Category Archives: Movies

Thor–my review of the movie

Movies

Thor movie stills-3

I’ll admit it. I went into this movie not expecting a lot of great things, but having always been a Kenneth Branaugh fan, I figured it couldn’t be that bad. And as a Shakespearean fan, I figured a touch of the bard into a superhero movie couldn’t be bad either.

First off, it wasn’t bad. It was cute, and it was one of those movies that does what it’s supposed to do. And that’s really about it.

Okay, that’s not about it. I did have a few more things to say. Like, for one, why can’t they just make a movie once that takes us right into the middle of the franchise, instead of having us have to go with the whole backstory thing, as if we’re too stupid to figure it out ourselves. As a result, we end up with one movie after another that is essentially retelling Superman the Movie, except by inserting another superhero into the role. We got this with Batman (twice), Iron Man, Spiderman, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the XMen (twice, or at least restarted again), Jonah Hex (or at least what should have been a properly done movie, but what can you expect when you put Megan Fox in a movie where it’s not porn?), Daredevil, Electra, and practically every other superhero movie that has tried to retell the same story that we already all know very well.

And that’s the problem. We all know the story. We know how the hero got to be what he or she is. It would be kind of nice to just start off in the middle of a franchise and see what happens.

And that’s what we got with Watchmen, and strangely enough, I kind of thought that was what we were going to be getting with Thor. I mean, think about it. We weren’t going to go back and do the birth of Thor, but we were going to see a series that took place about a Norse god that was already established. Turns out I was wrong, as we even got bits and pieces of him as a kid with his brother Loki growing up.

The movie did what it had to do, and that’s keep us entertained. It had the big crescendo moment where the hero becomes his big bad self, and then he takes out the bad guy. The problem, however, was that most of the action that shows up on the screen is kind of the fault of the hero himself. I mean, the movie starts because (spoiler alert!) Thor’s brother Loki manufactures a plan to get the frost giants, or whatever they were, to start up a war that’s been under a cease fire for centuries. But the war doesn’t really get going until Thor decides he needs to be the bad ass that he is and takes his buddies to frozen world to pick a fight with the frost giants. This leads to both Thor’s banishment, and the eventual war between the frost giants and the Norse gods. I hate when that happens. So, in the end, when Thor gets his powers back, he basically beats some monster that has been sent to Earth to kill Thor, saving everyone. And then goes back to Valhalla to save Valhalla from the gods who are angry at Valhalla because of something Thor did before he was banished. In other words, while Loki kind of started it all, Thor is equally responsible for the war, and in the end, he kind of fixes what he broke by destroying the enemies of Odin, people who became their enemies because Thor wanted to look cool. In other words, it was a lot about nothing. A lot of speeches get made, and a lot of posturing gets postured, and in the end, we’re left with the Norse gods not able to get back to America because they had to destroy the bridge to save the world. Kind of confusing, but yeah, Norse mythology can be that way. At least it didn’t end with any ABBA songs.

I did have to add as an aside that Dr Pepper is doing an interesting tie-in with Thor, where they advertise the Warriors III, the three warriors who serve alongside Thor. Only, in the movie, there are four of them. The Dr Pepper ad conveniently dropped the girl of the four members, which makes me wonder if she was added at the last minute, or Dr Pepper just hates women. I’m curious to know. Either way, she was the hottest of the four (being a guy myself, one can understand why I might say that), but she was also the toughest of the group. One seemed like he was trying to be Jet Li, one a human variation of Chewbacca, and the other guy some kind of pansy who fights with a sword. One of the secret service guys who points out the girl made the best attribution when he called her Xena. Couldn’t have said it any better. But she was too demonstrative of a character for Dr Pepper to have left her out of the campaign. It wasn’t a Warriors III thing as there were most definitely IV.

As I drove home from the theater, I reflected on the movie, and one thing seemed to sum up my experience: I forgot my umbrella at the theater, meaning that when it rained next, I would be without protection, much like Earth will be now that Thor destroyed the bridge that lets him come back, something significant because he’s supposed to return when the Avengers come out as a movie in a few years. So, let’s hope they have a Corps of Engineers in Valhalla building a new earthly bridge. Until then, I’ll buy a new umbrella and hope it doesn’t rain.

When it comes to issues of sex, America does not understand redemption

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I’m not one to latch onto another story and then write about it, although I admit there are a lot of bloggers who do that sort of thing. But this was one issue that I found to be so significant that I felt that it needed further attention, and perhaps even more perspective. An article appeared today in Salon.com that contained a personal narrative from Melissa Petro, a woman who had previously outed herself as a former sex worker and stripper before becoming a school teacher. As a result, she was hit hard by the conservative channels of the press, and then right after that by practically every other channel of the press as well. Even the governor felt it necessary to chime in demanding that she be fired. In all, she was completely railroaded out of the teaching profession, and by reading her personal story, you can also get the sense that she pretty much has a difficult time today of getting a job anywhere.

Now, I’ve written before about how I used to go to school with a lot of women who were sex workers while paying their way through school. At San Francisco State University, in certain disciplines, it was practically a right of passage. I couldn’t tell you how many friends I had who used to ask me to come see them dance as a stripper because at the time they were actually proud of what they were doing. Not all of them were, of course, but at one point in someone’s life, there is a sense that this is a perspective of freedom that not many other occupations can allow.

Unfortunately, that occupation is now competing against the sense that mainstream America has that anything involving sex is bad. And if you happen to work anywhere near children, it’s almost a given that you should be tarred and feathered and run out of town like the wandering gypsy you are. I won’t even get into the dichotomy issue of how most of the clients of these women tend to be the same men whose wives are horrified that these women did what they did; there’s always this sense that these “bad” women come from some place that has no interaction with the rest of society. And once they show up, they have to be run out quickly, or little Johnny might grow up to be a bad person, or might be forced into sex with her, or whatever bizarre hyper-fictious ridiculousness seems to be the fear that emerges in these situations.

The simple fact of the matter is, these women are all products of our society and civilization. They were churned out by the system at one time or another, and if we all want to go into this “they’re all bad for doing what they did” then we should take some sort of responsibility for putting them into those positions in the first place. We can’t have the luxury of just assuming that people are bad by nature, and therefore it was their fault that they chose to do those kinds of jobs that the rest of ridicule and condemn.

