Match Point

SPOILER ALERT: THIS BLOG PRETTY MUCH GIVES AWAY LOTS OF STUFF ABOUT A MOVIE.

In sports, the stars get the calls. Good pitchers get the outside corner. When Atlanta had three future Hall of Famers in its rotation -- Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz -- they got strike calls six inches outside so often, people started calling it an "Atlanta strike." In the NBA, if you're within two feet of Kobe Bryant when he shoots -- no matter into what pretzelesque shape he has concorted himself to get off a shot in a blatant attempt to get a foul call -- the foul's on you. Kevin Garnett has never been called for a moving screen in his life and also has never set a legal screen in his life. The NFL has lots and lots of rules whose single intent to prevent defenders from killing quarterbacks. Figure skaters from former Soviet republics get the best scores even when they flail around like mimes on crack.

The same things goes for movie reviews, at least some times. I'll give you an example.

The Muse and I watched Woody Allen's newer movie Match Point a few nights ago. I had been really interested in seeing this movie. I like a lot of Woody Allen movies, but hadn't been interested in very many recent ones before Match Point. Basically, Allen spent about 10 years starring in movies where he was the romantic lead opposite people like Mira Sorvino and Helen Hunt. Yuck. He apparently had to try to prove that it was OK for him to have married his step-daughter by showing that, hey, people will watch me in movies doing basically the same thing. It came off as deranged and gross. Woody's lucky that law enforcement didn't get involved.

Well, at some point, someone apparently gave him the hit over the head with the 2"x4" that he needed, so he made Match Point. He didn't appear in it. It was a drama and not some goofy comedy. It got really good reviews. And, you know, Scarlett Johansson is OK looking. So I was pretty interested in seeing the movie.

And you know what? It was barely OK. I kept waiting for something unexpected to happen. Nothing ever did. I kind of wonder if Woody was going for a Greek tragedy/kabuki theater kind of thing by telling a story where everyone knew what was going to happen. The Muse pointed out that the main character was a cypher. Was he supposed to be an unexplainable phemonenon like Iago or an empty vessel that is supposed to represent something that everyone could become? Who knows? Scarlett Johansson was largely wasted, although she had one scene where she flew off the handle and went all crazy that was pretty good. So, when the cypher guy extramaritally knocked her up and then killed her in order to hold on to the super-wealthy lifesftyle into which he had married, you both saw it coming from about a mile away and weren't too shook up about it.

Which made me wonder, why did all of these critics pee themselves over this movie? The only thing I can think of is that the critics, who probably are almost all great lovers of Woody Allen movies, were so happy that he had stopped trying to play himself off as the romantic interest of actresses who are 75 years younger than him that they just went so crazy. Basically, Woody got, in the parlance of figure skating, propped up. He got marks that he shouldn't have gotten. They didn't call him for traveling even though he took three steps.

Match Point: Movie minus

Arkady Renko

Just finished reading Red Square by Martin Cruz Smith. This was the last of Smith’s Arkady Renko series that I hadn’t read. Four of the five – Gorky Park, Polar Star, Red Square and Havana Bay – are great books. Read them. The fifth – Wolves Eat Dogs – is good. Unfortunately, it’s the most recent, which is not a good sign. Hopefully, any new ones won’t suck too bad.

The books have two unique things going for them. But, as attorneys frequently say, let me back up. The books are all set in what used to be called the Soviet bloc. Arkady is a police detective in Moscow. As with all good male detectives, he constantly gets into trouble, has a lot of scars and has difficulty with women.

Now, what the books have going for them.

First, Arkady is a great character. He basically is the traditional noir-type detective transplanted to Moscow. He never listens to anyone who tells him he should just let situations go. He always wants to actually be a detective and figure out what happened and catch the bad guys. Smith writes him, however, to make mistakes, to screw up, to not figure things out fast enough. He gets beat up constantly. Red Square starts with him basically getting his snitch killed and follows his laborious efforts to figure out what happened. Polar Star involves him trying to solve some killing on a fishing trawler for really no good reason other than his nature and consequently having people try to kill him. He chases what initially seem like simple crimes through the inevitable political machinations involved. I’m telling more than I’m showing here, but the character and his voice are very, very good.

