McCain-Obama II

John McCain: You need a friend,
but please stop calling on me

Let’s get this out of the way: John McCain is not my friend. I’ve never met the man, and he certainly does not know me.

Neither is Barack Obama my friend. He doesn’t know me, either – but at least does not pretend to be my friend.

I don’t trust people who use the word “friend” over and over again, and sound like a used car dealer trying to unload a clunker on a naive shopper. An old used car dealer, whose slick is wearing thin.

If I had to choose, I’d want Obama as a friend. But I’ll settle for giving him my vote – as the winner of Tuesday night’s debate and for president.

Obama could have done better. There were responses I wanted him to give to some of the questions, and mistakes that made me wince – especially pulling Delaware banking laws out of the political closet as an unfortunate metaphor in addressing a lack of requirements for health insurers in some states.

It might be true, but hey – the Republicans lately had not been going back to allegations of Joe Biden being cozy with Delaware-based bank/credit card companies. That’ll change as Election Day nears.

I enjoyed the spectacle of McCain dropping a line that many in the audience had probably used eBay – this from a candidate who has never even learned to email. So the work of his writers was transparent – it was just a line fed to McCain to make him sound current.

He’s not current. He’s the past. It was apparent from McCain’s repetitive answers that he’s still fighting the Vietnam war. He still thinks the only way out is victory, when there may be no such thing in Iraq any more than there was in Vietnam. Not for America, and not for Iraq after we went in and busted up the place so badly for the sake of regime change.

George W. Bush talked a few months ago about establishing a “time horizon” for getting out. One thing about the horizon – you never get there. And McCain doesn’t even have the horizon in sight.

The Real Weathermen

Stormy politics expected,
but a good chance for Obama

I asked the weathermen for their take on the presidential election – not the “domestic terrorists” that Cari-boo Barbie is trying to link to Barack Obama, but the guys who used to predict the weather at Baltimore-Washington International Airport.

The occasion Monday was the monthly breakfast gathering of a select group of federal retirees – the local National Weather Service forecast team and FAA air-traffic controllers.

They meet up the first Monday at the Glen Burnie IHOP, most ordering off the seniors menu, and discuss important issues of the day – as long as they pertain to sports. Politics and religion are usually not on the agenda.

Enter the invited guest – me. I don’t know the air-traffic guys beyond our meeting over pancakes, but I’d been talking to the weather guys for decades during my former life as a reporter at The Baltimore Sun assigned all too often to blather in print about heat, wind, rain and snow, not necessarily all at the same time.

So I’ll introduce them to you: Ken Shaver, a western Pennsylvania transplant whose perfectly modulated voice delivered weather radio broadcasts on WBAL and WNUV for years; Amet Figueroa, whose New York City accent might not fly for that kind of role here but was always loquacious and unintentionally funny when questioned about the steamy “good old Bermuda high;” and Fred Davis, a native Massachutan and level-headed meteorologist who was their boss as chief of the BWI forecast office.

These days, the weather forecasts come out of a centralized district office at Sterling, Va., and the trio’s been retired since the BWI operation was closed. Ken lives in Southern Maryland, Amet in Columbia and Fred in Pasadena, where he docks a boat named Bonnie Weather that honors both his vocation and his true love.

I polled the entire breakfast gang on who they’d likely vote for Nov 4, and the show of hands was about 7-5 in favor of Obama. (Yes, there are Republican sympathizers among the ranks these days, the FAA air-controllers’ 1981 strike and mass firing by Ronald Reagan notwithstanding.)

More importantly, I asked the weathermen their month-ahead predictions on who would win.

“Obama,” said Amet.

“Obama,” said Ken.

“Obama,” said Fred, with a cautionary look at one front that could put a wrinkle in such guesswork: Whether Americans, and clearly we’re talking about white Americans, will, in the privacy of the voting cubicle, accept the wind of change and choose a young African-American as their leader.

I hope so.

Odds and endings

Fred Davis and I have a little acting in common. Both of us appeared in Episode 6 during the final season of the HBO television drama “The Wire.” I have to unwrap my DVD boxed set and play it back, now that I know to look for Fred pouring tea for needy folks in a scene at the Baltimore soup kitchen Viva House where in real life he volunteers once a week. (In case you missed it, I was playing myself in the newsroom. And I don’t visit the newsroom nearly that often, since Sun retirees are made to feel less welcome than homeless men at a shelter these days.)

