I was very, very drunk...

 "Bruce Springsteen," she said, as an opener.
 She chose well, because that's the two word phrase most likely to get me to prick up my ears and stand to attention, after "free porn!" and "more beer?"
 "...I don't get it," she continued. "Whenever I hear him, I just think 'Give the man a Strepsil."
 Now, I'm used to getting shit for being a Springsteen fan.
 I'm used to getting shit from people who think he's an "80s act," and I'm used to getting shit from people who think "Born in the USA" is about patriotism.*
 So I'm no stranger to defending my fandom, and at the time, I rolled with it, with some good grace, not least because I respect the person who was texting those thoughts to me.
 Being a Springsteen fan requires some fairly specific socio-economic conditions, in my mind. You have to be poor enough to know what it's like to be poor, but smart enough to know what it's like to imagine NOT being poor.
 These criteria do not include, for the record, people who are middle class, went to uni and became poor, and now think they are "poor" as a description.
 That's not poor.
 Poor is having worn a high-viz jacket more working days of your life than not.
 Poor is knowing that you can eat or smoke, and you'd better figure out which one you want most.
 In possibly my favourite passage in his entire work, Springsteen explains the issue with typically astute stoicism.
 The song is called "Racing in the Street," the title a deliberate nod to Martha and the Vandellas. The melody is, similarly, a nod to the Crystals, singing "And Then He Kissed Me," although the piano refrain from that song has been slowed to the point that it is no longer a celebration and has become an elegy.
 Against this background, Bruce sings that "Some guys? They just give up living. They start dying little by little, piece by piece. Some guys come home from work and wash up, and go racing in the streets."
 That's all of working class life, in a line.
 Whatever you do, after your shitty job is over, whether it's going to the pub, whether it's reading the classics, whether it really is racing in the streets, you have to have something that makes the rest of your life bearable. Without your own personal salvation, it's all for nothing.
 With that in mind, I'm watching a documentary on Amy Winehouse, who I wasn't a big fan of.
 And she, in turn, is saying she didn't like Ella Fitzgerald.
 I'm sure there were people Ella didn't like.
 Ultimately, however, it doesn't matter who you like, or what you like, or what it means to others.
 Find something that makes the rest bearable. Good music is good. Funny jokes are funny. Bad music and not-funny jokes aren't worth it, but the beauty of life is that nobody will ever fully agree on what's good, what's bad, what's funny, and what isn't.
 Let's just all have fun with it. Find a thing you like, and that keeps you sane, whether it's Amy Winehouse, Ella Fitzgerald or Jack Daniel's.



*It isn't.

Superheroes - Idiots in Tights.