Second, either Smith is a better psychic than Miss Cleo or he got extreme lucky in that he started writing these books in the last few years before the Soviet Union fell apart. Gorky Park was published, I think, in about 1985 and Wolves Eat Dogs was published in 2005. Obviously, everything changed with the Soviet Union and its satellites in that stretch.

Gorky Park was a very unique window into how the Soviet Union worked with Arkady chasing down some crime that involved political dissidents and his investigation getting him into some serious political trouble. I haven’t read that book in years and years – at least 15 years – but what I recall of it was that it just presented the way that the Soviet Union worked at the time, which, in that period, was a very mysterious and foreboding thing. (Gorky Park was published only a couple of years after Reagan declared the Soviet Union to be the “Evil Empire” and, thinking his mike was off, declared that the Soviet Union had been outlawed and that bombing would begin in five minutes.)

Polar Star involved the exile to which Arkady was sent for his actions in Gorky Park. Basically, he sent to work on fish factory ships in the Bering Sea. Again, this book involved not a lot of talk about the Soviet Union breaking up, but described what it was like to be on the wrong side of political issues there and what it is like to work in the Artic. By the time Red Square was published in about 1992, things had fallen apart and that book describes how there was no food in Moscow and how the ruble was totally worthless and everything was being stolen and sold and then shifts to Munich and Berlin, which are like Oz to Arkady. Havana Bay takes place in, shock of shocks, Havana, in the years after the Soviet Union cut off support for Cuba and Cuba was falling apart. Wolves Eat Dogs then occurs mostly in the Ukraine and, specifically, the restricted zone around Chernobyl and Arkady trying to figure out how a big Russian mobster was killed without any particular weapon and what the big pile of sand in his closet has to do with it.

What these books do is provide this very detailed portrait of these worlds that Americans have always heard a lot about – Moscow, Havana, Chernobyl – but to which we really have very little access. I don’t know how Smith has the level of knowledge necessary to write these books, but I know that his description really made want to see what Havana is like. It sounds like it is going to be really something once things change in Cuba. The Malecon sounds like a wilder sort of South Beach.

Anyway, check these books out. As for me, it’s on to one of my big non-fiction bricks. Give me a nice 850-page book about a dead president and I’m a happy camper.

Where Is The Handbook For These Kids?

In the movie Parenthood, there is a part where Jason Robards tells his oldest son Steve Martin that, in parenting, you never get to cross the goal line and spike the ball. (This is after Robards' youngest son Tom Hulce -- you know, the skinny pledge in Animal House who drops the girl off at her house in a grocery cart and also Amadeus -- has to get $26,000 from Robards to pay off bookies who are going to kill him, which will prevent Robards from retiring from his hardware business.) Not to mix metaphors or anything, but these children also do not come with handbooks. Any time you think you have a handle on them, they show you that you don't.

Got a good reminder of that last night. Enthusio, Mermaid and I were upstairs flipping channels and came across Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire. Now, in thinking about whether this was OK, I thought "OK, I know that Enthusio likes this movie and he and Mermaid both saw in in the theater, this should be all right."

And, indeed, it was, right up until the scene where Voldemort comes back. At this point, Mermaid got quite upset. It wasn't because Wormtail cuts Harry's hand to make him bleed. It wasn't because Voldemort tells Harry he is going to kill him. No, instead it came earlier. It came when Wormtail dumps the not-yet reinstated Voldemort -- who is naked alien-looking thing at that point -- in the pot in order to perform the reinstatement spell.

For a moment, I couldn't figure out why Mermaid was getting so upset. Wormtail had just killed Cedric Diggory with a spell and she didn't flinch. Voldemort was the bad guy, but he wasn't being scary yet. What, what, what was going on? Then I realized that, to Mermaid -- a very literal child -- it probably looked they were cooking Voldemort. Moreover, at that particular moment, Voldemort looked kind of like a baby. I think Mermaid thought it looked like they were cooking a baby. Not good. Good job, Dad, letting them watch that.

Once I realized what was going on, I was able to talk Mermaid down. It took some work, however. That fell into the category of "troubleshooting," though. It sure would be nice if the child manual didn't come with just the troubleshooting part.

My New Favorite Picture

This is my new favorite picture:



It's from this week's Time Magazine. Nuns who play beach volleyball rock!

