Anderson Plays Chicken With KY

Latest news on Pamela Anderson (yes, there is actually "news" on Pamela Anderson) has her in Kentucky leading a protest against the state. Seems she's demanding they remove a bust of Harlan Sanders -- that's The Colonel to you and me -- from the State Capitol Building on the grounds that his company did a lot of vicious things to chickens -- beyond the usual decapitation, of course.


Apparently this included spitting tobacco juice in their eyes. Let's just... ponder that a moment. Or not.

Now I have no idea what that's all about or why they'd do a thing like that, though I wouldn't be surprised to find out it's true just because this is indeed a weird world we're living in, but I can't stop giggling long enough to draw up a protest sign and get on a plane to join the gang. It's just that the target is a bust. Did someone decide that Pamela Anderson was the obvious spokeswoman when "busts" were involved? (Product recognition, perhaps?) And if Kentucky demands that Ms. Anderson remove HER bust, can she wiggle out of it by pointing out that last time she did that it ended up on E-Bay and the whole thing was an emotionally draining nightmare?

Okay, no fair. It's not like she just jumped on the protest wagon for publicity. She cares about this, she cares about animal rights in general, and she's not afraid to go after a big company or even a state, which is admirable. Frankly, I have no great love for Kentucky Fried Chicken, or KFC as it is now known. When I was a kid and my mom was bringing home drive-thru food, I used to practically chant "not Kentucky Fried Chicken! Anything but Kentucky Fried Chicken" until she got home, usually with a bucket of that rock-hard, inedible crap. The rolls were good, but they were really only tiny versions of something you could get at the grocery store, so big deal. We wanted burgers and fries, not tobacco-flavored, chicken-shaped fossils. Remember when they came up with "Extra-Crispy?" I remember thinking that they probably came up with that name after weeks of brainstorming, having started with "Less-Penetrable."

All that aside, she's doing something important. If it's true that Sanders fostered those practices in his organization, from tobacco in the eye to actually ripping the heads off live chickens instead of the fast chop, then he was a creep and he shouldn't be worshipped. The bust should come down and it probably won't. This is Kentucky. This is the very, very South. No woman is going to tell them what to do, especially a porn star, which is her net worth there. The Colonel, on the other hand, is as synonymous with Kentucky as a Mint Julep. For better or for worse.

There's a distinct echo in here.

This has been a tidy field for a long time, huh? Debris-free. You could eat off the floor, it's so spotless. The demands of running a magazine made it impossible to find a spare moment to do the kinds of things I started this blog in order to do.

Not a problem anymore. Cosmik Debris Magazine sleeps with the fishes. After ten and a half years of wonderful times and great memories, we had to put it down. It never suspected a thing. Told it we were going camping, took it up in the mountains and when it leaned over the stream for a drink.... two quick, merciful shots to the index and it was done. It was... There wasn't... I really can't talk about it anymore.

The final issue and several years worth of back issues are still available at http://www.cosmik.com.

Now that it's gone, I have nothing to do. It's a little unnerving, after all those years of constant writing. Then I remembered... Thank God I have a blog. Of course, it took me several days to remember my username and password, but I'm here.

I'm gonna dust. Posting begins soon. Get ready to slap me around with witty comebacks, please. I'll order pizza.

DJ

The Debris Field looks mighty clean

Yes, it's slow as molassas here at the moment, but that's because Cosmik Debris Magazine is way, way behind schedule and it's consuming all my time. As soon as that's online, there'll be more to do here, so keep checking back, please. THANKYA everso.

DJ

Whattaya want on yer tombstone?

Just a little truth, please.

We've all heard the story of the Earps and Clantons and that fateful day in Tombstone, AZ, when tensions overflowed, along with Clanton (and Clayborn) blood in what has become known as the Gunfight At OK Corral. It's a famous story. Hollywood's covered it more than once. Surely you've seen an example or two.

Turns out it's crap. Whoda thunkit? Well, we should have, since the number one rule of truth is this:

IF HOLLYWOOD MAKES A MOVIE ABOUT AN HISTORICAL EVENT, IT'S PROBABLY HISTORICALLY INACCURATE, IF NOT A COMPLETE FABRICATION.

Write that down, repeat it as many times as it takes to memorize it, then have it tattooed on each arm. Hollywood can't tell the truth about anything. Hand them the most amazing true story in history and watch as they change the characters, the locations and events, and then add two or three song & dance numbers just for fun.

But it's a little more disturbing than usual when you find out something that's taught in school is a Hollywood lie. Such is the case with Tombstone's famous gunfight.

