There's a few hits, a lot of hits... and then there's Maru.

This blog gets about 4,000 hits a week. I'm happy with that.

The Other Blog gets between 14,000 and 18,000 hits a week. I'm startled and ecstatic about that.



Maru's feeder and videographer Mugumogu posted a video of the Internets supahstah one week ago, with Maru doing whatever Maru feels like doing. Washing himself, playing with a toy, getting in a box and filling all possible space, deciding whether being in a box is more fun that playing with a toy.

You know, cat stuff.

121,000 views in a week. And Mugumogu thanks us for all our best wishes.

If you have a blog that is more popular than a cat, you can write your own ticket.

Another state worker taking your hard earned money has the nerve to complain.

According to a new Field poll, a plurality of Californians now feel that state worker pensions are too generous. With scandals like the Bell city employees' pay packages and a town like Vallejo filing for bankruptcy instead of paying the pensions of cops and firefighters, I understand how public resentment has grown. Closer to my situation, the pay packages for people at the district level of the Peralta Community Colleges, where a boatload of people are making between $100,000 to $300,000 a year each, are more than a little grating when workers who actually makes students' lives better are getting canned left and right, like teachers, librarians, facilities workers and janitors.

But here's a guy sucking at the public teat who would actually like to tell you that he is getting screwed at the pension level and there should be something done about it.

That guy is Matty Boy.

Hi, how are ya? Nice to see ya.

Now that I work for the state of California and I'm part of the state pension plan, this means I will get docked Social Security benefits. I understand the idea is "double dipping" and I will note that I don't get any Social Security deduction from my check at Laney.

The thing is, I worked for more than twenty years out in the private sector before becoming a sponge off the taxpayers, having the gall to think that the time I spend 'splainin' order of operations or the quadratic formula or the Central Limit Theorem to community college students is actual gainful employment. More than that, I'm a part-timer, so I have to work several jobs to keep a roof above my head, and some of those gigs are still in the private sector. That means Social Security is taken out of those checks and I will get less of it than the average Joe, even though the system is still expected to be solvent when I get to retirement age, whatever age that scummy old coot Alan Simpson thinks that is.

And much more than this, I am NOT a unique case.

The current system has a sliding scale, but it depends on how may years you were paid "substantial earnings", a number which has increased over time because of inflation. If somebody has had a state gig his or her entire life, then it makes sense that since that person paid nothing into Social Security, he or she should just get by on a state pension and whatever savings were accumulated. But folks like me who have become state workers late in life and still have to work part time at companies that are taking Social Security out of each paycheck will never see any benefit from that removed money if we do not work enough hours outside the public employee system.

To me, it's just another example of a tax system designed to make the rich richer and the non-rich poorer. They use "small business owners" as human shields, but the very rich are robbing us blind when there has been enough growth in this country's economy in the past forty years that the tide should have lifted all the boats, not just the yachts.

Sunday Numbers 2.0, Vol. 6: Solving quadratics and the imaginary number i.

You might dimly remember the quadratic formula from a class you took in high school or college. One memorization technique is to sing the formula to the tune of Pop Goes The Weasel. This week, we are going to look at the formula, notice a problem that arises and see if we can get around it.

The original impetus of the problem was this. We have two numbers j and k, but instead of giving you the two numbers directly I tell you their sum j + k and their product jk. For example, if I tell you the sum is 10 and the product 21, with a little guess and check you should be able to figure out on of the numbers is 3 and the other 7. It doesn't really matter which one we call j and which one we call k, since 7 + 3 = 3 + 7 and 7 * 3 = 3 * 7. In terms of our variables a, b and c, the sum is -b and the product is c, while we set a = 1.

The problem is that guess and check can come up craps. If say the sum is 2 and the product is 5, you won't be able to guess the answer. Even more annoying, no pair of real numbers works. In this case, consider the quadratic formula where a = 1, b = 2 and c = 5. The quadratic formula has a square root in it sqrt(b² - 4ac), and the mathematical expression b² - 4ac is called the discriminant. Remember that we are not supposed to take the square roots of negative numbers, but in this case 2² - 4*1*5 = -16. We know the square root of 16 is 4, but what is the square root of -16? It was decided that is was 4 times the square root of -1. This means the two numbers that add up to 2 and multiply to 5 are 1 + 2*sqrt(-1) and 1 - 2*sqrt(-1).

