A JURY OF ONE'S PEERS

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Place of alleged jury duty? Newark, New Jersey

Time? Now

Intent? Execution of Democracy.

Objective Log:  (All times Ante Meridiem)

7:45 Insertion of smaller Blaiser into hostile Middle School Walking Territory Achieved, after driving onto the sidewalk to soften up the defenses.

8:05 Blinding sun during east-bound drive results in the regrettable loss of life for three unidentified small mammals. Recommend dusting for prints.

8:09 Within the perimeter of directed destination. Instructions on parking, however? Not discernible from my point of origin. Filing warrant to request wire-tap on Superior Court’s coffee-break room for intel.

8:12 Multiple court houses in same area, in which it is a misdemeanor, while driving, to turn left. Under Blaiser’s Rules of Engagement, I take the first lot within a 2-block radius.  Getting any closer will tie me up until lunch.

8:13 Vehicle abandoned with foreign national “parking attendant.” Weighing asset potential.

8:14 First Security Checkpoint. Make it through with credit cards undetected.

8:14:05 Wrong Building.

8:15 uphill sprint to on-time rendez-vous point: Correct Court House (submit on-call password in comment section below for exact GPS location).  Link-up team must not have made it out of Teterboro. Assumed private-jet traffic jam on tarmac.  No contractors for back-up; will have to go it alone today. Adjust pens and pencils accordingly.

8:15:45 Second Security Checkpoint: Second irradiation of leftover pastitsio lunch. Have gone with the Greek food as a red herring to both prosecution and defense.

8:15:53 Line to check-in counter winds baaaaaaaack through a poorly lit hallway. On-time arrival has placed me in 132^nd place.

8:17 Line moving impressively fast. Blood sample submitted in exchange for wireless access.

8:20 Surveillance of fellow “jurors” reveals much about their character, as revealed by shoe choice.  A man three people in front of me clearly is a judicial moron—from the looks of it, he though the Sicilian Defense meant it was ok for him to wear Camo shorts and leather flip-flops.

8:25 Credentials scanned and foreign-national parking stub inspected. Great amusement when interrogator is asked if only the court parking lot tickets can be validated.

8:25:05 Democracy has cost me at least $15 in parking today.

Sidebar: Anyone in Essex County who tells you that the first day includes free parking is clearly committing fraud. Researching Citizen Arrest Procedure. Considering extraditing self to Park Slope, Brooklyn, for tomorrow. Collateral damage: Girlfriend ecstatic; ex-wife homicidal.

9:13 a disembodied voice informs our holding cell that video indoctrination will commence. Relying on A Clockwork Orange-inspired training to countermand subliminal manipulation.

Filed from Superior Court Holding Tank, 9:15 a.m.

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Second Filing:

9:20 Video plays. A palpable sense of serenity floats up from most of my peers. A smiling woman tells us that voir dire is French for "say the truth." This is when the respective lawyers in a case choose the jury. Most of us will be excused during the voir dire  phase. She also says there are various ways one can be dismissed, and not to take it personally if we're kicked out by a lawyer with no reason given. Both sides can do that, but there are limits on how often, like when tennis players have three chances per set to challenge the ruling of the line judges, or in the case of Serena Williams, to stab them.

9:25 The fake jurors in the jury indoctrination video are dressed better than 90% of my fellow practitioners of civic awareness.

9:30 The video instructs us not to listen to discussions in the hallways, lest our impartiality be contaminated with….. information.

9:32 Not for nothing, but our orientation video is  already up to the judge’s instructions to the jury prior to deliberations. By this time in any Laws & Order franchises, the M.E. has barely even cut into the stiff.

9:34 Video automatically re-starts. Tactic of repetitive indoctrination in action. Two “jurors” flee the room, clearly moles. Disembodied voice instructs people in other room to stay seated. Captain has not turned off seatbelt lights. No one but me seems to notice.

9:35 Actual announcement from actual person. Actual person walks out and yells to confederate: “He’s still got it running!!! It’s still on!!!.” An error detected. Note to self to exploit later, when possible. Perhaps a bribe for extra bathroom time. Will weigh options.

9:38 Orientation nearly complete. Again with the parking ticket validation – they’re just taunting me at this point.

9:40 We will apparently be mailed checks from Trenton. Not sure what they think they're buying. Certainly not parking.

9:41 If we're out in the main jury holding area, lunch will be from 12--1:30 and then we're done at 4. If we're in a courtroom, some judges apparently go to.... gasp.... 4:30. I may need to apply for a job here.

