Does wishing for the demise of a show set in my home town make me a bad person?  I hope not, because I was glad to read this:

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — “The O.C.,” the once-hot teenage soap opera that saw its ratings plummet like a delinquent student’s grades, has been canceled.

Based in the affluent Orange County, California, city of Newport Beach, “The O.C.” caught fire in its first season, 2003-04, as the top-rated drama among advertiser-favored young adults and with a total audience of nearly 10 million.

“The O.C.” didn’t sustain its momentum, dropping to about 7 million weekly viewers during 2004-05 and then to fewer than 6 million last season. This year, returning in November after Fox wrapped its postseason baseball coverage, “The O.C.” has only drawn about 4 million viewers.

Somehow, the real Orange County became a magnet for producers of bad television over the past few years.  “The O.C.” scraped the bottom of the 90210-esque barrel from day one, yet somehow found enough of an audience that it spawned two Orange County-based reality shows:  The Real Housewives of Orange County and Laguna Beach.

I’ve seen all three shows, just out of curiosity.  There are definitely people who live that way, but they’re a relatively small number.  TV show fans do weird things sometimes; I wonder how many folks have moved here because of those shows, and what they think of the place after living here for a while.

The true reality of Orange County life goes down two seperate paths.  The high-life that everyone associates with O.C. is frequently a person with a $100,000 income living in an overpriced, rented apartment and driving a $150,000 car, leveraged to the hilt in order to finance an lifestyle they cannot afford.  That’s not going to last.

The other reality is comprised of ordinary people living normal, sensible lives.  I’d say that accounts for 95% of the county’s residents.

What you don’t see on TV is the sense of entrapment the real estate values place on homeowners here.  I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to who say that they couldn’t move even if they wanted to because the high cost of real estate and the step up in tax basis on their home would make even a downward move unaffordable.  They’re wealthy on paper, but that’s it.  There are homeowners with multi-million dollar homes on Balboa Island who couldn’t even afford to pay the property tax on their place if it wasn’t for Proposition 13.  They’ve simply owned the place for 30 years and bought when it was affordable down there.

I suppose these nuances don’t make for good television, but I dislike the reality shows because there’s a segment of the population that expects and wants Orange County to be as vapid and shallow as what ends up on screen.  It’s perplexing.  When shows like “Dallas” were on the air, nobody thought it represented the real city of Dallas.  Of course, that was twenty years ago; the definition of “reality” has undergone some plastic surgery since then.  I hardly recognize it.

I like Orange County.  I just don’t like the way it’s portrayed to the world on these B-roll TV series.  The sooner they go, the better.  Let the glare of Hollywood’s reality craze warp someone else’s community for a change.

Anyone who knows me is aware that I love just about anything aviation-related. If there’s a film, book, documentary, magazine, or web site that promotes or involves flying, I’m all for it. It takes a lot for me to turn my nose up at anything with an airplane in it.

Nevertheless, the trailers for the new Sony film Stealth look truly abysmal. It’s a shame, because I want to be excited about this movie. But I end up secretly hoping it bombs at the box office. Something tells me my dream will come true.

The best thing Stealth has going for it appears to be the special effects, and those seem about on par with something Fisher-Price might have packaged for sale to the public. The aircraft movement, cinematography, dialogue, and attitudes of the pilots are annoying as hell to watch.

I’ve seen the full length trailer and always come away thinking that I’d be more likely to part with $10 if they’d never created the trailer in the first place. It’s almost as if they were trying to make the worst movie possible.

Stealth. Yeah, right.

A&E aired an fascinating documentary about Howard Hughes today.

Well, it was half documentary. The other half seemed to be a combination preview and advertisement for the latest Martin Scorcese film, The Aviator. The program interspersed clips of the real Hughes with commentary from the cast and excerpts from the motion picture.

It’s obvious that the cast did their research, and I enjoyed the program — right up to the point where Scorcese himself jumped the shark by first waxing nostalgic about Hughes’ pursuit of aviation greatness and then claiming that “the word ‘aviator’ is meaningless to us today because there are no aviators anymore.”

Excuse me?

Try telling that to Steve Fossett, who in less than a month will takeoff from a midwest airport in the GlobalFlyer in a bid to become the first person to circumnavigate the globe non-stop and unrefueled. He’s a rich guy, just like Hughes was, and has set just as many records. Fossett currently holds ten world records, including the distinction of being the only person to have ever circumnavigated the world nonstop and solo in a balloon.

