Another republican is about to bite the dust Trent Lott Style! Do these people think before opening their mouths? Do they not understand that it's open season on them and they will be nailed on anything we can nail them with? It should be interesting to watch this unfold.

I guess now that Napster is out of the way, litigious Lars Ulrich has gone after yours truly. That's right, apparently, he considers anything even looking similar to his lame band's logo to be copyright infringement, and has contacted Cafe Press and had one of my stores shut down until I take off my "George W. Bush Illegitimable Tour 2002" t-shirt. Anyone who has one of the 5 or 6 of them out there, you folks now have a limited edition collectors item, suitable for sale on ebay if you can sneak it past Lars.

Are the holidaze over yet? We fly back to DC tomorrow at the buttcrack of dawn and I am so ready to be back to normal life. I'm not looking forward to work at all since now with being away for a week, having jury duty the week before that and being sick the week before that, I'll be burried under a mountain of work. Plus, the first week back is our yearly office cleanup week, so I still won't get a damn thing done. Damn, I cannot wait for a fresh start in a new city. I'm so sick of the daily grind. I'm in one of those moods where I wonder what the point of any of it is anyway. Blah.

And some very unhappy xmas news, Joe Strummer, R.I.P. :(

For you slacker boys who still need to get an xmas gift for that someone special in your life at the very last minute, Salon offers some advice.

Last night we saw The Two Towers. What can I say but kick ass! Just like every review I read, Gollum stole the show and Gimli the dwarf provided much comic relief. The action was intense, the fighting was brutal and bloody, and the effects were seamless. And did I mention how awsome Gollum was?

I'm back in California today at Anne's folks' house. The weather is grey and chilly, but still better than DC. Yesterday's flight wasn't too bad. We flew dircetly from BWI to San Fran and then took a little puddle jumper to San Luis Obispo. IT was a little bit turbulent, but otherwise uneventful. Watched Spy Kids 2 on the plane. Robert Rodriguez kicks ass, and I can't wait until he does the third part of his Mexico trilogy (rounding out El Mariachi and Desperado). I think I'm over the jetlag after a nice long night of sleep. Anne gave me one of my presents early because she didn't want to give it to me in front of her folks. It's a video of Duck! The Carbine High Massacre, the low budget film about Columbine that got a couple of New Jersey filmmakers arrested. I can't wait to see it, hopefully at Bad Movie Night at Greg's house since Anne doesn't think she wants to see it with me.

More news on our buddy, Rick Santorum: when even republicans are calling for Trent Lott's head, our favorite road raging, cell phone yapping, pimped out SUV driving Senator comes to the defense of the racist idiot from Mississippi. How very republican of him! Thanks, Rick. Every time I read something like this makes me feel better about milking you for publicity. (link via Zoe)

OK, trial is over and we convicted a guy on one count of Armed Robbery and 3 gun-related charges. I've never even been called up for jury selection before, so this was a completely new experience for me. While I definitely have my issues with the criminal justice system, I've always had a fondness for court drama (not so much the John Grisham stuff, but trashier stuff like those old re-enacted court shows based on real cases like Superior Court, Divorce Court, The Judge - but also real trials on court TV and of course great courtroom comedies like My Cousin Vinny), so I was pretty excited to have been picked to serve on a criminal case. And now that it's all over and done with, I can finally discuss it! As I stated, the case was armed robbery. The defendent was a 20 year old African American man who walked into a dry cleaners on Capitol Hill with a gun and demanded money from the Korean owner in front of his 9 year old daughter. He took the money, asked for more, then took the battery out of the cordless phone and took off. This was the case that I was on. Ten days later, he hit another Asian drycleaners, this time near Dupont Circle, much in the same manner. He had a gun, asked for money, asked for more money, and took their phone and the security video with him. This time he got caught, and the cops put his picture in a spread to see if the owner from the Capitol hill cleaner could ID him. He and his daughter both identified him from the pictures 3 weeks after the crime, but the daughter couldn't ID him in court and there were some other inconsistancies with the evidence in the Capitol Hill case. So they brought in some evidence from the Dupont Circle case which immediately raised some red flags with me and some of my fellow jurors that the prosecution didn't have enough for the first one and were trying to overcompensate. But after a day of discussing it and working on all the different angles of it, we all reached the guilty verdict, feeling that we did the right thing. After we were excused, the prosecutor and the public defender came into the jury room to talk to us about the case. Before this, even though we were comfortable that he was given a fair trial and that it really was beyond a reasonable doubt, many of us felt weird about having just basically sent a young man to prison. But then we heard from those lawyers. The deffender was amazed that we deliberated so long and had expected us to hand down a guilty verdict quickly. As it turns out, this was only the first of 8 trials for this guy. The reason that we weren't given as much evidence as we would have liked for the second robbery was because they didn't want to spoil it for the next case which is a no-brainer since he even confessed. The other cases against him are more robberies (including 3 seperate federal bank robbery cases), some other assorted things, and oh yeah, a murder. After hearing that, we all felt that justice was served and we helped that happen. Afterwards, half of us went to lunch in Chinatown and who was at the restaurant but the defense lawyer, who bought us all a bowl of soup.

