(In Favor Of Parentheses)

Filmmaker Kevin Smith, whose "SModcast", an hour long, free flowing podcast discussion with producer Scott Mosier, can sometimes degrade into a marijuana haze fueled laughfest (I hasten to add-on Smith's part, not Mosier's), raised an excellent point on his most recent show (http://bit.ly/VXgZH) that I have been thinking about for quite a while.

Smith's point was about the fact that we tell our kids (Smith has a preteen daughter) that they can be anything they want to be, and that isn't really true. Only in the case of someone being supremely gifted while also motivated to an otherworldly degree can you really be anything you want to be-and that, of course, is assuming that you don't fall prey to addiction, or get hit by a bus, or get hit by an addict driving a bus.

Someone's got to make the fries, as Smith puts it. In America, we seem to give short shrift to the people who make the fries.

***

Interesting piece on On The Media (onthemedia.org) about Bill O'Reilly's stalker producer and the people who tried to turn the trick on him from Gawker.com.

I have always wondered why people, confronted like that, or perhaps going into a courtroom or something like that, say anything at all. Maybe they sometimes do remain silent, and nobody runs that footage. I hope, if I am ever confronted with a camera like that, I have the presence of mind to say nothing at all.

There is talk of a potential strike at my workplace. (I am not involved directly, except in the sense that, were it to happen, my life will get an extra soupcon of misery to put right on top of the regular old misery.)( I am not in the union, I guess because I am considered management. Which is laughable, because I'm not in charge of anything.)(I'm not sure how I feel about unions. I'm for them in principle, but every time I have ever worked with one, it's been a dysfunctional and horrid experience. Perhaps, like communism, it's something that seems good on paper but never works in practice.)(It appears I am, however, in favor of parentheses.)