Spotted a lovely set of bumper stickers across the back of a Subaru Sunday, most of them with an anti-war sentiment. My favorite read: “What would Jesus bomb?” It was directly under a sticker calling for an end to bear hunting in Maryland. The peace sentiments went hand-in-hand with a ribbon-style sticker to “Support our Troops.” (Getting them out of Iraq would be a good start.)

Baseball news

It’s just as well the Chicago Cubs got swept out of the playoffs, since the team is owned by my former employer Tribune Co. and Sam Zell, whose ordered changes to The Baltimore Sun and other print properties are a journalistic nightmare. I would have loathed to see Zell holding the World Series trophy.

Speaking of baseball, I’ve never met Zell. But at a party honoring the huge Buyout Class of 2008 that shrunk the newsroom staff by about 20 percent, I whacked the celebratory Sam Zell Pinata with a baseball bat. A former colleague’s whack beheaded him like a bad scene at an Iraqi hanging. (Zell was full of it – molten chocolate coins and play money.)

About this blog

If you’re new to my blog, and that’s everyone since it’s just a week old, I’d like to introduce myself – David Ettlin, sunk to this opinion game after 40 objective years as a reporter and editor at The Sun. Since retiring in the Buyout Class of 2007, I’ve written half a dozen pre-season baseball stories for the competing Baltimore Examiner, filled in as an editor at the Baltimore Business Journal and Maryland Daily Record, written the cover story for the inaugural edition of the latter’s free monthly publication Exhibit A, and contemplated getting off my duff and writing a novel.

You can turn me up through a Google search doing a YouTube video about the first real tragedy I covered as a young reporter; telling tales at Stoop Storytelling (in June 2007 as Audience Storyteller No. 2, and as a featured speaker in that December’s annual “Holidays from Hell” spectacular); as a byline on a bunch but nowhere near all of the news stories I’ve written; and in tales of past lives by people who knew me back when.

I’m aiming to produce original material here, rather than (allowing for occasional exceptions) link after link to what others are writing on the Web. I’m hoping to post new material at least three days a week, after my daily-posting pace wears thin. And I hope, if you enjoy it, you message this link to your Internet pals: http://ettlin.blogspot.com/.

Special thanks to folks at sites including http://sideshow.me.uk/ and http://mybaltimore.ws/ who have pointed out the Cyberspace path to some of to my initial postings here.

And thanks for visiting!

Bawlamer, Hon!

Baltimore walk-don't walk sign
(slightly manipulated, at left) and Blogger Ettlin at festival. photos and manipulation by Bonnie J. Schupp


Taking in a festival
on a day as good as it gets

Saturday, on this first weekend of October, was about as perfect as it gets in Baltimore – mostly sunny, temperatures in the low 70s. It was one of the most perfect days ever for the annual Fells Point Fun Festival, which celebrates the city’s oldest surviving neighborhood. More often, it seems, the occasion can be brutally hot or miserably wet. And when you number the crowd in many thousands, you want low 70s. Maybe a little less sunshine, since I recently lost track of my favorite cheap sunglasses.

It was an easy choice among the day’s events. There was also the Michael Phelps parade north of town, and the Michael Phelps welcome-home ceremony and fireworks at Fort McHenry. The fact that Michael Phelps lives in a million-dollar-plus condo in the Fells Point area and wasn’t going to be home – well, we went to Fells Point.

I wouldn’t want to suggest that this town is suffering a bit too much from Phelpsomania, but it’s been hard to escape his domination of the local news media in the lead-up to the summer Olympics, during the Olympics, and now after the Olympics. It’s his rumored purchased of the swimming facility where he trains (and where I was too chicken to jump off the high board back around 1960), or it’s his mother’s return from Beijing to her job as a suburban middle school principal, or it's their endorsement deals (yup, even mom got an endorsement deal – because of the outfits she favored while watching her boy win eight gold medals), and it’s his reunion with his dog, it’s gossipmonger speculation on girlfriends. It just never ends.

Now I admit he’s a big deal, more famous right now than, maybe, Cal Ripken, who as far as I know never performed before a crowd in a skin-tight Speedo. So of course, young teen girls scream for Michael like they used to for Brit rock stars.

My brother was a swimmer in high school, and on the track team, and played JV basketball and football. By the time I got to high school, I had a note excusing me from gym – which was a good thing, since by then my brother was one of the gym teachers there.

But I digress, and return to the fun at Fells Point, where my wife Bonnie Schupp (her photos above) and I managed to find a free parking spot three blocks away and took in the sights, like half a dozen young couples dancing to swing music on an elevated stage in the middle of a street, old Polish ladies selling sausage and potato pancakes outside their even older church, little children squealing with delight on carnival rides like the spinning Dizzy Dragons, vendors selling all manner of clothing, jewelry and artwork, and the flow of legs and feet in the waves of people along the waterfront. (And some of the legs were attached to some very lovely young women, I might add.)

