I’ve just looked back through my recent posts, those dated since I’ve jumped continents, and have realized that I’ve been blathering. The more recent posts are all space-fillers, padding to keep the blog active while my life drops back into first gear. Certainly I can’t just make stuff up to make my life appear interesting….. Actually, what the hell am I talking about, of course I can make stuff up. I’m trying to be a writer damn it, that’s what writers do!

Speaking of writing, my significant other has been scanning through various books on how to write (she’s got a novel underway and we’re working on a screenplay together) and she came across a nice little quote. I’d repeat it verbatim, but she’s at her folks place at the moment and I’ve no idea where she found it, so I’ll have to paraphrase.

Writing isn’t hard, writers just want you to think it is to keep some of the mystery/status that goes with the title.

Couldn’t agree more, you don’t have to be a tortured soul to write meaningful prose, nor do you have to be depressed to peek into the dark side of the soul. That’s called Emo, and we all should have grown out of it by the time we leave our teens behind.

Writing is about self-discipline (not my strong suite) and grinding out the banal structure that is necessary to frame those nuggets of true inspiration. Granted I’ve had my melancholic days, days where I want to wallow in my own misery, but sadly they always seem to coincide with a friend or loved one desperately trying to jolt me out of my funk. No one seems to understand that we need the emotional lows as much as we need the highs. So when you try to explain that you’re actually really enjoying seeing the world through navy colored glasses and you’ll be fine again tomorrow they just don’t get it.

Sadly I write my best poetry when I’m down. Luckily this aberration also provides me with the basics for a small fire the next day as I destroy all the evidence that I ever attempted to write poetry.

…… I now have to revise my earlier statement that writing isn’t hard. After taking a break to be (briefly) social, I have now completely forgotten the bulk the things I was going to write about. This isn’t something I come back to, polish, edit etc. The strategy here his write, spell-check, post. No editing allowed. Guess I’m going to have to find another way to give this posting some punch…  

So in an effort to put a little more content into this post, here’s a pair of girls with plenty of substance. First the ever popular Tera Patrick, star of the blue silver screen. Second Rio Natsume, a girl with an incredible …um…. presence…..?

I’ve been back in the land of the unemployed for almost two months now, and it hasn’t been quite as productive as I’d have hoped. I’ve almost hammered out three short stories, a linked arc that might be worth reading, but the novels are going nowhere fast.

I recently got inspired by George RR Martin, or at least his lack of output acted as a bomb under my arse to get something, anything, out. I might submit the stories to an on-line site or try and get them in a proper publication, but I’m going to post a few of the smaller ones on wordpress too.

On an unrelated note here is Yuuri Morishita

Why are women that can kick my arse so sexy?

George you’re killing me.

Yesterday my brain exploded as I saw a new-looking book with the Martin moniker….. could this be… could it possibly be? No…. apparently not. Feast for Crows has undergone the same process as the earlier books, cut into two sections and released again to torture me and the other addicts awaiting in the wings with baited breath.

I know there are a lot of good authors out there….. but Song of Ice & Fire…..

…. don’t make me write the ending myself… I’m sure none of us would like that. In fact I’m damn sure of that.

Pro

Plunging cleavage & tight shorts

Con

Land Whales & Boguns

Just some unnamed bodies from the archives

Today is the first day of the landmark Animal Testing Elimination Act across Europe.

And on a completely unrelated note, Revlon/Dior daycare centers open their doors across the world in a coordinated launch this week.

Yes I know it’s a rotten tittle, but when you’ve got a review of The Departed, Meet the Spartans, and Juno, what can you do.

Lets save the best for last and start with… Meet the Spartans is a spoof movie, which means it is going to be full of lame jokes and visual gags. In this case they actually caused a few chuckles, yet it suffers from the same malady as other spoof movies. The good ideas that make up the spoof, the primary piss-takes and the scene setting all take place at the start of the movie, the first section is nearly always the best and it dies in the final parts as the writers run out of good ideas. In Meet the Spartans this rings true, with the chuckles fading as we move into extended dance-offs. However this movie left me with one great philosophical question, “Is it compulsory to go commando in Hollywood?” We had the Britney beaver shot, the Hilton beaver shot, and the Lohan beaver shot. If I want to be a hot young Hollywood actress would I have to burn my panties first? If so would I have to do this before or after the sex-change and time-travel that would be required to make me a starlet?

