It’s no surprise Hollywood has a Michael Jackson picture sketched out. I’m sure it’s just like obituaries, a prewritten biopic script for every person of renown is sitting on a shelf (or a server) eagerly awaiting the coroner’s pronouncement.

Johnny Depp and Jamie Foxx have both been mentioned as possible Michael Jacksons. Jesus, which way to go? The black/white axis is just one possibility. Why not Angela Bassett and Lou Ferrigno? Or a joint Pixar/Werner Herzog production? Although both Johnny DeppFoxx and Jamie FoxxDepp have a nice ring.

The thing to do is what they did with The Wizard of Oz. Make a white movie, then do a black version. Then, just for serendipity, Mike Tyson and Miley Cyrus to direct (winner of the pillow fight get’s first pick).

I would rather watch Michael Jackson moonwalk from Neverland to Cleveland than endure the sad story that everybody already knows, spun out in formulaic biopredictability.

If there was no biopic for Elvis, why Michael? Better to produce one long music video — set in the bedroom, or under an umbrella, or some other place where the sun doesn’t shine.

A man goes down on his wife. When he comes up for air, we learn her vaginal smell portends motherhood. Yes, the cunnilinguist (played by the very placid John Krasinski) knows something more about vaginal odors than the average joe. The problem with the movie isn’t the joke itself, it’s the maudlin, agonizingly stretched-out life lessons that follow — as if the husband-wife scriptwriters, Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, made a deal: “Okay, Dave, I’ll go along with your raunchy idea for an opening, but we’re going to redeem it by following it up with two hours of earnest, sentimental, family-values rich material.”

“Away we go!” was much better as a Jackie Gleason catchphrase.

PETA spokesperson, Michael McGraw, is tired of taking flak for the organization’s anti-fly swat position. “It’s not like we don’t understand that what that fly did during the President’s interview wasn’t wrong.” he said. “But the fly didn’t deserve to be punished — certainly not with death.”

The Katcha Bug Humane Bugcatcher is one alternative to killing the fly. In fact, PETA sent one to the White House. But as Ari Emmanuel noted, the fly will likely get past the Secret Service again. And again. Hence the need to kill.

“No,” says McGraw. “The bugcatcher is step one. Step two is reprogramming the fly with the FlyBehave Labyrinth ™.”

McGraw demonstrated, placing a fly at one end of an enclosed plexiglass maze that had, at its center, an attractant — a small patch of human skin redolent of food, sweat, and other body odors. As the fly steps towards the bait an image of a dragonfly or a praying mantis is projected on the walls of the passageways. After six or eight changes of direction, the fly simply gives up. The fly is then released to the outside world. It works.

“Yes, it’s not nice to scare a fly, but it beats killing it,” says McGraw. “And a small patch of your skin is all it takes. The skin will grow back. A dead fly is forever.”

The National Theater of the Deranged was an SF improv group active from the mid-70s through the late 90s. They performed every Friday night. Whenever there was a sufficient number of high-profile deaths in the week preceeding, they would do a bit called “Who’s Dead This Week?” It flew in the face of “Too Soon!,” and that’s what made it work.

Celebrity deaths seemed to come in threes. At any rate, that was the number that triggered the bit. It was matter-of-fact and unsentimental — except for the times it was oversentimental and maudlin.

The death trifecta this week — Farrah, Michael, and Ed — believe it, the Deranged would make it funny.

Not long after my right leg was amputated, I had a vision. In it, my foot was in a dumpster out behind the VA hospital. The day was cold, and the foot was jumping up and down in that sheet metal hollow, trying to keep warm. Bystanders looked to the source of the banging, but did nothing because they knew that’s where the limbs were tossed.

I thought the scenario was funny, so I told it to friends. I think I even wrote about it here. But I didn’t know what triggered it in the first place until today.

Back to my place in the ward sixteen months ago (when the jumping foot scenario entered my brain). It was probably a few days after the amputation and I was looking out the window at the greenery — mostly tall pines — at the west end of the public golf course bordering the VA. It was definitely morning, because the sun was on the window-sill. In fact, I was trying to judge, by the intensity of the light, whether it was warm or cold outside. That afternoon, during visiting hours, a man came in to see one of the others in my four bed ward. He was wearing work boots, jeans, and a flannel shirt. And tucked under his arm, so bulky he could barely hold onto it, was a huge black parka with yellow piping. It was at that moment, I’m certain, that I said to myself, “Hey, it’s cold outside. It looks warm, but it’s cold.” The foot jumping in the dumpster must have come to mind after that.

