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Annie and I watched The Departed tonight.  Astonishingly good movie.

The twists and turns are such that there are times when you don’t know who is who, and what the possible ramifications of a particular situation are.  There were a dozens of moments when we had to stop the DVD and recap who was loyal to whom, who knew what, when they knew it, and who else in the room knew the same thing.  There were situations in the film that were double, double reversed, so you were spun around two or three times.

The last 10 minutes of the movie, in particular, border on the ridiculous, but never quite step over the line.  The last scene — just before it fades to black — is a classic for all time.  (Here it is — don’t click it if you don’t want to see it.)

Trivia — this film has the most instances of the F-word (or its derivatives) for a Best Picture Winner.  It occurs 237 times.  I’d guess Mark Wahlberg says 90% of them.  Seriously.  His entire role consists of saying the F-word in new and inventive ways.

On top of all that, I now have an excuse to dig The Dropkick Murphys.  I’ve loved their name since college, but couldn’t name one of their songs until now.

If I was Irish, I would have heritage like this.  But I’m a New Zealander.  Last I heard, we have no mafia.

Seriously – how much practice does something like this take?

I had one of these last night, and I have to say it was arguably the most delicious thing I’ve eaten in months.  Like, to the point where I feel compelled to organize my life around access to it.  It’s the Blizzard of the Month.  If Dairy Queen dares cancel it, I might protest.

Okay, you can go back to what you were doing now…

Memoir of comfort woman tells of ‘hell for women’: Sobering tale of one woman’s experience as a “comfort woman” for Japan during WWII.  There was a strategic – albeit twisted — military purpose to this system.

Japan established its first "comfort stations" in China in 1932 to serve as a steam valve for the troops, preventing rapes that would generate local resentment and resistance, and to slow the spread of venereal diseases through medical supervision of the brothels.

[…] "I became, in name and reality, a slave," she wrote in her little-known memoir, "In Praise of Mary." "On Saturdays and Sundays, there would be a line and men would compete to get in. It was a meat market, with no feeling or emotion. Each woman would have to take 10 or 15 men."

73 RC planes flown together: I loved this video of 73 remote controlled planes being flown together by a group of enthusiasts.  You have to think that two of them collided at some point.

A sobering summary of how hard it is to be poor, and why it’s so hard to break out of poverty.

You don’t have a car to get to a supermarket, much less to Costco or Trader Joe’s, where the middle class goes to save money. You don’t have three hours to take the bus. So you buy groceries at the corner store, where a gallon of milk costs an extra dollar.

A loaf of bread there costs you $2.99 for white. For wheat, it’s $3.79. The clerk behind the counter tells you the gallon of leaking milk in the bottom of the back cooler is $4.99. She holds up four fingers to clarify. The milk is beneath the shelf that holds beef bologna for $3.79. A pound of butter sells for $4.49. In the back of the store are fruits and vegetables. The green peppers are shriveled, the bananas are more brown than yellow, the oranges are picked over.

[...] “When you are poor, you substitute time for money,” says Randy Albelda, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. “You have to work a lot of hours and still not make a lot of money. You get squeezed, and your money is squeezed.”

[...] The rich have direct deposit for their paychecks. The poor have check-cashing and payday loan joints, which cost time and money.

When you’re poor, everything costs more.

I can’t get enough of this clip of Matt Damon impersonating Matthew McConaughey.  I laugh every time.

I’ve been reading the Wikipedia article about Kwame Kilpatrick, the disgraced mayor of Detroit.  I’m honestly wondering if there has been a more blatantly corrupt and dishonest politician in recent history.  This guy was just unbelievable.

I’ll give you the top level summary of what has been an highly entertaining (depressing?) read.  Let’s start with a police officer and the chief of police suing Kilpatrick.

[...] police officers claim they were fired because of an internal probe into the mayor’s personal actions and that the firing was a violation of the whistleblower law.  The trial began in August 2007 with Kilpatrick and his chief of staff, Christine Beatty both denying they were involved in an extramarital affair.

This was, of course, later proven to be true in spectacular fashion when 14,000 text messages between Kilpatrick and Beatty were revealed.

Kilpatrick and Beatty, both married at the time, did discuss city business; however, many of the series of messages describe not a professional relationship but an extramarital sexual relationship between the two, often in graphic detail. The text messages further describe their use of city funds to arrange romantic getaways, their fears of being caught by the mayor’s police protection unit, and evidence the pair conspired to fire Detroit Police Deputy Chief Gary Brown.

So, to put this in order, for those of you keeping track — (1) Kilpatrick had an affair with his chief of staff, (2) spent public money on it, (3) conspired to fire the chief of police for investigating it, (4) blatantly perjured himself to cover it up, and in the process, (5) lost an $8.4 million verdict for the city of Detroit.

But, apparently he loved his family enough to make the city pay for a $25,000 single year lease on a new Navigator (that’s more than $2,000 a month…):

[a reporter learned] the city had entered an expensive one year lease for a luxury SUV. It was to be used to chauffeur the mayor’s family. The lease was for $24,995, five dollars under the amount that would have required the approval of city council. Kilpatrick, chief of staff Christine Beatty, police chief Ella Bully-Cummings, and other members of the mayor’s staff all denied that the red Lincoln Navigator was intended to be used by the mayor’s wife and children. Eventually, Kilpatrick admitted the Navigator was for his family [...]

And what did the reporter get for his trouble?

[the reporter] tracked Kilpatrick down in Washington, D.C., where he was attending a mayor’s conference. When Wilson tried to question Kilpatrick about the Navigator lease, a member of the mayor’s security team is seen on camera shoving Wilson against a wall.