 I've been doing that thing again; y'know, thinking whilst watching TV.
 It's never a good idea.
 I've already discussed how the day-to-day living of my life makes me feel like I'm automatically better at other peoples' jobs than they are. A recent example is from KFC. I don't know how much Kentucky Fried Chicken paid the person who came up with the line "There's a little bit of the Colonel in every one of them," but you could have paid me less money to come up with something better.
 "Something better" in this case being "anything that doesn't make you think that KFC food contains bits of elderly corpse."
 In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I only noticed that line in passing in an ad the other day. Having just looked up the ad on Youtube, it turns out that the line is referencing the many cooks employed by KFC, and that by following the Colonel's recipes, you could say there's a little bit of the Colonel in every one of them. Which makes me think about cannibalism AND sodomy, so I still think I could write a better ad.
 Anyway, my "I could do better" mindset has begun leaking out of reality and bleeding into fiction, recently.
 I guess it started with "Skyfall," in which Bond goes rogue to protect Judi Dench, and takes her to his old, remote house in the highlands.
 I'm not one to argue with fifty years experience in shooting people and banging models with funny names, so I'm hesitant to say I'm a better spy than Bond.
 What I AM going to say is: Really?!
 That's it?!
 That's his plan?!
 I would have hoped MI6 trained its people a little better than that. When your master plan involves re-enacting Straw Dogs with a couple of septuagenarians, you might not be the sharpest operative in the business. If you ever find yourself in a situation where your assets are "two pensioners and a shotgun" and your opponent's assets are "Apache gunship full of mercenaries" you might want to reconsider pretty much every decision that has led you to this point. Bond, it turns out, is a fucking idiot.
 Same thing with Batman.
 Batman is trained by the League of Shadows who are, when analysed, the worst ninjas in the world. (I'm not sure if the League of Shadows is an actual league, like in football, but if it is then the Himalayan branch would definitely be fighting relegation somewhere in the Autoglass division.)
 First of all, this is an organisation that is trying to influence the running of the world, covertly. Why the fuck do they do it from up a mountain in the arse end of China?! It's not like you can spring into action when it's a three day hike to the nearest paved road. Deploying highly-trained ninjas should really never have to involve hiring a minicab.
 Not that they can be THAT well trained, because the film implies that their chief techniques are to get people high and dress alike. They'd presumably develop massive penis envy at even the ropiest branch of Fitness First.
 "What do you train with? Weights? Smith machine? Nautilus?"
 "Nah, big jug of LSD and some pyjamas, mainly..."
 Of course, Bruce Wayne wouldn't have been able to destroy the place had they not kept a frankly "asking for it" amount of gunpowder right in the middle of the dojo, for some reason. There must have been somewhere else to put it, surely? Do ninjas not believe in sheds?!
 And then there's Iron Man. I watched that again, recently, and noticed something that's been driving me crazy ever since: Before he flies off for his boss fight with The Big Lebowski, Tony Stark tells General NotCheadle to "Keep the skies clear," before having a badass faceplate-closing, turn to camera moment...
 ...And then smashing a hole through the roof of his garage.
 Seriously, go back and watch the movie. Instead of leaving the garage he is standing in via the actual exit - which he his seen using earlier in the film - he just flies straight up through the roof and smashes a big hole through it.
 Why?! Why would you do that?! There is a demonstrably easier way to leave than blasting a big hole in your living room floor. Even when he's as far as the living room, he then has to presumably blow another hole in his roof, or fly through the window. Either way, he's going to be putting in a call to the insurance company in the morning for absolutely no fucking reason. (Probably the same insurance company that just got through sorting out that fire at the League of Shadows.)
 Tony Stark is supposed to be a genius. He can build a flying battle suit that travels faster than the speed of sound, but he doesn't have a clicker for the garage door, apparently. It's baffling.
 In summation, I'm a better spy than James Bond, I'm a better ninja than anyone who works for the League of Shadows, and I'm better at flying an Iron Man suit than Tony Stark.

 ...Why can't I get a [better] job?!

Guns DO Kill People. (So do maniacs.)

