The Race to Become the First-Ever Female Human to play Major League Baseball....The Heat Shall be ON.

Out of all the major North American sports, baseball, is by far the most gentlemanly of the bunch. Just to be sure let's list the concussion rates for all the sports. (concussion rates from the CDC).

These rates are per 1000 "athletic exposures" which I assume means a "game" basically.


1. Football (American): 64-79 concussions
2. Hockey: ~54 concussions
3. Soccer/Football (Euro-Style): ~20
4. Basketball: 16-20
5. Baseball: 4-5

So, out of the big deal sports....baseball only generates 4-5 concussions per 1000 games. Now, I can only think of a few situations where massive contact happens in baseball and it's mainly catcher-runovers, fielder collisions, fastballs up-and-in, and a few other situations.

For good measure let's put the concussion rate recorded for Cheerleading (the sexy womens who bounce around and flop around at football games and stuff)....

Cheer Leading: 11-15

Cheer leading, when they throw those chicks around and they land on their skulls and this and that...actually causes more concussions than baseball does.

Where am I going with this, you ask...well, if you haven't divined it from the title of the article yet....I'm going to suggest that baseball might be the only major sport ever that will at some point have a female human playing on the same field with male humans.

All the other sports are very combative, full contact, and highly physical events. However, baseball is very individualistic, pitcher vs. batter, a non-contact game that only in very rare circumstances becomes mano-y-mano and dangerous.

The BIGGEST hang-up for women entering baseball to occur really has to do with pitching inside. Pitchers and batters constantly battle over who owns the inside portion of the plate. Batters may lean in like that Carl Everett used to do and willingly get hit by a pitch....and pitchers will "brush back" the hitters to regain control of that meaty part of the strike zone. This war over the inside portion of home plate leads to most if not ALL the bench clearing ultra-violent brawls in Major League Baseball.

Now, look...say a woman pitcher hits a heavy-leanin' Carl Everett type hitter to brush him off...and this will likely occur....what would happen? A player uses the "charge the mound" technique to let a pitcher know not to throw so close to him next time he's up....so....what if a batter charges a female pitcher? This becomes murky waters now and really causes problems. No man would want to be known as the guy who charged and tried to punch a chick in the face.....so yeah, this is a big problem.

Similarly, if a female is hitting and the male pitcher wants to declare or re-declare the inside portion of the plate and whips one inside...now let's say the female hitter gets incensed and charges the male pitcher. What is the man gonna do just stand there and let her punch him? No, he would have to defend himself. People got on Pedro's case for example when that old 70+ year old Gerbil charged him...but what was Pedro gonna do? Just let Zimmer punch him in the face? No, that's crazy.

For this women in baseball situation to work, the one thing MLB would have to do is declare a NO BRAWLS rule whilst a female is batting and/or pitching and if a brawl does break out both players will be suspended for a complete season...the man and the woman. Thus, chances are this situation would never take place in a future circumstance.

Okay......so, technically with one rule change....yes a female baseball player at the MLB level could feasibly exist without issue at some point in the future.


History
The lady that struck out Babe Ruth

Jackie Mitchell (right)

Legend has it that at an exhibition-style event in the olden times....a lady named Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth. So, due to this feat women in baseball have some history to work with, I'd say. How gimmicky this event was cannot be determined, was it a gag? A show? A shtick....or was it a serious event? Who knows...but it is recorded in history, legend or not, that one Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and maybe Lou Gehrig too.

I'm not sure what Mitchell threw, what kind of pitches, and how fast....but at least this event stands as a sort of point of historical departure...and thusly....makes nay-sayers find that this idea isn't all that crazy.

Obviously, olden time baseball was pretty gimmicky. Everyone knows about Bill Veeck, for instance, sneaking a midget past league officials onto his roster and getting that midget Eddie Gaedel in to pinch hit in an official game. This Jackie Mitchell exhibition was likely pretty gimmicky as well and shouldn't be taken super seriously.


...But Seriously
Can a female in the present and near-future era become a Major League Baseball Player?

Gimmicks aside, is there a woman who is skilled enough at baseball to compete, 100% not gimmickly, with male humans at the most elite of human levels?

For a pitcher you'd need someone with enough arm strength to powerfully supinate thousands of arm motions per year. The only people who can do this are masochists, literally, that's the only people who can supinate vigorous arm motions constantly...total masochists. Not to be sexist...but are there that many women out there who can handle a major league pitcher's life style? I'm not so sure.

Eri Yoshida - Oneesan

In an article a long time ago I mentioned that Eri Yoshida would be a good candidate because she throws knuckle balls and those pitches don't strain the arm. Knuckle ballers in the big league cruise around well past their early thirties and have way less arm trouble than conventional pitching styles. Hoyt Wilhelm for example threw those junk balls in the majors (in the pre-steroid era) until he was 49 years old. Knuckle balls are a technique pitch that break 1.5 times making it difficult for hitters to adjust. If a woman could master the knuckle ball, like Eri Yoshida was attempting, then I think they could bypass the arm damage problem entirely.

Another idea to bypass arm damage could be instead of training young female pitchers to supinate their arm release action pitches...they should be trained to powerfully pronate their arm release action as suggested by Mike Marshall.

What is supination and pronation? Take your right hand, turn your thumb all the way to the right, and now punch your arm forward with that right thumb pointing as hard you can to the right. How did it feel? Now, take your arm back, turn that same thumb down this time towards yourself and point it to the ground and punch fastly forward again. Which punch felt more normal? When the thumb was out or in?

Basically the first punch with the thumb "out" was Supination....the second punch with the thumb "in" was Pronation. So what is pronation? It's a simple technique to not destroy your elbow and shoulder while you throw baseballs a multitude of times ad nauseam (amongst other things).

If a young female can be taught pronation pitches....I believe that woman could theoretically throw a series of elite-caliber pitches without causing excess damage to her body.

Mo "Money" Ne Davis

Personally, I think this is very feasible. Take someone right now with EXTREME talent, say, Mo'Ne Ikea Davis (that girl who was smokin' kids at the Little League World Series). Take someone with that Soul Intensity, Desire to Win, and Talent....and teach that kid a minimum of 3 pronation pitches to add to her arsenal and I believe she can develop into a major league pitcher. I'm soundly convinced of that...but only if she adds pronation pitches to her arsenal and uses those 80-90% of the throws she makes.

Look, there's very few knuckle ballers who can master that pitch to the point where they can have good ERAs at the Major League level. A more conventional pitcher like Mo'Ne may have better odds to make it. I think it would be a good idea for her coaches to experiment with pronation style pitches to maximize her development.

France's Melissa Mayeux

What about hitters and fielders? Maybe the first woman player can be someone who doesn't have to deal with the rigorous lifestyle of a pitcher. The main candidate at this point for the most developed hitting and fielding prospect is, as everyone knows right now, France's phenom Melissa Mayeux who is the first female ever in history to be added into the scouts master database and is legally allowed to sign a professional contract at the Major League level.

She's not big, she looks like a female version of Dustin Pedroia, short but athletic build, good fielder, good contact hitter.

In this post-steroid era we are going to see a return to center where a lot of the massive bodies are gonna slow down and we're gonna see a game more like the old days again.

I remember guys like the Craig Grebecks, the Jeff Reboulets, the Mike "Mad Dog" Mordecais, Andy Stankiewitzes, John Cangelosi types and guys like that...guys who were like 160 pounds (at the most) having spots on major league rosters. There's quite a few woman athletes who are bigger than those guys so it's not far fetched that the benches of the future could be filled with slick fielding chicks and slap hitting womens.

There's room for about 6 or 7 reserves on a Major League bench...you want players on your bench who have good fundamentals and a variety of tools you can use situationally. Even if a player excels in only ONE of the FIVE tools a player needs they can find a bench job. Can you run fast? You can be a pinch runner like a Larry Lintz. Can you field a difficult position like shortstop well? Then you can find a job on a bench somewhere. Can you get hits or walks or bunt? That's a skill managers need on their bench.

I'm sure there's females out there who can either run, field, or hit at a level where they could be very useful in a reserve role. Mentioning Pedroia before....even if you're 170 pounds you can become an All-Star like he did if you hone your fundamentals correctly.

Who Will it Be?

Will it be a junky-style Knuckle Baller like Eri Yoshida? I heard she's training with Tim Wakefield to further master the pitch.

Will it be a highly talented pitcher like Mo'Ne Davis? With the right coaches teaching her pitches that won't kill her small frame...it's possible.

