The Pitch: It's like The Fog meets The Polyphonic Spree!  

The Pitch: It's like The Matrix Reloaded meets Cremaster 3!  

Movie Poop Shoot - Title Bout  

I wonder if comic book thieves have fancy justifications the way music thieves do. No one admits they STEAL music -- everyone's "sampling" it, or has some fancy fucked justification about how CDs are too expensive. FUCK THAT: I steal music because I like having lots of music and not paying for it. Everyone would steal everything if they could get away with it -- that's why we live in the USA and not Navajo-ville.

Movie Poop Shoot - DVD Diatribe  

"At the end of the movie, John Turturro came up to me, and John's performance is of a sort of whinny, needy, obnoxious homosexual Jew, and Turturro came up to me on the last day and said, 'I just want to thank you so much for being the cinematographer,' and I said, 'Well, you know, you're very welcome, the pleasure was all mine,' and he said, 'No, not because of the lighting — I based my entire performance on watching you with Joel and Ethan. So that was sort of … adorable."—Barry Sonnenfeld on working with John Turturro

High Concept: It's like The Front Page meets The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz!  

Because he was a minor at the time of the alleged crime, Viehweg appeared in juvenile court Monday, although prosecutors said they will seek to have the case transferred to adult court.
[...]
"My position is he should be dealt with as an adult," Deputy District Attorney Ralph Dixon said after the arraignment. "In 1982 we would have proceeded in the manner we are now . . . and attempted to try him as an adult."

Oh, what a tangled web he wove Tobey Maguire is about as sorry as a movie star can be.

In a few short weeks this spring, he got himself dismissed from the next installment of "Spider-Man," had part of Hollywood's power elite work toward his reinstatement, won back his job, fired his agent and then was assiduously courted by the head of every major agency in town. He's back crawling the wall again, chastened by the whole experience.

"I feel like I learned a lesson," he says. "The movie is the most important thing."

The president, who has been campaigning across the country to drum up support for his tax cut and economic plan, scheduled a speech Monday at the Airlite Plastics Co.
Bush is expected to speak to the company's 575 employees about how his economic stimulus plan would benefit them.
Airlite president and CEO Brad Crosby said workers will be given one of four options during the visit: work their regular shift in an adjacent plant not visited by the president, take the day off and make up the work on Saturday, use one of their vacation days, or take an unpaid day off.

President John F. Kennedy had an affair with a 19-year-old intern who traveled with him on official trips, according to a new biography of Kennedy.
"She had no skills. She could answer the phone," Robert Dallek, author of "An Unfinished Life," told "Dateline NBC" in an interview that aired Sunday. "Apparently, her only skill was to provide sexual release for JFK on those trips and maybe in the White House."

Pynchon brings added currency to 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'  

Superlatives may get people's attention, but they don't do much to reward it. So if one were to hazard, for example, that novelist Thomas Pynchon's foreword to the new Plume edition of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" just happens to be the finest, deepest, sanest new 20 pages around, the case might yet remain something shy of closed. In the wake of such praise, good questions for a skeptic to ask might include "Compared to what?" "Says who?" and, hardest of all to nail down, "Why?"

SBC turns on the charm  

Meanwhile, employees are warned not to transfer irate customers to SBC's executive suite or to state and federal regulators unless the customer absolutely insists on speaking with the powers that be.
"Do all that you can for the customer to prevent having to send him/her to the Executive Offices, CPUC and/or FCC," workers are told. "Reminder: All complaints that go to the Executive Offices, CPUC and/or FCC are filed as official complaints against our company and don't do a thing to create customer loyalty!"

Yahoo! News - Typing Monkeys Don't Write Shakespeare  

LONDON - Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will produce a mess.
Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.
"They pressed a lot of S's," researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. "Obviously, English isn't their first language."

Yahoo! News - Are We Grown Up Yet? U.S. Study Says Not 'Till 26  

The poll found the following ages at which people expect the transitions to grown-up status to be completed: Age 20.9 self-supporting; 21.1 no longer living with parents; 21.2 full-time job; 22.3 education complete; 24.5 being able to support a family financially; 25.7 married; and 26.2 having a child.
'There is a large degree of consensus across social groups on the relative importance of the seven transitions,' said Tom Smith, director of the survey. 'The only notable pattern of differences is on views about supporting a family, having a child and getting married.
'Older adults and the widowed and married rate these as more important than younger adults and the never-married do,' he added. 'This probably reflects in large part a shift in values across generations away from traditional family values.'
The most valued step toward reaching adulthood, the survey found, was completing an education, followed by full-time employment, supporting a family, financial independence, living independently of parents, marriage and parenthood.

MPR's The Writer's Almanac  

It's the birthday of Thomas Pynchon, born in Glen Cove, Long Island (1937). His novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973) won the Pulitzer Prize but the editorial board refused to grant him the award. They called it "obscene" and "unreadable," so no one won the Pulitzer for fiction that year. The book won the National Book Award too, but Pynchon refused to go to the awards ceremony to accept it. Gravity's Rainbow begins: "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."

