A Truly Tasteless French Ad About JFK Assassination

Published: September 25, 2013 2013

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You can always trust the French to come up with something truly tasteless about American culture, say, a new TV ad for a gambling company with the JFK assassination as a backdrop. Two Dallas cops are standing along the parade route when one bets the other that he can spin his gun like a cowboy, accidentally discharges the gun, and the bullet ricochet all over the place until hitting someone inside a passing open-air limousine, where a Jackie-O look-alike scrambles over the backseat as a Secret Service agent jumps the back of the limousine, and the bumbling cops points to a nearby building.

An interesting reinterpretation of an iconic moment from American history that still prompts raw emotion in people, as the 50th anniversary of the assassination is on November 22, 2013. I wouldn’t be born for another six years, but the assassination deeply impacted my parents as their first wedding anniversary took place time. Like many significant events witnessed on TV, they remembered where they were when it happened. For my father in particular, and many older white Americans in general, this was the moment when the American dream got flushed down the toilet and the country went straight to hell.

Here are my favorite pop culture reinterpretations of the JFK assassination.

Red Dwarf

This British science fiction comedy TV series, “Red Dwarf,” has the intrepid crew going back into time to accidentally prevent the JFK assassination from happening. Most Americans remember JFK as being a great president because he got assassinated. If he had survived to complete his term, people might have remembered his administration as being no better or worse than the Jimmy Carter administration. The Red Dwarf crew takes an older, washed-up and jaded JFK back in time for him to pull the trigger to assassinate himself from behind the fence to restore his place in history.

The Watchmen

I was at WonderCon 2009 when the opening montage for “The Watchmen” movie, based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore, got revealed for the first time, where a series of reinterpreted American scenes from the 1940’s to the 1980’s included the superheroes with Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changing” playing in the background. The JFK assassination takes place with The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) pulling the trigger from behind the fence. The visual effects and the music made for a stunning montage.

The X-Files

From “The X-Files” TV series came the episode, “Musings of A Cigarette Smoking Man,” which explains how the Smoking Man as a young man became a key player in so many conspiracy theories about aliens and UFOs. His role in the JFK assassination was setting up Lee Harvey Oswald to take the fall by being in the wrong place at the wrong time and firing the fateful shot from a storm drain. As the older Smoking Man once told Agent Fox Mulder, he had watched presidents die.

Can We PLEASE Shut Up About The New Bay Bridge?

Published: September 18, 2013 2013

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The next time I hear the words, “Bay Bridge,” on the radio, I’m going to run over an orange cone in a construction zone on the freeway. Bad enough that the bolt fastener problem got talked about endlessly for months on “The Ronn Owens Show” during the morning commute and the news roundup during the evening commute. A week-long drumbeat to the closure of the Bay Bridge over Labor Day weekend was especially aggravating. But was it really necessary for KGO Radio to host their news desk on Yerba Buena Island—where the eastern and western spans meet—for the week following the bridge reopening on Labor Day?

I’m not sure if I will ever drive over the new eastern span anytime soon. Since I live and work in the south bay, I rarely have to cross the bay. The last time was a few years ago when I did a temp job in San Mateo and drove over the San Mateo Bridge to visit my father in a Sacramento, taking the 580 out to the I-5 in the central valley to avoid paying the bridge toll at the Benicia Bridge on the 680 in the north bay.

The last time I was on the Bay Bridge was the day of the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. I was working with my father in construction at the time. We visited a job site in Walnut Creek, crossed the Bay Bridge after lunch to visit a job site in San Francisco, and came home in time for the earthquake. We saw on TV the collapsed section of the Bay Bridge that we drove over hours before, which started the 24 year ordeal to replace the eastern span. The job isn’t done yet: still got bike lanes to add to the western span and the dismantling of the old eastern span over the next few years.

Now talk on the Bay Bridge has shifted to arguing over renaming the western span to the Willie L. Brown, Jr. Bridge. Tim Montemayor of “The Monty Show” screamed over the radio on Saturday that the state legislators gave in to being “blackmailed” by the NAACP, which is pushing to rename the bridge after the former mayor of San Francisco. That’s a bit of stretch even for conspiracy nuts. If you’re naming the bridge after Willie Brown on the western span, name the eastern span after Governor Jerry Brown and call it the Slick Willie/Moonbeam Jerry Bay Bridge.

Let’s shut up about the Bay Bridge and talk about something else for a change. The BART contract negotiations will rear its ugly head when the 60-day cooling off period imposed by the governor expires in October. The union is threatening to have the longest strike since the 1970’s if they don’t get a 23 percent pay increase, and BART management is threatening to run the trains during a strike. Although all the screaming and hollering might get tiresome, no one will be talking about the Bay Bridge outside of the traffic reports.