Will it be a role-player type slick fielder, pinch hitter, pinch runner type? A kind of Munenori Kawaski style player? Could be, I don't see why not....some of the builds of baseball players over the years who've made major league rosters thanks to hard work and skill honing have been very small. Craig Grebeck was listed as 5'8 and 160 pounds in the media books and those are always 2 inches over and 10 pounds more...so he was likely 5 foot 6 and 150 pounds that Craig Grebeck...no doubt. You don't need to be a behemoth to make a roster in MLB. It could be someone like Melissa Mayeux who I heard is honing her skills with Baseball Masters such as Barry Larkin, Steve Finley, and Steve Jeltz.

I think Mo'Ne would be interesting because she was such a huge news item. Her coaches should be in correspondence with Mike Marshall if I were them....asking what kind of pronation pitches would be ideal for her frame to work with.

Conclusion

Out of all sports, due to baseball's low concussion rates, it is the only sport which may be infiltrated by females and the year it'll happen is drawing closer....2020? Could be.

Bees

Everybody these days is talking about bees all the time. Everything is "bees this" and then "bees that" everybody is up in the club talking bees like there's no tomorrow. Are they going extinct? Can we live without bees? Will they sting us?

I've been readin' so much about bees these last few weeks, I better commit my thoughts on Bees to text before I forget all the shit I read about those little stingy bastards.

The sections of this aritcle will be the following:

1. What are Bees?
2. My experiences in my lifetime with Bees
3. Are Bees going extinct?
4. Can we live without the Bees?

Okay, let's go.

What are Bees?

Closest-packed Hexagonal Structure

Bees are an insect society with a hierarchy. There's a Queen bee and then there's worker bees. Bees deal a lot in flowers and dig pollen. They carry pollen around on themselves and pollinate flowers. Flowers need pollen to reproduce and bees buzzin' around going from flower to flower pollinates them up good.

Many fruit bearing trees and vegetables rely on pollination to produce edible foodstuffs for humans. So we should be thankful that bees buzz around helping flowers mate and make edible products for us to consume.

Bees also hang out in cool Hives. These hives are serieses of closest-packed hexagons which in tandem with each other create literal domes where they habitat themselves. Bees don't have mathematic or geometric axioms to draw from...they just create these hexagonal dome-like structures from instinct which is pretty cool actually. Humans deal mostly in squares and cubes when building structures and rarely build with the same architectural ingenuity as Bees do. Their structures are brilliant designs and Bees just make them by instinct alone...they've never read a math book, geometry book, or architect book....they just do the do. I respect that shit a lot.

In these hives they produce a sugar-substance known as honey...humans love this shit too. Lots of bee keepers who have hives harvest the bee sugar to sell it.

I see a lot of Naturo-Bozo-Clowns saying honey is super healthy compared to table sugar...but they are retarded. For every 100 grams of honey there's 82 grams of sugar in it. People are like "but it's natural sugar tho!" and those people are mentally crippled of any intelligence and should go fuck themselves. I hate people who think honey is a healthy alternative to sugar...it's got 82 grams of sugar per 100 grams! Can you fuckers fucking read!? What the fuck?

Bees have a natural defense spear on their ass that sting the fuck outta you too.

Bottom line on these spear-assed disco-sadistic suckers: They are great architects, who help flowers mate, and their goop can be eaten because it's sweet and tasty.


My Experiences with Bees

I'm not scared of these little sons-of-bitches. I respect the shit out of the mother fuckers and their closest-packed hexagonal dome-like structures yet if these whores try to sting me in the face or in the nose or in the ass...they are gonna get fucked up hard-core.

I don't really care about getting stunged, it's not like I'm allergic but if they come near me looking like they wanna sting me up the nose...I pull karate-kid moves on them...and smush them between my index/middle finger and thumb. Sometimes they sting my thumb on the way out but fuck them for fucking with me, man.

Get that thing away from me you dumb bee!

If they just flying around and chilling then fine but if they start buzzing around and trying to sting me then all bets are off, you Bees. I 'aint playing'...I 'aint even playin'.

I never clap to kill 'em just chopstick 'em with my index-middle and thumb fingers because it looks and feels cooler.

Other than the dumb ones...I love and respect the Bees. Most Bees are helpful and respectful members of society...but the ones who go around flailing that ass-spear like it's a god-damn switch-blade can honestly go eat shit and die.



Are Bees Going Extinct?

With climate temperatures changing, possibly some pesticides, and viral infections...many speculate that Bees are going extinct.

People who study bees are actually finding that their numbers are not exactly dropping. It was just one study which didn't take into account new members being born in the hives that fed erroneous data into a lot of articles written about bees these days. The lifespan of a Bee is 6 month to 2 years on average....so yeah...if the guy tagged a bunch of bees and they all died then yes the numbers would appear to go down. You have to measure the population of the Hive and not the Bees individually because their life spans are not long enough to go the individual route. Babies are born in the Hives to replace the Bees that die...so most studies are not showing a decline in Bees populations....but only the dumb one that didn't count baby bees born in the Hives.

The three factors that can kill bees should be taken seriously though. Altering temperatures seems to always have an impact on animal and insect life. Secondly, pesticides can kill bees....and thirdly when Hivers take their hives to California for the big pollination season viruses can spread. All over the North America people fly their bee hives to California for the pollination season for big bucks and yes viruses do spread at these big pollination parties.

As of this moment, Bees seem to be okay. If temperatures alter big time, a new pesticide isn't bee friendly, or a viral infection takes hold big-time then the bees will be in for trouble but data for now shows that Bees are pretty much okay.

Conspiracy theorists and certain more Naturo-Bozo themed sites seem to think not only are Bees going extinct but they will take us down with them. Well, no....not exactly, or well, not at all really....


Can We Live Without The Bees?

Conspiracy and "Natural" themed sites are predicting apocalypse for a Bee-less future....yet is that true? Yes bees do pollinate flowers and some flowers do produce fruit. Does that mean without Bees that we couldn't eat? No it doesn't.

List: What foods are pollinated by Bees

In that list we see that many of these crops are in the "cash crop" domain and not the sustenance domain. Rice is not in that list and rice is the foodstuff which feeds the most people on earth on this moment.

Even if Bees did go extinct from climate change, a mass virus, or a wickedly negligent pesticide...would we lose apples n' walnuts and other foods for ever and ever? No, we wouldn't.

China for instance doesn't pollinate with bees...they pollinate their flowers by hand. Similar to what this guy is doing, Observe:

You can take a q-tip or tooth brush and pollinate flowers no problem. Not to be rude to bees, I love and respect those honey-making geodesic dome makin' bastards, but they are actually pretty bad at pollination. They do it by accident mainly when they go from flower to flower...it's not like they have a memo from humans telling them which flowers to pollinate. Humans on the other hand know exactly which flowers they want to pollinate and they do it. This actually creates jobs for people and leads to HIGHER crop yields.

Why? Because it turns out humans are better at pollinating then those jabroni Bees are at it. Go figure....it's 100% true though.

Conclusion

So are Bees going extinct? No, climate change is their biggest threat BY FAR and it is possible for climate change to alter bees lifestyle to the point of destruction...but even in that worst case scenario apples and other foods would NOT go extinct with them due to humans being able to pollinate crops at better efficiency than Bees can anyway.

Bees are very cool, they are great at building things, making sweet goop to eat, and helping flowers bloom....but let's not go over-board with these Bee-Spiracies okay?

Death of Bees ≠ Death of Humans

Also as it stands right now, Bee populations are not dropping as many people seem to be claiming. In fact most studies claim to show Bees population increasing.

Ok, that's enough about Bees.

Writin' bout' War (What is it Good for? Something?)

There's a lot of war literature that has been written over the years, I'm not talking about like histories or things like that, I mean fictional data that is based on the tragedy of War.

Out of all of it ever written....you can actually divide ALL war fiction material into TWO categories. The first being "romance war books" and the other category being "un-romanced war books."

I know it is brazen to divide every single fictional piece of data written on wars into two polarized categories...but unfortunately it is true.

Firstly, Romance War literature regards the domain of Good Guys versus Bad Guys and promotes a "ra-ra-ra-Go-Team" sort of theme behind it. Some romantic war books are so sappy they feature Fencers who have a rose in their mouth at all times while conducting these super-fun nobleman wars. They feature characters that you wouldn't exactly find on a battle field in reality. These pieces of literature present war as a fun activity that is noble/heroic/right as the heroes defeat the villains.

