Once again, the "great" state of Florida is getting involved in a personal medical decision where they have absolutely no business. This time, they're trying to force a 13 year old girl to have a baby. I'm just reading about it on BBC, but could this become the next big media diversion from Bush's daily failures and dropping popularity? And how many times are these diversions going to come from the state where his brother is governor before people start getting wise to this?

Burritos of Mass Destruction?

Once again, life keeps on imitating the art of Washington Interns Gone Bad. This time, we've got real life Washington Intern Abbie Finfrock, writing about her experiences as a Washington Intern for the Telegraph. "Prior to coming to Washington, my 50-year-old father warned me of the mischievous older men I would most likely encounter here. Refusing to believe him at first, I have been proved wrong." It's practically a word for word account of the very first scene of Washington Interns Gone Bad where Becky's parents warn her about the sleazy political types that prey on young starry eyed interns. I tried to email this intern to offer her a copy of the Washington Interns Gone Bad DVD, but they don't list her email. So Abbie, if you find this by googling yourself, get in touch and I'll get you a DVD.

Aw crap. I just checked out the site for Radio Alice's 3 Minute FIlm Festival. They've announced the finalists, and A Guy Walks Into a Bar is not one of them. Bummer.

Cool! Culture jamming group installs viewing platforms outside the gates of 3 Los Angeles gated communities.

Oh so funny, and oh so not safe for work! Also not safe for anyone who does not want a mental picture of Ilsa She Wolf of the SS Ann Coulter engaged in the sorts of sex that can get you arrested in the South, or for those who don't have a sense of humor about those sorts of things. Thanks for that link, John. And while we're on blogs that focus on evil people, don't miss Darth Vader's very own blog. Best if read from the beginning.

With the whole blogosphere abuzz with Bush's big date with the Saudi prince, it was only a matter of time before someobody put it to music. That somebody was me. Enjoy!

Does George Bush hold hands with all world leaders, or just Saudi royalty?

My friend Eddie just put the finishing touches on his new album and you can hear it right here. I met Eddie through my friend Jenny. She played the part of Republican Bimbo in Washington Interns Gone Bad. During post-production while I was looking for songs, she told me about a friend of hers who had some pretty cool, very cinematic music and pointed me to his old MP3.com site. I loved what I heard and wound up using one of his songs during the opening credits. Three years later and they're married. We just got to see them a few weeks ago when they were out here visiting, and I miss them again already.

It's been a fun weekend. Friday night I went out to dinner with Anne and the mom and daughter who she used to nanny for in DC. They are some of the sweetest people I've ever met and they treated us to a very nice dinner at a fancy restaurant. Saturday I started a freelance video editing gig. I'm putting together a strange little sci-fi short from some pretty cool looking footage. It's the first time I've really done any editing on somebody else's material and it's pretty fun stuff to work with. I'm experimenting with coloring different shots, doing some neat split screen stuff, letterboxing video shot at full screen, accelerating and slowing down some clips and possibly doing a little bit of motion graphics. By the time it's done, it should be a pretty solid piece for the old demo reel. Today we went out with a bunch of friends on a field trip of sorts, which involved an antique car show, the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral, an exhibit of actual human bodies preserved for viewing of organs, a gallery showing of Donald Roller Wilson paintings, then lunch and bloody marys. Many of the folks there were involved with A Guy Walks Into a Bar (15mb qt), and we are plotting another bit of comedy gold sometime in the near future. I also met a couple friends of friends who are musicians and might want to play some time.

First Boing Boing, now Metafilter! My site is definitely running a bit on the slow side today because of all this traffic. Now if only I could get the attention of a certian Ms. Wonkette about a certain political comedy.

Wow, this blog has been boinged, and I'm rather pleased that close to 1000 hits in a couple of hours hasn't caused my host's server to crash (yes, I'm knocking on wood as I type this). Welcome, Boing Boing readers, and thanks to John for suggesting it to them! Update - 7:40PM: The hits are just pouring in! Update - 9:53PM: Wow. (oh yeah, I know that my web stats seem to be living one day in the future. I don't know why.) Update - 7:00AM:

I don't have a whole lot to say today. It's been a busy couple of days as I've taken on some new freelance clients in the middle of some major re-arranging/cleaning of our house (credit where credit is due, Anne has done the majority of the work on the house while I try to help where I can). I've been wanting to write something about the new Pope. Obviously, I'm not too pleased about the selection of Ratzinger. While I was not raised Catholic, my parents were and pretty much the majority of my exposure to the wonderful world of organized religion has been in the setting of Catholicism. I don't know if I really care all that much one way or the other. Sure, it would have been nice to see a Latin American or African pope, but I highly doubt that the powers that be in the Vatican would elect any who weren't willing to toe the conservative line, let alone anyone even remotely involved in anything resembling liberation theology. I find that a bit depressing, though not at all unexpected. But really, all that I have to say in regards to this new pope is a nickname... Pope Benedict Arnold Horseshack the First.

