An Outlet For Absurdity

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 05:39:41 GMT

Things must be done
in order for the world to run.

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 00:37:46 GMT

I have this odd urge to take one of the random thought bits that I always think would be great for a book and post it in the literaryquotes community.

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 21:44:46 GMT

Do you understand the fundamental paradox of blogging? When you are busy, you have things to say, but no time to blog. When you have nothing to do and more time than you know what to do with, then why not update the ole journal? But you have nothing to talk about? Do you see?

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 03:43:31 GMT

What with all of the people on my friends list doing it, I've decided I'm going to do NaNoWriMo. Guess I better get cracking!

Wacky!

Indiana Jones and the Relic of Gotham

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 04:00:14 GMT

No matter how many times I resolve, my apathy for updating is unabated.

Regardless, you should all right click, save as, and watch this.

Batman Begins

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 21:57:28 GMT

I love movies that make me want to make movies.

Injured Stormtrooper

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 07:08:54 GMT

I was going to finally write out my ruminations on Episode III tonight, seeing as this evening was my third viewing, but I couldn't fit the writing in between renderings of green screen tests, as I thought I would, so it will have to wait. Admittedly, they're rough around the edges (literally), but they're my first attempt.

padawan, if I can beg for your assistance one last time; I know I've made false starts before, which is why I didn't want to ask you again until I had the damn thing made and ready to go. And now it is, albeit, a bit cruder than I was originally intending, but it'll get the job done. And with the little test we did today, I know exactly what I need and know that it won't take more than half an hour to get, if that. If I could ask for but a half hour of your time within the next couple of days, then I can get this project out of the rut it's been in forever and push it forward and would be eternally grateful.

Fri, 20 May 2005 14:59:47 GMT

It appears that we will not be going to Star Wars Weekends.

However, in the parking lot after the second viewing of Episode III was a flyer done up in the style of the opening crawl that said:

You are invited to

And I just might go to that.

I should talk about Episode III, but I will do that later. Right now I'm working on riddleplayersproductions.com.

Damn you, Matty P!

Fri, 13 May 2005 14:50:39 GMT

I was actually going to make a real entry to. But I suppose I can do that later.

1) Total number of films I own on DVD/video:
A tough question to answer, since they're mostly scattered about on my floor and partially in the DVD rack I recently bought and some were just sent home on my recent trip north. But the box for the DVD rack says it holds 108 and I just about maxed it out, though with some DVD cases considerably larger than the standard DVD case such as Band of Brothers, Futurama, Family Guy, and The Simpsons. In addition to those are the boxed sets that don't fit on the rack including Lord of the Rings, the Stanley Kubrick Collection, all of Star Trek: The Next Generation and most of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Indiana Jones. Whew.

2) The last film I bought:
I don't think I've bought any in awhile, the most recent event which comes to mind is a trip to Best Buy that resulted in Fifth Element, THX-1138, and Star Trek: First Contact a month or two back.

3) The last film I watched:
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which I saw for a second time in Maryland with the sister and brother-in-law.

4) Five films that I watch a lot or that mean a lot to me:
I suppose I could just go down the length of my wall and list my movie posters.
2001: A Space Odyssey which is and remains to me the perfect combination of art form and message, of intelligence and emotional awe.
Star Wars which, along with Star Trek in all it's incarnations and variety, formed the pillars on which my entire childhood was based.
Lost In Translation, though not on my wall, is a reminder that the image of every frame should be composed with as much care as the finest painted and photographed images of art.
Pulp Fiction which is such an accomplishment in style and form, particulairly in the editing.

5) Tag 5 people and have them put this in their journal:
blondeheroine
brucix
bbqchikenmadnes

I can't think of two more movie afficianados as the three above, so that will have to suffice.

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 03:30:37 GMT

Our cat is terrified of the new houseplants Cory just bought, to the point that she hid under my bed for a day and a half without food, water, or a little box. Now she's hiding under the couch.

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 04:09:17 GMT

I have eleven free songs coming to me from iTunes and I don't know what to buy. Suggestions?

Also, why won't be Bittorrent download anymore? It refuses to read that there are any seeders or downloaders and as such, won't download. Why!

Sat, 09 Apr 2005 05:12:20 GMT

I'M AN UNCLE!!!

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 02:40:33 GMT

It's two weeks until the show and people are still stumbling over the words like it's auditions.

