But, on this fine Friday afternoon, I am still racing against the clock to get work done. Therefore, I call FRESH POTS!
Yes, yes, I realize that disease is no joking matter, etc. But the inveterate coffee-and-beer drinker -- coffee until 3pm, beer thereafter -- takes his encouragement where he can.
Friday, April 23, 2010
FRESH POTS!
Normally, I am an adherent to the James Fallows school of beverage consumption:
Regime change in Calyzstan/The Shield
Hey, so there has been a coup in Kyrgyzstan recently. And, insofar as my blog acts as a quasi-mirror of Kyrgyzstani political drama, there has been a coup in Calyzstan! Down with the non-posting regime!
Now, with that out of the way... I kind of let this blog go to waste for a while. My legion of fans will most assuredly rejoice, then, that I am back in full force. Sort of.
I think one thing that kept me away for so long was "The Shield," the 2002-2008 FX drama. During the great Calyzstan blog drought of '10, I watched all 7 seasons of this gritty, brutal show about a few LA cops that would give the folks at Human Rights Watch a severe case of heartburn. It stars Michael Chiklis's bald head:
Spoilers will follow
This is a pretty great show. The story focuses on Chiklis's Vic Mackey and the "Strike Team," a small group of detectives that police the Los Angeles streets as much as they con them. Each season focuses on a different shitstorm the Strike Team has stumbled into, starting with Mackey's murdering of a cop working undercover with the Department of Justice in the pilot episode. This and other less-than-ethical escapades such as working with gangs to run drugs through LA, robbing an Armenian money train, breaking into an LAPD evidence control warehouse, senseless beatings and killings of innocuous and culpable "bangers," etc. Plus cover-up jobs for every one of these dirty deeds. As you may surmise, the show is rife with moments where characters are almost being caught for any one of a hundred different offenses they have committed in the past 24 hours.
But, for all the envelope-pushing these cops do, they do their fair share of police work and get plenty of "bad guys" thrown in jail. In some ways, their often repugnant tactics are perhaps more effective than that of their fellow detectives. Ultimately, the constant line-towing and guilty consciences takes a toll of unbearable and in some cases fatal proportions on the members of the Strike Team. The story arc in season 5 sees this all begin to catch up with the Strike Team in heartbreaking fashion.
Their downfall starts with an investigation by a manic Internal Affairs Division (IAD) detective, played masterfully in a guest role by Forest Whitaker. Whitaker's Jon Kavanaugh is investigating Mackey's crew particularly in relation to the aforementioned killing of the cop/DOJ undercover agent. Kavanaugh is convinced that Mackey was the shooter, but can't prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, which drives him to eventual madness and incarceration. The one piece of tangible evidence Kavanaugh has on any Strike Team member is a kilo of black tar heroin confiscated from Curtis "Lem" Lemanski's car. (Lem had taken the kilo as collateral against a Salvadoran the Strike Team was squeezing for information, but didn't do the seizure by the books and was ratted out to IAD by a CI at the scene.)
Kavanaugh's investigation into the Strike Team is running up against a wall after 7 months and only the kilo on the books, and in a fit of rage after finding out Mackey slept with his (crazy) ex-wife (more accurately, he had this thrown in his face), he arrests Lem for possession with intent to distribute. The Team cons their way into $100,000 and bails Lem out of jail, then gets him into hiding in LA while plotting his escape to a goat farm in Central America.
On the night of Lem's planned escape, the three other Strike Team members (Mackey, Shane "Cletus VanDam" Vendrell and Ronnie Gardocki) each go to a pre-determined meet up point to deliver Lem to a coyote and secure his safe passage across the Mexican border. Vic and Ronnie are tailed by Kavanaugh and his one underling, so Shane goes to meet Lem first. At this point, Lem says that he doesn't want to go to the goat farm, that he would prefer to go to prison, but somewhere outside of LA, where he has some chance of not being shanked as soon as he gets to his cell. Shane, thinking that Lem will eventually give up the Strike Team for all of their misdeeds if he goes to jail, is justifiably conflicted. The options (sans goat farm) seem to be:
By the last episode of the series, Vic -- ever the master manipulator -- has found his way out of it all. By taking down a high-ranking member of a Mexican cartel who was attempting to make inroads to dominating the LA narcotics market, he secured a deal with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for a job (after being forced to retire from the LAPD with no pension for his... shall we say, antics?) and full immunity for every last thing he has done outside the confines of the law.
