Retrospective on The Gonzo Journalist

Two years after his suicide, wildman Hunter S. Thompson is still missed and stories continue to be told about the flat-out abandon with which he lived his life. Sadly, as he grew older, Thompson became physically and mentally worn down, ending up with what threatened to be “a very dull survival of a very gaudy life,” as General Sternwood put it in THE BIG SLEEP.

He died, as he lived, on his own terms. How many people actually do that?

AT&T Declares the End of Time

It’s the end of an era. AT&T is going to stop providing the time by phone. In fact, time has already stopped in 48 states, with California and Nevada as the sole holdouts. Soon, AT&T will no longer provide anyone with the time of day.

Eventually, there will be no place you’ll be able to dial a number and get the familiar “at the tone, the time will be . . .” followed by a recitation of same every 10 seconds.

Why? The equipment is wearing out, and you only need to look at a cell phone or computer these days to get the correct time. “You no longer have to pick up the telephone,” AT&T spokesman John Britton says.

Once upon a time, in the 1920s, you actually got a live operator who read the time from a wall clock. The service became automated in the 1930s. Since then, a number of women (and a few men) have served as the recorded voice of time. A few of the time ladies became fairly well-known during the 60s and 70s.

How sad, somehow. But time marches on, I guess.

Biden Some Time With Joe

Grist/Outside ran its interview today with Joe Biden, who is better known for his foreign policy chops than environmental record, but has received “a respectable 84 percent lifetime voting score from the League of Conservation Voters.” He says, “Clean-coal technology is not the route to go in the United States, because we have other, cleaner alternatives,” and sees nuclear power playing a role, if we can deal with the security and safety concerns (a big “if,” I’d say). He says we should be able to push fuel economy standards up to 40 miles per gallon by 2017 and says ethanol is “a good start” to reducing our fossil fuel use. His favorite natural setting or park: Yellowstone.

TV Providing Women Meaty Roles in Great Shows

Sometimes I think we’ve entered a new Golden Age of television. When you consider some of the well-written shows out there, like “The Shield,” “Rescue Me” and “Battlestar Galactica” (light years beyond the original 70s series, quality-wise), to name just a few, not to mention the gone-but-not-forgotten “Sopranos,” “Deadwood” and “John From Cincinnati” (a quirky favorite of mine; I was sad to see it get the ax; it had a wonderful “David Lynch goes to the beach” quality to it).

But these are not just great times for TV, but great times for women on TV. Some of the best shows out there feature women in central roles they can really sink their teeth into. And we’re talking heavy hitters like Glenn Close in “Damages,” Holly Hunter in “Saving Grace” and Kyra Sedgwick in “The Closer.”

Not to mention Katee Sackhoff as the amazing, strong, flawed-but-lovable Kara “Starbuck” Thrace on “Battlestar Gallactica” or Gina Holden and Karen Cliche as (respectively) the adventurous reporter Dale Arden and brash alien bounty hunter Baylin on “Flash Gordon” or Glenn Close (again) in a previous season of “The Shield.” I could go on and on and on . . .

Kid Nation vs. Education

The reality TV show “Kid Nation” has been getting a lot of press–little wonder, since the show sticks 40 kids on a New Mexico ranch for six weeks, with no parental or tutorial contact.

Although the executive producer compares the show to “summer camp”–and, having gone to summer camp, I recall it as an experience in which participants had a tendency to bond in mutual misery, especially over that food they served us from industrial-sized cans–I don’t think my summer camp required me or my parents to sign a 22-page, single-spaced contract letting them take me to unspecified “remote” and “inherently dangerous” locations and disclaim any responsibility for my safety.

Oh, no–I think not.

There’s something a little disquieting about our willingness to use (or abuse?) our children for the sake of “reality” entertainment, while neglecting to adequately compensate and support the people (other than their parents) who are really important to them–their teachers.

Now that thousands of baby boomer-aged teachers are retiring and younger teachers, frustrated with the stress of working in low-performing schools, are leaving the profession, we are ending up with a serious shortage of qualified educators for our kids. New York and Los Angeles are offering bonuses and subsidies to attract teachers, which are luring them away from other places, like Kansas, that face the same problem.

Alexa Posny, Kansas’s education commissioner, said its schools are suffering from “the largest number of vacancies” the state has ever faced.

