Today is Bagel Day at work (the day on which we get bagels as opposed to dress up like them).
While walking downstairs to claim mine, I caught a whiff of microwave popcorn being popped.
And that's when it hit me.
Popcorn-flavored bagel schmear.
Clearly, I could've kept this idea to myself and made millions. But I'm giving back to the Net that's given me so much.
This message is from a good two years ago.
The timestamp, however, is accurate.
John Ashcroft is being sued over the mishandling of a major terrorism case in Detroit. The lawsuit alleges that the Justice Dept. "continuously placed perception over reality to the serious detriment of the war on terror." Specifically, the plaintiff claims that a confidential informant was compromised and that results of the war on terrorism were exaggerated as a result of interference from Washington.
Which, you know, hardly seems like news really.
Except that the plaintiff is the former federal prosecutor in the case.
The prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino, has filed suit after being made the target of an internal investigation following his testimony to Congress. Turns out the Justice Dept. doesn't it like it when you criticize the War on Terror to the U.S. Senate.
In fairness, there's no reason the Senate should know how the folks in charge of prosecuting the War feel about the job they're doing.
I'm sure it's going just fine.
Forget that nonsense about using moss or stars to know which way is north. When's the last time you saw trees or stars living in a big city anyway?
If you want to find your way, simply look for the DirecTV satellite dishes outside apartment windows.
They always point south.
HDTV Arcade provides the skinny on which games will take advantage of high-definition monitors. Their by-platform matrices show if a game has a 16:9 mode or is available as progressive scan.
It would seem that the PS2 lags behind in this regard. Especially when compared to the Xbox.
I can't wait for the PS3!
The Yanks are getting A-Rod and (as Jeter will still be at short) I'm tickled pink. It's worth noting to all the "Yankees buy their championships" haters that:
The Yankees also got Rodriguez to defer an additional $1 million a year for each of the first four years with no interest. They offset that reduction in value by giving Rodriguez a hotel suite on the road (an old players' perk) and allowing him to link his Web site to the Yankees' Web site (a new perk).I like the fact the being in someone's blogroll has become a part of business negotiations.
In which Eugene & Mary perform a duet in the key of Gol'man.
Anna points out that Timothy McVeigh and I have more in common than stylishly short hair cuts.
But you've got to ask yourself, who doesn't like the movies Red Dawn and Brazil.
McVeigh's love of Red Dawn is easy to understand. You can picture Tim urging his militia brethen on with a full throated cry of "Wolverines!!"
What's really interesting is to see Brazil through McVeigh's eyes. This is, afterall, a movie with hero-terrorists battling against a monolithic beauracracy that has stripped its citizens of their freedom. They blow up fancy eateries, they make illegal heating repairs and are lead by a mustachioed and swaggering Bob DeNiro.
Except that's not what the movie is about at all.
In fact, there's not much in Brazil that actually establishes a real terrorist network. DeNiro's character is a freelance heating repair man. No connection is made between him and the bombings. In fact, those that try to make that connection are portrayed as fools. For example, Michael Palin's character Jack DeLint who says, "There are no coincidences, Sam. Everything's connected, all along the line. Cause and effect. That's the beauty of it. Our job is to trace the connections and reveal them."
The plot of the whole movie turns on this erroneous chain of events. Jill Layton is wrongly suspected of being a terrorist because she tries to help her neighbor who was wrongly suspected of being Tuttle who, himself, is not a terrorist at all.
The movie is not really about the righteous struggle against an oppressive society, a society so absurd in its machinations as to be inadvertantly malign as opposed to calculatingly so. Instead it's about Sam Lowry's struggle to escape the complacency of his own life.
All I'm saying is, I wish Timothy McVeigh would have seen the Criterion box set. There are some good supplemental inteviews which would have set him straight.
