Memorial Day? Veterans Day 2010 Leads To Searches For Memorial Day

A large number of people seem to be confusing Memorial Day with Veterans Day 2010, which is today in America. As of this writing, "Memorial Day" is the second most searched for trending term on Google. It also has related searches of veterans day, veterans day 2010, labor day, remembrance day, and something called anzac day.

But today is Veterans Day 2010.  Memorial Day is held on the last Monday in May.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs describes Veterans Day 2010 in this way:

The Veterans Day National Ceremony is held each year on November 11th at Arlington National Cemetery . The ceremony commences precisely at 11:00 a.m. with a wreath laying at the Tomb of the Unknowns and continues inside the Memorial Amphitheater with a parade of colors by veterans’ organizations and remarks from dignitaries. The ceremony is intended to honor and thank all who served in the United States Armed Forces.

The Veterans Day National Committee also selects a number of regional sites for Veterans Day observances throughout the country. From stirring parades and ceremonies to military exhibits and tributes to distinguished veterans, these events serve as models for other communities to follow in planning their own observances.

And in case you don't realize it, today is November 11th, 2010.  Today is Veterans Day and is a legal Federal holiday.  While Federal offices are closed, state and local governments may or may not be closed, and the same is true for schools.  For example, schools are closed in New York State and in the Oakland Unified School District in Oakland, CA.

It's best to check your individual school location and district.

Star Trek In Academy and Oscar News: Previs in the Making of Star Trek

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences always has an interesting press release to send along, but this one takes it.

It's not often Star Trek (where Zachary Qunto played Mr. Spock and is in the photo by Indywire) is the focus of an Academy presentation, but this time, J.J. Abrams movie version of the popular television series and favorite of this blogger is the subject of an event on Thursday, November 18th. Here's the release:

Visualize Star Trek at The Academy

Beverly Hills, CA – The Science and Technology Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will present “Visualize This: Previs in the Making of ‘Star Trek,’” a program exploring the previsualization (previs) process in the digital age, on Thursday, November 18, at 8 p.m. at the Academy’s Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood. Writer-producer Damon Lindelof will use sequences from the 2009 Academy Award nominee Star Trek to demonstrate how innovations in previs are influencing the filmmaking process.

The evening will feature a panel of Star Trek crew members, including David Dozoretz, senior previsualization supervisor; Brian Pohl, previsualization supervisor; Roger Guyett, visual effects supervisor; Marc Evans, production executive; and film editors Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey. Joining the panel will also be production designer and Council member Alex McDowell and previsualization supervisor Chris Edwards. Lindelof will lead a discussion on the challenges and opportunities that come with this technology-driven process. In addition, the program will include film clips and behind-the-scenes footage demonstrating how previs was used to shape several key scenes in the film.

Previs is an evolving pre-production process that now incorporates 3D animation tools and virtual environments, enabling filmmakers to fully explore their creative visions through the use of visual references for complicated film shots and sequences long before production begins.

In addition to producing Star Trek, Lindelof is co-writing the film’s forthcoming sequel as well as the feature Cowboys & Aliens, directed by Jon Favreau, due to be released in 2011. Lindelof also was a writer and executive producer on the television series Lost.

Star Trek received Oscar® nominations for its visual effects, sound editing and sound mixing, and won an Oscar for Makeup.

Tickets for “Visualize This” are $5 for the general public and $3 for Academy members and students with a valid ID. Tickets are available for purchase by mail, at the Academy box office (8949 Wilshire Boulevard, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.), or online at www.oscars.org. Doors open at 7 p.m. All seating is unreserved.

The Linwood Dunn Theater is located at the 1313 Vine Street in Hollywood. For more information call (310) 247-3600 or visit www.oscars.org.

Whatever you're plans are for that day, if you're in LA, alter them to see this one-of-a-kind program.

Cowboys' Jason Garrett Blasted By Terrell Owens On The T.Ocho Show

Terrell Owens has the last word on the Dallas Cowboys coaching situation.

Jason Garrett, the Dallas Cowboys Interim Head Coach, and former offensive coordinator was blasted by Owens as being a poor choice to replace former Cowboys Head Coach Wade Phillips.  

On his new show, The T.Ocho Show on Tuesday, November 9th, Owens, a Cowboys wide out two years ago, and now a Cincinnati Bengals Wide Receiver, along with show co-host Chad Ochocinco, asked Chad about the firing of Phillips by Cowboys Owner and General Manager Jerry Jones.

Here's the video:

Chad said he expected Phillips to be fired because he was not meeting the high standards The Cowboys set for themselves. Terrell Owens responded with words that cut like a hot knife through butter:

"From my experiences there, it's not Wade Phillips. But how do they think Jason Garrett is going to right the ship? No. He was the offensive coordinator? Just put this in perspective. Last week Green Bay scored 45 points. So obviously, if they're scoring touchdowns, then they're kicking off to the (Dallas) offense. They only mustered-up 7 points. Jason Garrett is the offensive coordinator. So if he's not putting points on the board, it's not Wade Phillips fault." 

