Pacificapocalypse

And remember, it’s the labor that cost the most, not the parts.

Jim Kunstler on the recent ‘economic unpleasantness’ and possible fall-out and the future; he’s a little hyperbolic and I’m not completely convinced about all the doom and gloom, but still and interesting take. I might have taken this with a slightly smaller grain of salt if he hadn’t recently penned a fiction novel that falls right in line with this prediction.

In the meantime, however, millions of Joe-the-Plumber types will have gotten their pink slips, slipped helplessly into foreclosure, watched the repo men hot-wire their Ford pickups, and eaten down the kitchen cupboard to a single box of Kellogg’s All-Bran (which had been sitting there for eleven years infested with weevils). They will be watching the official proceedings in the federal courtrooms with jaundiced eyes as they hunch in their tent cities, in the rain, sipping amateur-brand raisin wine bartered for a few snared rock doves. How long before the hardier ones among them venture out to Easthampton with long knives and matches?

I was joking before, but yeah, maybe I should learn blacksmithing and baking… you know, just in case this whole Mad Max thing plays out.
Or maybe I’ll just get another game for the Wii.

We Watch Movies: Quarantine

Ok let’s get this out in the open first: I’m over the docu/horror flick. Enough with the handheld camera work. Yes I get it builds a sense of place and realism, but I’m done. I’m really really done. ( I’m looking at you Cloverfield ).

With that said this movie scared the crap out of us. I mean damn, that was a scary flick. Here we are four years on from Dawn of The Dead (2004) where we got fast zombies and also six years out from 28 Days Later (2002) where we had, not quite zombies, but pretty damn close. And they were fast AND infected AND turned friendly happy guy into flesh ripping Mister Cranky Pants in, what was it? 30 seconds? Damn. Those two twists to the classic zombie paradigm really shifted everything.
They used to be slow, shuffling things who relied upon sheer numbers to eventually whittle down the plucky band of survivors. Now. They’re fast. They can run and climb. Oh hell no.
Since then there’s been little innovation in the cinema zombie, but Quarantine does manage to put a few new spins on the zombie schtick, setting it in a single sealed building was a neat idea for one, making the .gov a partner villain was another. What causes the pleasant residents to turn into mouth foaming killers is actually pretty clever as well as believable, I actually thought that part was one of the more intelligent aspects of the film. I mean, it’s pretty plausible.  Which is freaky.
Ok I *did* get a little tired of Jennifer Carpenter’s giggly cub reporter in the first part of the film, as quickly as I got tired of her, later in the film, screaming and freaking out unintelligibly. ENUNCIATE DAMMIT!. Right, you’re terrified. I get it. Sure I’d probably be babbling and peeing my pants as well, if I were in that situation, but GET A GRIP!.
Some great gotcha terror scare of the leap out and freak out variety, and a bonus sense of the creeping dread as the characters realize, that the .gov has written them off and they are NOT getting out of that building even *if* they survive the nastyness within it.

So yeah, good old fashioned scary film. Pretty smartly written and relatively believable.

Oh! And yet another movie with the greatest actor who’s face you’ve never seen, if only for the last few minutes.

Didn’t know what else to call this… showed up on the side of the EQ3 building next to the 9th Street off-ramp from 101.

Excuse the crappy  cam-phone from a moving bus pic.
Click for full size.

Seriously, I’m warning you, this gave me the absolute jibblies.

One word: spiders.

Now normally, spiders don’t particularly freak me out – I’ll admit to a certain unease, especially in movies that feature hundreds of the little fuckers. Dude! There’s no way to fight them! Guns are useless, you need like, poison gas or a freaking’ flame thrower.
But the occasional spider in the house doesn’t send me quivering.
This story and the accompanying pictures did.
Mouse over the link for an hint of the horrors that await.

You’ve been warned.

You, you are that false tingle, that lying trick of the nerves.
You are that feeling from a mobile device carried in a pocket, that’s set to vibrate.

And you *feel* the vibration, and you look; no missed calls, no new messages. Liar.

You are ‘fauxbration’

Until someone comes up with a more clever word for it.

I admired the man and then when he joined the drumbeat for an illegal war, I almost lost all respect for him.
This helps a little.

I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.
I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards–Purple Heart, Bronze Star–showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life. Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way. And John McCain is as nondiscriminatory as anyone I know. But I’m troubled about the fact that, within the party, we have these kinds of expressions.

Yeah the post title has absolutely nothing to do with the actual post, but how often do you get the chance to insert random Doors lyrics?

SF Chronicle announced – Part V: The Aftermath
Okay, so the final tally is something like 30 people from the business side have taken the buyout and are already gone; there are ( that I know of ) another three or four that have applied for and been accepted for the buyout but they’re still on-site for a number of different reasons ( training replacements, that sort of thing).
My old department has been eviscerated. And I mean that in the technical sense in that the internal organs have been removed leaving and empty shell of a carcass. I started with the Chron three years ago; when I was hired my department was made up of 14 people, some outside people, some inside people, some dealing with agencies.
As of this morning there are three people remaining.
Where once, there was enough business to support a 14 person department, there’s now only enough for three. Like a jumper of the Golden Gate, the business has just dropped out of sight.
Pretty friggin’ tragic.

Oh yeah and I’m no longer *in* my old department.
I’ve been transferred to a whole ‘nother part of the business. It’s been busy ( hence the lack of and intermittent posting ) which is good, makes the days go by quickly.
The training has been pretty much what I expected. None.
But at least I already know all the back end systems that make this multi-media behemoth function.
A whole new group of people to charm and subvert to my will; it’ll take time, but that’s ok.
I have all the time in the world.

Previous episodes of this sordid tale here:

SF Chronicle buyouts announced
SF Chronicle buyouts announced – Part II: The Reckoning
SF Chronicle buyouts announced – Part III: The Long Descent
SF Chronicle buyouts announced – Part IV: The Death March