Oakland needs superheroes

Nobody's put it out there yet, so I'm going to go out on a limb.

We need superheroes in Oakland. A Watchmen-like troupe would suffice. A seething mass of face-punching justice wranglers who can instill a sense of loss and mortality in the d-bags who are robbing local restaurants in the Oakland area. Most people have eaten at least one of these restaurants in the area. I can't back this up on e-paper...I don't have the results of a properly structured social study...but there some discrete quantitative data points numbering three or more (indicating a trend) that concisely tell us that this phenomena is increasing.

We don't need to arm the populace. We just need superheroes.

We need a few people who know what's going down, and where it's going down, so they can be there when it goes down, and twist fools. Someone, somewhere knows where the next round of robberies is going to be. Someone knows who's going to do it. That means the heist is avoidable, or, shall we say, conducive to bringing the proper big scary people who knock down doors and beat/maim/kill...fine...apprehend the bad guys.

We need people who can roll through to Ron Dellums' pad, sneak into his room, nudge him awake from his cozy Depends fortified slumber, whisper in his ear: "You are not doing your job Mr. Mayor...the Edgerlies of your city are running it...do something now, or we will."

We need Chip Johnson to be granted superpowers, so he can bust on fools who pistol-whip workers and patrons, package them for pickup for the cops, then take pictures of the perps, and then post them in his column where he'll expose their names and addresses.

Then...once a semblance of safety is returned to the streets of Oakland, we can turn our attention to the rotting, decrepit, desiccated, and corrupt zombie-like corpse we call City Hall and perform some major reconstructive surgery.

So far I haven't been able to find any postings on Craigslist offering superhero services (although someone's selling a superhero suit). If anyone finds one, please comment with the contact info, so I can get in touch with the person and discuss the role and compensation.

Ziggurat

01


Logan's Run (film).

Warcraft III.


















The uber-panopticon.

Soylent green.

These are all things that come to mind when reading about Timelinks proposal to cram 1 million people into a carbon-neutral footprint pyramid-like 2.3 km structure that does away with the need for cars, a lawn, a garden, personal space, and privacy.

Ridas Matonis, Managing Director of Timelinks, said: “Ziggurat communities can be almost totally self-sufficient energy-wise. Apart from using steam power in the building we will also employ wind turbine technology to harness natural energy resources.”
...
The concept will also aim at a better quality of life for the inhabitants. Transport throughout the complex would be connected by an integrated 360 degree network (horizontally and vertically) so cars would be redundant. Biometrics would provide security with facial recognition technology.

Oh, dude. My dystopic sci-fi novels are sooo right on. Tom Cruise's version of Minority Report here I come! Whoo-hooo!!

Picture it...you walking down the Zig-hall, and a Zig-scanner reads your retina and instantly cross-checks your identity with the Zig-repository, establishes interests from recent email communications, utterances made in your bathroom, recent purchases from the Zig-store, and a Zig-avatar appears and starts walking next to you, slyly suggesting items or services in which you might be interested...like sponsored listings you see in various search engines.
Instead of DUIs or PI crimes, there'll be Zig-infractions and in order to maintain societal balance, there'll be strict re-education policies in place since there's no space for prison...or maybe there'll be a Penal-Zig?

Excursions to the surrounding pastoral areas would be frowned upon, as the lands would be snatched up by mega-conglomerates, and seeded with powerfully mutated agricultural products that aren't so much healthy, as they are cost-effective, so Zig-officials would want to limit the amount of exposure to zigizens (like 'citizen', but for Ziggurat, sweet!) else the highly condensed populace would vector biological contaminents at a brisk pace.

Nations will collapse, and Zig-States will replace modern continent-oriented governmental paradigms. Alliances with neighboring Ziggurats will be established, and battles will be fought to control water sources as they'll be the sources for both hydro-electric power and for treating 1 million people's worth of excrement per Ziggurat.

Urban centers will collapse and will become vestigages of humanity's triumphs and folly, eventually fallen prey to managed lifestyles.

My new home cheer:
Zig-gu-rat!
It's where it's at!
Zig-gu-rat!
It's where it's at!
[repeat it...or else]

Mayor Dellums: Flaccid Impotent Bookend from the Past and His Crazy Adventures in Oakland

Way to go Dellums!

Whoo-hoo! The FBI issued subpoenas for current and former Oakland City Hall non-elected officials in connection to fiscal tomfoolery and crusty backhanded shenanigans enacted upon Oakland's coffers.

One of the recipients is Deborah Edgerly. She was the top non-elected official in Oakland since former Mayor Jerry Brown, and boy did she like to stick it to the man! Er...the taxpayers of Oakland.

I no longer live in Oakland, after departing to suburbia to raise a family, but I still love the city. Say what you will, Gertrude Stein, but there is plenty of 'there' there.

I do work in Oakland, and like other residents, we're all well aware of the embarrassing state of the public school system, increasing crime (hello robbers in the hood), and ineffectiveness of the current Mayor.

He's been living up to his moniker: The Quiet Mayor. He's staying out of the limelight, avoiding the press, and not saying much. He's also not doing much to improve the situation. What the hell? Does he think that the edifice of the eponymous Federal Building is going to be able to hide his ineffectiveness in managing his staff and the city?

Let's just take the case of the recent spree of 'takeover' robberies. Granted the state of the economy is somewhat to blame for the increase in crime, and that doesn't excuse the perps, but it does beckon the Mayor to step up and get serious about cleaning up City hall and improving the safety of individuals who are directly responsible for providing income for the city: namely local restaurateurs and related business owners.

I never saw the appeal in Dellums. He seemed pleased with himself for his past accomplishments, and thought that it'd be cool to chill in pseudo-retirement in a city that was so corrupt and mismanaged that it wouldn't make matters worse for him to stroll into office, pronounce some vapor policy, and then fade into the woodwork all the while touting his new 'political transparency' model.