Just because they wanted to solve all problems of this form and not for any practical application, mathematicians started working with the square root of -1, which the called the imaginary number and was eventually symbolized by the letter i. Little did they realized this new system of real numbers combined with imaginary numbers, which together are called complex numbers, would have real world applications in fields such as electrical engineering and quantum mechanics that were not even discovered when this algebra problem was kicking around. This is not the last time some mathematician works on a problem for his or her own amusement only to have practical applications discovered for this branch of math many years later, sometimes decades and sometimes centuries after the fact.

As one gets older, the mind wanders. Part Two.

Songs get stuck in people's heads. This is not a sign of senility or hearing voices. This is how the human brain works. Usually, when a song gets put in heavy rotation in the soft gooey grey .mp3 player I have between my ears, I can usually go back and track the reason why with some forensic precision.


For instance, there is a movie in theaters right now that I have no intention of seeing, but the posters are plastered all around at the BART stations.



For me, the next logical step is for my brain to cue up The Reflections singing their cheesy 1960s hit (Just Like) Romeo and Juliet, a song which completely misses the point of Shakespeare's play, but no matter.

It's catchy.


But sometimes I have no idea how a song jumps to the top of my brain's playlist. I think it's because as one gets older, the mind tends to wander.

This Thursday, it was like Dave Chappelle as Samuel L. Jackson came out, slapped me upside the head and screamed

BAND OF GOLD, MUTHAF#&%A!



As Casey Kasem must have said a jillion times, here's Freda Payne and her number one hit from 1970, Band Of Gold.

As one gets older, the mind wanders. Part One.

I've been reading a lot of stuff about Miss Elizabeth Taylor since she died earlier this week and apparently I'm not alone. If you go over to The Other Blog and scroll down to the Popular Posts feature, you will see that four of the top ten posts on my gossip blog are about The Last Great Movie Star, including the most popular and second most popular. That has never happened before.

I read that she and Debbie Reynolds buried the hatchet years ago. I didn't know that. They were both aboard the Queen Mary back when it actually was a boat that went places. Debbie deduced this when she saw an army of porters moving a mountain of stuff, including gowns and dogs and cases of jewelry, into a set of suites and quick as a bunny, Debbie thought "Oh, Liz is on board." She could have tried to avoid her, but the boat isn't THAT big, so instead Debbie sent her a note and invited her to dinner. By this time, both of them had re-married and Eddie Fisher was completely out of the picture, and Debbie says one of things that made her reach out was remembering when both she and Liz were 17 years old and working on the MGM lot and they were best pals.

And I thought, MGM. I thought about how Liz was best friends with Roddy McDowall from when they were kids until the day he died in 1998. I thought about how MGM taught its stars how to be gracious with the public and how well so many of those stars learned that lesson.


As the title of the post suggests, as one gets older, the mind tends to wander. From Liz Taylor and Debbie Reynolds and Roddy McDowall, my brain then flew to... Ricardo Montalban.

The connection is graciousness.

Years ago, back in the 1980s, Ricardo Montalban was a guest on David Letterman. Back then, Dave was a lot younger and his audience was young, hip and snarky. What was their view of Ricardo Montalban?

Fantasy Island. Rich Corinthian leather. That ridiculous outfit he wore in The Wrath of Khan when he uttered the deathless line "I want to keep on hurting you, Kir-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rk!"

And so Ricardo Montalban strides proudly onto the stage, into a pit of jackals ready to rip him to shreds.

And he was the most charming guest on a talk show that I have ever seen.

He remembered that he had worked with Paul Shaffer on a project and made a point to say hello. He answered questions about "rich Corinthian leather" and he said that people remembered the ads because they were well-written. He even remembered the name of the copywriter on the Cordoba ads, Jim Allardice.

When they cut to commercial, I thought, "Ricardo Montalban is no longer just a punchline to me. He is one of the good guys." To this day, nobody talks mess about Ricardo Montalban in my presence without me standing up for him, because he was a stand up guy.

Tomorrow: The mind wanders again.

Old wives' tale or the real deal? Some anecdotal evidence.

I suffer from seasonal allergies. I tend to sneeze like crazy when the weather is windy and it's common for me to get a scratchy throat when it's rainy.


A student at the art school where I teach recommended local honey for seasonal allergies. The idea is a spoonful morning and evening is giving you a small dose of the local pollen and helping build up your immunity. I can see how it "makes sense", but whether it actually works or not is another matter.

