Daily Loaf

It wasn’t easy for me to resist the temptation to gush happily in print over our President’s visit to DeSoto county last week; but what struck me as I watched the event on TV were the paradoxical images –

Consider this: a utility company executive delivers accolades to the President for his leadership on sustainable energy production. Is this an anomaly? Maybe, but FPL Group’s CEO Lewis Hay, belongs to an exclusive club. Its members are forward thinking business executives readying their companies for a new green economy.

Granted, Mr. Hay’s exuberance may be due to the $200 million of stimulus funding FP & L is about to receive. But you have to admit, it does take chutzpah for him and his activist executive buddies to visit Washington in support of climate change legislation. They gathered as the Waxman/Markey bill was coming up for a key house vote back in June, even taking out a full page ad in DC newspapers. Acknowledging the paradigm shift to sustainable, clean power production so many others deny, they see the legislation as good for business. Whoa, did you hear that, Chamber of Commerce? Jokingly, Obama noted that people get nervous about change, relating Hay’s comment “especially utility executives” to which the crowd, largely made up of utility contractors and employees, laughed heartily.

Or this image: Juxtaposed against gleaming hi-tech solar panels, straw cowboy hats perched atop the heads of men in the first row bobbed up and down nodding in agreement with the President’s words. Thirty years ago this would be a scene in a sci-fi flick, and for some in the Deep South it would have been a horror flick. An African American President telling a rural Florida farming community: Boys, we’re gonna be installin’ some special equipment out here in these pastures, we’re gonna start harvesting sun rays. Yeah, sure ya are, and I just got done putting a trailer hitch on my spaceship to Mars. Oh by golly, farming sure has changed. No horses corralling cattle; no tractors in the fields, no worry of drought damaged crops.
Read the rest of this entry »

Rush Limbaugh is getting more pushback in his purported bid to purchase the St. Louis Rams.  The Commish, Roger Goodell, a good corporate man if there ever was one, didn’t sound too enthusiastic about the possibility of the man with talent on loan from god being part of a group that buys its way into the National Football League.

As we recounted yesterday, several players and the head of the Players Association have already responded critically to the possibility of Limbaugh becoming part of the league.

Most of the articles written in the media in the past few days go back to Rush’s previous brush with the league, when ESPN hired him as a commentator for the 2003 season.  He lasted less than half a season after claiming that Philly QB Donovan McNabb was never really that good of a player, but more a wish fulfillment of “politically correct” white reporters.

But it shouldn’t take others to observe that the NFL players — who are the game — are 65% black, and Limbaugh has made racially divisive statements about blacks his entire career.  Who could forget his enthusiastic playing of the song “Barack, the Magic Negro” in 2008?

Indianapolis owner Jim Irsey said yesterday that he couldn’t consider voting for Limbaugh.  He  remarked:

”When there are comments that have been made that are inappropriate, incendiary and insensitive … our words do damage, and it’s something that we don’t need.”

Vampires are in.

True Blood, the Charlaine Harris-adapted stories of waitress Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) and her love affair with small town vampire Bill (Stephen Moyer) has garnered enough success for Showtime to have ordered a third season. (Even with Evan Rachel Wood’s cancerous performance.)

The CW has been raising the dead for years: Superman as a television property via Smallville, the concepts of Melrose Place and 90210, Tyra Banks — but Tyra and her ty-rades still weren’t enough undead for the network. New  to the line-up is The Vampire Diaries (cast pictured), probably starring some newcomer’s pecs and the bust of a blonde.

Oh, and there’s Twilight’s Robert Pattinson – you know, that kid from Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire? Maybe you’ve seen him in that.

The vampire has been a longtime mainstay of pop culture, exuding sex appeal and terror, and the comics world has been no stranger to blood suckers. Just ask my Dad.

I remember feeling very connected to him when we’d go comic shopping on Saturdays. He’d pick me up, we’d go to the local flea market (I’m from Ohio) and he’d buy me the comics I wanted, even getting a few of his own. I’d have my stack of X-Men — and my father would purchase issue after issue of Vampirella.

Vampirella, vampire warrior: born either of Draculon, a vampire planet, or of a division of Hell. The character’s backstory has changed in her forty-year tenure as comicdom’s sexiest vampire.

The Vampirella issues soon grew to the height of my father’s Playboy collection, and I realized that Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure why I didn’t object when my husband boldly posted a training schedule on our refrigerator and announced that we were going to do a half-marathon.  I was in the midst of my unemployment stint and deeply distressed.  Either he believed that a goal would alleviate some of my misery or he was not-so-subtly recommending that I drop a few pounds.  Regardless of his motivation, I agreed, and the next Monday we drove down to Bayshore to begin our training. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard to feel guilty when people don’t even bother to move out of the way of your tank when it’s about to run them over. That’s good, because Prototype is a game that clearly doesn’t want you to be thinking too much about innocent bystanders, especially if doing so would get in the way of tearing the hell out of anything and everything around you. Still, even I felt a twinge of discomfort while going for the achievement points for running over 500 people with a single tank. In retrospect, this actually works within the convoluted framework of Prototype’s story, but at the time it was just one more way of causing mayhem. Prototype’s all about the mayhem.

You play as Alex, a scientist who always wears a hoodie for some unexplained reason, and who has been infected by a virus that’s quickly turning him into a monster/superhero. And of course you have amnesia. So you’ve got to find out who did this to you while Manhattan dissolves into a chaos of nasty soldiers and even nastier infected who’re constantly attacking each other and you. You get to tear your way through both sides in a blood filled, high speed romp up and down the length of the city as you unlock the secrets of your recent past and search for who’s responsible. If the story sounds typical and uninspired, that’s because it is – amnesia, virus, shadowy government agency, trust no one, and did I mention amnesia? Blah, blah, blah. We’ve seen it all before. Protoype’s setting and story don’t break any new ground and are almost throwaway.

But it’s not the why’s and therefore’s that draw you into Prototype – it’s what you do. Read the rest of this entry »