Sorry about the lack of updates lately. I'm in NY for my sister's wedding which is happening on Sunday. Tonight is the rehearsal and dinner, then tomorrow night my sister, soon to be brother in law, dad, stepmom and a few friends are going up to Saratoga for a Steely Dan concert. I'll be back on the 3rd and I'll have plenty of updates about our trip. It's been refreshing being here and not thinking about politics, film or blogging for 10 whole days. No Bush, no Ashcroft, no recall, no Iraq, no editing, no sound mixing, no DVD export issues, no template tweaking, no blogrolling, no stats checking, no nothing but wedding and family and friends. It's a nice vacation.

Memo to Al Franken: never apologize for punking a piggie like John Ashcroft!

Rock over London. Rock on Chicago. R.I.P. Wesley Willis.

Fox News gets their asses laughed out of court over their trademark suit with Al Franken. Now if they can somehow just manage to get themselves laughed off the air by the viewing public...

I'd like to give a warm welcome to all of the Metallica fans who have been hitting this site from www.metallica.nu/forum/viewtopic.php?t=517&start=15 . I've already gotten one nice anonymous message from a Metallica fan telling me that the songs I "uploaded" from their cheese-ass new album right before it came out in May weren't the real thing. I'm glad that they still have fans who would believe any old crap that they're told be these over-the-hill hasbeen cheesers, but I don't believe it for a second. Even if the songs I reviewed were outtakes, they were definitely Metallica and they definitely blew. So for those 5 or so of you a week who keep hitting this site searching for "Metallica Chains of Pain," I'll go ahead and download the whole album again and review it again right after I do something more enjoyable than listening to post 80's Metallica, like having a root canal or colonoscopy or something.

The S.F. Weekly wrote a snarky little piece about that film festival that I'm designing the programs for: "The introduction of yet another film festival in this town, especially one scheduled Oct. 23-25 at the height of the fest season, is guaranteed to provoke yawns. The best you can hope for, if the coffee's working, is to generate a skeptical query: 'Whaddya got that's different?' "Well, i'm not at liberty to discuss the programming of the festival as it's not public yet, but I can tell you what they DON'T have that's different: Washington Interns Gone Bad. I'm glad that there's at least 1 festival out there that appreciates and celebrates edgy underground film.

Get to know your California gubernatorial candidates... Everybody knows about Arnold, Cruz, Gary, Larry, Mary and Arianna, but what about the other Davis? Scott Winfield Davis, that is. He's a "'fiscally and socially responsible' independent," a self-employed software consultant, and oh yeah, he's also the top suspect in a murder/arson case in Atlanta.

SWEET! I'm the number one search result for fair and balanced blog! In your face, Bill O'Reilly!

Dammit! Fare hike for public transit here in San Francisco.

Paul Newman weighs in on the Franken vs O'Reilly with this fair and balanced NY Times editorial.

Anne found this today and all I can say is only in New Jersey. Freakgirl, you know about this?

Guess what? New wedding pix are up.

Here's a silly flash cartoon for anyone who has ever played Dungeons and Dragons (whether you're willing to admit it or not) or known people who have played it.

I've seen this posted on a few blogs and I've finally gotten around to checking it out myself: Conceptual Guerilla's Strategy and Tactics is a site that aims to re-shape the debate against the right, and they've come up with something good that if embraced universally could spell doom for cheap-labor conservatives nationwide. Here's a little taste: "'Cheap-labor conservative' is a moniker they will never shake, and never live down. Because it's exactly what they are. You see, cheap-labor conservatives are defenders of corporate America – whose fortunes depend on labor. The larger the labor supply, the cheaper it is. The more desperately you need a job, the cheaper you'll work, and the more power those "corporate lords" have over you. If you are a wealthy elite – or a "wannabe" like most dittoheads – your wealth, power and privilege is enhanced by a labor pool, forced to work cheap."

I find the strangest pages when I go looking through my referers. Since switching hosts and domain parking for the Washington Interns Gone Bad site, all of the image search engine hits wind up just going to the home page. Most of the images have Karen Zamperini in them, as her character is Mistress Bridgette and lots of people seem to be searching for images with the word "mistress" in them, even in German. We also got a hit from a search for "kissing." The best part is clicking through the other search results, particularly on the German search.

Enjoyed the Northeast power outage? You can thank Enron and republican deregulation scams. (via metafilter)

A very cool game, not flash or java but dynamic html! I had no idea something like this could be done like that and I'm quite impressed.

