Creepy Puppets

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons--I love this show, and it would have driven me nuts with excitement when I was five.  It would be like watching my G.I. Joes (12" tall version) in the future, with an inappropriate level of puppet violence for small children.

Impressively Brazen

It's always fascinating when someone does something really outrageous, and then has the temerity to be completely unapologetic. Today's news story about the insanely high salaries of three officials in the small California city of Bell is a great example:

A defiant Bell City Council defended the hefty compensation awarded to City Manager Robert Rizzo and two other officials just hours after the three agreed to resign amid a public outcry.

In the city's first formal statement on the salary issue, Bell released a letter from Mayor Oscar Hernandez in which he praised Rizzo's service to the city and said his nearly $800,000 annual salary was justified.

"Unlike the skewed view of the facts, the Los Angeles Times presented to advance the paper's own agenda, a look at the big picture of city compensation shows that salaries of the City Manager and other top city staff have been in line with similar positions over the period of their tenure," Hernandez said in the letter.

Hernandez did address the outrage generated after The Times revealed the salaries last week, adding: "We recognize that today's economic climate and the financial hardships so many families are suffering put our past compensation decisions in a new light. To the residents of Bell, we apologize."

As part of the resignations, Rizzo, Police Chief Randy Adams and Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia will not receive severance packages. Rizzo will step down at the end of August and Spaccia will leave at the end of September. Adams also will leave at the end of August after completing an evaluation of the Police Department. Rizzo earns nearly $800,000 a year, believed to make him the highest-paid city manager in California and possibly the nation. Adams makes $457,000 -- 50% more than Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck -- and Spaccia makes $376,288, more than the top administrator for Los Angeles County.

I remember how here in Seattle, the similarly high salary of (former) UW President Mark Emmert was a source of contention--but at least the UW drew in massive amounts of money from research grants and athletics, and managed two hospitals in Seattle.

Here are a few facts about Bell, California (from Wikipedia):
As of the census of 2000, there were 36,664 people, 8,918 households, and 7,615 families residing in the city. The median income for a household in the city was $29,946, and the median income for a family was $30,504. Males had a median income of $22,596 versus $17,025 for females. The per capita income for the city was $9,905. About 21.2% of families and 24.1% of the population were below the poverty line, including 29.7% of those under age 18 and 16.7% of those age 65 or over.

And some facts about the City Manager:
Council members hired Rizzo in 1993 from the High Desert city of Hesperia as interim chief administrative officer with a starting salary of $72,000 a year. By September 2004, he was being paid $300,000 a year. Ten months later, his salary jumped 47% to $442,000.

His salary continued climbing $52,000 a year until July 1, 2008, when Rizzo received his usual salary increase and signed an addendum to his contract that gave him a 5% raise in September and guaranteed 12% increases each July.

His last raise was $84,389.76. Next July, he will receive a $94,516 pay hike [this story is from before he got fired].

Rizzo defended his salary and that of his staff and the council by saying they don't receive car or cellphone allowances and must pay their own way to out-of-town conferences.

However, according to their contracts, Rizzo, Spaccia and Adams can be reimbursed for their expenses. Bell council members are also eligible for reimbursements as board members of several city commissions, according to city resolutions.

Obviously, Rizzo and his compatriots really hit a gold mine in Bell (a gold bell?), and ran with it. Nice work if you can get it! I'm really impressed with the cell phone and car expense defense--that takes a lot of cojones in a town where the median household income is under $30,000, and most of those people are probably paying for cell phones and cars.

New Doodle; Newdle

Did this while talking to Beebo on the phone just now.  I like drawing chunky turtlenecks, for some reason.

Worlds Collide

The new season of Mad Men premieres this Sunday, and the season opens at Thanksgiving 1964 (so I have read). That means the reality of the show is now in the era of full-on Beatlemania (they hit the US in the winter of that year, and their first movie came out in August).
Who will be the first Beatle fan among the show's characters? Keep in mind, most adults of the time didn't concede any talent to the group until later, after "Yesterday" and albums like Rubber Soul were released.

