Since they seem to be the hottest thing on Channel 13 right now, (even Morgan Fairchild and Bo Derek are the star leads in one) our weekly dose of tele-novelas continue: PP Guru style.

THE CARY COATNEY - RIKKI LIXX's the 3rd Time's the Charm sweepstakes!!


Originally presented on www.myspace.com/purplepinupguru Thursday, July 20, 2006

Chapter 7

BEEF CURTAINS!!

Phobia and withdrawl is beginning to creep up on me.

Normally at this time of year, I'm usually en route to San Diego for the 37th annual San Diego Comic Con International. It used to be that this show was my bane of existence in this state - my focus of migrating to become a resident in the state of California was to be close to this show as much as possible. When I made the trek out here in 1985, the first thing I did as soon as I got off the bus was to make plans to attend this show. The reputation of how great this 'gathering of the tribe' so to speak, was the shot heard all the way to the East Coast - that everyone who was involved with the comic book publishing business made it priority one to make the exodus out here to premiere or yak about their newest projects.

Over the last twenty years in which I've attended was a nurturing process. I first went as a gawking fan boy- gobbling up everything new in sight with my mininium wage paychecks. Then, ten years on, I felt that their non-profit efforts to bring comic book sequence art to the masses (to coin a phraise from the late great Will Eisner) was a noble and just cause - so I began volunteering at the show - serving as a typist in the registration department (you'd be surprised at how much of a superstar you'll become when you can type name badges at between 35 -40 wpm) and eventually when my pro writing career got under swing with my countless contributions to the weekly trade publication, the Comics Buyers' Guide - I was hired on to run a department called the Small Press Area where I had to pick and choose the exhibitors/creators who I felt had the best potential of being future comic book stars. Until, finally, in 1999, I started to dabble in self-publishing myself with the creation of my own comic book, The Deposit Man then I was on the receiving end of the stick trying to prove that I had the moxy to show that I had some modicum of talent.

But this year - it's going to be a crapshoot on whether I can salvage anything of this weekend and make it down for at least a day or maybe a party crash or two. One of my rituals at the con, now that I've been of legal drinking age for the past twenty years or so is to go up to the fortieth floor of the Hyatt Hotel (although I' m not sure that it's even called that anymore), and drink like a fish with other fellow comic book creators and talk shop about the biz . There was a time when I was such a fucking prankster - that when they were doing promos for the first Blade film - they were giving out these "Nerf" ninja star frisbees. I scoffed off with a entire box of them from the freebie table and proceeded to take them up to the top floor of the Hyatt and held a contest to see if someone could beam someone in the head with them at the pool below by tossing them out the window.. Actually, the theory was to see if a "Nerf" product could really kill as much as a falling penny would from such a height..

This year has been a bad one for me - it's been my worse financially since 1993 when I was penniless and homeless and living in San Diego. Even though I managed to attend that convention (incognito, of course) on only twenty bucks (I had pre-registered the year before) - it's going to be hard pressed to even enjoy this year on a hundred or so dollars that I'm budgeted to bring down (hopefully at industry professional rate). The costs of attending these past few shindigs have become so astronomically high - that I blew close of up to $1600 last year alone just in salary and two credit cards.

Now you wonder why I'm so much in debt. I haven't even paid off last year'sconvention !

I hope I can redeem at least part of my dignity this year by banging out one or two new Deposit Man books by the year's end and perhaps go to the east coast or somewhere in Europe to promote it. I've got four already written in the can- it's just that with the layoff with Warner Bros and the IRS and credit cards chowing down on my ass - I haven't even had to chance to afford oxygen to breathe. My artist in Manitoba, Canada Larry Nadolsky doesn't want to do a new one until we've collected all the five we've done together into a trade paperback. So I have to raise some money next week to send up some artwork on a issue that wasn't up to snuff with him - which I don't blame him- I one time rushed out a issue to get it done in time for a convention and it came out looking pretty shitty.

