All through 2009, American resident of Pusan SKorea, Bobby McGill ran an entertaining political website called Idlewordship dot com,
which was similar to John Stewart's The Daily Show except it was a website – very newsworthy, very funny, very well put together.
Every news reference had a link to substantiative data. Many readers worldwide regularly commented on Bobby’s columns.
Bobby’s website featured every Monday – The Week We View, a humourous pun, or play on words of the Gilda Radner doing Bawbawa Wawa variety.
BM's The Week 'Review' was a humorous send up of the top news stories that week. I enjoyed that column SO MUCH; I miss that column
SO MUCH, that I decided to write my own. Here Tis.
The Week We View
Flights resumed, after plumes of dangerous volcanic ash spewed from erupting Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland,
filling the skies over North Western Europe with thick ash, halting flights for days, causing many Europeans to miss the Boston marathon and many world
leaders from attending the funeral of ex-president Lech Kacynski of Poland’s in Kracow Poland on April 18th.
Photos courtesy of me and my camera at the Staples Center in LA!
In NBA action, the #1 seed LA Lakers lost two straight games to the 8th seed Oklahoma City Thunder, featuring 2010's scoring leader, Kevin Durant,
during the first round of the NBA Finals. #1 seed Cleveland beat Chicago 4 games to 1.
NEW YORK, Apr. 16, 2010 – Kevin Durant today was named the Western Conference Player of the Month presented by Kia Motors, for games played during April. In the month of April, Durant led the league in scoring (34.6 ppg) and added 7.9 rebounds, 3.4 assists 2.0 steals and 1.6 blocks.
The series is now tied at 2-2. Game 5 is Tuesday in LA. The winner goes on to play either the Denver Rockets or Utah Jazz.
Cleveland, Boston, Utah, San Antonio, Phoenix, Orlando -- many teams this year have a chance to win it all.
One huge breakthrough in American TV in the new millennium is the presence of Tivo and DVRs, so that sports watching can now include NO commercials, AND your own instant replays. Show times in the new millennium are also meaningless as games and favorite shows can be recorded and watched whenever. Programs can be paused, re-winded, re-watched as often as one likes. I lived in Asia for 13 years. All this technology is new to me.
In LA Theater, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo began showing last week at the LA Music Center. BTiBZ is a non-linear, cutting edge drama involving a caged tiger (played by a white haired man), two young American GIs stationed in Iraq, the ghost of Saddham Hussein’s 30+ year old son Uday Hussein, who was gunned down by invading US troops in Mosul, Iraq; and an apiary making gardener, named Musa, whom the GIs call Habib. “My name is not Habib!” Musa, the gardener yells at the young GI’s towards the end of the play. Each character truly evolves in this wicked tale of past and present; and the tiger is very philosophical and curses a lot. A wonderful work of art, if I don’t mind saying so. We caught the preview last week.
The play doesn’t formally ‘open’ till May. LA Theater thrives at several different venues. I’ve reviewed several plays in recent posts. 
Also playing nationwide is the new film, The Joneses, starring David Duchovny and Demi Moore. The Joneses is one of those movies best enjoyed if you have no idea what the movie is about, before you watch it. For this reason, I will say nothing more about it, except that the inventive story of this film is one of the coolest ideas I have never thought of, and the film was very well cast, and is simply wonderful, if not disconcerting.
The film was especially entertaining since the Westside Pavilion on Westwood and Pico, where my mother and I together watched the film Friday night, has a multiplex that is really plush. Some theaters have sofas, and if the movie is rated NC17 or R, you can bring wine into the theater. Our theater had the standard theater seating, but not so many seats, so very roomy and spaced out (sic) and they had to be the most comfortable theater seats I’ve ever sat in. Well worth the eleven $11 dollar ticket price (sic). There was a film festival or special screening in one theater giving away free posters so everywhere you looked there were posters, rolled up and rolled out.
Also in the news, Jerry Brown, the ex-governor of California is campaigning once again, trying to become California Governor again.
Jerry Brown then, 1969, and now 2010
Brown hopes to replace Arnold Schwartzenegger this November. Brown is best known for creating the current marijuana laws in California , which Brown as Governor augmented during his tenure in the 1970’s.