 Having a fairly sterling crack at ruining the holiday season, a man reportedly walked into a primary school in America today and shot a bunch of people.
 Although this is a horrible thing to happen, it's depressing that it feels barely newsworthy. "Mass shooting in America" is such a common opener that several newscasters use it as a way of saying "Hello."
 To say American gun politics is complicated is laughable. Basically, everyone can have guns, and you're a Communist if you argue with that.
 My personal views on gun control in the states are a little more nuanced. Whilst I think that a blanket "let 'em all pack heat" policy is probably unwise, I would, in all honesty, probably buy a gun if I lived in America, purely because I don't want to be at a disadvantage. There are quite obviously a lot of crazy people in that country, they're all armed, and I would want to have something to defend myself with that wasn't punching if one of them opened fire at me. I honestly do have some sympathy with the viewpoint that if everyone had a gun, there would be fewer spree killings.
 I also, for the record, feel that there would be no spree killings at all if they worked harder at the whole "don't give the crazies firearms" end of things, but, again, that makes me a liberal, homosexual baby-killer in the eyes of about 50% of Americans.
 The inevitable non-debate will start in the next few days, and at the end of it, nothing will be resolved, but I've been wondering if perhaps America isn't having the wrong debate in the first place.
 The (gun)ship has sailed. There will never be a way to put America's ballistic genie back in its bottle. There are so many guns in America that there will effectively always be guns in America, and there's no point in trying to change that now.
 Except that that shouldn't matter.
 Because what nobody seems to notice is that there's a more fundamental question to answer, here: Why is everyone going so fucking crazy?!
 It may sound flippant, but it seems that there are some psychological issues that really need to be addressed in all sections of American society.
 We've already seen that postal workers and high school students seem prone to fits of murderous violence, and I'm intrigued to see what the background of the latest spree killer turns out to be.
 Something appears to be deeply, inherently broken in the national American psyche, and gun ownership doesn't really factor into it.
 As an illustration, look at Moscow. A city where there are more guns than people, and a higher percentage of alcohol-per-head than the Pogues annual concert at the Priory.
 Despite everyone being drunk and armed (~450,000 guns to ~400,000 people, fact fans) Russia as a whole features only ONCE in the top 45 results for spree killings in the "Workplace/School/Political/Religious" category of so-called "Rampage Killers." America, by contrast, has 12 of the top 45 results, including six of them in the top fifteen "workplace" killings. That's pretty astonishing, considering that the playing field consists of every nation on Earth.
 To stick with the statistical sample above, in terms of the top fifteen non-specific rampage killers (ie: people who didn't go into their office/school/church and who just went crazy wherever the mood took them) Russia crops up twice, and admittedly claims the top spot for all of Europe. However, that particular top-scoring massacre took place in 1925, which means that Russia had a period of 76 years where nobody shot a bunch of other people in a random location.
 This is, I should stress, Russia as a whole. Moscow, where the gun-per-head concentration is through the roof, doesn't even rate a mention.
 Neither does Switzerland, a country with an exceptionally high level of gun ownership. (They score about the same as Russia on the spree-killing stats.)
 Clearly, access to firearms is no barometer of the likelihood that a spree killing will occur in any given nation.
 So, once again: What the fuck is wrong with Americans?
 I don't have an answer, for once. I don't have a glib, ill-thought-out hypothesis or a silly idea.
 I just think a lot of bloodshed could be avoided in the future if Americans could work out what kept driving these people over the edge, and try to nip it in the bud.
 Or, y'know. Do the sensible thing and not sell lots of guns to people who are noticeably deranged.

Happiness Ruins The Blues...

