AND ANOTHER ROUND OF OSCARS, IF YOU PLEASE: Oscar has come and gone once again, as he is wont to do at this time of year, and as always he leaves not a rack of overpriced clothing behind. That sort of thing happens a lot when Oscar comes to town; he’s very much a schizophrenic Santa Claus that way; you lavish praise and money on him, and if he feels like it, he’ll come home with you. Even people who know Oscar isn’t coming home with them will go and make their obeisance to the little gold man. People not up for anything will spend the gross domestic product of a small Third World nation getting ready to sit in an auditorium and watch the nominees sweat like Mrs. Murphy’s prize pig and pretend that they are happy when they don’t win. The show would be much more interesting if the Academy gave the nominees bowie knives and told them that whoever made to the podium first would get the statue. Idolatry being Hollywood’s major religion, I am sure that the resultant bloodbath would be tremendous, epic, maybe even Cecil B. DeMille-like in its size, scale, intensity, and duration. It might even encourage the fashion designers to use more easily washable plastic fabrics in their creations and would also lead to more ads from cutlery manufacturers, who wouldn’t mind such an international showcase for their wares.

The show was its usually boring self, even if Ellen DeGeneres did her level best to liven things up; I liked the bit with Martin Scorcese and the screenplay—if you want to pitch a screenplay to a major player in the movie industry, it helps if you get the guy to keep still for a minute, like at the Oscars or when they are sitting on the toilet—and the vacuum cleaner was a cute bit of business, I thought, but then I am easily entertained. Mr. Scorcese finally won for Best Director and Peter O’Toole did not win again for Best Actor. Mr. O’Toole received a lifetime achievement Oscar a couple of years ago, so maybe the voters thought he could live without a Best Actor Oscar; he has, after all, managed to have an outstanding career without ever getting one, so maybe he doesn’t need one. After all, Kevin O’Connell received his nineteenth nomination in sound engineering this year, and once again, Kevin O’Connell didn’t get an Oscar, which is, I hear, the record for moviemaking futility, and Mr. O’Toole is nowhere near that number and probably doesn’t want to be, either. Melissa Etheridge won for best song and thanked her wife and their kids, which, to be kind, is legally illusional in the first place and biologically delusional in the second. She won for An Inconvenient Truth, a movie about global warming, which stars, if you can call it that, former Vice President Al Gore. Leonardo diCaprio encouraged Mr. Gore to announce his candidacy as they stood together on stage, and Mr. Gore was about to do so before the tuxedo-clad orchestra interrupted him. Mr. Gore looked surprised as the music drowned out his announcement. I can’t imagine why, though; you'd think that at this point in his life Mr. Gore would have gotten used to unseen men in black thwarting his political ambitions. Then there was Michael Mann’s rapturous and overwhelmingly patriotic paean to America, the land of the weird and the home of depraved, which was about what you would expect, given the audience, and there was much talk of diversity in the movies this year.

And yet, where was that much vaunted diversity at the Oscar show, especially in the category of Best Animated Feature? Cameron Diaz came out and, before reading the winner, told the assembled animated characters that they could not come up on stage to receive their awards. I was shocked, shocked, I tell you, at this blatant reimposition of Jim Crow, and in the very heart of Hollywood at that. It wasn’t that long ago that animated characters were completely welcome at the Oscar ceremonies. I clearly remember Chicken Little, Buzz Lightyear, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Woody the cowboy, and Kermit and Miss Piggy, who technically aren’t animated, I know, among others, giving out awards in any number of categories; I also remember the Academy’s honoring Chuck Jones for his work in animation not that many years ago, and I remember Beauty and the Beast’s nomination for Best Picture as well.

What has happened, then, that the Academy would try to impose this vile apartheid based not on the quality of a nominee’s work, but on the color of their pixels? Hasn’t the country moved beyond this sort of ugly anti-animation bigotry? Isn’t it time for the Academy to move beyond their loathsome bias and readmit animated characters to the movie industry’s mainstream? It certainly couldn’t hurt the Oscar show. By forcibly keeping the animated characters in the audience and only allowing the inanimate ones up on stage to drone on and on for their allotted portion, the Academy only makes the Oscars drag on and on and on and on and on, until the vast majority of the audience no longer cares who wins for Best Deputy Supporting Gofer and turns their televisions off, convinced, if they weren’t already, that the Oscar ceremonies, like math class and eating liver with lima beans, are proof positive that Einstein was right and time is relative. There is a small advantage to this, however; people who watch the Oscars from beginning to end are, on the average, five to ten minutes younger than those who don’t the program all the way through. They are just not as interesting.

