Children of the Corn

The entertainment world is strange.  Today Cher stated that Tom Cruise was “one of the five best lovers I’ve ever had”, and also stated as to whether she’s had a lesbian relationship “Of course, hasn’t everybody?”  But now Tom Cruise is writing his ex wife, Katie Holms,  love letters or something saying he wants to remain close with her.  Were it not for the Church of Scientology they would still be married today.  Again I have no problem with the philosophy of Scientology- - it’s just The Church and “Churchianity” that I can’t stand.  

Texas Governor Rick Perry has declared that he won’t seek a fourth term as Governor, but intends to run for President again in 2016.  All they need to do is replay old You Tube videos and his campaign won’t get past the starting gate.  Clearly the fact that Perry isn’t running again shows he thinks there is at least a fifty – fifty chance he’ll lose, which means that the man has undergone a major drop in popularity among the people of Texas these past two years.   All that reading Texas science books about dinosaurs coexisting with humans finally got to him.

Iran it seems has condemned the military takeover in Egypt, as if anybody cares what Iran thinks.  It’s strange that for 444 days the Ayatolah held our 52 hostages, yet we never went to war with Iran like we did in Iraq and Afghanistan.  However we weren’t so dumb in those days since Reagan had Saddam Hussein as our whipping boy to take the brunt of Iran’s fury and to weaken them.   Now I can’t even find the place where I saw that story.  But it seems that there is a “conspiracy” for the United States NOT to refer to the take-down as a Military Coup, because there is some technicality in the law that says if that happens, then Egypt can no longer get their 1.2 Billion or whatever, which me, and now the Obama Administration agree would be a bad idea.  Maybe the Egyptians consider “summer the off season” for all out War now anyhow.  Around here we have six weeks of the “dog days of Summer” before NFL pre season football starts up.  It’s pretty assured that congress won’t accomplish anything before then.

After listening to the KFI guy- - it clear at least to me that the Asiania Flight 214 crash of last Saturday was pilot error.  He had been “certified to fly a Boeing 777” but no indication he’s actually flown one before.  He’s never approached San Francisco airport before- - which even Joe Drisco thought was a dangerous approach.  He targeted the angle of his descent wrong, and then compounded his error by letting up on the accelerator- - which you almost never want to do, particularly in a steep dive because you lose all control of the plain.  But then seven seconds before impact the pilot was ordered to hit the gas, and with just 1.5 seconds to go he was told to abort the landing.  Had it been me and I saw what was happening and had seven seconds to act, I would have floored it AND I’d have simotaniously pulled back on the stick to the degree that it was safe at that speed and executed a sharp banking motion in a lateral direction to buy myself more geometric space before hitting the wall.  Admittedly the only cockpit experience I’ve had was at the Flight Simulator at the Santa Ana Science Museum.   Of course ILS or instrument landing systems, was out at the Airport- -  and I’d hope the guy’s altimitor was working properly and he was experienced enough to eyeball the approach visually.  I would not be.  Obviously each individual plane would drive differently and you’d have to be familiar.  But in fact the runway was some two miles long- -  so overshooting the target wouldn’t be that much of an issue, even as we now know that being out of fuel was not an issue.  They said that air speed needs to be 137 knotts and he was “substantially below that”.   That’s more indication of pilot error.  Of course that would be wind speed- - or gauging the speed by the wind rather than by the ground.  People may just decide they don’t want to fly because it’s just not fun any more the way it was when Johnny Wendell was a kid.   In the old days if you lived in a cold climate like Detroit or Chicago and wanted to visit grandpa and grandma in their retirement villa in Miami, you’d get the kids all dressed up and it would be a really fun excoursion.  But today they don’t have Champaign flights like Western used to when I flew.  They’ve even cut out meals and you have to even pay for peanuts, or perhaps even an extra pillow.   Circling the airport and taxiing and the security measures now are nightmares, not to mention being bumped from flights.