Oh yeah! The good news is, this site has every sketch from The State. The bad news is that the quality sucks. Stick your booties in the pudding! (via metafilter)

So we heard the closing arguments and began deliberating today, but we'll be continuing our deliberation tomorrow. So much for being done today, but justice must be done and we can't just rush to a verdict because we want our lives back a day earlier. I just want to talk about it more here, and maybe even get some of my fellow jurors on here as well. After court I had an interesting trip to my pharmacy. They told me that one of my prescriptions didn't have a refill, which I knew that it did, and told me that they would contact my doctor and get it refilled over the phone, but since I had run my supply dry, they were going to give me a few days' worth. This happened before and the lady in my doctor's office made me promise to always get a refill a week before I would run out. Whoops! So anyway, I get the bottle and I look and see that it says to take one pill three times a day, and I'm usually only supposed to take it twice a day, so then I look at the pills and they looked completly different (different color and shape)!!! They gave me the wrong thing entirely, and once I told them what it was supposed to be, she looked it up and realized that yes, I did have several refills on it. I'm just so glad that the folks handing out people's freakin' medications are paying such carefull attention. Yeesh! This one would definitely have my late pharmacist grandfather turning in his grave.

Jury duty update: The prosecution rested yesterday, so today there may be a defense witness or two and then we deliberate. If all goes well, I'll be blogging in depth about this case tonight.

Update on the latest cast member arrests: CNN had a story about it with a picture of Jill. This is just the latest cast arrest. Our pie-wielding anarchist, Chris Otten, was arrested pretty roughly a couple of times recently.

Well, ESPN Zone officially sucks in my book now. We had nothing to do tonight and thought we'd try something a little different and go visit the ESPN Zone. Neither of us are big sports fans, but they have a pretty sweet arcade in the basement and it's a whole lot closer than Dave & Buster's. Dinner was overpriced and not so great and the beers tasted a bit watered down, but that was OK because we were filled up, nicely buzzed and ready to play some games. First we played the skateboarding game, then the snowboarding game. Anne put her purse down in front of the game while she played and I stood there watching. When she got off the game, the purse was gone. I went up to see if it was in lost and found while she stayed down looking for it. Somebody had found it, minus any cash. Needless to say, we didn't want to stick around after being robbed, so we tried to get our game card cashed in (you load up a card with credits that let you play the games instead of using quarters or tokens). They wouldn't let us. Security and two levels of management told us that "I'm sorry, but we just don't do that." They totally acted as if it was Anne's fault for putting her purse down and told us about how this always happens there and that these kids just want to do whatever they can to keep on playing games. And that's supposed to make us feel better and more secure HOW??? So I'm using this blog as a soapbox to tell anyone who reads this thing that you should never go to ESPN Zone.

Last night we went to see Far From Heaven. We both really liked it. It wasn't your typical period piece. It was set in the 50's, but also done in the style of 50's melodrama, from the colors to the shots to the acting style and dialogue to the music, but the story went far beyond anything you would have ever seen back then. Great article about it here. One possible anachronism I saw though. Does anyone know if Gibson was making Les Pauls in '57? Today I hope to get together with my sound guy to go over the film and take notes on the final sound mix and remastering. I can't wait to hear this thing once it's all the way mastered because it already sounds pretty good. The other night I went over to a friend's house for a weekly movie night and we had a Trey Parker double feature. Started off with the South Park movie and then Cannibal the Musical, with the director's commentary track running. That has to be my favorite director's track ever. They continue to get drunker and drunker as the film progresses, several people fart into the mic, and there's even a few minutes of silence because they knocked the mic off. This got me thinking about commentary tracks in general and specifically what I'd like to do for commentary tracks on Washington Interns Gone Bad. Some of my favorite DVDs have multiple tracks, like Fight Club and Boogie Nights. The Troma ones with Lloyd Kaufman are funny, but he tends to tell the same old jokes in all of them, which can be slightly endearing in that kooky favorite uncle sort of way. The Spinal Tap dvd has a commentary track with the members of the band, in character, talking about the film as it's a real documentary done about them years ago and it's ridiculously funny.

Finally got film developed and the picture of me and Jello Biafra scanned in. Check it out.

