Warning: Annual Retrospective Season Looms

It’s that time of year when everyone (in the media) takes a quick glimpse back at the last 12 months before jumping blind into the next 12 months.  Time to revive for one last moment all the folks who croaked, the famous ones I mean, and all the big disasters (especially the ones they have pictures for). They always include a few of the good things that folks might have done, crazy heroic acts and heartfelt philanthropy for some total heartbreak case, not to mention all the year’s developments in the big news stories and in the latest teen idol’s complete disintegration.  

Hard to give a crap about the geopolitical quagmire, but damn I need my latest teen-idol disintegration news just to get me out of bed in the morning, how about you?

Bad Apple also feels a certain retrospective impulse coming on, because I’m celebrating the one year birthday of the Bad Apple Blog on December 6.  It’s been a year of discovery, invention, and strangeness at Bad Apple, and I’m going try to ruminate on the high points, exorcise the garbage, and generally get a handle on where all this rot is headed heading into the great 20 ot eight.

For example, I’m going to take a hard look at potatoes vs. tomatoes.  In 2008, I predict all-out war between the potato and the tomato stories here at Bad Apple. Such vegetable rivalries never end up pretty.

Also, what about the cannibal chickens?  Will they remain misunderstood freaks or will they become the new It-chickens of tomorrow?  Stranger things have happened, folks, so don’t be laughing at my predictions’ predictor, now. 

Well, this is just a preview of the kind of deep bad apple pie-style thinking I’ll be serving up in December.  As a friend, I strongly discourage you from facing the annual retrospective season without regular, inoculating visits to this site.

My Latest Money-Making Screenplay Idea That Has Yet to Make Money

Now let me turn to an ”elevator speech” example of my unique gift for money-making screenplay ideas that have yet to make money.  Imagine, if you can, a future-fantasy-action meets The Secret Life of Plants thriller, a parallel bio-freaky universe where the future of everything comes down to: 

Terminato and the Last Tomato…

Critics (in my head) call Terminato and the Last Tomato,
“the most suspenseful blog post of the last five minutes–ever!”

Something’s worse than rotten in the remote city-state known as Tomatofornia, and the stink trail leads right to Governor “Terminato,” the region’s tough celebrity governor.  Originally famous for playing Terminato The Deadly Tomato in the phenomenally popular film series, that was before he got into politics.  Now the “Governato” is quietly taking over Tomatofornia’s treasured Public Tomato-torium and seems seed-bent on directing it right into the ground. 

At stake is nothing less than the combined world’s knowledge of tomatoes, including when to use an “e” or not.  Its ruin in a tomato-centric world like Tomatofornia would lead to certain tomatastrophy, with dreadful implications for the Tomato-state and beyond. 

But before Tomatofornia’s last slice turns Gang Green, there’s one last hope.  The adorable and powerless Aliseedison Bowmato trips upon Terminato’s tomato-hater plot, and how he’s using the town’s crack-addicted wood elves and pink lawn flamingos to carry it out.  But how can little old she stop the spread of rotten death stank before the it reaches….

The Last Tomato?

Can Aliseedison take on Terminato’s gang and save the precious seeds for all future generations, or will tomatoes go the way of carrots and apples?  Will the evil celebrity governor make sauce of Tomatofornia’s public treasure?  What in hell is a Public Tomato-torium anyway? All these intrigues and more will unfold before you eyes in what other critics (in my head) call “the freshest take on the whole tomato-film concept blog post in years.”

Tune in soon here, for the first episode of Terminato and the Last Tomato.  In the meantime, if you like Terminato and the Last Tomato, you might enjoy reading about the Cannibal Chickens.

Have We Done Enough Nothing Yet?

Officially, it is unsafe to help the birds and clean up the oil on the crude-besotted coast of San Francisco Bay.  Officially, you should leave your hillside home to burn and let the experts take care of it.  And if there are no experts in sight and your house is burning and your shores are coated with black death and a wild bird is struggling to stay above the surf, well, remember to stick to safer activities like driving at 80 mph in the carbon car and shopping in the city where homicides are only at X many this year compared to last. 

Yes, and we all know what good hands our national security is in, and how safe the geoglobal political politics are making us everyday in every way.  Not to mention what’s going to happen around here when The Levy breaks, The Big One hits, and millions of people go crazy on each other for things like food and water.  I’m so freaken safe-feeling right now, I could swallow a sword. 

Why is it in a so-called participatory democracy that the official line is “do nothing?”  Haven’t we done enough nothing yet??  Haven’t we let them rip up the trolley lines and turn our cities around, to be built for cars instead of people?  Haven’t we let them string us along on this toxic death road long enough? 

We who live in our dream houses have let the fire’s fuel build up too much.  This land wants to burn.  The chaparral needsto burn to complete its cycle.  We told it, don’t burn:  It’s much safer to do nothing.  But oh, you cannot tell the chaparral that.  It may listen for a while, but we all know that when it does finally, inevitably go up, it’s much worse.  Even the chaparral won’t survive that inferno. 

So goes democracy’s story.  The powerful say “be still,” but enough fuel builds in the frustrated human heart to blow us all away in a beat. Justice and greater equality aren’t nice ideas to be set up in gilded frame in the back of some museum.  The human race can’t build a future on corrupt privilege for the few and massive injustice for the rest – we have to keep those relics in the rear view mirror if we plan to survive any significant length of time.

Today, deadly oil mars San Francisco waters, a bay of such peculiar natural security that the sea’s storms can’t penetrate.  All the unseen animals seeking refuge beneath its surface, a wilderness that humanity spoils everyday, in little ways and now in a big one.  It is too ugly to face, and yet I must see my own complicity in this pure evil unleashed on the voiceless innocent.  I too haven’t done nearly enough, have left too much to the experts.  Swept up in short-sighted survival agendas, living in not exactly a dream house but certainly not a reality house, either.

But fortunately (and unlike official spokespeople), fire doesn’t mince words.  So sometimes it becomes blessedly obvious that the only right course of action is to turn on the hose and stop your house from burning down.  Of course, in matters like fire and oil and democracy, time is of the essence.  Wait long enough, and the inferno isn’t safe for any living thing.  

What democracy and life require now is a low, hot fire burning under the proverbial asses of our politicians, figuratively speaking, so let’s all use a little bit of the overabundant fuel in our hearts to call and call and call, and vote, and talk to others voters, and get involved and get engaged, and do something! 

Don’t leave self-government to the experts, because that has proven the least safe course of them all.