I think we can rule out any of the real "grown ups", like Don, Betty, and Joan. Peggy is likely to want to be seen as being a serious career woman, so I don't think she's going to reveal herself as a fan, and she probably doesn't care.

Last seen dancing in Season One

Obviously, Roger Sterling's taste runs toward minstrelsy, though maybe his child bride Jane will tell him not to change the channel when they're on the radio.

Paul Kinsey might have an inclination toward the fab four later, but now I see him as a Coltrane and Dylan guy.

Pete and Trudy Campbell could be the dark horses of the group--they can be surprising.

Maybe gay German Kurt--he could have seen them in Hamburg in the early days, when he was friends with Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voorman (speculation).

But the one character who I will bet will be the show's representative Beatlemaniac is:

Sally Draper!

Post for Beebo

Lindsay subtly protests her jail sentence in court this morning.

tiny tvs

Just Wondering

How does anyone watch a movie on a laptop (unless they're stuck somewhere, like on a long plane ride)?

 Artist's depiction

I just don't get it.  I keep reading comments on blogs like this one: http://www.unplggd.com/ from people who insist that they watch all their TV on their laptop or desktop computers.  Isn't the picture too small, especially for more than one person to watch?  And how do you get in a comfortable position to sit still and watch anything that long?  I can't watch anything on my PC for longer than five minutes. 

Don't get me started about watching TV on an iPhone!

Finally!

Seattle City Councilmember Nick Licata pushes for stricter cadaver-exhibition rules

By Carly Flandro

Seattle Times staff reporter

Would you want your mother's dead body stripped of its skin and posed doing ballet for all to see?

Seattle City Councilmember Nick Licata wouldn't, especially if she hadn't consented.

Licata is sponsoring legislation that would place citywide restrictions on exhibits such as "Bodies: The Exhibition," which display preserved human cadavers. The council will vote on the legislation Monday. If it passes, commercial body exhibits will be allowed only if the deceased or their relatives have consented to public display.

Licata pursued the law after community members approached him about the ethics of the exhibit, specifically because Premier Exhibitions, which sponsors the "Bodies" exhibit, says it can't verify where the bodies are from or that the deceased on exhibit consented to such display.

On its website, Premier said it obtained the bodies from a plastination facility in China, which received them from Chinese medical universities. The universities received them from the Chinese Bureau of Police.
"The manner in which these bodies were collected sheds doubt on whether there's an incentive to produce bodies rather than take care of living ones," Licata said.

Exhibition organizers could not be reached for comment.

Bettie Luke, a prominent local activist and sister of Wing Luke, who was the city's first Asian-American council member, said the display is a "real cultural affront."

"Chinese don't treat their dead like this," she said, adding that long ago when Chinese people came to the U.S. to work, they would ask to have their bones sent back to their homeland if they died.

However, she said it seems wrong for all people.

Ron Chew, a museology professor at the University of Washington and former director of the Wing Luke Museum, agreed.

"Whether the deceased bodies are Chinese or from persons of a different ethnicity is irrelevant," Chew said. "It's simply wrong."

In a newsletter Licata wrote about his proposal, he described seeing "billboards of bodies frozen in space and time, minus their skin." That was when the exhibit premiered in Seattle in 2006.

The billboard caught his attention, he said, but he questions whether the program is as educational as it claims.

"Does the public learn more from posed plasticized cadavers than from illustrations or simulations?" he said. "What some may consider a unique educational experience may be viewed by others as sensationalism at its worst, a collection of dead bodies stripped naked, carved up and placed on exhibit."

"It's not a show for science," said Daniel Graney, a biological-structures professor at the University of Washington. "It's a circus."

He said the average citizen likely doesn't learn much from the exhibit. It would be like looking at the wires inside your computer: you would see them, but you wouldn't understand them.

Graney said his students dissect embalmed cadavers, and that the university doesn't touch bodies until it has a signed donor document from the deceased or their families. When the university is finished with a body, it is cremated and returned to the family or buried in a cemetery.

If Licata's legislation passes Monday, the restrictions on body exhibits would not pertain to remains that are more than 100 years old or consist solely of human teeth or hair.

Violators would be punished with a $250 fine for each day of exhibition.