But even saying that, there’s an immediate assumption that stripping or sex work is bad. Is it really? What is so wrong about someone who does that sort of activity? What makes that person any less “moral” or less worthy of normal civilization than any woman who has carnal knowledge with a man as part of a relationship? Discounting the whole “it’s only okay in marriage” sort of nonsense that predates 1950, “moral” people don’t really make all that much of a fuss about people who engage in sex in relationships with each other. Granted, they don’t wanted specific details, but they really don’t care. So why is someone who is engaged in this activity on a normal basis considered someone to be less worthy of belonging to our daily civilization?

Over the years, I’ve known a lot of women who existed as sex workers. For a time, I got my start creating web pages for professional dominatrices, mainly because they were the ones who really fed the business back then when the Internet was started. Strangely enough, my main clientele were professional dominants and churches. And quite often, the references I received crossed both demographics (meaning that quite often my professional dominants contacts came to me from the web sites of churches I created or maintained, and the other way around as well). We’d like to think there’s a serious disconnect or separation between both avenues, but there isn’t.

What’s really concerning parents these days is not the sex worker “problem” but the belief that sexual activity is starting with people at a younger age, and they need a criminal to point to in order to feel better about the situation. But the reality of the situation is that by compartmentalizing sex outside of acceptable parameters, we make it so that younger people see it as something to explore out of the attention of parents, and then families pay for the consequences. Most young people are getting their sex information by watching Hollywood and the music industry sexualize every woman who has anything to do with entertainment so that the expectation is that it’s something good and to be pursued. There is absolutely no connection between a stripper and a music starlett, yet conservative media condemns the stripper and hypes the product of industry. Yet, if you really think about it, the stripper caters to a clientele that is strictly adult, whereas the music industry and Hollywood will take anyone with access to an MP3 player or a dvd player.

And with all that said, I’ve kind of wandered off the topic of the original person herself, Melissa Petro. In her own words, she actually felt herself empowered by her experience as a stripper and sex worker (well, more as a stripper than as a sex worker as she didn’t seem to say too many good things about the latter). Unlike most stories of sex workers, we’re told of horrible conditions and how they were forced into the experience. She came to it on her own, and it was a productive environment for her until she found her way out. And then she made something of her life, becoming a teacher who works with children.

We should have been congratulating her, not condemning her. If we accept the erroneous argument that sex work is bad, she got out of it and came back to us to live a more productive life. She should have been the poster child for how to win through horrible circumstances. But she wasn’t treated that way. She was eventually fired, and she has little recourse of ever working again, in any job. Her own narrative explains how she moved in with her boyfriend to survive.

What bothers me most is that no one else seems bothered by this. We’ll go on with our lives and criticize her for having made the mistake of revealing her past to the rest of the world. In other words, her was a teacher giving us a teaching moment, and none of us learned a thing.

Why Didn’t Blu-Ray Take Over the World?

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There was a battle over dvd standards a few years back that was similar to the fight between VHS and Beta Max a decade or so even earlier. Sony had released their Blu-Ray player, and Toshiba had invented a rival called HD DVD. On the surface, the upcoming battle didn’t really seem all that significant (DVDs were still working fine), but Sony was about to release its Playstation 3 with a Blu-Ray player, and Toshiba was putting its HD DVD into the new XBox 360, made by Microsoft. So, the battle waged.

Strangely enough, even though the XBox 360 was the stronger seller (Sony dropped the ball and took way too long to release the Playstation 3), in the end, enough movie companies fell into Sony’s camp, and the Blu-Ray player eventually defeated the HD DVD format, becoming the only survivor. I don’t even think you can find an HD DVD movie anymore.

Yet, for some reason, even though Blu-Ray beat HD DVD, it still has yet to surpass DVD as the standard way of releasing new content for movies, TV shows and computer games. Instead, there has been an almost rebirth of the normal DVD player, the Blu-Ray remaining a higher end product but with an inability to maintain its dominance based on superiority alone.

And it is superior to DVD. In all ways. If you put a DVD player next to a Blu-Ray player and play them both at the same time, it’s obvious which one is better. But is that enough to make a difference?

You see, a couple of other things are going on that made the move to Blu-Ray not happen. First, Blu-Rays never replaced DVDs when it comes to price. In order to be the replacement, the price needs to be set at what people are willing to pay for movies and TV shows. For an average movie, there was a set price that people were willing to pay, and this came from years of establishing that market. Blu-Rays are almost always much more expensive. This was supposed to change over time as they took over the market, in that the prices would come down to match what DVDs used to be, so that they would effectively replace them. But that never happened. Instead, if you paid $19 for a DVD, you were always paying $29-35 for a Blu-Ray. While that doesn’t seem like a lot, it is when it comes to the economics of how DVD entertainment was expected. As long as Blu-Rays remained higher in price, it was always going to be seen as an exclusive item, and more of a luxury.

Blank Blu-Ray dvd prices never came down. They’re really expensive. A colleague pointed out to me that a dvd with the actual movie on it is sometimes cheaper than a blank Blu-Ray dvd. As long as that’s the case, you’re never going to get full adoption of the product. Plus, the players are still very expensive. It’s a no go all the way through.

One problem that Blu-Rays have that you never had with dvds is that you often have to make firmware upgrades. People don’t like that. Sorry. When they’re forced to keep updating their software for their dvd player, they get annoyed. With a dvd player, they don’t have to do it. Chances are pretty good, they’re not going to switch. When many dvd players are not connected online, you have even more of a problem.

The last point is probably the most important for the current situation. Blu-Rays needed to be the replacement for dvds, but instead we’re quickly moving online to streaming technology. People don’t even need dvds anymore, and if they see that as the obvious future, the replacement of the dvd is almost dead on a arrival. The thought was that people would pay more money for better quality, but instead streaming has gone the opposite direction, where people are willing to take less quality with more convenience. With that trade off, you might see why Blu-Rays might never take over the world.

It’s a great technology, but it may have been brought in too late to replace the model that was already going to be replaced by something different. Not necessarily better, but more convenient. Unfortunately, not always does the obvious successor become the winner.

Recap of the News and a treatise on quantum mechanics in movies

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It’s time for a little recap of the news, Duane style. There were just too many little things going on that I didn’t want to write a bunch of different posts rather than just do the whole thing at once.

1. Charlie Sheen. It seems his second performance (in Chicago) was a lot better than his first one in Detroit. Let’s see if he can manage to pull it off with a majority of his shows or if the one in Chicago was a fluke. What I have found fascinating about this whole story is how many people feel it necessary to comment about how stupid people are for wasting lots of money for a concert ticket to watch a “train wreck”. You know, as much as I agree with the sentiment, it’s their money, and if that’s what they want to do with it, who cares? It’s not like everyone else doesn’t waste money on stupid things as well. Some people pay outrageous amounts of money on porn, some on shoes, some on video games, others on Apple products. So let them. The only ones I found to be most relevant in their condemnations were the people who paid money to see him and were seriously disappointed. It should be interesting to see how this whole thing plays out over time.