Joe Conason talks about fair and balanced day in the blogosphere yesterday.

Last night, presidential candidate and former Vermont governor Howard Dean picked up a guitar and rocked out on the campaign trail. JasonBuckley.com, the fair and balanced blog, proudly brings you exclusive footage.

Ted Koppel gets a fair and balanced phone prank from Bob Dobbs, live on the air.

Watch Take Back the Media's fair and balanced "Army of One" commercial.

Salon has a fair and balanced story about the right wing's summer of hate. It's worth watching an ad for the day pass, since Salon is one of the most fair and balanced news sources of them all.

To make his campaign more fair and balanced, Ahnuld hires a Reagan administration war criminal.

Major power outage across the northeast. I hope my family in NY are OK, but so far I haven't been able to reach any of them. Somehow I know that one of Dick Cheney's buddies has something to do with this. UPDATE: I heard from my mom and she and my sister are both OK. My stepdad and soon-to-be brother in law are up in Rochester at some golf tournament and we haven't heard from them yet. I can't wait to hear the stories from my NYC family.

Salon has stories about my top two gubernatorial candidates today. First is an interview with Larry Flynt who may or may not be as fun to watch as usual. Then there's a bit about Arianna Huffington's upcoming speech about Arnold meeting with Enron's Kenny Boy Lay in the midst of the energy crisis and how Bush, Cheney and their corporate criminal cronies can be directly blamed for California's budget crisis.

Conservatism as a mental disorder? A federally funded study says yes: "A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in 'fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity'." To help underscore this, US conservatives fearfully and agressively attack this study with typical republican dogma.

Joe Conason weighs in on the fair and balanced Franken vs Fox story: "Fox News executives are either determined to waste Rupert Murdoch's money on legal fees, or they secretly hate Bill O'Reilly and love Al Franken."

Al Franken fires back at Fox News over their "fair and balanced" lawsuit: "...a few months ago, I trademarked the word `funny.' So when Fox calls me `unfunny,' they're violating my trademark. I am seriously considering a countersuit."

More on the fair and balanced thing: This Friday is Fair and Balanced Day on the internet.

Fair and Balanced, my ass! The blatant rightwing propagandists at Fox News have never heard of a little thing called fair use as they attempt to sue Al Franken for mocking them in the title to his upcoming book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. I think they're still mad at how he bitchslapped Bill O'Reilly at that book conference a few months back. Gee Bill, you're not so big and bad when you can't shout somebody down or cut their mic when they disagree with you, huh? Exit Stage Left points to the case that sets the precedent for Fox not having a leg to stand on in this, involving my favorite gubernatorial candidate. (hint: it's not that time that Gary Coleman got sued for punching a woman). So in solidarity with other bloggers and with Al Franken, I now declare Washington Interns Gone Bad to be a Fair and Balanced Political Comedy. We mock and you decide.

Last night we rented 8 Mile. When Eminem wasn't rapping, it was the worst movie ever. When he was rapping, it was great, kinda like an Elvis movie. There wasn't a single believable character or a word of dialogue that didn't sound forced and contrived. Eminem plays himself. He raps and he broods. So Anne's verdict was that it was truly bad, while mine was that it was so bad it was mediocre with good music. The bass thumping got our downstairs neighbors banging on the ceiling. I also had a job interview yesterday with a nonprofit organization in the tenderloin. They deal with homeless and poverty issues and they run a small copy shop that caters to other nonprofits. If I get this, I'd be running the copy shop. Not necessarilly the sort of thing that I'm really looking for, but definitely something that I can do easilly where my creative skills won't be wasted. The interview went well. They liked my nonprofit experience and progressive political street cred, though if somebody who has more experience with big copy machines comes along, I'll probably lose out to them. After I got home from that interview I got another callback from another job which I had applied for. This was at Global Exchange, a great nonprofit that does a lot of the same kind of work as my last employers in DC, Co-op America. The job would have been filling in for their print designer while she was at Burning Man. I was her top choice as she saw the sort of work that I did for Co-op and it is right along the same lines. Unfortunately, my sister's wedding is the same week as Burning Man. Though she was impressed enough with my work that she's keeping my info so that I might get some freelance if she ever has any overflow. So I suppose a few leads are better than nothing, but getting work in this city at this time is still no small feat.

