The fields along the California coast are a sea of pumpkins this time of year.
Big news from the famous Half Moon Bay Art and Pumpkin Festival on the Northern California coast. A California pumpkin won the prize for biggest gourd. Alien peoples from the nearby state of Oregon (and sometimes from even more alien places like Idaho) have been taking the pumpkin prize at Half Moon Bay since 1999, and native Californians were certain those outlanders had devised some devious means of doing so.
But for the 2010 event, they vanished, mysteriously I might add, and Ron Root of Citrus Heights, California (up near Sacramento) was the proud winner of the grand prize. His baby weighed 1,535 pounds. And that isn't even a record.
It is a terrific bunch of fun, this Pumpkin Festival, and always a surprising reminder of how rural the California coast can be, so close to the busy hills of San Francisco. Along Highway 1, within sight of the waves rolling in from the Pacific, is a fruited plane where family farms still grow artichokes and lettuce, flowers, Christmas trees and pumpkins.
The autumn weather is spectacular, the ocean will knock you out with its beauty, and there is only one negative. Also a feature of California.
The traffic is as clogged as Bill Clinton's arteries.
Looking seaward from California's Highway One.
The main roadway from the Peninsula over to Half Moon Bay, is two-lane Highway 92. On an ordinary day it is a wonderful, meandering road through the Coast Range and down to the sea.
On Pumpkin Festival weekend it is as backed up as the security line at O'Hare.
So, make your plans with care. By 8:00 a.m. on festival days--October 16-17, 2010--Highway 92 is bumper to bumper. One alternative is to take Route 84 from Woodside up through the hippy enclave of La Honda, and down to Highway One, from whence once can head north to Half Moon Bay. You can have fun poking along through La Honda spotting the marijuana growing.
My advice is to leave at dawn, miss the traffic, park the car and walk to breakfast in the cool quiet part of the day. See the pumpkins, stroll the tents filled with art, and then get the heck out of there by noon, before the traffic going out gets bad.
Last year I took the precaution of visiting Half Moon Bay one week ahead of the festival and had no traffic problems whatsoever. Which made me truly outstanding in my field.
A Guest Post for Robin Chapman News from Steve Thompson
Robin Chapman writes: These are the years the baby boom generation, children of the Greatest Generation, faces losing the parents that loomed so large in our lives (not to mention in the history of the world and the lives of free people across the globe.) My friend Steve Thompson, novelist, journalist and historian, lost his own military father several years before I lost my own. We were talking about our fathers one day, and he shares with us the following tribute.
January 1991. Apartment G102, Air Force Village West, California. I hung up the phone and looked across the kitchen at my wife. I stood rooted to the floor. We’d been preparing to make our daily trip the hospital where my father lay dying of cancer, and I had just been told that he was dead.
My wife and I embraced, and I gazed over her shoulder at the world. But not the real world. Not the world of G102, my father’s home in this community of retired officers. I was looking back into the past, into the world I’d shared with the man whose heart had just stopped and whose life had shaped me in ways I was only now beginning to understand. The world of a pilot’s son in the United States Air Force.
October 1961. RAF Sculthorpe, England. I was a 13-year-old kid at the junior high school at this Tactical Air Command base in East Anglia, playing football during phys. ed. As we huddled, the familiar sound of Allison J71s spooling up for takeoff washed across the schoolyard. We didn’t really notice the shriek, the way New Yorkers don’t really notice the traffic noise. We lived in a continuum of engines.
The jet’s scream rose, then abruptly ended in a gut-rumbling explosion. We ran to the fence and looked toward the runway. A dirty brown cloud roiled into the gray English sky. The noise on the playing field died as we stared at the smoke. The wail of the fire engines came as the smoke began to drift in the chill air. We looked at each other as we left the fence.
We knew what might happen next: A big blue Air Force car could arrive and some kids could be taken home to be told that their fathers had been hurt. Maybe killed. We wondered, as we always did: who?
That day, the blue car didn’t come. After school, when I got home, my father’s Vauxhall was parked in front of our house. Inside, I found him comforting my mother. The airplane had been his. The starboard engine on his B-66 had tossed a turbine blade and destroyed itself. He smiled at me and asked if I’d been worried. “Nah,” I said, and went into the kitchen to get some Oreos. We ate at the O-club that night. His squadron commander bought us dinner. I played pool with my dad. He won. He always did.