Is this the same guy who voiced so much opposition in the 80s against arms development and the refocusing of federal budgetary expenditures and was lauded by Nancy Pelosi and other high-ranking dems?

There is no 'W.' in 'Hobbit'

Oh man. Have you seen the trailer for Oliver Stone's new *unbiased* biopic? It's glorious. The cast you ask?

Elizabeth Banks ... Laura Bush
Josh Brolin ... George W. Bush
Thandie Newton ... Condoleezza Rice
Richard Dreyfuss ... Dick Cheney
Ioan Gruffudd ... Tony Blair
James Cromwell ... George Herbert Walker Bush
Ellen Burstyn ... Barbara Bush
Scott Glenn ... Donald Rumsfeld
Noah Wyle ... Don Evans
Jason Ritter ... Jeb Bush
Jeffrey Wright ... General Colin Powell
Rob Corddry ... Ari Fleischer
Sayed Badreya ... Saddam Hussein
Toby Jones ... Karl Rove
Michael Gaston ... General Tommy Franks
Dennis Boutsikaris ... Paul Wolfowitz
Allan Kolman ... Vladimir Putin
Paul Rae ... Kent Hance

You must peep the trailer. Dreyfuss as Cheney looks awesome, Scott Glenn as Rumsfeld is genius, and how did Thandie Newton nail the Condi smile so well?


As for the Hobbit, we know that Guillermo Del Toro is directing, as Peter Jackson was dissed by the studio. While they later made up, Jackson was going to be aboard as a Producer, but now the real meat: the entire LOTR screenwriting team is going to be penning the script for the prequel, which will span two films. Narnia, Spiderwick, Golden Compass, etc step aside, you fast-following wannabes.

I'm trying this as soon as I get home

Thank you internets. Thanks you for proving to me that there's more to you than just porn...there's you, in all your electronic glittering glow, showing me a Japanese video where I can learn how to fold a tshirt in 2 concise steps.

I heart tshirts, and I heart concise, although this looks like it might be hard to do while playing drinking games...er, while folding laundry.

Hiro and Y.T.

So I started reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, and I'm about 40 pages into it, and know it's going to be awesome.

Hiro and Y.T., by the way, are the...ahem...Protagonists...well at least Hiro is.

I was initially turned off by the whole 'cyberpunk' term because it sounded desperately needy. It screamed: I'm a cutting edge technophile who reads amazingly gadget-ridden books and don't make fun of me because I watch Star Trek, The Original Series! Of course, the dichotomy of the matter is that I like books with gadgets and own the TOS on DVD, but really who doesn't?

I digress...

What's the point in discussing the plot, when you can get it from Interweb Cybertown, suffice it to say that it anticipated virtual worlds like Second Life, and is rich with relatively accurately extrapolated computer science themes and disciplines. Above that, and this is what I find the most rewarding, is its social commentary on consumerism and what happens when privatization goes wrong, while at the same time not being extremely preachy.

It's so far been a visceral and completely engaging read. Which was a nice change from reading Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, about which I read somewhere in some dust jacket text indicating that Gully Foyle should watch out because Sterling's Abelard Lindsay was the new man constantly on the remake. I found that to be debatable, but the last part of Schismatrix became so anti-climactic (right around the time of the Neotenic Cultural Republic) and somehow bereft of the intensity and passion with which it initially started out that I returned it to the library...twice. Both times I checked it out! I had other books (Snow Crash) waiting in the hopper and somehow I just couldn't force myself to finish it.

I never do that, but when I do, it's soooo liberating.

We saw Natalie Portman

Oh yeah...almost forgot.

On the way back from the campsite we stopped at gas station/bakery/kitsch-mart spot (Big Sur Bakery) in Big Sur to get gas and saw Natalie Portman with her dog.

She rolled up in a Toyota Matrix with her boyfriend, and 2 ultra-hip scenesters that reeked of L.A. I totally have a *thing* for her. Here's what the dialog with my buddy went like:

Me:
Dude...she looks like Natalie Portman!

Michael Dudikoff:
No she doesn't.

Me:
[Pause...takes another good look] Dude that's totally Natalie Portman!

MD:
I don't think she is, dude. [starts pumping gas]

Me:
[Staring through space and time, which causes the side of her face to heat up] Dude, she looked just at me, and I saw her eyes and that is Natalie Portman...wow...she's small!

MD:
That does kinda look like her. Isn't she dating that singer dude?

Me:
Yeah, except I can't really tell...he's got a hat and sunglasses on...could be...he looks kinda like him. Who are those 2 lamewads with her?

MD:
Dunno...they are hella lame. Look like scenesters.

Me:
Oh man, she put her sunglasses on after she saw me looking at her. I feel creepy now.

MD:
I'm not sure that's her.

Me:
That's totally her. She's just smaller in real life. Damn...she's like 100 pounds or something.

MD:
Yeah, she IS very diminutive. Does she have a dog?

Me:
I dunno. I think so.

MD:
It's too bad we don't have the iPhone to look up on the internets to see if she has a dog.

Me:
There's no signal here anyway. Dammit. I know it's her. I'll look it up when we get home.

MD:
Cool.

The rest of the trip we built the case supporting the claim that it was Natalie Portman, and agreed that for all our arguments and suppositions, it all came down to the fact that it was dependent on the dog.

Case closed. Here's what the dog looked like.

I did think of taking pictures, but then I would've felt dirty and creepy. Still, I would think that someone who portrays the mother of Luke and Leia Skywalker would be a little more imposing. She was...diminutive, but just as pretty as she is in her movies.

All the fanboys at work are bugging out big time when I retell the story.