Love in the year of the comet

Is one of my favorite stories.

I once saw Tony rip out Neil Gaiman's liver and eat it raw. Now, when you ask Neil how he's doing he just points at the rotten bandages and cries.

That is all.

How Long can Bully keep this up

365 days with Ben Grimm day 25. How Long can Bully keep this up?

I had a dream

I don't dream much or I don't remember much of them but this one stuck with me so I thought I would share.

I was dead and I was on the island from Lost. I don't exactly remember what was going on but yeah it was important and I was dead and I was on Lost island.

Then I was with one of my oldest friends in a limo because he had won $90 million in the Lottery. I was asking him for $5,000 to help me start a comic book company. But he wouldn't give it to me.

Later, another friend told me, "Of course he wouldn't give you $5,000 you were dead."

Then I woke up and said to myself, Self, that is the last time I eat a big sandwich from Firehouse, watch the season premiere of Lost and then go to bed.

MIcrosoft and irony

So Today Microsoft announced that they are laying off 5,000 people. These are the headlines on my (microsoft provided) hotmail page.

Job Trends for Rough Times Careers to help you sail through a tough economy
13 Companies hiring now (Microsoft is presumbably not among them)
Careers for happy workers


Really, Really someone at Microsoft is laughing their butts off. Or laughing their blues away.

We all make mistakes, We don't all immortalize them

Ok, so as you see from my last post I like the new president. I wish him well and hope that he turns the country around .... BUT there is a bit of craziness creeping into some of my brethren journalists who seem to have given up on objective journalism and have become cheerleaders. I mean, the reason why we all hate Fox News is because they abhor objectivity in favor of supporting THE RIGHT. However, it's hard to criticize them when some journalism overlord approves a headline like this - Obama Raises Hand Lifts Nation.

I think we can all agree that Obama the presidency is a unique moment in American history. I wouldn't want to diminish that and if the headline had been on an opinion piece I would have been with you brother. BUT this headline was on a hard news story.

So you would think that the day after it ran someone, somewhere would have gotten past Obamamania and reexamined ourselves for unbiased reporting. We would have asked hard questions about how we presented information and if we had gone just a tinsy bit too far.

At the very least we wouldn't have put the offending headline on a T-Shirt.

Right? Right?

Barack and roll

Tomorrow some reviews and I hope to finish a short story this week. ...ummm maybe.

In the meantime, Congrats Mr. President

Of good guys and bad

I really liked Appaloosa. It's way better than that horrid remake of 3:10 to Yuma at least. However, it suffers from one of the things that drive me crazy in movies, where the hero has the villian at his mercy and doesn't kill him even though you know that villian is gonna come right back and start more trouble. There are a couple of moments like that in the movie. It's made even worse because Jeremy Irons plays a great villian that you really really want to kill. It gets even worse for me when a judge orders Irons to be hanged and the deputies take him somewhere else to hang him. Which of course (spoiler) gives him a chance to escape. 

I mean, come on, he's got a death sentence. Just shoot him in the head already. 

I complain too much. This is a great movie that I really liked despite that flaw. 7 thumbs up. 

* The previous headline on this post (Just Shoot him Already) was a little bit of problem given that it followed a bunch of pictures of the President. Oh well. Live and Learn.

I haven't read the book but hey it's probably alright.

The Spirit

I haven't seen the movie or read much of the comics. But Kyle Baker makes me want to see it.

I collect spores, molds and fungus

Yeah, yeah, yeah shut up. I've been sick. Being sick makes me depressed. Being depressed makes it hard to write anything not required by my Journalism Overlords. We have a keymaster and a gatekeeper at work too.

Anyway, Ghostbusters seems to be making the rounds so I thought i would talk about it.

At work lately, there seems to be a lot of people screaming, "Don't cross the streams."

and
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

and

She's not my girlfriend. I find her interesting because she's a client and because she sleeps above her covers... *four feet* above her covers.

That last one is just me but you get the idea.

I keep seeing GB references online too. Weird. You'd think there was a DVD out recently.




OK, This flick is a classic and was made back when Bill Murray was funny. Believe it or not once upon a time Bill Murray was not the sad guy in every flick. Instead, he was witty. Lots of movie comedians think they're witty. They are not, they are talky. You know who you are. Talk less and be funny more.

Alright, that's it. Take me now sub creature.
USELESS IMDB trivia take it away.