9:43 There's free coffee and tea, we're told, no doubt laced with fluoride. They’re after my precious bodily fluids. George C. Scott had it right.

9:45 We're free to stretch our legs and move about the cabin.....

9:45:07 Line for fluoridated coffee and tea now 45 peers deep. I take a cough drop to preserve my strength. 

10:20 The first wave of jurors are announced over the PA. There are about 30 of them. We all wonder if they'll ever return. I decide to infiltrate free coffee and tea area and canvas for intel. May also secure use of "rental locker" for the pastistio, except that it costs a quarter that then gets refunded later. Sounds Socialist.

MORE TO COME....

10: 45 --- Caught a case in round three -- off I go, but not before weakening substantially to free coffee. Into courtroom now where laptop certain to be confiscated...!

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11:45 We took 40 minutes to answer (get walked-through) a 17-question questionaire. Also found a friendly in the bailiff, who allowed me to keep my ......wait a minute, of course he wanted me to keep it -- ensures the fluoridation.

Given a 20-minute break, I sussed out the Cafeteria and had a massive pancake and some bacon, special order, 'cause they had closed the grill. May have found ally in the grill guy. Will make Cafeteria primary escape route, or at least have lunch there. Acquired plastic ware for the pastitsio.

Cannot, of course, disclose anything about the case, other than it's criminal. And it's criminal that none of my peers had the initiative to seek out the pancakes. Without backup, cramming calories seemed the logical choice.

Fluoridated coffee not taking effect yet.

We're back on time, but the court isn't ready. Judge must have gone for two pancakes.

MORE TO COME....!

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(All times henceforth are Post Meridiem)

1:30 ---- And, mere moments after that last post, I, along with 20 others, were excused from the case and sent back to Peer Holding. Peer Holding told us to take lunch for the next 90 minutes -- and this after having just finished our 20-minute break to assuage the exhaustion from completing the 17-question question-thingy. This jury duty thing is starting to resemble certain work calls I've been a party to...


1:34 ---- and I took lunch, thank you very much, and updated no blogs until now. Know why? Because I'm my own damn Blaiser. There were serious Facebook threads to attend to--on issues like who gets to call whom terrorists, and why Anderson Cooper can't stop making the story about him.

1:36 --- "Free" coffee appears to mean "until it's gone," here in the judicial catacombs of Newark, New Jersey. Fair and balanced enough. The cafeteria has reasonable prices and friendly help (and an express lane to the parking deck, where an operative might make, shall we say, a purposeful retreat).  Also observed the defendant and his attorney from the case that bounced me, and have decided beyond a reasonable doubt that although the brother dresses better than I do, he's GUILTY, GUILTY GUILTY!

1:40 -- in the "computer lounge" where I have decided, in a sense of fluoridated solidarity, to serenade my peers with my Baroque Magique iTunes channel. It will help to neutralize the highly annoying clicks and beeps coming from my next-cube-neighbor's electronic device.

1:44 Some guy in the next row is snoring. Or has succumbed to some kind of juris coma. Cell phone lady continues a litany of noise-making that has expanded into a bag of chips, and an extremely loud scarf. If the Bach proves an insufficient counter-measure, I'm considering an incursion.


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1:58 -- I narrowly avoid having my name called for the first wave of apres-dejeuner administrative fodder jurors. My ever-considerate neighbor is now folding the cellophane bag that contained the bag of chips slowly..... I realize that Grandpa's money clip, which has a very, very small blade, somehow snuck its way into my narrow-wale chords for a joyride and made it past security.  It occurs to me that I  could be making better use of my time--and the court's--by opening a large stack of mail.

2:17 -- High point of the afternoon thus far -- our judicial handlers just got on the horn, on behalf of a peer, and solicited change for a $20. Five of us responded within seconds. Has to be the pre-arranged signal they told me about in Langley. In the next five minutes, if we are not all Facebook friends, I'll know I've been made and will have to initialize Beta protocol, or in its unclassified name, "Go To The Bathroom."

3:03 -- just noticed the wall clock here is stuck permanently at 10:41:47.  How long have I been here? A day? A week? Must research these numbers as they relate to "Lost."

3:03:45 -- Especially since one of the guys in my courtroom group looked suspiciously like John Locke, sans knife.

3:27     EMANCIPATION!!!!! Doneski. And a small wistful feeling --- after all, if I were one of the accused, I'd want me for a juror......