May, 1990. California. For a magazine feature, I needed to find out why General Curtis E. LeMay had allowed the Sports Car Club of America to stage races on Strategic Air Command bases in the mid-1950s. I told my dad about it. He laughed, remembering his own MG-TD and SAC racing. I wondered how I’d get to LeMay, who I knew was living at the Village. “Don’t sweat it,” Dad told me.
A week later, he called to tell me I had my interview. He’d spoken to LeMay in the dining room. I marveled: as far as I knew, LeMay hadn’t given an interview in years. I wondered if he had agreed this time because the story was about sports cars rather than politics. Or if the reason was even simpler, if he’d agreed because I was an Air Force brat. I’d never know.
LeMay gave me two hours. He spoke of sports cars and SAC racing and much more. But of all his topics, the unfulfilled promise of strategic bombing and the genesis of Air Force Village West animated him the most. He told me—anger rising visibly—how little support Air Force officers’ widows were getting in their desperate search for affordable housing; how American bankers wouldn’t fund a retirement community for career military officers and their spouses; and how he’d had to go to Royal Air Force friends, now senior bankers in England, to get the startup money.
Five months later Curtis LeMay died. My father was one of the three men in wheelchairs in the front row at LeMay’s memorial service. Afterward, we talked about where we were going fishing in the spring. But spring never came for him.
As I stood in his kitchen, I gazed around the few artifacts of airman’s life that fit into a small apartment. On the walls were a few paintings and a pair of blue velvet plaques on which our Air Force decorations and insignia of rank were pinned. I looked at his command pilot wings and wondered what it would have been like to grow up with a father who did not go to work every day wearing a business suit the color of the wild blue yonder. I couldn’t imagine it. I never had been able to.
The wings reminded me of the Air Force Day airshows, of all the times I’d be fooling around out on the flight line with other Air Force brats, feeling superior to the awestruck civilians because we knew silver-winged secrets they didn’t. When the first formation of jets would scream overhead we’d fall silent, the superiority knocked off our faces by the JP-4 burning far above, and watch in wonder as our dads rocketed across the firmament.
We knew what we were supposed to do. Nobody ever told us. We just knew. We were supposed to step into the cockpits when they got out. To go higher, faster, farther. It was just that simple.
But of course it was not that simple. The Vietnam War was everything but simple, for me and for every other serving son of the military. Long-suppressed memories erupted, memories of civilians shouting curses at me and my comrades. “Baby killers!” they yelled. “Napalm murderers!” Ignorant of our realities, they knew only what they saw on TV. But they hurt us. The images of my Air Force and the Air Force of my father clashed, mixed but did not mingle, and yet were bound together by the things that never changed: the traditions, the faith in each other, even the rituals of Reveille and Retreat and Taps. Always Taps.
“Hiya, Sport,” he’d say when he got back from a mission, short blond hair smelling of Vitalis, flightsuit stained with sweat, kneeboard battered and chipped, helmet bag tossed into a corner. “Take the stick, Budro,” he say in the Piper Cub as the little yellow plane climbed away from the sun-baked Kansas fields. “Too rough for ya?” he’d call over the Gosport tube in the Tiger Moth as he rolled and looped it, making the green and brown quilt of England wheel crazily.
Steve's Dad and the crew were shot down near Rabul, flying the bomber "Hell Bent" during World War II and the rescue was captured by a photographer from Look Magazine. Rescued by a PBY Catalina, the chubby-winged rescue plane was nicknamed "Dumbo.
A later picture in the same Look Magazine sequence shows Steve's Dad taking a drag on a cigarette, a moment in time that suggests some of the real stress these men lived with.
Flying was life. But behind it, always, was Taps. Behind it, always, were Air Force fathers who took off and never returned. “Don’t sweat it,” my father would say when the base’s flag was lowered to half-mast and one of my friends would leave school in a blue car. And then he’d add, ruffling my hair, “They knew what they were doing.”
