I want to poke another hole inthe flimsy Dufus machine

Dufus wants a missle defense system. The question that nobody in the media or alive on earth seems to want to ask is why? Why have it? If the answer is to protect against small nuke states like Iraq then the system is not needed since no nation, no matter how idiological or extreme, is goingto accept itself being completely wiped from existance. A missle would be the stupidest way to deliver a nuke to the US. A missle is traceable. We would know exactly where it came from and take the appropriate, if terrible, action of destroying the offending nation. In otherwords Iraq would have to be led by complete idiots and as much as we would like to think we live in a cardboard world we do not. It would be national suicide to launch a missle at the US. No nation is going to do that. So what is the other answer to that question? To prevent a full scale strike by a large nuke power? Well lets say that the, for lack of a better term, Nuclear Bush, that we deploy is 99% effective at catching all incoming missles. That's a pretty effective system. I can't imagine a globally based system of anything being 99% effective but lets pretend. For some reason, that I can't imagine, Russia fires a full scale strike on the US and Europe. Thats about 2000 missles. The Nuclear Bush catches 1980 missles! Holy cow that is effective! Bush is vindicated! The system works flawlessly! Only 1% of the nukes make it through! This means total destruction and pretty much the end of the world, as far as humans are concerned. That 1% can pack up to 200 H-bombs. Remeber the multi-cluster warhead? Thats 10 H-bombs per missles. The US will take 175 and Europe 25 direct hits from 100 megaton H-bombs. Does any rational person think that we, as a nation, could survive being hit with that much firepower? That 1 % Is more than enough to totally wipe out every major American and European city. And lets not forget the 7000 nukes that we fire at the ol Russians and the other dudes we don't like. Closing time for the human race. A missle defense is not needed to contain the threat form little powers and is useless against super powers. I don't think the Dufus is that dumb. I think he's doing this to provide much needed boondoggle projects for General Dynamics, Lockheed/Martin, and the other players in the offense industry. One thing the missle Bush will do effectively is make Russia and any other power with semi large arsenal think about making it larger. The best counter to a expensive US missle Bush is a lot of cheap missles with as many warheads on them as possible. I really can't stand this jerk of a President. Oh to have the leacherous scumbag back in the white House or hell bring back Nixon! I can't see how destablizing asia with his nonsensical China policy and putting in jepoardy 30 years of nuclear treaties is helping make the world safe for anything. Besides the easiest way to do nuclear damage to the US is to ship a bomb in on a boat and blow it up in a harbor. Or ship in the parts and assmble it in an Apartment building. Missles are expensive, for poor terrorists, and big and hard to hide. They are traceable. Stick fon on a boat or in a van, it's way cheaprer. Once it goes off it automatically erases all traces of where it came form. Who would do we retalliate against? "Oh come on own up! Who did that?" Defending against that is something we need to be working on. Not some floating fart gas missle-bush.

We are idiots

Human beings are pretty much organic tape machines. We hear something and then play it back over and over again. Unlike a tape or CD we tend to garble the play back so, after main iterations the message is almost unitelligable. Such as this:

Original message: John's Dog has flees

Repitition: This guy I knows dog has flees

Repitiion2: That guys freinds dog has flees on its nose.

Repitition3: You know that reminds me, Johns got some flee bights on his nose too.

Repitition4: Flees tend to hang out on the noses of dogs and people. They like it (poor content being embelished with made up information)

Repitition 999: Today Congress has enacted landmark legislation banning certain types of chemicals thought to bring flee born viruses to the nasal cavity.

I listen to people talking to each other at work and I can tell if they are getting their info form a tv show. Most people try to pass off this info as some deep college induced knowledge that they had to struggled to attain. They spout off about all sort of shit. Experts on the Cuban missle crisis and Jazz abound. Funning thing is that the experts usually change their area of expertise just about a week after the latest round of PBS or Hitler Channel documentaries. If I bring up some other topic that hasn't been on tv inthe past week people get that 1000 yard stare and search their tv memory banks for info they don't have. If your going to talk about something you've seen on tv then just say so. Instead of trying to co-opt Ken Burns.

Worst Actor of the Universe Awards

What do I mean by that? The universe is somewhere between 15 and 20 billion years old. That is kind of a long time. In that time period certain actors have arisen that should never have been allowed to be on the silver screen. I do not consider the masses of lesser known actors and bit players. Only those that, through some fantastic failure in cinematic judgment, were allowed to play leading or semi leading roles in films tht were widely distributed. And there are many of them that have strove to rise to the level of worst actor i nthe history of the universe. I am sure that there are countless billions of other lifeforms that too have nasty thespians who should be squashed under 16 ton weights, but I can only concern myself with those that belong to the Homosapiens of Earth.

So without further mumbo jumbo here he is for all to recoil from and vomit at:

Joe Don Baker has no business being affilated with Humanity. In truth Humanity and the planet Earth itself should distance themselves from this being. No selfrespecting planet, solor system, or for that matter galaxy, should be seen in the company of this puffy, bejoweld, no-talent back-woods, banjo piken, shit hearder. Who or what in the name of all that is holy decided to heave this stinking pile of actor onto the breast of comely humantiy. Thankfully others of my race have taken up the standard and they too fight to keep this 220 pound rack of fatback off the screen and in the spotlight of denegration and woe. MST3K has done much to redeme the Earth and Milkyway with their constant attempts to further denigrate this macabre assemblige of san-talented idiocy. Yet they are now gone to the rerun-yard. Please don't let this pox and blight on the good name of Earth go un faught against. Do whatever you can to let the universe know that you too think JDB should be eradicated.

Joe Don Baker Porkapalooza!

More Megalomaniac concepts

Fright: This is a funciton of how feared your troops are. If the enemy is in Fright of you they will drop their weapons and run screaming from the field. They will abandon castles, town centers, they will "run away!" Like lemings, if faced with the sea they will rather drown than end up at your mercy. Certain kingdoms may be unable to be in fright of you should they be in a babarian state. You can even stop a war between to kingdoms by simply sending in your forces.If both kingdoms are in fear of you they will stop attacking each other and go back to a nuetral stance.

