Perhaps the most amazing thing I've yet heard to justify the coming War.

White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card on Meet the Press this morning, when asked why we don't wait until we find more evidence of Iraq's hidden arsenal before getting jiggy with it:

"...Saddam Hussein has 30,000 chemical weapon warheads. Hans Blix and the inspectors found only a handful. At that rate, it would be some 289 years of inspectors roaming around Iraq to find all 30,000 chemical weapon warheads."*

Ladies and gentlemen, Andrew Card. Tip your waitstaff. Try the veal.

*[this was paraphrased when I originally posted it. I've since found the transcript and changed it to reflect the direct quote.--ed]

Zod bless Netflix for giving us the opportunity to see some amazing films we'd probably never otherwise see. I just finished Les Vampires, a ten-part crime serial by French filmmaker Louis Feuillade from 1915. The idea of a seven-hour silent film was a little daunting and I expected to take a week or more to get through it, but I found it so accessible--even, often, enthralling--that I actually watched it in (more or less) a single sitting. This despite the fact that it's not actually about vampires. The vampires of the title are actually a gang of criminals, who are hunted down by a Parisian journalist and his endearing sidekick. It's a buddy picture, for the World War I generation.

Apparently, back in the nineteen-teens, people hid a lot. They were forever hiding in trunks or cabinets or, especially, behind curtains. Every room in every home had huge heavy draperies on the windows, and there was seemingly always someone behind them. Sometimes they'd hide for no real reason. I'm coming to visit my buddy, maybe while I'm waiting for him to get ready I'll hide behind the curtains in his foyer. Won't that be a hoot?

They also all had business cards, which proved to be an indespensible device for identifying the characters. Whenever someone enters a room, they hand over their business card. At one point the head Vampire answers his door to find a small boy. The boy hands him a card: "Tatave [the boy's name]: Rag-Picker".

Seriously, though, this is really a great story with a solid mix of mystery, action and humor. And it's always fun to see a period piece that wasn't a period piece when it was made. Most amazing of all has to be Musidora whose Irma Vep is one of the lead Vampires and possibly the first strong, independent female character ever on film. She's amazing, and Les Vampires is worth checking out for her alone.

"The remarkable thing about this annual review of King's life is that several years -- his last years -- are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole....

It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years."

(via Tom Tomorrow)

Wednesday, January 15, 2003 Posted: 6:03 PM EST (2303 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The failure of U.N. arms inspectors to find weapons of mass destruction "could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq's noncooperation" with U.N. disarmament resolutions, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday.

War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

If you don't read Hildago's Tailors Today, you should. It makes me laugh like (almost) no other. A few of my recent favorites: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

"Beset."

"Beset, beset, beset."

I took the train to NYC the other day, instead of driving. When I lived in New York--nearly ten years ago now--I'd take the train to visit my family in Boston, but I hadn't been on one in years. I like the train. I don't really care for flying--the pressurized cabin and stale air make me unhappy, and unpleasant. Plus, for most of the flight there's nothing to look at. Last weekend on the train, I spent most of the nine hour round trip just staring out the window.

It's amazing what you see from the train. Society tends to hide things near the train tracks. The neighborhoods that cities and towns don't want to the world to see get tucked away by the rails, and the people who live in those neighborhoods, with their backs to the tracks, tend to hide their ugliest junk in their back yards--out of sight from the street, but bared to all the rail riders.

Railroads tend to run through industrial zones, not commercial districts. Forklifts and dump trucks, waste treatment plants, vacant lots strewn with decades-old garbage and burned-out cars, all of civilization's grit and grime is there--that which our parents and grandparents saw every day, but which has been covered up and hidden away by our increasingly image-conscious society. When your grandfather's says our generation has it easy, he means we can walk around without tripping over junk. No one's around to catch the kid with the spray can tagging the dumpster by the railroad tracks, and when they do find it, no one bothers to clean it up. Part of me kind of likes that.

When I was a very young kid in the 70s, I remember how all the movies set in NYC showed the subways completely caked in graffiti, and that's how it used to be. By the time I got there, those cars had all been replaced, and transit cops were scurrying around the subway stops like cockroaches, scaring away the kids and their cans. I don't deny the city its right to graffiti-less subway cars, but part of me wishes I'd seen those days. I remember that finding a context for the work of Basquiat [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] was a lot harder by the time I came across it than it might have been in 1980.

One societal eyesore that I didn't see from my seat on the train was Prison. Maybe they thought having the train running by every night, whistling under some lifer's window, would be too great a temptation. They were probably right.

Mr. Crash Davis is my photoshop idol.