Examples of Romance War book are the Epic of Gilgamesh where the noble King Gilgamesh defeats his enemies and saves his people from a flood (this story was re-worked into the bible/kuran), or War of the Roses...a highly pompous regaled affair about who gets to sit on the Throne of England. The most widely-read Romance War book of all time is Three Kingdoms which details the War-Triangle (as opposed to the Love-Triangle writing tool) between the regal Liu Bei and his foes Cao Cao and Sun Jian.

Romanced War books Main Textile: War is a heroic, noble, and pretty fun little game.


Secondly, the other polarized group of war fiction data is Un-Romanced war pieces. These tend to present the topic of war as un-heroic, disgusting, wrong, insane, and bad. You're not gonna have too much ra-ra-ra cheerleading in these...and when you're done reading them you're gonna walk away from it feeling quite depressed and even queasy. This may not be as fun, or pump-up-able as a Romance War book but these Un-Romanced books are aiming to be more realistic. They don't want to get you pumped over war....at all. They want you to have a negative opinion on war.

We're going to look at a few good examples of these in depth in the second section of the article. Just to throw out a few now....a good modern day example is something like Full Metal Jacket where the "heroes" aren't really heroes...they are unbalanced weirdoes who are thrust into a situation they can barely even function in and try their best to kill before being killed. There's nothing very heroic about the "heroes" of Full Metal Jacket. Another good example is the Japanese film Grave of the Fireflies....which depicts two Japanese orphans during WWII and it is probably like the saddest friggin' movie anyone's ever made. Those two japanese kids did not have a good n' fun time in that war movie that's for sure. Those two kids had no fun at all in that war movie.

Non-Romance War books Main Textile: War really sucks, it's gruesome, devastating, awful, terrible, and just simply no fun what-so-ever.


Mind Set of the Writers

When reading old fiction datum it is fun to try and think of what the writer/composer of the text had going through their mind at the time. I do honestly think, the Romance War books, are written by a certain subset of the given era's population which were probably of a very privileged background.

I was sitting in this building once, I forget why I was there, to deliver something I think for some job I was doing, and this building was the Black Watch "armory" in Montreal. It's called an armory but it's more of a little lounge-club for older military types to hang out at. I saw a documentary once called, The Valour and the Horror, which claims that the Black Watch contingent came into the new-era World War back in the day very unprepared for WWII and marched up to the enemy's new-age firearms (gatling guns) and were just mowed down, yet the general told them that real men don't retreat, so they all marched proudly into the bullets to be mowed down one by one. I don't know if that account is true but this is what that movie claims...I think it's maybe exaggerated a bit.

Anyways, in the Black Watch building I was in a few years ago, I saw a painting hanging in the main room over the fireplace which made me think twice about that Valor and Horror movie....it was a portrait of Prince Charles (yes the dopey Prince there who does the homeopathy talks and has no use/function in life that you see on TV all the time)...it was a portrait of Prince Charles on a war steed with a glorious sabre....and I thought to myself...this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen in my life. This portrait of Prince Charles depicted this way is absurd.

That portrait really made me remember that scene in Valor and Horror where they claim the Black Watch was a group of unprepared children ordered to walk into gun fire by their officers and die like cannon fodder. The portrait of Prince Charles on that horse with that sabre was so odd looking that it made me really start to honestly question whether the claim made in that film might be true. Because something about that little military lounge was just downright silly.

I believe the mindset of writers who write Romance War novels are the same type who can commission a portrait of Prince Charles on a steed with a sabre and not laugh at that when it's completed. They can look at a painting like that and think of Heroism and Ra-Ra-Ra whilst looking at Prince Charles depicted as a war hero.....but honestly, who can take a painting like that seriously? You need to be a special kind of retard to not laugh at a painting like that.

With regards to Writers of Un-Romanced War fiction, I think they have a far more realistic view of what war is actually about than the Romance people do. That's pretty much a fact.

The case of Three Kingdoms is interesting though. There's theories in China that Luo GuanZhong was commissioned by the government to write that and after he was done he was angry about what they made him write....so he wrote Outlaws of The Marsh (a story about bandits uniting together and fighting government officials) under a pseudonym years later in his life. I think that's a common theory now-a-days actually in China. The current form of Outlaws is pretty Romanced but it is suspected by Chinese Historians to have been heavily edited and believed in its original manuscript to be a very a Un-Romanced style work.


Choice Examples of Un-Romanced War Media

Okay, it's not that I want to spend more time on Un-Romanced works than Romance works and I don't necessarily think Un-Romanced is better. I mean, Three Kingdoms is still one of the most well crafted texts I've ever seen in my life....but I think in this day and age it is more normal to write Un-Romanced for sure. Romance War media is seen a sort of odd and out of place now. Like a modern Romance War movie like Black Hawk Down for instance is one of the most terrible films I've ever seen. It's this ra-ra-ra go-team movie about War-Boys fighting hordes and hordes of ravenous Africans...Black Hawk Down is almost like a zombie movie...it's fucking atrocious. Romance war movies really don't seem normal in this era, I find. The African people they were fighting didn't even have personalities...it was like the heroes were fighting monsters. It felt like a propaganda movie from the 1930s or something that Black Hawk Down. Romance War media really does seem odd in this modern era.

These next examples are good examples of Un-Romanced War fiction.


  

1. Johnny Got His Gun (by Dalton Trumbo)

This book is about a guy who got blowed up in the war and lays in a hospital bed for an entire book just thinking about stuff. He has no legs, no arms, no hands, no feet, no ears, no eyes, no nose, no nothing but a brain and a chest and some organs.

They keep him alive with tubes and liquids and stuff and he just lies in bed....thinkin' 'bout stuff....like his past, his old jobs, his old friends, his old love. Things like that. He never thinks with punctuation though. Just periods. Never any dumb commas or stupid things like that. He only needs periods really this guy. He has no fucking arms and legs what the fuck good are commas to him?

He thinks in short chunky thoughts. Never really here nor there. Old memories he takes some time thinking about or maybe he thinks about the rats crawling over him that he can't get off cuz he's got no friggin' opposable appendages. Poor guy.

Finally near the end he starts thinkin' 'bout war and goes into this big diatribe about how if he was running things NO ONE WOULD GO TO WAR AND NO ONE WOULD GET BLOWED UP! NO ONE WOULD LIVE LIKE THIS! HE EVEN GOES INTO CAPS LOCKS TO THINK ABOUT THIS STUFF.

It's a good book, really. I like the writing style of it....I'm not huge on commas and shit either. Trumbo was arrested and detained for UnAmerican Activities for writing this book. So if you read it you can hold it and go "wowee! This guy was arrested just for writing this thing!"

I think writing-style wise alone this book is very unique and interesting.


2. The Wars (Timothy Findley)

This book is about this kid who is pretty excited to go to war with the pistol his parents got him and to be like his hero, this cool guy from his neighborhood named Eugene Taffler....but war turns out to really really suck and he winds up trying to save some horses from a fire and then going completely bonkers. Poor kid, he just wanted to be a kid really....He didn't really want to go to war and die and everything.


3. Slaughter House 5 (Kurt Vonnegut)

This book is about a nonchalant youngster who gets sent into a war and he doesn't really know what the fuck is going on, he gets captured, imprisoned, and fire-bombed, oh and all his friends around him start dying one by one...and then he gets so out-of-it and just wants to distance himself from his world that he actually zones out into outer-space and this alien lets him look at past moments of his life and explains to him that it takes no less than seven people causing 7 seperate action-chain events to create one human life.

Yo, this book is fucked man. It's pretty cool.


4. Suikoden II (Yoshitaka Murayama et. al)

This game, based on Outlaws of the Marsh and other fragments of Chinese history, is the story of two friends who unwittingly end up leading opposite sides in a civil war. They're best friends and don't want to fight each other but circumstances and reasons on both sides dictate they must fight each other to end this civil war.

The character you play as wins...and when it comes time to lead his newly united country as President....he just says goodbye to good ol' Viktor and walks out during the victory celebrations. He never wanted to fight this stupid war. He goes to meet his friend who lost the civil war just days before against him, and his friend wants to duel him. After fighting each other in a long and bloody war for 2 years...they grow tired of this duel as well...and they both just lay down their weapons and walk off into the sunset to travel the world like vagabonds.

What were they fighting this war for? Who knows and who cares in the end. They're both vagabonds now, traveling free and at ease....they don't even look back at the two countries they were fighting on opposite sides for. That's over and done with....that silly war.


