Richard Jewel dies

Dead at age 44. Yeah, he was a buffoon, yeah he was a fat guy, but he was a guy who did exactly what was he was paid to do, then spent the rest of his life getting killed for it.

He's still getting fucked, even in death. The Atlanta Journal Constitution uses the occasion of his passing to reprint it’s closing arguments in his (ultimately dismissed) libel suit against the paper.

We remember where we were the night of the Atlanta Olympic bombing. A few of the Ten were watching the games at the Pour House in Boston, and, after the news flash, one of the Ten said "A bomb? You’d never get me to go to the Olympics, no matter how much you pay me. Bwa ha ha ha " Those of you who have known us for a long time will appreciate how funny that remark is, in hindsight.

“Tribe members worry about Wampanoag image”

So says the understated headline from Sunday’s globe.

They should worry. We dealt with their now-deposed leader a few years ago. He was demanding, of all things, anti-terrorism funding. He was an absolute, name dropping thug, straight out of The Rascal King. When he didn’t get what he wanted from us, he threatened to go over our heads, then proceeded to drop a bucketful of names on our heads, most of them in DC. Turns out he wasn’t kidding.

After we turned him down we gave out boss a heads up that this guy might be calling again. His response? “He can keep calling as long as he wants. I’m not meeting with that bully again.”

At the time, they were still awaiting federal recognition that they were a tribe. We’re wary of a “tribal recognition process” that a) relies upon recognition provided by a congress that is easily bought and sold on a daily basis, and B) is nothing more than a prerequisite to Casino gambling.

The Wampanoags should be proud of themselves. Under Marshall's leadership, they’ve gone from being an unrecognized tribe to yet another well-connected labor union.

Clash of Civilizations update

How can you win if your team keeps forfeiting?

Berkely Breathed’s weekly strip mentions Islam, so of course it is pulled by a number of newspapers this weekend, including the Boston Globe.

"At least 25 of the 200 or so "Opus" client newspapers might not run the Sunday-only comic's next two episodes, which feature Islamic references and a sex joke. ..

Berkeley Breathed's Aug. 26 and Sept. 2 strips -- which comprise sort of a two-part series -- show the Lola Granola character wanting to become an Islamic radicalist (and wear traditional Muslim clothing) because it's a "hot new fad on the planet." Content also includes what Shearer described as "a sex joke a little stronger than we normally see."

Wyson said some client papers hesitated to run a sex joke and others won't publish any Muslim-related humor, whether pro or con. "They just don't want to touch that," she said." via Editor and Publisher

Read the illicit strip here.

Thanks to Universal Hub for pointing out the Globe's cowardice.

A Picture's Worth a Thousand Hours of Programming

The below photo sums up every bit of Spanish-language television we've seen since the advent of cable.


From an LA Times profile on Univision's Sabado Gigante.

Yup, We’re in the right place.

As many of you may already know, the Ten Angry Men relocated our World Wide Web operation to California, following the acceptance of the Webgineer into University of South Carolina. The graduate film school specifically.

Orientation began on Friday, and if there was any doubt as to whether we were in the right place, all questions were answered when we noticed that the kid sitting on front of us was wearing black boots, black pants, black shirt and a black trenchcoat.

Part of Friday's orientation was a mandatory safety seminar for all film school students. Typical presentation by the school fire marshal, facilities managers, etc. on how not to hurt ourselves, other students or, more importantly, the USC cameras and equipment during the course of our education. Two thirds of this seminar consisted of a serious disucssion of how students can avoid being shot by the LAPD while filming in the streets of Los Angeles.

(Not a small problem. About half the questions from the students that day were about the use of weapons and explosives on their films.)

The rest of the time was spent arguing about the finer points of copyright law and, eventually, the use of other copyrighted works in a student film. (If you ever want to drive yourself crazy, look at the laws governing what material you can and cannot use in a movie. Far more restrictive for film than in any other medium. Puffy Coombs and all his compatriots in the rap game can steal entire songs and rap over them with new words, and that’s considered an original work of art. Or some guy can photocopy panels from someone else's comic strip, and be labeled a genius. But if you are shooting a movie and somewhere a car drives by blaring “I’ll Be missing you” on the car radio, the filmmaker needs to get permission from a) the record label, b) Sean Coombs, c) Sting and d) Epstein’s mother, otherwise that scene had to be taken out of the movie. This explains why a lot of old TV shows aren’t out on DVD- it’s too expensive to go out and get permission to re-use all the songs and soundtracks that were used in the original televised version. But we digress..)