I was also toying with the idea of marriage. Medieval times were the high tide of marriage diplomacy. I think that you could secure an allied stance with a kingdom if you offer marriage to the other sides princess or prince. Of course you would not want a stupid allience. You would want a marriage based on the largest dowery you could take hold of. You personal glory rating would impact what king would be willingto offer his daughter to you for such a purpose. This Queen would be an NPC stationed at your captial town or imperial city. If she died then the kingdom from whence she came would go back to the previous status. You can marry as often as you need. However you cannot kill your wife or divorce her. This also brings up the subject of heirs. If you produce an heir and that npc is 21 years of age or older upon your death then there is no civil war and that heir will inheirit all your personal status unlike a chosen succesor who will use it's own status upon your death.

Texas crap

This is a colossal waste of money, time, and manpower: I want to know how much it cost the illustrious state of Texas to get their 50$ fine?

Atwater was driving her two children home from soccer practice in 1997 in Lago Vista, Texas, when she was stopped by a police officer who had noticed the three were not wearing seat belts. Texas law allows police to make arrests for routine traffic violations, except for speeding. The officer arrested Atwater, handcuffed her hands behind her back and took her to the city police station. A friend looked after her children and her pickup truck was towed away. Atwater's mug shot was taken and she was released after posting bond. She later pleaded no contest to the seat belt offense and paid the maximum $50 fine.

I assume the trooper is making about 45 to 50 k a year so he's pulling in around 20 bucks an hour. You have the police personel who took the mug shots, Then you have the court personel to do the paper work. I think that it cost way more money than 50 dollars to harras this woman. Oh yes lets not forget the amount of money spent bucking this case all the way to the United States Supreme court!!!! Admittedly she should have had her kids seat belted in the car. but that is not the point. Not even close to the point. We have really screwed up priorities if this is an arresting offense. This country is screwed up. Our whole neighborhood couldn't oust a drug dealer from a house up the street yet we have the money to arrest soccer moms. You can drive 100 miles an hour and get a ticket and go on your way, but not where a seat belt and your in the slammer. What a load of
crap.

The dufus hard at work pleasing the chinese

After pretending to act tough we now know how the big dufus was able to get the flight crew out of China. He caved on the sale of destroyers to Taiwan. So any time China wants to tell us what to do all they have to do is take some hostages? Way to go Mr. President! If Clinton did this he'd be up on impeachment charges again. As much as I think Clinton was a scum bag, and I disagreed with his China Policy of trade and look the otherway, at least he never bent over for China. I am so very glad that we have a strong leader in the White House. I only pray that he is not the Nevil Chamberlain of our time.

Orders and stuff for Megalomaniac

Sea born commands:

The Admiralty: Kings Lord Admiral is an npc that is available as soon as you are king. Like generals an Admiral can control a fleet of ships of any size and can be given commands to carry out. They can also be chosen to succeed as emperor.

Admiral level commands: Take fleet X and attack Y until Y has recieved Z% damage. Take fleet X and blockade port or town Y for Z weeks or months.
Take fleet X and patrol sea sinking all enemy ships rebuilding ships as required etc.

You have all the AofE commands plus several others. You can garrison troops on any vessal. You can order warships to blockade a harbor. If a ship in a blockade is sunk another one is built by the admiralty and sent to fill it's place. Ramming is another order. Ramming is not an order that does the ramming ship any good but will 100% sink an enemy vessal if the rammed vessal is equal or lesser in size than the ramming ship. You can outfit any ship with a steel ram. This can give the ship the ability to ram two ships before itself sinks due to damage.

Nasty things that can happen to your kingdom:

Famine: Everyonce in a while the crops will fail and when they do all work stops. Nothing can be constructed and the population falls by 10%. Famine is an equal opportunity killer in this game.

Plague: Not good at all. It can start in any TC and spread to adjacent buildings and people. Trade carts canbring it to other towns and ports. Ships can take it to other kingdoms. It is technically possible to kill off the entire population including solders and even you. People stop working turn sickly green for a few days then keel over. Nothing can be done but burn the infected structures down, sink ships, raze castles, etc.

Draconian measures must be taken. Quarentining the infected to isolated areas unitl they die is a good thing. Burning down infect structures, greek fireing groups of the sick. As your empire improves global civilization the chance of plagure breaking out gets slimmer and slimmer.
bizzare yet cool orders you can give to the entire population;

Once you are emperor you can give Edicts. And Edict has an effect on all the population of the kingdom recieving the Edict. You can quickly tell a kingdom to go on crusade. When and entire kingdom is told to go on crusade it mobilze all of it's inhabitents to go and attack the kngdom that is labeled as infidel. Once orderedthe kingdom will put all it's resouirces into troop creation and offensive millitarty action and all the civilians become skirmishers. This is a powerful command but can have dire consequences if it fails.

Megalomaniac even more devilish stuff

Capital city: This can be any town you have under your control provided that it has a Market, Church, Castle, and Town Center. Usually the largest city under your control will be the likely candidate. This function is allowed as soon as you are made king. The capital city becomes the imperial capital when you are made emperor. The capital city gets some automatic defensive advantages to a normal town. It automatically gets a wall around and paved streets at no cost to you. When defending the capital your troops will get a bonus on damage. The bonus on damage does not apply to mercinary forces. Once you town is made a capital it's church becomes the ecclisiastical center of your kingdom and any the first priest there or created is the bishop.

Road: These greatly increase your ability to move troops and goods to other town and regions. Speed is dubbled on roads. There are three types of roads. The dirt pathc is what is first available to you. It increases movement by 10%. The leveled path increases movement by 25%. The stone road increases movement by 50%. In order to build roads and bridges you need a royal architect, yet another npc. These are created in church schools. You need to have at least one to make any roads and the more you have the faster you can build roads since you can dispatch them to different regions for construction.