As did he. I read again the evidence in his decorations, the silver presentation mug from his last command. Is this all that’s left? I wondered. And then the door to G102 opened. Dottie, Goodie, Helen, all of them came in, as they had always come into Air Force kitchens, arms full of food and hearts full of love, summoned by the swift, mysterious Word that moved even faster than the blue cars when an airplane was down and men had died. They were the women who kept everything together on the ground when everything came apart in the air.
The memorial service was held in the Village Convocation Room. Chaplain Cooper reminded us of the eternal truths. It was easier for him because those who had gathered to remember my father had learned those truths long ago. A Marine colonel gripped my hand hard in the reception line. “I fought in two wars,” he said, “and your father was the bravest man I ever saw.” The colonel wasn’t speaking of his heroism in combat, where young men act quickly, but of his heroism in cancer, where old men must act slowly. The man in G102 had inspired them all, and they loved him for it.
When the memorial service was over, I surveyed the now-empty little apartment. There seemed to be no trace of him: a scratch on the wall paint, a burn on the kitchen linoleum. Was he ever there?
Overhead, a Boeing KC-135 dropped its landing gear and flaps to land at March Air Force Base, just across the freeway from me. I watched it for a moment, remembering the day the first gleaming KC-135 landed at our base in Idaho to replace the old prop-driven KC-97s. It was the day we decided the Jet Age had finally arrived. It was a day one era ended and another began. It was a day like any other day in the Air Force.
I slid closed the patio door to his apartment, started to walk away, and then stopped in the little patio, where he’d placed his hoya plants and hibachi. I knew something had not been done. I couldn’t decide what it might be. Then I remembered.
I turned, stiffened to attention, and saluted the empty room. I held the salute a moment, not thinking, just being who I was: the boy who had become the man to bury the father. And a pilot, as he had been.
There was nobody in the room to return the salute, of course. But there had been. And as long as the place is called Air Force Village West, there will be again.
Happy landings, Dad. We’re on your wing.
Steven L. Thompson
Originally published in the Oct/Nov 1991 issue of Air & Space/Smithsonian Use only with the permission of and credit to the author.
Six months after my father died and was buried with full military honors, I got a "thank you for your father's service" in the mail from the President of the United States. It was a heart wrenching surprise and it took a little digging to discover the origins of this mysterious Presidential Certificate.
The certificate didn't actually come to the mailbox at my house, but arrived at the funeral home in my name. The funeral director told me he had "checked the box" and had one for my sister too. The envelope said "Department of Veterans Affairs" and the signature was that of Barack Obama!
The certificate or citation reads: "The United States of America honors the memory of William Ashley Chapman. This certificate is awarded by a grateful nation in recognition of devoted and selfless consecration to the service of our country in the Armed Forces of the United States. (signed) Barack Obama, President of the United States"
Well, holy cow!
I Googled around to try to discover the origin of this mysterious certificate. My father had won many medals and honors, but I couldn't find the name of this one anywhere. I did see one On Line that had been signed for a veteran back in the seventies by POTUS Richard Nixon, and one signed more recently for a veteran who later joined the CIA and had been killed in the line of duty. The latter was signed by POTUS Bill Clinton.
Finally, I found an article by Molly Shomer which explains the certificates. They are available to the family of any honorable veteran who dies, and it is never too late to apply for one. She writes: "The Department of Veterans Affairs administers this program, which has been in effect since 1962. [Ed's note: perhaps this was an early JFK idea?] They prepare the certificates, each of which expresses the country's grateful recognition of the deceased veteran's service to the nation, and each of which bears the name of the veteran and the signature of the current President of the United States." She continues:
"This certificate, which honors the service and the memory of an honorably discharged deceased veteran, might mean a great deal to some bereaved family members. Unlike the nation's flag, which can be presented to only one family member, more than one memorial Certificate can be provided so that all next of kin of any age can receive one. Because it can take several weeks from the time it is requested to the time a certificate is received, it will usually not be possible to receive them in time for an immediate funeral. However, they make exceptionally meaningful gifts for family members who may be attending a memorial service scheduled at a later date. They are also especially meaningful when presented on Memorial Day or Veterans' Day." She concludes:
"There is no time limit for requesting a Presidential Memorial Certificate, so if certificates were not requested at the time of death they can be requested at any time."