Just a short note: I’ve had to check the perpetual calendar to find out on what day 6 June 1944 occurred (it was a Tuesday) and how long it took from that day to the German surrender (337 days) for one of our patrons, and so I figured, while I was at it, let’s figure out how long it will be to the next Presidential inauguration (699 days). Well, that is something to think about, especially given that the Oval Office wannabes have pushed this election cycle’s kickstand up and out of the way and are now riding the bike full throttle towards Iowa and New Hampshire, running down anything that gets in their way. In any case, I think I speak for large numbers of people when I say that by the time this happens we will all be so absolutely sick of this Presidential election cycle that we won’t care who the next President is, we’ll vote for anyone who promises to stay the hell off of our televisions and out of our sight for a prolonged period of time. I suspect this may work in the Republicans’ favor, as no one would believe a Democrat if they told us that they would bow to the public’s wishes and do nothing that got their faces plastered all over the evening news every night. By then, hopefully, Britney will have gotten her face tattooed or joined a satanic cult or become the father of Anna Nicole's next child, which might drown out the noise from Washington for a while and give the rest of us a break from the non-stop politicking. We can only hope.

Gratitude, of course, is the most fleeting of emotions, as you may know. Take, for example, the seagull to the left. Here I am, making this bird a star in the blogosphere, and what was its thanks for my efforts and the popcorn I bought to get him/her/it down into camera range? The bird took my popcorn and promptly shat all over my shoes. This is the thanks I get, and frankly, it serves me right, I think. Seagulls, for all their aerial grace, are extremely filthy birds with disgusting personal habits. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to discover that this bird is probably a liberal, or even worse, a Red Sox fan.

WINTER TIME BLUES: My apologies, everyone, for the lack of posting since this past Tuesday. As you may have heard, the northeastern United States, in which section of this our Great Republic you will find our happy little burg situated, has had any number of problems with precipitation this past week. I would not mind this so much; I ordinarily take such problems in my stride, treating them with an aplomb that astonishes and amazes all those around me; but this week the shear pins on my snow blower took the eponymous opportunity available to them and sheared right off, rendering my blower useless. It would have made little difference if they hadn’t; the snow, followed by icy rain and then more snow, was as hard and heavy as an IRS agent listening to a tale of financial woe, and subsequently I had to chop nature's own concrete up before shoveling the vile stuff away. After several hours of this, I had aches and pains in places I would have thought too small to hold such a large collection of agonies, a condition that left me largely devoid of the necessary spirit of humor and whimsy needed to pump one of these screeds out.

The Sanitation Department, however, is doing its usual bang-up job when it comes to removing snow from the city streets. Having called five times to ask them when they were going to plow my street, I’ve learned that they are now officially thinking about plowing out Main Street, if they can get around to it before August. As you might imagine, large numbers of the citizenry are not happy with the idea of cross-country skiing in an imported car and so have taken to shoveling the snow out the streets on their own. I noticed one such more or less unsuccessful attempt at the local Reformed Church yesterday. The Reformed Church used to be the Dutch Reformed Church, before a synod decided that maybe salvation was not a condition limited to Dutch people in particular or Calvinists in general. So they have dropped the ethnic modifier and are now merely Reformed, and when they are not busy reforming themselves they are busy pushing the snow out of their parking lot and into the middle of the street with a backhoe. I don’t think they were actually trying to do this; I think they were trying to find a way of clearing their parking lot and the street at the same time, but found, to their chagrin, that there was no way of having their meteorological cake and eating it, too. There was no way of clearing their parking lot without dumping the snow in the middle of the street, and no way of clearing the snow without putting it back in their parking lot, thereby defeating the whole purpose of moving the snow in the first place. Complicating this, of course, was a good healthy dose of Calvinist guilt, which came from these good folks wanting to be selfish and clear parking lots for themselves at the expense of others, and Christ’s command to love your neighbor as yourself, which doesn’t explicitly forbid dumping the snow from your parking lot in the middle of the street, but does seem to frown on the practice.