This conversation was just about wrapped up when one of the faculty raised his hand and doused a fresh gallon of gasoline on the campfire. It was the Cinematography teacher, a big, gruff guy who had the build, bearing, and attitude of a 1950's high school shop teacher. He blurted out:

“Graffiti too. Graffiti is copyright material too. “

Great. Try finding a wall in LA that does not have graffiti. Now we’re extending copyright protection to taggers?

US Track and Field Association to amateur runners: “Get the fuck out.”

The USA Track and Field Association discovers a great way to reduce the nagging popularity of their sport:

“USA Track & Field, competitive running's governing body, approved a rule last December that prohibits runners from using headphones in races it sanctions. Although the ban arose from practical concerns about safety and liability, it raises philosophical questions about how runners define themselves.” According to the Boston Globe

What a great way for running's governing body to encourage people to spend their time and money on another sport. But what really got our attention was this line:

“Collyer -- who directs the Jerry Garcia race through the Road Runners Club of America, not USATF -- is sticking with discouraging headphones.”

There’s a Jerry Garcia memorial road race? Yup. That’s how you choose to remember Garcia, by naming a road race after him? A hot dog eating contest, maybe. But a road race? We don’t think so.

Missing from the article is any information about how much of a safety problem this is. How many runners are injured in road races every ear? Is it on the increase? Decrease? iPods were launched 6 years ago; what’s been the trend in running/jogging accidents since? Are drivers or pedestrians complaining abut inattentive runners?

Also- does this mean deaf people can no longer enter any of these races?

Disclosure: One of the Ten is a competitive marathoner, and he doesn't use headphones when he runs (or an iPod. He may still have an actual Walkman.) As for the author of this post, on those rare days when we run, it’s also without headphones. The music’s too distracting. But then, before we left Boston, we usually ran alone, at night thru the Back Bay. We needed to hear traffic, the people, and, most importantly, that guy on the trike yelling “Mooooooooooooooove! Moooooooooooooove!” who barrels down the sidewalk at 8 MPH. But in a sanctioned UST&F road race, surrounded by hundreds of other runners all going in the same direction, along a pre-configured and well marked route? Probably not such a big deal.

Here’s the heart of the problem, in our ignorant and ill-informed opinion: This is really about the hard core runners who are miffed at all the slobs suddenly flocking to their sport and clogging all their lanes.

We noticed the same thing come up when we were researching the sport of surfing this past winner. Thirty-odd years ago, when it was a small subculture, there were lots of laments from surfers that theirs was the best way to live, and what a great place the world would be if everybody just surfed. Now, 30 years later, everybody does surf, and pick up any surfing mag and there is at least one article or letter to the editor complaining about how the suburban corporate drones and other newcomers flocking to the beaches with their new surfboards are ruining what used to be a “pure” sport.

This is about too many recreational runners clogging the field, pure and simple. Easiest way to get rid of them is to get rid of the earphones, so there you have it.

We ran the Corporate Challenge a few years ago, and we were disgusted with what we saw at the first mile of the race, when hard–core runners shoved their way past the rest of the runners. They were throwing elbows, and pushing and stepping on people. In a fucking recreational, team-building 5K race that was marketed to amateur runners. So we shake our fists at USA Track and Field - if you want to continue to close down public streets, and clog our neighborhoods with hundreds of runners, then suck it up and let the gearheads in.

But maybe we should give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume this really is about safety. Fine. You want to improve the safety of both the runners and bystanders? Forget worrying about the headphones, how about banning police motorcycles?


Photo via Flickr.com

Ten Men and an Ultimatum

The Bourne Ultimatum.


We caught the newest Bourne movie this past week. Pleased to say it lived up to its ridiculous hype.

Bourne movies are a perfect antidote to the James Bond movies, which we've hated for as along as we’ve been alive .* In the Bourne movies, his enemies are the ones who have all the gadgets, and he's left with nothing but his wits (and occasionally a gun, or whatever else he can get his hands on.) In this movie, he’s again trying to evade the CIA, who can track the movement and phone calls of anyone, anywhere, anytime. (There's a nice parallel here with a scene from The Simpson's Movie, where a Gov't analyst inside a giant control room stands up and yells triumphantly “We actually found somebody we were looking for!” )

We loved the first Bourne movie, can’t remember a single thing about the second one, and really liked this one. If you liked any of the first two, we recommend you see this one (and if you did like the 1st two, odds are you’ve already seen it by now.) And we've always have been a Damon fan, and we've seen just about everything he's been in. (But we draw the line at his upcoming appearance on Arthur.)



An animated Matt Damon, posing with Arthur the Aardvark, shortly before stunning Arthur with a blow to his solar plexus, followed by two quick shots to the throat and a leg-sweep, before making off with Arthur's parents' car and heading West to the Pacific City of Bikini bottom, where he hopes to find the key to discovering who animated him.

