Mark Knows It All

As if anyone cares, lately I have had “issues” with the Academy Awards. Here is another one. The Departed won the Best Picture award this year, and it won Martin Scorsese the Oscar for Best Director. Its loaded cast includes Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Sheen, Matt Damon, Alec Baldwin, and Mark Wahlberg. So I spent my 20 bucks to buy the movie, and settled in last night to watch this fine entertainment. American Beauty , the award winner for 1999, has met its match in the Mark Knows It All “How did it win the Oscar” turkey of the year contest. The plot is simple. The Irish Mafia places an informant in the Boston Police Department as the Boston Police Department simultaneously places an informant in the Irish Mafia. The tension centers on who is going to discover whom first. Even knowing the premise of the movie, it took me 45 minutes of this 2 ½ hour slog to begin to figure out who was whom. I spent a large part of the movie trying to explain it to my wife. Who?? What??...

Everytime I drive east, as I did last weekend, I complain to whomever is in the car with me how much I dislike driving on the Pennslvania Turnpike and the mountains. Even worse is the West Virginia Turnpike, which positively gives you motion sickness even if you watch your speed…curvy, twisty, hilly, and get me the paper bag in the back seat….quick!! Midst the twists and the turns, however, my inner history buff gets the best of me. Could somebody please tell me how our forefathers found their way through those dang mountains? How did John Young get to Youngstown? These guys had to have major league cojones to load up their families in mule drawn wagons and trek through the wilderness, through God knows what, to set up settlements in the west. How did they do it? Where did they get the guts? At the Breezewood exit on the PA Turnpike, there is a sign to Gettysburg. Why would Robert E. Lee decide to fight the union army…there? I can imagine the confederate and the union troops marching t...

I visited Washington, DC, this weekend with my son, who is looking at DC based graduate schools. This morning we visited George Washington University, and we heard a commotion while walking around the campus. Following the sound of a very noisy loud speaker, we walked down 23rd Street, past the State Department, and ended up on the National Mall nearby the Lincoln Memorial. Standing around us were droves of war protestors, there to protest US involvement in Iraq. It was supposed to be a march of a 100,000 plus people, originating on the Mall and ending at the Pentagon. In reality, there were about 10,000 protestors. These ideologues apparently don’t like the cold weather. It was obviously well financed. Tour buses were dropping their loads of protestors. People lined the street handing out stacks of pre-printed protest signs. There were shirt salesmen and button salesmen. There were people dressed in costume like the grim reaper wearing an American flag, and George Bush masks worn by p...

Last night, while attending a “formal” affair downtown, I managed to get a bad case of “foot in mouth” disease. There we were, seated at a table for 8, with good folks that I have known for years, and I kept calling my friend by his wife’s name. Not that I called him Shirley or anything. His wife’s name could swing both ways, so to speak. As valiantly as I tried, I could not stop doing it. I kept correcting myself, and apologizing to my friend. Nevertheless, John is probably wondering today why I kept calling him Bobbi. (The names have been changed to protect the innocent). What was the problem? Perhaps it was the din of the crowd. Among my plethora of phobias is claustrophobia, and I do have a degree of difficulty with large crowds. Or perhaps I have early onset Alzheimer’s, in which case get me the Aricept. Or maybe it was the 2 Martinis and subsequent wine that I guzzled (I mean sipped), which is my wife’s opinion. As for me, I think my mind is just too cluttered, and the synapses a...

The father of a close acquaintance of mine passed away on Thursday. Pat is an “acquaintance” because although I have known him for years, he lives out of town and I see him at most, maybe once each year. Lives often cross and then go different directions. This was a particularly busy week for me. My office was installing a computer network, and I was having difficulty in purchasing a computer that worked. My choral group’s concert was this weekend and I was responsible for the church serving as the venue. That meant 3 hour rehearsals every night, plus extra time to make sure the church was open and then closed. So I was somewhat irritated when I got the call on Thursday about the passing of Pat’s father and the funeral arrangements. I simply could not handle one more thing, and I decided not to go. My office associate also knows Pat, and when I described to him the conflict with the rehearsals and the Friday night wake and asked him to make my apologies, he told me that skipping the wa...