The 2009 Dumb-Ass Awards!

Scritzy’s Topic of the Day is Listing to Starboard, and our subject: The 2009 Scritzy’s TOD Dumb-Ass Awards!

So many things have happened this year that deserve callouts, I thought it only fitting to hold my own awards show. There will be no cheesy monologs, no mind-boggling entertainment, no acceptance speeches. Just what needs to be said. And sometimes there will be more than one award given for each category. (Since I’m running the show, I make the rules. Heh.)

So without further ado … *drumroll*

Category: Politics

The nominees are:

Congress for … oh, never mind. I don’t think any explanation is needed here.

President Obama for sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong and wasting the taxpayer’s money by having a beer party for a cop and the person the cop arrested.

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee for awarding the prize to a president who hasn’t even been in office a year when there were others so much more deserving.

The White House Security Detail for allowing two legends-in-their-own-minds to crash a party. Thanks for making the rest of us feel really safe about who gets in.

And the winner is …

Congress. Just because.

Category: Media

The nominees are:

Perez Hilton for picking fights, Twitting slurs and general dumb-assery.

Rush Limbaugh for believing something he read on the internet was true.

Television news in general for stopping coverage of everything else in the world to focus on people waiting outside a hospital to see if Michael Jackson was really dead. Seriously? Seriously?

TMZ for two million zillion many stories about the late Michael Jackson.

And the winner is …

Television news in general. You think the coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death was excessive? Think again. The coverage of Michael Jackson’s death was insane. So many networks were scrambling to do tributes to the late Mr. J that Fox actually reran the “American Idol” episode that featured Michael Jackson’s music. Now that is some kind of stretch.

Category: Entertainment

The nominees are:

American Idol for letting Tatiana del Torro through to the Top 36, bringing her back for the Wild Card round and letting her have fifteen more seconds of fame on the finale. (Same goes for Norman Gentle.)

American Idol for replacing the grating and annoying Paula Abdul with the grating and annoying Ellen Degeneres.

Adam Lambert for his performance at the American Music Awards. Not because it was shocking, edgy or controversial — because it was unnecessary.

Kanye West for being Kanye West.

And the winner is …

A tie: Adam Lambert and Kanye West. Adam Lambert is a phenomenally talented young man, and there is no reason whatsoever for him to stoop to such antics. For all his talent, Adam is yet a bit naïve when it comes to how he presents himself. I hope he will learn from his mistakes.

As for Kanye West — Do I really have to say any more? Except maybe, “Dude! Get therapy!”

Category: Indiscretion

The nominees are:

Jon Gosselin (without Kate, plus Eight, or however many) for being such a prime example of stellar fatherhood. Insert eyeroll here.

Michelle Duggar and Octomom for continuing to have children for public consumption (and public assistance, in Octomom’s case).

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford for not knowing when to shut the hell up.

Tiger Woods for not knowing when to keep it zipped.

And the winner is …

Tiger Woods. This was a tough one, considering how Governor Sanford’s continuing babble about what he did roundly embarrassed his constituents. But Tiger Woods? The golden boy of golf, winner of green jackets, founder of children’s charities? Again, here we have a extraordinary talent who has possibly thrown away everything he (and his father, God rest him) worked so hard to achieve. Sad.

Category: Cringe-Inducing Websites

I feel a little bad about this category, because I find amusement in all the websites listed. Still, I sometimes come away from viewing them feeling as if I need a shower. Warning: These websites are not safe for work, children, the faint of heart or the easily offended.

And the nominees are:

People of Wal-Mart for pictures of people half-dressed, badly dressed, barely dressed and — in one case — dressed to impressed in a Speedo thong and headband as he goes riding off on his bicycle. (This guy is famous, by the way.)

Ugliest Tattoos for everything from pictures of nasty business to Jesus as a Pez dispenser [No. Just no.] to Patrick Swayze as a centaur.

Regretsy for showing that not all crafters are masters at their craft.

Encyclopedia Dramatica for holding absolutely nothing in the world sacred and for its, um, interesting vocabulary. Beware of clicking links. You might not want to go there.

And the winner is …

People of Wal-Mart. Because honestly, what you see is what you see.

Category: Famewhores

These people aren’t what I would call famous. They want to be. They feel a need to be. But if there is any justice in this world, they won’t be.

The nominees are:

Arthur Kade for having the biggest ego in the universe.