The Cords Are Coming

It is a continuing theme of science fiction that, some day, the machines will take over. Usually, when they take over, they start killing or subjugating the people. The Terminator and Matrix movies are all about this. Star Trek has the Borg. Even Star Wars has the stormtroopers, who apparently actually were people, but that fact didn't really come out until Attack of the Clones in 2002. When I was 8, my friends and I were sure that the stormtroopers were robots.

At this point, though, I have to disagree with this idea that the machines will take over someday. Personally, I think that the cords will take over.

Have you looked behind your desk lately? It is the land of the cords, I'm sure. I know the space behind my work desk is like that. Since I got my IPod, the cords behind my dresser have multiplied. You have: (1) the power cord for my computer; (2) the power cord for the external CD drive; (3) the cord that links my computer to the external CD drive; (4) the cord that links my computer to the IPod; and (5) the cord for my IPod headphones. And I have a pretty simple setup. Enthusio got a GameCube for his birthday. That thing has: (1) the power cord; (2) the cords that hook the GameCube up to the TV; and (3) the cords that hook the controller to the GameCube.

So I think that the future belongs to cords. Oh, the machines may think that they will be taking over, but, on the day that they piss off the cords, the cords will unplug themselves and take over. And the world will be their rats' nest.

Michigan, Ohio State and Money

If you have watched anything having to do with sports this past week, then you know that Michigan and Ohio State are playing their annual football game today. Both teams are undefeated, they are #1 and #2 in the polls and the winner undoubtedly will go to the so-called national championship game. All of this on top of the fact that these two colleges' teams are both traditionally really good and have played each other about 1,000 times.

This year, however, is different. The whole "they're #1 and #2" thing has put the usual amount of hype over this game into the stratusphere. The elections office in Columbus, Ohio, is giving its workers the day off for the game, so the vote counting in one of the last undecided congressional races is just going to have to wait, dammit. (They work on Saturdays right after elections to make sure everything gets done, apparently. But not this Saturday.) The level of "analysis" of this game on ESPN and elsewhere has been akin to the bloviation that goes on before the Super Bowl. "Let's analyze who has the advantage in the running back matchup." "Who has the better punter?" Blah, blah, blah. Lots and lots of people are making, and getting paid, a lot of money because of this game.

But you know who isn't? The players. At least to me, this game has really put a spotlight on really serious problems with big-time college sports. Basically, hordes of people are more than happy to make serious bucks off of college athletes -- coaches have their own shoe contracts and TV shows, ESPN practically would have had to go out of business without this game this week, the colleges that make the BCS bowl games literally rake in millions and millions of dollars -- but the athletes themselves get scholarships and a whole lot of trouble if they try to make any money off their fame.

Now getting a full ride scholarship to some major university is nothing to sneeze at. (This is a blog, my grammar doesn't have to perfect. I can dangle my prepositions if I like.) With college costs going up much faster than inflation, getting a full ride scholarship is a big deal. And so it arguably is just compensation for athletes who are going to go out and represent their colleges (arguably).

The NCAA and the big-time sports colleges, however, essentially hide behind this sweet mirage when it comes to football and basketball. Those sports in college are no less about the money than the NBA or the NFL. It is very disturbing, at least to me, to see college athletes be pimped on the cover of "NCAA Football 2006" video games when you know that everyone involved in that game made bucks except the people who made it possible -- the players. Yet Notre Dame and USC and Michigan and Ohio State routinely rake in big, big bucks based on those players and then pat them on the head and "Good job, get back to your dorm." You think Coach K shares the money he makes on Chevy commercials with the players. Uh, no. Even if he wanted to do so, it would be against the rules and the NCAA would sanction the hell out of everyone involved.

I'm not saying that college athletes should get paid like NBA and NFL players. But they should get some slice of the compensation that they are generating. Maybe there should be some kind of trust fund for big-time college athletes who don't make the show.

I'm not saying that you should stop watching college sports. I'm not. I am quite hoping that my office gets tickets to the first couple of rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament for which we applied.

It's just that, when you create a system where one group of people generate the value and another gets the value, you are going to have problems. Guaranteed. And that's where big college sports are right now.

Time Flies

Two things happened recently that made me feel old.

First, I turned 36. Birthdays hadn't bothered me much in the past, but, when I started doing the multiplication -- I think that this was one day when I was walking over to play softball, the sport that claimed my right ankle last year and has recently broken the bones of at least three guys I either know personally or was watching during the incident -- I realized that 36 is 18 times 2. O-kaayy, twice as old as 18. Still better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, though.