Bridges: Spendy and time consumming but worth the effort. Note that both roads and bridges can be destroyed. Bridges come in two varieties. The simple trus-bridge and a drawbridge. Both take time to research. Both types can be upgraded to fortified bridges that give more hit points.
Drawbridges can be further upgraded to tower-bridges that have some offensive capabilities.

Encampments: This is really a type of stance you can order an army into. If you order your army to encamp then they will erect tents, picket there horses, and dig a trench around their paremeter. This heals them very fast and provides a defensive bonus if attacked. It takes time to encamp, similar to erecting a trebuchet. They cannot move unless given the order to break-camp.

El Presidente' SCHRUB!

The dufus is at it again! Just when you thought that the failed Texas athletic supporter couldn't get any worse he rises to the occasion! Today we learn that he has slashed the budget for traking Russian nuclear material! Thats right boys and girls, our beloved dufus has cut programs that help us track plutonium, uranium, and warhead stock piles in Russia. Even his republican appoligists are backing away from this stupid move. What an idiot. I don't know who's worse Bush or that Rice chick. Of course Rice's role as national security adviser is perfect for her since she has sooooo much experience comeing from that intellectual think-tank otherwise known as the Chevron Corporation. Bush should be impeached before he starts WWIII.

PS I am not going to capitalise dufus since he is not worthy of a proper noun.

More additions to Megalomaniac

Once you are king you can also bribe the church. In AofE churches and the clergy go around making troops well and converting the enemy to your cause. Fine and dandy but the real church had other attributes. Forinstance Henry VIII made himself the head ofthe church of England thus gaining for himself a cut of all that lucerative collection-plate doe and taxes paid by pesants to the chruch for using church owned land to live on. The first cleric you create in your captial city is the defacto bishop. Once he is bribed you are the head of the church and you can get 20% of all the doe collected. This doe is a function of how many people live in your kingdom. Another thing you can "research" in the church is Simony and Indulgences. Simony is the charging of fees for religoius services. Indulgences is a bribe a person makes to God so that they get a few years off of pergatory. Both Simony and Indulgences were frowned on by the historic church but accepted nonethless as means of making more doe. Simony and Indulgences at 5% each to the level of doe you can collect from the chruch. Be aware that if your personal glory rating falls to below 10 those you have bribed will cease being your buddy and you will lose the benifits.

Homage is another thing to help you make money and control other kings. If you conquer a kingdom its land is added to your kingdom and its king, if not killed, is made a vassel to you. As a vassel this petty king must make payments to you on a yearly basis. the payment is 1 gold peice per person and structure existing in that kingdom. If you order the king to make more farms and people the king will then have to come up with the payment. if the vassel cannot come up with the doe the computer will tell you this and you can decide to ignore it and let him pay what he can. Tell him to reduce the exess towns and population (kill them all) so that the payment eqates to what is actually existing in the kingdom in question. If you choose
the former then your glory rating increases ir you say 'fuck you pay me!" then your glory rating falls but your kingdoms renown rating goes up.

As a vassel the king must also come and send troops to fight for you if needed. A vassel's troops behave just like your own troops. Vassels may also ask you to help them if a unfreindly comes raiding them. If this happens you can: Ignore them, Tell them to fight it out with their own troops, help them by sending your own troops in. Ignoring their crys will not cause them to leave your service, but your glory rating will suffer. If too much is destroyed that will adversly impact the income from that kingdom. If you tell them to fight it out with their own troops they will do everything to kill the enemy including invading that other territory and destroy it. This is risky for a couple of reasons. One the vssel might noght have enough strength to do it. Two they might kill off a potentially lucerative kingdom before you have a chance to conquer it and make that king a vassel. Sending in your own troops allows you to control things. Your glory rating goes up if and the renown rating goes up if you win. With your own general there you can order the vassels troops to do your bidding.

General is a special unit, like an assasin or a bishop. If there are no generals then the army is under the direct command of the king. As your power grows you will find it tiresome, likethe boy with his finger in the dyke, moving from mini-crisis to mini-crisis. A general is handy in that you can order him to control a given group of troops. You go to a seperate map screen and order him, via way-points, to carry out numerous functions. Example: You create a general in a Barracks (big buck but worth it) You select the troops (unlimitted number) and place them under his command. Then you go to a strategic map screen that shows the world minus all the graphic bullshit. On this map you draw the route he will take to his objective. You order him to move under stopping to attack nothing along the way. Once at the objective, say attacking a castle, you tell him to "lay seige" then you tell him how long the operation will last. If he takes more than 50% casulties he must retreat to the start location. If he is there for more than three months he must retreat to the start location. Once this is done he takes charge and goes about his duty. the point is that you are free to do other things whille the general is doing your bidding. Generals can also become emperors.

Further details on Megalomaniac

The opening scenarios using the halflife engine pit you in an every-man-for-himself set of battles. Your regiment will not attack you nor will they come to your aid if you get in trouble. Most are outdoor battles but a few would require you to hack your way into a stronghold or burn down a town etc.

The REVOLT chapter of the game adds a high degree of complexity to the game. The preceeding chapter of State Building is basically a clone of AofE.

In the Revolting chapter I made mention of assasinations, mercinaries and bribary.
Assasins are special units that you can create in a town structure called a beer hall. The assasin costs big bucks but can move through enemy terriroy without getting killed unless he is found out buy an Intelligence officer. This unit is also a beer hall creation and is the unit designed to counter an assasin. The assasin unit is a single use npc in that he will die in his attempt even if he is successful. Assasins are armed with a crossbow but it is not a long range weapon and so the assasin needs to get close. It is also an autonomous unit in that is out of your control as soon as you turn him loose. You go to your list of kings and generals and select the dude who is to be assasinated. Once that is done the assasin travels on his own to the location of the hit target and will try as often as he can to kill the guy until he is killed or dies killing his mark. If
you wish to call him off you will haveto hunt him down with your own forces and kill him. If the assasin is able to kill his target your plot will not be discovered and the nation the mark once lead will not attack you. Should he fail there is a 50% chance that the mark's country will launch an attack against you. And your personal glory rating will fall too.