But how long after? I remember asking a nurse what happened to amputated limbs and the like. He didn’t know. Were they incinerated or reduced in acid? I must have filled in the blank at that time: they’re thrown in the dumpster. I meant to ask the vascular surgeon, Dr Rapp. He’d know. but I never remembered to do that. For over a year, after each vascular appointment, I’ve left the hospital thinking, “Damn, I forgot to ask again.”

Today was sunny, windy, and cool. But it wasn’t that cool, and that’s why I took notice of a boy riding a bike. He was wearing a parka. Black with yellow piping.

“We’re losing pleasant voices right and left,” says Merrill-Lynch VP in charge of Customer Relations, Peter White. “The average American simply can’t understand what we go through trying to retain voicemail talent.” Indeed, last year the nations top five banks saw 15 of its top female voices train for jobs with banks in China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.

Like Mary Ann Sarbinjay. As recently as February, one could hear her pleasant alto: “Good afternoon. Thank you for calling Merrill Lynch. Our offices are open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday.” In addition to her base pay of $3,500, she received a bonus of $60 at Christmas-time. But that wasn’t enough to keep her. The Bank of Mongolia reached out. They offered not only to teach her the 25 sentences required to do the job, they included a thatched vacation hut on the North Korean border. Her compensation was not divulged. but is reported to be in the $5,000 range.

Goldman Sachs has been able to fill the gap with male voice talent, but they have been forced to add perks such as buggy rides in Central Park and free ShamWows in addition to the four figure salaries. Still, customers have complained because some of the men sound black. “We are doing everything imaginable to hold onto our white-sounding voicemail providers,” says Morgan-Stanley-Smith-Barney’s David Stanley-Barneysmith, “but the pool of talent is small. Please try to understand our situation.”

Bankers insist this will right itself in due time. In fact, Bank of America has purchased the Columbia School of Broadcasting and will be graduating twenty white-sounding females by mid-December.

On a trip east, years and years ago, I went to Arlington National Cemetery. There, on a hill overlooking the nation’s capitol, I suddenly had a weird feeling. I didn’t know what it was then — it was a humming in the left temples followed by the relief you feel after you crack your knuckles. I didn’t feel it again until I moved to San Francisco.

I turns out that what I was feeling was my gaydar. By the late 80s I’d heard so many people talk about gaydar, it was a relief finally to have a name for the sensation. I’d feel it then look around — sure enough, guys in work boots and colored hankies in their Levis back pockets would be in the vicinity.

So in 1993, when I went back to Arlington National Cemetery, I had that feeling again. But this time, I knew what was going on. I was standing next to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

The Unknown Soldier was gay.

It was a nice day and I approached a man who was holding hands with another man. This guy is obviously gay, I thought. “Hey, I hate to be intrusive,” I said, “but how is your gaydar?” He brightened and said, “Thanks for asking. It’s pretty good. And let me tell you, it’s going ping ping ping ping ping.”

At that moment, a man in a dark gray suit approached the three of us and flashed a badge. “What are you fellows discussing?” I was about to blab about the gaydar thing, but the officer — whatever kind of official he was — shushed me. “Maybe you haven’t heard, but a few months ago ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ was instituted. I hear the word ‘gaydar’ near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and my ears prick up. I guess you could say I got ‘gaydar-dar.’” He laughed at his little joke, displayed his badge again, and moved on.

It’s pretty easy to see how they could have buried a gay soldier. In the WWI-era, gaydar hadn’t been invented (maybe discovered is the word). You could be burying a war hero or a gay — maybe they endured the same things, stormed the same machine gun nests, had the same medals pinned to their jackets — there was no way of telling who deserved the honor.

It’s no wonder morale and unit cohesiveness dropped to rock bottom in the trenches during WWI. Nobody knew who to blame.

Oh sure, the big shots are going to deny The Unknown Soldier was gay. It’s so much nicer to think the morale and unit cohesiveness in the Tomb is all that it can be.

Calm returned to Tehran’s blood-soaked streets today after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenai announced the results of the recount of Friday’s election. “Muslim can no longer be pitted against Muslim. Neither Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nor Mir-Hossein Mousavi shall be seated as President of the Republic,”  said the Mullah. “Although an earlier glitch in the technology awarded the office to Ahmadinejad, an easily adjusted Diebold software program produced the results Allah apparently wished for. The infidel, Norm Coleman, eager to return to public service, will assume the Presidency.”

The recent hard-fought election in Iran promised to be a nail-biter. Although Hussein Mousavi, the favorite of young and reform minded Iranians, urged his supporters to observe peaceful means in protesting the results, Iran’s Diebold election machines have left no room for argument. In fact, it wasn’t even close: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has prevailed.