It's no surprise that the head of Reuters popularized the phrase "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," because only a journalist could come up with something so utterly facile and idiotic, and actually obscene, in fact. But a huge part of the world believes that, and there's nothing I can do about that. They have their little causes, whatever they are. And one has to care about them profoundly, or one is a target. That's the way the world works, the whole world. Ideologically, it doesn't really matter–I really hate ideology, that's for sure. But ideologically, there's really nothing to say about it, because that's what it is. The world is ruled by violence, or at least the imminent threat of violence. It always has been. This is the way the world is, and there's nothing I can do about it–I mean, I can say it, I can observe it, I can have a feeling about whether that's good or bad. I could have, even, some empirical evidence that it's good or bad. But it doesn't matter, because that's what rules the world. Violence.

When the news broke in March 2000 that the Fang family was taking over the Examiner from Hearst Corp. – mollifying the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust concerns about Hearst's purchase of the San Francisco Chronicle – many people wondered what, exactly, the Fangs were up to.

It was, to put it mildly, an odd deal. The Fangs paid exactly $100 for the name, Web site, news racks, and archives of the onetime flagship of the Hearst empire, the self-proclaimed "Monarch of the Dailies." And Hearst agreed to reimburse them up to $66.7 million for running the paper through July 2003. The transaction almost certainly wouldn't have happened without the backroom wrangling of key local politicians, including Brown and Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Not a single film of some 70 produced by India's Bollywood, the most prolific film industry in the world, has been successful at the box office this year, the BBC reported today (Tuesday). Director Karan Johar said that the audience for Indian films is engaging in a "mutiny." He told a BBC reporter in Bombay: "I think after a long time the audience has revolted and decided it will not see anything that isn't good cinema. It has rejected mediocrity." The rejection has reportedly had devastating consequences for film distributors. The BBC observed: "The distribution system has suffered so badly, distributors are not buying films any more -- they have no money to shell out."

Bennett told Newsweek he had done nothing illegal and that over the course of a decade, he had "come out pretty close to even." But the magazine quoted a casino source who had witnessed Bennett at a high-limit slot machine: "There's a term in the trade for his kind of gambler. We call them losers."

Nora, my faithful darling, my seet-eyed blackguard schoolgirl, be my whore, my mistress, as much as you like (my little frigging mistress! My little fucking whore!) you are always my beautiful wild flower of the hedges, my dark-blue rain-drenched flower.

Woodstock's celebration of Dick Tracy Days, June 21 to 25, will begin with a 16-year tradition, a Woodstock City Band concert in the Park-in-the Square.
For eleven years, Dick Tracy Days has officially opened with a band concert. This year's band concert begins at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, June 21. "Books on the Square," music inspired by literature, is the theme of the evening.

Two first editions of author J.K. Rowling (news - web sites)'s next instalment in the hugely popular series, not due for general publication until June 21, were discovered in Suffolk by an unnamed 40-year-old father-of-two, The Sun newspaper reported.

The daily sent a journalist to collect the editions, which were now being kept securely in the newspaper's headquarters in east London.

Now I'm a very confused girl. Ever have a close friend and observe their little cutesy rituals with their significant other? Then watch them break up, and see them do the same things to the next guy?
I had a friend who did this cute little Kiss Attack sort of thing, where she'd jump onto her boyfriend and kiss all around his face really fast. He really seemed to love it, but then they broke up, and the very next time I saw her with her new boyfriend, she did the same exact thing to him. He really seemed to love it, too. His expression was that of "Wow, this girl is so cute and spontaneous," and I wanted to say, "Buddy, it's just part of the Mandy Boyfriend Treatment."
All the things I used to do with Sean, little tickles on the back of his neck, holding on to his elbow skin, they used to have so much meaning when I did them to him, but I was shocked when I started dating another guy at how easy it was to do.
Wow, I thought. I can still convey this affectionate message without any sentiment attached! How fucking sick am I? I'm just miming through the actions.
I couldn't figure out which relationship it cheapened more. The one I was currently in, or the fact that I was recycling a sentiment that apparantly didn't mean enough in my previous relationship.

The Pitch: It's like Serpico meets Maid in Manhattan!  

The Pitch: It's like Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Best In Show meets Buffy The Vampire Slayer!  

The Pitch: It's like My Dinner With Andre meets Shock Waves!  

Listings: April 29 - May 5, 2002 (Writers Almanac)  

Today is May Day, one of the oldest holidays on the calendar. The ancient Romans celebrated it with a festival of thanksgiving to the flower goddess, Flora - they scattered flower petals in the streets. The Celts built bonfires to ward off evil spirits. In medieval England, whole villages would turn out to go "a-maying," paying homage to their local May Queen, and dancing around a maypole. Women rose before sunrise to wash their faces with dew, which they believed would beautify their skin.