Mercinaries were always a popular way to bolster your army if you were a poor slob of a king. Macheavelli didn't think much of mercinaries and warned against employing them. In the game I use Macheavellian rules for mercinaries. You can hire them from freindly lords for a specified length of months. Once they are in your command they will attack anything you order them to attack. Yet if they are outnumbered they will break and run. If the are garrisoned near a town, even one of yours, and they are not under orders of some kind, they will begin to attack the locals and burn buildings. If there receive no orders for more than a month they will go wild and you'll have to kill them. Mercinaries are best used for bolstering a force for use in a pitched battle where you have the upper hand. They pay no attentioin to your personal glory rating. Once their term is up they automatically leave and return to their home land.
Bribes can be a most effective and less violent way to revolt. In the game, during this chapter and onward, you can bribe any npc in the world. You can bribe clerics, knights, kings, castles, beerhalls, anything as long as you have three things. Money, a high personal glory rating, and your army must have a high renown rating. In otherwords you not only need the money to buy but the nature to intimidate. Bribed troops are loyal, unlike mercinary forces, and will fight even in death defying battles. However they cost more to bribe than mercinary forces cost to hire. The cost to bribe is tied to the stats you have and the stats of the king under whom they are presently serving. Once bribed they will remain yours unto death unless your personal glory rating falls below 10. In that case even your own troops will abandon you. Bribing kings is tough unless you have a huge amount of cash and the power to back up the cash with the not-so-subtle threat of war.

The chapter of Monarchy, where you have to attain the throne of your kingdom, adds further complexity. You have all the tools at your disposal that
you gain during State Building and the Revolt, but you also have to start paying attention to your kingdoms overal world rating. There are fifty kingdoms on the planet and your kingdom fits somewhere in that order. If you want to be emperor you have to get you ranking to number one. Not every kingdom who is listed as numero uno is an empire. Not only does kingdom have to rate number one but it's army must have the highest renown and the monarch must have a high personal glory rating. Once you have acheived that then you are, without doubt, the emperor of the world. As you claim more territory and vanquish your foes your kingdom expands and it gains in rank and stature. You should do freqent comparrison rankings with your neighbor states. If you see that you are inthe acendency you can try to bribe a kingdome off or take it over. If your overall rating (GRWR) is twice that of a neighboring state they may wish to have you become their overlord. As overlord you gain all the advantages of the wealth and troops of the subjegated kingdom without having to conquer it. If you decide to conquer a state you must reduce it unitl its GRWR is low enough so that it seeks
refuge under your rule. Only a kingdom that is adjacent to your domain can be subjegated without conquest. As king you must also continue your role
as leader by establishing farms, towns, castles, etc. You can also send exploration ships out to check out the big wide world. As your exploratio parties find more kingdoms your ranking will change.

Once you have beceom emperor your characters day are numbered. Eventually it will die. In selecting a successor you go to the list of generals and kings and you can literally select anyone under your control. You will notice there each character has a personal glory rating, an army renown rating, and a kingdom ranking. You want to pick a person who has high ratings. The higher the rating the less chance for a civil war to break out upon your death. However you also are given the age of each character. Since the life span, throughout history increases, at each time you choose the age matter changes. In the beginning the average life span is 45 with a maximum age of 65. So one way to choose is to takethe youngest leader with the highest rating. That way your emprie won't change hands to often. If you choose king Ulfwaln the sextagenerian he may rule well but may die before he can choose a successor. The main thing is that you don't know when your character will die. The likely hood that your emperor will die in a given year increases as he or she gets older. Chooseing a new emperor is an ongoing problem you will face many times in this phase of the game.

The last number you must deal with isthe world civilization level. It is a summary of all the ratings of all the kingdoms of the world. The higher that number the longer people live the less lieklyhood of war or plague and the higher all your emperors rating become. As this number rises new technology and society emerges. The main thing to emerge is the Senate. Peace leads to people demanding freedom. However, as in real life, the npc population is still pretty busy just tryingto survive. The kings are the first to see the need to cooperate with each other to achieve goals. You will be asked if you will permit a senate being founded. if you say no, depending on your rating, there might be war.

Bills do not come to you that often. The bills that come and their nature depend on the overall level of cililization of the empire.

I'll let you know of any other rules that pertain to this cool game ofthe future.

Megalomaniac

Title: Megalomaniac
Style: Realtime / Turn based game of global domination and overlordship Number of Players: 1+ human and 1+ai

Setting: Real and or vitual worlds generated by editor or random generation.
Description: You select a nationality to belong to. You select your sex. The computer generates some specs for you and your character apears in the ranks of a regiment of skirmishers. The view of the coming battle field uses the Half-life engine. You can see your other cohorts. They all seem hell bent on marching off to attack an enemy you spy to your front some 100 yards away. The battle ensues and you must fight your way to survival. If your side wins then you advance to the a new rank in that army. If your side looses, but you live then you are enslaved and have to escape a camp. If you escape then you advance to the next rank in your army.

Next you are given the choice of infantry or cavelry. The cavelry gives you great speed and increases the damage you can inflict on the enemy, but reduces your manuverability and the types of weapons at your disposal. Once you choose you are put in the ranks of a like regiment of either infantry or cavelry. If you choose a Pike then you are part of a pikemen regiment etc. You fight another battle. If you live and are victorious you are advanced again. If you live but are captured then you must escape from the dungeon of a castle.