Couldn’t escape politics, of course. There were booths for Obama, Barr, and McCain – the latter scrunched up next to that of an international Buddhist organization whose chapter in a rural prefecture once invited us to speak during a trip across Japan. Republicans, bless their hearts, have never invited me to speak anywhere, and it’s just as well. The important thing to report is that Obama regalia outnumbered McCain regalia; in fact, the Obama booth ran out of buttons and yard signs, although there were plenty of stickers to hand out in lieu of buttons. Of course, Baltimore is about 90 percent Democrat in voter registration.

There was an old lady manning the McCain display, and she was very nice when I said I wished she had a McCain button so I could add it to my collection of losers’ buttons. “Nobody told me he was going to lose,” she retorted.

But McCain was already a loser – in 2000 when, in an inept bid for the Republican nomination, he failed to save the nation from George W. Bush. And that’s a fact. You can look it up.

Obama can’t lose in Maryland – not only because of its notable Democratic majority, but because if he goes down here, his campaign is doomed.

Oh, fudge!

On a lighter note, here’s to good fudge. There was a booth offering free samples, and it was excellent – but we didn’t want to carry chocolate fudge around for two hours, so we didn’t buy a larger quantity. But I found out it's a family business in the Pittsburgh area, which offers online sales. The link: http://fudgiewudgie.com/. If you’re in the market for some really good stuff, you can look that up, too.

Correction

Old friend Rosemary Armao, a journalism professor at Albany, N.Y., whose stops as an editor have included The Baltimore Sun, Sarasota Herald-Trib and South Florida Sun Sentinel, commented on my ‘Great Debate’ entry that my spelling of Hillary Clinton’s name was an L short. Oh L! So I fixed it. Nobody’s poifickt.

A most venerable artist

Age itself is beauty,
but the murals were great


Attired in a spiffy suit and lime-green vest, Frank Calloway sat in his wheelchair chatting and grasping hands with well-wishers – as much the center of attention as his murals at Friday night’s opening party for the new exhibition at the American Visionary Art Museum.

The trip to Baltimore this week from his home state of Alabama likely was Frank’s biggest adventure, including the first airplane flight for an artist whose folksy works are getting attention amazingly late in life.

Frank is 112 years old, according to records of the Alabama mental health department that has cared for him for more than half a century.

He has no birth certificate as proof (not unusual for rural Deep South African-Americans in the late 1890s) – and you might say he doesn’t look a day over 105 – but if true as the State of Alabama maintains, Frank Calloway would be the second-oldest man in the United States and seventh-oldest in the world.

And there he sat in the main hall of the Baltimore art museum’s new exhibition, “The Marriage of Art, Science & Philosophy,” his Cinemascopic visions all around. Frank’s creations in colored pencil and crayon relate to mathematical computations of his own device, and what he sees in his mind may not be those of others.

At 110, asked what he would like to do, Frank wanted to see the ocean. He had never seen an ocean. So he got the closest thing to an ocean available to a venerable resident of the state’s Alice Kidd psychiatric home: an overnight trip to a beach resort on the Gulf of Mexico. His only mural resulting from the trip shows a paddlewheel boat on the water – a ship that only he saw there.

As far as anyone knows, Frank had never even been on a boat until he got to Baltimore Wednesday, and enjoyed a ride on the harbor water taxi.

He’s been cared for in state institutions since the mid-1950s, said to have been diagnosed as mildly schizophrenic. Experts have said that such a malady would account for his use of vivid colors – like purple for cows – in the murals drawn on long sheets unwound from rolls of wide butcher paper.

His artistic abilities were discovered after the state ended its practice of having patients work in the fields – labor that he long felt gave his life meaning. Art was among the occupational activities that replaced outdoor work, and Frank took to it voraciously.

But it was only in the past decade that people started to notice, and there were even sales of some of his artwork – the money helping to pay for personal needs. His murals were exhibited in the state capital, and the state employees telephone directory.

In an era of deinstitutionalization, Frank Calloway might have fit into another environment, but the reality is that the state facility in Tuscaloosa has become his home, and the staff that has long cared for him his only family. A local lawyer was named his personal guardian, to oversee his affairs, and she was part of the entourage that accompanied him to Baltimore.

FAA restrictions notwithstanding, Frank was shown the cockpit by the Southwest Airlines (no rule should be an absolute) and he was awarded a first-flight certificate.