Adobe is buying Macromedia. I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing. As somebody who is not exactly a fan of corporate consolidation and monopoly, I worry. I always thought that the competition between the two kept them both failry innovative and I would hate to see them get lazy on the improvements. But as an everyday user of both of their software, I'm trying to be optimistic.

Today, Anne and I went to an estate sale up in Twin Peaks. Anne got some really funky vintage coats and jackets. I got some cool records. I also came across a Newsweek magazine from 1974 with Patty Hearst as the cover story and I had to have it. Anne asked me where I was going to put it. I told her "on my blog, of course!" So, without further ado... Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | Page 6 | Page 7 | Page 8 UPDATE 4/21/05: Welcome readers of Boing Boing. I hope you stay a while and check out some of the other things I have on this blog. Might I suggest some tasty recipes from the 70's, or perhaps my feature length political comedy DVD? UPDATE 4/21/05: Welcome visitors from Metafilter. Please enjoy your stay here. I don't have a Mefi account, but I read it all the time. UPDATE 5/30/05: Listen to Patty Hearst's SLA recordings (via John Griffiths)

Pictures from our trip to Florida are up now.

Gus Van Sant has a new film coming out called Last Days. It's a fictionalized story about a grunge rocker who is having a very hard time dealing with fame and drug addiction who has decided to kill himself, based on obvious true events. It's shot much in the same cinema verite style as Elephant, the fictionalized story about a couple of troubled kids who wear trenchcoats and kill a bunch of people at their school before killing themselves. Elephant, though really well done (in my opinion - a lot of people hated it) was very hard to watch. Just seeing the trailer for Last Days (embedded quicktime) almost made me cry. Here's an article about it. I don't know if I can handle watching the whole thing. (via metafilter)

Meet our friendly neighborhood partner in the war on terror, Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan. He likes his beer cold, his government strong and his prisoners boiled alive.

Remeber the old "Choose Your Own Adventure" books? Here's a great assortment of covers that didn't quite make it to publication.

Now that the Pope and Terri Schiavo are last week's news, our wonderful government can get back to doing what they do best, making a big old fuss with Orwellian overtones (Salon link - just watch the ad) over "indecency." I guess they've solved all of our problems... gotten the homeless off the streets, brought unemployment to zero, got our troops out of Iraq while bringing down oil prices, cleaned up the environment, stopped street and corporate crime, cured AIDS and cancer, got health care for every man woman and child, ended all discrimination, etc... so now they can focus their time and energy to tell us what we can watch and listen to. Sure, they drag this issue out every election year to stir up the base, but this time it's different. This time they're trying to get the FCC to cast a much larger umbrella over parts of the media which it has no jurisdiction. And they're talking about prosecuting broadcasters and even writers with criminal charges if they write or speak anything deemed "indecent." But of course, the re-invigorated democratic party fueled by new grassroots activism and Howard Dean are coming running to the rescue of free speech, right? Well, not exactly. When's the last article any of you have read that had "Joseph Lieberman" and "against censorship" in the same sentence?

Here are a couple of pictures from our trip to Florida. These were taken by my stepmother. We haven't unloaded our pictures yet because we came home to a massive spyware attack on Anne's computer. It's all fixed now, so I'll probably be posting a full gallery of these soon. It's been a little nuts just catching up after being away for such a short time, but it was so worth it. So, here's Anne and I on the Venice jetty and my dad and I playing some guitar.

We just got in from a nice long weekend in Florida visiting my dad and stepmom. We had a great time and did a whole lot of fun stuff in just a couple of days. Details and photos will be coming soon, but right now I'm way too exhausted from being on a plane all day to post a bunch of pictures. The highlights were lots of alligators, the Ringling Circus Museum, and jamming some Radiohead tunes with my dad. Apparenlty, while I was away, another well deserving member of the neocon asshat brigade was hit with a pie at a speaking engagement! This is the third one in just a couple of weeks. I look forward to watching this trend continue.