Well, this sounds sweet, but it ends like this: Vic Mackey, once the star detective of the streets of LA, is sitting behind a desk in a suit typing up bullshit reports 40 hours a week for 3 years. His ex-wife and children went into the witness protection program, due to her general fear of him. Lem is dead. Shane -- who in the final season is on the lam with his family after getting caught attempting to kill Vic and Shane after they attempted to kill him when they found out he killed Lem and also didn't say anything but just watched when they killed a Salvadoran gang kingpin who they thought killed Lem -- killed his pregnant wife and young boy via narcotics overdose and then blew his brains out. Due to Vic's immunity deal and the extensive amount of acts he confessed to to cover his ass, he implicated Ronnie in enough shit to send him away for life.
No badge, no honor; just a desk job in some governmental bureaucratic organ, punching keys all day, going home and waking up for more the next. Mackey's deal is exactly what he wanted in life, but without everything and everyone he cared about, and is thus the perfect comeuppance, though after 7 seasons of getting used to his extrajudicial ass kicking, you kind of feel sorry for the guy.
And yet, in that final scene with Mackey sitting at his desk, wearing his tie, finally coming to terms with every sordid thing he's done, the true brilliance of "The Shield" shines through again. It makes you wonder: Was this all an elaborate backstory for that random bald guy you work next to? And what sort of crazy backstories might your co-workers have?
Now, with that out of the way... I kind of let this blog go to waste for a while. My legion of fans will most assuredly rejoice, then, that I am back in full force. Sort of.
I think one thing that kept me away for so long was "The Shield," the 2002-2008 FX drama. During the great Calyzstan blog drought of '10, I watched all 7 seasons of this gritty, brutal show about a few LA cops that would give the folks at Human Rights Watch a severe case of heartburn. It stars Michael Chiklis's bald head:
Spoilers will follow
This is a pretty great show. The story focuses on Chiklis's Vic Mackey and the "Strike Team," a small group of detectives that police the Los Angeles streets as much as they con them. Each season focuses on a different shitstorm the Strike Team has stumbled into, starting with Mackey's murdering of a cop working undercover with the Department of Justice in the pilot episode. This and other less-than-ethical escapades such as working with gangs to run drugs through LA, robbing an Armenian money train, breaking into an LAPD evidence control warehouse, senseless beatings and killings of innocuous and culpable "bangers," etc. Plus cover-up jobs for every one of these dirty deeds. As you may surmise, the show is rife with moments where characters are almost being caught for any one of a hundred different offenses they have committed in the past 24 hours.
But, for all the envelope-pushing these cops do, they do their fair share of police work and get plenty of "bad guys" thrown in jail. In some ways, their often repugnant tactics are perhaps more effective than that of their fellow detectives. Ultimately, the constant line-towing and guilty consciences takes a toll of unbearable and in some cases fatal proportions on the members of the Strike Team. The story arc in season 5 sees this all begin to catch up with the Strike Team in heartbreaking fashion.
Their downfall starts with an investigation by a manic Internal Affairs Division (IAD) detective, played masterfully in a guest role by Forest Whitaker. Whitaker's Jon Kavanaugh is investigating Mackey's crew particularly in relation to the aforementioned killing of the cop/DOJ undercover agent. Kavanaugh is convinced that Mackey was the shooter, but can't prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, which drives him to eventual madness and incarceration. The one piece of tangible evidence Kavanaugh has on any Strike Team member is a kilo of black tar heroin confiscated from Curtis "Lem" Lemanski's car. (Lem had taken the kilo as collateral against a Salvadoran the Strike Team was squeezing for information, but didn't do the seizure by the books and was ratted out to IAD by a CI at the scene.)