What a valuable tradition was begun under President Kennedy! This certificate arrived and my heart swelled with pride. I knew and my father knew that he had served and served proudly. But it was a reminder than I will not soon forget.
My father, the lifelong conservative, would likely have chosen, if he could have done so, to have had it signed by President Ronald Reagan. But in our country, we honor the office, no matter our political party. So thank you, President Obama. My father and the Gipper are consulting about you at this very moment, and coming up with a list of suggestions that might help you in the future. Or might help replace you with President Petraeus. But it isn't personal, sir. It's just politics.
For more information on the Presidential Memorial Certificates for Veterans, go to the web site of the Department of Veteran Affairs.
The author posing on a rock above Bean Hollow Cove, on the Pacific Coast. That big brown thing behind me is the carcass of a rare blue whale.
I wanted to see the whale. It had washed ashore just south of Half Moon Bay, California, earlier in the week and as the tides rise the carcass will eventually wash back out into the sea from whence it came. So the time was limited.
I downloaded ShralpTide, a tidal chart app on my iPhone and headed over the Santa Cruz mountains to reach the beach at low tide.
The blue whale washing in the tide at Bean Hollow State Beach.
There was a small crowd of onlookers on the cliffs and the nearby beach. The autumn sun sparkled off the sea and caught the iridescence of what remained of the whale's gray-colored hide. From that side she still looked like a whale. The southward wind took the scent of decaying whale blubber away from us.
But I couldn't see well, so I hiked around to the windward side, wearing the blue rubber gardening shoes I bought my mother and she never wore. They were good beach shoes, though they have a ladybug print on them that is seriously dorky. Fortunately, looking dorky at the beach is de trop, so I fit right in.
The walk was worth it as the view from the south side was much better, even though it now smelled like a fish market on a warm day.
Blue whales are long and thin and in spite of the decay you can see that in this picture, looking from the tail fluke towards the head, though the whale is upside down so you can't see its head.
This being California, it was a spectacular day and there was a docent on hand to brief the tourists. The docent told us this blue whale had weighed about eighty tons and explained that the State Parks Department had put up what looked like red crime scene tape to keep the gawkers a dignified distance away from the deceased mammal. He pointed out that her calf was washing in the nearby surf and that the calf had not been born, but was emitted after the mother's death.
Looking down from the cliff, it was easier to tell this was a whale when you saw her gray tale fluke which had not yet begun to visibly decompose.
Scientists had finished their tests by the time I got there and determined the eighty-foot female had a fatal collision with a ship. She was on her way to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico to birth her young and enjoy the warmth of the Mexican coast away from the chillier winter up North.
The accident prevented her winter vacation, but provided scientists with new information about her life and untimely death. She was young: eighty feet long is smallish for a blue whale, so she probably had years of growth ahead. She had some fractured vertebrae, hence the deduction she had died in a collision. Plankton have been rich this year, so feeding has been good which likely attracted her to the region as she stopped on her route south.
You can see the red crime scene ribbon in this photo. It kept people from souvenir hunting.
This species was almost hunted to extinction in the 18th and19th centuries and is now protected. There are only a few thousand of blue whales remaining in all of earth's oceans and scientists are now studying ways to prevent collisions like the one that killed her. That may be the good that comes out of this.
I'm glad I took the time to see her. She was magnificent, even in her death. I meant no disrespect in posing with her. I did not do so as if she were a trophy, but to remind myself in years to come that I was there. It was a remarkable sight on a stunning day: nature brought ashore a rare creature for us to see as close as ever we might, to wonder at God's handiwork and to ponder our own ability to undo it.
The new antique Baluch rug in the old bedroom with the new paint.
I have wanted a couple of antique rugs for the bedroom I just painted, the one which uses the four-poster bed I found up in the rafters of the garage at my parents' home. Mom was a pack rat, bless her heart.
And since I am a firm believer in using your pocketbook to vote your principles, I decided I didn't want anything from Iran in the room, even though those rugs are often the loveliest. They are also the most expensive, as they have become the most chic. So thrift was a second motive for my search beyond Iran.
When the deep purple falls, over sleepy garden walls ... the first photo of the room was taken in the bright light of morning, this in the afternoon as the room takes on a different aspect.