5. Short Untitled Twitter Story (Norm MacDonald)

On May 25th of 2015....on Memorial Day....one twitter user typed out his Memorial Day tweet for all his followers to read, he did it in the form of a short story which used roughly 15 "tweets" as they call them.

Now you know with this N. MacDonald character that he often starts these long-winded set-ups just to lead you into a shaggy-dog puncher. Famed celebrity Andy Richter onced described his story telling style as, "it's like leading someone on a two hour walk up a hill just to point out a pile of dog poop"... so you wondered if Mr. MacDonald was just on some shaggy-d set-up with this story...but he wasn't.

When he was done tweeting out his chunks of text which comprised this mini-novel....it was a very well-written short-story....it was one of the best examples of Non-Romanced War fiction ever created.

It was a short tale about a young man sent to war, sent away from his gal and his momma....he was sent to watch the friends he grew up with die in front of him....like that poor soul Richie Bellman from the farm next door to him.

It was a short twitter masterpiece which perfectly encapsulated the style of writing known as Un-Romanced War fiction. It was a very nice Memorial Day story....

.....and then he deleted it. Why? Nobody knows. It's just stuff of legends now....stuff of Writing Legends. It seems No One other than those who read it that night of May 25th shall ever read it.....

Punchin' Up some Scripts.

I wanna learn how to write movies good.

I mainly write things in this blog to get better at the skill known as Writing. It's like any other skill, writing is, like you have to practice to get any good at it. I always used to read a lot but writing is more harder than reading and thus is a harder challenge to take on. Gettin' good at writing is like going to the driving range, or taking a car to a field to drive around and learn it....to really learn writing you got to go to a field (a paper or a computer screen) and start punchin' up keys 'til you gain proficiency as such.

This site mainly deals with essay-style writing because that's the only style I really know...but movie writing seems fun too.

I was on the internet the other day and saw someone a tweet a movie pitch he had to Jean Claude Van Damme over twitter. It was the internet writer Seanbaby and he pitched a sequel to Time Cop via twitter. He broke the pitch into 48 twitterable chunks and then assembled them chronologically backwards so if you are reading the film from his twitter feed...it would read from start to finish.

I realized while reading that Time Cop 2 pitch...that I've seen so many movies....that I can play a movie in my head and basically construct and visualize an entire film that doesn't exist in my brain. While reading the Time Cop 2 script I could easily visualize the goings-on of this film, no problem at all. It feels like I've already seen Tim Cop 2 even though it does not even exist.

Looking back, I've visualized entire films in my head over the course of a general-day many times....just from my imagination and nothing else. I look into the abyss of nothingness in my skull and then slowly visualize entire films from start to finish. Films that don't exist...films constructed from experiences of watching many films.

Sanguillen's Quest

Like one time, I read this article about how Pirates catcher Manny Sanguillen refused to believe that Roberto Clemente died in a plane crash and vowed to search the area where his plane went down and find his friend alive. While reading that article, I kept thinking, "damn, this would make such a touching film." The next day while at work and showering and stuff....that movie happened in my head. Manny Sanguillen's search for his friend kept me unbored while doing shitty stuff at work. This wasn't a great movie, though, it was a long time ago, it was probably like 10 years ago...my mental movies are better now. My imagination got too out of hand with this film and Sanguillen, whilst in the jungles of Nicaragua (or was it Ecuador?), had to battle lizards....and then the lizards kept getting bigger...and by the end he was fighting Dinosaurs with Lazor Beamz and it was just a silly place to take a heartwarming film such as this.

Committing these mental movies to some sort of existent record may be a fun exercise. Maybe it'll teach me how to write movies. You have to stick to your strengths when trying to write a new style of writing....and when it comes to movies...I seem to have some experience writing bio-pics for obscure baseball catchers.

Oh wait...I just remembered....

One time I did write a baseball bio-pic in school as a sort of joke thing to see what the teacher would say. I copied it to this blog and it's in this article over here....

(If you scroll all the way down in this mess to the pic of Steve Jeltz you can read Steve Jeltz Saves Christmas: https://writingsonsubjects.blogspot.com/2012/02/the-steve-jeltz-thing-from-school-i-did.html)

That Steve Jeltz Christmas story is a very very heartwarming story. I was young when I wrote that, re-reading it now...I think I was a better person back then.

Soooo.....the only experience I have in both fiction writing and story telling is with obscure baseball players so I might as well train harder in the Obscure Baseball Player Story Telling genre in order to not have to learn anything new or apply myself too much whilst practicing movie writing.

First we'll need an obscure player, and sticking with the back-up catcher motif, we shall try and write a back-up catcher bio-pic. Hmmmmm, how about.....

A Mike LaValliere romance-comedy? No.

A Tony Eusabio crime drama? No.

A Ron Karkovice buddy cop film? No.

A deep introspective kafka-esque Lenny Webster vehicle? No.

A Rick Cerone workin' man movie? Hmmmmm......Yes!


The Rick Cerone Story

Well, that's the movie I'm gonna play around with in order to try and learn how to write movies. So, you can stop reading now if you want or you can follow me on this amazing adventure in learning.

Baseball bio pics are pretty common....I read there's a Bill Lee one coming out produced by Eric Gagne. I'm gonna watch that for sure.

The premise for the Bill Lee movie (this Bill Lee movie is a real one not like mine) has him fooling around in rural Quebec from what I've read and I don't know how that will sell to American audiences. I think they'd make more money setting it in Boston, no? It's not even Montreal it's set in, it's set in like the Triple AAA league and in like Granby or something.

I watched that Jackie Robinson bio-pic with Harrison Ford and it was really good and it made big bucks. Montreal had a big role to play in Jackie's rise to success yet in the movie they really cut out any reference to Montreal except for a brief mention by Ford at one point. Honestly, I was a bit disappointed but I understand why they set it in Florida and that's because American audiences respond better to that. They don't want to hear about french Canada if they don't have to. The Bill Lee movie, I hope it does well, despite being set in rural french Canada. I think it's a great idea but I'm not sure how the American audiences will react to the non-american setting for the Bill Lee bio-pic.

Anyways, this article I'm writing is about my baseball bio-pic so we better get to it. My movie isn't gonna have any trouble with setting because it's gonna be set in the biggest city there is...New Fucking York in 19-fucking-81...The Big Apple, baby. That's the biggest setting there is!

Now we need some historical information to base our "based on actual events" bio-pic on. If you're not familiar with that phrase it basically means...."based on something we read once and it sounded cool so we stole the idea." I'm gonna use this New York Times article as my "actual events" as such.

"And Rick Cerone is STILL on Trial" October 12th, 1981:
(http://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/12/sports/and-rick-cerone-is-still-on-trial.html)

Did you read it? Now do you see why a Rick Cerone "workin' man versus the big wig" type of movie would be awesome? All the characters for the film are set-up from that 1981 Dave Anderson article. The working hero and the rich evil big wig boss that is keeping our hero down.....those two polarized characters are easy to work with. George Steinbrenner as the villain is a great character to work with, most people remember the back-of-his-head portrayed in Seinfeld yet my movie will portray all-of-his-head and even his body.

The first high-drama climactic scene will be based of the actual event of Cerone and Steinbrenner "exchanging expletives word-for-word." The schism event will be everyone turning on Cerone which makes him feel down and sad...but as you can see from the source-material article....the victory at the end will be "50,000 fans cheering for the hero" Rick Cerone.... and in the end his enemy will accept him as being "my type of ball player." So it will be a happy ending for sure.

Hmmmm, we need a few more characters. We need a comedy-relief dopey side-kick who plays Cerone's roomate, we need a cool black guy who doesn't dig Cerone at first but by the end really digs him, we need a sub-boss secondary villain and we need a hot-chick too. I can fill those roles by looking at the 1981/1982 Yankees rosters....and for the chick I'll just google a hot celeb from 1981/82 and pretend Cerone and her were intimate lovers.

So let's make a list before it gets too confusing, these are the basics so far.

Title: The Rick Cerone Story

Hero: Rick Cerone
Bad Guy: George Steinbrenner
Vice-BadGuy: Bob Lemon
Dopey Side-Kick: Lou Pinella or Bucky Dent
Cool Black Dude: Oscar Gamble
Hot Chick: Olivia Newton-John

Main Theme: A "Stone Cold vs. Vince McMahon" style thing of the Working Man fights back against The Boss.
Secondary Themes: Baseball, Italian Culture of the 80s, White person and Black person becoming best friends, swearing, toilet humor.

Schism: Steinbrenner's dislike for Cerone spreads throughout the entire organization and all the Yankees, even the FANS, start hating poor Rick Cerone. Will he quit baseball forever or will he win back his teammates and fans hearts?