I'm a little suspicious, but I'm heading out. Definitely watching "Lost" tonight. If no one hears from me in about 45 minutes, please accost all foreign-national parking attendants you may encounter with the following code words:

El bailff no lleva los pantalones!!!!!

Thanks for reading, and as always, please remember that in the event of an emergency, your attorney, located under your seat, may be used as a personal flotation device.

Thank God Its Fifteen Minutes Are Nearly Up...

In a spasm of culture, tens of millions of people (this author included) have now viewed a synthesized Auto-Tuned sequence about a day of the week, masquerading as a pop song sung by a perky and unflappable Middle Schooler named Rebecca.

Hipster irony has long feasted on performance offerings that are so bad, they're good. That this sensibility has gone viral—a kind of smug rubber-necking, slowing our critical-thinking highways to a dismal, numbed crawl—is what's taken the actual video viral, and encouraged the attendant virtual stoning of its innocent-bystander star. As Meaghan Daum writes in the (where else?) Los Angeles Times, "Whereas it used to be that the forum for anonymous public opinion was the high school bathroom wall, now the whole world is essentially a bathroom wall."

And so, we are Pavlov's dogs reacting as if we were Zsa Zsa Gabor's dogs—we bite through that jewel-encusted leash and run to the food dish of fame and celebrity, gratefully lapping up the slop du jour. But we eat too fast and then we throw up.

In other words, the reaction to an item in question has become more important than the item itself. Or is it? Perhaps we're missing a profound message here by denigrating its messenger. Perhaps the message is as deceptively composed as, say, the perfectly rendered paintings of the Dutch Masters...

image courtesy of Anthony Falbo

Rather than debate who's to blame for the phenomenon of all our attention focused on a phenomenon, let's just look at The Thing itself and see what can be gleaned. I think the diabolically clever lyricists at Ark Music Factory know exactly what they're doing. And we all should be scared. Here's why:

To start with, the "record label" responsible for "Friday," Ark Music, contains an ancient Biblical reference in its title that could bely the organization's true motives: Gathering all the notes audible to humans, two by two, and cleverly storing them in plain sight, constructing songs like "Friday" as a hedge against an ongoing deluge/war against music, as evidenced by the work of John Cage ("4:33," the Silent Symphony for Piano and Lost Patience, for example, or an organ piece that began a performance in 2001 and will go on for 639 years.) See also, the music of any alleged atonal composer, or Hootie and the Blowfish, whose melody lines seldom reach beyond two or three tones anyway, and are therefor ideal for Ark-like storage. Note uncoincidental aquatic reference in this group's name, and its leader, Darius Rucker, named for the third "King of Kings" in the Achaemenid Empire, who lived from 550—486 BCE, generally agreed upon by Christian Fundamentalists as the exact timing of the Great Flood, or at the very least, sometime during the Old Testatment.

So, right off, we can easily understand that this is not simply a case of sleaze-bag talent-free college drop-outs in Southern California taking advantage of parents with shallow guilt and deep pockets, and their vapid, privileged children. That's simply what they WANT us to think while they wage a mystically informed, prophesy-driven, fanatical crusade against everything music, and by extension, everything Free Americans hold dear: BUT MOST OF ALL GUNS. That's right, THEY'RE GOING TO TAKE AWAY OUR GUNS!! Here's further proof, if you can't see past your own bubble-gum blindness yet:

To the knowledgable, independent thinker, it's all there in the cynical, ironic title of the song: "Friday." But I'm way ahead of myself. Let's take this one step at a time:

The stage is set for this brilliant deception right from the first lines. Ms. Black sings:

Oo-ooh-ooh, hoo yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah-ah-ah
Yeah, yeah, yeah

Thoughtful, right? And rightly so. These words are designed to be soothing—in REALITY, what they're distracting us from is a male voice superimposed over Ms. Black's, which ominously intones the foreshadowing code: Yeah, Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ark. Ending the line with "Ark," is an unmistakeable directive to the trained ear, that informs the listener who's in charge here (Ark Music Factory), who's delivering the REAL message and what's REALLY going to be revealed in subsequent stanzas.

