Just for the record: I don’t care what Arnold Schwarzenegger does with his private parts — that’s his business. It’s the public-policy hypocrisy that’s galling, because that’s our business. For example: vetoing gay marriage because it might somehow ruin the sanctity of his own. (And this from a guy who made his millions in gay-friendly Hollywood, too.) Even worse was the fiscal state he left California in, as detailed here by George Skelton. Please click and read that and then do some basic math:  by cutting the vehicle license fee, which was purely an election move, Schwarzenegger created a budget hold of $4 billion that grew into $6 billion annually. Multiply that by seven years and you get about $35 billion. Now, what was the size of California’s budget hole? About… $35 billion. So what did we get for our $35 billion? Enormous cuts to programs and services (most ruinously to our educational systems, especially the higher-education system that was once the pride of the world). Oh, and enormous ego gratification for the movie star who made it all happen.

Today, I got a contact lens. Not contact lenses, a contact lens.

Overall, my vision is good. I’ve had a very minor prescription for eyeglasses since I was 21, but I don’t wear them the glasses often because I don’t need to. At night or in dimness, things get a little blurry, so I wear them in the theatre, or to drive at night, but that’s about it.

The past few years, though, I’ve been  giving a lot of presentations — speeches or remarks, accompanied, sometimes, by Powerpoint. The glasses have been a pain because I can’t read with them on, and I can’t see the audience in the dim without them. So today I went to my optometrist and he prescribed one — one — contact lens. (So, in other words, I’m paying twice what I should for the little lens carrier.)

My optometrist is a large bearish man of what I take to be Russian extraction, with fingers the size of cudgels. So while I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of my sticking my fingers into my eye, I was less excited about him doing it. But everything went off without a hitch, and he said I proved to be a good subject for contact lenses. (Or lens.) One thing he did note as he swapped out about 500 different lenses until finding the right fit:  how very sensitive my vision is. A little too much adjustment this way and it was fuzzy, that way and it was smaller, the other way and I got a glowing 3D effect that reminded me of how much I hated “Avatar.” I was like the Goldilocks of contact lenses. In the end he got it right, but not before I was reminded again that I do have my own way of looking at things.

 I’m an admirer of Herzog’s films (see here and here and many other posts on this blog), and his documentaries are special treats. Like the Bush administration, Herzog never allows himself to be held back by the facts:  every insight is a product of his distinct imagination, delivered in his doomy Deutschland monotone. Herzog can imagine things we can’t; in his vision, nature is chaotic and insane, and to look animals in the eye is to address our continual war with them. (He also seems to think they are winning, or will win.)

For those interested in Herzog’s dystopian view and its mordant delivery, Slate has done us all a favor. They’ve compiled some of the choicest great moments in Werner Herzog voiceovers. (Although I’m sad that they couldn’t find a place for “Lessons of Darkness,” Herzog’s extraterrestrial look at the Kuwaiti oil fires set by Saddam Hussein, a film that’s an enormous shudder-inducing accomplishment.) But if you’re looking for a primer into the Herzog documentary method, Slate’s overview fills that function nicely.

Hm. Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul. Makes it really hard to decide which one I’d most like to see them nominate.

Last week when I was reading the international response to our extermination of the dangerous pest known as Osama bin Laden, I was sadly unsurprised to see so many British editorials bemoaning U.S. action. Winston Churchill, for sure, was having a very unpleasant day in his justly commodious afterlife. Somehow or other, the civilization he had bequeathed to his people, rescued from the evil dictatorship others were hell-bent on inflicting upon it, had turned into a nation of quislings.

Imagine, then, how thrilled I was to see this yesterday:  an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from Andrew Roberts, a British historian of World War II, apologizing for his countrymen, who seem far removed from the bulldogs of past glory. Quoting Churchill, who was chary of “the long, drawling, dismal tides of drift and surrender,” Roberts wonders whether the British “can be counted upon for much longer.”

It continues to astonish me that in some circles the sentiment carries on that we somehow did wrong by Mr. bin Laden. I can’t explain it, because I can’t understand it.

Proving once again that theatre is indeed popular entertainment, just gussied up.

The western world is filled with weight-loss cures. And how fitting it was that I found a certain special one yesterday that I hadn’t heard of.

Yesterday, you see, was International Monty Python Day. I hope you didn’t miss it. The day had me reminiscing about one of Monty Python’s most iconic characters, a character who every day here in America looms even larger, Mr. Creosote, who serves as a bigger and bigger role model for many of us. Here’s the scene that launched Mr. Creosote to fame:

Now, in what I can only assume is his honor, a company has introduced WaferThin weight-loss wafers. Oh, if only the thoughtless maitre d’ in the clip above had offered one of these and not the fatal chocolate variety!

Scouring our bookshelves for a novel to read with my soon-to-be-nine-year-old son Dietrich, I landed the other night upon The Mote in God’s Eye, a first-contact science fiction novel by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle that I’d read in 1976 when I was 13. I wondered if it was too advanced for him — and his almost-13-year-old sister flat-out said it was, even though she’s never read it — but I figured that it’s got lots of space battles, and aliens, and that ultimately we’d make our way through it as successfully as his older brother and I had done with Journey to the Center of the Earth when he was the same age. So we started reading it the other night.

When you’re reading old science fiction, you’re reading what I’ll call projected alternate futures, the sort of things that make up storylines on “Fringe.” The book is set in 3017, but it’s important to remember that in a way that isn’t just over a thousand years in the future — it’s more properly one thousand forty-three years since its writing. So the authors, writing four years before the introduction of the home computer,  and 11 years before the release of the first PDA, are commendably prescient when they write, “Rod Blaine scowled at the words flowing across the screen of his pocket computer” — although one could say that if we’ve got “pocket computers” already, a millennium before the setting of their novel, it follows that we’ll have something far more advanced in the far future. (Unless, paraphrasing Einstein, we’re fighting World War IV with rocks.) At the same time, if  Niven and Pournelle are thoughtful about technology (and weaponry and the military), here’s something they weren’t thinking through in 1974:

“Blaine was rushed down the elevator to the Governor General’s floor. There wasn’t a woman in the building, although Imperial government offices usually bristled with them, and Rod missed the girls. He’d been in space a long time.”

So, somehow, in the future the military returns to all-male service, despite 4,000 years, to date, of  women serving in various military capacities; or the current military service seen in Israel, the U.S., Russia and, I believe, most industrialized or post-industrialized nations; or the projected futures depicted in artifacts of popular culture such as the Halo and Mass Effect games and seemingly every James Cameron movie.  Acceptance is often driven by pop culture (by way of example, see:  interracial relationships, homosexuality, etc.). That very anachronistic point of view seems far more 1974 than 3017.

But then, the best perspective on the skewed time-reality of the book came from  Dietrich himself, who, when I told him that I’d read this book “in the 1970’s,” tittered and said, “The 1970’s? That’s like 300 years ago!”

Courtesy of the New York Times, here’s an overview of significant offerings on stages across the U.S. this summer — including an offering from my theatre company, Moving Arts, as part of the Radar L.A. festival in June. More on that to come later.