Watching Joan Jett At The Mountain Winery

Published: September 11, 2013 2013

Joan Jett Unvarnished 2013I’ve been teasing my friend about going to see K.C. and the Sunshine Band and the Village People at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga next week, as KGO-Radio (810 AM) was giving away tickets for a week (his response was “No!” and “Hell no!” to seeing the 1970’s bands). When I checked the ticket prices, I noticed that Joan Jet & The Blackhearts was playing on Saturday, 9/7, and found a pair of reasonably priced tickets. We didn’t hesitate to see her play this past Saturday.

I was never a big music fan growing up. My older brother and his Fleetwood Mac albums got kicked out of the house when I was still a young child. My mother bought me an old record player and a set of Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley 45’s from the Goodwill Store. My father’s truck only had two radio stations, country and talk. That didn’t help me as a confused teenager in the early 1980’s, listening to the Beatles when everyone else was listening to Michael Jackson, Duran Duran and Boy George. I did pick up Joan Jett’s single at the time, “Crimson & Clover,” but I didn’t become a fan until I heard “Bad Reputation” in the first Shrek movie.

Getting to the Mountain Winery was a special challenge. Although the directions for getting there from the 85 was clear, it was less clear once we got into the mountains above Silicon Valley. We caught the right turn from Highway 9 that was a sharp U-turn on to the road that went past the winery, but missed the similar left turn into the winery that was also a sharp U-turn. That became obvious when I drove past a sheriff cruiser and the uphill drive went downhill from there. After making a wide U-turn at a four-way stop, we drove back through the entrance to start the steep climb with multiple turns on a narrow road. This was rough driving for my 1999 Ford Taurus that caused the engine to overheat and the coolant to boil over.

The Mountain Winery is literally on top of the mountain with a spectacular view of Silicon Valley. More so after the sun goes down and the street lights turn on to surround the tall buildings of downtown San Jose in a brilliant sea of orange street lights. Despite the views, we couldn’t escape the wildlife. Flies aimed for the eyes and nose to lay their eggs. As the evening cooled down, a bat came out to eat the flies. Marijuana smoke and alcohol fumes whiffed through the air.

The opening act was Survival Guide with Emily Whitehurst and Jaycen McKissick. Their music was quite different with a techno beat. Jett dived into a set list that featured a selection of songs from the new album and the classic songs she acknowledged that we all love and know so dearly, performing 18 songs in 90 minutes almost non-stop. The audience was mostly baby boomers who outgrown being young punks. A memorable performance.

The Nightmare Continues At Amy’s Baking Company

Published: September 4, 2013 2013

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For some strange reason, CNBC has made the fifth episode of “The Profit” unavailable on their website unless you have a cable TV subscription. That’s frustrating since I only watch TV online. Fortunately, Hulu had the episode, “LA Dogworks,” available for viewing. Marcus Lemonis tries to turn around a dog daycare center but walks away when the verbally abusive owner refuses to change. One of the reasons why I love watching this show is that Lemonis isn’t afraid of walking away from a bad deal.

Hulu followed that episode with the episode of “Nightmare Kitchen” that featured Gordon Ramsey walking away from the verbally abusive owners of Amy’s Baking Company. I’ve heard about this episode when I read news articles about the owners that are still having a social media meltdown, facing legal issues and retaliating against the critics months after the show aired. As I watched the episode, I couldn’t believe the number of F-bombs that the owners tossed at everyone who disagreed with them. I’m surprised that a “South Park”-styled counter wasn’t keeping track of how many times the F-bomb got mentioned.

If you watch enough episodes of “Restaurant Impossible,” where celebrity chef Robert Irvine spends $10,000 USD to turn around a failing restaurant, most owners are people who never worked in the restaurant business, paid too much money for their restaurant and have no clue on what to do next. There’s more to running a restaurant than opening a new store front, hiring staff and cooking food. Many of these people would have been better off investing their money into a stamp collection.

No surprise that Amy’s Baking Company falls into this all too familiar pattern.

The husband, Samy, a former house builder who gets out of the business long before the housing bubble popped in 2007, asks his wife, Amy, what they should do next. Her dream was to open a restaurant. He sunk a million dollar into the new business. She ran the kitchen, he ran the front desk. Somehow they managed to keep the business going for many years until a blogger writes a bad review that accused them of serving frozen pizza and business falls off dramatically.

Expecting Ramsey to use his reputation to fix their reputation from the “online bullies” boggles the mind. The frequent F-bombs at customers, stealing tips from the staff and serving undercooked frozen foods aren’t something that a celebrity chef’s reputation can paper over. As the cameras revealed on “Nightmare Kitchen” and other reality TV shows, the problems that business owners face are not always external. If they can’t look in the mirror to see the true source of their problems, they and their business will never change for the better.