Remembering the best actor in the world

As I was intermittently paying attention to this year's Academy Awards (Billy, the Borscht Belt called - they want their jokes back), I did happen to catch the segment of the show they do each year honoring people in the business, mostly actors, who've passed away.

I call it the Cavalcade Of Dead Stars. The Academy calls it In Memoriam.

Watching the familiar names and faces go by, I was waiting for one actor's name in particular who died last year: Pete Postlethwaite. Come to find out since he passed away on January 2, 2011, he was actually honored in last year's on-air cavalcade.

Postlethwaite was one of my favorite actors of all time. Apparently I was in good company - Spielberg called him "the best actor in the world."

His craggy face and nose that'd been broken several times in bar brawls all but insured he was never going to compete with more classically good looking actors for lead roles.

But as he proved time after time, role after role, you don't have to be the lead to be unforgettable.

Most people remember him from his Oscar-winning performance along with Daniel Day Lewis In The Name Of The Father.

Hard to believe it was his only Oscar.

He lent an air of credibility and realism to popcorn fare like The Lost World. And he riveted my attention with his unshakable confidence mixed with just a hint of threat as conduit to Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects.

My favorite performance though was one of his last - Irish mobster, and florist, Fergie Colm in the Ben Affleck directed film The Town. Menacing, fearless, understated and terrifying, the scene where he's pruning roses while he tells Affleck how he got his mother hooked on drugs before she killed herself is a master class in acting.

I'm glad the Academy didn't inadvertently leave him out of the cavalcade this year. It would've been almost as criminal as nominating him for just one Oscar after a lifetime of Oscar-worthy performances.

School's out

So remember my post about getting a speeding ticket? In it, I said it was my comeuppance for all the times I was speeding and didn't get caught. I was going to pay the fine and go traffic school and that would be it.

That was before I got a letter from the court saying the fine was $360 - before the additional traffic school fees. For those of you keeping count, that's $22.50 for every mile over (you do the math).

There's paying the ticket then there's surrendering to state-sponsored extortion in the form of outrageously exorbitant traffic fines for only 16mph over the speed limit (there, I did the math for you).

After getting the letter, I immediately went online to see how I could fight the ticket. What I found was no shortage of websites specializing in helping beat the ticket. These sites, like the dog-walking companies I've posted about, have names that try a little too hard to convey exactly what it is they do.

The problem with almost all of them is that they charge more than the fine to make the ticket go away. And there's no actual guarantee they'll be able to do it.

But after a little further research, I found what I was looking for. And I found it, of all places, in a forum on the Southern California Subaru Impreza Club site.

Buried deep in the small print on the back of the citation is something called Request For Trial by Written Declaration. Basically I go to the courthouse, post the fine as bail, then get a form to fill out and make my case. Then I send it back into the court. When I request a TWD, that means the officer who wrote me up now has to write up his side of the story and submit it to the court as well. Neither of us have to appear.

There are two great things about that. First, when an officer comes to court to testify against you, he gets paid between $200-$300 extra. When he has to respond to a TWD request, he doesn't get paid anything extra. And since the last thing any officer wants is more paperwork, a high percentage of times they just blow it off entirely.

Second, it's writing. And not to sound like it's gonna sound, I'm pretty good at it.

If the judge decides in my favor, the case is dismissed and my fine/bail is refunded with 60 days.

Here's the great part: if it doesn't go my way, within 20 days of receiving the decision I can request a courtroom trial where I can plead not guilty, or request traffic school. If I don't like his decision, I can have another go at it to make it come out the way I want.

It's the very definition of a win-win.

So yesterday, I went downtown, posted the bail and got the form. I waited in a long, long, long line for the traffic court window. I couldn't help but feel out of place due my obvious lack of tattoos and passable grasp of the English language (on both sides of the counter).

On the Subaru site are examples of successfully written TWD's. I'll use one of those, edit them with the facts of my case, clean up the writing a bit and send it on in.

And I'll do it the only way I know how. Fast.

No strings attached

When I think of a Stradivarius, like most people, the first musical instrument that comes to mind isn't a trumpet. It's a tuba. No, it's not a tuba.

I've posted before about my son, the jazz trumpeter and, objectively of course, how incredibly, awesomely talented he is. And while I have no doubt the talent is all his, I also believe what helps bring it out to its full measure is the instrument he plays.

His Stradivarius.

Truthfully, it's a little misleading. It's actually a Bach trumpet, and Stradivarius happens to be the name of the model.

He didn't always play a Stradivarius. When he first began, we rented him a Yamaha trumpet from a local music store (I don't care how much disinfectant they spray on the mouthpiece. It's like renting bowling shoes - I was still nervous about it). We wanted to make sure he was going to stick with it before we made the investment for a trumpet of his own.

