greybean.com

This might be two Monday nights in a row without rain. I haven’t gone out there yet, though, so I could be wrong. It did rain this morning, however.

A couple things: 1. Ocean’s Twelve has a website and a teaser trailer (if you can call it that). The teaser has a pretty awesome look to it, but don’t think you’re gonna learn anything about the movie. Or even see a single frame of film. Nevertheless, I cannot wait.

2. thedigitalbits.com is reporting a September 28 street date for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Also, it’s listed at a $29.98 SRP. Considering that it’s a Universal title you can expect that to mean that it’ll be a two-disc deal.

3. They’ve also posted the FINAL cover art for Kill Bill Volume 2. Definitely not as cool as the yellow on black version below, but decent. The color scheme thing holds true but they abandoned the axis shift. I don’t understand why. That was the coolest part. Now this cover has lines at right angles while Volume 1 is all parallels. Weird.

4. I’ve officially changed the name of my fantasy team on the league site to the Medicore Bugs after this week’s 5-5-0 showing. That’s after three consecutive 5-4-1 weeks, remember. That adds up to a month of 20-17-3. I’m really blowing the doors off the place, eh? I made some further lineup adjustments as reflected in the menu on the right. Bastards.

5. Read this, from nerve.com:

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I get the feeling Ronald Reagan’s critics are off the mark. Since his death, the fortieth president has been deified and demonized with equal passion (if not equal volume or venue). But forget, for a minute, what you might be reading online about Reagan’s general density, the murderous Guatemalan dictator he supported, the arms deal which might – just might – have supplied Al-Qaeda, his justification for an invasion of Granada that was shaky at best. The most infamous part of his legacy hasn’t gotten so much attention: his deplorable domestic record on AIDS.

The statistics are worth repeating. In 1981, the first year of Reagan’s presidency, 199 cases of AIDS were reported. Eight years later, more than 55,000 people had died. This number, it has been pointed out, exceeds the number of U.S. combat deaths in either the Vietnam War or the Korean War. If Reagan is to be assigned posthumous credit for something as ephemeral as "making America America again," then responsibility for the AIDS epidemic — a public-health crisis over which he had direct legislative influence — must also be his.

Instead of forestalling a plague, Reagan allowed it to spread, silenced by an irrelevant debate about the "morality" of its first victims. He didn’t even say the word "AIDS" in a public forum until 1987. His first significant piece of AIDS policy was passed in November 1988 — seven years after the start of the epidemic, by which time 50,000 people had died and countless others had been infected worldwide. In a 2001 speech, Reagan’s surgeon general, C. Everett Koop (who is occasionally referred to as "the frustrated surgeon general, C. Everett Koop" or "the thwarted surgeon general, C. Everett Koop"), revealed that Reagan repeatedly shut him out of discussions about AIDS, in favor of counsel from religious conservatives like Pat Buchanan.

Last year, the miniseries The Reagans depicted the president dismissing AIDS with the line, "Those who live in sin shall die in sin." It was a screenwriter’s dramatization and ultimately edited out of broadcast, but it briefly renewed controversy about whether Reagan’s AIDS policy was dictated by homophobic religious beliefs. That is debatable, if not for long: even Reagan’s official biographer noted that the president once mused "maybe the Lord brought down this plague" because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments." But what’s inarguable is that Reagan was faced with a grave public-health threat and dragged his heels. In the public consciousness, he was silent on the topic for six years. And how simple it would have been for him to affect change! With one speech, he could have gone a long way toward curbing homophobia. By putting AIDS policy on the fast track — or anywhere other than the back burner — drug research could have accelerated. Safer-sex education could have been implemented earlier. Lives could have been spared.

This is not just Monday-morning quarterbacking. As the crisis unfolded, the president was notified, reminded, pleaded with — by Koop, by the CDC, by media, by demonstrators who lay in the street outside 1600 Pennsylvania. For some reason, those images I remember seeing as a kid are missing from the memorial video tableaux of Reagan on horseback and at the Berlin Wall. They’ve been neatly extracted, swept off the table like a dirty piece of Nancy’s china sent back to the kitchen for polishing.

And now, in TV reports and among conservative commentators, there’s a lot of talk about Reagan’s "vision" — of "morning in America," of the "city on a hill," of how he made people "proud to be Americans" — but when it came to AIDS, he showed none. That’s his history. He wrote it. No picture of the man is complete without it. It’s history we shouldn’t rewrite or suppress under any circumstance, even under the guise of paying respect. — Michael Martin