Second, Bob Barker retired. Yes, retired, after 1,543 years of game-show-hosting. I believe that Grandpa Bob actually started his career as one of the Irish monks who helped saved civilization during the Dark Ages. Bob saved the part about the prices of dinette sets, washers, driers and hot dogs carts and spaying and neutering your pets.

But, really . . . I watched The Price Is Right almost literally from infancy. One of my earliest non-Watergate memories is sitting in our living room trying to talk to Bob (OK, maybe one of the hostesses) through the TV and having my mom tell me that the people on TV can't hear you. (But what if they could? Pleeaaase, Jack, Sawyer and Kate, go away for a while. Chloe, go to the CTU cafeteria and get a nice chocolate-vanilla swirl soft serve, it will make you feel better.) As a teenager, I loved The Price Is Right. I spent way, way too much time during the summer watching Bob on the show. One of my greatest accomplishments is that, on one magical day when I was about 14, I guessed within $100 on both showcases. Dude, man! My freshman year of college, I was sitting in my dorm room one day minding my own business when, suddenly, the small guy with the really loud voice (no, not me, the other one) yelled "OH MY GOD!!!" down the hall I leapt out of my room, looking to see who had set something on fire now, when the guy then yelled, "THE BITCH OVERBID ON THE WASHER!!!" Yes, he was watching The Price.

And who held that cultural jewel together? Bob. For 877 years, Bob hosted that show. When it was on during the day. When it was on at night. With the dark, natural hair. With the dark, dyed hair. With the white, natural hair. Saying something other than "spay and neuter your pets" at the end. Saying that every single day at the end. Watching as women busted out of their tube tops running down to contestants row. Running away from Samoans who wanted to put a death grip on him. Bob was there, the Walter Cronkite of game shows.

Then about 1992 or so, Bob started showing us his more human depth. "Depth" in lots of senses. Acting depth, in his classic turn in Happy Gilmore, slugging Adam Sandler. Personal depth (as is "god, how low can you go?") in that he apparently had been harassing the hostesses for years, according to the hostesses at least. No longer was Bob just the guy who had hosted game shows during the Crusades. Now we knew Bob to be a game show host with feet of clay.

And now he has retired. It is the end of an epoch, a geologic age. I suppose that this had to happen at some point. Mike Wallace retired from 60 Minutes, right? Storm Thurmond retired from the Senate, right? The Rolling Stones retired from touring, right? (Oh, sorry. But that does remind me, when will we finally learn why Keith Richards was in the coconut tree?!? It's a cover-up of Mulderian portion.) So Grandpa Bob's bowing-out made me feel old, too.

But, of course, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Standing in line at Safeway yesterday, I saw on Soap Opera Digest that Bo and Hope are back together on Days of Our Lives. What is this, 1985?

Spots on Presidents

"A leopard can't change its spots." "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." They are total cliches and kind of offend us in that they violate the American idea that you can always change into something better or at least different. But, when you vote for President in 2008, keep them in mind.

I say this because at least our last two Presidents, probably the last three, got themselves into deep trouble doing things that were perfectly consistent with the things we found out about them during their first campaigns. Don't believe me? Look at the facts.

In 2000, we found out that George W. Bush basically had sunk at least two companies by apparently committing to the same business his dad had been in and overcommitting what was basically other people's money. When things went south, his father's friends bailed him out. Eventually, his father's friends basically put him in charge of a baseball team, whose value went way up when public money was committed for its benefit, and he sold high and got rich.

In 1992, we found out that Bill Clinton had had a lot of trouble staying away from women to which he had access as a public official. Gennifer (with a G) Flowers was the one who came out in 1992. Clinton never exactly denied that he had had something going with her.

By 1988, there was little doubt that George Bush was basically a pretty decent guy who didn't have a lot of grasp of the way that most people lived, tried more than a little too hard to make up for that and was willing to be pretty fluid in his political positions.

And each of these guys' characteristics came back and bit them badly when each of them was President. The mess in Iraq strikes me as a really, really unfortunately inflated version of W's oil business failures. Now he's asking Jim Baker, his dad's old friend, to tell him how to deal with it. You (and Hillary) can draw a straight line from Gennifer (with a G) Flowers through Paula Jones to Monica Lewinsky. Bush 41 bought it politically when he couldn't figure out what a supermarket scanner was and tried to do the right thing by agreeing to raise taxes after glibly declaring "Read my lips -- no new taxes."