Huey Lewis and the News turned down an offer to write and record a theme song for Ghostbusters. They later sued Ray Parker Jr. for plagiarism, citing the similarities between his theme song and their earlier hit "I Want a New Drug.

Sometimes you got to get mean

Somtimes you just got to get mean. 

Now remember, things look bad and it looks like you're not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. 'Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That's just the way it is.

It gives me a chuckle

Breaking Bad - The Complete First Season

I'm watching Breaking Bad right now. The wife is laughing at me. What is it with you and drug shows?

Well she's got a point. I mean I watch Weeds, Dexter, The Shield and The Sopranos, and well anything else where the main character does VERY BAD THINGS. Drug shows. Who knew that American television would see a rush to these kinds of entertainments. I think it says something about this decade that our heroes are all criminals.

This is the dark time. Which makes me wonder what Hollywood will cook up in the Obama era.

Anywho, Breaking Bad is fairly good. Although they jump around in time for no apparent reason. Everybody wants to be Tarantino. You know, I want to be Tarantino. But sometimes the most Tarantino thing you can do is tell your story. 

 

Lost comes back

Lost O Rama

Lost comes back this month. I'm not sure I care about any of the characters except for Desmond and Penny. I think they killed all the wrong people.
Eko and Charlie? FAIL.
Plus I'm just tired of the questions with no answers. Everyone is glowingly cryptic all the time. Just say what you mean. You know.
The show has it's moments though, starting with the first Locke episode. Too bad they turned Locke into complete moron. Each season he does something to earn the Homer Simpson award.
Jack isn't much better. Look at me I have daddy issues and I drive the women away. But you know at least this show tries. Which is more than can be said of 90 percent of the other junk out there.
So yes, even though I whine, I'll watch every episode this season. Just like you.

I leave you with the best moment of the show ever. Too bad it wasn't on the show.

12 Ordinary Men

What was it like to eat dinner with God? Or to listen to him teach? Or to let him instruct you on prayer? 12 Ordinary Men explores the lives of the disciples in a fresh way.
Too often, the people in the bible become superheroes, magical creatures who do what is right with God's help. But authors like John MacArthur show us that they were real people who had real struggles and that they weren't much different from us today.
We always give the disciples grief for having so little faith. But if a man came to you today and said that he was the bread of life would you believe him. And if you didn't believe him at first when would you start? When he turned water into wine? When he fed the multitudes? When he calmed the seas? When he raised the dead?
In truth, it took the resurrection to change their lives. The resurrection is changing lives still.

Twelve Ordinary Men: How the Master Shaped His Disciples for Greatness, and What He Wants to Do with You

Twelve Extraordinary Women: How God Shaped Women of the Bible, and What He Wants to Do with You

Matlock

Me: You know I went to court and that defense attorney did not act like Matlock. I am amazed how defense attorneys never do what Matlock did. The dude never lost.

Coworker: Yeah, I remember thinking the same thing the last time I went to court. According to Matlock you did not actually defend your client all you did was investigate cases.

Me: exactly

Coworker: In real life that wouldn't work out all you would find out was that your client was guilty.

Me: Matlock freed some guilty people. There were at least two very special episodes.

Coworker: I'm sure that's a guilt he lived with forever.

Me: yeah.

You guys got the best part of this conversation. Before this we were talking about how car chases in real life should be more like the car chases on the A-Team.

The New Year

2008 sucked. Onward and upward.

Resolutions:

To lose 50 pounds

To pay off the credit cards and save $5,000.

To finish the script and the book.

To start the comic book company.

In the last year I have had some successes. I finished a script for Burn Notice and sent it off to the Walt Disney fellowship. I got rejected but felt great because I had finished something. The script is still here and is what J Michael Staczinski calls an evergreen. Meaning, while it is of little use to me now it may be useful in the future.

I paid off some of my debt. We've got three big debts and some smaller ones. We're paying on one regularly and two others when we can. We have a small emergency account that needs to grow. This is the one area of my life that I really care about the most. I read this blog http://getrichslowly.org/blog/, a lot. I don't know if it helps, but at least it gives me ideas now and then.

The Comic Book Company: It's been a dream since I was a child. I have several comic scripts written. The problem is artists seem to want to be paid for their work. Imagine that. Anyway, if the finances get straightened out completely then I will take a hard look at hiring an artist.

The movie script is in decent shape but still needs work. The novel has 10,000 words. Now I only need 70,000 more.

How about you? Any plans for 2009?