Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

The first screenshots are out for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which will be released in October (we”ve already pre-ordered it at Amazon).

And here”s what Rockstar is showing:

Hmm. Urban youths participating in a drive-by.

Another urban youth posing in front of his lowrider proudly holding his Mac-10.

Yet another urban youth, baggy pants down to expose his BVDs, hanging out in his troubled L.A. neighborhood.

So the game (set in L.A.) seems to feature African-American characters (and no doubt Latinos as well) as violent gang members. And it could be that the youth in the second photo above is the gun-toting ebony “hero” (the L.A. equivalent of Tommy Vercetti).

In Vice City, Tommy was out to kill Haitians and Cubans. In GTA3 it was mostly Italian mobsters on the other end of the guns. But come October, GTA will set its sights on America”s favorite minorities, which are also being protrayed as the worst kind of stereotype (bling-bling wearing, gun-toting, low-rider-driving gang members).

The GTA franchise has become one of the most successful video games lines of all time, with more than 30 million units of GTA3 and Vice City sold to date. And - with PlayStation 2 prices coming down and gaming still gaining in popularity - San Andreas will likely outsell them both.

Get ready for the joint press conference with Joe Lieberman and Jesse Jackson.

Our friends over at ajc.com have switched to the very consumer-friendly business model of making every visitor register for the site before they can view any content. Being pretty familiar with their old business model of publishing the entire newspaper online for free every day (and driving down subscriptions and sales of the print version), I guess they have to try something.

But I”d love to get a look at their new user database. I figure they probably have a few hundred thousand people “registered” at this point, and I”d imagine most registrations look a lot like the one I created tonight (my cookies got dumped, so in order to use the very fine set of RSS feeds That Yellow Bastard set up, I had to re-register):

First Name: YetAnotherFakeEmail
Last Name: ForTheAJC
Email Address (must be valid): yetanotherfakeajcemail@yahoo.com
Password: password
Year of Birth: 1915
Household Yearly Income: More than $100,000 (to get them excited)
Gender: Female
Street Address: 714 Hank Aaron Drive, Atlanta, 30315
Phone: 404-555-1212
How do you use the AJC: Subscribe 7 days (again, excitement for them!)
Tell us about your interests (check boxes): Each and every thing you asked me if I was interested in! What a great user I am for you to have! The advertisers will love me!
E-Mail newsletters you”d like to receive: All of them! Gimme! Wow, you sure do have a lot of newsletter subscribers - advertisers will love that!

I wonder if the AJC people have an intern who sits around all day just weeding the obviously fake registrations like this one out of their legitimate user data. Somehow I doubt it.

Word is that the State of Georgia revoked the registrations last week of about 77,000 vehicles “believed” to be uninsured. Note my use of quotation marks about “believed”.

I”m all for getting uninsured motorists off the road. Down in the “hood, I bet more than half of the Impalas and Delta 88s flying down Moreland Ave. have no insurance, and lord knows I don”t want them to hit me.

But there”s a potentially huge problem with what the state is doing. See, here in Georgia we have a fairly new law that says the state only recognizes you as having insurance if the DMV computers say you have insurance. You no longer have to carry insurance cards - mostly because they are legally meaningless now.

And your insurance company is responsible for telling the DMV computers that you have insurance. Gee, no chance for a problem there, huh?

I ran in to this issue firsthand in March when I went to renew the tags for my Maxima and the wife”s Santa Fe. As the clerk was processing my renewal, she stopped suddenly and told me there”s no insurance coverage showing on the Santa Fe, so she cannot renew my registration.

Apparently, this happens often enough that the DMV keeps stacks of instruction sheets at the ready to give to folks in my situation. She handed me a sheet and mentioned that my insurance company would have to fax in a declarations page in order for me to register. I showed her my insurance card to no avail.

She told me that what happens a lot of the time is that the insurance company will mistype the VIN number (gee, it”s only about 50 alphanumeric characters and insurance companies must only have to do it about 10,000 times a day - how could that happen?) when entering coverage information.

Thankfully, my insurance company - Progressive (highly recommended) - was on the stick enough to get a declaration faxed over (at 8:30 in the morning) within about 5 minutes.

After my renewal, I had to follow-up with Progressive to get them to re-input the Santa Fe VIN into the DMV computer, because despite having a declaration page in front of her, the renewal clerk could not actually update my insurance status. The fax only allowed me to get my registration renewed.

Today, I called Progressive to make sure the insurance information had been updated. They assured me it was (I”m going to double-check on the DMV site, however).