As of this afternoon, I am Juror #4. That's right, I had jury duty today and actually wound up on a jury. It's definitely been an interesting day. It started fairly early taking a cab in through pouring rain to the courthouse. I got there, got signed in, and then sat down in the "Juror Lounge," a big room with a bunch of chairs and TVs mounted from the ceiling. While we were waiting for the orientation, they were showing the Ken Burns Jazz doc from PBS. I was half expecting to get to spend the whole day sitting around watching that. They were just starting to get into the post-war bebop era when my number was called to be on a panel. So I went down to the courtroom with a group of 60 of us and they asked us a variety of questions to eliminate anyone who was unsuitable. After that, they had the first 12 of us go and sit in the jury box while the prosecutor and the defense eliminated some of us. I was in the first group of 12 and there were a whole bunch of people who the lawyers liked less than me. They just didn't ask me any of the right questions. But all kidding aside, I'm actually quite interested to serve on a jury. I've never done it before, I've always been a fan of courtroom dramas, and it's a criminal case that I can't really discuss here until it's all over. For now, just take my word for it that based entirely on opening statements it's going to be a fairly interesting case. The judge insists that this will only take up to three days. I'll offer a full report as soon as it's over.

Two Washington Interns Gone Bad cast members were arrested at a direct action against military recruiting centers as part of today's national day of action against war in Iraq. Adam Eidinger, who has a quick cameo in one of the news reports, is no stranger to being arrested for direct actions. He was targeted as one of the "ringleaders" of the protests against the Republican National Convention in Philly and held with some ridiculous bail. I could go on about his many arrests, but it's just easier to link to this. Jill Blankespoor not only makes her acting debut in Washington Interns Gone Bad, she made her activism arrest debut today. The lunchtime anti-war march I went to with a bunch of my coworkers was a little more low key. It was a snoozer, but I ran into a bunch of cast members and met a bunch of new people.

Tonight, I had the great opportunity to catch a book signing with David Thomson. I don't know how I've managed to have been interested in film for so long and have no idea who this man was until just a couple of days ago when I came across this great opinion piece of his about Hollywood being too chickenshit to do anything overtly political these days. I read it on my Visor and his email address was listed so I of course figured I'd drop him an email and let him know about Washington Interns Gone Bad. Then as I was looking through the latest Citypaper, what do I see but a book signing at Olssons! It turned out to be a discussion between Thomson and Leon Wieseltier, literary editor for New Republic. If I had known he would have been there, I would have brought another copy of the movie and a press kit, but he did get one of Elizabeth's business cards with the URL on it. During their conversation, I was getting more and more intimidated about giving a film like mine to a hardcore film scholar like this guy, and I was pretty nervous going up and talking to him, but when I handed him the press kit, there was a spark of recognition. He had gotten the email! I don't know what will ever come of this, but it was still pretty cool and now I have an autographed copy of the latest edition of A Biographical Dictionary Of Film. Also, I just posted a silly animated gif of Anne being silly while we were snowed in last week.

Starting to feel a little better than yesterday. I actually left the house today, twice. First trip was to the bank, the office, and the post office to enter into two more film festivals, Sedona and South by Southwest. I also tried to get half price day of show tickets for Batboy the Musical, the off Broadway play based on the exploits of the Batboy straight from the pages of the Weekly World News. I couldn't get them, but they've extended the run through the end of the month. Later, Anne and I went out to Union Station for dinner and a movie. We had Burrito Brothers for dinner and then saw the Ring which scared the freakin' bejesus out of us. I haven't been that scared at a movie since I don't know when. It was really done well, not showing too much, letting the mood and your imagination scare you more than anything. Plus there were some very surrealist influences. If you like scary movies, see this one on the big screen while you still can. And on a completely different note, I came across a posting from Elizabeth's dad about the Washington Interns Gone Bad premiere. Apparently we were not the only ones who managed to get there just by the skin of our teeth. I'm glad that they were able to make it and that the whole family enjoyed it. And lastly, in game emulator news, I've been having lots of fun with the Capcom emulator, though after a while, all of their games seem to be on the same formula, but still lots of fun.

Dammit, I'm sick. I have a very icky head cold so I'm home from work today. I'm not feeling particularly motivated to do anything, but my sister's fiance burned me a CD full of oldschool videogame emulators so I've been playing all of my old favorites. Anyone remember Rolling Thunder? They used to have it at Fairgrounds Piza in Rhinebeck and at the old Hyde Park diner and I was completely adicted. It's not the most advanced game, just a man walking around shooting at these scary hooded baddies, but it's completely addictive. I've also been playing Super Mario, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Wizards and Warriors on the Nintendo emulator. Lots of fun. I might download my all time favorite, Tron, though I wonder how I'll play the tank and cylinder levels without a wheel. I also have a couple of festival submissions to get in, and if I'm feeling better tonight, I have to go to a client's house and set up a new machine.

Just back in from NY and tired as hell. I cannot express how much I hate the New Jersey Turnpike. I hate that road in new and exciting ways. But I did love seeing friends and family, including the latest addition to our family who I got to see for the very first time. Pix later once I'm caught back up with everything. Looking at a fairly busy week. There are several festivals that I need to enter in the upcoming days, plus I need to redo some of the titles, work with John on the final sound edits, and I have at least one night of freelance work setting up a new machine for a client. All this starting with a very short night of sleep after the drive from hell. Fun.