Barry's Life in Napa Blog

Cool Hand Luke is the quintessential Paul Newman movie for me. It brought together all those qualities that he portrayed in his best characters - strong but damaged, sly but true, the blazing smile that floats up out of a deep well of sadness. And always cool, always cool. Newman had one of those attributes you cannot teach in acting class - charisma - and he had a trainload of it. A list of his best reads like somebody's top 20 films. My faves after Cool Hand Luke would be The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Sometimes a Great Notion, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Hustler, Hombre , and Slap Shot , which was a gross comedy but Newman brought dignity to it. And you can't hardly find a real stinker in his filmography. He had a real sense of what he did and didn't want to do with his acting, and with his life. In his era you made your bones on the stage, New York was the only destination for the legit actor, and he was the first to play some character...

I know a person could be writing today about Obama and the Tom Bradley effect , Palin's "pay for your own abortion, rape victims" policy , the ramifications of a nuclear Iran, parallels between the crash of '29 and the crash of '08 , and other urgent stories du jour . But I have a nagging question that trumps them all: What the hell am I supposed to do with Facebook? I understand that it's a social networking site. I understand it used to be called "MySpace for college kids." I get all that, but now what? I mean, what am I supposed to DO with it? (BTW, since I am communicating on a young person's topic here, it is necessary that I use terms like "I mean" regularly, and also use abbreviations like BTW, by the way.) No one ever sends me an instruction book for these new things. I am supposed to figure our for myself about "writing on the wall," and "poking" people. What do I look like, Stanley Einstein or something? ...

An observation: people who have car alarms that go off at 4:30 in the morning two days in a row and cause certain people to be awake way earlier than they should be, especially when certain people can never get back to sleep once they're awake, should be rounded up and exiled to Las Vegas. What's the deal with car alarms anyway? (The previous sentence brought to you by Jerry Seinfeld.) There was a time when the car alarm was a novel thing and if you heard one going off you reacted to it. Now you just walk on by, close the window (which doesn't help certain people sleep), turn up the TV. Rather pointless. The Presidential candidate who promises to do away with car alarms gets my vote. Ban leaf blowers, too, and I will vote for you twice. AT&T is promoting their new U-Verse service in my town these days. One of the things they offer is TV (not really cable, but that's the idea) and their pitch includes the promise that you can "record up to 4 programs at once....

Seven years ago this morning everything changed. Seven years ago this morning my son was just a goofy high school junior, and my daughter was only 12. Seven years ago this morning I could still run three miles in 27 minutes. Motivated by what happened seven years ago this morning, my son became a Marine, learned to run three miles in 20 minutes, and prepared for his time in Iraq. I can recall, if not still feel, the anger I felt seven years ago this morning. I might have joined up myself but I was already too old. Now I am too old plus seven years, and have had my anger refreshed. The anger infusion came courtesy of a documentary on the 9-11 conspiracy theories. Discovery Channel? History Channel? Conspiracy Channel? Can't remember which. I think it first aired in 2007. Two hours of a well-balanced look at the claims the "truthers" make, juxtaposed with actual truth. It's amazing that these conspiracy buffs can make some of their claims with a straight face. For exam...

Let me make it crystal clear at the outset, I've got nothing against white people. Many of my friends are white, in fact, and I am married to a white woman and we have white children together. As a reader here, you may be surprised to learn that I, myself, am white as well. But when it comes to whiteness, there's nothing that can compare with a Republican National Convention. If you have been a campaign follower for the last few months, you will have seen many staged candidate appearances, the type that result in eight seconds on the evening news. In these events you can typically see a carefully selected group of people in the background, behind the stumping candidate. If the polls show weakness with women voters, behold, there will be women in the background. If the Hispanic vote is weak for Joe Candidate, the bleachers will be chock-a-block with brown faces. But when it comes convention time, you can't dictate who gets seen, and the last few nights have revealed just how...

And so the grand three-day weekend winds down and I return to work today refreshed, relaxed and rejuvenated. This feeling will last until about 10:30am, but I will enjoy it while I have it. I will have the pleasure of looking back on an eventful Labor Day, when we wondered whether it was VP nominee Sarah Palin or her teen daughter who had recently been in it. Labor, that is. (Hahahaha, funny joke on two meanings of word "labor"! I kill me!) For those who aren't keeping score, blog postings on Daily Kos on Saturday (which seem to have been taken down now?) claimed it was Palin's 17 year-old daughter who gave birth to the 5 month-0ld in the family, not Sarah herself, claiming a coverup. Within a news cycle or two, we got the official word from Palin that the teen is in fact preggers in the present tense if not in the past tense. I imagine they worked overtime at the celebrity gossip magazines this holiday weekend, with a newly famous teen mom who might overshadow the ...