2. Libya. Most people who know me also know I’m not a real fan of war. Since leaving government service, I’ve become more of a peaceful individual, and the idea of starting wars for any reason bothers me. Anyway, the situation in Libya is interesting in that it’s not just about war. It’s about choosing sides. For decades, we treated Gaddafi as the enemy, and then during the War on Terror, we started treating him as an ally. And the second that a revolution started in his country, we took sides against him. But at the same time, we also realized that we still want and need oil, plus the help of Libya against future terrorists is also a necessity, so if he isn’t removed from power, there’s going to be a very interesting dilemma our country has to face in the future. Do we go back to treating him friendly, or do we forever treat him as an enemy, knowing that he’ll probably start fostering terrorism used against us. Add to the fact that the rebels are now possibly targeting civilians in order to fight Gaddafi, and you have one of those situations the US is so good at getting itself into. We’re really good at doing the “right thing” but what we’re not really good at doing is knowing when to stop or even how, especially when the “right thing” is no longer the good thing. We stopped potential civilian casualties, and now we’re in the situation where we have to decide whether or not to back the rebels rather than just protect civilians. Like I said, we’re not historically very good at making choices like these.

3. Source Code. I saw this movie over the weekend, and I really enjoyed it. I’ve been hearing mixed reviews from others, however. Most of the established review sites have liked it, but the people who haven’t seen it seem to be interested in criticizing it, which is somewhat bizarre if you think about it. One of the biggest criticisms has also come from people who have seen it, and it (SPOILER ALERT…don’t read further if you’re interested in seeing this movie) has to do with the ending of the movie. And I’m finding that kind of funny because I think the criticism comes from people not realizing exactly what happened at the end. I keep hearing critics say, “the cheezy ending which didn’t make any logical sense” or how they believe that there was too much suspension of disbelief that was required to make that leap at the end. Well, what I want to add to this is that I think they didn’t understand what happened. It wasn’t a cheezy ending for the main character to make the choice he did. What really happened was he understood what was going on, but the scientist didn’t. The scientist thought he invented a process (the source code) to take someone through another individual’s mind and relive the last moments of his life. He argued the significant point that kind of gave away the ending, IF YOU KNEW ANYTHING ABOUT QUANTUM MECHANICS. The movie created a Shroedinger effect, in that what was really going on (and the main character realized it in his own uneducated way) was not a reliving of last moments of life, but a jump into another reality, kind of the “is the cat dead or alive” effect of Shroedinger. When he asked to save the people on the train and sent out an email message to the woman behind the camera, he realized that he was saving another reality, not his own. He understood that the people on the train were dead in his own reality, but he wanted to save another reality this time, and that’s the one he managed to continue living in. Yes, it’s highly complex, but if you followed the quantum mechanics, it actually made some sense. Anyway, spoiler done.

4. Obama announced his reelection. Really? That came out of nowhere.

5. The Budget and Shutting down of the government. Hope it doesn’t happen. But this is what happens when you give people too much power, too much responsibility and no ramifications if they don’t get the job done. To them, it’s all about winning this ideological battle and has nothing to do with actual service. All of them were elected to serve their country, but in reality they’re doing what they do best, serving themselves. The only people who will suffer will be “the people” as the politicians will all get paid regardless of what they do. Always remember that when they do what they do, or even more importantly, don’t do what they do.

6. Anti-teacher sentiment in America. I’ve really never seen it this bad. For ridiculous reasons, the right has decided that the way to clean up government is to go on the warpath against teachers, pretty much trying to use teachers as their scapegoat of everything that’s wrong in America. For years now, the problem has been education, but teachers aren’t the problem; they’ve been the ones trying to solve the problem. Unfortunately, no one seems to really be interested in dealing with the actual problems, like poverty, hunger, apathy and violence. Because governments have been spending money like it’s going out of style, somehow the teachers have been seen as the ones responsible, even though they don’t make those decisions but politicians do. So, of course, because politicians can’t blame themselves, they’re going after the people they can blame. Economically, the system cannot maintain itself as it has, but that’s not the fault of teachers; that’s the fault of the budget people who have been playing the “kick the can down the road” game for decades now. Well, we’re running out of road, so obviously now that it comes time to make tough decisions, we’re proving we elected people who have never made good decisions to begin with and expecting them to come up with proper solutions. How more broken can the system be than that?

7. The War on Drugs. I know it hasn’t been in the news lately, but actually it has. It’s in the news every day, even though we see it as other stories. We’ve been fighting this “war” for decades now, and we’re not winning. Instead, what we’ve done is create a criminal society where addicts are now perceived as criminals and added to our prison system population instead of treated. Then we ruin their lives, making it impossible for them to ever properly rejoin communities, thus falling back into irresponsible behavior. We have also created a criminal element of people who prey on other people. By allowing this behavior to continue, we have also pushed back race relations a hundred years, where we have one group of people attacking another group of people, where the only things that separate them are color of their skin, because other distinctive characterizations are more difficult to ascertain. In some cities, like Denver, we have race riots being fought, and they happen under the noses of the rest of the country, which prefers to be completely oblivious to this type of behavior, using pretense as a process of filter. Where we need leadership to fix this, we have people who gain political prominence and power by fueling this behavior, and we all lose. I’m just saying.

That’s all for today. Stay well, and don’t eat the yellow snow. It doesn’t taste like bananas.

Those Rare Movies Where Great Writing Appears Almost from Nowhere

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I’ve been kind of consumed by something else lately. I’ve been trying to write Java programming for a personal project of mine. But usually when I get consumed by something like that, every now and then something else manages to hit me out of left field, and I’m left astonished because I never saw it coming. This time around it was a movie I watched on Blue Ray the other day, a movie called Sideways.

I heard the movie was pretty good, so I had bought it on Blue Ray back when Best Buy had it on sale. Of course, buying a movie and then finally seeing it are two different things as my time is usually very limited. But on the weekend, I decided to take a few hours and actually watch the movie I had bought weeks ago.

I’m usually not that taken in by movies, as I’ve become a very cynical critic of most movies I see these days. Don’t get me started on the whole remake phenomena that seems to be going on these days. But as I watched Sideways, I realized I was seeing something that was rare. It was not only a very good movie with excellent acting from everyone in it, but the writing was superb. From a writing standpoint, there’s a moment when you’re watching superb writing that you start to realize it, and for me it was pretty deep into the movie because I hadn’t even realized it was affecting me so. But at one point, I even felt the scene hitting me because the writing was so perfect and delivered so well by Paul Giamatti that I was floored by what I was seeing.

