I don’t know if I’ve ever gone political on this blog before, but man, there’s so much ridiculous stuff being said about the potential concealed weapons ban in Lincoln that I’ve just got to put some pieces together.

First off, I think the concealed weapons bill passed by the Legislature this year is ridiculous. It was completely sold on fear; first we were told we need to protect ourselves from thieves, and then it devolved to needing to protect ourselves from prostitutes. While I won’t attribute it to Senator Combs, some of the discussion was also referencing a need to protect ourselves from terrorists and foreigners as well.

Their pro-gun rhetoric was also completely contradictory. They were saying that there won’t be more shootings or any vigilante attacks…but then they’d rally the troops by telling tales of scenarios in which things sure would have different if someone only would have had a gun…

So the Legislature passed it, but apparently there was a loophole allowing cities to pass their own bans before the state law is enacted. Mayor Seng is for it. Chief Tom Casady wrote an excellent editorial in the Journal Star about his and his officers’ concerns about allowing concealed weapons in town.

Here are a few of the points worth mentioning:

“Police officers not only deal with the very worst people, they also deal with good people at their very worst moments, when judgment and clarity are overwhelmed by emotion. We’ve all handled the personal crises of fundamentally decent citizens who were momentarily acting poorly. Concealed carry in Texas is the perfect example: the Department of Public Safety reports 5,319 arrests of concealed carry permit holders in the first 5½ years.”

“Many studies refute Lott’s findings, pointing to a falling crime rate nationwide. Between 1999 and 2004, violent crime in Nebraska fell from 7,172 offenses to 5,302, a 35 percent decrease over five years without a concealed carry law.”

“The Legislature’s ironic action in prohibiting concealed carry in their own chamber is a tacit acknowledgement that there are a few people who will have concealed carry permits that are downright frightening at times, despite clean criminal records.”

“While it prohibits felons and those convicted of drug crimes or violent crimes from getting permits, there are many serious misdemeanors that are not cause for denial: stalking, violating a protection order, indecent exposure and impersonating a police officer, to name a few. If you’ve been convicted of rolling back an odometer (a felony) you can’t get a permit, but on my desk is the criminal history of a 29-year-old Lincoln man we have arrested for trespassing and exposure on 12 occasions. He will be quite eligible for a concealed-carry permit.”

So the man writes an eloquent and intelligent piece on why the police oppose it. The reaction, while ridiculous, shouldn’t have been surprising.

Larry F. Graham of Lincoln said “If the 85 percent number is true (referring to the percentage of police who oppose concealed weapons), which considering the source is suspect, we need to recruit clearer thinking police officers to Lincoln.”

That’s right – if the police disagree with Larry on how best to handle the law and fight crime, the problem is obviously that we need new police.

Now I’ve had a few interactions with dishonest police, and I’ve heard of and witnessed some of my friends have been really roughed up by cops with attitudes who weren’t listening to reason – just bullies with badges. But in spite of that, I do not believe for a second that Casady and the 85% of police who oppose concealed weapons responded that way because they secretly and devilishly want the people of Lincoln to be mugged and/or gunned down by crooks in a dark alley.

The gun lovers continue to assert that in areas where gun control is enacted, crime rises. In response, Marcus Tooze wrote a detailed letter to the paper outlining how the often-cited UK statistics are misleading and out of context, mentioning that “…the U.S.A. would need a population of 23 billion people to get to the same gun death rate as the U.K.”

But the pro-gun absurdity doesn’t stop. Tim Matthews of Platte Center is either a subtle satirist or unintentionally hilarious when he worries that alcohol restrictions are next. He says:

“’About 1 million violent crimes occurred in 2002 in which victims perceived the offender to have been drinking at the time of the offense. Among those victims who provided information about the offender’s use of alcohol, about 30 percent of the victimizations involved an offender who had been drinking.’

Isn’t it about time for alcohol control? Wouldn’t less alcohol on the streets make our society safer? Wouldn’t those in law enforcement be safer with less alcohol on the streets?”

as if there aren’t laws restricting the use and consumption of alcohol. Thanks for proving your opposition’s point, Tim.

And today’s paper includes a stunning local editorial from Vietnam vet Terrance Reis, who really summed up the views of the pro-concealed weapons gang.

They can’t argue for it based upon the logic the opponents are using. So the only thing they can figure out how to do is just deny what they’re hearing. The cops are wrong. Reis says “(Casady’s) lack of support is very typical of a chief of police found anywhere in our country who has a politician for a boss.” Okay, I get it. Chief Casady wants to endanger the lives of all of Lincolnites because Mayor Seng controls everything he says.