If you live you are put in command of the regiment inwhich you have been serving. Now you have control of how the regiment attacks. There are nine other npc's to order around. Now the game takes on the AoE engine accept closer up. You can equip your fighters with varioius weapons and armor depending on availability in the location and the type of regiment you command. Before the next engagement you can go to the lord general and get a map of the area and see where your regiment fits into the overall battle. The battle begins and you must acheive your regiments objective with at least yourself serviving. If your side looses you are put in the tower to and you must escape.

To live is to be rewarded! The lord general makes you a brigade commander. Now you have three regiments under your control. You can select the type of the two new regiments; infantry, cavelry, skirmishers, archers, seigers. The next battle is for you to fight alone. Your brigade is sent into a distant march to acheive a goal. Once the goals is achieved you are sent to your next assignment. Each one is slightly different requiring you to use different tactics and skills. As you achieve goal after goal your brigade recieves new equipment, skills, and renown. The renown level will become very important in the near future.

After ten or so campaigns, if you have lived, your brigade has become famous throughout the kingdom as a kick-ass oufit. You recieve word that the king is dead and that three sons of the dead king have split the kingdom and are waring with each other to claim the crown. You are given three letters, one from each prince, begging you to fight for their cause. You must choose which to fight for.

Once you choose you are put into the army of that prince. Each prince has a different demeaner and this changes for every game. Because you are the most notorious lord general in the land you are put in charge of the entire army of said prince. You must fight and defeat each of the other princes. You must also build units as they are lost, develope technology to serve them, and keep them supplied. Your view of the kingdom is broader now resembling the AofE engine.

The other princes are fighting not only you but also one another so you can use this to your advantage. Since you are the lord general now you have brigade commanders to deal with. You must order them to move their own mini-armies into position and fight. The more you are victorious the more they listen to you. The more you loose the less likely they will be to perform.

After you are victorious, of rather if you are, then the new king gives you a domain of your own to govern. You can take your old brigade with you. It is a remote location that you are expected to develop and defend. You must build some towns and fortifications and fight off the nasties that try to attack you. After your domain reaches the status of State, you can go and try to win over as many troops of the kingdom as you can and then try to dislodge the old king from his throne. IN short you can revolt! From a strategic standpoint the deck is stacked against you. The king has lots of troops and castles. However there are "other" options. You can use an assasin to rid the kingdom of it's monarch. If you have enough doe you can try to bribe the troops to your favor. If your really loaded you might try to bribe the king himself. The more succesful you are as an administrator of your domain the more easily you can grab power. You can even use allied lords from other kingdoms to help you in your quest for power; beware of using too many mercinaries they need doe to keep working for you and they don't like hanging around doing nothing.

If you revolt you better do some daring victorious fighting or the troops you have won over will defect back to the king. Should you loose your revolt you will be put back into your state. Your state will be plundered and you'll be poor and without troops. You'll have to rebuild all that to fend off the nasties that want to take your lands. You can always revolt again since there is no time line here.

If you should be successful in ousting the king, the crown is then thrust upon your head. You now are the king! but the king of what? A pimple of a kingdom on the world stage. The world map beckons and you see your kingdom as just a tool. A tool you can use to build an empire that will span the globe! You see those neighborning states who dislike you and those you have good trade relations with. How do you start? Do you build a mighty invasion force and attack? Or do you launch trade missions and build alliences through commerce? Unlike AofE the economic power of your domain has a direct impact on your ability to through your imperial weight around. In the Megalamaniac world there are dozens of other states, some small, some vast, all striving for the same thing. Your state always has a rating. The higher the rating the closer your kingdom comes to being seen as the seat of empire.

Should your kingdom flourish and gain wealth and military might you have other options given to you. You can order a neighboring kingdom to attack another kingdom and fight to the death. You can tell them what to build. Be wary of sending another naiton to it's doom. Your power also comes from victory. If your commands result in failures then you kingdom's rarting will fall and you might get ordered around yourself. Should this happen you can always say no. But then you will have to be prepaired to fight that king who did the ordering or suffer sanctions or blockades.

When your kingdom reaches the summit of power and it is seen as the seat of a world empire, and you are seen as the emperor, things do not stop. The world needs structured government in order to advance. You could systematically genocide your enemies out of existance but that would leave the world in a barborous state that would cease to be under your control. Your empire can only exist as long as the nations that make it up continue to exist. Yet empires are not nation-states. They are an ensamble of states each with competing voices and goals. Your task as emperor is to maintain the glory of your domain and keep the states in line. A never ending task?

Well sort of...You see, although the game has no time limit your character does have a lifespan. And when he or she is old, and scared up, they will eventually die. Another task you have is the choosing of a successor. If you do not do this intime your empire will be ripped asunder by civil war and one of the petty kings will be thrown up as the new emperor, the seat of government will move to that region and you will be faced with dealing with things from that standpoint. The wise thing to do is go to the list of kings and generals and choose the one who you like the best and move them to the imperial seat before you die. The civil unrest will still happen, but war might be avoided.

As your empire continues forrests are harvested and regrown, as long as you don't cut down too many trees. Fisheries will also recover should you not over fish them. And the population can get huge as long as you maintain a balance of people to resources.

Somethings to worry about: If you choose to lead the armies of the empire yourself your army will get a big bonus in strength and damage infliction. However if you are killed then the empire will devolve into civil war and the next strongest lord will be the new emperor. Once you are emperor you can, at any time,. choose your successor. This is something that should be done prior to your death but not to much in advance. If you choose to far in advance the person may be killed in a battle and you can only choose once. This means instant civil war upon your death. The other problem with choosing a successor to early is that the guy instantly gets a big head and if you faulter in your managing the empire he of she might decide to attack you and take the royal purple for themselves, ergo civil war. Try not to choose a successor until your old and gray. Once chosen you choice is made and cannot be undone.