My niece served in Afghanistan with the military and also in Uzbekistan with the Peace Corps (she's eclectic in her service) and thus, I decided on trying to find a vintage Silk Road rug for the room. A Silk Road rug would be one from what I call the Stans: Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and the other Stans that were once part of the Soviet Union or their sphere of influence.
Somebody else had thought of this before I did, and has an Internet business importing vintage rugs from these parts of the world. You can still get them there for nothing and sell them at a tidy profit--all to the benefit of this impoverish part of the world as well as the importer and the shopper. They have a great web site at: Bukhara-Carpets.com, and they are based in Luxembourg. I perused their vintage and antique pieces and found one at a great price (under $1000 ) and decided to buy it as a test of how this might work. I used my USAA credit card and Pay-Pal so I could cancel the payment if the business was not legit.
The rug I ordered, took just a week to get here and it is gorgeous!
Made in about 1900, it is a red Baluch rug, probably made in Afghanistan. I have good company in my taste for this style, which I learned watching a show about T.E. Lawrence as I waited for my rug to arrive. T.E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, took part in a somewhat nasty raid on a Turkish train during his time with the Arab revolt and on September 24, 1917, wrote a friend about the adventure: "The Turks then nearly cut us off as we looted the train, and I lost some baggage and nearly myself. My loot was a superfine red Baluchi prayer-rug".
T.E. Lawrence's natural father was Sir Thomas Chapman, so perhaps I inherited this taste for red Eastern rugs via my DNA. Being connected to this crazy genius is one of my fantasies so please indulge me in this. (His grandfather was named William Chapman and so was my great grandfather.)
The rug was well depicted on the Internet site and is worn as I expected it would be, but well-made and beautiful. Rich of color, it seems to change depending upon the light that hits. it.
The old red Baluch, worn but lovely.
The only hang-up came when Fedex called from Memphis and said they had to email me a U.S. Customs form to fill out and sign as the rug's "importer." Turned out it was a form generated by the Department of Homeland Security. So now I'm on their tracking list as some kind of suspicious character with activities involving Muslim rugs and will probably pay for this with further hastles the next time I'm going shoeless through the security line. Thus we live with the aftermath of 9/11. ( "But officer, the rugs came to me via Luxembourg!")
But, it only held up the Baluch for about 24 hours and I was, frankly, surprised the thing actually got here at all, not to mention looking as beautiful as I had hoped. I'm not inclined to think that Al Gore invented the Internet. It couldn't possibly work this well if he had.
BTW: I got this idea from my friend Polly, who had a living room strewn with red, antique Persian rugs and they made her home look gorgeous, no matter how she arranged the furniture. I get all my best decorating ideas from stealing. Thank you Polly!
Gotta go. I'm going to order another Silk Road rug before the rest of you buy out the best ones.
Tony Curtis (1925-2010) and Janet Leigh (1927-2004). Their marriage didn't last, but together this talented couple produced Jamie Leigh Curtis, a formidable talent herself.
In newsrooms we always say that famous people die in threes and thus it has been in the past week in the world of the movies: actress Gloria Stuart, director Arthur Penn, and Tony Curtis, all gone to their Great Rewards within a few days of one another. Here's a look at some of their best, starting with Curtis, who was one of the most charismatic actors ever to hit the movies, and had parts in some of the best.
Sweet Smell of Success (1957) "The cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river." "Match me, Sidney." And: "I love this dirty town!" are just a few of the memorable lines from this noirest of films set in 1950s New York City. It is so dark, Pauline Kael called a "sweet slice of perversity." Curtis, as the greasy press agent Sidney Falco, does everything but grovel for powerful columnist Burt Lancaster's J. J. Hunsecker in one of Lancaster's creepiest roles. Playing against his handsome, charming type and turning it on its head, Curtis seems to stand in a harsh spotlight in this story of shadows. How could they all be so mean to Martin Milner? With a screenplay by Clifford Odets (Golden Boy, None But the Lonely Heart) and Ernest Lehman (Sabrina, North by Northwest) SSOS is all smell and none of it sweet, but you just can't turn your head away until the last frame. "You're dead, son," says Hunsecker. "Get yourself buried." Don't be caught dead missing it.