Tay Zonday for “Chocolate Rain,” one of the worst earworms ever recorded.

Tatiana Del Torro for being, as Simon Cowell so pithily put it, “a drama queen … desperate to be famous.”

Tara Gilesbie aka Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way (or as I like to call her, EbonyRavenWhatthehell), for “My Immortal,” the most execrable fanfic ever written. Yes, it’s several years old, but it’s still being read (and cringed over) by people everywhere. “My Immortal” has earned its own Encyclopedia Dramatica page.

And the winner is …

Arthur Kade. I daresay no one since Lucifer has reeked with such self-importance as does Kade. He calls his quest for fame “The Journey” and loves to be seen with hawt chicks in sort-of hip places. His videos are so embarrassing that I wonder if anyone besides him can watch them without yarking. He’s just gross. No other word for it.

Category: General Dumb-Assery

The nominees are:

Al Gore for the inconvenient truth of “Climate-gate.”

Sasha Baron Cohen for Brüno.

The Jackson Family for doing everything they can to cash in on Michael’s death.

Scritzy (that would be me) for being suckered into seeing Brüno.

And the winner is …

The Jackson Family. Especially Jermaine, who seems to think that his brother, St. Michael, has imbued him with all the wonder and goodness and awesomeness that the departed glowed with in life. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the weirdness Michael glowed with has been imbued as well.

I will, however, give myself the consolation prize for the two hours of my life I’ll never get back that were spent watching Brüno. That movie was so offensive that I wanted to put the popcorn bucket over my head so I wouldn’t be recognized when I left the theatre.

Since there are a couple more weeks left in 2009, there may be some dumb-assery yet to be seen. If there is, additional awards will be given at the end of the year.

Pax,

Scritzy

Sing Thee to Thy Rest: The Girl from Caledonia

Scritzy’s Topic of the Day is Unanswerable Questions, and our subject: no one seems to know.

On November 8, 1979, the US was still reeling in disbelief about the hundred or so hostages being held at the American Embassy in Iran. It was a nightmare that was to last 444 days, the hostages coming home on the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as President.

Sometime that November night, close to the intersection of Rte. 20 and Rte. 5 in Caledonia, New York, a young girl was shot and killed. Her body was found the next morning in a cornfield near the South side of Rte. 20.

In the glare of updates about the hostage crisis, an unidentified body found in a cornfield didn’t seem to rate much coverage.

Thirty years of coverage later, the girl from Caledonia is still unidentified.

She was young, somewhere between thirteen and nineteen; judging from the postmortem picture of her, I would guess around sixteen. She had shoulder-length wavy brown hair that looked as if it had been highlighted blond in front — what was in those days called “frosting.” The frosted area was in the process of growing out. She was small, around five-three. Her eyes were brown. She had no distinguishing marks, no previous broken bones. Her teeth had been neglected, and some were badly decayed. Yet she did not appear to have the hygiene of a runaway who had been on the road for some time.

Her clothing was not particularly unusual. She was wearing a boy’s plaid button-up shirt, tan corduroy pants, brown lace-up ripple-sole shoes. Around her neck was a choker of silver beads and three turquoise stones, two of which resembled bird fetishes. Clipped to her belt loops were two key chains: one was shaped like a heart and inscribed He who holds the Key can open my heart; the other held the key that fit the small silver heart.

She also wore a red nylon-lined men's windbreaker with black stripes down the arms, its inside label reading Auto Sports Products, Inc. Subsequent investigation revealed that the jackets were a one-time promotional gimmick, and there was no way of tracing where the jackets had gone.

The one oddity about her, considering that she was in Upstate New York in late fall, was that the girl was suntanned. Her tan lines showed that she had lain in the sun in a halter top. It was speculated that the girl had either returned from a vacation or had recently relocated to Caledonia from an area of warmer climate. Interestingly enough, pollen samples taken from her clothing were determined to have come from only four places: Arizona, California, South Florida, or Mexico.

While there were no witnesses to the girl’s demise, a waitress from a small dinner in Lima, New York, remembered seeing the girl the night before the murder. A truck driver said he saw her at a truck stop, trying to hitch a ride to Boston.

The above is nearly the sum total of knowledge about the girl from Caledonia.