As the empire keeps the level of civilization steady things progress and new technology and society will develop. After a long period of time your kings decide to tell you that they want to meet in a capital of some kind to better govern the empire. This is the begining of a senate. YOu can choose the location of the captial. The senate will start sending bills to you for approval. These bills establish law, army barracks locations, new weapons, advisements on wars that shouldbe fought etc. You can always say no to them and some of them you should say no to. But if you thwart their will too often you may face civil war. As the senate continues to develope the emperor will have to spend more time dealing with them. You can always kill them all but you better have a huge personally glory rating. Each emporor has one and it increases with good decision making etc. However even if you kill the senate it will simply reconvine with a new bunch.

After another long time interval the kings begin to relinquish power to a new class of leaders who, up unitl now have been weak little snot balls. The class is town mayors. Each town has had a mayor since its inception with a town center. Spontaneously the empire has an election and the senate gets bigger as these mayors are elected. The kings still command your armies but are now nolonger involved with infrastructure. The civil senate gives you bills far less concerned with military matters and more concerned with benifits for society establishing university systems, graineries, hospitals, civil police forces, and most ominously, restraint on the powers of the nobility. Right now you can order a king to take his army and attack another king and nobody, as long as you have a high glory rating and you kingdom has a high power rating, will thwart you will. If you aquiess to this bill to regulate the king's power they will tell you no more often and when they do say yeas it will only be after a vote by their populations. This makes for even more intrigue. You can send in your own army and terrorize the poppulation into follwing you. But terror is a double edged sword. If you do this too often you will be on the road to civil war.

Another landmark bill to come to you is the civilization of the army. This puts building of arms and armies under the control of the senate and as emperor you must get senatorial approval for war. This may stick in your craw and hence will not be a bill signed soon by a typical megalomaniac. Should you aquiess to the senate your personal power in the senate will fall, ergo they will be able to now overide your vetoes. Yet civilization rating of the world increases so that your empire gains more stuff and culture. If yo usay yes to this in order for war you must get a majority vote in the senate then get your commanders to get their kingdom's assent to your request. You can avoid the second vote by leading the troops yourself but watchout for the unlucky arrow in the head. Your old brigade, long considered the preatorian gard, can still be lead by you without any such voting though in this empirial world a single brigade is mighty small. The significance of this bill cannot be overstated. The relinguishing of power by the emperor to the senate means the begging of the end of your dynasty as a real force. It will benifit the world but not you.

The last bill you will see is a bill ending the title of emperor. This bill is triggered, as are all the bills, by the level of civilizationi of the world. At this point there is no need for a dictator any more. By this time you, as emperor, are advising the senate on what to do not the other way around. You are given three choices. You can say no and try to hold on a little longer, you can auger in and give up the throne entirely, or you can ask for a general election on the viability of your throne. If you are a glorius emperor you may pull off the coup of coups and become a constitutional monarch. You will have the palace, the gold, and the respect, but none of the stress of governemnt. At this point the music swells and the game is at an end. If you choose total abdication you are lionized as the father of the new world and eventually will be the focus of a new religion. If you choose the first course you will be asked again, in a year, if you still hold on there will be war. This war will pit you against your enemies and most likely will lower the civilization rating to the point where there is no senate. However your death will be the main goal of the war and if you die and your empire has a low civilization rating a civil war will ensue.

This game is not a single night game. It could take weeks if not months. The game time is quite slow compared to AofE. But the rewards are huge. As the game progresses you go from a petty skirmisher to the hights of empire and then death. Then you will be personified by numerous emperors, each with names and character, you will face struggles in war and at peace. You will plot and face plots. In the end you will face your own
dynasties oblivion and how you deal with that final struggle will tell the ages that will come what kind of an empire it really was.

Who makes the game?

Nobody does. It needs to be made. For now it resides in the software of my own brain.

The big Dufus Caves again

Our dimwitted, fart smelling, Dufus of a president has now caved to the meat industry and relaxed testing of school lunch meat for samonella poisoning. According to the Big Dufus, and those pitchforked imps who advise him, our kids can drink more arsenic and consume more bacteria and breath more pollutants. But hey the corporations that bought our Dufus of a president will get a break. I hope all those idiots out there who were moronic enough to waste their vote on Nader realise how much he fucked things up. Was it really necassary to allow our nation to ingest more poison just so the green party could prove a point? As lacklustre Gore would have been, all this shit that has gone down in the last few weeks would not have happened. I hope all the Naderites enjoy their arsenic. What the greens need to do is infiltrate both the democratic and republican parties. Not waste their time and votes in lofty circle-jerks that accomplish nothing. A divided opposition to corporate power is the surest way for them to walk over us all. We need leadership that moves us in the right direction. This takes time. The greens seem to think that revolutionary change will happen if only their side would be listened to. Clap-trap! In a country of 280 million people and opinions it takes a long time to move the naiton in any direction. Millions agree with Bush?! Does this make for watered down laws and national direction changes? Yes but even though these bits of legislation are watered down and murky they were at leasst moving in the right direction. Now, with leadership who should where NASCAR like jackets with all the corporate sponsor logos, we are seening 12, and in some cases 20, years of right-direction legislation dulled down even further and stopped or reversed. Opposition to this power cannot be divided again no matter how illustrious the candidate for the green party happens to be. I hope these people see that there was a clear difference between Gore and Bush. I'll toast Nader with the arsenic.

Rant now finished.

Notes from afar: Interesting thing about living in the sticks

At night it is fucking dark. I mean holy crap it gets black out there. On a cloudy day where there is no moon the metro area is nothing but a really faint gray haze to the west but around our house night is seriously good in its attempt at earasing reality from view. I guess thats why so many farms have those damned anoying vapor lamps. Yet even when you stand in the light the surrounding area is as dark as the inside of "W"'s empty head. One hartening sound you hear is the din of hundreds of frogs all hoping to get layed. What I can't figure out is how all ofthem start and stop at the same damn time. MY two dogs find the area a bit of a mystery. "Where is our turd filled backyard?" they yelp.

So far so good.