Climactic Victory: Through strength of character and a timely homerun....Rick Cerone wins his teammates respect and the adulation of New York baseball fans.

Oscar Gamble = Cool Black Dude

Ooooooh, it sounds pretty good, this movie. Obviously we need a cast. Now, for that Bill Lee bio-pic they cast a real pretty-boy named Josh Duhamel to play Lee....but my movie's lead is a workin' man so I can't cast a pretty boy type. I need a big overweight Italian guy to portray Rick Cerone correctly.

We need an overweight, Italian, preferably a Yankees fan, who excels at swearin' and toilet humor....hmmm....

An image is forming in my mind, yes, it is. I can see who meets these criterion crystal clear in my brain. The ONLY person who I can think of who possibly can do justice to this film and tell the important story that NEEDS to be told with this Rick Cerone bio picture is...of course...

Artie Lange.

Artie Lange as Rick Cerone.

Lange is the only human on earth who could enter into the Rick Cerone character and really do it the justice it deserves. It's a perfect fit. We're talking oscar here...not Oscar Gamble this time....but oscar like award-oscar. If someone actually makes this film and casts Artie Lange as the lead....I absolutely guarantee it will be regarded as a cinematic triumph of the amazingest degree. No joke.

They'd need to dye his hair and stuff though so he can pass as being a 29 year old athlete....but he has range, Artie, so I think he can stretch the role and pull it off.

You should see how the movie goes in my head, it's great, like Artie is really really good in it. He's funny but he's also very believable and the audience really relates to him.

The other actors can be slotted in later...the villain has to be mean, the side kick has to be goofy, the black dude has to be cool, and the chick has to be hot...that's the only criterion for those roles.

Look, after I'm done punchin' up dis script I'm gonna shop it around to all the big movie people and shit so I'm not gonna just throw the script in the next section, but, I will provide dialogue samples from certain key scenes of the film.

Sample Scenes

Okie-doke, so here are some samplers from the script. I'll set them up so you know what the fuck is going on in the scene too.

Humorous Scene 2C:
In this will-be memorable scene, Rick Cerone is catching in a game but needs to use the bathroom to move his bowels. The umpire is another Italian man named Ron Luciano (who is played by Ernest Borgnine....oh wait...he's dead...sorry...Ron Luciano will be played by Pat Cooper).

This scene is based on the actual event when Hubie Brooks one time (this actually happened) called time out to go take a leak during an at-bat.

Hubie had to go to the bathroom.

In real life Hubie had to number-1 but in my Luciano-Cerone scene it is a heavy number-2 that Cerone needs to evacuate from his body. Both characters being Italian, you'll noticed that, they use a lot of Italianized english terms and talk a lot about Italian cuisine. The scene begins as Cerone catches a fastball and turns to look at Luciano and says...

Rick Cerone: Luch! Holy shit! I...I....I gotta go!

Ron Luciano: Go? Whaddya talkin' 'bout "go"? Go where? Wat the fuck you talkin' 'bout?

Rick Cerone: You fuckin' fongoul...I gotta fucking take a shit!

Ron Luciano: A shit!? What? There's NO SHITTIN' IN BASEBALL! Ya dumb segarsi!

Rick Cerone: Luch, man, I gotta go, I'm not fucking shittin' you man...I gotta shit!

Ron Luciano: Are you fuckin' kiddin' me? You're fucking joking ya stupid asshole! Skeevosa!

Rick Cerone: You're gonna see in about 5 seconds that I wasn't jokin' you fat piece of garbage!

Ron Luciano:  You cazzo-suckin' asshole! Turn aroun' and leave me the fuck alone!

Rick Cerone: Luch....on my grandmother's grave...I swear I'm telling the truth.

Ron Luciano: On....your grandmother's grave?

Rick Cerone: Ya. Man, I ate 2 cannolies, a pizza, and a buncha gnoccies for pranzo!

Ron Luciano: You crazy sonavabitch...........TIME!

(Wow, you should see Pat Cooper in this scene....he is simply impeccable....like his timing and stuff).

Confrontation Scene 1F:

In this scene Rick Cerone has just made a grievous mental error of a magnitude which most would describe as being  "game-altering".  George Steinbrenner (all of his head, not just the back of his head) calls Rick on the telephone and proceeds to tell him he's over-weight, stupid, and ugly.

Rick Cerone: Hello, it's me Rick Cerone. Who the fuck is this?

George Steinbrenner: Who the fuck is this!? Who the fuck do you think asshole!?

Rick Cerone: Oh, Mr. Steinbrenner hi, uh, howzit goin' ?

George Steinbrenner: Ooooooh just swell, just swell fatso.....

Rick Cerone: ....

George Steinbrenner: It's just that your dumpy mentally-crippled ass COST ME THE GAME!

Rick Cerone: Hey, hey...come on. Didja see how Goose pitched today? He sucked shit!

George Steinbrenner: No! You know who sucked shit out there, today? YOU DID FUCK FACE!

Rick Cerone: ME!? FUCK FACE!? Ya I'm a fuck face alright....BECAUSE I FUCK FACES!

George Steinbrenner: You fuck faces? NO! You have the face that gets fucked....fuck-face!

Rick Cerone: Wanna bet? How 'bout I come into your office and fuck you in the face?

George Steinbrenner: YOU fuck ME in the face? You fat stupid retarded asshole! FUCK YOU.
Rick Cerone: You're the fuck-face...you fucked-up fuckin' FUCK FACE. Fuck you MORE than FUCK ME! BYE! FUCKER!

(Ooooh that scene's intense. This is the eighties too so it's those rotary phones you can SLAM down hard and shit. Wow).

Reconciliation Scene 2B.1
In his scene Oscar Gamble and his humongous and wicked-cool afro come to make amends with Rick Cerone after Rick helps Oscar's girlfriend fend off creeps at a Detroit disco-tech after a road game.

Oscar Gamble:Yo smooth brother.....
Rick Cerone: ???

Oscar Gamble: I.....I.....I.....yo.....thanks for helpin' my girl back in Detroit.
Rick Cerone: Hey, it's nuthin' man.
Oscar Gamble: Smooth brother....I'm sorry for calling you a fat ugly Guinea Dego piece of shit.
Rick Cerone: Ya. I'm sorry for calling you a retarded moolie asshole.
Oscar Gamble: Hey man....what's done is done. It's water under the bridge, smooth brother.
Rick Cerone: Osc, you've really taught me a lot 'bout hittin' n' losin' weight....I.....
Oscar Gamble: Hey man, we're teammates and dats what teammates do.
Rick Cerone: Life is tough sometimes, Osc.
Oscar Gamble: Hey, life is always tough. They don't think it be like it IS....but it DO!

Words of Wisdom

Filler Scene 3A:

To fill up some screen time there's a part where Cerone goes down to Mexico to play some Winter Ball after the '80 season and he befriends fellow Italian Don Demola who's re-conditioning his arm after surgery down there. They are battery partners when A HUGE BRAWL breaks out after Demola hits a batter with a pitch and Cerone picks up the batter and helicopter suplexes him.

This scene is based on the actual event stated in Tommy Lasorda's book where he claims in a winter ball game to have hit a batter....then the batter charged the mound....and then Lasorda CLAIMS to have picked him up, spun him around like a helicopter, and then suplexed him. Personally, I don't believe Tommy Lasorda did this but it is stated in his book that he did and this is the "actual event" that this scene is inspired/stolen from.

(Note: Don Demola is a pretty funny Italian guy with a good accent.....See this interview)

(Note II: The brackets mean they're thinking to themselfs.)

Rick Cerone: (He wants inside!? Fuck, he's gonna nail this asshole!)

Don DeMola: (I'm gonna whack dis asshole. Fuck this guy. I'm nailin' him)

Rick Cerone: (Oh shit....here we go again.) *WHACK*

Don DeMola: Here he comes! Aaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeiiiieeeeeeeee!

Rick Cerone: What the fuck! He's getting his ass kicked!

Don DeMola: Yo Rick! Come fuck this guy up! Give him the helicopta suplex technique!

Rick Cerone: You ready!? You ready for the Rick Cerone Helicopter Suplex Mark II !?

Don DeMola: HOLY SHIT! HE'S GOT 'IM IN DA HELICOPTA SUPLEX! HOLY SHIT!

Rick Cerone: GRRRRRRRRAAAAARGH! BLAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGH! YAAAAAAAA!