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 00:42:55 GMT

Here's a question:

How much would it cost to buy the movie rights to a book that nobody's ever read, written by an author everybody knows?

Where would I find this out?

Mental Workout

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 21:15:44 GMT

Yesterday evening I went from directing a play to working political strategy and then to the preproduction of two upcoming film shoots.

My brain runs triathlons and I love it.

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 20:50:10 GMT

Fine. I did the bandwagon thing.

Facebook.

Frakking bandwagons.

Fun Fact

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 05:18:59 GMT

When screaming at the top of your lungs, you don't need to do so directly into a microphone.

22nd

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 18:11:41 GMT

Last year, for my twenty-first, I went out and got transcendentally drunk, as one must for their twenty-first. The thing was, it was a Monday night, and I had a philosophy mid-term the next day. However, I fulfilled both my scholastic and social responsibilities, and despite recovering from massive inebriation the next morning, I dutifully walked into class at 9:45 and took my test.

The last question was an essay: "Elaborate on the differences between stoicism and epicurianism."

The title of my essay was, "I'm Taking This Test With A Hangover: Stoicism In Action"

I got a high B. The professor said I needed to be more specific.

Sun, 20 Feb 2005 02:20:25 GMT

I've been asked to update more frequently.

Though I still can't bring myself beyond the complete nihilistic disregard for the importance of transcribing daily non-matters.

But I was asked.

So, today I woke up at 6:30 to work parking for the Daytona 500, to raise money for the Riddle Players.

Then I took a nap and completely fucked up my sleep cycle.

Last night I did something I shouldn't have, but I did see DBCC's drama club's History of America:Abridged, which was hilarious.

And I'm at this instant, asking a woman out. And the response is...mixed. Sort of. I think I'm getting exactly what I was hoping for, I don't know. We'll see.

Last night we drank and had a good time, staying up late into the evening, despite the 6:30 call this morning. Tonight I call it easy and watch the original Battlestar Galactica, as a companion to my love for the new Battlestar Galactica.

I'll try to be more cryptic in the future. You know, that slightly poetic, cryptically terse nature to entries people make when they don't have the motivation for full-blooded treatises?

But instead, for right now, we'll go with simple sentence fragments.

Don't complain, I am updating.

Almost finished applying to AU Grad School. Took the GRE's on Valentine's Day and scored 620/610 verbal/math which I was worried wasn't terrible impressive, but Elliott (who has already been accepted) apparently didn't score as well, so, we'll see.

The radio station went Low Power FM and can now actually be heard. The Training Director will be listening to my show on Sunday and make the determination whether I should get a Low Power time slot or not, despite the fact that it's still my first semester on the radio.

Not so much sentence fragments. Still lazy.

So say we all.

Sat, 22 Jan 2005 21:03:19 GMT

Tomorrow will see the beginning of my talk radio show on the campus radio station.

Twenty-one and already a political hack. Hooray!

Got something liberal, Democratic, activist, anti-Republican, anti-Bush, anti-corporate, anti-media that you think I could talk about? Please comment.

Check big-words.blogspot.com sometime tommorrow night for a recording and a transcript.

And wish me luck!

Thu, 23 Dec 2004 19:11:12 GMT

Oh what brave new world that has such kittens in it.

Help Support Howard Dean for DNC Chair

Sun, 12 Dec 2004 21:30:11 GMT

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 15:21:33 GMT

We could learn a lot from the Ukrainian people.

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 04:23:45 GMT

I hope not. I would rather just have lost legitimately and been secure in the stupidity of the majority of the American people than the potential ease of the complete disruption of our electoral system.

Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked

by Thom Hartmann

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.

And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.

The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.

Also See:

Florida Secretary of State Presidential Results by County 11/02/2004 (.pdf)
Florida Secretary of State County Registration by Party 2/9/2004 (.pdf)

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable – this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line – the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.

One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.

One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility of problems in Florida.

Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless of size.

Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."

While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again brings the nation back to the question of why several states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.

Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.

Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.

But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.

Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.

Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.

"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."

He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."

Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.

How could this happen?

On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"

Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."

"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"

Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.

Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.

"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.

But, it's running on a Windows PC.

So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."

On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software – or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.

Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.

Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to.

According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.

And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.

So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.

But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."

Thu, 04 Nov 2004 01:50:27 GMT

Things are very, very bad now.

And they will very likely get a lot worse.

Tonight is for tears. Tonight is for depression.

Tomorrow we start fighting.