 A little over a hundred years since it was first reported in the wild - on a lonely train platform by a bemused white journalist - the blues seems to have finally vanished from the popular music scene.
 Sure, there are the odd traces of blues DNA left in almost everything from Kanye West to the X-Factor, but real, honest blues music played by well known contemporary artists is a thing of the past.
 It wasn't always this way; any major band of yesteryear you can name owed a lot to the sound of poor black American men, from the Rolling Stones (named after a Muddy Waters song) to Led Zepplin (named after something Ringo Starr said, but we'll ignore that) to Beatles tracks like "Revolution."
 There was a time when any guitar hero worth his plectrum was steeped in the blues, from Jimmy Page to Jeff Beck to Joe Walsh. (It also helped, apparently, if your name began with "J".)
 Even as late as the 1990s, Eric Clapton was a major global star, and went triple-platinum with the blues covers record "From the Cradle."
 So what went wrong? Times change, granted, but something as important to the foundations of modern music as the blues should surely still be making its presence felt, right?!
 Maybe it's that everyone is happier and living longer.
 Look at the first people to record the blues: poor, disenfranchised, discriminated against, often with some sort of notable medical ailment. If you heard of an artist called Blind, Limbless McGee or Balding, Toothless, Arthritic, Impotent Jones, there wouldn't be much doubt about which section of Fopp you'd find their records in. The blues was a genre for people who had it almost cartoonishly hard in life. Poverty, borderline slave-labour in cotton fields, social injustice, an early grave - these were the expectations of the healthy, let alone people like Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell, Cripple Clarence Lofton (who actually began life as a tap-dancer, because the only thing more lacking in 1930s Mississippi than good eye care was a stringent enforcement of trades descriptions legislature), Peg Leg Howell, the list goes on and on.
 These days, nobody has it that hard. Even people with physical ailments (Jeff Healey is blind; Dr. John had his finger shot off in a bar fight) have modern medicine to rely on. Nobody is as utterly miserable as black people living a hardscrabble existence in the depression era South - nobody is even as miserable as the average person was in the 1950s, when bands like the Stones were coming together and artists like Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters were big news in the states.
 Nowadays, things are easier and people are happier. Even Eric Clapton has settled down late in life and had children, meaning that he hasn't made a good record since... Well, since the 90s. His last three efforts were an overproduced covers album, a duets album with J.J. Cale on which he contributed only one impossibly twee song about his kids, and the album "Back Home," a record so bad that I only listened to it once because I couldn't afford to keep buying my speakers rape councelling.
 Other blues players are still out there, but they're usually at least seventy and never likely to trouble the charts.
 The overall happiness and progress of the human race is going to lead to a dearth of great blues performers. Eddie Boyd raged that he "worked five long years for one woman" who had the nerve to throw him out; the most John Mayer can complain about is that he spent five long months shagging Jennifer Aniston, something for which most men would willingly sell their souls.
 That brings me to another point: Selling your soul to the devil just isn't done anymore.
 For those who aren't aware, briefly, Robert Johnson, one of the earliest and most influential artists in the blues genre, was a talentless nobody who would occasionally hang around juke joints attempting to play harmonica. He disappeared for six months and when he returned, he was one of the greatest guitarists ever recorded. His music is still awe-inspiringly complex, often involving Johnson simultaneously playing two tunes on the same guitar. He died at the age of 27 (don't they all) under mysterious circumstances.
 Son House, a contemporary of Johnson's, made a passing remark in 1966 that Johnson had "sold his soul" to learn to play, and from this throwaway metaphor, a legend was born that Johnson had met the Devil himself at a crossroads at midnight, and struck a Faustian bargain to obtain his supernatural playing ability.
 Which probably isn't true, according to everything we know about reality, ever.
 Still, Son House's initial comment - taken as intended - has weight. Johnson must have studied night and day to get that good, just as Jimi Hendrix would years later. (Hendrix would, according to friends, take his guitar everywhere, including to the movies.)
 Nobody is doing that kind of thing in the modern world, for two reasons.
 One, as already explained, we're all happier and better adjusted than we used to be. The shut-ins and loners of the world are fewer and farther between, and therefore there are fewer people who will at any one time be obsessively learning an instrument as their only means of recreation, and two: Even if there are still obsessive, lonely people, there's no longer such a thing as an "only means of recreation." In the 21st century, all anyone needs is a computer and a wifi connection and you can amuse yourself with all kinds of things for hours upon end. Dedication to one single hobby is basically a thing of the past, not to mention the fact that tormented, howling, unrequited love - the foundation of so many great blues songs - can usually be patched up by ten minutes on youporn.
 This is why there has been a slow dying-out of the blues-influenced guitar god. Fewer unhappy people means fewer blues musicians. Fewer blind people means fewer blues musicians and more unwanted labradors. The ready availability of the internet and all its distractions means fewer dedicated music students and, ironically, more blind people.
 With the improvement of living conditions for all people, increased tolerance and the march of technology, we're never going to get good quality misery again. Which is probably for the best, but in it's own weird way, it kinda gives me the blues.

Five Horrible People Behind Heart-Warming True Stories

 Every so often, I pitch an idea to Cracked.com, and every so often, they politely decline it or ignore me totally. In the spirit of this quaint tradition, here's one I didn't even bother trying to pitch, but still wanted to write.

 Anyone capable of even a little bit of critical thinking knows that "based on a true story" at the start of a movie doesn't mean the same thing as "This is all completely true, we swear."
 Sometimes, however, the events in popular films are so completely contrary to what actually happened that film-makers would be better off with a title card that said "Here's some shit we decided might have happened."
 Such as...

 5. American Gangster.


The Movie: Denzel Washington stars as real life drug dealer Frank Lucas. Having worked his way up from a mere limo driver in the underworld hierarchy, Lucas uses a combination of brutality and strategic thinking to dominate the heroin trade in 1970s New York.
 An intelligent, business savvy black man, Lucas is able to out-plan the competition and obtain his heroin direct from South East Asia, smuggling it in the coffins of dead G.I.s, whilst using his calm, philosophical exterior and the dismissive racism of the time to remain under the police radar.