Don DeMola: Whoa! Rick....dat was cool!

(This scene is really cool.)

Conclusion

Alrighty, so I'm gonna pitch my script to all the big producers and shit. It'll get made, probably. Someone'll probably steal the idea but it'll get made eventually I bet.....maybe.

It's so good this movie, it doesn't have T-Rexes like my Manny Sanguillen non-existant mentally visualized film but it's still very very good.

Pat Cooper's great in it, and the guy who plays Don DeMola is a kid who's new but really good at acting. Oh and fuck, the chick who plays Olivia Newtons-John is soooooo sexy it's not even funny.

Everybody wants the next big-thing and I can honestly ensure you that back-up catcher bio-pics is the way to go. It's the new thing.

Water Numbers

Water water is everywhere so let's all have a.....oh wait a sec, it's as salty as sam, yo.

Everybody talkin' California drought left and right these days. William Shatner has a kickstarter going which aims to raise 30 billion (!!!) to build a water pipeline from Washington state to California state.

If it's at the point where people are willing to even think about investing that much money into solving the problem it would be good to understand the numbers involved with the situation before applying any sort of plan into action.

I don't pretend to be smart or anything, but, I do think having a basic understanding of the quantities and numbers involved in problematic situations does let people generate better opinions on the problem. In regards to energy for instance, I see every day people saying this or that will solve the energy problem and get us off fossil fuels....but when you do the math these solutions in some cases would only produce a fraction of what is needed to operate human earth in an advance technological state. I wrote on article on this blog called, "Rating the Energies, Yeah!" to just try and look at how much energy is needed to run human earth in that advanced state and what energy sources were best to do that.

(That energy article here): https://writingsonsubjects.blogspot.com/2014/05/ratin-energies-yeah.html

That article aimed to find how much power in terrawatt hours humans need to operate earth at this highly technically advanced state. Similarly to that article, it might help to find out how much water California presently uses, how much is used per industry, and how much water will be created by proposed solutions at the table.

Like the last article, I'm gonna put the same disclaimer up...because I'm not an expert. I'm not anything. The majority of hours of work in my life has been in the furniture upholstery, wood-working/finishing, and residential moving fields....not in science.

Warning

Look-it my fellow global g-units, I'm not a scientist or anything and the datum and opinions expressed in this blog article are my understandings of what seems to be the numbers on the scenario at hand, maybe all the things I read are false...who knows. I, of fairly sound mind at this moment, believe the statistics and opinions expressed in the following text are true...yet, who knows if they are wicked correct or not. I'm just a dude, man...just like you and me. If something written here is of interest to you then by all means conduct your own research and formulate your own opinions on the subject matter.

California Water Use

The United States Geological Survey presents these statistics for water usage in California, to keep the article uniform all quantities shall be expressed in Gallons:

Water use per Day: 38 billion gallons

Which Industries are Using it....

Agriculture/Irrigation: 64%

Electric Power Generation: 17%

Infasrtucture/Government Use/Domestic: 17% 

Industry/Mining: 2%

Okie-doke, so 38 billion gallons is quite a hefty load of drinkable water used per calendar day (24 hour time period). 

First off, I left "Domestic" use in the table for a valid reason. I didn't just lump it into Government use for the reason to show that domestic use of water is almost non-existent in terms of water usage. This is, of course, the millions of citizens drinking water, flushing toilets, washing cars, filling pools, etc....

Jerry's got it wrong.

So for all those "green" hippies who think they are saving the world by not flushing their toilets until they are overflowing ("if it's yellow let it mellow if it's brown flush it down"), or pretending that turning the faucet off while they brush their teeth is saving the world, or yelling at their neighbor because they see them washing dog poop off their walkway with a hose ("YOU CAN'T WASTE WATER, ARE YOU STUPID!?"). To all these people...you are not saving anything at all, when all domestic use by all citizens amounts to about 7% of water use...you are like a grain of sand in the desert...you are not eco-warriors who are saving the planet...you are simple jabronies...plain and simple. This is a systematic problem that HAS NOTHING to do with domestic water use so next time you see someone running a hose, or brushing their teeth, or flushing pee-pee down a toilet...you have no right to get angry at them with your pretentious eco-warrior voices...so just shut up. Governor Jerry Brown (who always smiles and never frowns) has imposed sanctions on domestic water use but that is not a problem solving measure it is simply a band-aid solution that makes it seem like the public is to blame for the state's water problems.

With that out of the way let's move into the other areas of water usage...

Electric Power Generation is the amount of water used in running power plants in the region. California is already getting its nuclear plants to use ocean water for cooling itself down and stopping them from melting down, therefore, nuclear plants despite using a lot of water are no longer (or will no longer in the future be) using drinkable water but rather salty water. If you are running a nuclear plant and have not switched to using salt water to cool the plant down....you are being very silly....there's no reason you can't use salt water for this procedure.

The out-dated coal is still used to power close to 20% of California, which is pretty fucking bad, and not only is coal the most polluting, difficult for workers to mine, and inefficient....but it also uses a fuck-ton of water. These plants, like nuclear, MUST switch to using salinated coastal ocean water for this process. There is no reason as to why these plants need fresh water from aquifers for their water usage needs. Same goes for natural gas and petroleum plants as well.

Infrastructure and government use regards all sorts of things from public owned establishments to public use. Fire hydrants, commercial businesses, public pools, and other public operated establishments. It amounts to about 10% of total usage.

Now that bad boy, agriculture and irrigation, accounts for about 2/3 of the state's water usage. Unlike power plants, switching to using salt water is not an option because you can't irrigate with salt water, you need fresh water to irrigate. This is indeed an actual problem and it actually needs to be addressed because you can't use 66% of the state's water to operate one sector of the economy.

Agri-Bizness

I referred to California's agriculture as a sector of the economy rather as a food source because that's exactly what it is. They're not planting like rice and stuff there...ok? They are planting what I'd call rich people crops. They plant plumbs, kiwies, almonds, grapes, walnuts, lemons, and weed.

You're not feeding the earth with these crops, these are known as "cash crops" plain and simple. They are called cash crops because people pay a lot of money for these products.

That's another thing that angers me about the "green" hippie community. They are all these vegans who won't eat meat n' potatoes....but will subside themselves on weird rich people nuts grown in California...and they'll be all like "if we all just stayed home and smoked weed all day the world would be a better place!"...well, not to burst your bubble but it takes a lot of fresh water to grow marijuana in case you didn't know.

It's weird because the Americans will go to war with Afganistan and burn all their opium farms because apparently "Drugs are bad m'kay"...but you'll never see the Americans drop napalm on California marijuana farms, will you? Kind of strange.

Even though science shows marijuana is not a dangerous drug and helps cancer patients get their appetite back during chemo...it is still a very addictive drug with millions of users in North America. California produces the most marijuana, way more than any state, almost more than all states combined. To operate these semi-legal farms takes VAST amounts of water. Not only water but the indoor growers use incredible amounts of energy to operate their quasi-legal facilities.

It burns me up because these weed hippies are the most fervent about saving the environment and are always angry at government. I bet they are the same people pissed at the public for brushing their teeth and flushing pee-pee without poo-poo down the terlet. Fuck them, fuck these fucking hippies. Marijuana is a cash crop sucking insane amounts of fresh water and energy out of California...and why?

....just so rich people can get high, that's why.

Same goes for almonds, walnuts, oranges, lemons, and other cash crops. Albeit these have nutritional value at least unlike weed which just gives the user a muscle relaxant agent. These, unlike weed, are legal and counted towards GDP and you'd expect that number to be high right? You'd expect the sector that uses 2/3 of the state's water to be a big huge percentage of the state's GDP right?

Wrong.

Agriculture in total amounts to...wait for it....

....TWO (2%) of California's total GDP! Whoooop-deeee-friggin'-dooooooooooo!

Solutions

First off, Jerry Brown's restrictions on domestic water use are ridiculous. To pretend a guy washing his clothes in San Diego, or a some kid making a jug of Kool-aid in San Franciso is the reason why you have a water crisis is down right ridiculous!

Get the Salt out.

The proposed solution of William Shatner of importing water from Washington state isn't a bad idea but 30 billion is quite a lot of funds...and Washington likes water too...maybe they want that fresh water.

If people are serious about this, the first thing you have to look at is de-salination which although had been around for almost a century is only really getting going lately.

The Middle East is the leader in these plants, out of necessity, because they want to operate large scale industries yet live in the gosh darned desert...so they have no choice but to get the salt out of ocean and sea water. 