All this at 112.

Simply amazing.

For that matter, so was the work of dozens of other artists chosen by museum founder/curator Rebecca Hoffberger for the exhibition, which runs for nearly a year and is a not-to-miss Baltimore attraction.

And how about: A blog entry that didn’t mention Sarah what’s-her-name. (By the way, I happened on a reference to her in a blog link earlier in the day as “Caribou Barbie.” It’s just too easy, my friends....

Addendum on age

I should, since the theme here was much about a super-centenarian (folks 110 and older), put in a plug for my centenarian Aunt Alice's video on YouTube. Some folks have found it inspiring -- and one left a message saying she left work early because of it! If you like it, mention it to your friends -- Alice is delighted that she has been viewed more than 1,600 times by folks around the world since it was posted just after its recording on her 101st birthday. Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5TBwJF0v1g

The Great Debate

They both screwed up, but
Biden came through at the end

Joe Biden muffed it. For more than half the time, he forgot to look into the camera and failed to talk directly to Middle America in straight and simple terms. Even so, he came closer to answering questions and – at the end – gave everyone a rare gift: A glimpse of his soul.

In the epic science fiction novel “Dune,” the desert-dwellers are stunned when the young exiled prince “gives water to the dead” by crying.

In American politics, tears don’t always play well in election campaigns. Hillary Clinton’s tears helped her, but only briefly, in this year’s Democratic presidential primary battle. In 1972, supposed tears in New Hampshire helped short-circuit Edmund Muskie’s quest.

Thursday night, near the end of his debate with Sarah Palin, Biden welled up emotionally, fighting back the tears as he recalled the tragic highway deaths decades ago of his first wife and their daughter and the ordeals of his injured sons. It was all there for America to see.

Palin was ice cold by comparison, after being sequestered and rehearsed for a week in mystical Sedona, Ariz.

She learned her lines very well: “Wall Street greed” was hammered on half a dozen times, although once she mixed up Main Street and Wall Street, and she looked like a pleased schoolgirl at her successful pronunciation of “Ahmadinejad” (learned so nice, she said it twice).

While Palin was short on substance and avoided answering questions as she returned to her repetitions and obviously concentrated on the talking points she had been taught, Biden spoke too often away from and above his audience.

Biden failed to challenge Palin’s qualifications for the vice presidency. Some observers had expressed the opinion that directly confronting her lack of knowledge and her inexperience beyond the borders of one of America’s least-populated states would backfire, but to my eyes, Palin’s embarrassing answer about “only being here five weeks” could have been repeated by Biden. He was far too deferential, instead giving toothy smile after toothy smile.

When Palin went on the attack, she did it with a smarmy smile, cloying winks, and folksy “aw, shucks” manner sure to distract many voters from any misinformation, mistakes and lack of knowledge. She was back to being good old Hockey Mom, and she’s carrying the Republicans’ big stick.

Who won? That's a matter of, well... debate.

"Religulous" overkill

Movies, continued:

If you like Bill Maher, you’ll be forgiving enough to like his new movie tirade “Religulous” – a little.

As unfair as it is amusing, “Religulous” is pretty much an equal-opportunity attack on major religions of world, and a few of the minor ones, by a comic zealot proclaiming his own devotion – to doubt.

I, too, am a doubter. But I admire people who have and live by their beliefs, so long as they don’t attempt to impose them on others – particularly through government.

Mutual respect works for me. But it doesn’t really work for Maher. He harshly takes on Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mormons and Muslims – oh, and not to leave out Scientology (ridiculed without even a mention that it was invented by a hack science fiction writer).

But, I must add, there were plenty of laughs before the punchline, which is the Apocalypse – whether the work of God, or a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of true believers. There were plenty of images of mushroom clouds.

The theater was packed Wednesday night for the Baltimore preview (it opens Friday), including all three rows set aside for reviewers (and their dates). Maher attracts crowds with controversy. But my prediction is that “Religulous” will have a quick Exodus to Blockbuster, perhaps slowed a week or two if protesters bother to turn up outside theaters and thereby generate publicity.

One person seemed annoyed enough to leave the preview screening amid the lampooning of Judaism. I thought maybe he just had to pee, but didn’t notice him returning.

Muslims won’t be very happy, either. One hopes the most extreme among them don’t throw a fatwa fit over it.