And now with the hubbub surrounding the new movie announcements based on several comic book properties - it's a wonder I'm already feeling left out. Just today in Variety they announced that, in addition to Paramount doing Iron Man, Warner Bros suddenly lit a match under their ass and said: 'hey why the fuck aren't we doing a Doom Patrol franchise" Let's see: Fox, under the auspices of Marvel = X-Men. Dc Comics under the auspices, well Warners Bros owns DC anyway = Doom Patrol. Both have super-heroes mutant shunned by society. Both superteams have a mentor stuck in a wheelchair. Both teams were created back in the sixties. And so on and so forth. But somewhere down the line - some uneducated schmuck who doesn't know shit from shinola about comic book lore is going to cry foul or stinking rip-off . Hulk 2 was also announced to be directed by the guy who's done both Transporter movies. My favorite entertainment news item of the day was the signing on of Guillermo Del Toro to direct DC's Deadman. Guillermo is a great all around guy who loves doing the macabre version of comic books. He's done Blade II and possibly one of my favorite faithful comic book adaptations to ever to hit the screen Hellboy in addition to his own creations of Chronos and the Devil's Backbone. Guillermo is now a San Fernanado Valley boy - I see him around every so often in Sherman Oaks grabbing a coffee or some gelato at the local Italian coffee shop on Ventura Blvd. He's very easily approachable and always apprecative of any feedback on his projects.
And that's the way that things go when it comes to sitting at a studio office when the action's a hundred and twenty miles away from you down on the 405 freeway.

The summer hasn't been a total waste however. Last Sunday, my surrogate sister, Becky drove me and her second husband up to Ventura County to a beach I've never been before out in Santa Buenaventura - somewhere out on the outskirts of Camarillo - where we met one of her old friends who's got like 4 or 5 kids of her own. Anyway, her friend got me out in the water to do some boogie boarding. I didn't know what to expect - I thought I just try it to humor everyone in our traveling party - and oddly enough I wound up staying out there for a couple of hours actually fucking enjoying myself. Just enough to get sunburned because I was too stupid to put on sunblock.

On the ride back - Becky and her second husband, Albie started to bicker again and this time they were calling each other and their private parts names. One such name that Albie threw out was Beef Curtains. I jumped in the middle and asked, what the fuck is that? Becky look shocked. Yeah, where did that one originate from? Becky started laughing her head off- 'you mean, you never heard of a woman's vagina being referred to as Beef Curtains before?" No, not really. "Oh yeah,' she went on ' especially if they have big lips down there - it's commonly referred to 'beef curtains flapping in the wind' . I told her to write that down: that's hysterically funny and that's definitely something to be used as Deposit Man dialogue repartee. Becky has given me plenty of ideas for crude and obscene Deposit Man dialogue

We hurried home- because I was going to be late to save Lixi's honor.

Lixi and I didn't spend too much time together this weekend. We spent approximately 2 and a half hours together late Saturday afternoon. We fixed and cleaned the pool and went to Target to do some shopping where I repeatly annoyed her with my frantic cart driving. For some reason, I don't excel in pushing a shopping cart too well. I kept bumping it into her - because she would constantly stop to pick something up from the bottom shelf. She would huff at me on occasion: 'WHY DO YOU ACT LIKE SUCH A GODDAMN CHILD?'

Well, I don't do it intentionally.

But she had a solution. Just park the cart in whatever aisle we need to shop in and throw the crap in it when we're done. Anyway, she rewarded me with brownies that night from Little Debbie. She also flashed her tits at the security cameras when we were in the elevator getting back to her car- just for laughs.

However, the freshly repaired dam between us began to burst Monday night - although I wasn't the root cause of what made her really lose it.

