Soooo, of the following, naturally this could Only be completely fictional, and have No resemblance to actual current political occurrences whatsoever, especially given the date that I sent it to myself . . . .

I guess for my story ideas I'll actually have to come up with something plausible . . .

Sol

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: we hold, what not speech to give.
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:39:25 -0800
From: Harcourt Alexander Raschid
To: Cassiel Cardinal MacAvity

So I'm looking at an overly wordy org name, and get a bit to plug
into a story . . . of the following, the Liberal Democrats are the utter
right wing, and the Conservatives keep getting elected instead of the
L.D.:

A Liberal Dem speaker is holding forth on the Correct Beliefs, and the
Proper Behavior, and how the conservatives are godless, worthless and
doomed because of their failure to support the L.D. view of How Family
Things Should Be, and then utterly blows that season's campaign out of
the water by announcing that the campaign that Everyone Must Follow is
called Families United, that Families united can know, overcome,
fulfill, forever!!!!

Her handlers never let her give a speech again.

As every political news report notes that evening--especially the T.V.
news that repeat the footage of her last sentence over and over---a
really good slogan helps a campaign, and if the slogan has too many
words, go with the acronym.

Today is the second of November, Thanksgiving is a few weeks away in the future, and tonight I have come back from a round of grocery shopping . . . . where Lucky's has started pouring Xmas music through the overhead speakers, and my memory of relative sound levels tells me they've even cranked the volume.

Courtesy of my time working in a bookstore where the company bosses also had No idea or experience of being on the floor with the customers, I recognized every single song played while I was getting my groceries . . . and for those who shop there, and probably by this point, shop anywhere else, for those who work in that environment, that loop of the Exact Same Tracks Over And Over will Not stop until New Year's Eve, playing literally for **Two Months** without interruption . . . . . . .

And we're doing a recession, and people are supposed to get Attracted into the stores, not get driven away screaming.

Of course this does, in fact, have nothing to do with those customers who have not already countered by cranking their portable stereos, so that they are not listening anyway, thus rendering pointless All noise from overhead.

In turn, of the rest of us who don't bother with ambient music, we'll just duck in and out as fast as possible, in this time of recession and reduced spending where all these retailers are thus even more frantically needing customers.

And, finally, ultimately, the only ones who are hearing that loop over and over and over are the ones who work there, have no choice Anyway, and just Are not the people that the inexperienced, naive, and clearly clueless senior staff want to piss off . . .

The movie Tropic Thunder is, in very short, about just how stupid aspects of filmmaking can get, with the particular emphasis on Hollywood variety filmmaking. As part of this, TT starts with a series of trailers of upcoming movies by characters who are themselves in TT. The Ben Stiller character is doing his sixth movie where the Earth has a disaster, and the character winds up holding a baby--the sixth movie is considered unique because it has earth in a deep freeze instead of being on fire, and he winds up with two babies. The Robert Downey Jr. character, the one in blackface in TT, is in a movie about gay medieval monks. The Jack Black character, who specializes in multiple characters, fat suits, and farting, has a sequel that is called Fart Two . . . . . . .

And in the last few minutes, an actual boy band has made an announcement that has hit Google news . . .

What's that smell? The Jonas Brothers in 'Walter the Farting Dog'
Los Angeles Times - 40 minutes ago
Casting Couch: Jonas Bros Ready for Farting E! Online
Jonas Brothers To Star In 'Walter The Farting Dog' MTV.com





I am now awaiting the announcement of the movie of Rocky Meets Rambo, and the movie about the gay evangelists---Given Sarah Palin being in the news for some reason recently, make that a movie about gay Pentacostals . . . .

Soo, this time I dreamed of doing laundry at some outdoor banks of machines, among some trees. Then the machines were at an SCA or faire event, as a center divider to a couple of rows of merchant booths. I had forgotten my knee high boots, but did have the tanker boots, and was wearing the t-tunics anyway. Next I'm waiting for someone else to finally come wandering back and finally get laundry out of the driers. By this time that I've been waiting, mebbe I should just pull the last person's laundry out, pile it on top, and swap mine in so that I and everyone else can keep moving. Joan walks by in full elizabethans with standard escort in kilts and weapons. I waved, she then spotted me and happily nodded Hi---at that hour of the morning, she's prolly off to some administrative meeting. I go back to the puzzle of sorting out the timing of my laundry and the idiot who just wandered off and left things.




---Additional detail, for those of you who didn't know Joan, she and her husband died around the beginning of the year, but then as far as their ages when they died, some of His stories were of his time in the Korean War, and she definitely was his contemporary . . . She died of late onset cancer, and he died of just general cascading age.

