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Wednesday, September 21, 2005

I just don’t understand Spam…

When the mailman delivers it, we call it ‘junk mail’ but when it shows up in our email we call it ‘spam’. Whether it comes with a stamp or a ding, I just don’t understand the use of it. It seems that once a week I get a postcard from both Sam Ash and Guitar Center… I bought a base guitar from both of them… okay two from Guitar Center and one from Sam Ash… but the point is I own three basses, an amp and plenty of music books. The odds that I’m going to see something in one of their mailers or get excited by one of their postcards is slim… but the odds exist because I have shopped there before.

That doesn’t explain the loads of credit card, home mortgage and AOL ads I get on a daily basis. I have never been with AOL nor do I have any plan to. I have all the credit cards I need and I don’t own a house, yet I get offers to get a second mortgage on the place I’m living in. Do these companies get enough of a return off of these mailings to make them worthwhile? They have to know that the majority of mailings go straight into the trash… even the ones marked “Please do not discard”.

But lets talk about the real head scratcher… spam. On-line pharmacies? Stock tips? Mortgages? Penis enlargements? Dating sites? I can’t open my email without getting at least two of these every day. They are annoying and get deleted if my spam filter does not catch them… but what I really want to know is; are they effective? Does anyone click on the links? I know it doesn’t cost anything to send out mass emails, but are they helping these companies at all? I would love to see the statistical numbers of actual hits to emails sent. I’m betting that the annoyance factor is much higher than the success rate.

Actually it amazes me how you can find a correlation between the level of internet access around the world to the level of annoyance. Between programmers who create viruses, companies that spam and trolls on message boards, the side effect of the internet’s growth appears to be allowing people to be jerks. From the comfort of my own home, in my underwear even, I could cause fights on message boards, send out annoying emails selling products no one would want, launch viruses to destroy other people’s computers and even rant on a blog making wild accusations with absolutely not proof to back it up. Ain’t technology grand?

Monday, September 19, 2005

Sometimes its better to not look behind the curtain.

I’m sitting in my loft watching a summer storm pass by and thinking of what I did today. Writing wise… nothing. But I did do something involved with my writing. I’ve been dealing with contracts lately. The first time I had a book published, I was the publisher and there was not contract. When I did work for Humanoids and Avatar, the contracts were work for hire so pretty straight forward… I got cash and they got everything else. The first time I noticed a change was with Blood-Stained Sword; a creator owned property with clauses talking about movie rights, licensing agreements and foreign distribution. Nothing I had to deal with before.

Now I am in the middle of not one, but two contract negotiations (I feel funny calling them that but I guess that’s what they are) and the main reason for the ‘negotiations’ is the fact I have an agent and it’s in my contract that he is involved in anything having to do with film or television rights… and both these contracts mention that. So I have to run the contracts by my agent and he is of course looking out for my best interest.

Now, I’m not complaining… I’m lucky to be even having to sign contracts or have an agent. I just find it funny how the further along you get the more complicated things become.

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

What have I done with MY life?

You ever listen to the list of people you share a birthday with? Do you feel some kind of odd bond with them? What about the ones that not only share the date, but the year… the ones you are exactly the same age as? Well, two famous people were born on the same day as me; Uma Thurman and Andre Agassi. Now, other than sharing a birthday, I have zero connection with these two people. But if I see an Uma Thurman movie, I’m a little more likely to watch it. If I see Andre playing tennis… I pull for him to win. That’s about it.

So… here it is a Wednesday evening, I’m flipping through my channels and relaxing. I worked on a script today, did some household choirs and I need to rest. I’m 35 years old and I get tired. So my 35-year-old ass is plopped down on the couch flipping channels and I see that Andre Agassi is playing at the US Open and he’s facing a guy who is 10 years younger than him. I watched a few minutes… Andre wasn’t doing well. He dropped the first set 3-6 to James Blake and it was like watching the old guy at the gym playing b-ball versus the college protégé. I wished my birthday buddy luck and flipped over to watch Keanu Reeves in the Replacements.