It seem that this neighbor of ours likes to pretend that's he's the on-site manager of our little Melrose Place mock up. He's directly next door to Lixi...and he's also directly next door to the laundry room. Our immature and mutual neighbor who we shall knight: Mr.Ruthless Toothless (he's missing all his teeth - because maybe someone hit him too hard) has a thing about Lixi and for what he precieves to be illict behavior to be happening at Lixi's place. He says that strange people go in and out at all hours of the night - (duh - sometimes it's me at 4 in the morning!! But since his eyesight is equally bad... ) and that applying two peepholes into her garage constitues that...drugs maybe manufactured in her garage. Which is not true at all because I've been down there with a flashlight checking for dead rats. Anyway - that's just a taste of the long litany of violations that he feels he has to inform law enforcement about her every activity

To make this short - and I've got to close up shop soon. Mr. RT has been involved in some numerous confrontations with Lixi in the past, ever since she's moved in last summer. The big blow out occured while I was sleeping and it concerned Lixi using the laundry room at 2 or 3 in the morning. Mr. RT says that he has to wake up at 3:30 AM to go and paint houses. Mr. RT makes a shitload of money and lives on a pension on the side. He likes to go traveling around the world and can afford to disappear for months at a time. However, Mr. RT sleeps in a one bedroom apartment and lives with his dad, even though he's over fifty years old he has to sleep on the floor of the one bedroom apartment where he claims that the rattle from the washing machine causes him to go mentally ballistic. So I admit - the hour of 1: 30 or 2 in the morning is a little trifle out of hand , even in Lixi's case- who's a natural night owl in which there's probably is no cure for her somnambulistic ways. Minutes after I left her apartment that Monday evening around 8:30 helping her out with some task or chore, I heard her yelling at someone in the courtyard. And it turned out to be her all-time nemesis - MR RT ragging again about the washer being turned on.

But wait - it's only 8: 30 at night. Mr. RT has asked me politely in the past to be done with all my wash at 10.

Okay, now why is it a double standard for her?

So I went down and I intervened - asking MR. RT to please compose himself.

However MR. RT felt that he had the undeniable right to casually fling the word WHORE in front of her. Repeatly echoing it in the courtyard for all to hear.

I sort of lost it.... on him. I wasn't going to let months of reconcilation with Lixi to go down the shitter like that.

So I....

I'll be continuing this next week.

~

Coat


12:41 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment - Edit - Remove

SPARKY: One day someone will remember that the PPG correctly identified Reagan as a cowardly bullying whoring turncoat rapist who gave Hollywood to the Mafia ... As we camp other blogs - Judy the Lip is back in the news it seems ...



SCOOTER'S DISGRACED HONEY POT IS UPSET ...
She's the wretched reporter used by Rove and Armitage :

“ “I’m worried about bloggers,” says former New York Times reporter Judith Miller. “(A post) starts as a rumor and within 24 hours it’s repeated as fact.” Miller said blogs “don’t post corrections when they learn that what they have posted is wrong,” but added that she was “glad to welcome them as long as they agree to the standards.” When not helping blogs improve their correction standards, Miller peddled false intelligence from the White House and Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi that helped convince Americans that Iraq had WMD.

EG - Jack Shafer catalogues her failures 3 years back: “ If reporters who live by their sources were obliged to die by their sources, New York Times reporter Judith Miller would be stinking up her family tomb right now. In the 18-month run-up to the war on Iraq, Miller grew incredibly close to numerous Iraqi sources, both named and anonymous, who gave her detailed interviews about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Yet 100 days after the fall of Baghdad, none of the sensational allegations about chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons given to Miller have panned out, despite the furious crisscrossing of Iraq by U.S. weapons hunters.

In a Page One Times piece this week ("A Chronicle of Confusion in the Hunt for Hussein's Weapons," July 20), Miller acknowledges that "whether Saddam possessed such weapons when the war began remains unknown." But from there, she serially blames the failure of U.S. forces to uncover weapons of mass destruction on "chaos," "disorganization," "interagency feuds," "flawed intelligence," "looting," and "shortages of everything from gasoline to soap." Alternatively, she writes, maybe the wrong people were in charge of the search; perhaps a greater emphasis should have been placed on acquiring human sources rather than searching sites; and it could be that the military botched the op by not investing the WMD searchers with the power to reward cooperating Iraqi scientists financially or grant them amnesty.
Judith Miller finds everybody associated with the failed search theoretically culpable except Judith Miller. This rings peculiar because Miller, more than any other reporter, showcased the WMD speculations and intelligence findings by the Bush administration and the Iraqi defector/dissidents. Our WMD expectations, such as they were, grew largely out of Miller's stories.

