Day: November 22, 2004

I’ve been playing a little GTA: San Andreas, and I gotta say, if there’s one thing I’m pretty stellar at, it’s fighting fires. I must be the only firefighter in Los Santos who has bought 4 homes just out of money earned from freelance firefighting.

Once you get to Level 12, you become fireproof. Not explosion-proof, just fireproof. This will be handy if I ever get the flamethrower…

But while you are fire proof, you can still catch on fire. This enables my new hobby- I wreck my car, which catches on fire, and then blows up, spreading flaming debris all over the street. Then the fire department comes, and parks in front of the car as they try to hose it down.

While they are busy, and partly blocking the road, I set myself ablaze. Then I walk to the cars blocked behind the fire truck and set them on fire with my own flaming carcass. If I can get enough cars on fire, enough of them blow up to keep the firefighters perpetually busy.

Soon the entire street is covered in piles of flame. Cars start blowing up without my help because they cannot escape the street inferno. A car blows up every ten seconds. People run around in a panic, but there is nowhere to go. I have created hell!

Sort of ironic since I am a retired firefighter. I guess it’s like Dennis Hopper in Speed, since he was the retired bomb squad guy who took up making bombs as a second career. Except it’s almost nothing like that.

Ellen Feiss is the girl in the Apple “switch” commercial who became a celebrity because of her stoned delivery.

She tells a story about losing her essay on her dad’s PC… her eyes are bloodshot. Yeah yeah, Ellen claims she was on cold medication at the time, but most people still think she was stoned.

• Ellen Feiss Fan Club
• ellenfeiss.net

Web link of note: Ellen Feiss
(At http://www.ellenfeiss.net/)

I was just reading about Bernhard Goetz, the ‘Subway Vigilante,’ in a chapter in The Tipping Point, a book on epidemics of memes. I was reminded of Frank Miller’s Batman: the Dark Knight Returns.

Miller’s famous Batman story almost single-handedly ushered in a new era of comics for adults, and I have read it many times. Since I first read it in the early 1990’s when I was in high school and didn’t read the news much, I didn’t catch a number of the cultural references. I had no idea about the crime wave that was hitting most of the country, which would crest in the late 1980s / early 1990s (for those who are feeling nostalgic, don’t worry, I have a feeling the insanely high crime rate will be back soon).

Anyway, one such reference: In a subway scene, young hoodlums drop a hand grenade into a doomed woman’s purse. The news reports the story in a single sentence. As Batman mania hits the streets, an unemployed wrestler is inspired by Batman’s vigilante methods and attacks a “client” in a restaurant, dressed as Batman. Another, Taxi Driver-inspired maniac hears the backwards lyrics to Stairway to Heaven and goes on a shooting spree in a porn theater. This time, both incidents are blamed on the Batman by the media (no that porno theater shoot-out had nothing to do with Batman).

In another reference, the psychologist of The Joker analyses the Batman and how his personality predisposes him to violent situations, and how The Joker is a victim of his Batman-infested environment. Much as people at the time made excuses for Bernhard Goetz and saw patterns in his life that led up to this particular incident on the subway.

The epidemic of crime in New York in the 1980s cannot really adequately be described. I remember my parents telling me about how rotten the subway was. But when I finally rode the subway, it didn’t seem so bad. The difference? About ten years- they had ridden it in the mid 1980s, and I rode it in the late 1990s, after several waves of highly successful “clean up” initiatives.