Well, my site has been down for a couple of days now, something about a security update to the server at my host and it always seems to take them a ridiculous amount of time to recover from these updates. I don't talk too much about my job here since there have been a number of people fired from their jobs when their bosses read things on their blogs about work (ever heard the term Dooced?). I think that my boss is cooler than that, but I still don't think I'd give too many details about my job. I would like to take this opportunity to talk about our accountant who I am 100% sure does not read blogs. She's a great accountant and a complete character. She's in her 60's and has 2 hobbies that she's really into: Star Trek and poker. I've always had a passing interest in Star Trek and I've recently joined a monthly poker game, so I have plenty to chat about. She's a real talker. We can't listen to any music when she's in the office because that distracts her, but she talks all day long, sometimes to herself and sometimes to me or others in the office. Sometimes it's hard to know who it is that she's talking to. I'll often bring up various Trek-related things, mostly about Howard Stern's constant references to George Takei, and more recently about the new William Shatner album. She says that she doesn't really care too much about the actors, but loves the characters that they played. She said that if Shatner released an album as Captain Kirk, she'd be interested in listening to it. So she was in the office yesterday and we were talking about my boss' wife who is in the proccess of writing a book on yoga when she wondered if anybody would buy her memoirs if she wrote them. She told me a few interesting and very personal stories and mentioned that she has lots of memories that she's just pushed back to the darkest corners for safe keeping. I told her that regardless of whether there was an audience, that it would probably be very theraputic to put it all in writing. This of course brings me back to my very favorite blog as of late, 63 Days, in which Alli writes, chapter by chapter, the story of how she was sent to a boot camp for "troubled teens" back in the 80's. It's a very compelling read and I highly recommend it to anyone reading this. It's brought back some memories from my own teenage years that I've pushed back into my own darkest corners for safe keeping. I don't think I'll be blogging about any of that anytime soon (if ever), though that would probably be a great way for me to come to terms with things and get past them in a healthy way.

My google ads seem to be going a bit crazy lately. This morning they were all for those tacky "support the troops" magnetic ribbons. I've been meaning to rant about those stupid things since I was home in NY for Christmas and saw them on just about every car. Here in the Bay Area, they're outnumbered by anti-Bush bumper stickers, but I've been seeing more of them lately. I know this has been asked by about a million bloggers already, but how the hell does slapping a cheap magnet that more likely than not was made in another country support the troops? Are the people with these ribbons actually doing anything to help the troops? Many of those with anti-war stickers are doing a whole lot more to support the troops by fighting to get them out of harm's way. I wonder which support the troops would prefer, magnets or trying to keep them from getting killed in a sham of a war. Now here are some ribbons that I would put on my car.

Rick James is running for city council, bitch! And he's not too happy with the fact that everybody is stealing his campaign signs.

After the recent spate of pie and salad dressing attacks on right wing propagandists, one member of the conservative professional victims society says that "It's only a matter of time until they start using guns." It seems the good professor might have forgotten about the founding fathers' intentions when they wrote the second amendment. It seems that the reason that they thought every American should have the right to keep and bear arms wasn't so that their kids could get hold of them and shoot up the local high school, but in case our government ever became so oppressive and tyrannical that it would be the citizens' patriotic duty to overthrow that government. I hope that these poor poor right wing victims of such awful hate crimes with a creamy filling remember this while our current "leaders" continue to push towards a single party theocro-fascist state with no accountability or checks and balances. They should remember that while they're up on stage spinning their lies and propaganda and realize they're lucky that it's just a pie.

Every now and then, I get a touching and heartfelt, beautifully and intelligently written email from the other side of the political aisle. What I admire about supporters of Bush Term II: The Fascist Boogaloo, is their respect for differing opinions made obvious by emails like this one... Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by (yourgay@yahoo.com) on Sunday, April 3, 2005 at 15:41:59 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- name: John message: Liberals sre gay. Submit: Send Thanks, John! You represent the best and brightest of the political right. You are well represented by the likes of George W. Bush.

In the war on drugs, drugs continue to win.

Neocons attacked with creamy goodness! William Kristol and Pat Buchanan get hit by pies and salad dressing respectively in the last couple of days.