Stupid Reality: Whilst all movies employ a "pinch of salt" mentality when claiming to be based on the truth, people who knew Lucas - or, indeed, any of the principle characters involved in the story - have put the movie's accuracy rating at a healthy "one percent." That's an estimate from people intimately involved with the real events the movie is based on. It also means "American Gangster" is probably less accurate than "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."
 Starting his life in the criminal hierarchy as a humble "guy-who-robbed-bars-at-gunpoint," Lucas was described by associates as a brutal, impulsive and functionally illiterate flunky.
 Rather than the suave, contemplative and sympathetic figure epitomised by Denzel, the real Lucas succeeded in crime because he was the nastiest rat in the shit-house. Not only is there no evidence of his ever using coffins to smuggle drugs, but most contemporaries agree he simply wasn't smart enough to come up with the business model he is credited with. The only source for these facts about Lucas' life? An interview with Frank Lucas from a few years ago.
 Turns out violent heroin dealers from the slums can't entirely be trusted. Who knew?


4. Braveheart. 

The Movie: Mel "he wasn't crazy yet" Gibson plays Scottish folk-hero William Wallace, a simple man who wants only the quiet life until, typically, he is PUSHED TOO FAR. Atypically, he then instigates a national uprising and begins a war that eventually sees Scotland gain independence. (Apparently, there are some occasional wars that aren't caused by Jews.)
 Wallace is  martyred in an emotional scene before he sees this come to pass, maintaining his stoical dignity and everyman demeanour even in the face of torture.

Stupid Reality: Also, he was a pumped-up giant who committed a slew of war crimes.
 Seriously.
 Whilst Mel Gibson stands a normal 5' 10", most scholars agree that in reality, Wallace was a giant, estimated to stand at an absolute minimum of six-feet-six. When the script for the movie mentions that Wallace is rumoured to be seven feet tall, it's not actually kidding.
 Also, he was far less a noble savage forced to take arms, and more a savage savage who liked taking arms off of other people. At the shoulder. With a big fucking sword.
 After the battle of Stirling Bridge, Wallace - whose forces had routed the English - personally skinned the corpse of the Scottish treasurer and had a long strip of his hide made into a strap for his sword.
 Following this victory, Wallace invaded England and was reported to commit acts of ethnic cleansing, his men raping and murdering anyone they came across with glee. He was also said to burn down schools with children inside, and have monks drowned for his entertainment.
 One can only assume those scenes were extras on the DVD.
 Wallace has spawned a thousand Scottish tattoos, remembering him for patriotic slogans like "How can I be guilty of treason when England is foreign to me?"
 His other famous line, "Because Fuck Monks And Children!" has yet to catch on.


3. Erin Brockovich.

The Movie: Julia Roberts plays Erin Brockovich, a spunky female lawyer, because for a few years in the early 2000s, approximately 30% of our entertainment involved spunky female lawyers. 

                                      Not all of them were hot, and not all of them made the sequel...  


 After getting a job as a legal secretary, plucky single mother Erin notices a file on a small town where there are a disproportionately high number of cancer cases, and, through her amazing talents of hard-headedness and large-boobedness, manages to sleuth out the cause: A local conglomerate poisoning the water table and, by extension, the people of the town.
 She then champions the cause of these poor downtrodden folks and eventually brings the evil corporation to justice.

Stupid Reality: Alright, fair enough, Erin Brockovich wasn't an illiterate heroin dealer who burned children alive like the other entrants on this list.* But the happy ending of the movie is far from accurate.
 In the film, Brockovich's street-smarts lead to the case of the townspeople being considered in private arbitration, which means that it is reviewed by a judge or judges without the need for a trial-by-jury.
 This is fine in theory, but legal scholars have begun to fret that the rise of private arbitration runs the risk of creating a two-tier legal system and rampant cronyism.
 In the case of the Brockovich trial, the judges who arbitrated were wined, dined and taken on cruises by the lawyers for the conglomerate that poisoned the town, which does tend to put paid to the idea of impartiality.
 A lot of the residents of Hinkley, California were aghast at the story portrayed in the movie. Far from a happy ending, many of them had to wait months for their settlements - without ever receiving the interest that had accrued - and felt that their compensation was nowhere near high enough. And some claim to have never received their money at all.
 Residents have even attempted to sue their own lawyers for, in layman's terms, "doing a shitty job."
 Still, at least the company that was poisoning the water has been forced to mend it's evil ways, right? Not according to a 2010 article it hasn't, no...