How was she killed? One story posited that she was shot in the back by the side of the road; perhaps she was running from her attacker. Then she was dragged into the cornfield and shot in the head. Another report was that the head wound was inflicted prior to the back wound. A slug was recovered from the dirt beneath the victim; it was tested against hundreds of other bullets from guns seized by the police, weapons traced to places as far away as Canada, Europe, Mexico. All searches turned up empty.

The girl’s fingerprints were sent to the FBI. No match was found.

Since the Finger Lakes region of New York, where Caledonia is located, is near the Canadian border, there was speculation the girl could have been from Canada. No matches were made with any missing persons in Canada, however.

The murder has never been solved. Henry Lee Lucas confessed to it, but he confessed to everything. (He and his partner in crime, Ottis Toole, were in the area some months before the murder, however.) Another suspect was Christopher Wilder, a serial killer who was interested in racing. The Auto Sports Products jacket resembled a racing jacket, and Wilder was hiding from the police in the area around the time of the murder. He was killed by police, though, before they could talk to him. Others have claimed to be the girl’s killer. No one has ever been charged.

So why does the girl from Caledonia remain unidentified? Wouldn’t she have been missed at home, at school? Was she living with her killer(s) or was she just in the wrong place at the wrong time? She was attempting to hitch a ride with a trucker; was she running away or trying to get back home?

The reconstruction done by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is quite accurate, compared to the post-mortem photo — though I believe the reconstruction makes her look younger. The NCMEC has also done an age-regression, trying to give an idea what the girl may have looked like as a tween, perhaps in the hope that someone who knew the girl when she was younger will recognize her.

This girl likely spent the last minutes of her life in abject terror. What was she thinking as she was being taken to that cornfield on a cold night? Did she know what was going to happen to her? Did she make a last, desperate attempt to get away from her tormenter, only to be felled by a shot in the back?

Look at her face. Try to imagine what it’s like — that no one knows where you are or what’s about to happen. Or worse, someone does know — and doesn’t care.

Where were her parents? Her siblings? Her friends? Why hasn’t anyone come forward to claim her?

Thirty years and over 10,000 leads later, the questions remain unanswered.

Caledonia’s Jane Doe was laid to rest in Danville, New York. There is a marker at her gravesite that reads Lest we forget an unidentified girl. November 9, 1979. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

It’s sad to think that someone did forget her, and forgot while there was still time to do anything to save her.

I pray she is at peace.

Pax,

Scritzy

Hot August Scattershots

Scritzy’s Topic of the Day is Scattershots, and our subject: random rants and rumination.

A new washer and dryer were delivered to our house yesterday. Since my washing machine died well over a week ago, and I have laundry piled up to the ceiling, I welcomed the delivery.

But (why is there always a but?) the guys from the appliance store were unable to hook up the washer because the hot-water faucet had corroded. So spouse called a plumber. He said while the plumber was here, he’d get the condensation hose for the air conditioner replaced. (Spouse blamed the cats for the hose being broken. He blames the cats for everything, and he’s usually right.)

I believe the plumber arrived sometime around 8:30. I woke up briefly at that time, long enough to take my medication. Because I didn’t fall asleep until the wee hours, I dropped off again rather quickly. And because I took my medication and lay back down, I slept until 2:00 PM. Yes, you read that right.

I leaped out of bed, angry at myself for sleeping so late.

The plumber was still here.

Spouse was sitting on the basement steps to make sure none of the cats ran out the open basement door. I asked if the water had been turned back on, and he said yes. So I jumped in the shower, dressed and took the dog out. The dog desperately wanted to get into the plumber’s van. Try pulling a 70-pound dog in the opposite direction of where the mutt wants to go. It’s not easy.

After feeding the mutt his treat, I retreated to my office. About a half-hour later, I heard the basement door close. Spouse came back inside.

It was a little before 3:00. Spouse stood and debated whether or not it was worth going to work. He decided he would.

So God knows what the plumbing bill will be. At least he hooked up the washer and dryer. Once the basement floor dries out, I can go downstairs and try out the new machines. I never would have believed I’d be glad to do the laundry.

Oh, and since the air conditioning had to stay off for quite a while, the house is hot and muggy, just like outdoors.

* * *

Sometimes web designers go nuts. One of my favorite websites recently underwent a redesign, and the new page is cluttered and confusing. Hard to navigate. Hard to search. What on earth were they thinking?