I guess I should be glad my birthday”s not in July. If I hadn”t registered in March, the state would still believe the Santa Fe is uninsured. The DMV says notices go out to people whose cars show up as uninsured (just getting a notice costs you $25), but considering I also had to change my address when I registered, I doubt we”d have even gotten a notice.

If you”re “believed” to be uninsured and you”re stopped by a cop, you”re subject to additional fines and your vehicle can be impounded.

So it”s quite possible that a person - such as myself - who is fully insured can have his or her tag revoked, car impounded and potentially go to jail for somebody else”s clerical or technical error.

Of course, the wife”s the one who drives the Santa Fe most of the time …

This from our “Nobody Will Get This But Lee, TCL & Scott” department:

I was enjoying a click-stream-of-consciousness through some blogs tonight that ultimately led me to a post on NewsDesigner.com dealing with how the Dallas Morning News handled the beheading photos of Nick Berg.

In that post was this seemingly-insignificant line:

So I clicked the link on his name, and sure enough, it”s that Rod Dreher.

Those of you who aren”t, in fact, Lee, TCL or Scott are probably asking yourself “who the hell is Rod Dreher?”

The short story is: Rod Dreher is my “arch nemesis”.

In one way or another, his existence has irked me for just about 20 years now. So, of course, he pops up again as I”m innocently breezing through some blogs.

Nemesis Phase 1: Beret Boy
It was a weekend night (circa 1985) at The Chimes and Dash Rip Rock was playing. I”m not sure who all was with me that night (other than Lee, who was always there), but we were all kicked back in one of the elevated booths, draining pitchers of beer and taking in the show like the cool cats that we were. Most Dash fans at the time took in the shows with a sort of subdued intensity. But out there in front of the stage appeared two or three people who seemed to think they were at a Sparks concert - dressed up in “trendy” clothes and flailing around in a high-energy dance that only kids who go to magnet schools learn how to do.

The leader of this group of losers seemed to be this one kid who flailed just a little faster and dressed with slightly more purpose - including a ridiculous beret.

“Who the f*ck are those idiots?”, I asked my guys. Lee tells me he recognizes the beret guy from one of his classes, that he thinks his name is Rod and we had gone to that weird “arts and sciences” school in north Louisiana.

“Well, he”s an idiot. I hate him.” was my response.

Rod the Beret Boy would become a fixture at Dash shows, always dancing like a magnet school moron and always irking me. I so dreaded seeing him walk in the door of The Chimes, Lee dubbed him my “arch nemesis”.

I figured the extent of my exposure to Rod the Beret Boy would be Dash Rip Rock shows, but I was wrong.

Nemesis Phase 2: J-School Jackass
After I went into journalism, I discovered that Rod the Beret Boy was also a journalism major. Actually, he was an obnoxious, over-cocky, irritating, loud-mouthed journalism major. I suffered through a class we were in together one semester, and then changed my schedule when he walked in to my “opinion writing” class the next semester.

His involvement with The Reveille is one reason I had no interest in writing for them. I did all I could to avoid Rod Dreher.

He won all sorts of student-newspaper awards for being such a cocky jackass, which pissed me off even more.

Then on the last day of the semester in which he was graduating (we are the same age, but he didn”t opt for the 6.5-year plan), Rod wrote an editorial in The Reveille that changed my opinion of him 180 degrees.

He wrote that anyone graduating LSU with any sense of ambition and any desire to make a good life for themselves should leave Louisiana the day after graduation, for Louisiana is a backwards, hopeless place that sucks the life out of anyone with talent and ambition.

Wow, I thought. He gets it. He just wrote exactly what I think about Louisiana. Maybe he”s an OK guy after all.

A week later, he took a job as the movie critic for the Baton Rouge paper.

Nemesis Phase 3: The Sellout
So Rod Dreher became the embodiment of the power Louisiana has to suck all life and ambition out of you. I hated seeing his byline in The Advocate (the Baton Rouge daily, not the national gay newspaper) during my last year at LSU, but I so despised him and his hypocricy, it was even more motivation for me to leave Louisiana.

Nemesis Phase 4: Undue Fame
I didn”t hear much about Rod Dreher for a few years, then one day I”m watching TV and a talking-head show is on. “Welcome Rod Dreher, a writer for the New York Post …” the host said.

“Oh, for f*ck”s sake,” I thought to myself. And sure enough there was a beret-less Rod Dreher staring at me through my television.

It was clear my nemesis would not go quietly into …. well … wherever nemesises are supposed to go quietly into.