Considering I usually don't dream, at all, I think this translates to an assessment that while assorted and extremely varied projects have gotten stacked up and intermixed, just the same, I've been managing to keep moving on and through the assorted work. There Are ongoing and repeated resets. Sometimes I miss something. Also, though, a good deal of the combinations of what I'm working on are completely new and since few maps exist for this work I have to find the dead ends myself. But I do keep things moving. And then there are the multiple occasions that someone else screws things up for Everyone, not just me, and I have to supply the missing bit to keep moving around that, too.

No wonder laundry machines would turn up at a recreation event, be the event SCA or back at a faire(1). On my part, once more awake, at least I do approach being back to mebbe two concurrent projects, and working full time, and doing everything else, and will soon get back to the everything else . . .


(1) Yes, faire. An actual and genuine theatrical recreation of a late 1500's English town and only those you would find there, and not one of the 21rst century nightclubber and 1700s pirate laden spawn of RenCo that have been plaguing both SCA and faire alike in the last 13something years, see themacavity.com/#modest , among other locations, for details . . .

Appreciation:
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 6, 2008; 4:00 PM

He was the hawk.

He soared. In fact, everything about him soared. His shoulders soared, his cheekbones soared, his brows soared. Even his hair soared.

And for a good two decades, Charlton Heston, who died Saturday at 84, was the ultimate American movie star. In a time when method actors and ethnic faces were gradually taking over, Heston remained the last of the ramrod straight, flinty, squinty, tough-as-old-hickory movie guys.

He and his producers and directors understood his appeal, and used it for maximum effect on the big technicolor screen. Rarely a doubter, never a coward, inconceivable as a shirker, he played men of granite virtue no matter the epoch. He played commanders, Biblical prophets, Jewish heroes, tough-as-nails cowpokes, calm aviators, last survivors, quarterbacks and a president or two.

Later in his life, he took that stance into politics, becoming president of the National Rifle Association just when anti-gun attitudes were reaching their peak. Pilloried and parodied, lampooned and bullied, he never relented, he never backed down, and in time it came to seem less an old star's trick of vanity than an act of political heroism. He endured, like Moses. He aged, like Moses. And the stone tablet he carried only had one commandment: Thou shalt be armed. It can even be said that if the Supreme Court in June finds a meaning in the Second Amendment consistent with NRA policy, that he will have died just short of the Promised Land -- like Moses.

Was he great actor? Many think not, and few would rank him with contemporaries like Brando, Dean, even Widmark or Wayne. But at the same time his talent was much underrated, as it frequently is for people who enjoy the blessed gift of great beauty. For the purposes of the movie industry in the '50s, at the height of its patriotism and Western-centrism, he was a perfect fit and always gave solid, professional work. Can anyone imagine either "The Ten Commandments" or "Ben-Hur" without him?

And he was in a number of first-rate and even a few great movies. His greatest film, "Touch of Evil," featured Heston as a Mexican narcotics detective, probably his biggest stretch and not really an outstanding performance. But he was invaluable in getting Universal to put up the money for Orson Welles' s great shaggy dog. It greatness may be incidental to Heston's performance, but its existence certainly isn't incidental to his behind-the-scenes efforts.

Then there's "The Ten Commandments," such a perennial that even today, half a century after its creation, it gets a ritual primetime network unspooling. Nobody ever accused its director, Cecile B. DeMille of greatness; DeMille was more entrepreneur, logistics expert, visionary, and carny barker than true artist. And the movie he made remains a monument to kitsch, particularly the orgy sequence unleashed by Edward G. Robinson. (Now, would you go to an orgy hosted by Edward G. Robinson?) And DeMille's concept of Moses wasn't particularly deep either: he saw the great conduit between man and God as a kind of Mount Rushmore head, given life atop Heston's lanky frame and posed heroically against dramatic skies. The best performance in the picture was by Heston's hair, which grew into a lion's gray mane with Susan Sontag highlights (boy, was that scary!) But he functioned there as he did in "Ben-Hur" essentially as the rock upon which the church of giant '50s pop religiosio-amen-chorus moviemaking was built. He may not have really parted the Red Sea but he got millions to part with their bucks to the greater glory of the big studios and that was sermonizing Hollywood could understand.

It's easy to make fun of these two behemoths. Of the two, "Ben-Hur" is vastly the superior and again it's Heston's natural instincts for the heroic, as opposed to the pompous or the self-dramatizing, that help the movie to work so well. He mastered horse-team driving, no easy thing, for the still-classic chariot race, many people's choice for the best action sequence in movie history. He looked great in a toga, Roman armor and a Jewish robe, he was able to convey Judah Ben-Hur's suffering, anguish and heroism without overstating it, or fighting the scenery or giving the film an unsavory narcissistic center. In the end the movie stands for a certain kind of glory and grandeur that have passed from the scene and the screen, except in occasional nostalgic retro-wallows like "Gladiator."