Now this doesn't mean that you shouldn't vote for someone for President if somewhat disturbing things come out about them when they are running. Let's face it, there has be something a little different about you if you decide to go through what you have to go through to get elected President. Ultimately, you have to pick the best person from your party's candidates or, if you don't care about any particular party, the best of two candidates. But, as in all things, you have to listen to your little voice when considering Presidential candidates. The things you learn about them when you first meet them tell you who they will be in office.

Weirdness in the Underwear Aisle

OK, I know most of you probably haven't been dying for a post on this subject, but I bought some underwear today. When I got them home and went to put them away, I noticed some very odd about them:

They came in a Ziploc bag.

Yes, if I had so chosen, I could have sealed my new underwear back up in their package to keep them fresh.

Why does underwear now come in resealable containers? Who knows? There is, however, someone out there who made the conscious decision to market his or her company's underwear as a perishable. I wonder why they didn't choose to use Tupperware. I mean, they're easily stackable.

I undoubtedly have dwelt upon this topic for far too long already. I will just add Ziplocs for underwear to my ever-lengthening list of pointless things along with, among other things: (1) revolving lights that outline license plates; (2) little toes; and (3) Paris Hilton.

The Millenium Falcon

Enthusio got a truly awesome birthday present this year. I mean, I think it is truly awesome. He got a Transformers set that is supposed to be Han Solo and Chewbacca that connects and transforms into the Millenium Falcon. As they supposedly say in Boston, wicked awesome!

What makes this so wicked awesome is that Enthusio thinks that it is wicked awesome. This is beyond lame, but it just makes me gleeful that Enthusio loves Star Wars. (At a band concert in which The Mermaid was playing a couple of weeks ago, one of the high school kids played a little riff of Luke's Theme and Enthusio and his pal looked at each other and simultaneously said, "That's from Star Wars!") In past generations, I suppose that fathers swelled with pride when their sons first rode a horse or tied a nice nautical knot or shot a deer. I, however, swell with happiness because Enthusio loves Star Wars just like I did when I was his age. And, more than that, because he, like all right-minded Star Wars fans, loves the Millenium Falcon.

Of all the machines, gadgets, things, etc. in the Star Wars movies, two reign supreme: (1) the light saber; and (2) the Millenium Falcon. The light saber's appeal is pretty obvious. The absolute coolest thing in the Star Wars movies is the concept of the Jedi. The second set of movies diluted the Jedi's coolness by showing that, yeah, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there were a lot of Jedi and that they basically were like the karmic cops. But, the Jedi remain the absolute coolest thing from Star Wars (see the movie "Go" if you doubt me -- one line from that movie reflects Obi-Wan Kenobi's eternal coolness). And the light saber reflects that fact.

The Millenium Falcon is a different matter. Unlike the light saber, it is not elegant whatsoever. It is constantly called a piece of junk. There is a whole motif in Empire Strikes Back about how the hyperdrive won't work. It catches on fire and R2D2 extinguishes it. Han Solo won the Falcon from Lando Calrissian gambling. It's a sketchy ship. But, of course, it basically always comes through. It gets out of Mos Eisley. It escapes from the Death Star (although, of course, Grand Moff Tarkin allowed it to escape in order to track it to the rebels' base). It knocks out Darth Vader just as he's about blow Luke up. It gets Princess Leia off of Hoth when she can't make it to her transport. Its ugliness is an asset because it can hide in the Imperial garbage. It basically is the mechanical embodiment of Han Solo, the skeevy rogue who comes through. It is a mark of Return of the Jedi's inferiority that Han and the Falcon spend a lot of the movie separated. Why should Lando get to use the Falcon to blow up the Death Star II (and all of those independent construction contractors as noted in Clerks)? That was B.S.

So the Falcon is the best-loved ship of the Star Wars movies (some people might argue for Slave I, Boba Fett's ship, but I have never gotten the Boba Fett obsession). I remember reading a quote from Tiger Woods somewhere in which he said that the best Christmas present he ever got was a set of Millenium Falcon Legos that he begged and begged for. That kind of says it all. I remember seeing the big set of Millenium Falcon Legos a few years -- somehow it was the first time I had seen it -- and thinking, "I literally would have killed someone for that when I was 8."