It turns out Rod had taken a job as movie critic for the Post after a few years in Baton Rouge, and somehow had transformed himself into a right-wing editorial columnist. So, from time to time, Rod would show up on Fox News to spew the kind of right-wing garbage I”d long ago come to hate.

On one of our trips to New York, I picked up a Post (having forgotten about Right-wing Rod”s job there), and was smacked upside the head once again with the reality of my nemesis.

Nemesis Phase 5: Burnout
I don”t remember if TCL (a subscriber) told me that Rod had left the Post and was writing for National Review, or if I discovered this on my own. “F*cking hell” was my reaction to this development, I believe.

The nemesis had surfaced again. But on the road to Bob Novak status as a major conservative commentator, Rod threw a rod.

It turned out that his jump from the Post to National Review was a result of Rod getting really freaked out by the anthrax incident at the Post just after Sept. 11. And the attacks on New York helped push him down some weird path toward Mel Gibson-like fundamentalist Catholicism.

His name would pop up in articles about dangerous Christian writers, and he”s apparently a champion of the anti-gay-marriage movement (yes, I despise him for that, too).

I don”t know when he left National Review or under what circumstances, but he was clearly marginalized in his Catholic wackiness and wound up at some freaky God outfit.

Foiled by your own religious zealotry! Take that, nemesis!

I”d figured him to be forever mired in the obscure world of religious zealots. And that pleased me. He never deserved to be taken seriously as a “political commentator” at National Review, and he drank too much of the right-wing KoolAid.

Nemesis Phase 6: Ressurection
But now he”s re-surfaced in Dallas. Apparently he”s been there a year as an assistant editorial-page editor (these are the folks who write the “unsigned” editorials that are supposed to represent the whole paper), and pieces are just starting to appear under his own byline.

There must have been a “cooling off” period imposed by the paper to help people forget about his fundamentalist Christian rants. His reputation was so poor that there was a petition circulated by the Dallas Muslim community asking the paper to fire Rod.

Nemesis Phase 7: Trying to be cool like Cap”n Ken
The one bylined column of his appearing on the DMN site talks about how he decided to buy a house intown rather than in the suburbs and how much he loves his funky intown neighborhood. Kind of like how the wife and I sought out and love funky East Atlanta.

Will it never end?? DAMN YOU, NEMESIS!!!

Finals are going on down at LSU, and so The Reveille is done for the semester. Therefore, no Jessica Pivik column. In fact, we may have seen the last of “On Top”.

But no worries. I figured Jessica would be busy with finals this week, so I wrote her column for her.

On Top With Jessica Pivik (by Cap”n Ken) May 13, 2004 “It”s better to give than to receive.” Any girl who says that obviously isn”t with the right man. Come on, guys. I know it”s a jungle down there, but with a little practice, your oral skills can rival those of Jessie Jackson. If your gal can master the art of sword swallowing, the least you can do is learn how to make your way through her forest. But a lot of girls tell me their men remain clueless when it comes to giving oral pleasure. “Most of the time, I end up wondering what the hell he”s doing down there,” a friend told me. “But I give him an A for effort.” Some girls I talked to are just so happy to find a man willing to make frequent trips to the “Y”, they don”t dare criticize his cunnilingual skills. “If I tell him he”s not doing it right, I”m worried he will take it personally and just stop doing it,” said a sophomore. Most guys admitted that developing oral skills is not high on their agenda. “I see it as part of the process,” a guy responded. “If I need to go down on a girl to get laid, that”s fine with me.” Historically, girls, your pleasure has always taken a backseat to his. And Dr. Debbie Stoller of Yale University says while Bill and Monica helped bring the blow job into vogue, the same is not true of cunnilingus. “The reciprocal act continues to be inappropriate breakfast banter; hell, there”s not even a cute, colloquial name for it,” she says. “The word “cunnilingus” doesn”t exactly roll off the tongue, if you get my drift.” So women are expected to give a good hummer, but men have no pressure to improve their technique. But it”s not like guys aren”t interested in spending time south of the border. A recent survey found that more men than women found cunnilingus to be “appealing.” “I want to make my girl happy,” one guy said. “I take pride in all of my bedroom skills.” No, girls, I”m not giving you his phone number. And for you girls who may be self-conscious and pull a willing man away, loosen up! He wants to do it! As with any sexual activity, play it safe and avoid those STDs. Whether your man is an oral pro or just a clumsy licker, the bottom line is that his face beats your hand any day.

I don”t know if this story is true, but if it is, it”s damn hilarious.

From US News via Boing Boing