Heston made a number of other extremely good films as well. His favorite was 1968's "Will Penny," a hardscrabble western with director Tom Gries, set in an anti-romantic west of hungry, starving people, inarticulate heroes who never saw the inside of a bathtub. I know it was his favorite film because he sent me a copy after we met at an NRA event many years later. And it was a great performance in a very good film, and it showed what he could do: Who could believe the same man could make you enter the private lives of Michaelangelo and Will Penny, genius with chisel and brush, good hand with frying pan, lariat and Winchester.

In fact, his later films let him be more actor and less icon. He was always pursuasive, except in the football movie, "Number One," where slow motion revealed that he lacked a professional athlete's grace and power; he was only big. But in "The Omega Man," "Soylent Green" and "The Last Hard Men," all humble B movies, he was extremely impressive (in "Soylent" he played a great scene with orgy-master Edward G. Robinson, another woefully underappreciated actor).

But his last great film was probably Sam Peckinpah's "Major Dundee," playing the title role as a Union officer in the Southwest who, short of men, recruits some Confederate cavalrymen (led by Richard Harris) to cross into Mexico in search of an Apache band raiding the frontier. It's got Peckinpah's native grit, insight into male violence, and sense of scrubby western reality, and Senta Berger in a completely ludicrous role as a European doctor (!) in a tiny Mexican village (Hollywood! Don't you love it?). But the real issue is Harris vs. Heston. Harris, desperate for attention, turns into a magnificently neurotic, self-dramatizing, deathwish-driven troubadour of Nineteenth Century "honor," while Heston is stuck in the thankless role as the practical military guy with a hard problem to solve. In other words, Harris is Doc Holiday, poor Chuck the dreary Wyatt Earp. Interpretations will vary, possibly driven by political considerations, and maybe I'm in the bag for the big guy, but I give it to Chuck on points in the late rounds.

One of his earliest films was a noir entitled "Dark City," but his face and frame were entirely too free of neurosis for the world of film noir. In almost no time, he moved to center ring roles -- "The Greatest Show on Earth," as a circus boss in 1952, for DeMille. By 1953 , he was Buffalo Bill Cody in "Pony Express," his first iconic role. It just seemed to get better and better and certainly by the time of "The Ten Commandments" he had arrived. That role also cemented him in place as Mr. Monument to the Great Western Way.

If you pine for some hint of scandal or even minor weakness, Heston's life isn't the place to look. He married early (to Lydia Clarke) stayed married, had kids and seemed never to make the gossips.

In his private life, he was given to follow that strange calling that is half public service and half self-aggrandizement with the distinction frequently blurred. He was six-term president of the Screen Actors Guild, an early celebrity marcher in the civil rights crusade, and his beloved status in Tinsel Town was certainly validated when he received the Academy Awards' Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1977.

Why then, it must be asked, did he take the leadership of the NRA, never the most popular of lobbying outfits in Washington? One cynical explanation is that the old star was looking for an audience that would treat him as he had been treated in the late '50s and early '60s, almost as a god.

But the abuse he took! The anger he generated. The fury he absorbed from a Hollywood and a critical community that were turning ever more liberal in the wake of the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. Good Lord, he didn't need that at all.

The only answer can be: he believed. His had to have been a ramrod sense of the Second Amendment and he never varied from it. Hate his politics or love them, you have to say: There was a man.

When I met him at that NRA event (I am a member; he had read some of my novels), I was disappointed. He was -- no other word will do -- old. He had an old man's stooped posture and an extremely tentative way of speaking, as if clarity were an issue. His features, once so mythic, now seemed fragile, draped with a loose parchment of delicate, spotted skin. He didn't walk so much as shuffle, as if he were already wearing those hospital paper shoes; it was as if he had a walker with an oxygen tank attached.

We exchanged cordialities and banalities (can't remember a word of it), and then it was time for him to address the crowd. He shuffled slowly into the big room, and the spotlight came on him, and it was as if with each step he tossed off a decade. His shuffle became a stride and then almost a strut. His posture went from the question mark of age to the exclamation point of youth. His lungs filled, revealing the full breadth of his wide shoulders. He neck turned iron, his chin came aloft, his vision sharpened and the years just fell away like leaves. When he spoke he boomed in Moses' triumphant baritones, delivering the Tablets to the believers.

I thought: Good for Chuck. Magnificent to the end.