To be sure, Miller never asserted that Iraq had an illegal WMD program or a stockpile of banned weapons. Far from it: Every time she writes about WMDs, she always constructs a semantic trapdoor allowing her to pop out the other side and proclaim, It's the sources talking, not me! But thanks to the reporting of the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, we now know Miller was a true believer who grew fat on WMD tips from her sources inside Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress organization, and that once in-country she threw a bit and saddle on the WMD detectives and rode them like Julie Krone from one end of Iraq to the other to investigate those tips.

That none of the official tips or the ones provided by Miller revealed WMDs indicates that 1) the Iraqis perfectly expunged every site Miller ever mentioned in her reporting prior to the U.S. invasion; or 2) her sources were full of bunk. Either way, if Miller got taken by her coveted sources, so did the reading public, and the Times owes its readers a review of Miller's many credulous pieces. Thanks to the power of the Nexis Wayback Machine, we can give the Times a few tips on which Miller stories need revision, redaction, or retraction. ...”

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Capital-Journal: Jan Biles: Former N.Y. Times reporter decries Bush policies: Liberties suffer, secrecy grows, reporter tells K-State crowd

MANHATTAN -- Judith Miller, a former New York Times investigative reporter who went to jail to protect a confidential source, said the balance between national security and civil liberties has been tipped, allowing the Bush administration to become secretive about its decisions, intrusive into public lives and reluctant to share information the public has a right to know.

Miller said many Americans don't understand how their access to information and the freedom of the press have been affected in the past few years.

"We are less free and less safe," she said, explaining that there is a "growing secrecy in the name of national security."

Miller, who spent 85 days in jail for refusing to reveal a source in the Valerie Plame case, spoke Friday morning at Kansas State University as part of the "Community Readiness Communications: Accurate Messages in Times of Crisis" conference.

Plame was a CIA agent whose identity was leaked in 2003 when her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, criticized the Bush administration's prewar intelligence on Iraq. Miller went to jail rather than reveal her source, White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Miller said "no one can deny lives haven't changed since 9/11" and that national security is a concern, but the federal government has used that fear to justify eavesdropping on phone conversations and tapping into e-mails without warrants and classifying information that once was available to the public.

"More than 50 million documents were classified last year," she said, explaining that translates into 125 documents a minute. "It's intimidation by classification."
>
And American citizens are paying for it, she said, to the tune of $7.2 billion in fiscal year 2004.
How can an electorate be free and informed if it is denied information? Miller asked. Without a free press, such stories as the torture of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, warrantless wiretapping and CIA prisons in Eastern Europe wouldn't have been reported, she said.

"People need to know what the government is doing in order to debate," she said.

Miller said the American media, however, give the federal government reason to doubt its motives and competence each time it is discovered that an article is plagiarized or gossip is reported as fact.

The blurring of entertainment and news and the relaxing of journalistic standards can be seen in online bloggers who are critical of people without giving them an opportunity to respond or who don't post corrections when they learn that what they have posted is wrong, she said.

"I'm worried about bloggers," she said. "(A post) starts as a rumor and within 24 hours it's repeated as fact."

While she advocates a federal shield law to protect mainstream journalists from divulging their sources, she doesn't favor extending that to bloggers who don't follow the standards and ethnics of the journalism industry.

Still, she wouldn't restrict a blogger's right to publish online. She said some bloggers have been invaluable in uncovering government flaws.

"I'm glad to welcome them as long as they agree to the standards," she said.

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Will think of something to say soon I hope - Sparky