With a few exceptions, many of the most creative video ideas these days are showing up online, not on the air (which seems to be too crowded with fake-reality show knockoffs to allow for any truly original ideas).
Anyway I stumbled onto this newish web series the other day which, in the tradition of God Inc. and others, shows that there are still original and fresh ideas out there. Here's what creator Lauren Iungerich writers on the YouTube channel...
In the brutal world of dating and mating, every single woman needs a fan. Kate Maxwell just happens to have two.
My Two Fans is a new web series from creator, director Lauren Iungerich. The show was inspired after Lauren got "facebooked" by a fan of play she wrote called LOVE ON THE LINE for a charity event during the 2007/8 Writer's Guild strike. After meeting and befriending her fan, Jonathon Roessler, Lauren thought about how all average, single people need fans. And thus the idea for the series was born. My Two Fans is a 16 episode partially- improvised series. All 16 episodes were shot in a span of 4 days.
The series is a bit chick-focused, but it's got pretty good production value for a web series and it's way more entertaining than anything Gray's Anatomy has to offer.
It is simultaneously one of the most interesting and most scarifying articles I've read on the current state of the economy.
As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.
If you are feeling too optimistic, too upbeat about the current state of affairs, this article is a good antidote. It's something to read while our society self-destructs.
The first year of kindergarten is in its home stretch, and I must say it's been a resounding success.
Our kid has made great progress, both academically and socially. It's all that you could hope for as a parent doing this for the first time. Last night, my kid read a story to me before bedtime.
We've always tried to encourage our daughter to be inquisitive, to ask questions and be interested in learning new things.
That's not to say that there haven't been a few surprises along the way, like the time she wanted to dissect a dead snake, for example.
Another such surprise came a few days ago.
I'd just picked up the kiddo from school. She was in the backseat buckled in to her booster and we were going over the highlights of the day.
Then she came at me with this gem:
kiddo: Dad, there's something I wanted to ask you.
me: Okay. What is it.
kiddo: "Is 'ass' a bad word?"
me: Uhh...
me: Um. Well, yeah. It's kind of a bad word.
kiddo: Oh. Okay.
me: Most of the time it's not a nice thing to say. Your mom would probably get mad is she heard you say it.
kiddo: Okay.
me: you should probably look for ways to say what you want to say without using that word?
kiddo: Okay. I haven't said it. I heard someone at school say it, so I just wanted to know if it was bad.
And... scene.
Just a gentle reminder that the teachers aren't the only people teaching our kids at school.
Every once in a while I like to class up the joint a little with a nod to the fine arts. And I can think of no finer work of art than this homage to the famous Mona Lisa.
This headline that came across my RSS reader the other day hit home in a couple of ways:
Feds seize two big KC area financial institutions
Federal regulators seized two large Kansas City area financial institutions Friday to protect depositors’ accounts.
U.S. Central Credit Union, a $34 billion institution based in Lenexa, was placed into a federally controlled conservatorship.
Separately, TeamBank was seized and its branches, including five in the Kansas City area, will reopen today as part of Great Southern Bank, which has a branch in Lee’s Summit.
I have a lot of friends who have lost their jobs during this economy. More than I can count on all my fingers and toes (that's more than 24).
But this is the first instance that I know of where the Federal government is taking over area banks. So until this article, most of the upheaval in the banking sector was all happening in New York and Washington, and maybe North Carolina.
But now it's happen in KC. In our neck of the woods. Hell, there's a TeamBank location just down the street from my house. Correction, there WAS a TeamBank location there.
And just to make it a touch more personal, I have a relatively close family member who was a mid-level executive at TeamBank.
I haven't learned yet whether he's keeping his job or not. The article notes that the branches are opening under a new name this week. One would think that it would be difficult to fire everyone and still open all the branches the following week.
So good luck to you out there. Whether you're looking for a new job or your just trying to keep the one you have. Here's hoping this recession ends soon.
What a relief. I'm glad to see everything going so well for our new president.
Not even 70 days into his first term yet and already he's got such a great handle on the national debt, foreign policy, unemployment, health care, tax policy and the internecine quarreling of congress that he has plenty of free time to do all of the fun stuff that POTUS's get to do.
Things like posting on his blog, updating his Twitter feed, choosing a new pet dog, filling out presidential NCAA Tournament Brackets and, hanging out with his good friends in Hollywood.
I don't know about you, but last night's appearance by Obama on Jay Leno's Tonight Show gave me a renewed faith that Pres.O. has everything under control.
Some may say he's just pandering to populist outrage, appearing with comedians and actors on late night TV to diss AIG for paying a couple hundred million in bonuses.
I say it's better to get this outrage out of the way now before the Obama administration gives AIG another $30 billion in a couple of weeks.
Besides, Pres. O. doesn't really have anything better to do.
With the tough economic times getting tougher, and the potential for low-down dirty greed and graft growing, I figure it's a good time to come out with my list of Top Ten Gangster Movies.
After all, they say the economy in New York is so bad that the Mafia had to lay off 50 judges.
Anyway, I'm sure I don't have to explain the category. The name pretty much speaks for itself. But as always this kind of thing is highly subjective. So if you disagree with my final list, say so in the comments. I might actually change the line up if you make me an offer I can't refuse.
Top Ten Favorite Gangster Movies
10) Scarface: Aside from Al Pacino's ridiculous accent, remains one of the only Oliver Stone movies I really like. Full of irredeemable characters and brutal violence, it's a parable of how drugs and corruption will lead only to the firing of fully automatic machine guns in your Miami mansion.