Shout out to everyone who was at the NYC Meetup on Friday. I made the trip out from Boston, kind of on a spur of the moment. My pics are here.

(Personal note to G, C & W: I have more photos. Please deposit an appropriate sum into the Helping Hands monkey-helper paypal account by Midnight Monday, or I make them public.)

you're gonna go to the record store
you're gonna give'em all your money
radio plays what they want you to hear
they tell me it's cool, but i just don't believe it
--Reel Big Fish

There's been some talk recently about the proposed "Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price Antitrust Litigation Settlement". Under this settlement some record companies and retailers are willing to compensate us for gouging us for the past thirty years with ridiculously inflated prices if we'll agree to take a little money and leave them alone.

Under this settlement, if you've bought a compact disc (or cassette or vinyl record) from a retailer between 1995 and 2000, you're eligible for a (very) little bit of money in reparations. Maybe. Some record distributors and retailers will pony up a maximum of $67,375,000 to be distributed among all the various claimants after, of course, the lawyers take their fees. You can only make one claim, no matter how many records you've bought. The payment per claimant can be no more than $20. If the per-claimant settlement drops below $5, the money will go to "not-for-profit, charitable, governmental or public entities to be used for music-related purposes or programs for the benefit of consumers who purchased Music Products". Whatever that means.

In other words, file a claim and you may receive between five and twenty bucks. Or you may not. That's fair, right?

Consider this:

I was at a mall record store recently--I hadn't been in one for probably 10 years or so. I came across Elton John's Greatest Hits--the regluar single-disc collection that was originally released in 1975(?) and we all had on vinyl. It was priced at $18.99.

EIGHTEEN FUCKING NINETY-NINE!!

That album has been sold many many millions of times on multiple formats. Forget that the production costs on it were virtually nil to begin with, since it was all previously-released material. The profit on that, I would guess, after artist royalties, manufacturing and distribution costs, and the retailer's cut is probably in the neighborhood of $14. I'm not a music industry accountant or anything, so this is pure guesswork, but I can't be too far off. Hell, knock a big chunk off, just to be generous. Call it $11 per disc.

Consider that not all records are sold for $18.99, few records sell as well as EJ's Greatest Hits, and record companies do deserve a big profit. Let's call the mark-up seven bucks. Suppose, too, that space aliens have been coming down for decades and skimming two dollars off the top for every disc sold. That's five bucks a pop that we've been gouged.

Now, how much have I been overcharged over the years? I've bought approximately 1000 CDs in the last 18 years or so. $5 x 1000 = $5000. Cut it in half, because most people don't buy that many CDs. $2500. Cut it in half again, just to be generous. $1250. Now cut it in fourths because this whole fucking this is ludicrous, so our math should be too. That's $312.50.

And they want to give me $20. (That's a whopping two cents per disc.) Which will probably turn out closer to five. Which will probably turn out to be NOTHING, as this thing is beginning to get publicized and soon everyone will be lining up for their shot of SOMA.

I've got a much better idea. Why don't Tommy Mottola, Richard Branson, Musicland, and all the other bastards involved in this--in the words of my favorite cult author and internet celebrity--slowly and gently fuck the fuck off? They been exploiting artists and gouging the public for decades and they think this settlement will make up for it? They can take their two pennies and shove them. I've found a much better way to even the score. It involves:

a. Never buying another major label record as long as I live. (They're free on the internet, dontchaknow.)
b. Never paying more than $12 for a CD for the rest of my life. (I haven't in many years. Even $12 is way overpriced, but I won't quibble.)
c. Supporting the SHIT out of independent labels and mom-and-pop record stores. (Competition forces prices down.)
and
d. Buying used CDs whenever possible. (Stay out of the loop altogether.)

In the meantime, they can keep their five bucks. It don't buy shit at the record store, anyway.

As we head into Year Three of Ashcroft's America, we're hearing more and more about the kafkaesque (no, not that kafka, this kafka) treatment we're coming to expect at the airport.

Penn Jillette, of Penn & Teller fame, recently had an airport incident with a (typically bizarre) twist.

via the site that dare not speak its name

Playstation is now offering a kit which allows gamers to run linux on their PS2. I know that people have been hacking the xbox to run linux for some time, but this is the first I've heard of PS2 running an alternate OS.

Speaking of the xbox hack, a heretofore anonymous donor had apparently contributed $200,000 in incentives to encourage the project. That donor has just been identified as Michael Robertson, the brains behind the Lindows operating system, a linux-based "alternative" to Windows. As Homer would say "In your face, Bill Gates".