Oh, there was a gunfight, alright. Happened in 1881, and the story even names the right people. But it happened on the street that ran behind the OK Corral, not in the Corral. In a recent article, the New York Times reported that Tombstone is in danger of losing its Historical Landmark designation because most of the original buildings are gone (including the corral, as if that matters now... the dirty rotten #$&#!@s), and because the faked-old buildings aren't necessarily accurate representations of the originals. (Apparently, there are festive colors in use that weren't available on the great frontier, for starters.) Not to mention the Disney/Hollywood attractions some of the townsfolk have installed in place of true historic sights to see. But how, exactly, did the Corral get into the story? According to the town museum manager, Hollis Cook, It's down the Hollywood. Again.

Indeed, Mr. Cook said, the shootout actually took place behind the corral in a vacant lot and on Fremont Street, but Hollywood thought "O.K. Corral" was sexier. "It sold a hell of a lot more tickets than 'Gunfight on Fremont Street,' " he said.

What I want to know is how my teachers -- and probably yours -- got hold of the information in any form that made it teachable. Did it ever actually enter textbooks? Is it there now? What's true and what's crap?
Well, for starters, don't immediately believe what you see in Tombstone itself. There's some BS'ing going on. For a classic example, try the gun shop.

George Spangenberg sold weapons to both Wyatt Earp and the gang he faced at the O.K. Corral. Today visitors can see the G. F. Spangenberg gun shop - "Est. 1880," according to its sign - standing on Fourth Street. Well, actually, the shop was established only 16 years ago to cater to tourists and has no connection to the gunsmith whose name it borrowed.

"We don't say it's the same shop," said Jim Newbauer, a manager of the store, which is across the street from where the original stood. Nor does the shop go out of its way to say it isn't.

So some people suss it out, some people take you at face value, trusting that your National Landmark must be for real, are taken in. They teach their kids the things they learn when they come through this town. Or you teach their kids when they come through themselves. Some authenticity couldn't hurt, could it? Don't you think people would like to know what really happened there? So they didn't really fight in the corral... It's STILL about Doc Holliday, Wyatt and Virgil Earp and Kurt Russell and a famous gunfight.

Um, there WAS a gunfight... right?

So why not give the tourists reality, no matter what that reality is?

"They don't particularly want dusty, dried-up history," said Donna Winn, manager of a tourist attraction called Ghosts and Legends. "They want to be entertained."

Actors and stuntmen stage several gunfights a day, including one at the O.K. Corral (which also features a re-enactment by mechanized statues). But Ghosts and Legends, which opened in January on historic Allen Street, is yet a step closer to Disneyland, a haunted house of sorts with skeletons, a computer-animated ghost of Doc Holliday narrating history and special effects like a sharp blast of air when a gun is fired.

Ghosts and Legends. Great. Well at least there are a few pieces of the past still standing, and I'm sure the past isn't disrespected in those places. In THOSE places, I'm sure history is properly preserved.

The Crystal Palace saloon, whose first floor dates to the 1880's, has a faithfully reconstructed bar. But it also has a crude second-floor facade of offices, like one for Virgil E. Earp, marshal. (His middle name was Walter.)

That's just great. Scratch Tombstone from my list of must-see destinations. That's okay, it just means I go on next years trip this year instead. That's going to be a blast. I'm going on a Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid vacation. Gonna hit all those historic spots, like where they jumped off the cliff into the river, swearing all the way down, and where Butch rode the bicycle with Etta on the handlebars, and where they looked down at the posse and said "Who ARE those guys?" Yes sir. Gonna soak up some real history.

Varsity Black & Blues

Who among us doesn't have a horror story or two about a little league coach? Doesn't matter if you're male or female, tall or short, young or old. It doesn't matter if you played like Mays, and it doesn't matter if, as a baseball player, you were a hell of a science fair competitor. Most of us have dealt with the insanity of some overzealous baseball freak who fancies himself the reincarnation of Casey Stengal, or at least watched others deal with him. Even at the T-Ball level.

Yes, the T-Ball level. That's where coach Mark R. Downs, Jr., of Dunsbar, Pennsylvania plied his trade, coaching a rag-tag bunch of 8 year olds toward greatness and glory... and the title.

Wait, no, that's not right. He just coached 8 year olds swinging at a stationary baseball sitting on a post in front of them. It's how you prepare kids for little league, and it's supposed to be fun. But apparently Downs managed to turn even this assignment into fantasy baseball when he paid one of his players to injure another player so he couldn't play and bring down the quality of the lineup. According to a report on Sports Illustrated's web site, SI.com, Downs...

"...allegedly paid one of his players $25 to hurt an 8-year-old mentally disabled teammate so he wouldn't have to put the boy in the game, police said Friday.

Mark R. Downs Jr., 27, of Dunbar, is accused of offering one of his players the money to hit the boy in the head with a baseball, police said. Witnesses told police Downs didn't want the boy to play in the game because of his disability.

Police said the boy was hit in the head and in the groin with a baseball just before a game, and didn't play, police said.