Bush is so @#$ Stupid and so are the Excite freaks

To those of you who might agree with the freaks in the Excite forum I do not apologize for the following rant:

I use Excite as my news service and the place I go to to answer stupid polls. I have to say that I am almost diametrically opposed to almost every poll result on Excite. The latest poll is "Do you favor the air strikes to uphold the no fly zone in Iraq." You are given the 'yes' 'no' or 'not sure'. I answer no because I think that the airstrikes are bogus and nothing but saber rattling from Bush II "son of Bush". Going to the forum to discuss this stupid poll I find that all the turds in it are tape recorders playing back the one-liners and non-policy-positions of Bush and his lame assed staff or the non-policy of the jerk that was in the office before him.

How can America choke down the nonsense that Iraq, or for that matter at little saudi terrorist Binlawden, are real threats to us. If anything they are nats, anoying but hardly worth the trouble to swat at them. Meanwhile we have real trouble brewing when Russia fires off a missle that could contain a multi-cluster warhead. Of course we don't have a response to that now do we. We can't send a carrier task force to rattle our sabre at
Russia. Here we have a nation whos military hasn't been paid in years. A nation that is racked with nazi-like nationalism and xenophobia. Compared
to Russia, Iraq is a sublime and steady rock of predictability. So what do we, the Super-power, do? We opt to forget about the anti-balistic missle
treaty and toy with the idea of igniting an arms race with the very county who's population blames us for it's troubles. Back in the soviet days the Russian people harbored no hatred for us. They hated their government but not us we were the good guys. Now, after having their economy ruined via disasterous foreign intervention, and a load of anti-american propaganda fed to them by the old authoritarian socialists, who are now saying "we told you so." they don't like us much and won't take to listening to America when it tells them what to do.

It was a nice thaw while it lasted, at least for us.

As for the dunderheads who are devout believers in the golfwar credo of "make my day" foreign policy, they are going to be in for a very rude
awakening when the power they rattle their sabre at just stairs at them and rattles back. In my opinion the cold war is an unwinable and unstoppable
war. We thought the enemy was soviet Russia but the real enemy is oblivion. It might come out of Russia or China or out of the US itself. We will forever be struggling to keep ourselves from falling off the edge of sanity and ending the world. I hope the struggle lasts forever, because if it ever ends we will have fallen off that edge.

Continuing onto another topic: Schools

"Do you favor school vouchers to allow kids to go to private schools?" No fucking way. Vouchers are little piddly-diddly amounts of money that will not send an east LA latino to private school. Vouchers will only help rich people. Do they really expect me to believe that a $500 dollar voucher is going to help me send by kid to St Mary's? Hardly. That might pay for one weekend school retreat but that's about it. Bush is a skankhead for pushing the lie on people. Give my district a voucher of 100% funding and I'll support it. Bush is for schools what Tonya Harding is for good-sportsmanship. Keep your goddam tire iron off our school's kness you texas small-peckerd bastard.

The dunderheads online want good schools but think that they shouldn't pay any property taxes to support them. They want to go to the store and get all their food free, and they get cranky if they lose a board game, and their development has been arrested at the age of fifteen and has been scentenced to life, and they are pissed because they have to pay $1.55 for unleaded while the world pays $4.00, and they eat 25% of the worlds resources, and they want to live forever, and they all want to be the emperor, and they all want to have the deathstar,and they all are puzzled why the rest of the world is sick of them.

fini

Age of Empires

[4]

Game scale (1-5) 1 being totally sucky and 5 being Il Magnifico

I load game and skillfully leave the documentation in the box since I know how to rule the world and don't need any rule book to tell me how to do it better. I quickly grasp the concept of fornicate more pesants to do all the grunt work. I make all the mistakes a would-be ruler makes. However I learn form them. Soon the turd slurper CG-enemy comes-a-knockin on my town's door. A cute little regiment of briton infantry from the evil Aethelfrith. I spent about a nano-second trying to be freinds with this scumbag only to have him rebuke me. Since my town is amply protected by multiple gard towers most of the enemy is dead before they get to my town center. The morons that do find their way there are horrified to see a castle defended by a dozen or so longbowmen. I guess the CG Aethelfrith considers them the lost regiment since none of them return alive.

Meanwhile, not very far away, I have my army corps of engineers. This is an army of nine peasents surounded by heavy cavelry, crossbowmen, and pikemen. This corp specializes in shock construction. Since I am trading with two other CG idots, one of whom is stupid enough to be freinds with me, I am roling in gold. I cant spend the stuff fast enough. Stone is trading at the 4 to 5 gp's per stone and I don't really care. I buy it by the 100 stone. My engineers mercilessly begin to encircle CG Aethelfrith's town with a dozen towers and a castle or two. He freaks and launches ilconsidered attacks against all the fortifications but it is no use. He's doomed. I send in me occupation force in and slaughter all the peasents and monks, blast down the churches and the pathetic CG Aethelfrith gives up. The Black Prince sends in some monks to pick up relics that are now up for grabs.

The Black Prince is my bro. He's been my freind and we have made a happy alliance for a long time now. So what do I do? Change my status with him to enemy and kill his monks and take the relics for myself. Then I go back to being freinds with him. His kingdom is richer than mine but it is harmelss so I don't worry about him. After thrashing one CG enemy I take my ACE south into more enemy territory. I build a couple castles on two opposed escarpments and then wall off the region. The little green pukes down there are like locusts chopping down trees. I decide to make them the new enemy of the moment and send an army in to hurt them.
There is a big battle around their town cetner, wich is destroyed, but I have to withdraw to the saftey of my to forward castles. By the time my army has regrouped I have created more troops to repalce the dead. I then run into the population limit. I need a bigger army so I go to my own town and kill peasants. I then build seige engines and send them south to serve as artillary support for my invasion army.