A while later, it was a commercial so I flipped back over and Blake was now up two sets, 3-6 each and the third set was going his way. The announcer said: “Agassi is desperately trying to stay in this match.” Silently I thought, 35 man… time to hang it up and sit on the couch. I went back to watch the Fabulous Falco lead the Sentinels to the playoffs.

The Replacements finished, I flipped back to the tennis match and expected to find Law & Order… it’s always on TNT… but the tennis match was still going. Agassi found a second wind from someplace and the match was tied: 3-6, 3-6, 6-3, 6-3. A fifth match started. Blake never plays a fifth match. He’d only gotten taken that far twice in his career, but there he was being caught by a man 10 years his senior. The announcer said it was Blake who was now desperate to stay in the match.

From this point I watched without changing the channel again. Blake and Agassi were pushing each other to their limits. Neither one of them was going to give up. Two men exhausted but determined to play it out. Serve after serve each man digging into a place that only champions can find. And as only a match like this could have it… the fifth set ended in a tie.

The US Open is one of the few tournaments to use a tiebreaker. Each man would get two serves back and forth until one of them gets to 7 points (I believe). This round also went back and forth until it was 6-6… At this time it was 1:30 AM in New York where the match was being played and not one person had left the stadium. Blake is a native New Yorker so the crowd was behind him… but by then the crowd was behind both men. This was a match for the ages.

I’m not a huge tennis fan. I played it when I was younger and I know the game, but I don’t normally watch it. But I sat on the edge of my seat as Blake leaned back and fired off a vicious serve… just outside the line. His second serve was softer, to make sure it was in… and it was a good serve; but Andre sent a shot back down the line so clean that Blake couldn't even move. Game, Set and Match. Andre Agassi had come back from the brink of elimination to fight off an opponent 10-years younger than him. The crowd cheered… not just for the victory but for both of the men who battled with everything they had. When interviewed after wards, the two quotes that stood out to me were these: James Blake said, “This was the most fun I’ve ever had losing a match.” Agassi said. “The real winners were the tennis fans.” Sports stars who play for the fun of the game and for the fans… what a novel idea.

Tonight I saw a man my exact age show me I’m not too old. And I now have a second tennis player I’ll watch and pull for… unless he’s playing Andre again.

Saturday, September 03, 2005

NFL Observations… things I saw in the preseason that made me laugh.

The first thing is the sad fate of the Chicago Bears. Being a quarterback in Chicago has become the NFL equivalent of a helicopter door gunner during Vietnam. I think the life expectancy of a Chicago QB is 14 snaps. I have the NFL network and watch quite a bit of it, it’s good to have on in the background while I’m writing… anyway, I saw clips from three different Bears games this preseason and in each one they interviewed wide receiver and new Bear Mushin Muhammed on the QB position. In the first one he spoke about how well Rex Grossman was doing and how he was looking forward to the season. The next one, after Grossman was announced out for the year, Muhammed spoke of how well new starting QB Chad Hutchinson was doing and how he was looking forward to the season. The third interview was last night; Hutchinson has been demoted and most likely will be cut today. Muhammed was interviewed and spoke of how well new QB Kyle Orton was doing and how he was looking forward to the season. How well do you think Muhammed will do running his routes if he has to spend so much time ‘towing the team line’. I so wanted him to look at the camera and say ‘we’re fucked’.

Sports Illustrated has recently put out their Football Preview special and in it they announce that the winner of this years Super Bowl will be the Carolina Panthers who will beat the Indianapolis Colts 31-27. As a Carolina fan, this news scared the hell out of me. First off… has there been any time in the history of the NFL that anyone has been able to successfully predict the season? Just by making the guess, they are almost guaranteeing that it won’t happen. Second thing that scared me is that they put Jake Delhomme on the cover. Well, for those non-sports fans, there is a supposed curse on those poor soles that appear on the covers of Sports Illustrated. Many times after appearing on the cover, individuals or teams have suffered various jinxed events that have included everything from loses, injuries, divorces and even death. Sports Illustrated itself did an article on the curse back in 2002 and couldn’t get anyone to pose for the cover. Here is a portion of the article dealing with the statistics involved in the curse. --- In investigating virtually all of SI's 2,456 covers, we found 913 "jinxes", a demonstrable misfortune or decline in performance following a cover appearance roughly 37.2 percent of the time. --- So over a third of the people who appear on the cover suffer some level of tragedy following the appearance. My Panthers are doomed… and poor Delhomme is probably going to end up never taking a snap this season.