The possession, sale, cultivation, or transportation of marijuana is ordinarily a crime under California law. (See, e.g., § 11357 [possession of marijuana is a misdemeanor]; § 11358 [cultivation of marijuana is a felony]; Veh. Code, § 23222 [possession of less than 1 oz. of marijuana while driving is a misdemeanor]; § 11359 [possession with intent to sell any amount of marijuana is a felony]; § 11360 [transporting, selling, or giving away marijuana in California is a felony; under 28.5 grams is a misdemeanor]; § 11361 selling or distributing marijuana to minors, or using a minor to transport, sell, or give away marijuana, is a felony].)
That law has not been changed, except that now, since The Compassionate Use Act of 1996, and subsequent similar legislation in 2003, smokers with a permit are now ALLOWED to legally purchase marijuana at dispensaries, at crazy expensive prices at chic, boutique-like dispensaries all over Los Angeles and other California cities. I've lived in Asia for so long, this is all NEWS TO ME!
Those WITHOUT the ‘marijuana card’ are not allowed to enter dispensaries. Those without the ‘marijuana card’ can be fined up to 300 dollars for simple possession of cannibus in the state of California. Florida, Arkansas and other states incarcerate for simple possession.
California dispensaries purchase their ‘medical marijuana’ from indoor growers who use lights and pay 1000 dollars or more a month in power bills. Growers with permits are allowed to grow top quality medical marijuana and sell it to dispensaries for 3,200 dollars a pound+/- (the current market price). Dispensaries charge up to 20 dollars per gram! Some dispensaries grow their own in the dispensary. You can see clones growing if you look through the big wall of window into the Nirvana Pharmacy on Westwood Blvd. near my house. THEY not only have pot growing inside their place of business, but they offered me a card. I could have accepted that card and paid the fee, but I refused. I refuse to pay $150 for something that I can do for free.
Growers of marijuana without permits have their plants seized; growers of marijuana without permits are fined or imprisoned. What kind of a society allows SOME people to cultivate a plant that can be grown anywhere by anyone for 3,200 hundred dollars a pound, while others are jailed for growing for personal use?
All’s I can think of is – how can growers sleep at night while they make boatloads of cash, while other decent Americans are jailed for DOING THE SAME THING! Maybe they are happy that their competition is getting squashed. That’s some fucked up shit.
Today, my friend, Tim took us to a dispensary – we waited in the car, WE non-cardholders can not enter the dispensary. It’s funny cuz my older brother, the guy diving the car we all rode in that day – my brother has no working kidneys and he goes to dialysis three days a week, every week. And there is no end, till he gets a suitable kidney transpant. When my brother returns home M-W-F evenings his body is devastated z. My brother is the perfect candidate for medical marijuana.
My brother will NOT get a card because he believes that, at any time, a serious backlash could ensue – this is America; it’s happened before – and because my brother is an elementary school teacher, perhaps if it becomes public record that he ‘smokes pot after dialysis,’ it may cost him his job in the future, the way many Americans who attended Socialist meetings and rallies during the Great Depression, lost their jobs and were blacklisted in the decades that followed.
Why was I turned down for a marijuana prescription card, while my friend Tim, who is just as healthy as I am, got a card. Another one of my friends, who has a card AND is authorized to grow told me, “The doctor asked me, ‘Does pot make you feel better?’ I said, ‘Yes’. He gave me a card.”
Me? I requested a card for reasons of anxiety and stress – I was told that my ‘need’ sounded very recreational, so I was denied a card. I spent a whole afternoon at this Hollywood ‘clinic’ where many people – there for no other reason, except to get a card – waited with me.
Nobody was there for ‘medical’ reasons. Every person in the waiting room was there for ‘pot card’. Those patients that the doctor deemed ‘fit to possess a card’ paid 100 dollars for the card. For every 100 people, that’s 10,000 dollars. He’s a doctor. He’s supposed to be helping people. How does he help people?
In California, doctors can make up to 10,000 dollars a week by NOT HEALING, but simply by being some kind of Devil's Advocate – “YOU can smoke; but YOU can not. It’s pretty arbitrary. It's a fucked up system.
