2000-12-08 - Noonish
My nominee for Fucking Worst Fucking Bad Fucking Idea of 2000: deregulation of California�s electrical power industry. This past summer we here in San Diego got treated to the spectacle of every "pro-growth" and "pro-business" politician in the county (meaning every politician in the county), who were all on record as creaming their pants over what a win-win situation deregulation was going to be, suddenly washing the stains off their trousers and becoming champions of the consumer because our electric bills had just tripled and we were out throwing eggs at SDG&E employees. Now, this fall, the whole state�s power grid is maxed out, and the people in charge of it are trying to avert rolling blackouts by, in essence, shutting off the TV in the living room so they won�t blow a fuse if they run the microwave in the kitchen. Expect them to start blaming the Y2K bug any day now.
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So I went to Barnes & Noble last night to do some Christmas shopping. After picking up a Harry Potter calendar for my niece, I started browsing and eventually found myself in the true-crime section. I love true-crime books. I never buy them, but I love them--I just skim through them furtively in bookstores while keeping a lookout for anyone I know. True-crime books and VH-1�s "Behind the Music"--those are my two guilty pleasures these days. I wound up spending way too much time flipping through Vulgar Favors, that Maureen Orth book about Andrew Cunanan.
Man oh man, what a howler. I almost bought it. Any true-crime book must strike a tone that�s both lurid and moralistic, but this one was epic. Picture The Red Shoe Diaries meets "Mary Worth" written by Dr. Laura. I can�t wait for the made-for-cable movie to get made--with Robert Downey, Jr. (post-rehab) as Cunanan and Corbin Bernsen or some other washed-up �80s TV star as that fashion designer whose name I can never pronounce. Joe Eszterhas will direct.
(In case you don�t remember, Andrew Cunanan and the Heaven�s Gate mass-suicide were San Diego�s two big news stories for 1997. This being San Diego and not New York or L.A., our cults and serial killers are kind of lame. Can you picture Charlie Manson and his followers vacuuming the house, wrapping themselves up in purple doilies and bumping themselves off with NyQuil or whatever it was that the Heaven�s Gate people took? That whole thing was too neat and tidy--it was like Jonestown run by Canadians. And Cunanan didn�t even kill anyone notable--unless you count Fashion Designer Guy, which I don�t. At least Mark David Chapman bagged one of the Beatles.)
(And while we�re on that subject: He�s dead. Move on. I have.)
(Do you think that�s enough parentheticals for one entry?)
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