“This is an acute problem that is becoming a crisis,” Posny says.

So . . . reality TV or better education? Tough choice, I know.

JT Leroy’s Story–Truth? Fiction? Both?

Another article about Laura Albert, aka author JT Leroy, who over the last two years has reportedly “lost, in no particular order, her livelihood, her boyfriend, a piece of her identity, quite possibly her apartment and a civil fraud trial in Manhattan this spring, enacted, more or less, because she signed a movie contract with her nom de plume.”

Leroy, her literary persona, was supposed to be an androgynous addict and the son of a West Virginia prostitute–but, of course, he didn’t exist. And Albert’s true life, as she recounts it, is something stranger than fiction.

As the article notes, though, “Ms. Albert has veracity issues. Can she be trusted? What, in short, should be discarded? What believed?”

I don’t know, but it’s good to see she has at least one influential supporter–David Milch, who gave us “Deadwood” and the short-lived, but interesting “John From Cincinnati.” Milch seems to have some good advice to offer her, too. But I’m assuming that didn’t include hanging with Courtney Love.

Ross Macdonald Back In Print

Happy news for hardboiled mystery fans! All 18 of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels are supposed to be back in print by this coming spring.

To quote the article: ” He wasn’t the hardest of the hard-boiled or the toughest of the tough guys. But Lew Archer, the often melancholy hero of a series of acclaimed detective novels by Ross Macdonald, matched his biting asides with a humane worldview, a love of the underdog and–when he wasn’t boxing or downing Scotch–an introspective charisma and cerebral temperament.”

In my opinion, Macdonald, whose real name was Kenneth Millar, was a great writer, as was his wife, mystery writer Margaret Millar. This article gives you a lot about Macdonald’s background and his approach to writing. It would be interesting to see a similar write-up about his wife, who could write a mystery that keeps you guessing up to the very last line like this one.

In A World of #&*!

A report by U.S. intelligence agencies gives a grim prognosis on the ability of Iraqi leaders to run their own government. While the report says increases in American troops have helped lower sectarian violence, it also concludes that Iraqi leaders “remain unable to govern effectively” and that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government “will become more precarious over the next 6 to 12 months” as rival Shiite factions try to take power.

Meanwhile, the number of Iraqis fleeing Baghdad has soared since American troop increases began in February, according two humanitarian groups. Because they are running to other parts of the country, rather than leaving it, their moves are accelerating Iraq’s division into sectarian enclaves.

So, someone remind me . . . why are we there?

Oh, yeah . . . and, in an LA Times op-ed, Amy Zegart says there’s one problem with the report laying responsibility for 9/11 at the feet of a couple of former CIA top officials: they aren’t to blame. Zegart writes that, rather than pointing the finger at a few top-ranking individuals, “the ugly reality is that 9/11 stemmed from a far more frightening cause: the inability of our entire intelligence system to adapt to the rise of terrorism after the Cold War ended. Organizational breakdown, not individual error, is the key to understanding what went wrong — and what is still wrong six years later.”

Eat, drink and be merry, all.

Aren’t the Appalachians Already Short Enough?

The Bush administration is getting ready to give its legal blessing to the practice of coal mining through mountaintop removal. This is the controversial technique of simply blowing the tops off mountains to get to the coal, allowing rubble from the blast to be dumped into valleys and streams.

Although, to quote the article, this practice “has been used in Appalachian coal country for 20 years under a cloud of legal and regulatory confusion,” it has drawn the wrath of environmentalists, for its tendency to despoil streams, among other things.

Government officials say the rule is needed to clarify coal miners’ rights. The National Mining Association says that mine owners must be allowed to dump mine waste in streams and valleys, or it will be impossible to for them to operate in mountainous regions like West Virginia, where some of the richest low-sulfur coal seams lie. And environmentalists say the rule change will speed the ruination of the landscape and obliterate hundreds of miles of streams in central Appalachia.

The Chic Chopper for Chicks

It’s called the 2007 Miss Behavin and its a unique new motorcycle–a chopper designed specifically for women.

The new bike was the brainchild of Mona Alsop, vice president and co-owner with husband, Kevin Alsop, of Big Bear Choppers. Kevin, chief designer and president of the company, designed and built the bike. And Susan Carpenter’s review of this new ride is in today’s LA Times, complete with snazzy photo.