Best performance goes to the actor playing Jesus at the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando, who held up well to Maher’s questioning – even offering a metaphor to the comedian’s disbelief of a Holy Trinity, likening it to the three forms of water as solid, liquid and vapor.
That is followed by the scene of tackily-dressed Florida tourists sitting on benches and enjoying the brutal and bloody crucifixion reenactment. (The attraction’s Web site is hoot unto itself at http://www.holylandexperience.com/. )

A shame the movie was made pre-Palin. She would have fit right in. But she’s getting plenty of attention on Maher’s weekly “Real Time” show on HBO.


Upcoming

The Great Debate is still on, and I cancelled plans for yet another movie when a TV-less friend suggested coming over Thursday night with his girlfriend and making a party of it.
And I hope you’ll be reading my take on Biden-Palin soon after.

Channeling Bristol

Today's little rant

I know it’s too easy, and probably unfair – but it’s also Sarah Palin’s fault. After all, she’s the one who brought up the “family values” stuff that makes her such a model mom to the religious right (as distinct from the right religious). It was all about teaching only abstinence, and putting up some sort of iron chastity curtain to block out many of the realities of life in 21st Century America.

Haven’t heard much about daughter Bristol lately. She’s off the front pages, not even evident in the inside pages, and her Hockey Mom hasn’t been saying much about the 17-year-old’s pregnancy situation since that storm blew over.

And whatever happened to the foul-minded goalie boyfriend who slipped a got-lucky shot past the family values defender and scored. Last I saw him, he was up there on the stage in St. Paul, Minn., sharing the climactic moment of the Republican National Convention with the McCain team, dressed up in his Sunday best and furiously chewing a wad of gum; then there was the little matter of his ugly but disappearing presence on the Internet.

The point is that Sarah Palin would like to see her spin on family values imposed across America, when they didn’t even work inside her own little igloo. And it’s about how big a lie you can spin to make teen sex OK in the eyes of do-no-wrong Republicans because, after all, her daughter’s going to keep the baby and marry her self-described “fu**in’ redneck” boyfriend, almost as if it were planned.

It’s just good old Republican retroactive hypocrisy. Paint it in the bold colors of “we’re doing it right, even when we did wrong, by golly.” Now everybody applaud.

But I can’t applaud. I feel sorry for Bristol, who at worst is an ordinary teenage girl with an all-too-common problem, revulsion for her caricature jock boyfriend, and scorn for the mother who shamelessly thrust them into the national spotlight.

Any bets out there on the long-term prospects for this teen romance? You can have two guesses – one predicated on a Republican win in November, the other on a loss that sends Sarah Palin home to carry her current job to term, assuming she’s even on the ticket come Election Day.


Now that I’ve gotten it out of my system, at least for today, we move along to a new feature of this almost-as-new blog:

Movie Reviews!

I’ve gotten into a serious movie habit lately, thanks to a membership benefit of Friends of the Maryland Film Festival, and a Web-based network called Gofobo: Free movies, usually before they’ve officially opened. There’s a row or three set aside for movie reviewers, not that the Baltimore area has actually got three rows worth of reviewers, and most of the other rows are filled with festival members and invited guests.

I confess I’m not a movie expert. My wife Bonnie and I attended a recent screening of “Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys,” and I had no clue about who is Tyler Perry. But I found out, because the African-American actor-producer-director personally showed up to introduce his film to the predominately black audience at what was said to be its first public screening.

It’s been open now a couple of weeks, and done fairly well at the box office. We enjoyed it – particularly the acting of stars Alfre Woodard and Kathy Bates, which largely made up for the film’s soapy plot.

Last week, I saw “The Lucky Ones,” courtesy of the Friends group, and was awed by the performances of co-stars Tim Robbins, Rachel McAdams and Michael Pena as three wounded soldiers returning from the Iraq war – the former presumably ending his service, the others on 30-day leaves. It’s a buddy movie, and they embark on a cross-country road trip that at times channels “The Wizard of Oz,” complete with a tornado and a dog. Not sure who the wizard was, but “Oz” was portrayed by Las Vegas. Great casting of that, too.

Eloquent in its empathy for the American soldier, the film did not fall at all into the trap of being antiwar. It was, if anything, pro-humanity and inspiring.

The next night, I lucked into gofobo tickets for an advance screening of “Eagle Eye,” being shown all of four hours before its midnight opening at a suburban IMAX-equipped theater. It relies on nonstop action and spectacle as two ordinary people (played by Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan) get snatched up as pawns in a runaway computer’s effort to bring down the American government for being what it viewed as unAmerican. Runaway computers, now there’s an original idea. (American government acting unAmerican, now there’s another original idea.)

Did I mention, it was shown in IMAX? Two hours of big, loud, explosive, car-crashing IMAX?

The IMAX was terrific.