It didn't take long to see he was serious about it (as opposed to, say, cleaning his room or doing laundry), so it was time to shop for a quality horn he'd have and use for years to come.

Fortunately that was the easy part. Because the question was never where to get it. It was what time do they open.

The Horn Guys was the only place we ever considered buying from. Sure, we could've applied the rental fee towards purchase of the Yamaha from the music store, but, again, all that disinfectant.

Not being able to carry a tune in a suitcase, I'm always impressed and happy in stores like this. Bright and shiny things everywhere - right up my ally.

After learning about the many trumpets available from the incredibly knowledgable musician owners of the store, and having my son try out several of them (with his own new mouthpiece), we decided on the Bach Stradivarius Bb Model 37.

I didn't know much - and when I say much I mean anything - about Bach Trumpets. Come to find out it's one of the most respected names in brass.

It's easy to understand why one respected name in music would want to appropriate another. To say something is the Stradivarius of its category means it's unquestionably the best.

Which explains why you don't see many claims like "the Salieri of Flugelhorns!"

Educating Rick

The Republican party has a lot to be proud of in Rick Santorum.

Finally, finally, someone has the courage, the foresight, the vision, and let's just say it - the balls to take a stand against higher education.

As if it wasn't enough to misquote President Obama while he was speaking to a tea party group in Michigan, Santorum decided to throw in some good, old-fashioned name calling. Apparently in Santorum's universe, Obama is a "snob" because he wants everyone to have the opportunity of a higher education should they choose it.

It's easy to see why Santorum would be against this. After all, with his B.A., M.B.A. and J.D. degrees (one more than Obama has), he's obviously an educated man. He understands first-hand the pointlessness and futility of a higher education.

While he was a hard-working student at Penn State, University of Pittsburgh and Dickinson School of Law, he must've come face-to-face with plenty of those educated elitist snobs day after day. What with their "intellectual" discussions and "critical thinking" and "larger world view" it must've taken everything he had to graduate with his three degrees.

Obviously being around those leftist professors and their America-hating agendas is how Santorum is able to recognize Obama for the snob he is.

As the above paragraph from his 2006 campaign website so clearly illustrates, Santorum is so flustered at the thought of today's children having accessibility to affordable, higher education, he forgot that six years ago he was for it.

Thank you Rick Santorum for coming out against education. Together with your woman-hating policies to turn back all the progress they've made in the last 100 years, I believe you may have a real shot at this thing.

And if it doesn't work out, you can always tear up those over-rated degrees and get yourself a job requiring less skills.

After all, even liberals have to buy their fries from someone.

One word too many

Is it just me, or does anyone else see a pattern here?

When's the iSelectric getting here?

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, copywriters didn't work on computers. They worked on this beauty. The IBM Selectric Typewriter.

If you've ever typed on one, just seeing the picture instantly brings back the sound of the inter-changable font ball clacking away, not to mention the visceral feedback from the keys as you pounded on them.

The Selectric III pictured had several improvements over previous models. I won't go into them here, but you can read about them all at the IBM Selectric Wikipedia page.

This old school technology - which was quite revolutionary at the time with it's correction ribbon and stationary carriage - has been single-handedly responsible for every keyboard redesign since desktop computers were invented, at least when it comes to haptic feedback (for the haptic-ly challenged, it means using the sense of touch in an interface to convey information to the user - for example, if a key has been pressed).

They were big, clunky and loud, just like my high school girlfriend.

But like her, I loved working on it.

The punishment should fit the crime

On my friend Rich's blog, Round Seventeen, he's started a series of posts called People We Need To Kill. I'd like to nominate these two examples of human garbage.

Joyce Hardin Garrard on the left and Jessica Mae Hardin on the right are, respectively, grandmother and stepmother to 9-year old Savannah Hardin. Or at least they were.

What happened is that Savannah lied to the grandmother about having eaten some candy, so as punishment last Friday they made Savannah run for 3 hours straight. She wasn't allowed to stop, nor was she allowed to drink any water.

Dehydrated and sodium depleted, Savannah had a seizure and died days later.

I suppose the telltale line in the news story was "The trailer where Savannah lived..."

I'd like everyone who thinks I'm kidding when I say you should need a license to be a parent to take a good look at these two aberrations. I hate to judge books by their covers, but what's painfully evident to me is this couldn't have been the first physical or emotional abuse this little girl suffered from these inbred freaks.

Fortunately they've both now been charged with murder. As I said in the title, I think the punishment should fit the crime.

They need to make both these women run for three hours nonstop in the Alabama sun, then let them die of dehydration. Preferably while holding ice-cold water bottles in front of them, just out of reach.

I know some of you think the death penalty is wrong, and I should be more forgiving and merciful. Here's my answer to that.

Tell it to Savannah.