Having seen what Diebold did to preserve the Bush administration in 2004, Iran was known to be seeking the technology. In 2005, a Syrian organization, presumed to be sneaking voting machines from the manufacturer in Ohio, through North Korea and into a warehouse near Damascus, had its site leveled by Israeli bombs. But it was too late — the machines had been delivered to Tehran by that time.

George W. Bush, at a Diebold shareholder’s meeting this weekend, responded to the election: “Democracy is a fragile tendency. Iran proves that if a country wants liberty bad enough, it will find the means of freedomized capital resources to outfit them with the secret ballot, even if it means a secret vote deletion button.”

I had a conversation in the summer of 2006 with a woman I’d considered a friend — a difference of opinion about the Israel-Lebanon conflict going on at the time. I said Israel had responded appropriately to a rocket attack in the north. My friend said no way. As the debate went on, she said Israel was responsible for the Iraq War. Gathering steam, she cheered Hezbollah and said Hamas was a peaceful organization. When she got into Zionist conspiracy territory, at the same time insisting she was not anti-semitic (she claimed many Jewish friends) I bailed. But my sense of disappointment was deep. We were both liberals and, until this, I assumed our sense of the world mapped fairly well.

Match Jeremiah Wright’s recent rantings about Obama being controlled by the Jews with Patrick Buchanan’s like-minded comments. Molly Ivins put it well when she said about Buchanan’s 1992 Republican Party keynote speech: “It read better in the original German.”

Under W, the Republicans went on record as being pro-Israel. That’s the only reason Buchanan’s soft-pedaled the anti-semitism.

On the Right — the Von Brunn Holocaust Museum shooting. On the Left — the murder of a soldier at an Arkansas recruiting center by a recent recent convert to fundamental Islam.

Ideologies that promote violence are always with us. But it’s hard times that encourage the followers to act. Loss of power invites the sense of power that goes with blaming, finding, then killing the object of your hate.

It’s not surprising to see this happen in the middle east. Without anything protecting an individual’s rights, or even basic necessities, the greatest satisfaction a man might hope for is an explosion that ends the existence of imagined demons.

Again, Jews are in the crosshairs. Here, there, and everywhere.

Seriously, in this age of computers, iPhones, and big-brother recordings, we can’t do better than a box that goes down to the bottom of the sea with the plane? We have “virtual” everything else, why not a virtual black box? A simple data stream broadcast from the aircraft to a satellite would do the job. If the storage problem from the millions of flights every month is too great, the information for each flight could be erased upon safe landing.

And black? Years ago pink was the new black. It’s been fifty colors since then. Has it come full-circle and black is again black? It’s so 50s (which I believe is when the flight recorder was invented).

Okay, I guess I should do my research before I begin to write. The following is the opening paragraph from the Wikipedia entry: “Black box is a technical term for a device, system or object when it is viewed in terms of its input, output and transfer characteristics without any knowledge required of its internal workings.” There is no reference to the color of the box itself. It’s simply that the insides are unknown to us.

But maybe it’s time for air-travelers to take personal responsibility for their post air-crash whereabouts. A swallowable black-box would be more in the Libertarian mode. Either use it or don’t. It’s up to you. Ask your flight attendant for one — and chase it with a Johnnie Walker Black.

In the three years I’ve been blogging, I don’t think I’ve put up a photo of myself, but going through my iPhoto collection today, I thought, “There’s a photo of me that I like. I better use it.”

That’s my friend, fellow improviser John Askings, standing behind me. I don’t know who took the shot, only that it was on my camera. What was going on in the scene? He was my butler, I remember that much.

That was two or three years ago. I was about 65. I didn’t know as much about the world then as I do now.

Whenever I look at a body of water, I always wonder what it would be like if you put gelatin in it and let it set, then pulled it out, inverted it and placed it on the landscape. Then you could see the inverse mountain that Lake Tahoe is by flying over it. Or better yet, do this to all the waters on the earth, then place them inverted on a smooth globe. A nice relief map of our seas. I suppose somebody could do this on a computer.

The Segway is an inverted pendulum. Its brilliant inventor, Dean Kamen, has somehow imagined the functions and worked out the mechanics to do this. And yet, only about 30,000 have been sold since it was introduced in 2001. Can the technology be downscaled so that dominoes standing on end could not be knocked over? That way we’d never have to see another stupid commercial based on the falling dominoes concept.

I have upstairs neighbors who have a piano. The family consists of a cute, but ditzy mom, an uncommunicative father, and two meth-addicted children, five and seven. One of these people plays Jingle Bells on the piano every day for about a half hour. Sound travels downwards in apartment buildings because the floor acts as a tympanum. I am listening to it now and the Christmas spirit is long gone.