Just how evil do you have to be to do something like that? It's not just the major news stories like this that make me wonder why there isn't extensive psychological testing required of anyone applying to coach children. Just go to a few games at your local field and in no time at all you'll find yourself cringing at the behavior of a coach. This far over the top? Not likely, but careful screening for the more common "Stengal Syndrome" would probably catch a creep like this guy. You've gotta love the understatement by the police officer in the case, by the way.

"The coach was very competitive," state police Trooper Thomas B. Broadwater said. "He wanted to win."

Downs has an unpublished telephone number and couldn't immediately be reached for comment Friday.

I'm pretty sure that's 666. And I didn't even need a phonebook for that.

Here's the kicker. If convicted, the mandatory penalty within the T-Ball league is a year-long ban from coaching. Call me a reactionary if you must, but if I had the job of coming up with mandatory punishments for the league, mine would be much simpler. Mine would be a blanket law stating that anyone convicted of any sort of abuse of their position as a coach would never, ever be allowed to look at the kids again, let alone coach them.

Better Late Than Never

It seems like I'm always late to every game. My favorite television show? West Wing. But I didn't discover it until Bravo started showing it nightly and did their big "Get everyone hooked" marathon, sometime after the third or fourth season. Same with Buffy The Vampire Slayer. And I never saw The Daily Show until long after Jon Stewart took the helm. Music? I'm a rabid reggae fan, but I climbed on board mid-Marley, not during the Studio One heyday. And while I did catch the earliest wave on the WWW, I seem to have missed the first breaks in this Podcast thing.

For those who are even farther behind than I am, a Podcast is the latest way of broadcasting just about anything, from a "radio" show to an album to a rant or whatever turns your crank. The concept is simple. A huge percentage of the population spends a huge percentage of their day strapped to an iPod. Why not pre-record shows and make them downloadable so that people can import them into their iPods to listen to at their convenience? It gives anyone a chance to be a broadcaster, and believe me, just about everyone's giving it a shot. I've been listening to a lot of Podcasts lately, and I've heard some absolute garbage. I've heard people screaming threats over political injustices, muttering nervously about sexual fantasies and even showing off some really horrific singing voices just in case someone from Idol is listening.

On the other hand, I've heard some things in the pretty good-to-great range. Former MTV VeeJay Adam Curry has a half hour Podcast called Adam Curry's Daily Source Code that's well worth listening to. He's entertaining, he's got a free hand to play music he believes in, and he seems genuinely interested in being a pioneer in this field. So much so that he's doing things like taking a laptop out to a meadow overlooking the ocean and recording his show on battery power just to show how portable (and laid back) it can be.

If you wanna hear something very strange yet addicting and funny, check out Keith and the Girl. He's a stand-up comedian, she's his girlfriend, and they live in NYC. They'll talk about anything. One show was dedicated to discussion of Keith's psychotic father and the way he messes with his kids' heads. How is that entertainment, you ask? Good question, and I'm on board, in principle, but it's the way these two talk; the banter, the delivery, the ability to laugh at themselves that makes for a show you find yourself laughing out loud at. And cringing, at times, but if they didn't dance on the edge like that, the highs wouldn't be so high.

If you're feeling like you need to have a good laugh at the current administration before you wind up crying, may I recommend Whack My Bush? The Podcasts are short at approximately five minutes, and some of the jokes fall flat, but they're firing them at you so fast there's bound to be a dud here and there. It's just what it sounds like it is: a send up of the Bushies, with Condi as the task-master who keeps little Georgie on track, Tony Blair as a whimpering little wimp - oh, wait, I guess that one wasn't such a reach - and, my favorite, Donald Rumsfeld portrayed as Yoda. "Mmm... STUPID, he is." Quite a lot of fun, all in all.

Yeah, I'm late as hell getting started, but not as late as I usually am. And what I lack in punctuality I always make up for in obsessive-compulsive devotion, so look for more recommendations as I plow my way through the... um... Podesphere?

Excuse me, I'm new here. What do we call this land o' Podcasts?

First Post On The Left

There will be more here in a day or so, but I wanted to get an initial post online now. The Debris Field was the name of a section of Cosmik Debris Magazine, an online publication I started in 1995 and we're still doing to this day. The mag itself is mostly about music and politics (decidedly liberal), but The Debris Field was a spot where you could find anything and everything. There might be quotes, jokes, recipes or nasty evidence against some hack politician or school board member. Sometimes there was art, sometimes links to good online radio. It reflected my own short attention span. I miss that section, but it would probably be a much better blog than a magazine section. Something like that should be interactive, don't you think? So that's where we'll try to take it. Hopefully we'll find a niche, but even if it just resonates with a handful of people, that's fine with me, as long as it's good company. See you here.

DJ Johnson
Cosmik Debris Magazine
http://www.cosmik.com