Under Jason Garrett Terrell Owens posted his lowest season performance totals of his career in 2008, with 1,052 yards and 20 touchdowns, then Dallas released him after that year.  With the Bengals, Owens is already at 770 yards and 7 touchdowns.  Owens is correct: Jason Garrett is not the solution.

The problem is Jerry Jones thinks Garrett is the solution, and has become spell-bound by Jason's confident speech and tone.  But confident speech and tone don't win football games; good coaching does.  This blogger agrees with Owens that Garrett isn't the answer:



But Garrett's in now, and on a short time frame to make a difference. He must engineer a way to beat The New York Giants. Only that will save his job, and it's a big first test coming up.

If he fails that, forget about the rest of the season and forget about Garrett as the Cowboys coach for 2011.

Julia Mancuso Still Gunning For Lindsay Vonn On And Off The Course

Julia Mancuso, the downhill skiing racer who's sexy Playboy photos and very provocative lingerie business (remember "Kiss My Tiera"?) was the talk of the 2010 Winter Olympics,...



...is in the news again. After winning two Olympics Silver Medals, Mancuso sets her sights on the World Cup overall title, and fellow downhill competitor and nemesis Lindsay Vonn, who's won the title three times over the past three years.

What's interesting, is while Mancuso says she doesn't have a "beef" with Vonn, she, at the same time, feeds the idea that one exists. In the New York Times, Mancuso says:

We are just so different and we come across as different, and maybe that's what this is all about. The differences make it easy to compare. But I respect Lindsey as an athlete, and we’ve never had any real conflict, so to speak.

"So to speak."

It's that line which keeps the assertion that Vonn and Mancuso do have a personal conflict alive. If Julia had clipped her sentence - just avoided saying "so to speak" - that may have killed the speculation that a problem exists.

The best thing for Julia Mancuso to do is concentrate on her skiing and the propagation of her sexy image and related products.  

Lindsay Vonn can generate her own publicity.

Jean Quan Is Oakland's Mayor-Elect; Don Perata Considers Lawsuit

The Oakland Mayor's Race is both over and heating up yet again. First, big congratulations to now-former Oakland Councilmember and Oakland Mayor-Elect Jean Quan, who won the Ranked Choice Voting mayoral election by 50.98 percent to 49.02 for Former State Senator Don Perata. This after all absentee and provisional ballots were counted today by the Alameda County Registrar of Voters, Wednesday.

Jean becomes Oakland's first female and first Asian mayor.  That, alone, is massively cool.

The outcome has rankled the Perata Campaign, which has put out strong signals that it plans to file a lawsuit to have the vote count "reconsidered."

As Perata Campaign Manager John Whitehurst has said to the media

"It's a travesty that a candidate that wins 78 percent of the precincts and leads by more than 11,000 votes (after first-choice votes are counted), with a margin of nearly 10 percent, loses the election. In any other contest it would be a landslide win, not an election loss. Ranked-choice voting is an injustice, and Oakland will pay the price."  


But that's the media spin, and add to that the Perata camps assertion that Don won "all of the African American precincts." The Perata Campaign and supporters are putting out all of the signs that point to only one conclusion: a lawsuit. None of my sources would deny that possibility.  Moreover, the Perata camp is issuing a press release that contains a blog post from Lance Williams that, until now, has not been mentioned in any of the media coverage.

The title of the blog post says it all: "Confusion about Oakland’s voting system may have affected election."  And these three paragraphs are key to its message:

One out of every 10 Oakland voters showed signs of confusion about how to vote for mayor using the city’s new ranked-choice voting procedure, according to a computer analysis of returns obtained by California Watch.
The confusion was so great that it may have flipped the final results of the extraordinarily tight mayor’s race between former state Senate leader Don Perata and city council member Jean Quan, the analysis shows....
More than 5 percent of voters marked the same candidate for their first, second and third choices, the analysis shows. But a voter can only vote for a candidate once, so for these 4,900 voters those second and third choices went uncounted.

The other factor upsetting the Perata campaign is that  Quan and Councilmember Kaplan openly "gamed" the Rank Choice System.  Now, from this blogger's perspective, not making voting deals with the other campaigners was a massive error.   The Perata Campaign should have fought fire with fire, but openly chose not to do so.  The result is Jean Quan wins, but in doing so sets a dangerous precedent for future Oakland elections.

Now, Jean's the target, and if she does not do well as Mayor (which I personally don't think will be the case because I'm going to be on her 24 and 7), the same voting games that got her in, will be the ones that cause her to be out in four years.

That written, Quan can be a great Mayor of Oakland - perhaps the best we've had for a host of reasons I will get into later.  It will be exciting to see what she does.  Installing a new Chief Administrative Officer to replace Dan Lindheim will be her first major official action.