Reis adds, “Concerning the survey performed by one of Casady’s officers, I believe those results are flawed. It has been found that surveys given by law enforcement agencies to law enforcement personnel are biased. Why? Possible retribution.” I would assume then that the 15% who weren’t against the ban have been duly punished.

Reis tries to explain that concealed weapons are needed as a deterrant from the common stranger-based street crime, promoting the power of simply brandishing a weapon in front of a would-be criminal…and then he says “For those citizens who are against concealed carry, remember this: You are more likely to be killed by an acquaintance or family member than by a stranger. In fact, everyone is.”

And then he defends himself further by pointing out

“…the U.S. Supreme Court ruled years ago, that it is not the responsibility of law enforcement to protect you. Nor do they have to.

This ruling has stood fast and has been supported by state supreme courts throughout the country. The police are not a proactive force; rather, they are a reactionary force, reacting to crimes committed.”

which gets back to the point the pro-gun folks were attempting not to make from the beginning. Oh, we won’t be shooting criminals at all…but watch out criminals, because here we come!

Reis closes his column with some proper hateful fear tactics, stupidly telling his readers that the police and Chief Casady actually want you to be in danger.

Strangely enough, I don’t think carrying a concealed weapon would make me any less afraid of these people.

I am so sick of how unfair Randy and Paula are to Katharine.

They constantly rip her for attempting to sound like the greats, or whatever. First off, I’m always amazed at how confidently original she sounds. The night she got harassed for sounding like Whitney Houston, I had to ask Sara who sang that song because I thought she sounded so Katharine.

Then Taylor comes out sounding JUST FREAKING LIKE a watered down Bruce Springsteen. Paula and Randy pick songs for Eliot and Taylor based upon who they sound like, and they don’t care. They just keep kissing their asses.

Katharine is so far beyond everyone else. Taylor and Eliot sound like good amateurs. They make this competition seem like the best amateur in the world. Katharine seems like a pro. I wonder if Paula and Randy are so critical of her because she’s so far beyond their never-was / has-been / wanna-be selves.

Both Arby’s and Wendy’s have recently unveiled new menu items to expand beyond the traditional fare. While this is not to the degree of Jack in the Box serving burgers, tacos and teriyaki bowls, it’s inching uncomfortably close.

Wendy’s Frescata Sandwiches
These new delights are obviously targeted at the health-conscious, because they are advertised packaged with Baked Lays and a bottle of Dasani. I have no illusions of health from my fast food, and I also greatly enjoy Wendy’s fries and pop, so I went with the standard meal accessories.

The Black Forest Ham and Swiss was my sandwich of choice. In person, the sandwich was bigger than I expected from the photo. I thought I was going to get something nice and cute on a little bun. Bigger-than-expected would normally be a treat. However, this was not the case.

The size of the bun dictates the amount of meat that must be on the sandwich. A cute little sandwich would be very satisfying with a conservative amount of meat, because a conservative amount of meat could still stuff a little sandwich and make it seem like it was overflowing with content.

A bigger bun, however, requires a lot of meat – and anything less than a lot makes the sandwich seem cheap and skimped on the goods. So I found myself with a lot of bun and not as much innards as I’d like.

The tangy sauce on the sandwich was also a turn-off. I ate there an hour ago and my stomach is still upset. It reminds me of the horrible internal sensation after eating Arby’s chicken bacon ranch wrap.

Rating: Helps keep off the pounds by boring you while eating it or causing you to throw it up later.

Arby’s Gyro
I don’t know what I was thinking ordering this. The only tiime Arby’s ever strayed from the standard “thinly sliced meat on soft bun” formula and I didn’t get sick was with their amazing sourdough melts, which they of course discontinued.

But the picture on the wall made it look like a real gyro. The meat in that picture looked like gyro meat – that kind of meat that gets sliced off a big brown rotating spool with a machete. It didn’t look like roast beef, which was my fear: that Arby’s would put their regular old roast beef in a pita and call it a gyro.

So I asked the woman at the register, “Does the gyro have seasoned gyro meat, or just roast beef?”

“Oh, it’s seasoned,” she told me. I should have known, through that carefully crafted response, what that meant.

The Arby’s gyro is a pita, some onions, lettuce and tomatoes, and then traditional Arby’s roast beef with some sort of seasoning and sauce gooped on. It’s like how you would make a roast beef sandwich at home if you ran out of buns and only had a pita. And then if you put a bunch of toppings on that don’t belong on a roast beef sandwich.

Much like the Wendy’s Frescata sandwich and all the Arby’s wraps, the gyro made me sick to my stomach. I quickly wised up and chased it with a Hot Ham & Swiss and everything was pretty much okay.