I watched the soap opera.  The Hail Mary pass was in the air- - and then it was caught in the end zone, and Elvis scored his take-down of Stephano Di Mira.  Elvis quipped that he won because “I took advantage of a father who would do anything for his son- - when my own father disowns me and stabs me in the back”.   Yeah, payback is a bitch.  As to Jack Junior, he just never lets up.  He doesn’t give it a rest.  He has yet to say one civil word to either his mother or to Daniel.  But lingering in Jennifer’s mind are Daniel’s words of “Getting me out of the picture isn’t going to “fix” your son, in fact, it will make it worse”.  The other line haunting her is “Now your son will learn that he has the power to make you do anything he wants”.   There was a strange line of Jennifer spoken in exasperation of “Don’t you think I KNOW that I’m being manipulated by my son?”  So - - -. 

Randy Rhodes is highlighting the fact that this whole Sanford Florida trial is taking on a bizarre and farsical quality of an unreal nature.  You know Sanford Florida is not that small of a town, and strangely it isn’t that far from Orlando and Disney World.  But it’s like one of these Stephen King novels like Children of the Corn.  The whole town is like a Cult.  Everybody knows each other.  George Zimmerman has all these friends and friends of friends and their wives, and one calls him “Georgie” and another friend buys George expensive suits and stuff- - almost like a “kept” man in some kind of homosexual gigilo relation.  Don’t ask.  But now the defense is going crazy.  They are going to admit Trayvon’s history of pot smoking into evidence, which as Randy points out would only make him more docile- - and hungry for things like Skittles.  And you have all these people with strange accents testifying.  You have Orientals and Jamaicans and Latinos and Indians and Blacks.  Sanford Florida is quite the racial potpuree.  But strangely only white people got picked for the jury.  The prosecution is totally fighting with BOTH hands tied behind its back.  They can’t admit a voice expert.  It's my understanding that this has been accepted tehnology for decades, and they have an actual recording of Trayvon's voice.  They are not to even bring up the fact in closing that George Zimmerman wouldn’t take the oath and testify on his own behalf.  That would be “drawing an adverse inference”, which isn’t legal.  And the prosecution is not even allowed to state the obvious that Zimmerman was a racial profiler.  Zimmerman's mother stated in court “Actually I’ve never heard my son scream like that, but I still know it’s him”.   It was pointed out that "There is really no room at all to doubt the basic facts of this case, no matter the defense tactics.  I did not hear either of those two "neighborhood witness state that Trayvon was on top WHEN the shot was fired.  If either witness actually SAW the shooting- - did either of them report it right away and say "A black man was straddling a white man?"  They tried to admit testimony that "Trayvon was in pain for a couple of minutes after the fatal shot" but it was objected to and striken from the record.  Now you have to cross examine some “simulated animation”.  It’s like that Star Trek episode where they were reduced to “cross examining a Computer”, which they couldn’t do.  Sow why wasn't the Prosecution then allowed to put on its Own "animatronics computer simulation?"  As to that sick question addressed to Trayvon's mother of "You have to HOPE it's your son's voice you hear being tortured or whatever".  My response would have been 'I would have hoped to God it was NOT my son who was going through all that anguish, that I had to hear, but the sad fact of it is- - that is Is my son's voice."  So now you have some uneducated old white ladies- - who probably think if they see it on a Television show it must be the truth- - watching some Disney style electronometric computer animation.  Who is going to cross examine THAT?  It gets worse.  Like I tell you this town reminds me of that movie “The Letter” the old one with Bette Davis.  There are so many strange characters in that movie that creep me out.  This Oriental corinor- - - states over and over again that he has absolutely no memory of performing the autopsy on Trayvon- - and for some legal reason he’s not allowed to use the notes he compiled.   Of course the medical examiner testified that the end of the barrel of Zimmerman’s gun was some four feet away from Trayvon’s body.   We know Zimmerman’s father was a perhaps crooked Judge of magistrate- - who got two restraining orders lifted against Zimmerman.  One was for battery against an law enforcement Officer, and the other one was for wife beating.  By the way Zimmerman’s wife is legally barred from testifying in this case because she is guilty of purgery- - which dates all the way back to the big about the defense fund of nearly a million dollars.  Of course none of that testimony will be allowed in this trial.  And now we hear that Zimmerman was taking a judo martial arts class three times a week.  We are told “The first thing you are taught in that class if how to dislodge someone who is on top of you.  Particularly someone fifty pounds lighter than you. 