On to The Departed. This movie was so intense that it blew me (and most of the characters) away when I saw it on the big screen. A second viewing however has left me full of praise for Sheen and (can’t believe I’m saying this) Baldwin, but less for the main two players. The acting is intense, so intense that it goes beyond the surreal and can be mistaken for nothing but acting. My little woman thought that de’Caprio looked all hot and grown up, but that doesn’t float my boat so it didn’t save the movie. Jack Nicholson played… well… Jack Nicholson. It also didn’t help that it was a big-budget rip-off of the far superior Infernal Affairs, and as for the last visual pun…..yeesh!

Last comes Juno. A-grade acting, awesome writing and a believable story. I wish the pregnant teens I’d met had been this smart/savvy, and maybe that’s why I liked the movie. This was a sweet movie, not necessarily realistic in a teenage muddled emotions kind of way, but worth watching.

No photo today, I’m having a respectable phase. Fear not, this too shall pass.

After insulting the KKK this is an effort to placate the NRA (the Political Correct evolution of the KKK)

so…. chicks with guns

um…. think that worked?

We are coming up on my least favourite time of the year, that time when America grinds to a halt to contemplate it’s vulnerability to attack by a hostile nation…….. no, scratch that…..

….when America grinds to a halt to contemplate it’s vulnerability to attack by a hostile organization….. nope, that’s not exactly right either……

….when America grinds to a halt to contemplate it’s vulnerability to attack by a hostile individual and his few fanatical followers….. no, still not right…..

 ….when America grinds to a halt to contemplate it’s vulnerability to attack by a hostile, foreign, individual and his few fanatical followers….. better

The rest of the world has lived with terrorism for centuries, the Basque Separatists have been assassinating politicians in Spain since the 1970’s, while the IRA spent the time blowing up buses of school children in Ireland and in the UK. In Asia, Eastern Europe, Australia, Europe, the list of terrorist attacks and deaths goes on, sometimes performed by CIA trained forces such as the Mujahedin (who would go on to become the Al-Qaeda). America itself has lived with terrorism since its inception with the executions, bombings, lynchings, and burnings of the KKK and other domestic terrorists.

However it was on September 11 2001 that America was finally shocked into action by this murderous legacy into invading not one, but two countries. Afghanistan, and Iraq would bare the brunt of American ire, raised by the PR machine into a paranoid fear of further attacks. While the move against Afghanistan might have conceivably been justified as an attack against a government that supported and protected terrorists (the same could have been argued of Northern Ireland and a dozen other nations), the movement against Iraq had no such justification. The Hussein tyranny, that rose to power with US support, was a staunch foe of Al-Qaedaand Osama Bin-Laden.

… but I’m getting off topic again. 9-11 is the time when the world stands still to watch a real man-made disaster, one that has been compounded by the destruction of Iraq and the terrorism of a propaganda campaign designed to keep entire nations so frightened of their own shadows that they blindly go to war with a phantom enemy and heir own personal freedoms. In one day 19 hijackers, and 2,974 civilians died another 24 are missing and presumed dead. This is not funny, it is not something that conspiracy theorists should play with, this was a human tragedy.

Having said that lets put this tragedy in perspective. In 2001 there were 29,573 firearm related deaths in America, making the twin towers death toll equal to 10% of the national deaths by firearms. There are an estimated 400,000 smoking related deaths in the USA each year, meaning that the twin towers death toll was 0.7% of the number of deaths caused from smoking cigarettes. To put it another way, for each person that was murdered on September 11, around 134 people choked their last nicotine permeated breath in hospitals around the United States of America.

As of today there have been 4152 confirmed allied casualties in Iraq, exceeding the 9-11 death toll by over 1,000. Civilians deaths in Iraq are somewhere between 151,000 and  1,220,580 depending upon whom you ask. Sounds more like a war of terror to me, and that is only Iraq. The world is a horrific place, death can lurk around the next corner. America, which till recently was only scared of its own gun toting criminals, is starting to learn this. Next time 9-11 flashes across your screen ask yourself how many are starving in Africa, how many are dying in Eastern European wars, and how many children have been born with Aids. 

I’m depressing myself now…. girlie pictures next post….. possibly with guns in the hope I can placate the NRA…..