The scene was simple, between Giamatti and Virginia Madsen, who were having an intimate conversation about wine. At one point, she asks him why he loves Pinot, and it starts off as such a simple response before it turns into a metaphor for the character Miles, who Giamatti plays. He talks about how the Pinot is a red wine grape that struggles for survival, and unlike the Merlot, he appreciates everything that grape goes through as it can only survive in specific climates and areas but manages to succeed and produce a wonderful tasting wine as a result of its survival. The lines that Giamatti delivers in this scene were so powerful and so poignant that I found myself amazed that this practically appeared from nowhere yet seemed so perfect for the moment that served as its introduction.

When the movie was finished, it made me wish that so many other movies would even attempt a smidgen of the brilliance that existed within this script, but then I realized that so many other movies would shove themselves out of Hollywood’s doors and we’d have to wait for something as wonderful as the writing of that movie again.

The Act of Writing a Screenplay

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I’ve been thinking about writing screenplays for awhile now. So, I saved up all of the money in my piggy bank and bought myself a copy of Final Draft Version 8, a screenwriting software program. Well, it was kind of difficult to figure out how to make sense of it, but I’ve been playing around with it for a few weeks now, and this evening I decided to actually start work on a screenplay.

Well, kind of. I actually realized I needed to figure out how to write a screenplay before I actually start writing a new story. In other words, had to get past the how to before I got to the doing it stage. So, what I did was go back to one of my stories already completed and then work backwards. You see, some years back, I wrote a couple of movies in “fake” screenplay form and then choreographed a movie, which I then put together in The Movies software. I did a whole bunch of them. But I decided to go back to my favorite one and then rewrite the story from a screenplay perspective, rather than the seat of the pants version I did before.

And I’m discovering that writing a screenplay is a whole different animal to type of writing I normally do. But it’s a whole lot of fun. It’s a completely different process of writing that you never really figure on until you sit down and actually try to do it.

The story I’m working on is called Buried Memories, a romantic movie that is more my typical style of writing (meaning it’s not the usual kind of story you’re going to find anywhere else). As I’m taking some liberties with Buried Memories 2.0, it’s going to be a bit different and a lot more robust than the original version. Either way, it’s something new for me to play around with, and after I finish with this project, I’ll probably start writing a screenplay from scratch.

Anyway, if you’re interested in the movie that was originally done for this story, I’m going to try to embed it into this post for you to experience.

Buried Memories

Why I Never Watch the Academy Awards

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Last night was the big night for overexposed movie stars to rub shoulders with each other and then give each other awards. The rest of us, sadly enough, weren’t actually invited. And if we showed up, we’d be arrested and escorted off to some place where we would never bother the rich and famous again.

A bunch of movies were up for awards. A bunch of people who were in those movies were up for awards. Supposedly, songs that were sung or played in those movies also got put up for awards. In the end, very rich people rewarded each other on national television and gave speeches about how humble and wonderful they are. The rest of us, because we’re essentially peasants in comparison to the rich and famous, were allowed to watch them on television and cheer them on. If we were lucky, we could go to one of their movies and spend $10 to see how wonderful they were.

That’s kind of why I don’t care about the Academy Awards. It’s a hoo ha kind of show that’s designed around rewarding people who have somehow elevated movies to something more significant than Nobel Prizes every year, where someone’s movie gets more media exposure than a brilliant writer or peace champion who has risked life to make the world safer for others to live in. Movie stars and that crowd have elevated themselves to the new royalty, except they have basically done nothing different than wandering minstrels used to do only centuries before, except the wandering minstrels were usually chased out of town once they used up the local charity.

I don’t hate movies. I love watching good movies, and I recommend good ones to all of my friends. But I don’t worship the people who make them or who star in them. Okay, maybe Woody Allen in his day and perhaps Sean Connery in his, but that’s about it. Today’s stars are somewhat irrelevant to me, as I don’t find any of them to be all that impressive. I find most of them interchangeable, and quite often unrecognizable. Whereas people used to lust after the next appearance of Marilyn Monroe or the next movie starring Humphrey Bogart, that doesn’t happen anymore. Today’s stars are insignificant and overhyped. We spend more time trying to know about their personal lives than we ever did before, mainly because I don’t think people are all that interested in their movie star appearances any longer. None of them have the sustaining power to cause us to jump up for joy as we used to do in Alfred Hitchcock’s day.

This is why I don’t care about the Academy Awards. They’re generic, overhyped and irrelevant. During yesterday’s show, the studio heads tried so hard to hype the show for the youth of the world by showcasing two younger actors, and it fizzled and died. People just didn’t care. The days of Bob Hope or Johnny Carson headlining the Academy Awards are gone, mainly because the interest in the vehicle died a long time ago.

Last night, I watched the last four episodes of the 6th season of Weeds, a show that was so much more enjoyable than anything that might have occurred during the Academy Awards. And this wasn’t even their best season of Weeds.

Part of the problem is that we stopped making great movies and now just make movies. Generic movies. Boring movies. Remakes of remakes of movies. And we pretend its all new and fascinating. We have our “stars” go on talk shows and talk up how great their current projects are, even though they’re talking about a remake of Batman, or whatever generic intellectual property comes to mind. Creativity is gone, mainly because Hollywood tends to think that writers are afterthoughts, something you call in after the “geniuses” run out of ideas. And then every now and then one great glimmer of hope will show up, and then be milked to death before anyone can think of something creative to do with it.

That’s why I stopped watching the Academy Awards. Hopefully, things will get better one day, but I’ve been saying that for a few decades now, and it hasn’t happened.

I don’t have a lot of hope that things will.

What it All Comes Down to

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I guess it’s time for another update on what’s going on, what’s on my mind, and where I think things are going.

1. My Readership. I suspect I really don’t have anyone reading this blog (my main one). It gets printed also on Open Salon, which might grant me a few readers there, but even there it’s a crap shoot as to whether or not anyone actually reads (or cares about) anything I have to say. I also import my blogs to my Facebook profile, and even though I have a bunch of “friends” there, I suspect practically no one reads anything I have to say there either.

It’s a real problem for a writer who wants to be taken seriously when no one reads anything he has to say. It gets really frustrating. I mean, Snooki can write a book and it becomes a bestseller based on her outrageous behavior alone, but a consistent writer generally has to kill someone in order to get anyone to read his stuff. And they wonder why so many literary types kill themselves before they ever become famous, often discovered after they blew their brains out over the frustration of trying to actually make it as a writer or an artist.