California's in this situation as well and if it wants to operate its cash crop farms it needs these plants. The Carlsbad plant, when operational, estimates to produce 50 million gallons of fresh water per calendar day. There are 16 plants of this magnitude being planned in California at the moment.

16 x 50 million = 800 million gallons

Not bad, each plant has a price tag of 1 billion bucks. So...if you slap these all around the coast you can generate quite a bit of fresh water. If Shatner is raising 30 billion (he's not gonna get it by the way) he should be looking at building THIRTY de-salination plants along the Western United States coast line which output fresh water to the Californian region.

46 x 50 million =  2, 300, 000, 000

We know that California needs 38 billion gallons of fresh water per day to support its nuts, grapes, and weed habit. So, 2.3 billion would give them about 6% of the fresh water they need....which honestly doesn't cut it...AT ALL.

Is the answer to build a 30 billion dollar pipe-line and steal water from Washington state? No.

The only answer is to make laws that limit cash crop farming in the region. Sorry.

America'll go napalm all the rice fields in Vietnam just to fuck with them...or it'll go burn up all the cash crop opium fields in Afganistan to de-mafia the region...but you won't see it fucking with illegal cash crop farms in it's own backyard.

If they even limited cash crop farming in California the problem would be solved but they can't. Wasting water to produce 2% of the state's GDP is every citizens god given right! Vegans need their almonds for their diets! Weed addicts need their hit! It's their god given freedom to use this much water!

FIRE! FIRE!

Is it too drastic for Jerry Brown to ask the federal government to drop incendiary liquids on legal and non-legal cash crop farms and burn them sky high? Yes, yes it is. It's too drastic when they do it in other countries too. You can't just burn 'em up. So what do you do?

If pipelines, de-salination, and napalming aren't real answers, then what is? Maybe there's no answer...maybe California behind its alluring facade of Hollywood is actually a down-right mess of a region. 

Maybe the federal government should start similar economic sectors that are strong in California in other regions. Maybe a second or third silicon valley can spring up in other locations around the United States which lures people away from that region is a good idea. Maybe a second Hollywood can spring up in New York or Chicago or Boston or Texas (redneck Hollwood?) which lures people away from the over-saturated California region. Who knows.

Conclusion

The suggested solutions of Jerry Brown to blame the crisis on the domestic population is downright ludicrous.

Shatner's idea of importing water from Washington holds merit but good luck getting 30 billion, g. Good luck convincing the state of Washington to part with its fresh water too.

De-salination plants along the west coast can give them a few billion gallons of fresh water per day...but they use a fuck ton more than 2 billion a day.

Fire bombing all the almonds, walnuts, and marijuana cash crops is simply too drastic.

Who knows. It seems when you pull back the curtain of Hollywood bullshit...this region is simply a wasteful behemoth who runs off coal for power for their energy. It's possibly the most inefficent economy on earth.

The main point to bring up is not to blame regular folks washing their dishes for this mess, that's down right absurd.

Califoooooornia.

Oh Gosh, I really like those Redneck Monkey Movies.....

Geoffrey Lewis (Left): RIP

One of the stars of those old seventies redneck monkey movies died the other day, Mr. Geoffrey Lewis, and that really got me thinking about those old redneck monkey movies again. I'm Talkin' 'bout Any Which Way but Loose and Any Which Way you Can.

It was these movies 'bout two guys, some chicks, and a monkey who run a foul with a nazi biker gang and the cops...so....Clint Eastwood kicks the shit out of all the nazis and the cops.

I saw these movies when I was really young too. A lot of the American stations that I got as a kid (TBS, WGN, SBK) used to take turns showing redneck movies. Whenever I used to come home from school as like a 12 year old kid...the TV would darned sure have some sort of silly redneck movie on.

Redneck movies involved a lot of drinking, fighting, bottle throwing, truck driving, country music, and a touch of romance. An example of a more modern redneck movie would be like Roadhouse with Patrick Swayze where like Swayze has to drink and fight and bang chicks...but the seventies redneck movies were even more better than Roadhouse.

The pace-setter for seventies redneck movies were the Burt Reynolds ones where he has to drive a truck full of goods somewhere (or ride along side in a trans-am keeping the cops away from the truck is more accurate). This one was ALWAYS on after school when I was a kid and I must have seen it numerous numerous times. Looking back now, Smokey and the Bandit, didn't make any sense. Like, Reynolds is a "smuggler" yet he's smuggling BEER over state lines. As a kid I thought this was soooo bad ass but beer is not illegal in any state. What was so bad ass about "smuggling" cases of two-fours over state lines? Nothing. Anyone can deliver beer....it's not illegal at all. There really was no reason for Officer Jackie Gleason to have given Burt Reynolds and good ol' Cletus a hard time for 2 hours due to them having a truck full of beer.

A year after Smokey and the Bandit came out...someone had a great idea. They took the redneck genre of film (drinkin', truck drivin', n' fightin') and threw a monkey in the mix....not just any monkey, but an Indonesian Orangutan into the mix. Now, if you're not familiar with Any but Way which Can you're probably thinking that putting a Sumatran ape into a redneck movie is just a stupid idea....but you're wrong....it's not a stupid idea. It's a brilliant idea is what it is.

There's no real set-up either as to why Clint Eastwood and Geoffrey Lewis are hanging out with an Orangutan. Clint just goes into some shed near his house and fools around in the dark for a bit, and then the lights come on and it's an orangutan....and then they high five and start chugging beer. That's it. There's no scene about him meeting the ape and there really doesn't need to be. Clint Eastwood is a bare-knuckle boxer who has a monkey...get used to it.

The President of the United States

Look, putting a primate into your films just makes them better, it just does. It's like adding salt to french fries, or bacon on pizza...getting a monkey into your movie just automatically makes it better. It has to be a REAL monkey though...not an animatronic one like in that Korean gorilla baseball movie, and it can't be a midget in a monkey suit like in that Matt LeBlanc baseball movie...IT MUST BE a LIVE n' REAL MONKEY....like in Bedtime for Bonzo starring Ronald Reagan (I've never actually seen Bedtime for Bonzo but from the title I assume it's about the president of the United States helping a monkey fall asleep). It's gotta be a for-real ape...a computer generated monkey or a midget in a suit cannot replicate the effect, it just can't.

It always works, always. Like, Grandma's Boy was a great movie and then they made it even better by whippin' a monkey in it. It can't fail, it's a fool proof strategy.

If you don't like monkeys....there's something veritably wrong with you.


RIP Geoffrey Lewis

What a great actor, he's probably like the first guy ever to wear a baseball cap backwards and that became really cool to do for a while. The last time I saw this guy in a movie, I was actually quite disappointed in what I witnessed though.

The last movie I saw him in was Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects about ten years ago. It's a movie about this circus clown and his family of juggaloes, or whatever the fuck they are, who go around murdering folks. Geoffrey Lewis shows up in this film and takes on the juggaloes.....and loses. What the fuck?

Am I to believe that...a bunch of juggaloes can defeat Clint Eastwood's sidekick? That a bunch of retarded circus clowns can best Geoffrey Lewis in arm-to-arm combat? I don't think there's any situation that could play out in reality where that scenario is even remotely believable!

Lewis fucking hung out with Clint Eastwood, he banged that chick who shows her tits in Hair (the chick that goes on all those National Lampoon Vacations), he's dealt with nazis n' cops n' the mafia, WHILE HANGING AROUND WITH A SUMATRAN ORANGUTAN....and I'm just supposed to suspend belief and accept that this man can be defeated and killed by a bunch of fucking juggaloes? No way, Jose.

It's cool Rob Zombie casted this old screen icon for his juggalo movie...but I feel the direction he took the film was quite effronterous in nature....the film, all in all, was unrealistic and the movie suffered for it. Lewis should have kicked the juggaloes asses, dumped their vehicles into a dump truck and high fived his ape...like what would have happened if this movie took place in real life.

Either way, RIP dude, you were a cool guy.


What's Up with Clint, though?

What's Clint doing with his life these days? How come the seventies Clint was bare knuckle boxing in scrap yards, drinkin' with monkeys, kicking the crap out of nazis and cops, carrying around a 44 magnum, chillin' with Eli Wallach, and bein' good/bad/ugly......while the now-a-times Clint is like worrying about his mom's bridges over counties and hanging out with Meryl Streep? Seems like a weird direction to take his on-screen persona if you ask me.