Operation Petticoat (1959) This very funny movie with the stupid title has both Cary Grant, Tony Curtis, and World War II going for it. Curtis later said that when he hit it big in Hollywood the executives asked him what he would like to do next, and he said; "A submarine movie with Cary Grant." And this is the result. Grant deadpans and underplays his way through this comedy so well he almost steals the show from Curtis, who plays a hustling Naval officer determined not to get his feet wet or his uniform dirty. When necessary, however, he proves how resourceful he can be at, what is known in the military as scrounging. The result? A very unusual color for their submarine, and a number of scenes (my favorite involves a pig) that will make you laugh away any troubles that may come your way. I think this movie is highly underrated, probably because the stars make it look so easy.
The Outsider (1961) Tony Curtis plays Ira Hayes, the reluctant Navajo war hero, in a bio pic role that should have won Curtis an Oscar. It's a tribute to Curtis that he continued to take on antihero roles like this one, in which he stars as Hayes, the American Indian Marine who was unprepared for life "outside" the reservation and who found himself tortured by the focus he received as a "hero" of Iwo Jima. Ira Hayes' story is true, touching and sad, and Curtis makes us care about this troubled man.
I'm assuming you've seen the Curtis "standards" including his turn in drag in Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot (1959), and his turn handcuffed to Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones (1958). He's also famous for a very suggestive scene with Lawrence Olivier in Spartacus (1960), in which his Brooklyn accent (on a Roman slave) is the least odd thing about it. And for the record, Curtis claims he never did say: "Yonda lies da castle of my fadda," but it made a great story about this talented man.
Gloria Stuart was a success in 1930s Hollywood, and is now known for her role as the elderly Titanic survivor in James Cameron's overrated epic Titanic. When she died recently at the age of 100, she could claim credits in more than forty feature films, understandable considering the century she spent on earth. Besides Titanic, she was known for her big roles in small films and her small roles in big ones. Two of her best?
The Invisible Man (1933) She doesn't get much to work with here, playing against Claude Rains who is almost always, well, invisible. But this film, from Universal Studios, was an landmark in the horror genre, with which Universal became so associated. Halliwell's Film Guide (one of the best film reference books around) gives it four stars. You'll enjoy seeing Stuart at her young and lovely best.
The Old Dark House (1932) This film has a first rate cast, which chews the scenery shamelessly in this prototype of all the "scary house" movies that came after it (and that's a lot). Starring with Stuart, who looks stunning in the shimmery negligee she slips into that she just happened to have in her overnight bag and which looks a tad chilly in that non-centrally heated English Victorian house with its ghastly aspects, are; Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton, Raymond Massey, and Boris Karloff. How could you go wrong? The storm rages outside, the wind howls, the rain comes down in torrents, and around every corner there is something very strange. A great Halloween treat, and another of Halliwell's four star classics.
You'll also see Stuart playing maternal roles in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938) and Poor Little Rich Girl (1936), both starring Shirley Temple. And, my friend, screenwriter Steve Latshaw says to look for Stuart, much later in her life, in the wonderful movie My Favorite Year (1982) in which she plays a bit part in the restaurant scene as Peter O'Toole whirls her around on the dance floor.
Arthur Penn, who died recently at the age of 88, is much acclaimed as a director and was very talented, though I confess to be not a huge fan of his work. There is something special in that family, though, as he is the brother of the hugely talented still photographer Irving Penn, who is so good at his advertising images, he has forced me to buy a number of things I have had no use for whatsoever but couldn't resist thanks to Penn. Director Arthur Penn is best known for his turn directing Bonnie and Clyde (1967), a movie that now looks better for its fashions than its exploitation of sex and violence that producer and star Warren Beatty used as a means of getting headlines. Penn's best, I think, is his first, The Miracle Worker (1962) starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in the story of Helen Keller's childhood struggle to overcome her twin handicaps. Both Bancroft and Duke won Oscars for this one. Penn is also known for Little Big Man (1970), starring Dustin Hoffman, and Night Moves (1975) with Gene Hackman.
