As everyone who follows the show knows, the next to last episode of of that season deals with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Having not been alive during that time, I was struck by the depiction of everyone’s response–glued to the TV, crying, a personal sense of devastation–and how the only event in my lifetime that ever generated a similar response was the 9/11 attacks (with Hurricane Katrina the only other event even in the ballpark).

But when put in light of what happened September 11, 2001, I can’t possibly imagine ever being as upset over the assassination of a president as people in the 1960s were over JFK (whether I had voted for the person or not). Would I be sad? Absolutely. Angry. You bet’cha. Scared for the country? Of course–who knows what the aftermath might be.

But the personal level that people felt JFK’s death in 1963? No. Ultimately, the president is only one person, and one by the nature of his job has willingly assumed risk. Compared to the vast numbers of innocents in the World Trade Center and New Orleans… the magnitude simply doesn’t compare.

The sad steps by which a nation lost its innocence.

Flash forward nearly one year and the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power has solved the riddle of the bursting water mains. Their answer?

Exactly what my wife and I said a year ago.

Really? It took that long to figure that out. This post has nothing to do with the two of us patting ourselves on our backs, and everything to do with how pathetic it is that the LADWP took so long to come to that conclusion.

Seriously, I should have walked down there and delivered the answer to LADWP myself.

One would hope that any scientist on staff with half a brain saw the root cause immediately and that it just took months for the bureaucracy to release those very findings. What, then, does that say about the bureaucracy of such an organization? Yes, some time would be needed to prove the assumption, but a series of simple tests that would not take long could easily show that these stresses were indeed the root cause. It’s unfortunate, since the water conservancy programs do serve a good purpose.

And we wonder why the government never seems to get anything done.

Check out the website at RandomEncountersMovie.com

One of my favorite segments of the annual Academy Awards broadcast is the “In Memoriam” recognition of those notable members of the Hollywood community who passed away over the previous year. Last night was no exception, but what really stood out was the separate special tribute to director John Hughes. His sudden death was far more upsetting, far more meaningful to me than Michael Jackson’s was or ever could be. It still is stunning, all these months later.

Watching the Hughes tribute, I was left with the question: has any other director ever been the voice of a generation in the same manner and to the same extent that John Hughes was to the children of the 1980s?

I would venture to say not.

Although we frequently speak of musicians being the voice of a generation, that terminology is seldom directed to filmmakers in the same manner. Yet if you were in high school when Hughes’s films were released, his movies spoke to the reality of your circumstances in a way that no others did. If you were a few years younger, those same John Hughes movies were the blueprint of your high school years was to come.

As I’m sure many of you remember, this blog tribute became somewhat of a viral sensation right after Hughes died. The post probably had more meaning for me than most readers because I actually knew the specific world that the writer, Alison Byrnes Fields, wrote about, beyond the general universe of high school angst. The line that caught me for a loop was:

And he consoled me when I complained that Mrs. Garstka didn’t appreciate my writing.

I attended Xavier High School, an all-boys Catholic school, in Middletown, Connecticut. Down the street was our sister school, the all-girls Mercy High, where my younger sister would later go to school. We had a Mr. Garstka teaching at Xavier, and I seemed to recall that a Mrs. Garstka worked at Mercy. A couple of Google searches and some cross-referencing later and I was able to connect the dots: Alison Byrnes Fields had attended Mercy, albeit a few years before I went to Xavier.

No two people’s experience are ever the same, of course, but the climates of Mercy and Xavier were pretty much the same, so even separated somewhat in time there was probably a lot with which we could relate. Catholic high school in small-town Connecticut is Catholic high school in small-town Connecticut, after all, especially when the two schools in question are as interconnected as ours were.

But the beauty of John Hughes’s work was that it didn’t matter if you went to the same school as somebody else or the most radically different; the films were still relevant. Every teenager of the 80s and early 90s could relate to his movies in a deeply personal manner. The letter written by the students in The Breakfast Club succinctly summed up Hughes’s own movies perfectly; it didn’t matter if you were the jock, the beauty queen, or the outcast, the trials and tribulations of the American high school experience were, at the core, the same.

Check them out here:

Nate Barlow Interview: http://wholetruthnetwork.org/?p=305
Negrette Article: http://wholetruthnetwork.org/?p=311

Hope you enjoy!

I recently launched a new website, Food Trucks dot info (http://www.FoodTrucks.info).

Food Trucks dot info is your resource for Los Angeles food trucks:

• Twitter feeds for every truck collected in one place.
• Periodic featured trucks with more detailed information.
• Food truck reviews.
• News on new trucks.
• Map of popular LA truck stops.

And if you haven’t already, please also visit my sports site, Deep Into Sports (http://www.DeepIntoSports.com).

Deep Into Sports launched a year and a half ago and has rapidly grown during that time. I recently realized that while I linked to it from the main NateBarlow.com site, I never “announced” it on my blog. Deep Into Sports is a site by people deep into sports, for people deep into sports, who want their coverage to go even deeper into sports. We strive to provide fans with unique viewpoints and creative perspectives beyond that which they receive from the larger, “corporate” sports news sites. As they say on the gridiron, go deep!

Enjoy, and I look forward to your feedback.

http://www.moviemaker.com/screenwriting/article/script_to_screen_changes_to_a_screenplay_20100106/

Hope you’ll listen!