The first 30 minutes of the Bourne Ultimatum are among the tightest, most exciting we’ve seen in a long time. Great story, great action, and most of it believable. After that, it becomes another chase movie, but it’s still a fun ride all the way though. The story is a nice escalation of the Bourne storyline- now his mission is to find out how he became the super agent that he is today.

Biggest problem we had with the movie is that it featured an appearance by our Action Movie Deal Killer: that inevitable scene where the hero (or the villain) dives through a window and emerges unscathed. It’s an immutable law that no matter how realistic or literal a movie is up to that point, once a character breaks this threshold, it’s all downhill from there and the stunts get more and more ridiculous. This happened in Die Hard 4, another movie franchise originally noted for its believability (remember in Die Hard 1 when he stepped on some glass, and his feet bled for the rest of the movie?) In Die Hard 4, a villain crashes thru a glass wall, and 40 minutes later Bruce Willis is engaging a fighter jet in hand-to-hand combat. Once we see one of these plate-glass scenes, we mentally check out of the movie. In the Bourne Ultimatum it occurred about halfway through the flick, in the middle of an otherwise good cat and mouse sequence. (What was so aggravating about this one was that just before dove thru the window, Bourne stopped to wrap his hands in rags so he could vault over a glass-encrusted ledge w/out cutting his hands….)

But it was a great action movie. Directed by the guy who made the under-appreciated United 93, it's shot in the same way. Feels like the cameraman is one of the characters in the scene, instead of a neutral, perfectly positioned observer. The camera is always moving, and is often a few seconds behind the action. But be warned that it's tough going in the beginning – as the camera zooms thru a Russian warehouse, you're likely to feel seasick until you've adjusted. Not only does it pitch and roll, but it zooms in and out of focus.

Random thoughts:

• Good: A lot of key scenes had no dialog at all. Two scenes stand out where all we see are the eyes of a character as he (and later she) digests the information they’ve just received. Great stuff.

• Bad: Too much time on rooftops. Every chase ends with Bourne on a roof, looking down at his pursuers.

• Bad: For the 3rd time, Julia Stiles shows up, says a few lines, then gets sent away. Only this time, she dies her hair black and leaves looking an awful lot like a young Rosie O’Donnell (emphasis on awful).

• Bad: So the US government trains its supersecret cadre of superkillers…. inside an office building in the middle of Manhattan?

• Good: The fight scenes are great. A hand to hand fight to the death inside a Casablanca bathroom is outstanding.

• Good: Matt Damon as a superspy. We heard someone say someplace that Damon is the perfect choice to play a real-life spy, because he has a look that is instantly forgettable. If you passed him in a crowd you probably wouldn’t even notice him. We agree. We’ve met a few spies (we have it on pretty good authority that we even had lunch with one From The Other Side last summer) and a lot of Navy Seals- each and every time, they were underwhelming. 98% of all Seals we’ve met are under 5’8” tall, and look about as threatening as that lone Caucasian guy stuck working behind the counter at a Dunkin Donuts.

• Great: The music.

• Bad: We found the ultimate revelation – of how Bourne became such a super agent - underwhelming. Apparently consisted of an empty bathroom and a dunk tank.

• David Straithairn needs a haircut.

PS: Before the movie, we saw a preview for Ben Afleck's new movie, Gone Baby Gone, his adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel. Not a good trailer. Made us not want to see a movie we were very much anticipating (and having seen the trailer, we're now wondering if they'll be wicked smaht enuff to subtitle all of Casey Afleck's dialog.) But we're still going to see the movie on opening day, bc:

1) It's the first movie written by either one of these guys since they won the Oscar,
2) It's written by people from, adapted by people from, starring people from, and set in the city of Boston, and
3) We're Big Lehane fans.

PPS: also saw the trailer for Good Luck Chuck, the new Dane Cook movie. Cook looks like a younger Denis Quaid, but with much, much more acne. From what we can tell from the trailer, he mugs for the camera as women throw themselves at him while his fat friend yells exposition to him.

* Yeah, we hate, hate, HATE the bond movies. The only ones we could ever sit through were the ones with the Roger Moore Bond, because in our opinion he played it the only way the material could be played - as camp.

We’d agree with this analysis

The Levels of Boston Irishness


By some bird called Boston Maggie:

"Shamrock Green: Lived in Southie or Charlestown since birth. If he's not like one of the guys in "The Departed," he sure knows guys like them. A huge hockey fan. Everyone he knows has a nickname like Sully, Cliffy, Knotzie orFitz. Wears a scally cap. Read "Black Mass" and knew everyone in it personally. Has a tattoo of a shamrock or a harp. Drinks Guinness."

