Weekend Update Once Again

Dear Diary: Once again my horoscope appears to belong to someone entirely other than anyone I can even imagine. It declares that I will be stunned by my astonishing good fortune that will come both unexpectedly and in piles. That at this point it would pretty much take an exceptionally pretty girl falling out of the sky with a parachute strapped to her back and a pack full of gold bullion strapped to her chest declaring her endless devotion and amorous intentions, to live up to the hype of that horoscope, doesn't stop the horoscope from making such a ridiculous claim. Then again, the last time I took my horoscope seriously -- it told me to go out and party and that a good time was inevitable -- I nearly got thrown through a plate-glass window down in Adams Morgan when some plainclothes cop got kicked unconscious by a rioter while trying to make an arrest, and I was stupid enough to actually try to help him back up. Well, from that I learned that no good deed goes unpunished, especially when it's an "all hands on deck" weekend downtown, and that my horoscope could, and ought to, be ignored.

Then again, one never knows when inexplicably love-struck hotties will fall out of the sky bearing both romance and tax-free loot. I hear it happens all of the time... to other people.

Other stuff happens to other people, and for that I should probably be thankful: I live a bored and boring life with little reward, but also very little risk.

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Last night I stayed up late and found myself watching the mesmerizing mystery-thriller Gone Baby Gone.

This is an exceptionally good film, although you might not expect that from the opening few minutes. This film depicts a world and a subculture that most of the US and the rest of the world tends to prefer to ignore, the white trash ghettos of Boston Massachusetts.

The film is a mess of dark secrets, and worse, of lamps hidden under a bushel, as the saying goes. You might call it something close to film noir, and despite being filmed in color, this utterly recalls the grit and menace of mid-20th-century films where all of the cops, all of the criminals, all of the victims, and all of the heroes were the descendants of northern-european Caucasians.

Back when the US was overwhelmingly full of almost nothing other than White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and the inevitable Non-Denominational German-Irish, film inescapably dealt in ambiguity and stereotype wasn't easily imposed on it merely by decisions in casting. The voluptuous brunette might be the victim-in-waiting or the private-eye's love interest, or the client looking for her vanished beau, or she could be the femme-fatale. Ambiguity could be introduced anyplace, visually or as plot elements, and even the resolution could be ambiguous, or so buried in ambiguity it might be a few days or weeks (or re-viewings of the film) later that one would finally understand what was going on.

"Gone Baby Gone" is one of those masterpieces of ambiguity, where in a lot of places you can't really decide who's the victim and who's the victimizer. By the close of the film, you're left wondering whether the hero is a hero or a villain, whether the villain is a villain or a hero, whether tragedy is better than hope and whether hope might not be wasted on the hopeless in their hopelessness and hapless lives. And the film is also one of the masterpieces of reality-checking: being white, or black, or anything else for that matter, is no guarantee of being good or bad, criminal or saint... and there's no guarantee of moral goodness or ethical taintedness to be conveyed by knowing on which side of a badge a person seems to stand.

Nor, for that matter does poverty create saints nor sinners, though the film makes it pretty clear that more or less of each can be mixed in ways you might never know unless you were willing -- or required -- to give far more attention and scrutiny to detail and interaction than you might ever reasonably want.

This film also convinces me that I wouldn't want to go anywhere near Boston if there's any possible way to avoid it, or at least I would want to go nowhere near the parts of Boston portrayed in this film. If this is what you get when you have too many white people in any given place, I can understand the cries of so many for "diversity".

Of course, me saying this will probably result not in my horoscope's prediction of cash-laden hotties appearing out of nowhere professing their affection, and would more likely result in some cute little redhaired girl knocking at the door to give me a swift kick in the ass and an admonition of "don't go running down the Irish, you Kraut bastard". Hey, I'm just reviewing the film, you want to assign blame, blame it on the Brothers Affleck and the original author, Dennis Lahane.

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Ah, the boring boringness of a rainish Saturday afternoon.

Could be worse, I suppose. I could live in Dorchester, that sketchy Boston neighborhood in "Gone Baby Gone". Aspen Hill's bad enough, but at least we aren't pretentious like some other parts of Montgomery County. We're too "diverse" to be condemned or praised, I guess, though the "diversity" recently seems to be shifting towards a linguistic and ethnic monoculture quite the opposite of Dorchester's all-white English-speaking monoculture.

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Moving right along, the Gazette reports a 50 year sentence was handed out to Hector Mauricio Hernandez, murderer of honor student Tai Lam almost exactly a year ago.

Also in the news, the Washington Post reports on a bizarre home invasion in which an unsuspecting couple asleep in their bed awoke to being beaten with a machete and clubs. Evidently this was the result of some teenager telling her friends she'd had an argument with her parents, and she seemingly didn't stop to remember that her friends were Latino gangsters.

The article declares that "[p]olice do not think the invasion was gang-related", but that characterization is certainly more due to their belief that this is not an attack by members of one street-gang against members of another street-gang, more than due to any certain knowledge about affiliation (or lack thereof) with gangs by the suspects arrested.

Personally, though perhaps it's not MS-13, Vatos Locos, or South Side, I would call three young men who sneak into people's houses and beat them with potentially deadly weapons as "a gang".

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Moving right along, again, the Examiner reports that Montgomery County Planning Director Rollin Stanley has been blocking an internal investigation into repeated massive failures of the Planning Board's information-systems security mechanisms.

Obligatory Prominent Disclaimer: I have a patent (number 7,464,403) for an information-technology security system and thus might be thought to be a trifle prejudiced and one-sided when it comes to this sort of reporting.

But the Examiner claims that there has been almost one firewall breach per day over the last year, on average, and that's just insupportable. Then again, so is a total system crash, which reportedly happened this last spring. The world being the world, and the InterNet being what it is, one reasonably may suspect that the whole Planning Board's entire local network of PCs running MicroSoft(tm) software is well and truly Pwned and should be considered the inside asset of hostile organizations or individuals unknown.

Actually, that assumption would tend to explain a lot of really questionable decisions, plans, and proposals coming out of the Planning Board in recent months.

For example, you might take a look at the Planning Board website (carefully, it may be controlled by hostile entities looking to plant spyware or viruses!) for the Gaithersburg West "Science City" Master Plan proposal.

Harking back to the recent Special Election rhetoric, all of the Urban Planning community folks were singing the praises of "mass-transit centric high-density mixed-use" development, and that's what Gaithersburg West would be, with the notably deficiency of not actually having any nearby mass-transit. There's the proposed Corridor Cities Transitway, but that has yet to be approved, much less finalized, much less funded, much less actually built. It's 20 years off at the very least, so all of that proposed Gaithersburg West "Science City" development would have to be served by the already hypercongested I-270 and surrounding surface streets.

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Well, I think I'm done for the day, now I guess I'll cook another TV dinner, watch some more TV, and wait for my horoscope to deliver my amorous and wealthy hottie to my humble abode. I guess I can alternate the total suspense with wondering why I haven't heard yet from Publisher's Clearinghouse ("you may have already won!") and wondering if the predicted rich hot gal will send a limo to pick me up to begin our new life of endless escapade, or if maybe she'll drive it herself.

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