Kavanaugh's investigation into the Strike Team is running up against a wall after 7 months and only the kilo on the books, and in a fit of rage after finding out Mackey slept with his (crazy) ex-wife (more accurately, he had this thrown in his face), he arrests Lem for possession with intent to distribute. The Team cons their way into $100,000 and bails Lem out of jail, then gets him into hiding in LA while plotting his escape to a goat farm in Central America.
On the night of Lem's planned escape, the three other Strike Team members (Mackey, Shane "Cletus VanDam" Vendrell and Ronnie Gardocki) each go to a pre-determined meet up point to deliver Lem to a coyote and secure his safe passage across the Mexican border. Vic and Ronnie are tailed by Kavanaugh and his one underling, so Shane goes to meet Lem first. At this point, Lem says that he doesn't want to go to the goat farm, that he would prefer to go to prison, but somewhere outside of LA, where he has some chance of not being shanked as soon as he gets to his cell. Shane, thinking that Lem will eventually give up the Strike Team for all of their misdeeds if he goes to jail, is justifiably conflicted. The options (sans goat farm) seem to be:
- Lem goes to jail in LA, gets knocked around for a bit and then is swiftly killed.
- Lem goes to a federal penitentiary elsewhere in the US, holds strong for a while, but is eventually killed or rats out the Strike Team to get reduced time.
- Lem rats out the Strike Team, goes into witness protection, and Vic, Shane and Ronnie go to jail, where they will soon be killed.
- Shane goes to his car and returns to Lem's car with a sandwich. After giving Lem the sandwich, he drops a live grenade (stolen from the Salvadoran gang) into Lem's lap and walks away.
By the last episode of the series, Vic -- ever the master manipulator -- has found his way out of it all. By taking down a high-ranking member of a Mexican cartel who was attempting to make inroads to dominating the LA narcotics market, he secured a deal with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for a job (after being forced to retire from the LAPD with no pension for his... shall we say, antics?) and full immunity for every last thing he has done outside the confines of the law.
Well, this sounds sweet, but it ends like this: Vic Mackey, once the star detective of the streets of LA, is sitting behind a desk in a suit typing up bullshit reports 40 hours a week for 3 years. His ex-wife and children went into the witness protection program, due to her general fear of him. Lem is dead. Shane -- who in the final season is on the lam with his family after getting caught attempting to kill Vic and Shane after they attempted to kill him when they found out he killed Lem and also didn't say anything but just watched when they killed a Salvadoran gang kingpin who they thought killed Lem -- killed his pregnant wife and young boy via narcotics overdose and then blew his brains out. Due to Vic's immunity deal and the extensive amount of acts he confessed to to cover his ass, he implicated Ronnie in enough shit to send him away for life.
No badge, no honor; just a desk job in some governmental bureaucratic organ, punching keys all day, going home and waking up for more the next. Mackey's deal is exactly what he wanted in life, but without everything and everyone he cared about, and is thus the perfect comeuppance, though after 7 seasons of getting used to his extrajudicial ass kicking, you kind of feel sorry for the guy.
And yet, in that final scene with Mackey sitting at his desk, wearing his tie, finally coming to terms with every sordid thing he's done, the true brilliance of "The Shield" shines through again. It makes you wonder: Was this all an elaborate backstory for that random bald guy you work next to? And what sort of crazy backstories might your co-workers have?
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Quick note on Rahm Emanuel
Today has been rife with coverage on White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's degree of influence in the Oval Office. See this, this, this, this, this and this (from a week ago). No real comment on this at the moment, but after seeing all of these articles and the accompanying pictures of Emanuel, one thing stuck out in my mind: Boy, does he look like Vincent Curatola, the actor that plays Johnny Sack on The Sopranos. Photo evidence:
And hey, they even share similar anecdotes:
- Phil Leotardo: Jesus Christ...that's like forty grand. You gotta be fuckin' kiddin' me, John.
- Johnny Sack: Am I smilin'?
- Johnny Sack: You either deliver that prick to my door, or I will rain a shitstorm down on you and your family like you have never fucking seen.