2. Bonnie and Clyde.

The Movie: "They're Young, They're In Love, And They Kill People," proclaimed the tag-line to the sexy, devil-may-care crime movie with the tragic ending.
  Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow (played with ridiculous attractiveness by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty) embark on a Robin Hood crime spree, never harming the innocent or robbing the working man. They're playful, good looking and really don't mean any harm, only killing in self defense and at one point taking playful pictures with a kidnapped lawman. Sort of like "The Beverly Hillbillies," but with more larceny.
 Eventually, hubris and the harsh nature of the world catches up with the young lovers, and their former lawman hostage, enraged at the ignominy of his treatment, tracks them down. Betrayed by one of their own, the unarmed lovers are cornered and share a final, passionate glance before being torn apart in a hellish, unending maelstrom of gunfire.

Stupid Reality:  To say that the real-life experiences of depression-era outlaws were grittier than the movies make out is like saying that the Holocaust was less fun than Julie Andrews made it seem.
 Clyde Barrow, whose first arrest came from not returning a rental car on time, was a killer long before he met Bonnie Parker, having beaten a man to death in prison after the man repeatedly raped him. Embittered (for some strange reason) upon his release, Barrow began a one man war with the forces of law and order in Texas, seeing every crime he committed as an act of personal revenge on authority.
 And the whole Robin Hood aspect? The Barrow gang were responsible for the shootings of nine lawmen, as well as a smattering of shopkeepers, who were killed for items such as "twenty-eight dollars and some groceries."
 As for the glamour of outlaw life, the gang's notoriety left them afraid to approach public areas, meaning they invariably bathed in cold, outdoor streams and ate around campfires, if at all.
 Having narrowly escaped capture by the awesomely named Sheriff Smoot Schmid (sheriff Smoot Schmid sold sea shells by the sea shore on his days off, fact fans) the two murderous hobos were finally brought to ground by Frank Hamer, who was far from the bumbling victim the movie portrayed.
 A big, powerfully built man who was semi-retired at this point, Hamer was a legend in Texas for doing things his own way, cracking heads and getting results. He was known for his disdain for authority and an obsession with his own personal ideas of justice. Before Barrow and Parker, he had personally shot fifty-three suspects, and been injured in the line of duty seventeen times.
 That's right. Bonnie and Clyde, who were the bad guys, were taken down by Dirty-fucking-Harry.
 Hamer had never met the couple before his posse killed them, but far from being the un-armed sweethearts hollywood gave us, Bonnie and Clyde were found to be in possession of machine guns, shotguns, rifles and pistols, and a few thousand rounds of ammunition. Of course, by the time these weapons were discovered in the back seat of their car, the couple had been shot so many times that the coroner couldn't find a way to keep the embalming fluid in the corpses.

 
1. The Hurricane.

The Movie: Much like the song Bob Dylan wrote about the same subject, The Hurricane is a story of racially motivated injustice in 1960s America. Denzel Washington (again?!) plays Rubin "The Hurricane" Carter, a young black boxer on the fast-track to the middleweight title.
 Having already been wrongfully jailed for attempting to defend his friends from a pedophile, Carter is all set to put his past behind him when the spectre of racial discrimination rises again, seeing him first denied his rightful place as the world champion, and then arrested for brutal murders that he had nothing to do with.
 Imprisoned but unbowed, Carter spends years fighting the corrupt white system, becoming an icon of racial injustice, before mounting a last-ditch appeal that sees him exonerated of his crimes, finally allowed to walk free after nearly twenty years of wrongful imprisonment.

