pact either, to pick up the post-9/11 cry.

Solidarity

"Socially, culturally, morally, America has taken on the aspect of a decadent society and a declining nation."-- Patrick J. Buchanan, preface to Suicide of a Superpower

It is rather disconcerting to respond to a GQ image of the stadium exodus in Paris just prior to heating up your fish and chips and then find yourself quoted live on France 24 three hours later, rushing to telephone the dying aunt now holed up with dying brother and my immediate progenitor, my father, exhausted with tales of his dying wife, as fed to you by a sister you listen to, mouthing support you do not mean. Louise is dying, the fleeting nurse and more evincing invalid with her rheumatoid arthritis. "Her rectum is falling out of her ass," says besieged sister, and this makes you, as a cripple who wants to kill her apartment manager on any given Sunday, feel curiously more lucid than the rest of my clan: I am now evidently in charge, hanging by a thread while being quoted by France 24, watching the civilized world simply descend, trying to curb my hyperbole, but truly believing that Caucasian moral decency is imperiled, aware that this is a draconian throwback even to the 19th century. I could tell you too, how I took on Trudy Richardson and Debra Horne and the new one, Gail Sims, last week, losing my temper, standing up to Debra, calling her incompetent, a lout, realizing my contempt for these mocha women isn't worth my soul.

Louise has Sundowning Syndrome, to hear my sister tell it, while I continue to accrue a better, diminished, picture of Ben Carson, my mild interest in the black boy who did good in Detroit waning. He fooled Nightline, evidently, those many years ago, the carefully groomed and educated minority now revealing levels of bombast which alarm the establishment, reminding yourself you have little idea who the establishment is. But the generalized anxiety among the fractious conservative class seems to convey "What if Trump or Carson gets the nomination, or worse, becomes president if the edifice of ossified Clinton centrism cracks?"

My response to this is cynicism: So what? Neither the smirking monkey with his evangelical definition nor the mogul-shyster would have the actual power to do much damage, not immediately, in this facade of a democratic republic where a wastrel of a reactionary like me gets quoted on live international television looking for social media filler about the latest attack on Europe which has broken many congruent hearts.

If I in turn had the power to generate hawkish policy, I'd say its time for the third world war. Assassinate Assan Rouhani of Iran, dissolve Syria, expose the Russian armed forces for their ineptitude, and so forth, as withering in rhetorical sentiment as papier-mache, while I was quoted on France 24, trivialized spastic on the margins, preferring to die in battle. Ludicrous, my family decimated by chemotherapy, innocent Western blood flowing in the age of a troubled new century molded by the fanaticism of a nefarious Saudi named Osama. The disintegration of Airbus 321 was tactically effective. It caused a united retrenchment. The attack on Paris, in contrast, will backfire, in expected ways and otherwise. All I can do is regret benighted choices, observe the web of familial disease, crack ghoulish jokes. Consider the hospice industry with disgust. People need to know when it is time to make peace with death, and my stepmother, and my father's sister Marie, and her brother, need to stop receiving extraordinary medical intervention. They will not do it of course, but it would free up resources to ease the stringency of the welfare state we all hate. The brutality of a cause, the brutality of centralized institutional paradigms, these are flip sides of the same coin.

I am not a liberal

Do not think that because I hate my landlord that I'm a liberal. Presby's power comes as a direct result of congressional classification, and while I am sure this Councilman-At-Large, the go to gentleman for special needs, is a sweetheart, I remember this bastard, his wife, rumors of the black mafia and the corruption swirling around city government under John Street, whom I met, and the look in the mayor's eye said "be nice to the retard," which I did not countermand. I had a craving for a burger and threw on a threadbare skirt and one of Monica Carr's blouses absent the reserve of a brassiere, and when I saw Street in the parking lot, I posed an incredulous interrogative, "Is that the Mayor?" then rushed home seized with fervor to crucify the bastard with the voice of New Republic finesse, and my confidence cratered, unfortunately.

Not that I had not achieved my goal at fusion before, with my appearance in the Inquirer's metro section, but a TNR byline would have sustained it, and now achieving that is problematic. Marty Peretz, whatever his flaws, was acute, sharp, penetrating in the selection of his contributors, which at times aroused my zeal. This is not TNR under Hughes as a privileged candy man.