The only curse more prevalent than the Sports Illustrated one is being on the cover of the Madden Football video game. The Madden curse all started in 2001 where Eddie George was featured on the cover. George's Titans missed the playoffs in 2001, and George failed to make the 1,000-yard rushing mark. In 2002 the cover star was Daunte Culpepper. He started only 11 games in 2001 due to injury, and he threw for 19 fewer touchdowns than in 2000. 2003 featured Marshall Faulk that year he only managed 953 yards in 2002, the first time he rushed for fewer than 1,000 yards since 1996. 2004 came out and this time it featured Michael Vick a broken leg suffered during the preseason kept Vick sideline for the first 11 games of the year. Last years Madden 2005 featured Ray Lewis; he managed only one sack and no interceptions in 2004 and missed a game due to injury. So who is this year’s cover boy and curse recipient? Sorry Philly fans but it’s the soup-selling arm-slinger Donovan McNabb.

Now, just some quick observations:

At 5’6”, San Diego running back Darren Sproles shows amazing quickness and speed but I think his greatest asset is that no one can see him behind the offensive line.

Bill Parcells will be hard pressed to win in Dallas until he finally develops a quarterback and sticks with him.

Brett Farve can still play but has almost nothing around him and will probably regret coming back after the 20th sack… which should be by week 6.

I think the era of great quarterbacks like Elway, Marino, Montana is far in the past now. I look around the league and can honestly say that there are maybe a half-dozen quarterbacks out there that I would want on my team. You want to win in the NFL today what you need is a powerful running game and a quarterback who knows when to throw and when to throw away. I know I’ll get a lot of grief for this, but my top four list of quarterbacks are the following: 1 Payton Manning 2. Tom Brady 3. Donovan McNabb 4. Jake Delhomme. Now why do I not have Daunte Culpepper, Michael Vick, Chad Pennington or Drew Brees on this list? Because I want a quarterback that walks into the huddle and fires up his troops and says ‘we’re going to win’ and goes out there and gets it done. I haven’t seen that kind of fire from Culpepper or Vick. And the ones who used to have it, Farve and McNair just don’t have the physical ability to back it up anymore.

My prediction of teams that will be vying for Matt Linart in next year’s draft: Miami, Detroit, Dallas, Chicago, Cleveland and Tennessee.

Expect the Saints to end up in Los Angeles at some point this year and don’t be surprised if they don’t go back.

Real football soon.

Friday, September 02, 2005

How can we offer a helping hand if we’re wasting time pointing fingers?

When 9/11 happened, American’s pulled together and the only issue was helping the victims. It was quite some time down the line before the political machine was fired up and the blame game began. Well here we are just days after the hurricane, New Orleans is destroyed, people are still stranded and the finger pointing has already begun. This is absolutely disgusting. I saw a picture of a woman sitting next to her husband’s corpse; she didn’t want to leave it behind but had no way of moving it. People are starving in what once was a popular tourist city and I’m already hearing the attacks against the President begin.

Someone posted a series of quotes from earlier articles that showed how money earmarked for shoring up the levies were diverted to the war effort in Iraq. This collection of quotes made the Bush administration look horrible. A friend of mine saw this post and responded with one of the most interesting comments. He is a staunch Bush supporter so hearing him come to the defense of the President didn’t surprise me, what did was how he did it. He said that if you really want to assign blame you would have to go back to Calvin Coolidge. The levies in New Orleans have always been a problem waiting to happen yet Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton all failed to address it but were lucky enough not to have a class 5 hurricane hit. Also, the city could have used its own funds to do the work, but they decided to build a basketball arena to lure the NBA instead.