Stupid Reality: First off, Carter wasn't on a fast track to anywhere, much. Although a ranked middleweight contender, Carter was already past his prime and slipping down the rankings by the time of his fight with middleweight champ Joey Giardello. Giardello won the fight not by deignt of racist judges, but with the classic boxing trick of "handing Rubin Carter his ass for fifteen straight rounds." Giardello sued the movie producers, who were forced to admit it was bullshit and pay him off.
 As for Carter himself, he was far from the embattled saint depicted on screen. He had spent time in juvenile detention, but not for protecting his friends from pederasts. He was instead convicted of "protecting" a man from his own wallet and wristwatch in a mugging - mugging being one of Carter's hobbies. He assaulted and robbed numerous people, black and white, with impunity.
 Whilst spending time in detention centres, he was frequently noted for his habit of blaming everyone else for his own wrongdoing. Even when caught red-handed in a misdeed, he would always strenuously protest his own innocence and claim he was the victim of various conspiracies against him.
 In June of 1966, two black men - one short and stocky, one tall and thin - entered the Lafayette bar and grill in New Jersey and shot three people dead. Witnesses say the shooters left in a white car. Rubin Carter was subsequently pulled over whilst driving his white Cadillac, and, when police recognised him, he was immediately LET GO.
 Far from being discriminated against for his race, Carter was let off the hook because of his celebrity.
 As reports became more detailed and specified that the shooters had left in a white Cadillac with butterfly tail lights, Carter was stopped again (still driving his white Cadillac - which had butterfly tail lights) and arrested.
 In the car were Carter (a muscular 5' 7") and his friend John Artis (who was taller and thinner.) Also in the car were a shotgun shell and a .32 caliber pistol round. Both a shotgun and a .32 were used in the Lafayette shootings.
 Convicted and sentenced, Carter began a long campaign of protesting his innocence, eventually leading to a re-trial a decade later. This time - with two black jurors in attendance - Carter was found guilty again.
 During the period of his re-trial, incidentally, Carter was released on bail just long enough to savagely assault a female supporter in a quibble over a hotel bill.
 Carter was eventually released, as in the movie, due to the efforts of a Canadian religious sect that, in reality, Carter has since severed all ties with. His convictions were never oveturned; it was merely decided that a third trial, twenty years after the fact, was not in the public interest, and that Carter should be released on the basis of time served.
 If all of this weren't damning enough, during his re-trial, Carter was offered a deal: Take a polygraph test. If he passed the test and it agreed that he was innocent, the result would be included in his defense. If he failed the test and it made him look guilty, it would be ignored.
 Carter still refused to take the test.
 Also, Denzel Washington REALLY needs to start screening his parts a little better.




*That we know of.

Be Careful What You Write.

 I've been a cigar smoker since I was eighteen.
 Like pretty much everyone who turns eighteen and isn't Amish, there's a sudden thrill of new things that you're actually, legally allowed to do.
 In fact, when I was eighteen, you could still do a lot of things that you can't do now, and one of them was "smoke in a bar."
 So I took up cigar smoking, because cool people did it. Y'know, like Wolverine from X-Men.
 I probably looked fucking ridiculous.
 I probably still do.
 But I was surprisingly gratified to find that I really enjoyed it. This wasn't something I suffered through for the sake of affectation. I liked it, I still like it, and I still do it.
 I could bang on and on about why it's so great, but I won't. Cigars are just a thing that I'm into.
 Which is why I was browsing around related things on the internet earlier, and came across something in the "I can't add much to this, it's just funny" column, similar to my recent post about Sly Stallone's press release.
 This is a quote from Cigar Afficianado magazine, in 1993.
 I want to stress, this is a full five years BEFORE the Lewinsky scandal broke.
 With hindsight, though, it's fucking hilarious:

 "President William Jefferson Clinton may have comfortably adjusted to the ban on smoking in the White House--it seems he doesn't light up ... anymore. In effect, he hasn't been banned from enjoying a cigar, just smoking it. In this way he can avoid any accusations of inhalation, and he is still able to savor some of a cigar's more relaxing elements."


 Smoke if you got 'em.