Tell that to Burt Rutan, who designed the GlobalFlyer and the first airplane to circumnavigate the world nonstop/unrefuled, Voyager. Or to the guys who piloted Rutan’s SpaceShipOne into space two months ago, becoming the world’s first commercial astronauts.

Tell that to Jon Sharp, Richard VanGrunsven, the Klapmeier brothers.

Tell that to the guys who funded the X Prize, or shoot past 500 mph at the Reno Air Races in 50 year old airplanes that weren’t designed to go anywhere near that fast.

Scorcese may be a brilliant director, but he’s so dazzled by the legend of Howard Hughes that he misses the incontrovertible fact that these and many other modern aviators have eclipsed Hughes’ achievements, and in every case done it with far fewer resources. Films will be made about those people, too, though probably not for a long time.

If Scorcese was truly visionary, he’d at least be able to step away from the camera long enough to see what’s going on all around him.

“No aviators”? Please.

Looks like Ocean’s Twelve is going to be a success. Hey, it could happen.

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) — “Ocean’s Twelve,” the heist caper that George Clooney, Brad Pitt and their A-list pals shot in their spare time while living it up in Europe, stole the No. 1 slot at the North American weekend box office.

According to studio estimates issued Sunday, the Warner Bros. film sold $40.9 million worth of tickets in the three days since opening December 10. Warner Bros. and CNN are units of Time Warner Inc.

It marks the fourth-biggest opening for a December release, after the “Lord of the Rings” movies, and narrowly surpassed its 2001 predecessor, “Ocean’s Eleven,” which opened with $38.1 million in 200 fewer theaters and finished with $184 million.

I can think of at least a few sequels that met the standard set by their predecesors: The Godfather II, The Empire Strikes Back, Rocky II, Terminator II, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Hell, sometimes a film goes on to become a full-fledged franchise, a la the James Bond flicks. Most of the time, however, sequels are mediocre at best.

Remakes have an even worse track record.. Which is why I wasn’t expecting much when the remake of Eleven opened in 2001. Thankfully, Steven Soderbergh was smart enough to know a) not to mess with a classic, b) the storylines and pacing that satiated a 1960’s audience would not be well received by a 21st century theatre goer, and c) third rule of fight club: there was only one Rat Pack, so leave it alone. So beyond a vague similarity in the storyline, the two films are independent of one another.

One of the few films I was really hoping to see a sequel to was another remake, The Thomas Crown Affair. It didn’t set the box office on fire, but it’s been my favorite movie since the day I saw it.

Anyway, I’m glad to be in Las Vegas during the premiere of Ocean’s Twelve. Not only was the original filmed here by Sinatra and company, but the remake of was set at the Bellagio, my favorite hotel. I’d probably be staying there right now were it not for the fact that it’s about five times as expensive as Texas Station.

Speaking of which, there’s a large cinema complex here in the hotel, and they had some sort of special event going on for the opening of Ocean’s Twelve yesterday. I’m hoping to see the film while I’m here, but with the ATP course schedule, it may not be possible.

I had a feeling this was coming.

Bringing viewers compelling, real-world stories of heroism, military strategy, technological breakthroughs and turning points in history, Discovery Communications, Inc. will transition its Discovery Wings Channel to the Military Channel on Monday, Jan. 10, 2005.

Despite the fact that D-Wings had an annoying habit of playing the same shows over and over again, it was still better than much of the stuff on television. From a marketing perspective, the switch to a military channel is shrewd. Many folks either have friends or family serving abroad or know someone who does.

There were some interesting series on D-Wings: Learning to Fly, From the Ground Up, Aviatrix, and so on.

I hope Discovery will spread new and existing aviation programming around rather than drop it completely. Few people outside of general aviation appreciate its usefulness or contributions to the economy. Anything that educates the public about GA is a plus, and the Discovery Wings channel was at least a step in the right direction.

I’ve never been one of those people who believes that God strikes people down with a bolt of lightning when He’s unhappy with them. After all, if this were the case I would have been burned to a crisp years ago.

No, I think His method is to allow organizations like the FAA or IRS to hound people like me until we only wish a 1.21 gigawatt bolt would finish the job.