If I visit a few more of these ‘clinics’ that do nothing but dole out pot cards for 100 dollars a pop – I’m sure I’ll find a doctor that will give me a card so that I can buy pot legally.
But I find the whole matter so hypocritical that I refuse to be a part of it. I’d rather spend 100 dollars on weed, given the price, than perpetuate some hypocritical laws.
At the 420 Apothecary on Western Ave. we paid 60 dollars for 3.5 grams of Shipwreck, an Indica/Stativa blend that came in a plastic pharmaceutical container labeled Shipwreck and given in a white pharmacist bag.
The animated sitcom Southpark satirized this cannabis issue in an episode a few weeks back, in which Southpark Colorado got a dispensary. First Randy Marsh, then all the men in Southpark gave themselves testicular cancer so they could buy weed. Their testicles swelled to the size of Hippity Hops, the 1970’s toy that you bounce around on. All the men of Southpark started smoking weed and bouncing around town on their swollen testicles. The satire was so Jonathan Swift; basically – how can America be so hypocritical?
I lived in Asia for 13 years, and now after 5 months being back in the USA, I’m learning a lot about my country. I watched a documentary last week called Outrage about the anti-gay movement in America. I didn’t live in the USA in 2004 and I'm not gay. Still, I never knew that the Christian Right tried to create a new constitutional amendment in 2004 declaring that marriages could only be a man and a woman. The bill was shot down. But still, the bill got a lot of support and financial backing. Commercials advertising Christian Families aired on TV and the biggest story in this documentary film Outrage is that MOST of the Congressmen and Senators who backed this bill, are in fact, homosexuals living double lives. You see them in the film, by day on Capitol Hill, and by night, at gay clubs. Their gay lovers of many years are interviewed. It’s really a groundbreaking film, and it
shows how most of America’s problems stem from the Christian Right trying to spread their views on everyone.
This weekend, HBO is premiering You Don’t Know Jack, a bio piece starring Al Pacino, Susan Sarandon, and John Goodman, directed by Barry Levinson about Dr. Kavorkian. Dr. K served 8 years behind bars for giving his patients what they wanted.
Dr. K’s whole mindset was that people should have the right to determine their own future, and that all laws that are medival in nature and harmful to society SHOULD BE OPENLY DISOBEYED.
If a German man in Nazi Germany or a white man in Slavery America or a White South African man during the Apartheid years loved a Jewish woman or Black woman respectively, should they have renounced their love interest because that is what society deemed appropriate? Would that have been the moral thing to do?
ALL of Dr. K's patients that he assisted with suicide were terminal cases – cancer emphysema, etc. He turned down many patients who wanted to snuff it because he didn’t think they were terminal, or he didn’t think they were thinking clearly. The media did a really good job of portraying Dr. K as a monster. This film gives the REAL STORY.
These ‘Right to Life’ people really irk me. The only crime Dr. K committed was upsetting the sensibilities of the Christian Right, who feel the need to extol their beliefs on everyone. Medicine is science – where does religion fit into saving lives, or ending human suffering? Or animal suffering for that matter.
This Sunday, after visiting the 420 Apothecary, my brother, Tim and I drove through Hollywood and there was an Animal Rights protest halting traffic and forcing passers-by to look at blown up color photos of ‘animals suffering.’ It was largely an ‘anti-hunting’ demo which is strange because Hollywood is not known for ‘hunting.’ In fact, most Los Angeles residents are NOT avid hunters! We wondered the purpose of such as show in Hollywood. My friend Tim commented, “It’s all narcissism! These people just wanna be seen.” Pretty much. People in America love to press their own views onto other people. As a result, non-criminal elements of society like Dr. K and pot smokers are persecuted.
In other news, on Saturday twisters tore through Yazoo, Mississippi tearing down power lines and killing at least 10 people, injuring dozens of others. Twisters were seen in Louisiana and Alabama as well.
Well that’s about it, as April 2010 comes to a close. I hope Bobby McGill is doing well, and I hope every one else is as well. Stay high!
Bravo signing out – April 26, 2010
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