Well, That's One Way

Life In A Subprime Ghost Town: Not Paying The Mortgage Feels "Great!": "
Sinclair: We went through months of being skinflints, because we knew that we were going into the red, so we didn't buy anything. All the sudden, we had a bank full of money and we're living rent-free, but we know that's not really our money.

Vigeland: How does that feel?

Esmeralda Sinclair: Great! Like he said, we were so tight with money..."

Yuck

Another KBR Rape Case: "Jamie Leigh Jones, whose story made the news in December--when she alleged that her 2005 gang rape by Halliburton/KBR co-workers in Iraq was being covered up by the company and the US government--also initially believed hers was an isolated incident. But today, Jones reports that she has formed a nonprofit to support the many other women with similar stories. Currently, she has forty US contractor employees in her database who have contacted her alleging a variety of sexual assault or sexual harassment incidents--and claim that Halliburton, KBR and SEII have either failed to help them or outright obstructed them."

We Don't Even Have a Barn

Know the old saw "I've got a barn, let's put on a show!"? Well, this time we don't even have a barn:


The School of Drama presents "The Commedia Project."

It's amazing how much something can change from inception to execution. More than a year ago I sat in a meeting where we were trying to figure out how to make the prospect of a "styles piece" more interesting. My boss said "What about a period Commedia Wagon?" and we were off.

What we've finished with isn't so much what I think we saw in our heads back then, and the "period wagon" well, as you can see, is something else entirely.

It is closer than it was along the way though. This project had an earlier incarnation where the trailer became an antique truck. After putting about a month or so into that solution we changed designers - and concepts, moving somewhat closer to the original intent.

Somewhat.

In many ways we really haven't delivered this time. What the designer had in mind starts here:



But we were a little bit bigger, and then we decided it needed to be "over the road" legal, and we wind up a little heavier, and, and, and...

So we were unable to get the bike on the front to work (the trailer had so much momentum that you would turn the bike and the rig would just keep on going, folding the bike up under the unit as it went, oops). The last 10 days or so has been a never ending opera of getting the thing to steer. I think in the end it will be workable, but I am a little disappointed that we weren't able to properly deliver. Although for the first time I remembered today that when we planned the darn thing I had the project calendared with like an extra 6-8 weeks so we would be able to adapt and get the bugs out, only to lose it all to the previous concept. Maybe if we'd had the time we started with we would have delivered more on target. Or maybe it didn't matter. Still...

So if you're around town, we're taking our show on the road to Station Square, South Side Works, and to Heartwood Acres (oh, and we'll do some shows on campus too):

(click to enlarge)

Interestingly, just about 20 years ago I was involved in a Commedia project when I went to CMU. Our approach wasn't quite so elaborate:


I guess the program has changed just a little bit in a generation.

"Good News Everyone..."

APR. 07, 2008 | News | SCI FI Weekly: "Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will release the second of four new Futurama movies, The Beast With a Billion Backs, on DVD June 24.

The company described the movie this way: In their latest extraterrestrial exploit, Bender, Fry, Leela and the crew encounter a repulsive, planet-sized creature with billions of probing tentacles and find themselves involved in a disturbing--yet sensuous--interplanetary love story."

Got MLE Tix?

Yup.

And not a moment too soon.

BSG Update

CNN Could Not Be More Wrong

I just can't disagree more. The folks at CNN are building their election coverage around the idea that the economy, that our money is "Issue #1."

Do they watch the news?

I know the credit crunch, and the markets, and the housing bubble, and the price of gas are all important. I get it, those are the things that all hit us on an everyday basis. But they really aren't, can't right now be Issue #1. Actually I think it might really be nice if they could be, but we don't have that luxury.

The only thing that can be anywhere near the top of the page, the only thing that has any business being called anything like "Issue #1" is the war.

As long as we have men and women in the field in harms way, as long as people are being killed every day, as long as we are waging war in the world that is all that can be Issue #1. There can be nothing more important than the policy decisions and the operational readiness in support of our soldiers and our allies, and no, the way we support the troops, the way we support our allies is not to spend.

And really, if you want to be crass about it, the dollar impact of the war is far ans away more significant than any of the current economic issues. The waging of the war is causing us to borrow something on the order of $2 Billion dollars each and every day. If the bill came today, each family in the country would owe over $16,000. Your stimulus check isn't going to cover that. And those of us with student loans, car loans, or mortgages can tell you that when the bill does come it will be way, way more than that 16k.

You want to do a real economic story? Cover the war.

One of the most insidious things about our current world stand is that the government is spinning as hard as it can to make sure that if you don't have family in the war that you don't notice the war. It is irresponsible for the news media to collude with the administration to bury the story. CNN should be ashamed that they are calling anything but the war "Issue #1."

We all need to stay focused. We are all party to an immense undertaking both terrible and celebratory, it must be the most important thing on our minds and in this election.

This guy says it better.

Most Liberal?

Have you heard all the talking heads running on about how Barak Obama is "the most liberal senator in the senate?" It's really been pretty difficult to miss. Regardless of how you come down on that statement, would you have the same confidence in it if you knew that the same study group proffered the same criticism of John Kerry just prior to the last election calling Kerry the most liberal senator?

Well they did.

I have to say that in my own experience I was ready to believe, probably I did believe that Obama was being correctly labeled. However, when I heard that the same people had given the same label to Kerry my thoughts changes - maybe not all the way to ratfuckers, but certainly to shenanigans.

I got that bit listening to Counterspin. It's a great but hard to find show on NPR stations. You'd think they were a liberal source, but they are sorta like me: they hate everyone. Well, hate is probably too strong; but they are very much balanced in their observations.

They went out and got non-partisan data which says that Obama and Clinton are nearly ideologically identical and just barely to the left of center for the current group of Democratic Senators. It turns out that there are several senators further to the left than Obama. In order to come to the conclusion that he is the "most liberal" you have to cook the books. Probably if you dig deeper you will find their results are consistent with their methodology, but based on what I heard on the radio I believe you would also find the methodology was created to produce that result.

There were two other interesting tidbits on the show. Looking at McCain they discover that he almost defies an idealogical label, vacillating widely throughout the spectrum. I guess that could be interpreted in multiple ways. You could say that he has no convictions or you could say that he makes his decisions based on the facts at hand. How do you think the opposition will portray it?

The other thing they brought up was that the entire Democratic caucus is to the left of the entire Republican caucus, there is no idealogical overlap whatsoever. So we'd be best to adjust our filters such that when someone is called "a liberal republican" or "a conservative democrat" that it's really meaningless across the entire continuum - just within the group itself.

Find Counterspin and listen.

I Think Not

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