We have learned a little more about this strange religious book Author who did the Lucifer Diary.  His name of course is Lewis R Walton and most of the Waltons in England live in either Lankishire or Yorkshire.  He has written many books dating back to the eighties- - and most with all the familiar buzz titles.  There are indications that he’s a Seventh Day Adventist, which is one of the classic Terrible Five in cults.  The others are Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, and Unitarians.  There are gratuitus references to observing the Sabbath when he had no particular function in the story to do so.  He chose Satan as the mouthpiece in which to express his “peculiar” thoughts (and I use that word in the politest, generic sense)  He seems to be obsessed with the idea of Creation - - and when someone else pulls off a Creation in the Universe he’s jealous because it wasn’t him who got to do it.  This is strange.  He’s also obssed with the idea that angels are unable to reproduce.  This wasn’t even true then because angels before and even after the flood bred with ‘the daughters of men” to beget Giants.  Goliath was one of these giants.  And he’s not right Biblically about a lot of things.  His Christology is strange because he speaks of “Jesus and the Holy Spirit going off to do a new creation, and he’d leave me here at the Throne with the Father- - and I never knew what was going on until they came back and gave us all a report”.  It’s almost as though he’s some kind of Tri-Theist.  And he’s also wrong about the whole thing about “In the beginning God created the Heavens - - and then after countless Eons- - he created the Solar System”.    The Bible seems to indicate that Earth was created at about the same time (as Dylan states in a song) as he created Heaven.  But the Satan character stews in his juices with his doubts and “mathematical calculations” for eons and - - as you turn the pages skipping ahead you see that Lucifer is kind of the Brian Jones of the cosmic.  He thinks he’s in charge but he loses rank and status with each passing year.  In the end he seems to descend to the level of an errand boy as others beneath him pass him by and seem to know more than he does.   Even the bit about creating Earth isn’t accurate.  Because Biblical scholars state that there was a time when only alien beings lived on the Earth in “dwelling places” or cosmic cities, and Lucifer was a magnificent bejeweled creature who walked “upon the stones of fire” and that he had some kind of built in pipe organ in his body.  We move on to the fact that according to him - - Adam and Eve were in Paradise for about 440 days before the surpant even appeared, and in all that time Eve never got pregnant or bore a child.  But as George Burnes informs us- - they were basically a couple of horney teenagers “:sixteen years- - seventeen years old - - tops”.   But one might infer that Adam and Eve never even had sex until after they were expelled from the Garden.  So much for rapid “replemishing of the planet”.  We move on to Christ’s crucifixion.  You have two prominent Jewish officials who obey every jot and tiddle of the Torah - - and yet they violate a prime precept of the Law by failing to bury a dead body on the same day in which he died.   Also books like Jude and Peter state that the angels that rebelled- - were sent to a place called “Tarterus” or we know better as Hell, and that Jesus descended into Hell and “made proclamation to the departed spirits”.  You’d think this would be a substantial entry in Lucifer’s diary- - but he doesn’t bother to make an entry.  In our next scene we have the Roman guards, and there are apparently four of them and one of lamenting he could be at the sea shore right now on weekend leave with a cute broad sipping in a Pina Collata or something, were it not for this assignment.  One of the four says that Jesus healed the survent of a friend of his- - and the account made him wonder about things called Messiahs - - and another told tales of how in the last day a Roman Legond (that I never heard) said one day the Gods would come to earth.  We are then told that Satan is invisible and sees Gabriel move the stone and let Jesus out of the tomb, but rather than rebuke Satan for being his welcoming committee- - it’s almost as though Jesus doesn’t even see him there.  But of course the guards see all of this and along with the ground shaking and bodies with incandecent glowing they run in terror shouting to everyone who would listen that Jesus is risen.  They vow to tell Pilate because they fear Death less than they fear for their mortal souls.  But they are intercepted by Chiaphus who bids them to keep silent as to what they have seen, and pledges to pay them enough Silver to be set for life.  They take the money and depart.  But by the end of the day stories of the Resurrection are now all over town.  So Chaiphus played the fool.  The whole book is strange - - very strange.