This means when I post my blog, I get tons of traffic, but I suspect it’s a bunch of bots that are trying to get people to buy their shit rather than actual people reading my blog. My spam filter logs dozens of spam messages a day, which are all the type that say something like: “Read your posting, and I completely agree with you. You should try out this new version of sex medication which can be found at….” Yeah, it gets really annoying and frustrating.

But just because I suspect one of my stuffed animals might be reading this by tapping into my wifi at home, I’ll continue….

2. Snow. I really hate it. I do. I’m not from Michigan, even though I live here. I’m from California, and if I could afford to live there or could have ever found a job there, I would be there right now. I hate the snow. I hate the cold. I turned on my heater two nights ago for the first time (been using an electrical set of heaters all Winter long), and it was so much nicer than just being able to heat up one small room, and not very well either. Even though my electrical heater could get the room up to about 70 or so, it felt like it was 45. I’m now using my real heater, even though it’s expensive as hell. But I can’t take the cold any more. I really hate it here.

3. The Whole Nook vs. Kindle Debate. I’ve written a few articles on this because I bought both a Nook Color and the $189 Kindle 3G + Wifi. I’ve completely given up on the Nook. I had two subscriptions to magazines with the Nook Color (Consumer Reports and the New York Times Book Review). I gave up trying to get the Nook to download Consumer Reports. It would start to download and then just stop. I would check the wifi signal, and it would register as fine. After three days of trying to download a magazine I already paid for, I gave up, cancelled my subscriptions and I will never use the Nook again. Contest over. The Kindle wins. It might not look as nice, but at least I can actually get content onto it. The Nook Color is a piece of shit that should never have been sold to people. I will never recommend it to anyone ever again.

4. Egypt. Things are probably going to get really interesting now that Mubarak went on the air and basically told the protesters: “I hear you, but I just wanted to say go fuck yourselves. Have a nice day.” He’s decided that even though people are out in the streets risking their lives, he’s not leaving. The Army has now backed him, which means that one of two things are probably going to happen. They’ll crack down on the protesters, and this will be one of those sorry moments in human history that people try to forget when talking about how great a people we are, or the people are going to end up going the way of the French Revolution, overthrowing the government and killing Mubarak if he doesn’t escape out of the country first. If you’re a dictator, and you pretty much give the finger to your people when they demand you step down, you really don’t have a lot of options that can play out from that moment on. I mean, all sorts of things can happen, but right now, it’s going to be a slaughter of people unless a whole lot of people back down, and when people are backed into a corner, they usually strike back instead of back down. Unless they’re Americans. Then they either sue you or back down and say that they want to spend more time with their families.

5. Relationships. I don’t know anything about this subject. I’m not in one. I don’t recognize one when I am in one. I don’t even know what women are, although I see movies with them in it, so I do believe they might exist, although I can’t verify it in person.

6. Politics in the USA. We’re going to be heading towards another presidential election with no electable people in the Republican Party, a current president who has done nothing to be reelected, other than make arousing speeches that don’t translate to actual action, and a whole lot of self-important politicians who think they deserve to be the next leaders of the free (in theory, at least) world. Right now, the front runners for the Republican Party seem to be Sarah Palin (the joke that keeps giving), Newt Gingrich (a pompous airbag that comes installed as standard equipment), a just-announced “I’m seriously considering it” Donald Trump (another rich buffoon who thinks that being rich translates to leadership potential), and a bunch of other people no one knows, has ever heard of, or cares one iota about whatsoever. So, right now, I’m calling it a boring presidential election where we reelect Jimmy Carter, um, Obama.

7. The Academy Awards. A bunch of movies I didn’t see, don’t want to see, and don’t care about, are competing for the top honors this year. As you can guess, I’m holding my breath in anticipation.

8. SyFy Becomes Shark Attack Channel. I don’t know when this happened, but my favorite channel (I remember actually asking a television station provider if they carried the SyFy Channel and not caring about any others) went from being a station with original science fiction programming with shows like Stargate SG1. Atlantis, Warehouse 13, Eureka, Battlestar Galactica (then Caprica), some variation of Star Trek, and lots of that sort of stuff. Now, it’s Man-Killing Shark and really bizarre movie of the week crap that stars Erik Estrada as a small town sheriff who is fighting a shark that has grown feet and chases people on the beach, but Estrada, who plays Skip William, is afraid of sharks because a shark killed his family in a drive-by shooting in Compton. Okay, that’s not a real show, but it should be. Who stole my SyFy Channel?

9. The Federal Budget is Out of Control. Um, when has it ever not been? We’re approaching the debt ceiling in February, when they told us that if we didn’t do things right, we’d be hitting that debt ceiling by September. Um, it’s FEBRUARY and we’re already arguing for having to increase the limit. And this is the government that’s trying to FIX the economy? Really?

10. Facebook Went Public. I laughed my ass off when I heard it was going to happen. If ever there was a bubble corporation that has absolutely no value whatsoever being sold for so many billions, I couldn’t find one. At least GM makes cars. At least Microsoft puts out a browser or operating system every now and then. But what does Facebook actually produce? Your content. Your friends. Your information. In other words, not a damn thing. Yet, they’re bad boy of leadership is now a multi-billionaire, and they’ve been launched as a fake IPO (a real one wasn’t done because the SEC would have hit them with all sorts of legal injunctions, which should automatically tell everyone something’s not on the up and up, but even that doesn’t cause people to take notice). Yeah, I use Facebook, but it’s such a non-entity in the grand scheme of things and is really only as important as it is at any one moment, knowing that it can go the way of Myspace in a second. Or like AOL, which still tries to regain some importance. Or sadly, like Blockbuster, that sad commentary of a video rental store that hasn’t realized it was obsolete ten years ago.

11. Verizon’s iPhone. Finally. Not that I want an iPhone on Verizon, but now I don’t have to read 10,000 stories manufactured by CNN about how great it would be to have the iPhone on Verizon. It’s there now. Leave me alone and stop hyping the stupid thing on your news site. Nobody really cares, as we discovered when no one lined up at the early Verizon Store openings that day, letting the event come and go without much fanfare. Nobody really cared.