But, of course, that's cleverly hidden also, for what we get instead, is a list of actions followed by a puzzle facing the singer, all of which can only be designed to confuse and obfuscate, for they bring up many more questions than they answer. I'll break it down for you:

Seven a.m., waking up in the morning
Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs
Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal
Seein' everything, the time is goin'
Tickin' on and on, everybody's rushin'
Gotta get down to the bus stop
Gotta catch my bus, I see my friends (My friends)

Forget the simple logistical problems presented by waking up and immediately attempting to "be fresh," before either going "downstairs" (a Dante-esque metaphor for Hell), or addressing the agrarian implications of the importance placed upon a "bowl," where one might sustain oneself with "cereal." Cereal is clearly meant to mean something else entirely, for in the video, there's a clear LACK of even a SPOON, much less even a TABLE. Obviously, it's because if the camera zoomed out, what we'd see would be the singer's "PARENTS," sitting at this TABLE drafting secret plans and/or legislation to TAKE AWAY OUR GUNS.

But forget that for now. The "song" continues to bob and weave with its intentions by presenting the listener with the following inconsistencies and unavoidable questions: WHY wouldn't the singer take the bus, which is to say WHAT's different about this day? WHO tipped off her friends so that they would pick her up? WHAT was dicussed about breakfast at THEIR houses, and most important, WHO is the driver, when in all liklihood all occupants are too young to have licenses? (kudos to the LA Times article for picking up on this first). The whole question is "conveniently" sidestepped—as is the whereabouts of the actual BUS—and instead we're presented with an unsolvable riddle:

Kickin' in the front seat
Sittin' in the back seat
Gotta make my mind up
Which seat can I take?

Which seat indeed? Reinforced by its hypnotizing backbeats and synthesized vocals, this question is obviously much larger and impossible to answer: it's the old immovable object and irresistible force all over again, simply stoping the progression of logic dead in its tracks. It's enough to make one download the song and listen over and over and over—just like I did—to garner the information necessary to clearly establish a direction in which one would have to go concerning this decision of which seat might better one's chances at an enjoyable commute to Middle School. I mean, seriously, I took the better part of today to grapple with all of this.

So then I took the question deeper. One the one hand, the back seat is traditionally where the "cool" kids hang out. It's an attractive place to be, and God knows what's ACTUALLY going on back there, because other passengers have to turn around and USE THEIR EYES, when thousands of years of genetically refined instincts—handed down from Biblical Times, just like the Second Amendment—are telling us to keep our eyes FORWARD, where we might not only avoid danger in the form of, say, predatory Upper Classmen, but also so that we are better situated to acquire items to help us survive, like a bowl of cereal. Remember, we never saw the bowl of cereal consumed, DID WE? That's because it's NOT ABOUT THE CEREAL AT ALL! Sadly, at this point, this game of symbology chess has already been won, and the fiendish, freedom-hating tyrants of Ark Music Factory have you right where they want you. And where is that? WITHOUT YOUR GUNS!!! You can be sure of THAT!

It's Friday, Friday
Gotta get down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend, weekend
Friday, Friday
Gettin' down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend
Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Fun, fun, fun, fun
Lookin' forward to the weekend
7:45, we're drivin' on the highway
Cruisin' so fast, I want time to fly
Fun, fun, think about fun
You know what it is
I got this, you got this
My friend is by my right, ay
I got this, you got this
Now you know it

Incredibly, these three stanzas are calculated throw-aways that you've heard a thousand times before and that mean exactly what they ACTUALLY say: Nothing. It's been done by every group from The Beatles to Loverboy to the Backstreet Boys to Nirvana to Insane Clown Posse—discussing the weekend, partaking in enjoyable activities and concurring with one's friends regarding an equitable distribution of labor, all set against the backdrop of journey in a convertible. If you STRETCH your imagination a LITTLE, it ALMOST sounds just like a pop song.

And that would be a MISTAKE, because we've almost made it to the business end of this "song." BUT NOT YET!!. Not ones to take any chances, the heartless bastards at Ark Music have thrown in a reprise of the Scylla-and-Charybdis-like dilemma of the convertible's seating arrangement, followed by the dazzling repetition of the words "weekend" (three times); "partying" (four times"; and the eponymous "Friday" (six times), just to ensure the listener's synapses are thoroughly stewed into a simmering gourd of Quaker five-minute oats:

Kickin' in the front seat
Sittin' in the back seat
Gotta make my mind up
Which seat can I take?


It's Friday, Friday
Gotta get down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend, weekend
Friday, Friday
Gettin' down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend


Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Fun, fun, fun, fun
Lookin' forward to the weekend

It's all so diabolical, and presages the arrival of the real message, the crucial sequence—the one that the song was constructed to mask, and the one that CANNOT be mistaken for anything else: PLEASE pay attention here, if you've taken nothing else from this analysis. As the section begins, we notice something's "up" when the video breaks from live action to animation—a CLEAR comment on a MYSTICAL, OTHERWORLDLY, kind of mystical world, that's other: AND it begins with 2:06 elapsed. If I have to eplain the significance of THOSE numbers to you, you may as well just get hopped up on Nyquil, watch The DaVinci Code and march up to your nearest jack-booted governement agency and HAND-DELIVER those Second-Amendment-protected, beared arms.... Don't get me started....