Apex and Zenith both refer to the top. Thus their use as brand names over the years. Interestingly, they’re about as far apart alphabetically as such similar words can be. Nadir and Nader, different story.

In the movies, woman on top (astride) is usually the sexual position of choice, probably because with the sheets artfully placed, any penetration is unseen. In actual practice, man on top, either missionary or doggie-style, has got to outnumber it by 100 to 1. And who gives a shit where the sheets end up?

I haven’t been sucked into many of the FaceBook polls, but the toilet paper debate caught me: Do you install the roll of paper with the end coming over the top or from underneath? Why it’s an important enough subject for debate, I don’t know, but obviously I must feel it is. Without any sense of irony, I joined in. (I voted over the top).

Perhaps it has to do with the question’s relationship to another issue: When I am in a coed public toilet, do I leave the seat up or down?  I have strong feelings about this. I leave the seat up.

I’ve actually had women friends enter the bathroom as I leave, then ask me later why I left the seat up. The implication being I had somehow done them a discourtesy.

But think of it this way. Fifty percent of the users are men. If the seat is down when men enter the bathroom, approximately a quarter will not bother to lift the seat when they urinate — they will obviously leave at least a few drops of piss on it. The next person who has to sit, be it a woman or a man, will have to deal with it. You see it and wipe it off, or you sit down, feel it on your butt, and mutter a thousand “fuck-yous.” If you’re a woman it’s “fuck-you-guys.”

Furthermore, when a toilet contains effluent, the action of flushing creates aerosols — particles of residue small enough to be carried above the level of the seat. These resettle fairly quickly. On the seat, naturally, if it is down. Some of the more old-fashioned toilets — those with powerful, blustery, non-watersaving flushes — obviously put more aerosols in play.

So you see, women, I am doing this for you.

Yesterday, back at the VA for a prosthesis adjustment, I happened to look at the spot from which George Bush, in official portrait, gazed vacantly out on the lobby. When you spend nine months in a government institution, you get stuck looking at whichever U.S. President is current each time you turn a corner. But yesterday, I saw President Obama on the wall, and it was jarring. I was pleased, of course, but put off, too, and it took me a while to reason what was making me itch. It’s this — presidential portraits are platitudes. The pose, the colors, the ever-present flag. As such, they are in keeping with the characters we’ve been seeing on the national stage for the past few decades. When a person has any vitality, or makes any believable connection with the public, a cliched portrait is a disservice. It didn’t bother me so much to see W. overlooking the bureaucratic green tiles of the lobby — he was in keeping with them. Besides, he’s just a pathetic asshole. Obama, though — after today’s speech in the middle east, I’m beginning to think he’s the real thing.

I’ve been to the hospital for numerous appointments since Obama’s taken office, but it’s the first time I noticed the portrait had been changed. I asked my friend, Victoria, who is a physical therapist. She said, “Oh yes, it was just put up.” This made me wonder, is there an official date in a new administration by which Presidential photo-portraits must be displayed?

And do we need an official VA department to assure compliance with that date? Uh, no.

On Jan 31st, 2009, this woman was searched, herded about ungracefully by officials and forbidden to drive to the polls. Fair enough, Baghdad security was tight and officials were simply trying to help her stay alive. In spite of it all, she proudly displays the evidence that she voted in the Iraqi Provincial Election that day.

We’ve seen a lot of this imagery the past few years. Republicans, who began with the claim we were invading to remove Weapons of Mass Destruction, were forced to downsize their claims every few months after the 2003 invasion. Finally, they ended up with democracy in Iraq was the goal in waging war. Ink-stained fingers were proof.

Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay, will be running for Governor of California in 2010. For the past 13 elections in which she was eligible to vote, she voted 6 times. Pretty pathetic, but it sounds almost heroic when compared to the voting record of Hewlett-Packard’s ex-CEO, Carly Fiorina. She only went 5 for 18, and she’ll be running for the California Senate. Both of these women, it should be remembered, have been flag-waving, Iraq-war supporting Republicans.

“Do as I say, not as I do.” Let that be the ad slogan for both of these women’s campaigns. Maybe it’s the CEO thing — My day’s too important to interrupt with a trip to the polls. Or even to mark a mail-in ballot. Gosh, if you’re that busy, take it into the bathroom and mark it while you sit on the toilet.

Of course, these two women shine when compared to some of the men. In the years Dick Cheney was based in Houston as CEO of Halliburton, he voted in only 2 of 16 elections. Now here’s a guy who really championed the inky finger.

If somebody cannot take the trouble to vote, he or she does not deserve your vote.

This lecture is over.