12. Groupon’s Super Bowl Ad. All of the people who are upset about this incident don’t want to even deal with the ramifications of what really happened. First off, they all got upset at the ad where Groupon poked fun at itself by using the controversy of China and Tibet as its canvas. Well, here’s what they’re not getting, won’t get, and especially won’t ever own up to. The humor went over their heads. Not that they didn’t get it. It went OVER their heads, meaning they had to be smart enough to realize what was going on. Consider the source. It came from the direction of Christopher Guest, who is well known for creating comedy that not everyone gets, mainly because it pokes fun at people who are on stage and represents entire groups of people who when they watch it don’t always realize they’re being seen as the morons they really are because they’re so locked into their own little worlds that they are incapable of realizing the rest of the world sees them as ridiculous. It was the exact same humor used with Groupon, and of course, the people watching it were not Christopher Guest fans. They were Super Bowl fans, which I’m going to go out on a limb here and say we’re talking about two completely different intellectual mindsets here. Fill in the blanks to figure out which one I’m probably insulting here. I don’t really care. I’m not selling ads. Those people just didn’t get it and went nuts against Groupon. Why am I not surprised? I’m also not surprised that no one else is either.

13. Lindsay Lohan’s Theft Charge. Okay, I’ll admit it. I enjoy reading about the many demises of Lindsay Lohan. I don’t know her, I’m not a fan, and I probably shouldn’t care. But it’s like watching a train wreck happen in front of me. I probably should call 911 for help, but I can’t stop watching. I don’t get the same trill out of Charlie Sheen. Nothing about him fascinates me, nor does his drama. Lohan’s, on the other hand, completely fascinates me because I keep thinking that ir probably won’t get any worse, and then it does. I don’t even think she stole the thing, but that’s not even what keeps me interested. What keeps me interested is how someone can take her fame and continue to destroy her career, her future and any support from the community that she might ever have. Just the other day, her legal team says that it’s not going to deal with the allegations in public; they’ll deal with it in court. Then the first day of the trial, Lohan tweets her whole ordeal to the public, trying it out in the public again, even though that’s exactly what they said they wouldn’t do.

I can’t stop watching.

14. Writing. I’m taking a break from my current novel and working on a screenplay. Then I’ll be working on a word text game app that I’m designing for the android platform. I realized recently that there aren’t a whole lot of word text games out there any more, and I think it would be fun to create a new one. I remember how fun they were to create back when we were first designing computer games for the early systems, before graphics took over the industry.

That’s really it for now. If you’re actually reading this, let me know. I’d really like to know that there are people actually reading the blog.

More Common Comments on the Day’s Events

Memoirs, Movies, Politics, Writing, , , , , , , ,

Just thought I would mention that most of my new posts tend to go on Open Salon these days. If you’re following me, that’s probably the best place. Some of my more original stuff appears on my main blog site, and I apologize if some of that doesn’t make it over to Open Salon. I’m discriminatory on where some stuff goes and others does not. Anyhoo. On to the day’s comments….

1. Egypt. There’s really no way to avoid this story right now, nor should we, yet it’s amazing how many attempts are conducted to do just that. In case people don’t realize it, Egypt (or more likely Tunisia) has opened the door to a post-Huntington fourth wave of democratization in the world. For those wondering what I’m talking about, Samuel Huntington’s The Third Wave postulated that democratization occurred in three huge waves over history, starting with the US revolution being the first wave, the period after World War II being the second wave, and the eventual fall of communism (predicted in his book, even though we’re past that period of time now and he was right) was the third wave. I’m anticipating a fourth wave, which was touched off with the collapse of Tunisia, and now with Egypt, there’s every indication that it might create a wave of further democratization in the Middle East.

But there are some important points to consider. Just because an Islamic-based nation (or influenced nation) moves towards democratization does not mean it moves towards more positive relations with the United States. Unfortunately, we’ve been seriously influenced by a lot of statistical inferences over time, like the infamous duality of “no two nations in a democracy have ever gone to war” and “no two nations with a McDonalds have ever gone to war.” Political scientists and media hounds have been repeating those lines for decades, even though neither one of them is completely accurate. They just sound good and make people think that as long as other nations move towards democracy that everything is going to be all right.

Well, the simple fact of the matter is that the United States has a long history of backing some pretty evil people, and it’s in a lot of those places where this fourth wave of democratization is taking place. Just because two nations are democracies does not mean they will be friends. And another misstep of information: Being a democracy does not necessarily mean a system that exists under the economic policies of capitalism. Sure, they can go well together, but it doesn’t mean they have to. We’re just so used to it being that way because that’s what we grew up with. Athens wasn’t really a capitalistic society, and it had the first accepted democracy. So we need to be really careful when we throw around terms, because they bog us down with tiny details that tie our hands when we need to be very flexible.

For those who eschew democracy, or even anarchy, this is an interesting period of time, but we need to realize that just because a people demand democracy doesn’t mean they’re going to get it. The US revolution brought about our democratic republic. But the French Revolution, while it brought about a short period of democracy, also brought about Napoleon and years of dictatorship and warfare. We need to be really careful about these things.

But we should support democracy wherever it appears, even if it doesn’t benefit us personally. I doubt the democracy of Egypt is probably going to be the greatest thing for the United States in the beginning, because we stood by the evil dictators through thick and thin. But after years of supporting their freedom (in the future, not in our past), we might develop a friendship with an emerging democracy. And if we ever want to have good relations with Muslim and Islamic countries, this might be the way to start, because after time a democracy might build a friendship with another democracy once it is discovered that neither harbors any ill will towards the other. But right now, we’re so bogged down in our war on terror, that I don’t see that happening any time soon. There’s too much noise taking place for a truly beautiful song to be heard.

2. The Storm That’s About to Come. Supposedly, there’s a huge storm about to hit the area where I live. I’ve heard predictions of 18-20 inches of snow, winds that will increase the wind chill geometrically and all sorts of weather evil that precede total Armageddon, the Rapture and Elvis Sightings. Fortunately, every storm this season has completely missed us. I don’t know how, but we’ve been really lucky. But they say that by 6pm tonight, Zeus himself will be throwing lightning bolts at stuck cars on the side of the road and Loki will be out doing all sorts of mischief like he normally does in periods like this.

Okay, there’s going to be a bad storm. I’m not looking forward to it. But it’s Michigan. Sometimes, it gets bad. Hopefully, people will be safe and the government will perform as it is supposed to do, and in a few days we’ll all get back to normal again. Then we can all sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, or Xena, or whatever deity or hot chick is appropriate.