9) Carlito's Way: Pacino plays a much more likable character in Carlito Brigante, who is trying desperately to go straight. The opening and closing shots are particularly memorable as Pacino gets another great death scene.
8) Snatch: The elaborate plot punctuated by quick cut editing made this film a real treat. Guy Ritchie might have questionable taste in women, but he can spin a right good yarn. It's worth watching if for no other reason than to learn this valuable lesson: Never trust an Irish gypsy. 7) Reservoir Dogs: A tremendous cast delivers great dialog in Tarrantino's freshman effort. The nonlinear story telling packs enough humor to balance the brutal violence, and the dialog makes the characters seem real and even sympathetic at times.
6) The Usual Suspects: One of my all time favorites films of any genre (despite the presence of Stephen Baldwin). The complex plot was executed (so to speak) so well with great writing, directing and acting that the view is pulled in to the story rather than lost. Again, compelling dialog makes the viewer sympathetic to the characters, and it has probably the best surprise twist endings in cinema history.
5) The Departed: Another great cast in a film with an excellent story. I appreciate Scorsese going all the way to the end on this movie. Staying true to the title, all of the principal characters reap the ultimate wages of a duplicitous mob life. My only gripe was the overly obvious metaphor at the end as a rat scrambles across the balcony ledge.
4) On The Waterfront: Probably the original gangster film staring Marlon Brando at his best as a has-been boxer Terry Malloy who decides to stand up to the corrupt, mob-controlled labor union. This has one of the best scenes of Brando's career when, as Malloy, the tells his brother that he "coulda been a contender."
3) Goodfellas: Another brilliant work by Scorsese with another amazing cast. We watch as Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) climbs the ranks of New York's underworld, only to be done in by the double dealing of friends and his own self-destructive tendencies. One of my favorite scenes was the single shot of Hill introducing the denizens of the Copacabana club.
1) The Godfather & The Godfather: Part II We've got a two-way tie for first place in the category, and it should be no surprise it's the first two installments of The Godfather Trilogy (it should also be no surprise that the third installment didn't make the list at all). It's the epic story of how Michael Corleone gets pulled in to run the family business and then slowly becomes consumed by it, losing everything he struggles so hard to hold on to in the process. This is the apotheosis of the genre, with strong writing, amazing photography and some of the best actors of the generation with Brando, Pacino, De Niro, Robert Duvall, James Caan, Diane Keaton and others.
When you work in an office like mine, there's plenty of opportunity for awkward situations when you venture outside the three and a half walls of you cube.
Here's one that comes up often. In the building where I work, there's a corridor running long and straight (yeah, yeah, The D. I know. "That's what she said.") between blocks of cubes (or, as I call them, cell blocks).
Anyway, several times a week I'm faced with the situation of seeing a coworker coming down the corridor toward me. Maybe I'm on my way to the break room, or heading to a meeting room or whatever. But I'm walking one way and the coworker, who is probably someone I only marginally like it I even know their name, is walking toward me.
No remember, this is a very long corridor. Maybe fifty yards or even longer. So depending on where we both entered the corridor, we could be walking toward each other for a very long time.
That's where the awkwardness enters the equation. At some point, I like to at lease acknowledge the other person (whom I probably don't like, but I'm a nice guy, see), usually with a fake-friendly wave or a head nod. If they get close enough, I'll offer a polite "Good day, sir."
The problem is, if I wave too soon I've got another 30-seconds or more of walking toward the person. It's an awkward window of time because it's too short to strike up a superficial conversation, but it's too long to just stare at each other as you approach.
Anyway, I've come up with a couple of strategies for dealing with this phenomenon.
If it's in the morning and I'm just arriving, I usually have my computer bag in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. With my hands thus occupied, I don't have to wave. Then to fill the awkward window, I usually take a drink of coffee, pretend it's too hot and blow the cup to cool it off. Do that a couple of times until my coworker either turns out of the aisle or we pass each other.
But my preferred method is to use my cell phone as a prop. I have one of those so-called smart phones, so when I see someone open the corridor I can pick it up and pretend to be busy checking my email and text messages.
Depending on how long I'll be walking toward the oncoming person, I can also fake-check my voice mail messages. Usually I throw in a frustrated head shake, like someone just left a message with a really unreasonable request that is going waste a lot of my time today, you know, just to be convincing.
Then when I get up even with the oncoming coworker I can give one of those "What're you gonna do?" shoulder shrugs.
Not to swagger jack The Hives, but a few recent events have made me realize how much it sucks to be correct sometimes.
Take, for example, this issue of AIG paying out millions ("millions", sound so quaint after bandying about terms like "billions" and "trillions" so much) of dollars in executive bonuses.
True to political form, politicians -- especially Democrats -- are acting all outraged and verklempt that such a thing could actually happen. Never mind the fact that they wrote provisions into their bailout bills that allowed an “exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009.”
Look, I'm not here to defend AIG. They should be out of business as far as I'm concerned. I'm just saying that when people voted for change, I'm pretty sure they had in mind a climate where companies like AIG weren't being enabled by politicians like Pres. Obama, Sen. Max Baucus and Sen. Christopher Dodd.
And they are enablers. Let's face it, you don't have to be an economist (whatever the hell that is) to know that when you pump a brajillion dollars out of a firehose into the economy with virtually no oversight, you're just creating a breeding ground for backbiters and syndicators.
And you people who thought we were getting change, as I've been saying all along, should have known better. A comment from Sen. Dodd is particularly telling.
We have a right to tax.
-- Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Connecticut
"We have a right to tax." This is the Senator's solution. Put billions of dollars into a failed business (from which, btw, you are the single largest receiver of campaign donations) and then tax that money right back. Lather, rinse, repeat.