Still, his love for his family shines through:

On May 8, 2007, WXYZ-TV reported that Kilpatrick used $8,600 from his secret Kilpatrick Civic Fund to take his wife, three sons and babysitter on a week long vacation to a five-star California resort, the La Costa Resort and Spa. [...] The story was also compounded after WXYZ’s cameras caught Kilpatrick in a fit of rage grabbing the microphone out of the hand of reporter Ray Sayah and throwing it.

It doesn’t stop:

Kilpatrick used his influence while in the Michigan legislature to funnel state grant money to two organizations that were vague on their project description. The groups were run by friends of Kilpatrick and both agreed to subcontract work to U.N.I.T.E., a company owned by Kilpatrick’s wife Carlita. Carlita was the only employee and the firm received $175,000 from the organizations.

Still loving his family:

The Detroit Free Press examined city records and found that 29 of Kilpatrick’s closest friends and family were appointed to positions within the various city departments. [...] Some appointees had little to no experience, while others, among them Kilpatrick’s uncle Ray Cheeks and cousin Nneka Cheeks, falsified their résumés. Kilpatrick’s cousin, Patricia Peoples, was appointed to the deputy director of human resources, giving her the ability to hire more of Kilpatrick’s friends and family without it being viewed as a mayoral appointment.

Wait, let’s take a quick break to assault a police officer:

On July 24, 2008, at approximately 4 pm, Wayne County Sheriff’s Deputy Brian White and Joanne Kinney, an investigator from Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy’s office, went to Kilpatrick’s sister Ayanna Kilpatrick’s home in an attempt to serve a subpoena on Bobby Ferguson. Ayanna Kilpatrick is married to Daniel Ferguson, Bobby’s cousin. While on the front porch of the home, Kwame Kilpatrick came out of the house with his bodyguards and pushed the sheriff’s deputy, as Sheriff Warren Evans said, “…pushed him with significant force to make him bounce into the prosecutor’s investigator”. The mayor yelled at Kinney “How can a black woman be riding in a car with a man named White?”

Finally, here’s the big one — it’s vague, and unproven, but nonetheless spectacular.  Here’s the intro from the very beginning of his tenure as mayor:

Kilpatrick’s controversies started from a wild party alleged to have occurred in the fall of 2002, involving strippers at the official residence of the mayor—the city-owned Manoogian Mansion. It is alleged by former members of the mayor’s Executive Protection Unit that the mayor’s wife, Carlita Kilpatrick, came home unexpectedly and upon discovering Kwame with the strippers began to attack one of the women.

It gets much less funny when the stripper gets murdered, and the lead investigator starts digging a little too deep.

On March 1, 2008, a ten page sworn affidavit by former Detroit police lieutenant Alvin Bowman was filed by Yatooma in the U.S. District Court in Detroit. In that affidavit, Bowman states that “I suspected that the shooter was a law enforcement officer, and more specifically, a Detroit Police Department officer.” [...]

Bowman explains how the highest levels of the police department, including then-police chief Jerry Oliver and his successor, Ella Bully-Cummings, deliberately sabotaged his investigation. He claims that files were deleted from homicide computers, reports were removed from the homicide file, and the Greene murder file itself was locked up so Bowman could not access it. Bowman states that eventually he was transferred out of homicide [...]

Someone call Dick Wolf.  This saga is a season full of Law and Order episodes.  How did this man stay mayor for six years?

Javon Walker recently had surgery outside of the Raiders organization, which is a big no-no.  Your team paid good money for your body, so you don’t do anything without prior approval.

This article sheds some light on the relationship between players and their team doctors.

Many veteran players feel the qualifications to become a team doctor are questionable because they suspect a lot of the hires are based upon the amount of money the orthopedic surgeon or orthopedic group offers to pay the team to be its “official” health care solution. Just as important, the team doctor, by definition, works for the team and is beholden to its interests, which aren’t always aligned with a players’s interests.

Additionally, I’m sure many players feel like the team doctor is much more loyal to the team than them, and would clear them to play against their better judgement to make the owner happy.

This exact thing was explored in depth in a great book called “You’re Okay, It’s Just  Bruise” by Rob Huizenga.  Huizenga was the team doctor for the Oakland Raiders. However, he was just the generalist — the “general practitioner” for the team.  The most important doctor on a team is the orthopedist, since 99% of all issues are musculo-skeletal.  In general, the orthopedist is paid many times more than the generalist.  Huizenga tells of the Raiders’ aging orthopedist clearing players who shouldn’t been allowed within a mile of a football field.  The risk of paralysis apparently looks smaller next to the risk of missing the playoffs.

(I noted with some interest that this exact same relationship was depicted in the Oliver Stone film “Any Given Sunday.”  The team generalist (Matthew Modine) is constantly at odds with the team orthopedist (James Woods).  I suspect a lot of that dynamic was taken from Huizenga’s book.)

Unsettling article about euthanizing horses at a race track — a historical look back, set against the experience of a vet and a horse that “took a bad step.”

As she nears Heelbolt, he is facing away from her. He’s calm, but she can see he’s standing on only three legs. His left front ankle is dangling and shattered, attached only by skin. Two arteries are split. Blood is everywhere — on his leg, his hoof, the grass. Wow, this is a bad one. Canady has seen this type of injury before, and she’s seen how horses react to it. Some grunt and snort and thrash. Others, seemingly unbothered, try to run. But in her 12 years as a vet, she has never seen a critically injured horse do what Heelbolt is doing now. Eating grass.