Rating: Not gyro, crap!

I understand a fast food restaurant’s desire to liven up the menu. But you know what would make me go to Arby’s and Wendy’s more? If they stopped raising their prices all the time. I know we have things like inflation, but it gets pretty ridiculous when sandwiches that were 99 cents a few years ago are now like $2.79. And then those jerks at Wendy’s jacked up the prices on the dollar menu stuff – even on the pop. Everyone knows that pop is like 99% profit, so increasing the price of pop is one of the slimiest, cheapest things a joint can do.

In their minds, they might be getting 20 cents more of my money, except I’m not going there anymore, so they’re getting a lot less. Just do what you do and do it well, and people will come there. Don’t gimmick me in the door and then tell me pop is $1.49 now.

Best Song of All Time: “3/4 Ben” by Pablo’s Triangle

Best Food of All Time: “Gyro Plate” by The Gourmet Grill

Well, I can barely walk. My left ankle is killing me, and my right knee is sore. I have a massive headache, and my legs are hurting so bad I couldn’t fall asleep to even take a nap.

But this morning, I ran my first ever half-marathon, and I had so much fun.

I was ridiculously under-prepared; I’d gone running about 5 times over the past 3 weeks in preparation, never exceeding 6.5 miles (only exceeding 4 miles 3 of those times). I had never run that far in my life – the furthest I’d ever run was 8 miles back in high school.

But there are so many people there, you just get swept up, and running the whole way wasn’t too bad. It was only about mile 12 that I started to get worn out and even think about the possibility of walking, when a random stranger in the running crowd started talking to me. I kept talking to her, and by the time we had to part ways (she was running the full marathon) it was almost the end of the race.

The crowd is awesome. There are people out on the streets the whole way. I was having a blast, high-fiving all these kids who were super excited to cheer on four thousand strangers.

Just so much fun, and easily worth the agony of this afternoon.

I saw American Dreamz last night. I’m not going to link to anything or look for an image, for fear of giving some web hoster the wrong impression – that I liked it.

The movie was just so, so bad. I thought from the commercials that it looked like it’d be fun, lighthearted satire. I thought moments like the mother saying “Oh she’s been singing since she was six months old,” and then showing a home video clip of the mom going “Sing! Sing!” would be smart, isolated events.

The movie, beyond just being not funny, is bad in so many ways. Its depth of political satire paints a picture of someone taking their first poli sci class and thinking “A ha! I will make a statement!”

Biting jokes like “The president is dumb” and “Other people make decisions for him” and “He doesn’t read” is about as intense as it gets. Okay, thanks buddy.

For satirical humor to work, there has to be some level of insight. And the things criticized should at least be asking for some type of jab. I mean, does having an American Dreamz contestant singing “I’m a Rocker!” or whatever take any kind of effort? Yes, we know that American Idol contestants are often archetypes. What exactly is the problem there?

Beyond the attempts at satire, nobody is consistent, yet so much of the humor is reliant on situations where someone does something out of character. If there’s nothing standard from which actions can deviate, they have no effect. We are just supposed to laugh because things like terrorists having TiVO are apparently inherently funny, even though the terrorists do nothing BUT act unlike terrorists.

And you’d expect the brain behind American Pie to at least be able to pull of some kind of situational humor. Nope.

Truly, this movie fails on every conceivable level. I think I laughed once, and I can’t even remember why.

This was just going to be a quick demonstration, but the club’s interest in the project and Maggie and Sara’s enthusiasm in performing their roles demanded that we finish the production.

I put in a Lightning Seeds CD tonight as background music for getting some work done, and it just made me think about how much I enjoy this one-man band. I didn’t pick up the best of when it came out in 1997, because I remember objecting to something in the selection (I have no idea what it was now).

For the unfamiliar, Ian Broudie was long ago part of an art-punk Liverpudlian outfit called Big in Japan. His bandmate, Bill Drummond, later went on to become Echo & the Bunnymen’s manager and one half of media manipulators and house music geniuses The KLF. Broudie became a producer, working with new wave and new romantic groups like The Icicle Works and The Colour Field. By the end of the 80s, he was creating solo studio works and dubbed himself The Lightning Seeds for the release of his debut, Cloudcuckooland.

And now, because I’d like a break, I’m going to put together my own Best of The Lightning Seeds. Be warned – this is wimpy, poppy, sissy music. It’s light and playful. He has a song called “Sugar Coated Iceberg.” But man, sometimes I’m just in the mood for this stuff.

1. Marvellous (from Jollification)
This one goes first because of the long intro. It was just kind of made to be a suspenseful album opener. Once it kicks into the actual song, it’s a good herald of what’s to come.