3. Charlie Sheen’s Melt Down. Um, supposedly Charlie Sheen went into some drug-induced moment where he asked some porn star actresses he was partying with to move in with him and babysit his kids. Why don’t I ever have weekends like this? I mean, last weekend I was at Costco trying to decide between Honey Nut Cheerio’s and Frosted Cheerio’s. That was the extent of my drama. Not once did “porn star moving in with me to babysit my kids that I don’t have” EVER appear in that dilemma. My life is so boring. This week, he’ll be in rehab with seriously overqualified therapists asking him if he made the right choice, and I have no one to help me figure out if choosing Honey Nut Cheerio’s was really the right choice I should have made. Not that an expensive rehab therapist would know better, but I can’t see the harm in asking a porn star actress for her opinion. I just don’t have any on speed dial like Charlie does.

4. Kim Kardashian is supposedly upset that she posed nude for a magazine. Um, I’m upset I bought Honey Nut Cheerio’s at Costco instead of Frosted Cheerio’s. Sadly, both were consequences of choices we made. I’m just not going to suffer as much due to the results of my decision. Although those frosted cheerio’s sure looked good on that box cover. But at least I didn’t pose nude for a magazine, which means so many more people won’t need therapy next week.

5. I forgot to make my speech about how I don’t care about my students’ grandmothers. What am I talking about? Well, every semester when I go over the syllabus, I usually make a spiel about how I don’t care one iota about the health of any of my students’ grandmothers, meaning that if your grandmother dies during the semester, tough luck. You’re not getting any extra breaks, like taking a week off from school because of poor old grandma’s ailing health. I know it sounds callous, but I don’t really care. My first semester of teaching, it was the number one excuse from students as to “why you need to let me take the exam late”. It then became a part of my syllabus reading where I indicated that if your grandmother was dying, ailing, dead, in jail for robbing a 7-11, accepting an Oscar/Nobel Prize/therapy…I didn’t care. Exams were on a certain date and you needed to show up on those dates or it was YOUR fault for not being there. I forgot to give that spiel this semester, and already I have one dying grandmother and a funeral for a great grandmother that has made it “why you need to let me take the exam late.” Students need to be more original with these things.

6. The Oscars/SAG Awards. I don’t care. Really. I saw one movie out of all of the movies that are up for awards. It was Inception. And I didn’t like it because the blue ray I watched it on was defective to the point of where I couldn’t hear what was going on with 30 percent of the dialogue. It could have been a good movie, but I’ll never know. Didn’t watch a single one of the other movies. Wasn’t interested. So I’m not on the edge of my seat waiting to see if Colin Frith (or whatever his name is) wins for a movie about some stuttering English guy’s speech he gave. Nor do I care if the Dude gets an award for a remake of a John Wayne movie. Or if the chick from the really bad Star Wars movies (the prequels) gets the award for some ballet movie she made. I’ve heard the movie was really good. Okay. Big deal.

And that’s my problem right there. The awards aren’t for us. It’s for them. It’s a big ceremony they put on where THEY dress up, THEY present a bunch of awards, and THEY receive a bunch of awards for things THEY did that helped THEM profit greatly. It would be like going to work tomorrow and receiving awards on television for correcting memos that I do each and every day. So a person made a movie and then got filthy rich off of it. I don’t care. Yet, they feel they need to flaunt it in front of the rest of us. They built a whole industry around a gimmick where a guy used a camera to show trains coming into train stations (where the whole thing started). Some of them are really good. Others, not so much. But with so many important REAL things going on, a yearly event honoring these things seems gratuitious at best. Perhaps they should change the Oscars to present awards ONLY when something so groundbreaking occurs that we all should take notice. Awarding them every year means we award a whole bunch of crappy things because it happened to be the one year when all the great visionaries decided to make a rom-com instead of the Godfather. I’m just saying.

7. Android vs. iPhone. They’re just cell phones. Not artificial hearts. I had an iPhone and now I have an Android phone from Samsung. My reason for switching was because of Apple’s walled garden. But personally I was happier with my iPhone and if they would have fixed it so I could have done something about spam phone calls, I would have remained with them. But in the end, both are just phones. That’s it. You can call them smartphones, but who cares? They’re just phones. People call me on them, sometimes. Other people I call. If they disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn’t be the worst thing ever. Stop acting like they’re curing cancer. They’re just freaking phones.

8. Eva Longoria and Tony Parker divorced. So what? Why do we even care what celebrities do with their personal lives? This reminds me of when Melissa Etheridge came out as a lesbian. One of my friends chided me because I was a fan of her at the time, saying: “Now what are you going to do now that she’s come out as a lesbian?” I stared at him as the moron he was because he somehow felt that information was relevant. It didn’t make her music any less enjoyable. I wasn’t ever expecting Melissa Etheridge to show up at my house and want to have sex with me in the past, so how exactly did this change anything? Now, Shania Twain getting remarried was different. I mean, she’s the foundation of my religion, even if she doesn’t know it, so that was much different.

9. Certain News Sites will ignore Sarah Palin for some announced length of time to prove how irrelevant she is. I’m sorry. Who is she?

10. Stephen King’s The Stand is to be made into a major motion picture. I’m interested, even though I was very pleased with the television miniseries they did of the book. The Stand is definitely one of my favorite books of all time. I liked both the old version and the newer one he released later (some people are very definitive in which one they prefer).

That’s all for now. Wish I had more to say, but my life is really boring.

Time for Another Round of Current Events and Happenings

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1. The Assassination Attempt in Arizona. Okay, there’s really no way of walking around this topic without having to address it head-on. It’s pretty much the main story of what’s going on in the country, and like most current events, it’s yet another one of those that seems to be so out of context practically everywhere it gets reported. What everyone can agree on is that it was a tragic event, and most of us wish such a thing had never happened. However, I suspect that it’s only been a matter of time because there are a lot of crazy people out there, and if John Lennon’s death wasn’t a warning decades ago, we really should have been paying a lot more attention.

You see, there are a lot of people who are not playing with a full deck out there. We run across them each and every day. If you live in a big city, you can’t step over enough of them without running into another. Some are homeless, who stand on the street corners and do all sorts of bizarre behavioral activities, like yell at you, try to pee on you, beg from you, and pretty much anything else you can and cannot imagine. We had to be nuts ourselves if we honestly thought that they’d stick to their little corners and not start to bother the rest of us. I teach at a community college, and in the years that I’ve been teaching, you run across a lot of people who sometimes don’t seem like they’re all there. And you get really worried and concerned. But for the most part, no one really cares, because as long as it doesn’t affect them, why should they care?