Found via UniversalHub.com

Photo via Flickr.

California is hazing us newcomers

We rode our first earthquake the other night. Woke up at 1 AM on Thursday morning to find the room in our new Ten AM World Headquarters (West) gently swaying back and forth. Registered a 4.5 on the Richter scale, don't you know.

Although were we were quite far from the epicenter we imagine the scene outside our window that morning looked something like this.

Taking the concept of a tie-in too far

Tomorrow were going to see the Red Sox play the Anaheim Angels in Anaheim. The Angels were until 2003 owned by Disney, who this summer put out Ratatouille, the delightful tale of a rat who takes over a restaurant's kitchen.

Fittingly, the Angels' ballpark is overrun by rats..

"Public officials reacted with anger and disappointment Monday to news that food vendors at Angel Stadium, including its exclusive Diamond Club behind home plate, had been cited 118 times for vermin violations since 2005, far more than other stadiums in the region." via the LA Times

* yeah, Disney no longer owns the angels, but it's a good excuse to bring up the fact that we're going to the Sox game tomorrow.

If you want to have any understanding about the true nature of the violent crime problem in Boston, read this piece by the Boston Globe. (or just watch The Wire, but we’re tired of recommending that show to you people)

Here’s the money quote:

"Crime in many neighborhoods runs in families, where elders bequeath gang membership, drug abuse, joblessness, and brutality to their offspring like a toxic inheritance. In Grove Hall, police have said that 2.4 percent of the area's 19,000 residents cause most of the serious crime. Many of those people, police say, are related."

Read the full article. And don't miss the graphs the Globe put together:

• Family profile

• Impact on the Grove Hall n'hood

• Public resources dedicated to the family

The root cause of crime is, apparently, criminals. Specifically, a small group of hard core, recidivist criminals raised in an atmosphere of violence and neglect who are operating within a community that is otherwise largely law abiding and eager to do the right thing.

And it’s not because of any wholesale neglect on the part of the city or state:

“A Globe analysis shows that in the final year of Liquarry's life, government agencies spent at least $314,000 on his family, about half for social services and government benefits, in an extraordinary effort to save the family, especially the children.

Besides the salaries for the battery of social workers who regularly called on the house, the public spending includes a subsidized housing allowance, food stamps, court-appointed public defenders, and the $56 paternity test that a judge ordered one of the fathers of Liquarry's mother's other children to undergo for an out-of-wedlock child with another woman.

The other half of the total went to the costs of prosecuting and imprisoning family members. Taxpayers spent an estimated $30,000 on a double-homicide trial for the father of two of Liquarry's half siblings in October -- he was acquitted -- as well as dozens, maybe hundreds of hours worth of police work on cases that involved family members. When the Boston Herald admonished the family last month for costing the public $10,000 in needless investigative work because Liquarry's mother, Lakeisha Gadson, falsely reported that her son had been shot by home invaders, police and social service officials knew the bigger story. The family had been tearing through $10,000 in public resources every couple of weeks for a long time.”

(Before you praise the Globe for it's investigative reporting on this piece, a close reading will suggest that most of the legwork was done by the Boston Police as far back as 2004)

As a founding member of the Ten once said to a Boston Police officer working out of C-11 nearly 12 years ago: “It all starts in the home” to which the officer responded “Amen, brother. Amen.”

A Sentry of the Evil Empire

Several members of the Ten have spent time in the security field, and we've also spent some time in those field level VIP seats at several parks and stadiums. So we enjoyed today's brief profile of Francisco Estevez, the Yankee stadium security guard assigned to Steinbrenner’s box seats.

But we enjoyed even more reading about how he got his current assignment:

“I began doing relief work in Mr. Steinbrenner’s seats in 2000,” said Estevez, who lives within walking distance of the Stadium. “The following season, the attendant working here got transferred out to one of the parking lots.” via the NY Times.

Obviously, the kid’s predecessor did something to piss off someone. Now that's the story we'd like to hear more about.

Now that the horse is long gone

Time for everyone to lock those barn doors.

"The (Longfellow Bridge), which carries tens of thousands of cars and Red Line commuters over the Charles River each day, is one of 588 bridges in Massachusetts that are considered structurally deficient under federal safety standards. The century-old bridge has undergone just one major overhaul, in 1959."

Any of you planning on driving over a MA bridge in the near future might want to give this a good read.

A favorite game that one of our grandfathers used to play was “tell me a way that you can drive out of Boston, without going over a bridge or thru a tunnel.” Happy Motoring.

image via Getty Images.