As it happens, there is a farmer's market right in front of the art school every Wednesday and a stand that sells local honey there. My student may have heard his information there. In any case, the stand had some East Bay honey and I've been having the spoonful morning and evening for a couple weeks now. Even though we are going through a rainy spell with intermittent windy and cold days, my allergies are not acting up. It may be coincidence, but I'm running low on honey and I'm going to buy another jar today.

As for the scientific literature, here is a link to Discovery Health. There was a study done at Xavier University, but it wasn't peer reviewed. There may be some benefits to honey in general and local honey may be better than just any old honey you buy at the store. Honey is a bad idea for babies because of infant botulism, but if you are over 12 months old, the only bad thing about honey is that it is almost pure sugar, but a much healthier version than the corn syrup crap in most processed foods.

So, the Matty Boy view. Give it a shot, it can't hurt much. Side effects include a pleasant sweet sensation on your tongue in the morning and evening. Usually in this type of weather, I would be a mass of nasty symptoms, but right now I'm okay. I'll report back in when the flowers are in full bloom.

A few kind words for narration.

I've read several writers complain about narration in film. The big idea being violated is "Don't say it, show it." Exposition, narration's sneaky second cousin, gets bad mouthed in the same way. If you are the kind of person who watches commentary tracks, you will have heard writers apologizing to actors for any scene in which the actor is forced to give exposition. It's clunky, it slows down the pace, etc. I've never taken a screenwriting class, but I get the feeling people teaching screenwriting hate narration with a white hot hate.

As a person who watches movies but has never made one, let me say a few kind words about narration.

The documentary exclusion: Some of my favorite films are documentaries. Occasionally, a documentary can get away with no narration, like Koyaanisqatsi and Winged Migration, but these are a tiny minority of exceptions to the rule.

The vast majority of documentaries need narration and exposition. This does not make them bad films.

The opening scene narration exclusion: Some really good movies start with a scene of narration. In Citizen Kane, we get a newsreel talking about the life and death of Charles Foster Kane just before some newspaperman is sent on assignment to get more of the story. In L.A. Confidential, it's Danny DeVito reading while he is typing a story for his scandal mag Hush-Hush.

Both of these are really good movies. If you aren't convinced with those two on the list, let me throw in Casablanca, which doesn't even have a clever tie-in reason for the narration.

Sometimes it's the quickest way to set up a story. Nothing wrong with moving the action along.

One of the greatest narrated films of all time: I've already said how much I like Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, but it bears repeating. Some think of it as the first film noir, though I think The Maltese Falcon should be put in the genre as well. Whether it's the first or not, it's one of the best. The movie has a good gimmick for the narration, as it is supposed to be Fred MacMurray confessing his crime into a dictating machine for his colleague Edward G. Robinson to find in the morning. As I pointed out in my first review, it has the line that nicely sums up the entire genre: "I did it for the money. I did it for a woman. I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman."

A very good modern film with narration: I recently rented The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt as Jesse and Casey Affleck as a member of the last gang assembled by the James brothers (Sam Shepard plays the much older Frank) who kills Jesse because he fears for his life. It has a great cast - Garret Dillahunt, Jeremy Renner, Sam Rockwell, Paul Schneider, Mary Louise Parker - and off-screen narration by Hugh Ross. As for the rule of "Don't say it, show it", this movie shows plenty, with a lot of long close-ups of Pitt, Affleck and Rockwell, who plays Robert Ford's brother Charley, but there's a lot of back story, and the audience wouldn't know it except for the narration.

An under-rated classic with narration: The St. Valentine's Day Massacre from 1967 is not true to the facts of the historical record, but it is a hell of a lot of fun to watch. Netflix doesn't think it's worth having around, but you can get it on Amazon.com for a reasonable price. It's directed by Roger Corman and, like all his films, made inexpensively, but it's got a great sixties cast of character actors and narration by one of the best voice actors of all time, Paul Frees. I can't say for sure, but I think Corman may have gone with voice-over narration because people were so used to it from The Untouchables, which was made in the 1960s and was also about the Prohibition era.

The reviews on Amazon are generally good, though they quibble about how little Jason Robards looks like Al Capone and how many details are not historically accurate. I am a little sorry to hear how fast and loose with the facts the movie is, because when Frees in narration says a line like "At 7:30 a.m. on the last day of his life, Albert Weinshank was having an argument with his wife about money." I want to believe it is completely accurate.

As I said, I haven't been able to find this movie on Netflix or at the Oakland Public Library, but even though it's been several years since I've seen it, I can recommend Corman's The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, not in spite of the narration by Paul Frees but because of it.