"Do not lie, and do not do what you despise" J of N

when the pirate incident was in full play i admit i was worried abuot how obama would respond. i wanted, still want, strong military action to end this crap. i was worried because i just wasn't sure how an untested president would react.

then i started to see bloggers and even some of my republican friends claiming already that obama had failed.

this article is a great summing up of what happened happened in that short time.

In the days and hours before, these critics painted the Somali pirate stalemate as a metaphor for the weakness of the Obama administration’s national security policy. That Sunday morning, Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker, attributed the pirate attacks to a lack of “will” by the White House, which was seeking a “magical solution” that “doesn’t involve risk and doesn’t involve making hard decisions.” One rightist blogger wrote that the Somali pirates had been emboldened by the administration’s “touchy feely” military posture.

A few hours later, making a hard decision sanctioned by the president, the Seals blasted the three pirates on the lifeboat, and Captain Phillips was freed.

it shows just how quickly, out of desperation, the right is looking for anything to try to take down the president.

i'm sure the same thing happened under bush and the left but its worth keeping in mind.

the home of a blogger who is critical of the phoenix police was raided by them and every computer taken from his home. the warrant lists "computer tampering with the intent to harass" as one of the causes. pretty scary stuff for anyone who blogs.

i haven't seen this yet on google news or anything and it really needs to be spread as much as possible.

here is a link to one blog about the raid. we could really use journalists to take interest and get the reality of this story out there.

mid-may to be exact. its been a year in the making and man am i ready for it - i get laid off on in mid may. from that moment i'll be getting 6 or 7 months severance which i could easily make last a whole year. or i could get another job and get it all in one lump sum (and get massacred on the taxes).

i've been putting off thinking about it until i got an official date - which happened today.

i've always had this corporate life support system going and its helped me write really only stuff i've wanted to write and not worry too much about whether it might be marketable or not.

a week or so ago i started talking to an agent about writing something that would essentially be only for money. a decent amount of money though. a year ago i woudln't have even thought about it. i'd have to write (once again) under an assumed name and tailor what i create to a particular genre and audience.

is this what i'll be doing from now on if i don't get another life support gig? maybe i just need a few days space from this announcement.

yes, its been a while since i "blogged".

mindsay is sort of boring to me lately. myspace sucks and i hate facebook, its put me back in touch with a lot of douchebags i thought i'd jettisoned from my life decades ago.

fucking status updates. how many times do i have to hear that the girl who used to give handjobs for $1 on high school field trips is, yet again, exercising? the women that, way too many years ago, i tried to look up their skirts going up the stairs now all look like graveyard ghouls. and those are the ones that i can still spot some resemblance to our shitty year book photos. there are some who have become so old and haggard that they dare not whisper their real last names when they signed up and only use their married names.

ah, who am i kidding? i'd still try to look up their skirts.

reminds me of an "interview" (of sorts) i had a while back:
"well, i was editor of my high school newspaper if that counts"
"do you still have any issues?"
"luckily all issues have been lost. bad fire, very tragic"
"lucky for whom?"
"what?"
"you said it was lucky"
"oh, i meant tragic."

watchmen was great. i never read the comics and i thought the movie was amazing. its so refreshing to not have an "origin" film. and one line in particular sums up why this is different than other superhero movies: rorscach on the way to his jail cell hears, off-screen "rorschach, i'm going to fuck you just like i fucked your mother." and its no idle insult, the main "hero"'s mother was a whore.

i'm going to see it again in imax.

the windows are open wide and its a beautiful day. i shaved off the weeks worth of hair on my face and i'm off to work on a new script armed with a stack of index cards for each scene.

i don't know, that dress did strange things to her boobs (especially in high def) and she looked drugged up but under the right "conditions" i think i'd still tap goldie hawn. 

i'm getting ready to be disappointed that slumdog wins tonight. the rest of the movies this year aren't MUCH better. there's been a lot of shit this time around. the reader started out good but sort of shuffled off to nazi-ville gimmicky bullshit. i turned buttons off about half way through it. i watched all of frost/nixon but didn't think it was any sort of epic. i didn't make it all the way through milk either but i probably liked it the best.

how can you give directing nomination to slumdog when the acting from the main character was so bad that you wouldn't even think that he could ever have been nominated for best actor and NONE of the other actors in the movie are nominated for anything at all.

the wrestler and the changeling should have been nominated for best picture. i liked them both better than the other nominated ones.

just didn't care much for slumdog at all. it was gimmicky and the acting (except for the kids who were great) was terrible.