What was especially interesting in all of this was the sign in front of the church, which announced to all who passed by that they should wear the colors of the Cross. I found this fairly interesting, in that while I’ve heard many debates one way or the other about the philosophical, theological, and historical meaning of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, I’ve never heard a debate about the event's meaning in terms of fashion. In fact, I’d never heard that color coordination was theologically relevant to the Crucifixion at all; I suppose this is one of those dogmas, like predestination, peculiar to the Calvinist confession. I know that the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, which are usually pretty mindful of fashion trends, don’t have much to say one way or the other about what to wear to crucifixions, although I am told that the Church of the Nazarene holds that one should always wear a seersucker suit and Argyll socks to a hanging, and that the Assemblies of God think that a nice navy blue blazer is the thing to die in if you’re going to a lethal injection. I haven’t heard about any other denominational preferences in terminal fashions, but I am sure that the one thing all Christian denominations would agree on theologically is to make absolutely sure that if you are going to an execution, make absolutely certain that you are wearing clean underwear.

CYNICISM ALERT: I don’t usually do a lot of linking, especially on political topics; there's lots of folks out there who do this a lot better than I ever will, so I usually let them do it; but this article from the Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel was entirely too good to pass up. This bit of news comes under the category of no matter how cynical you get, it’s never enough. Apparently, the Democratic objection to the Washington gravy train for the past twelve years wasn’t that the gravy train was corrupting American politics; their objection was that the Democrats were in the gravy train’s caboose with an expired ticket.

No, I am not getting rid of the photoblog; it's just that this template is starting to get a little monotonous and I figured everyone could use a break from the blue, so here's a shot of my mother's morning glories from last spring or summer or whenever it is that morning glories turn up.

CAMPAIGN UPDATE: Well, here I am, just over one week into my campaign for the 2060 Democratic Presidential nomination and I can safely say that my candidacy has already hit a couple of minor snags. The first is money, which is usually a problem for almost all candidates this early in the election cycle, and the other is the willful silence of the mainstream media on my candidacy, a problem reserved for conservative candidates no matter what their party. The faithful reader of The Passing Parade will no doubt remember that I began this campaign with just $15.63 left over from my previous paycheck. Since then I have managed to add $5.75 to my political war chest. These funds are not, however, immediately available to me; I will have to bring the bottles across the street to the local Grand Union and redeem them first; but I estimate that, if you factor in the inexorable rise of inflation, the $21.38 now will be more than enough to buy air time in New Hampshire and Iowa. In fact, if my calculations are correct, my $21.38 in 2007 dollars should be worth something approximately $117,934,726.41 in 2060. Assuming that I will spend at least 25% of that on prescriptions and other medical costs; keeping a 102 year old candidate on the campaign trail is much costlier than keeping some whippersnapper half that age is; I believe that I should have more than enough to swamp my opponents in the primaries and still have enough left over to play online poker morning, noon, and night.

That is, of course, assuming my opponents do not stoop to low and devious means to raise money. As I’ve previously mentioned, I do not want to take the low road in this campaign, but it is becoming clear that at least one of the other contenders for the nomination has recently taken substantial sums of money from the tooth fairy for what I, for one, can only see as a somewhat questionable quid pro quo. Let me be among the first to say that while I would be more than happy to accept the moral and financial support of the gay rights movement and the dental industry, I will not allow them to dictate my agenda nor will I stand idly by when some misguided members of those two groups attempt to suborn a candidate for the highest office in the land. That the tooth fairy involved seems to have gotten the money for this pre-emptive bit of peculation from two, and possibly four, members of the AARP only leads me to conclude that my opponent is now so indebted to the special interests that the American people cannot take his (or her) candidacy seriously. These, of course, are the same American people who in 2007 obsessed daily about the comings and goings of one Britney Spears, at that time a well-known bit of intellectual fluff known to promote tooth decay and senile dementia in laboratory rats. I am sure that in 2060 someone similar will have the same equally noxious effect on broad swathes of the populace, so perhaps there is still hope for my opponent.

As for the mainstream media, I must say that their lack of interest in my candidacy is truly astonishing. As far as I can tell, not one major news outlet covered the announcement of my candidacy and not one political blog has offered an opinion about my running for the nomination one way or the other. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal apparently don’t care about my positions on the issues, Rolling Stone doesn’t want to know my opinions on the hot new bands out there (word up, that Bach kid, he’s going places, dude), Annie Leibovitz hasn’t taken my picture for the cover of Vanity Fair and apparently won’t be taking my picture for the cover of Vanity Fair any time soon, GQ hasn’t mentioned that chances of winning the nomination would improve greatly if I dressed for success and got rid of my usual wardrobe of sweatshirts, ratty sneakers, and dirty navy blue Dockers (at least I think they’re navy blue; it’s hard to tell nowadays), and absolutely nobody on Hef’s staff has called trying to line me up for an in-depth Playboy interview. The Playboy thing really cuts me to the quick, too, given that my site meter tell me that The Passing Parade is the place to be for anyone who thinks Miss November 1984, Roberta Vasquez, was the hottest Chicana babe since La Malinche.