What am I, in the political sense of the term? An annihilator with libertarian sympathies, close to making myself expendable because women in case management have absolutely no fucking idea what they're doing, and Presby's owners aren't about the good works of their doctrine. Persecuting my non-compliance is a business model to them. Bad things happen to good people? Let it go? How many bad things? If my sister lost one of her children, I doubt she'd continue with the pragmatic conduit role of reigning me in. My mother is dead because she miscarried, birthed two cripples, one who should have been euthanized, and lost a son. My stepmother is her friend from nursing school my father married to survive, and she is an invalid on her last legs. If I was Louise I would not hesitate to bake arsenic in almond cookies and consume them. She hates my sister, Benjamin and I, which is probably transference. My father is a misogynist and doesn't love her.

I have serious doubts about whether or not I would have been better off if the 1963 neo-natal unit had shut off my oxygen. I am not exactly sure by what magic I had prevailed, but what is in store for me? Bed ridden dependence on the descendants of Jim Crow or Hispanic drug mules, and I'll be damned if I'm going through that, mark my words.

It might be too much icing to assert Dr. Carson has my admiration, but I do respect his honesty despite my racism, and it may be a tempered racism, as I do not want to engage in slaughter due to ethnicity. My virulence comes from forced diversity, my intolerance based on the fact that I cannot define my own boundaries because the system says I cannot discriminate. The question remains, however, if a mixed race constitutional scholar disillusioned our expectations, why we expect any better from a conservative neurosurgeon. I'm thinking about doing a piece on Carson.

Discrimination will always be part and parcel of the human dynamic, hence, Imperial Companions comes a bit late to my table. I ain't working for you, but I should never have had to be defeated by inner city violence and the polemic of HUD's lies when it comes to housing low income tenants. It might be hard for me to die like a militant, but that is my preference, if it comes to that.

I bought more cashews. They make me happy, but just a handful now and then.

Peachy Keen

It is difficult to hold within our grasp that not all historical undercurrents have closure. Tuberculosis was a fungal epidemic effectively beaten back in the 1950's with derivatives of the breakthrough antibiotic of the 20th century, and hygiene campaigns which followed in its wake, but AIDS saw the condition make a comeback. As a terminal illness, it manufactured at least one serial killer in Doc Holliday. Stacy Keach portrays the gambler as an embittered existentialist against Faye Dunaway, in yet another revisionist Western. As a bio pic, in this part, Keach manages to transcend his composite swash buckler who pretends. It might have something to do with necessarily being as large as an embittered legend, liberated in having nothing to lose. Why Dunaway challenges her glamorous hauteur by enveloping herself in a wardrobe of slutty trash remains an unconvincing perplexity, but her Katie Elder is suitable playing off of Keach's manic undercurrent, bumbling their way about the set like paper cut outs, doomed by corruption and conspiracy. The Doc Keach adorns is naive in small ways, able to be taken in by the Mexican inn keeper for a pricey sum, or sold a house incautiously, and yet remains a man of leonine ruthlessness, calling a bluff, or aiming to kill.

To wit, though I am patently indifferent to national politics as having any bearing on Philadelphia as a cesspool of incompetent depreciation, I may rally around Ben Carson. Not to make too much of the contradiction in terms. Certain kinds of experience cuts across identity, and I comprehend, as a life long recipient of institutional stricture, why a black neurosurgeon would become a reactionary defining zones of exclusion. Can he win the nomination? Can he beat Hillary? What the fuck do I know?

But the possibility of igniting a third world war is exciting, so I'll wait in the wings with the fiery torches glaring from my pupils. Maybe I'll send his campaign a few dollars, Joan d'Arc in search of a sword and zeal, the thirst for cleansing purity. I had a difficult Wednesday on 10/14.

Adversary Across The Table

With a supreme act of will springing from the essence of his being, he turned away from his life and the long train of disastrous consequences that had flowed from it." --Richard Wright, Native Son, page 255, 1957 edition

I have held certain cards close to my chest about offering a responsible discussion on race, and after branching out into as many estuaries as there are going back into our seas, I've given up. Fewer black friends than gay ones, yes, but they existed, a blind couple. The wife who thought I was going to suicide over my breakdown at the capable mind games in the hands of my former spastic supervisor, her husband, my neighbor Roger Moore from long ago, sexually attractive paraplegic baller, not many more, leading into the question of why Dr. Ben Carson gained notoriety: because Americans who pay attention to network newscasts which assume a mature audience needn't be coddled like cutting edge medicine, because conjoined twins are still enough of an anomaly to hold our attention, because John Hopkins denotes prestige and Ted Koppel's God complex, and Carson was a minority neurosurgeon in this stratosphere, and yet something cut across the com links and the studio lighting in his emotive force about the Bjani sisters, a viewer could not forget the stress and anguish of "bathroom by committee," and it is that intense emotional investment by which one understands how Carson evolved into the dark horse surprise as 1 in 15.