Penn has a lot of 'splain' to do about the weird Missouri Breaks (1976), a Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson special in which Brando changes his accent from scene to scene and which has no discernible plot. But hey, it was the seventies and there were a lot of drugs around so stuff happens. I enjoyed his somewhat obscure documentary, Visions of Eight (1973), about the 1972 Munich Olympics, in which he gathered eight talented feature film directors to look at different aspects of the contest--but that film also has a big flaw. The huge story there--the deaths of all of Israel's athletic team at the hands of PLO terrorists--is only a tiny part in the film. And to paraphrase the movie Broadcast News (1987) that "buried the lead."
Tony Curtis, Gloria Stuart, Arthur Penn: examples of America's exceptionalism. May they all rest in peace.
Politics has never been a clean sport, so I can't say, like Louis in the movie Casablanca, that I'm "Shocked! Shocked" to see the nasty turn it has taken this season.
In Florida, Rep. Alan Grayson (D), is running television ads against his Republican opponent, Dan Webster, accusing him of being a member of the Taliban. Webster, a longtime state senator and former speaker of the state House of Representatives, has at least found Grayson's stupid smears have a silver lining: the ads are so outrageous, Webster's campaign contributions have soared, apparently because voters are so disgusted by them they believe Alan Grayson should be given this opportunity to find himself another line of work.
In California, the new third rail of American politics--illegal immigration--has become the October surprise in the race for governor between Jerry Brown, the democratic candidate and one-time governor, and Meg Whitman, the republican candidate and former CEO of eBay. Brown, who at 72, has spent his life running for office, has the support of the state's left-leaning unions, some of whom seem to have taken a part in this smear on Whitman.
The story is that Whitman, who once employed a housekeeper, who showed her a Social Security card, a driver's license, and other paperwork, and for whom the Whitmans paid the proper taxes and produced the appropriate W-2s, turns out to have been lied to by the boarder hopper and become the hirer of an illegal alien. Oh wow. There's a shock.
But the housekeeper, with the help of who knows whom from the Brown camp, has hired attorney Gloria Allred, who has produced the housekeeper (crying, of course) at several news conferences, and who now says she felt exploited by the Whitmans, and humiliated when she was finally fired for being illegal.
Okay. Now let me get this straight. As Americans, if we ask anyone with an accent to show us their paperwork that proves they have a right to live and work here, we are a bunch of racist xenophobes. And if we hire people, and don't press them and double and triple-check the paperwork they produce for us to fill out those endless IRS forms we toil over each year, then we are a bunch of exploiters of foreign laborers whom we employ in our sweat shops.
Sounds like illegal immigration is a big problem! Maybe we ought to address it! But because of the above reasons nobody except the governor of Arizona seems to have the guts.
During the Reagan administration, Congress passed an "immigration reform bill" that gave illegals already in the U.S. a means to legal residency, and added strict penalties to stem the tide of illegals across our porous borders.
The legislature meant well. And at least the president at that time was willing to address it. But boy did that turn out to be a be a flop.
Now, no matter what you say about illegal immigration you stand accused of being "against immigration of people of other ethnic backgrounds." Give me a break!
I hope, here in California, Meg Whitman will use this stupid smear, as an opportunity to talk to the voters about how challenging this issue is for all of us. And show us all how her very own case is a perfect example of why we need to enforce the regulations we presently have in place with regard to immigration. Whitman, as a new technology executive and political novice, may not yet have learned how to turn the smear to her advantage, as Reagan, a real pro at this stuff, himself learned in California.
Remember how he used to say to Sam Donaldson's hectoring questions: "Sam, I'm glad you've asked me that .... " and then smile his nice big smile and smash the tennis ball right back over the net?
Because all this really shows is how totally desperate Jerry Brown is, at 72, to get himself and his friends back in the governor's seat of the most powerful state in the nation. Brown, who was once a bright young man, mentioned in dispatches as a potential presidential candidate, can't believe all these other guys he knew have managed to get to be president of the United States and he--Jerry Brown!!!--has not. And not having Whitman's considerable campaign chest, he's pulled out this ancient political trick-or-treat surprise in a ploy to get back his mojo.
And the issues? Gosh, we hardly ever talk about those darn things.
The fields along the California coast are a sea of pumpkins this time of year.
Looking seaward from California's Highway One.