Actually, I know what they were thinking. They wanted the website to look as close to its rival website as possible. Shades of my newspaper days: the paper redesigned its masthead so it would resemble a rival newspaper’s in hopes those grabbing papers at newsstands wouldn’t notice the difference. (Insert eyeroll here.)

* * *

School has already begun in my city. In the middle of August. When it’s hot as hell. For years the school district received parental complaints about school starting too early. Finally the school board relented and moved the start date to the last week in August (as it was when I went to school). Now suddenly the date is creeping backwards again. What gives?

I’ve never had much desire to get into politics, but I swear I sometimes want to run for a place on the school board. The board has goofed up so many things, broken so many promises, been so irresponsible with our tax dollars. Perhaps a fresh perspective is needed. And since I’m not a parent, ergo, I have no dog in that fight, I really could be a representative of the people, not of the school where my kid/grandkid/niece/nephew is enrolled.

I doubt I would be elected, though. I’m too opinionated. I’d piss too many people off.

Which could be exactly what is needed. Heh.

Pax,

Scritzy

Look Out, Helter Skelter ...

Scritzy’s Topic of the Day is Past History, and our subject: a weekend of terror, now forty years old.

August 8, 1969: It was a typical Friday for me, a thirteen-year-old fan of teen idol Bobby Sherman and of David Selby, portrayer of Quentin Collins on the Gothic soap opera, “Dark Shadows.” I wrote a letter to a friend, watched the day’s episode of DS, went on the weekly grocery-shopping trip with my parents and lamented in my diary that I missed Hal, a schoolmate on whom I had a crush. No doubt I stayed up late, as was my wont on Friday nights.

Across the country in Los Angeles, another thirteen-year-old called up her big sister and asked if she could bring some friends over for the evening. The older sister, whose name was Sharon, was eight months pregnant. Since she tired easily, she suggested that sister Debbie make the visit another time.

Deep in the night, as I slumbered, Debbie’s sister Sharon, three of Sharon’s friends and a teen only five years in my senior were brutally butchered.

Saturday, August 9, 1969: My diary entry expressed joy in discovering that a favorite television show, having long gone into reruns in syndication, was now broadcast on Saturday nights. If I watched the Huntley-Brinkley report that evening — and I usually did — I would have heard the news that actress Sharon Tate, hairdresser Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Folger’s boyfriend Voytek Frykowski and a young man named Steven Parent had been slain at Sharon’s home. (Sharon’s husband, movie director Roman Polanski, was in Europe at the time.)

I honestly don’t remember whether I heard about the murders on TV or read about them in the paper. But I do remember feeling a little creepy, because I knew who Sharon Tate was. She wasn’t a prominent star. But several years prior, I had read a story about the movie Valley of the Dolls; Sharon Tate had been one of the film’s stars.

That same Saturday, a couple who lived in the Los Feliz district of LA and the daughter of the wife were headed back home from Lake Isabella. The story of Sharon Tate’s murder was all over the radio. When the husband stopped at a newsstand to pick up a paper, the news dealer chatted with the couple about the murders. As far as it is known, that news dealer was the last person to see Leno and Rosemary LaBianca alive.

Other than their killers, of course.

Sunday, August 10, 1969: I noted in my diary that we — my parents, sister and I — had visited my grandmother. We stopped for an Icee on the way home.

On that same Sunday, Frank Struthers, the son of Rosemary LaBianca from her previous marriage, arrived home from a camping trip and found that his stepfather’s boat had been left out overnight. The shades were drawn over the windows; no one answered the door. Feeling uneasy, he called his sister, Susan, who in turn called her boyfriend, Joe. Joe and Frank found Leno LaBianca butchered in the living room. Rosemary was in the bedroom, and her body was not discovered until after the police arrived.

I don’t know if the murder of the LaBiancas made it to my city’s newspaper. It was probably a local-to-Los-Angeles story. Yet the murder of the LaBiancas bore some gruesome similarities to the Tate murders the night before. PIG had been written on Sharon Tate’s front door — in her own blood. Death to Pigs and Rise had been written on the LaBiancas’ walls. And on their refrigerator door, two words, the first of which was misspelled, that would become synonymous with the killings: Healter Skelter.

“Helter Skelter” was a song from the Beatles’ so-called White Album, a strange mélange of ballads, rock and just plain noise. “Revolution 9,” a virtual montage of bizarre sound bytes, was described by one critic as sounding like “a bad acid trip.”