Mayor-Elect Quan Does Not Have A Mandate

With all of this, Mayor-Elect Quan must be sure to realize that she does not have a mandate; she did not score the majority of popular votes.  That should be of concern for her.  The Mayor-Elect must - and I think will - be open to people.  Moreover, Jean must - and this can't be overstated - develop a very thick skin. She must work to jettison the idea that people who criticize her aren't in her corner.  Not so.  She's Mayor of Oakland, now, and that means she's got a PR-issue to deal with every day.

As Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris told me, "Zennie, there are a thousand games you can play in City Hall every day.  The question is which one you should play?"   What Elihu was saying to me is you always have to watch your back, figure out where the arrows are coming from, and then have a plan to strike back, if it's worth doing so.  If you have the right temperament , the game's fun.  Jean's got to develop that to be successful.

But that's all to come.  Right now, the Perata camp is seething.

Stay tuned.

Stabenow Silent on Tier 5 Again! Students Riot in London over Austerity Measures

In her appearance on MSNBC’s The Ed Show Wednesday, Debbie Stabenow was silent on Tier 5 again. Once more, the 99ers are being completely ignored in favor of Washington focusing to extend the UI filing dates for the more recently unemployed Americans - those who have had their benefits, instead of those 99ers trying to survive on ZERO UI checks for more than 8 months.

Senator Stabenow (D- MI) along with 10 other Democratic Senators, waited until the very last minute before the Senate adjourned for 6 weeks back in August - to introduce S3706 (Tier 5) originally. Then when the Senate returned - S3706 was sent to committee to die, before the 99er NOVO movement forced some action to be taken. Unfortunately, the action Stabenow promised the NOVOs ended up being a lame half-effort by Stabenow and Whitehouse (D-RI) that was - you guessed it - at the very last minute before the Senate adjourned again for 6 more weeks back in September. It was the token Republican Senator George LeMieux (FL) who objected to Debbie Stabenow’s request for unanimous consent for her Discharge Resolution in order to bring the Americans Want to work Act to the Senate floor before the election.
[Stabenow's interview begins at 8:32 in the clip below]



The term ‘Washington is broken’ does not even begin to cover what is wrong with our government. Congress is also heartless, cruel, stupid, selfish and completely void of any moral constitution or conscience.

It is totally incomprehensible how in America our highly overpaid leadership, from the lowest ranking member of the House up through the President himself could allow millions of people to go hungry and homeless for months on end and refuse to even acknowledge the plight of the 99ers - let alone refuse to fix the problem.

Students Riot in London over Austerity Measures
We could learn well from our brethren across the pond. Tens of thousands of students marched through London on Wednesday against plans to triple university tuition fees, and violence erupted as a minority battled police and trashed a building containing the headquarters of the governing Conservative Party. Organizers said 50-thousand students, lecturers and supporters demonstrated against plans to raise the cost of studying at a university to 9-thousand pounds a year - three times the current rate - in the largest street protest yet against the government's sweeping austerity measures.



The students in the video above are not even hungry, homeless or hurting people - they just want affordable education for a better life.

The 99ers are struggling to survive. Washington is responsible for deregulating Wall Street, allowing greedy bankers to ruin our economy then Congress bails them all out. Washington is responsible for rewarding those who ship our jobs overseas by the millions. Washington rather spend trillions on killing overseas then spend hundreds of billions of dollars improving living conditions on foreign shores - but Washington does NOTHING to help the American victims of the economic carnage directly caused by the failure of Congress to do their jobs right. (Right being to work in the best interests of the American public)

I suspect that very soon hurting Americans will rise up and send a clear, unmistakeable message to Washington that the poor will not be ignored any longer. After all - if American Protestors happened to get arrested, at least they will be fed and have a warm place to sleep for a few nights, more than many have at this point.

If you are waiting for Tier 5 to save the 99ers - don't hold your breath - as Washington couldn't care less about impoverished, hurting Americans. Not before the election, not during the Lame Duck Session and certainly not when the Republicans take over next year.

The Walking Dead: New Series on AMC

The Walking Dead is a new series on AMC about, you guessed it, the walking dead.  I am a huge fan of zombie movies and so when I saw promos for this show while watching a movie on AMC I was immediately excited.  I have always had a fetish for post apocalyptic scenarios and so I went to the website where they are streaming the first episode.  I was expecting a cheesey show with sub par acting and costumes, which I would have been fine with because I'm such a fan of zombies.  But I was pleasantly surprised to find that the show is surprisingly well made.  The show is directed by Frank Darabont who directed The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.  The dialog and plot is well written and from what I've seen in the first two episodes the series is going to be a great opportunity for zombie fans to get their fix of post apocalyptic goodness every week.

The show airs Sundays on AMC at 10/9 Central.  For more information on the show and to check out the first two episodes streaming online you can go to the shows website at

http://www.amctv.com/originals/The-Walking-Dead/

John Bobst