Anyway -- here's the crux of the whole cheese enchilada:

Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today i-is Friday, Friday (Partyin')

It begins innocently enough, with a rational accounting of the present and the past, two things that cannot be changed, and the one-word endorsement of the supremacy of the present, or Friday: (Partyin').

However:

We-we-we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today

It's so plain, they didn't even bother to hide their exuberance: Of COURSE "we so excited." We so excited 'cause we about to subconsciously HAMMER the FREE WORLD with BRAINWASHING—it's both the coup de grâce and the Coupe de Ville, the alpha and the omega, the smoking gun and the Grassy Knoll, the Dick York and the Dick Sargent.

Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes after ... wards
I don't want this weekend to end

Do you see what I mean? It's all so elegant and simple and clearly obvious: It was never Friday. It was ALWAYS Saturday and Sunday. Those are the days whose outcomes we can influence, and those are the days in which the message of Ark Music Factory is embedded. It's as if our Best Days are meant to be before us. Days in which THEY'LL COME TO YOUR DOOR AND DEMAND YOUR GUNS!! But more on that, later.

Having delivered its rhetorical, precision-guided prophesy, the song continues with its only Red Herring, the spoken-word section, a juxtaposition within a double-entendre rapped up by (DUH) the same ominous intoner of "ark" in the Very Beginning: It all comes full circle, except it doesn't:

R-B, Rebecca Black
So chillin' in the front seat (In the front seat)
In the back seat (In the back seat)
I'm drivin', cruisin' (Yeah, yeah)
Fast lanes, switchin' lanes
Wit' a car up on my side (Woo!)
(C'mon) Passin' by is a school bus in front of me
Makes tick tock, tick tock, wanna scream
Check my time, it's Friday, it's a weekend
We gonna have fun, c'mon, c'mon, y'all

This guy's just thowing us off the trail left, right and center. I mean, he's in the back seat, he's in the front seat, he's having it both ways. AND HE DOES ALL THIS WITHOUT CEREAL!!! IT MAKES NO SENSE WHATEVER!

But finally, a coded denoument in which "Friday," gets its closest yet to an ACTUAL pop song, with the singer performing in front a mass of wriggling, dancing peers, a recapitulation of themes (fun, weekend, partying, yeah) to a quick, merciful ending, for its secret seed has already been expertly planted.

It's Friday, Friday
Gotta get down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend, weekend
Friday, Friday
Gettin' down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend

Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Fun, fun, fun, fun
Lookin' forward to the weekend


It's Friday, Friday
Gotta get down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend, weekend
Friday, Friday
Gettin' down on Friday
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend

Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)
Fun, fun, fun, fun
Lookin' forward to the weekend

And, by 3:48, it's all over. And with it, so are your chances to KEEP YOUR GUNS AND LIBERTY SAFE from the forces of LIBERALS, Jay Leno, the ghost of John Lennon, and RACHEL MADDOW!

Tune in next week when we will ILLUMINATE the significance of Saturday and Sunday, as hidden for centuries (IN PLAIN SIGHT) within the texts of William Shakespeare's plays. One of those days of the week appears ELEVEN times in FIVE plays. The other ONLY appears in the comedies As You Like It and Loves Labours Lost, but NO ONE'S LAUGHING!!! For therein begins the REAL message that makes "Friday," so subversive and dangerous. Please read the texts of all SEVEN plays before reading ANYTHING ELSE, or watching ANYTHING on You Tube!!

In future symposia, we'll disuss troubling questions like:

• HOW the Left stirred up riots at the Democratic Convention in '68, by promoting the song "Build Me Up, Buttercup."

• WHY the secret of Sonny Bono's whereabouts on November 22, 1963, died with him in a "mysterious" ski accident.

• WHO stands to gain the most control over your lives (and sidearms!) from a re-release of Musical Youth's seminal early-80s single "Pass the Dutchie"? (Hint: WHICH side do they pass it to? I'll give you ONE GUESS!!!)

Thanks for reading, and remember to ALWAYS keep your powder dry, while you keep REACHING FOR THE STARS!