With the death of Geoffrey Lewis, I think Clint should complete the Whether but Loose which Can trilogy and reprise his role of the Philo Beddoe character one last time. I know he's too old to flip out and shit but he can still be like a wise foul-mouthed granpa who drinks with monkeys and drives the story for the new-era bad-ass lead character.


Conclusion

You can't insert monkeys in every movie or it'll ruin the gimmick....but I would say every 1/14 films could have monkeys inserted into them without losing the monkey magic. So, if you're in the hollywood scene and you're a big-shot you should try to work a monkey into at least one in fourteen of your films, I'd say.

I don't think the Presidential monkey movies work though. I don't think Presidents should be making monkey movies...it's just stupid. Reagan's monkey movie just seems odd.

With the Dawning of the Digital Age....Is there a Future for Apostrophes, Accents, Cedillas, and Umlauts?

.....or is there NO FUTURE for apostrophes, accents, cedillas, and umlauts in this digital human age?

In this article we will wonder aloud whether these punctuation variables, or as many refer to them "accidents of history," have any place in the current digitized writing climate. We're gonna look at what the heck they are, then we're gonna look at where they probably came from, and then conclude on whether or not these letter variations have a future or not.


What are these Things, anyways?

' = Apostrophe
é, ê, è = Accents
ç = Cedilla
ū = Umlaut


They are cute little punctuation marks that appear in sentences or on top of vowels or under the letter C from time to time in Euro-disseminated languages. English people know about the apostrophe more than any of the others...the others appear in the latin-based romance languages more often (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, etc.).

They are for pronunciation and have no value to reading and writing. Speech and reading/writing are two separate mental faculties that surprisingly have little in common with each other. Reading/Writing is very technical and code-based while speech is more wave-modulated audio bits which are learned from listening and repetition.

You can be 100% illiterate and still be a great speaker or singer....speech is not related very much at all with reading/writing. Readin' and writin' is a code that is deciphered with the eyes to the brain whilst speaking/listening is a code deciphered with the ears to the brain.

For that reason, are pronunciation-related variables necessary in eye-related deciphering? Not really, no.

The digital age has seen the rise of Google Translate, which has spidered almost all written linguistic codes and matched them with definitions in order to act as a universal translator. It isn't perfect but it's pretty freaking good to be honest. I can send a Chinese article through it and read it in English and get a pretty good jist/idea of what was stated in the Chinese coded article.

Languages have been broken down, bit by bit, and all definitions/idioms/concepts that these variables represent have been massed together in one database which can churn out any langauge codification into the language you are able to read with your brain. It's pretty amazing, really.

That's the state of affairs in the present (2015), but before we conclude on the question if these linguistic punctuation variables have a place in the human future...let's first look at where I think they originated from.


The Possible History of the Weird Lines n' Slashes on our Dumb Words

Note: This is a theory and I have no way to really prove it so it's just food for thought, really.

I honestly believe that apostrophes, accents, cedillas, and umlauts are accidents of history which were born unto writing by errors in the early printing press era (16th to 18th century).

A written language is only a written language if many many people accept that the definitions of the character-variable sets are what they are. If a few thousand people accept and use the term "Shoe" to refer to the things you put on your feet to help you walk then that character variable set of "Shoe" is thusly an accepted term, part of the lexicon, and part of written language.

Prior to the early printing press era, do you know how many people on earth were literate? Do you know how many people could read linguistic codes and understand them? Less than 1% of people could. The invention of the printing press (which first appeared in China prior to the 14th century) is what made written language codes accepted languages. The automatisation process of the printing press disseminated the written codes to a wide audience who in turn learned the codes in order to read the books and flyers coming off the press line.

Old school printer.

In the early printing press era in Europe, these machines were not exactly the most efficient and error-free devices to say the least. The first problem was the people who worked the printing press machines were illiterate people (paid in pennies) who matched up the symbols they were given to the press plate to print a page....and being illiterate it was common that dozens of small errors were made in every single page that was printed in any given book.

The other big problem was any small damage to the machine plates would get soaked with ink and a page might be printed with dashes, slashes, dots, and other dumb shit all around the page....and since it is a plate and uniform...the dots and slashes APPEARED IN EVERY SINGLE BOOK THAT WAS PRINTED ON THAT MACHINE.

These problems in the early printing press era may even be a large factor as to why European dialects shifted and mutated the way they did. Spanish, French and Italian were once THE SAME LANGUAGE at one point. We must also factor in small deviations of style created by poets and other writers which disseminated texts to their region which altered the written codes in their areas (copy cats wanted to write like the popular poets of their region) yet printing press errors may be a stronger factor as to why dialects variated the way the did.

Imagine the time and place in the 17th century, hundreds of thousands of people learning the new hip thing called reading in their spare time and hundreds of interesting books being printed to be read by these hundreds of thousands of people. The printing presses in all the major metropolis cores (London, Paris, Seville, Lisbon, Venice, Hamburg, etc) are all running off these printing presses like crazy and people in all these core-cities are reading these texts...

Let's say the printing press in Seville made an error on the plate, the worker matched the symbol to his blue print wrong, then hundreds of thousands of people in Seville would read the book with the spelling mistake. Hundreds of thousands of people, who are learning to read for the first time in great masses in human history, all getting a book with a minor alteration in the language system. Next thing you know, all Spanish people are writing "Jajajajajajaja" instead of "Hahahahahaha" to represent laughter because that's how language in written code was presented to them.

Or let's say Lisbon's printing press factory sent out a popular book with a weird line over a vowel. Let's say a scratch in the plate put a small diagonal line over an "e" on EVERY SINGLE BOOK that was printed and acquired by hundreds of thousands of people in Lisbon. All of a sudden people are asking their friends and elders..."Hey, what is this line over the e?" and all it took was one bozo to make up something to pretend he's smart and say..."oh that? Well it means it's an e that's pronounced more high pitched " and next thing you know that scratch on the printing plate has now become a damned RULE of ORTHOGRAPHY and bozo-face gets appointed head of the Portuguese academy of writing rules because everyone thinks he's so fucking smart. Whooop-de-dooooo.

Oh, go take a walk, blue pen bozo.

Or let's say, (just one more, sorry), that London's printing press puts some dumb scratch between some dumb word and people look at it and go "what's that line between my word, guvnah?" and then some fantastic fop pipes up "Well, that's an apostrophe, it is! How could you not know that you simpleton!?" and then that printing plate scratch gets a name and everyone is throwing these new-fangled high falutin' apostrophes in all their dumb books and acting all smart. Fast forward a few hundred years and english teachers ALL OVER THE PLACE are taking out red pens and anxiously scanning their student's papers for the word "your" to see if they put the apostrophe in it if they wanted to denote "you are" and if it's not there....they load up that red pen like it's some sort of scepter of divine truth that shoots lightning at orthographic mistakes and they draw the biggest and meanest circle around your "your" and write over it in HUGE red ink "you're" to let you know how stupid you are! Oh, take a long walk you english teachers, take a nice long walk and really think to yourself how petty you are. You're job is to circle words that have missing apostrophes! You're duty on earth is to circle printing press plate scratches from the 17th century and make your students feel stupid. Take a long introspective walk, you english teachers, you.

Jabroni....thy name is apostrophe.


Does the Digital Human Future have a Place for These Printing Press Mutants of Yester Year?

Look, for style purposes I think everyone should write how they feel is fun for them to write. Me? I like to use punctuation when I write. I use commas and especially ellipses (the three+ dots). I use ellipses because I actually think what I'm gonna write next when I put that break in. I'll be writing these silly blogs.......and then I'll like stop and breathe and think for a second.....and then finish whatever dumb thing I was writin' 'bout.

The other main mutation factor in written langauge codes that I mentioned above is poets and writers who have unique and interesting styles do 100% change the vernacular and lexicon of a region/world. People don't just start writing from scratch otta nowhere...they synthesize and copy other writers who's stuff they've read. So if you like apostrophes or cedillas or umlauts then go for it and use 'em. If that's your style, then yo.

....but....

Don't go overboard with silly writing rules. Like, if you're getting mad over You/You're ....honestly ....you should chill out. If I write this,

"Your taking this reading/writing shit too serious. Maybe you should chill out and go walk you're dog or something..."

In all seriousness, is there a person out there, who can read english, who's so stupid that they couldn't understand what was being stated in that sentence? If you couldn't understand that statement above because a printing press error from the 17th century was omitted from one word then, sorry to rude, but maybe you are very very stupid. Maybe you can't read.

If you did understand that statement but were angered and enraged by it...well....maybe you're a bad person or something. If you love your dumb apostrophe so much maybe you should marry it.