But to a scruffy little guru named Charlie, “Revolution 9” and other songs from the White Album, together with verses from the book of Revelation in the Bible, were words of wisdom. There was going to be an Apocalyptic battle, Charlie told his family of followers, one that would pit the white man against the black man. The black man would wipe out the white race, but then — according to Charlie — would not know how to rule the world. Thus the black man would turn to Charlie to do the ruling. Charlie and his Family would be the world, and the black people their servants.

The name of the war, Charlie said, was “Helter Skelter.”

But the war wasn’t coming down fast enough. Charlie felt frustrated. He felt hassled by The Man. He decided he had to do it. He had to start the war himself.

And so on a sweltering hot Friday evening, Charles Manson sent some members of his Family — Charles “Tex” Watson, Susan “Sadie” Atkins, Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel and Linda Kasabian — out on an errand: go to the house at 10050 Cielo Drive and kill everyone there. Twenty-four hours later, Charlie took Tex, Katie, Susan and Linda, along with Leslie Van Houten and Steve “Clem” Grogan out on another jaunt, for the same reason: to kill. Tex, Katie and Leslie dispatched the LaBiancas per Charlie’s instructions.

Almost every criminal makes mistakes. Charlie’s mistake was to send Linda — a fairly new member of the Family, the only one with a valid driver’s license — along on his missions.

Though it took several months for the killers to be caught — thanks to Sadie’s loquacious bragging to fellow inmates while in jail for still another murder — Charlie and the Family were actually arrested on August 16, just a week after the Tate murders, for suspicion of auto theft. They were released when the warrant was found to be misdated.

Eventually, though, despite unbelievable bungling by the LAPD — a PR nightmare even episodes of “Dragnet” couldn’t erase — the killers were arrested and brought to justice. Linda Kasabian was the star witness for the prosecution. The trial lasted unbelievably long — its lengthiness no doubt exacerbated by the blustering of Manson’s defense attorney, Irving Kanarak.

Making the weirdness of the trial even weirder, Manson’s other faithful — corralled by Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme — kept a vigil outside the courthouse. “We’re waiting for our father to be set free,” they announced.

Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecuting attorney, fought for and obtained not only guilty verdicts for Manson, Atkins, Krenwinkel and Van Houten, but also the death penalty for each defendant. (Tex Watson, tried separately, was also found guilty and given the death penalty.) The California Supreme Court overturned the death penalty later, and the murderers were to spend life in prison.

Forty years later, all of those convicted in the Tate-LaBianca murders remain behind bars. Tex Watson, having converted to Christianity, runs a prison ministry. Susan Atkins, dying of brain cancer, has applied for compassionate release. Patricia Krenwinkel trains seeing-eye dogs. Leslie Van Houten, who was retried and convicted again in the late 1970s, tries constantly to get herself released from prison.

And, not surprisingly, Charles Manson is a ranting, remorseless, crazy old man.

It’s highly unlikely any of them will ever see the light of day outside the prison walls. Sharon Tate’s sister, Debra — the thirteen-year-old who wanted to spend the evening with her big sister — is the last remaining member of her immediate family. She fights with ferocity against any of the killers being paroled. Despite Tex’s Christianity and ministry, despite Susan’s plea to die with her family, despite Patricia and Leslie being “model prisoners,” Debra will battle until her last breath to see that the murderers remain incarcerated.

There are other members of the Family imprisoned for other murders. Of those, only Steve Grogan has been paroled. Parole for the others seems unlikely.

Squeaky, who remained loyal to Charlie long after the others had renounced him, pulled a gun on President Gerald Ford in 1975 — she said to bring attention to saving the redwood trees. (Another account says that she targeted Ford because of the Family’s hatred for President Richard Nixon; Ford was seen as continuing Nixon’s policies.) Was she acting on Charlie’s orders? Maybe not. But she had to know Charlie would be pleased by what she did. She was sentenced to life in prison.

And unbelievably — to my mind, anyway — she has made parole. Ironically enough, Squeaky will walk out on August 16 — forty years to the day since the raid on Spahn Ranch.

Even after all this time, the weirdness remains.

Pax,

Scritzy

I Won’t Be the One

Scritzy’s Topic of the Day is Don’t Go There.

And I won’t.

Maybe I’ll be the only blogger in the world who won’t write about what happened a few days ago.

But I won’t write about it.

Pax,

Scritzy