The event turned into a bit of a surreal experience when suddenly people thought it was supposed to be a wake-up moment for the problems that have been occurring in our society. There’s a lot of anger and hate speech going back and forth between the different sides of the political spectrum, and for some bizarre reason people actually thought that this event might lead people to talk about these problems and do something about it. Not going to happen because no one wants to admit there’s anything wrong. Well, at least not with themselves. They’ll point fingers and say something’s wrong with YOU or someone else, but never with themselves. But that’s been the problem from the start, and as long as we’re never going to engage that, we’re never going to change the hostile discourse happening in this country.

Sure, it’s easy to blame Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck or (pick any politician or pundit), but the odds of actually opening up a real dialogue so that people actually listen to each other is practically impossible. It’s a nice pipe dream, but pipe dreams are just that. Dreams.

2. Verizon is Getting an Iphone. Good for them. I had one with AT&T and I’ve been very upset with AT&T and Apple for awhile now because of the fact that I can’t stop people from calling me, especially when they’re people I don’t want calling me. Neither Apple nor AT&T were very helpful here. So I left and joined Sprint, adding on a Samsung Epic phone instead. Pretty happy with it. Be happier if it had a battery life like the iPhone, but you take what you can get. Now that Verizon has an iPhone, I don’t really care. It’s still a phone from Apple, and Apple requires that it maintain control over its walled garden. Not a selling point for me.

3. Golden voice Ted Williams. I saw this coming a million miles away. The media jumped on this rags to riches to rags to riches story and thought he was the next best thing to sliced butter. Well, I kept wondering, “when is the other shoe going to drop” meaning when is the media going to turn against him? Well, now he’s kind of gone of the deep end because of personal problems, which no one could have ever expected would happen with a guy who has been living on the streets after throwing away his previous life. I mean, who would have thought something like that could happen? Anyway, sarcasm aside, he’s now heading to rehab and was arrested in Los Angeles. We’ll see how this story plays out, but I’m not expecting a lot of happy endings.

4. Unemployment has gone up again. Of course it has. And last month, it went down. The month before, I think it went up. We need to stop reporting these numbers and then providing commentary after it. Each time they do it, some pundit makes an argument that fits his world view of what he thinks should happen, rather than what is really happening. We’re in a recession right now. The market is going to be flying all over the place on a month to month basis. Stop trying to figure out long term strategies based off of short term notifications. It never works. Which brings me to my next one:

5. The Stock Market Fluxuates. Yes, it does. But one thing that needs to be constantly brought up, and it never is, is that the stock market really has very little connection to what’s really going on. It’s the Las Vegas for rich people. People buy based on speculation, and they think they have an idea of how the market is going to change in the short term. NONE OF THESE FIGURES has anything to do with what’s really going on. Companies are selling products, people are working for these companies and get paid whatever wage they normally get paid, and then some people buy some of these products. But because the stock market price of a company went up or down does not always reflect what’s going on in the real world of that particular company. Quite often, these fluxuations come because some executive did something stupid, like embezzled money, or had dinner with a celebrity. If the stock market goes south over the span of a week, it may not really mean anything to the real world as an implication. It may just mean a whole bunch of people panicked because they stopped living in the real world and see the market as the real world. Man, I hate the stock market.

6. Middle East Talks Aren’t Going Well. They never are. The two sides of that conflict are probably NEVER going to get along. Each new administration comes to the table convinced it’s going to make a difference but rarely ever does. That’s because the two sides hate each other. They have no incentive to be friendly to each other. Each side wants the other dead. That’s their international policy towards the other side. And it’s been that way for so long now that generations of their people grow up hating people they may never have met. If you want to fix the problems there, you have to do it generationally, and you have to do it by a completely different set of characteristics than our current process of diplomacy allows. Tit for tat and carrot diplomacy does not work on countries that live their entire lives to kill each other as their one foundational value. I could go at length on what would work, but NO ONE CARES OR LISTENS, so I’m going to stop caring, too.

7. Tablets Are the New In Thing. I’ve said this before, but it requires repeating. Tablets aren’t new. When the iPad was announced, suddenly a whole bunch of people who never wanted a tablet suddenly thought they needed one. We were like Eskimos being told we needed freezers and refrigerators by Don Draper and whatever fictional agency he might be working at. But shortly before this announcement, tablets were already out there trying to get us to buy them. And we didn’t. Why not? Because we didn’t need them, and they seemed kind of stupid to have. Well, now we all need them because Don Draper Steve Jobs told us we needed one. So now every other company under the sun is now releasing their tablet computer to compete with the Ipad. And I won’t be surprised if we start buying them this time around. We’re such sheep.

8. Myspace laid off half its staff. So what? Myspace has been irrelevant for years now. It used to be the “in” thing, and then Facebook came along and turned Myspace into an ugly sister of the hot cheerleader. Ever since Facebook, Myspace has been struggling to appear relevant. But its not. There’s nothing about Myspace that causes people to care. When it was told to sit at the kiddie table of technology, they tried to appear relevant again by pretending that it was the place to go for music. But Facebook was already there doing that, so Myspace continued to become even more irrelevant. At one point, I thought I might use it to hype my writing, but then realized that they were really only interested in doing so if I was already big time famous, which I wasn’t. So it wasn’t useful to me. And then I figured that if I was already big time famous, I probably wouldn’t need them. I’d just have a million facebook friends instead. Then, add to the mix that no one seems to be using Myspace anymore, and you realize why it’s probably going to be sold one of these days to someone like Murdoch who keeps buying up properties that are already irrelvant and trying to somehow make it seem like he bought a very relevant purchase.

9. Seth Rogen is Upset About the Hate Towards his Green Hornet Movie. So what? It’s a movie, not anything relevant. Make a really good movie that causes people to take notice, and maybe it won’t get the hate. Just saying. Then again, no one’s actually seen the movie, so perhaps the condemnations are a bit early.

10. Two of my novels are now on Kindle and the Nook. Innocent Until Proven Guilty, my first novel, is available on the Kindle.  Thompson’s Bounty, which is a science fiction, time-travel novel I wrote involving pirates, is available on the Barnes and Noble Nook, and it is available on the Kindle as well. I would not be very upset if you chose to read my novels. Really.

11. The people of Haiti still seem to be suffering, even though most of the world has left this area because it’s not a photo op any more. Just saying. Some people gave up on it because they don’t like how the Haitians are continuing to follow corrupt leaders who continue to cheat them out of international aid. Some people gave up on it because they only have the capacity to handle concern for a certain amount of time (usually the time between football season and American Idol finalist run-offs). And then some people just don’t care.

That’s all I have for today. My stuffed animal Brucoe thinks people should do more to care about other people, but he’s just a stuffed animal, and what does he know?