Nevertheless, it’s a hell of a coincidence that the actor portraying Jesus in Mel Gibson’s controversial film “The Passion of Christ” was recently struck by lightning during filming. The odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 600,000. That’s rare enough. Now let’s consider fact that there are usually dozens of people on a set during filming, yet the guy who was hit just happens to be playing the role of Jesus. And it doesn’t end there; one of the assistant directors was also hit–for the second time in as many months while on the set.

I’m not suggesting God’s pissed–I’m sure He couldn’t care less. I just think it’s weird.

Even stranger, though, is the uproar over this project from certain religious groups. Apparently they are concerned that the film will spur anti-Semitism through it’s conclusion that the Jews killed Jesus.

Am I the only one that finds that conclusion funny? I guess if you read the Bible the Jews did kill Jesus. He was in Israel. Is anyone surprised that there were Jewish people there? If He had been in Spain, it would have been the Spanish. If He’d been in Athens, the Greeks would have killed Him. If he’d been in America, we would have done it.

But that’s just geography. The real problem I have with religious leaders opposing something like this film is that it places responsibility for anti-Semetic acts with the wrong party. Don’t get me wrong–I understand the role history plays. The Jewish people have been persecuted since the days of Constantine for this. Technology has only accelerated mankind’s ability to kill his fellow man, and in the greater scheme of things World War II is still recent history. Once bitten, twice shy.

But clarity must reign supreme. Personal responsibility is the key here. Racist behavior today cannot be sloughed off on a film any more than a German operating an oven at Auschwitz could say they were “just following orders”.

Racism is bred out of fear and ignorance, not truth and knowledge. So all that’s required is for someone to say the blacks/Jews/Mexicans/etc are responsible. A film is just a film. No matter what it says, it doesn’t force anyone to do anything. In fact, such a film might even be healthy. It forces us to think and reflect on its conclusions. Religious leaders who look upon this movie with trepidation have cast their aspersion based on the worst humanity has to offer. Shouldn’t our rabbis, our pastors, our clerics look to the best instead?

But let’s stipulate that these religious leaders are right, that anti-Semitism rises after the movie is released. Even if the conclusion and content of a film like “The Passion of Christ” are 100% reprehensible, when race-based crimes are committed, the responsibility for those crimes must lie with those who commit them. Period. Any other conclusion takes us down a very slippery slope.

Consider the broader issue of “hate crimes” legislation. I’ve never understood this. The basic idea is that if you commit a crime against someone because of their race, color, sex, or religion, you are punished more severely for it. So if I beat up John Doe because he’s black, I get 10 years in prison. If I beat up John Doe because I want to steal his wallet, I get two years.

This is extremely dangerous because it punishes people based on what they think instead of what they do. If someone beats up John Doe, they should be punished because they beat him up, not because of why they did it. The reason is immaterial.

As I understand the concept of freedom, people are allowed to think or feel whatever they wish, even if it’s unreasonable, ignorant, and just plain wrong. The law should be limited to punishing people based on their actions, not their thoughts or beliefs. That’s why for more than two centuries, the American Way has been to defend the right of the other side to say their piece, even when we find their beliefs to be in complete opposition to our own.

I can appreciate the good intentions behind the P.C. police using the legal system to change the way people think, but that is not the system’s purpose. The law should not be used that way for the same reason the framers of the Constitution prohibited it from being used to establish religion.

Sometimes the best way of protecting something sacred is to not protect it at all.

I’m not a big television watcher. My father wasn’t one of those dads said things like “TV rots your brain!”, but we all know it does. When I do watch television, it’s often CNN, The Discovery Channel, or The History Channel. But there’s something coming up this weekend on TNT that I’m looking forward to. It’s a film called “Pirates of Silicon Valley”, basically the story of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I’m sure a lot of liberties were taken in creating the film, but the subject matter is of great interest to me. In fact, it seems “Pirates of Silicon Valley” is Pick Up Ax with a different name.

Microsoft stole from Apple. Apple stole from Xerox. Xerox stole from someone too, even if it was only a dead guy named Vannevar Bush. It’s like flying. If you ask an American who performed the first heavier-than-air powered flight, he would say the Wright brothers. If ask a Frenchman in the know, he’d probably say Clément Ader (who was French) flew a steam-powered flying machine called “Eole” on October 9, 1890, more than a decade before the Wright brothers.