Do I believe he will succeed Obama? No. Am I aware of the contradiction of respecting his forthrightness juxtaposed against my intolerance? Yes, and I do not intend to resolve it here; in much the same vein that liberal critics plaster Losing Isiah for tasting like tree bark, any critical observations genuinely threaten to veer off the asphalt. People like me give offense, and receive tin ears. We don't even know what having a frank discussion means anymore, except what we internalize when we're in it. Memory seeps like putty after a time, and I seem to recall Richard Corliss making grist about Jessica Lange twenty years ago, but that could not have been possible. The film still was the sociological fodder in its moment, and is, on a certain level, ludicrous. Halle might have been prepping for Cat Woman, and white adoption of black children often leads to depression and mental health disorders.

The film made an imprint, not over its quality, but over its construct and what it straddled, and then gets crucified by superior progressives like Kurchak and lambasted by those like spastic on a rightward drift, who has seen black parents engaged in aggravated assault against their children-- not to excuse my dead mother and her men, but there is still a difference.

Let me switch gears momentarily: I had a traumatic experience in email borne out of desperation and fear and told a former supervisor I thought I had fallen in love with her. On her end she was, or so I speculate, trying to save her marriage by sportscasting to me a little too much. Fifteen years later, I am debating letting a possible occlusion kill me and she wrote herself a demotional grant of some sort and still has a salary. I've put myself on trial, picked pieces apart, and I'll never be entirely repaired, even though I was in a bad space and can't put the onus entirely on her behavior-- but what it did was absolutely shut down LBGT tolerance. I will never knowingly associate with homosexuals again, not after what I put myself through. 

I could, however, sit down with Dr. Carson. The gulf would be there, but both he and I know institutional paradigms to the bean, and I would not assign blame at his door for what happened to me within the community of his ethnicity. This does not mean I'd apologize for the very dark nature of my posts; it does mean I could engage, unless I err that he'd utilize the normal mechanism of recrimination.

Lethal Injection for Horses

"What?"-- Jason Statham

It is difficult to evaluate Jim Webb as an alternative to Hillary on the basis of his one recent interview with Judy Woodruff. He hasn't been exactly visible, but is a potential candidate who used to have a gravitational pull for me, and he seems to recognize progressives are free-falling out of a helicopter in an ironic, fantastical, denouement. If Mrs. Clinton doesn't run, or in some context loses the primaries in a bloody fight with a dark horse like Webb, the problem becomes obvious, in that, all things being equal, Webb would lose to the Republican nominee, barring something extraordinary, like a Rand Paul Ben Carson ticket, and by Christ wouldn't that be fun! 

Pleased to recapture a cultural reference, I remember Carson doing an interview on his advisory role on the Bijani twins, and he cut an impressive figure. I was going to do a very long apologia for him on his views of homosexuality, and we may return there, to my delicate gay bashing with its hideous implications-- but not today, since I can't handle a battle with the German left and moral umbrage of my minority wardens combined, at least not without becoming a full fledged Libertarian first-- I've flirted, spiritually, with Libertarian philosophy for a long time, and telephoned the party from the ghetto, years back, and argued with the gentleman who answered my call about my terror over guns-- however, if one has to pick a side, I'm leaning heavily, today, towards becoming an operative, without any reason, thus far, to like Carson-- remembering the eclipse of Herman Cain. Even at the price of losing ground, Carson should have explicated his anti-homosexual bluntness, not backpedaled.

The right needs more courage to remain unpleasant; if a neurosurgeon of such skill and compassion can see homosexual activity in a vein so similar to mine, journalists with a platform might want to ask more questions before dismissing us as bizarre.

Jason Statham has the bizarre action thriller humor all to himself, and Crank nearly had me pissing myself with its humorous subversions, including its homage to Jon Voight and Midnight Cowboy. My thought processes need fermentation, however, in my balance between rough draft and polish.