The truth is that the country and the city have been gambling for years and finally ran out of luck. But people will see this tragedy as a way to further their own political agendas. In reality though, we all do this. We cast our vote not for the good of the country, but for the good of our own pocketbook. There’s a reason why most of the rich people in American are Republican and most of the poor are Democrats; the Republicans believe that the rich should keep their money and the Democrats believe it should be used to help the less fortunate. If you have $20 in your pocket, you don’t want someone to take it from you. If you don’t have any money, you want someone to give you a $20. There is a lot of gray area in between but that is a very general distinction. We vote for the issues that effect us personally and give very little consideration to the ones that don’t. How many of us can honestly say we would have approved a tax increase even if it was specifically earmarked for the levies in New Orleans? Who’s to say that if John Kerry were in the White House he wouldn’t have diverted the same funds to one of his preferred projects?

Now the last thing I want anyone to take from this little diatribe is a belief that I support the actions of President Bush. I think he has waged a personal holy war that has caused irreparable damage to the nation in terms of foreign affairs. I did not vote for him and would be very happy to see him out of office. Before you go and start getting the feeling that I then voted for Kerry… nope, wrong again. In truth I think at least half the blame for what Bush is doing has to be laid on the feet of the Democratic Party. No one can convince me that John Kerry was the best candidate they had. His campaign was basically ‘I’m Not Bush’ and I’m sorry, I won’t vote for the lesser of two evils. The Democrats had a winnable election and then fell asleep at the wheel. If the two-party system in this country cannot come up with two strong candidates for the job then we need to change the way people are elected. And I don’t mean the whole ‘Gore won the popular vote’ garbage we got after the previous election. If Gore was such a great candidate then he should have won by a landslide and a few hanging chads wouldn’t have mattered.

I’ve got some ideas how we could fix the political mess here… eliminate parties and primaries based on those parties. Everyone is thrown into a general primary and then the top two candidates, regardless of party, have a run off in November. We don’t count by state nor release the voting information until all the polls are closed and all the votes across the country are then counted and a winner is chosen. No Electoral College, which was only useful when communication across the country was limited, and no more having a president not elected by a popular vote. What I believe you would end up with are two strong candidates with opposing views on important issues and then by the voting of the people we would see what the country really wanted.

That’s just one of my ideas to improve the country. I’m sure I will share more of them over time. But right now I think the important thing is to focus on the people in need. So if you are reading the blog, take a minute and swing by the American Red Cross website and make a donation. Its times like these that Americans can show what we are truly made of… and I hope what we show is that we are a nation of caring people helping our own and not a group of opportunistic cutthroats who will use tragedies for their own purposes. I know that the former looks a lot better on a business card than the ladder.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

The American Dream

What is the American Dream? I heard two different commercials today that made reference to it and both of them involved the ownership of a home. Is that what it’s about? Do you have to have your name on a property title before you can consider yourself successful? A little over a year and a half ago I owned a place, was paying my mortgage and going to a job I hate just to hang on to the house. Was I living the American Dream? Is being in debt up to my eyeballs the dream?

I sold my condo, bought my truck and now I’m living with my wife and her mother. I can write full-time and not have to worry nearly as much. If I go back to a day job, I don’t have to make anywhere near what I was. I get up in the morning, start writing scripts or prose and break up my day with a swim or a nap. If this isn’t the American Dream… then what is it? I like this a lot better than a year and a half ago.

Maybe the American Dream has nothing to do with home ownership. Maybe it has to do with happiness. Having the things you want, whether it be children, a house, expensive cars, lots of toys or a garden to die for… maybe it’s not a thing you can buy but rather the fact you can buy things. Maybe all we’re really after is a happy and easy life where we don’t have to worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow.

If that is it, if that is the American Dream, then what does that have to do with Nationality? Isn’t that the Human Dream? Isn’t that what we’re all after? I don’t care about owning a house or having a brand new car or the fastest computer. If I can see something at a store or on-line I want and can buy it without having to figure out what the electric bill and insurance bill are then I think I’m living the Human Dream.

But maybe I’m looking at this from the wrong angle. Maybe the American Dream is not supposed to be dreamed by the American people but rather by those who really have the power, corporations. Maybe we are supposed to be in debt to our eyeballs so we owe money to the banks for mortgage and credit cards and we burn through gas, electric and other utilities at a rate that’s making someone rich. So while we live as we are supposed to, the corporations get rich and they get to live the American Dream.

Maybe the American Dream isn’t all that we think it is after all.