- Johnny Sack: You know somethin' Ralph, not only are you a thief, you're a lying fucking prick. I should've let Tony chop your head off a year ago.
- Rahm Emanuel: [You liberal activists are] fucking retarded.
I rest my case. Rahm Emanuel = Johnny Sack.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Welcome to Calyzstan
Well, here it is: my initial foray into the writing side of the blogosphere. As such, this first post is obligated to be a meta-post. Blogging about blogging. I can't promise that this will be the last post in this vein, but maybe it will be. Later on, more (or perhaps less) substantial matters will appear, and blog about them I shall.
At any rate, I've been getting more interested in blogs lately, so I figured it was high time for me to try my hand at blogging. So far, so good.
I initially envisioned that this site would be called www.calistan.blogspot.com. Turns out that someone already has this domain. And you can see for yourself what great things they have done with this. After a brief panic (how could I possibly think of a new name for my blog?!) I looked into WordPress. Yes, I admit it; rest assured that I never posted there. Flash forward five minutes and presto, I tweaked the name a bit and am now the arbiter of www.calyzstan.blogspot.com. Welcome.
A brief note on the name. Throughout parts of my younger years I have been referred to as "Cal" or "Cals"/"Calz." The nickname of "Calvin" has also been thrown around (by one person), but I can attest that none of these are actually my name. This lineage also produced the term "Calistan," and its current spelling of "Calyzstan" I believe reflects the proper pronunciation best. For clarification, that's Cal (as in Cal Ripken Jr.) -istan (as in Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, or Kyrgyzstan -- sorry, Kazakhstan). This will most likely be a point of confusion going forward.
The significance of naming this blog after an old one-off nickname came to me a couple of hours ago while eating dinner at The Spotted Pig in New York. Perhaps it was the cheeseburger and shoestring fries, or maybe it was the Old Speckled Hen on draft that got me thinking that this would be the right name for the blog I was soon to give life to. The idea as I recall now was that the blog would be my domain of sorts, or my territory. Given that "-stan" derives from the Persian word for "place of," I figured that Calyzstan fit the bill.
As for the content of this blog, it will be an assortment, a mish-mash, a potpourri, a minestrone blog soup, if you will. I intend to post an "eclectic" mix of content ranging from what's going on in the world to what's going on in my life. Not too descriptive and purposefully vague? You betcha. Future posts will speak for themselves.
At any rate, I've been getting more interested in blogs lately, so I figured it was high time for me to try my hand at blogging. So far, so good.
I initially envisioned that this site would be called www.calistan.blogspot.com. Turns out that someone already has this domain. And you can see for yourself what great things they have done with this. After a brief panic (how could I possibly think of a new name for my blog?!) I looked into WordPress. Yes, I admit it; rest assured that I never posted there. Flash forward five minutes and presto, I tweaked the name a bit and am now the arbiter of www.calyzstan.blogspot.com. Welcome.
A brief note on the name. Throughout parts of my younger years I have been referred to as "Cal" or "Cals"/"Calz." The nickname of "Calvin" has also been thrown around (by one person), but I can attest that none of these are actually my name. This lineage also produced the term "Calistan," and its current spelling of "Calyzstan" I believe reflects the proper pronunciation best. For clarification, that's Cal (as in Cal Ripken Jr.) -istan (as in Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, or Kyrgyzstan -- sorry, Kazakhstan). This will most likely be a point of confusion going forward.
The significance of naming this blog after an old one-off nickname came to me a couple of hours ago while eating dinner at The Spotted Pig in New York. Perhaps it was the cheeseburger and shoestring fries, or maybe it was the Old Speckled Hen on draft that got me thinking that this would be the right name for the blog I was soon to give life to. The idea as I recall now was that the blog would be my domain of sorts, or my territory. Given that "-stan" derives from the Persian word for "place of," I figured that Calyzstan fit the bill.
As for the content of this blog, it will be an assortment, a mish-mash, a potpourri, a minestrone blog soup, if you will. I intend to post an "eclectic" mix of content ranging from what's going on in the world to what's going on in my life. Not too descriptive and purposefully vague? You betcha. Future posts will speak for themselves.
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