Since I am now that rarest of creatures, a conservative Democrat, I’d thought that I could at least get a rise out of the folks who read the Daily Kos, that these people would demand that I, like Joe Lieberman, be run out of the Democratic Party on the electrified third rail, preferably after a good tarring and feathering. I am, after all, on record as being a big supporter of President Bush, I think that the ideal way to end the war in Iraq, or wherever it is we will be fighting a war in 2060, is to win the war, I am pro-life, anti-gun control (for the most part; I do support weapons testing—maybe it’s just me, but I think you should be able to prove you know what you’re doing with a gun before you can buy one; accidentally shooting yourself in the ass because you don’t know the muzzle from the butt when there’s an intruder in the house is not the ideal way to deter criminals and makes you look foolish to boot), and for smaller government in general. These are my positions, and yet not one Daily Kos reader, or anyone else from the leftosphere, for that matter, has left so much as an intemperate or even vaguely impolite remark in the comments section. Not one of those guys has taken the trouble to call me a no-good Nazi KKK racist fascist homophobic bastard who ought to die choking on my own puke. I don’t know why not, frankly; they’ve done that and more for candidates who are a lot more moderate than I usually am.

JUST A QUICK COMMENT: I wasn’t going to go back to the Arkin controversy; there are plenty of people better qualified than I am to take him and his uncharitable opinion of the all-volunteer military to task; but it does seem to me that the people who share his opinion are in for a startling, and to them, entirely unexpected, comeuppance. Today’s American military is probably the best-educated armed force this country has ever fielded. Some 96.78% of enlisted personnel are high school graduates, 92.1% of the officer corps hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, and many of the enlisted troops will be going on to college after their hitch is up. In short, the idea that this particular group of individuals will sit still and take their lumps while the left smears them as they smeared the Vietnam veterans is nothing short of fantastic. It is no wonder then that the left is busy trying to restore the late and unlamented fairness doctrine and will try, no doubt, to have that abomination applied to the Internet also. The most successful smear jobs have these two things in common: first, that the victim of the smear cannot answer the charges hurled at them, and second, the person perpetrating the smear can control or stifle any voice that might want to aid the victim. With the arrival of the Internet, the men and women Mr. Arkin so callously dismisses can answer him back and they can do so without worrying about whether or not some media gatekeeper who agrees with Mr. Arkin will censor them.

For the Democrats, the idea that large numbers of these men and women will support a party that derives much of its backing from the sort of people that agree with Mr. Arkin’s assessment of their service to their country is equally fantastic, not too mention terrifically shortsighted as well. The average American today can now expect to live into their mid to late 70’s. When you consider that the youngest soldier in Iraq now is in his late teens, the Democrats will have to wonder if winning in 2008 is so important to them that they are willing to alienate this young man and his comrades in arms from their party until 2068. This, of course, is a very foolish question on my part; today’s Democrats are willing to alienate anyone and everyone you can think of if it helps get Hilary into the White House in 2009. Ah well, so it goes.

COMMENT: A Mr. William Arkin, who earns his bread commenting on national security matters for the Washington Post, a well-known scandal sheet, described American soldiers in a column in that newspaper recently as mercenaries. This is very odd, or at least I think it is, since the National Catholic Reporter reported only last month on the efforts of some Dominican nuns to donate canned goods to Air Force families that cannot otherwise afford canned goods. Since the goal of a mercenary soldier is to make money at his chosen trade, the American mercenaries responsible for protecting Mr. Arkin and his low opinion of them seem to be making a complete hash of it and should probably go into some more remunerative line of work, like bloviating for liberal newspapers. They would then be able to hurl cans of lima beans, chili con carne, and sliced yellow cling peaches in heavy syrup through the Washington Post’s front windows and still have enough left over to feed the family until payday. Maybe it’s just me, but somehow or other I don’t think that Mr. Arkin believes his local fire department are mercenaries, or if he does, he has the good sense to keep this opinion to himself, lest the men whose service he denigrates so dismissively decide that saving his life or family or property is not worth their sacrifice.

In unrelated news, the FDA has approved the use of a female contraceptive as a treatment for acne. It has been many years since I was a teenager, but if I remember right, which is hard to do with almost anything regarding the 1970’s, in those days most teenaged boys considered acne as a highly effective female contraceptive. It almost always worked and had the added benefit of being free.