It doesn’t matter who was “first”. It matters who did something with it. The guys who do significant things with new inventions are the ones that change the world. For whatever reason, Americans have done more than anyone else to bring new technology into everyday life. Television, radio, film, electricity, automobiles, airplanes, submarines, computers, the microprocessor. The list is endless.

The most fascinating of these inventions, to me, is the personal computer. Xerox could have been the world’s biggest computer powerhouse. Instead, they gave away all their secrets to Steve Jobs in exchange for the right to buy a million dollars worth of Apple stock at $10 a share. They had the future in their hands, but they didn’t do anything with it. Apple did. And so I’m looking forward to seeing this film about the personalities who had the vision to foresee a computer on every desktop.

Every month or two, my ex-roommate Richard and I will spend an evening hanging out. It usually goes like this: a dinner much too high in calories and fat, then a mainstream type movie, then back to my place to make fun of Saturday Night Live or play a computer game like You Don’t Know Jack. Pretty routine. This last time, though, was a bit different.

First of all, I found out at dinner that he did indeed audition for Jeopardy, as he said he would. But he didn’t pass the test! I couldn’t believe it–you’d have to know Rich to understand just how full of useless trivia he is. I also beat him at You Don’t Know Jack that night, winning two out of three games. The world is turned upside down! With the Jeopardy audition, you have to correctly answer 35 out of 50 questions you are asked. And they are fill-in-the-blank, not multiple choice. Rich said only 2 out of the 50 or so people who auditioned passed the test.

The coolest part of the night was the movie. Instead of a typical big-release picture, we decided to see an indy film, The Last Days of Disco . Currently in “limited release” in Southern California, Disco it is a Whit Stillman film and part of his trilogy of movies which include Metropolitan and Barcelona. When we got there, I was reading a blow-up of a Los Angeles Times review of the film posted outside the theatre and saw that a friend of mine was one of the stars of the film.

Matt Keesler, who plays a assistant District Attorney and major disco aficionado in the film, played the title role in The Interrogation of Nathan Hale at SCR a few years ago. He’s a cool guy, and I’m glad to see him doing so well. I enjoyed not only the film itself, but also seeing a sextet of “unknown” but highly talented actors for a change. A person can only stomach so many Harrison Ford, Tommy Lee Jones, Al Pacino, other other “A” cast movies before yearning for something truly different.

Today was the first reading of Hollow Lands. With intermission it came to about three hours. The director, David Chambers, had us break the script down into individual stapled scenes because the script was so unwieldy in size. I thought the reading went well, but I felt sorry for a few of the actors that had little to do in the show. It must have been hard to sit up there onstage and wait for three hours, especially after four hours of rehearsal this morning. What’s really weird is performing at 3 p.m. on a Friday. The next reading is at 10 a.m. on a Sunday. That’s even stranger. Theatre isn’t supposed to take place in the morning. It’s not natural.

The last episode of Seinfeld is tomorrow. You’d have to be living inside a hermetically sealed bubble to have not heard about it by now. Supposed to be the most watched sitcom episode in history, something like a billion people.

On the John and Ken Show (it’s on an L.A. talk radio station, KFI 640 AM), John has been going on about how wrapped up people get in these fictional characters and how he doesn’t understand it. I’m listening to it right now, and John is making fun of the Puerto Rican activists who are up in arms over the flag burning in the second to last Seinfeld episode. Don’t worry, John’s not racist–he hates all activists as a matter of principle. I have to say, KFI is my favorite radio station. You can listen to it anywhere on the Internet via RealAudio, which is how I’m hearing it now. I believe KFI has the most powerful signal in the country. You can get KFI as far away as San Francisco, Nevada, and Arizona. Most of the hosts are very entertaining even if you disagree with them, which I often do.

There is one exception, however. Phil Hendrie. All of his guests are staged. He rants about the stupidest little things and has a nasty habit of insulting and unceremniously hanging up on his callers. His show is the biggest waste of a 50,000 watt radio station I could possibly conceive of. I never liked him, probably because he replaced Mr. KFI, who had a fabulous show. Mr. KFI had no screener, no staged calls, nothing. You just called it to say whatever you wanted to say or talk about. It doesn’t sound like much the way I describe it, but it was great. And it got me through a lot of L.A to Orange County commutes over the years. I don’t know exactly what happened to Mr. KFI. I think he discovered he was actually adopted, and moved home to a different radio station.