Having this in my background, it just tickles me how much Enthusio likes that present he got. Last night, he had me help him transform it from the robots into the ship. Oooh, that was fun. And I'm too old to have been into Transformers. My younger brother The Philosopher was into Transformers AND Star Wars. If and when he ever has a son, I will have to get him -- them -- a Millenium Falcon Transformers set.

Voting in California

Politics have always interested me greatly. There is a story in my family that, when I was about 2 1/2, I went around talking about Nixon firing Archibald Cox. Operating from my own memory, I believe that my first memory is of the House Judiciary Committee's Watergate hearings. (I remember sitting in the middle of the floor of our house on the dairy around lunchtime with my dad, watching these long rows of people talking. I have a very distinct memory of a black woman talking. As best as I can piece together, this is a memory of Barbara Jordan and the House Judiciary Committee. I have never claimed that I am not somewhat unusual.) I was a Political Science major in college and actually took way more Poli Sci classes than were necessary to finish the major. As with sports, I have to try hard not to obsess about politics. And, of course, I always vote.

All of that being said, the task of voting this year in California, in my particular town, is almost beyond comprehension. Here is the list of things on our ballot:

1. U.S. Senate
2. U.S. House
3. California Governor
4. California Lieutenant Governor
5. California Attorney General
6. California Secretary of State
7. California Controller
8. California Treasurer
9. California Insurance Commissioner
10. California Assembly
11. California Supreme Court Justice 1
12. California Supreme Court Justice 2
13. California Court of Appeal Justice 1
14. California Court of Appeal Justice 2
15. California Court of Appeal Justice 3
16. California Court of Appeal Justice 4
17. California Bd. of Equalization (which deals with certain taxes & fees)
18. A state ballot proposition about transportation bonds
19. A state ballot propositiion about homeland security bonds (I think)
20. A state ballot proposition about housing bonds
21. A state ballot proposition about education bonds
22. A state ballot proposition about flood control bonds
23. A state ballot proposition about penalties for sex offenders
24. A state ballot proposition about water bonds
25. A state ballot proposition about parental consent for abortions
26. A state ballot proposition about cigarette taxes
27. A state ballot proposition about oil taxes and alternative energy
28. A state ballot proposition about parcel taxes for education
29. A state ballot proposition about political campaign financing
30. A state ballot proposition about eminent domain
31. A local ballot proposition about local electricity service
32. Another related local ballot proposition about local electricity service
33. A local ballot proposition about whether to have a Target in our city
34. A local advisory ballot proposition about having preference voting (just asking for our opinion -- it won't actually do anything).

I guess that I should consider myself lucky. Our city's always hotly contested city council election was on the June ballot. There's no runoff for state schools superintendent and this isn't our year to have county supervisor and state Senate elections. We don't seem to have any runoff elections for county officers like sheriff, clerk-recorder, assessor, district attorney, tax collector, coroner . . . . We aren't in a hotly contested congressional district and our U.S. Senate race was decided in about November 2005, so we haven't been subjected to a deluge of stuff about them.

But to paraphrase Dirty Harry (only the first Dirty Harry movie was really good, the second and third ones kind of blew, but the fourth one -- Dead Pool -- was good and, it's a little-known fact, featured Jim Carrey's first role in a movie because he was the Axl Rose clone who got killed at the beginning), do I feel lucky?

No, I do not. I mean, how can anyone have really good opinions about all of these things on which we are asked to vote? I'm an attorney, so I actually have some opinions about California Court of Appeal justices, but, if you're not an attorney, how can you really know much about them? Why does California have both a State Treasurer and a Controller, both of whom deal with the state's money and both of whom are elected statewide? I'm in the water business, so I understand what the water bonds and flood control bonds are, but, if you aren't in that business, could you have a really good opinion about them. I'll tell you, I don't have a firm grasp on what the transportation bond is about, but, geez, if you driven in LA or Bay Area traffic lately, you know they have to do something. I'll admit that, when I saw Proposition 88 on my absentee ballot -- it's about parcel taxes and education -- I had no idea what it was. Guess I need to read up on that one.

At least Gary Coleman's not on the ballot again this year.