Ladies and gentlemen, the entries are all in and we now officially have 155 candidates on the ballot for the governor of California. My name is not on the ballot, though I did see a quote from one candidate about doing it just to get his name on there. That could have been me. I could have been a contender. Even though I'm not running, I still might put together some issue ads and turn them loose on the unsuspecting public and see what kind of publicity I can drum up.

Yesterday afternoon Anne and I planned to catch a movie. We wound up catching 2 movies and a filmmaker Q&A. The Balboa is one of only 5 independent movie houses in San Francisco, and for the price of one movie, you get a double feature. We went to see 28 Days Later (which was very good, but not as scary as I was expecting) and then stayed for The Weather Underground. This was one of the best documentaries I've seen since Bowling for Columbine. The Weathermen were a faction of Students for a Democratic Society who during the early 70s split off to kickstart the revolution here at home. They bombed a bunch of state and government buildings and corporate offices without killing anyone (except for 3 of their own who blew up while making bombs), and even busted Tim Leary out of prison. The film was incredible. While there's plenty of information out there about the Weathermen, their story has never really been put together all in one place and told by those most closely involved. The film also included a lot of incredible footage from the time, including some very graphic and disturbing clips of up close death in Vietnam. Unbeknownst to us ahead of time, the film's producer, Carrie Lozano, was there for a Q&A afterwards. I got to speak with her briefly to introduce myself as a fellow political film maker and get her card to pass along a copy of Interns. If you see that this film is coming to a city near you, do yourself a favor and go see it. Any DC folks reading this should already know that it opens at Visions on Aug 15th.

Who wants more wedding pictures? This is the first batch of our professional photos. Our photographer gave us about 300 proofs, and it's taking a while to go through and figure out which ones we want to go into albums and which ones which will be the "outtakes." Kenny Morgan is a great wedding photographer; nice, professional, with a great eye and an excellent affordable package where we get to keep the negatives. I'd recommend him to anyone getting married on the Central Coast.

California republicans are putting all of their eggs in the one basket of a freakin' novelty candidate. It should be interesting to see the Kindergarten Cop actually can campaign beyond using dumb catchphrases from his movies. And it should also be interesting to see just how dumb the electorate is if they actually vote for for Mr. Jingle All the Way if he doesn't actually campaign on anything beyond "I'll be back," "hasta la vista baby," or "I hope you left room for desert because I'm going to ram my fist into your stomach." And Davis is going to be missing the boat in a big way if he doesn't do some parody commercials against Arnie. True Lies, anyone?

Uh oh, there are going to be some really angry rednecks over this.

Good old Johnny Ashcroft is all pissed off again. This time it's over judges doing their jobs who sentence based on thier JUDGEment rather than some arbitrarilly set minimums.

The Onion A.V. Club interviews Ween!

Novelty candidates? Whatchootalkinbout? I'm not sure if this is a joke or not, but apparently Gary Coleman is in the race now. (via freakgirl)

Governor Ahhhhnuld? The ultimate novelty candidate is in the race in a catchphrase-laden announcement on last night's Tonight Show, spurring a bit of a meltdown in the democratic party.

Washington Interns Gone Bad, the book? Thanks to those great folks at CafePress, I have new options for new merchandise. They now offer book publishing in various sizes and with different binding choices. I've begun to lay out the WIGB screenplay for printing, and I also plan to write an introduction and add much of the presskit, my production diaries (as seen on this blog), stills from the film, behind the scenes photos and more. This also opens up the door for me to publish other things, though that would mean I'd need to seriously start writing again which I really haven't done in years (I'm not talking about this blog, but actual fiction writing). Perhaps I'll even consider picking up the novel that I started a while ago. Another cool product that they are offering are CDs, either audio or data. Since I don't have permission from all of the musicians involved to put out a soundtrack album (not to mention how much work it would be to actually split the revenues for that), I'm considering a data CD with a decent quality mpeg file of the movie that people can watch on their computer. It would have to be cheaper than the DVD or tape. Of course, it would be very easy for somebody to take that and put it on their favorite file sharing program, but I figure any filesharing would actually work for the benefit of the film and help it achieve the cult classic status which it deserves.

Anne and I were running some errands in our neighborhood today and several blocks of our street were blocked off by the police (about 20 blocks up from us). Here's why: SF Homes Evacuated Because of Hand Grenades. Fun! UPDATE: Turns out that a WWII vet still had some souvenirs in his house after all these years. Three grenades and 2 mortar shells. That link says that there's video, but I can't seem to get it to play.