2. The Life of Riley (from Sense)
One of the two most recognizeable Lightning Seeds keeps the energy up from the opener. Supposedly written in two phases – before and after – the birth of Broudie’s first child.

3. Three Lions ’96 (single)
I have to put both versions of Three Lions on here. This was the original, from the Euro 96 tournament.

4. What If… (from Dizzy Heights)
It keeps the sort of romping-anthem quality of Three Lions going while getting back to the more traditional Lightning Seeds sound.

5. Why Why Why (from Jollification)
This was one of many collaborations with Terry Hall (The Specials, Fun Boy Three, The Colour Field), which included some co-writing and production duties over the years. The song is a little unsubstantial, but still quite nice.

6. Change (from Jollification)
One of my favorite Lightning Seeds songs. It was an obvious single and has the stand-out singalong moments of several pop songs packed into one.

7. Life’s Too Short (from Tilt)
I admittedly didn’t get too familiar with this album – it was much more of a standard four-on-the-floor house feel, as is this song, and I guess that’s just not what I was looking for from the Lightning Seeds. That said, this is a fantastic dance song.

8. You Showed Me (from Dizzy Heights)
This is a great cover of the Turtles song, and it brings us back down a little bit from a few dancier tracks.

9. Perfect (from Jollification)
When I picked up this single in 1997, this was the first Lightning Seeds song I’d heard since the Sense album. I was surprised that the project was going and that it sounded as instantly accessible as I’d remembered.

10. Pure (from Cloudcuckooland)
I’d say this is probably the most recognizeable Lightning Seeds song, and for good reason. I remember when I was a kid, I saw this video on MTV late one night and it annoyed me. This dorky British guy was singing in such a wimpy way over this cutesy music. It didn’t fit in with whatever Def Leppard or Winger video probably surrounded it. But there was something about it that, in spite of my resentment, made me feel like I was seeing something special – like it was this secret between me and MTV, as ridiculous as that sounds. Now, looking back and imagining something like this being played in the hairband heyday does seem pretty fascinating.

11. Ready or Not (from Dizzy Heights)
There were aspects of this album that were almost, dare I say, “rock.” And with Broudie’s delicate little-boy voice, it sometimes made for almost laughable moments. This song tiptoed that line, but the urgency and earnest quality to the vocal makes it work.

12. Sense (from Sense)
This title-track and one-time leadoff track is another Ian Broudie-Terry Hall collaboration with another anthemic chorus.

13. Lucky You (from Jollification)
14. Like You Do (from Dizzy Heights)
Some of these songs just deserve to be on the album.

15. Three Lions 98 (single)
I like this version more than the original, which is probably heretical if there are Lightning Seeds fans passionate enough to care about that. I know it’s my bias from “being there” when this came out for the 98 World Cup, but there’s just something about this one that seems to pack more energy.

16. All I Want (from Cloudcuckooland)
I know this was the opening track from the debut album, but there’s something about its laid back confidence that works as a closing statement for me.

In addition to the usual film clubs, my new club this semester is Animation Club (now renamed ANNIE to better fit with DAVE). When I pitched it, I was thinking we could use Final Cut Express and layers to do some computer-based 2D animation. I knew we wouldn’t have the time or attention spans needed to learn Flash, but using layers and keyframes seemed like a decent way to do some simple animations.

On the first day, I described the 2D “drawing-based” animation, but I also proposed stop-motion animation as an alternative. I could tell that the concept was pretty foreign to nearly everyone, as it should be, since 3D computer animation has basically rendered stop motion pointless. So just to demonstrate, I storyboarded an improvised tale of Dixie Cupp, played by a Dixie cup, and her friend Elmer, as played by a bottle of Elmer’s glue.

As a class, we quickly went through the process of situating a stationary camera and inching the actors along through their motions. Then we went into the computer lab where I ran through a hasty version of editing together a stop-motion movie.

The project was crude and clumsy but it was amazing to see their imaginations activated. This totally inspired them, and now I think everyone’s doing a stop motion movie. Today in club, some of us helped shoot most of Stephen’s “March of the Origami Penguins,” in which a scientist’s notes fold themselves up into origami penguins and march off while she’s out of the room. Everybody else was either finishing up their storyboards or building their characters out of clay.

I don’t have any idea what most of their ideas are at this point, but when I was loading up people’s models into a box at the end of the day, I got pretty excited to see what they’re going to come up with. This should be a productive club. I think I’ll post “The Adventures of Dixie Cupp” the next time we’re in the lab and I have a chance to compress it.

I posted a few weeks ago about a story I was interviewed for regarding the big international cartoon controversy. I couldn’t find it online then, but now here it is.