Random Esquire

I saw this dude – Martin Sullivan, former CEO of AIG – on television.  He was in front of Congress trying to explain why AIG executives spent $440,000 on a week long retreat in California after tax payers spent $85 Billion dollars bailing out the company.

And his hair was very white except for a tinge of yellow.  It was gen-u-ine old man hair.

Here’s how to identify genuine dirty old man hair:  It looks like mayo that’s been left out too long and has started to go yellow.

That’s old man hair.

Just one more reason to wanna punch the dude.

In 1966, a young film maker named Frederick Wiseman filmed for four weeks inside the Bridgewater State Prison for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts which was run by the Massachusetts Department of Corrections. It showed the routine of the prisoners – psychiatric sessions, force-feeding of inmates, bathing, shaving.  The film screened at the New York Film Festival before the Mass Supreme Ct ordered that it be banned and destroyed, saying it violated the privacy rights of the people shown.  The Superior Court, in 1969, said it could be shown to professionals.  Wiseman appealed to the U.S. Surpreme Court, which refused to hear the case.  It was the first time in U.S. film history that a film was banned “not for reasons of obscenity, immorality or national security.”

In 1991, the Superior Court reversed the ruling and in 1992, PBS showed the film.  It was called Titicut Follies after the variety show at the Mass. Correctional Institute.  I happened to see it and had no idea what it was at the time.  One scene stuck out in my mind.  It was of a thin patient being strapped down on a bed and a man feeding a long tube in through his nose down into his stomach.  When the tube was fully inserted, the man (doctor?) stuck a funnel on the top of the tube and poured something the consistency of pancake batter into the funnel, thus force feeding the man.  He had a cigarette in his mouth, the ash dangling over the funnel.

More after the cut. (more…)