Meanwhile the green fuckers are attacking me and I loose a castle. So what! I build another one. I discover, to my fiscal horror, that two of my trade carts are missing. That little green fucker killed'm. I build three more after killing another lumberjack peasent, and send them to the green turd to trade. My town is practically a ghost town. About half the peasents are with my invasion army as engineers.

The artillary has arrived at my marcher castles and I imediately launch my strengthened army in two divisions at the green gothic enemy. I order all units to stand ground. I find this to be the best offensive order of all. It forces the dickwad computer into attacking you and, like the civil war battles of old, the battle hardware favors the defender. Each division splits into two wings and creartes a kill zone about the size of the enem town. My two huge divisions keep good order. Gothic attackers are killed by the knights and swordsmen while the longbowmen sweep the town of villagers. The artillary blasts down another town center and then a barraks and a stable. The computer, being the stupid bastard that it is, cannot get it into its head that might makes right. All it would have to do is mass it's own forces and drive north around my army and it would force me to abandon the attack so I could save my own city. Or it could, as general James Longstreet used to say, hit me "on the end" and break my fomration apart.

What does the might dual PIII 750 do? It sends irregulars to slap at me as if to say, "icky human go away and stop hurting me." I am grossly disappointed in the lack luster tactics of this green foe. I break off the attack and retreat to give the PIII time to regroup and come at me. I want a more interesting battle. Nope. I finally give up and move my army back in.

When I deam the moment right I order all the knights and infantry to be as agressive as possible and they sweep though the area killing things. I
order the artillary to cease fire so as not to hammer my own troops into the dirt. I box them up in longbowmen and move one division back to the
marcher castles. Then I move the other east, and in a moment or two the green dude gives up.

Now it is noly the dufus Black Prince. My bro, compadre, commrade in arms (thats a joke I asked for his help once and he didn't do squat.) So what do I do with him? I send in the ACE with seige engines and blast open a big space in the center of his domain. I build a big fortress with two castles and I garrison half my invasion army inside it. I Shut the gate and leave it alone. I turn the diplomatic status to enemy for a moment or two and let the garrison and casltes, spew arrows all over the place killing the princes peaseants and soldiers. Then I go back to being freinds with him. He starts to build more soldiers and every once in a while I go in and teach him who's emperor.

So do I like this game? Hell yes I like it. However I would change it to make it better in a couple very important ways.

1. To make this game live up to its name I would allow for a CG enemy state to be terrorized into surrender but still have it's own troops. If your own domain loses to many troops then this enemy ceases being under your thumb and revolts.
2. As your territory increases you should automatically be given the opportunity to appoint NPC governors to regions. These governors would do your bidding. You give them an order such as: Defend region from any incursion. They then use the regions resources to do jsut that. Or you could say: Attack neighboring region. The governor will do it. However if the empire becomes too weak they me split off and become enemy states that you have to reconquer.

Familyman

This film should have been the crowning turd in the waterpipe but it was not. I liked it. It was an idea that has been done to death but was done so well that I just came out feeling good. When he woke up in the messy bed and the kids were screeming and running through the house that was great. That was real. I thought "man would I want to stay in that world?" Then I remembered that I do live in that world. The guy chose it over the millionaire lifestyle. I guess I like the movie because of just that action.

Big Kahuna

[6]

You know this film had great acting and terrific dialogue but salesguys jsut don't get all cerebral when they are out in the field. Sorry that is bullshit. They don't postulate on the existance of God or their own lives meaning. All they do is sleep, sell stuff, eat food, go to bars, shit and go bakc to sleep. Taking this film on face value you'd think that sales guys are fucking monks in polyester, their eye's trained heavenword. Not so. This film was a pet project by one of my favorite actors Mr Spacey. Remember I think Spacey should be a Jedi. He'd kick ass.

Castaway

You know this film is so sucky that I wish I could cast it away. What a waste of film, story, actor, etc... It didn't show me anything I have seen before. My idea for a castaway story is that the guy ends up on the island and all he has is one fedex package. he opens it and finds college text books for a physics professor. After burning a couple he decides that he might as well read them since he might go nuts. So after 4 years he has read and re read them. They range from Max Born's book on Einstien's Theory of Relativity and textbooks on quantem mechanics to cosmology. In the package there is a treatise, written by a cambridge mathamatician. It is an attempt at a Grand Unified Theory, a theory linking quantem mechanics with general relativity; a theory of everything. It is unfinished. After four years of solitude the castaway is now, not only an expert spear fisherman but a phycisist. Without the external nonsense of the modern world his brain has adapted into a hunter gatherer / physicist of the highesrt order. Then he stubs his toe on a rock. This seeming trivial injury is fatal in his current surroundings. He knows it. So he does what he can to write down on his cave wall the equations necassary to describe the workings of the cosmos. As he finishes the camera tracks back out accross the ocean and out into space and you are left with the irony that the secret to the future of the universe is housed in a cave on a southpacific island.

Gone in 60 Seconds

[2]

Dull dull dull or god it was dull. I kepts waiting for the KR500 and you had to wait all the way to the end and then they CGI'd it over a bridge. Sucks.

The Perfect Storm

[3]

As soon as I finished the book I knew this was going to be a film and I knew it would suck. The Book is written in a very journalistic way and reads more like a magazine article than a novel. It is a great book. Junger goes into ocean mechanics, history, and fishery detail that is totally lost in the movie. For instance his anecdotal info is riveting as well. Take the time a rogue wave blasted out the bridge windows of the Queen Mary, that's 90 feet above the water line, and she came within a degree or two of capsizing. Or the time, in the 1850's when a fishing boat came across a note in a bottle with the last words of a crew that hadn't been heard from in a year. One of the more interesting twists in the book is Junger's description of how the people left behind have to willfully extract the men from their lives. It is just a mater of faith that the men are dead since no boat, or bodies were ever recovered. The film also plays fast and loose with the facts. First of all there was no distress signal sent from the Andrea Gail. The rescue helicopter that picked up the crew from the yacht was not enroute to the AG but to a japanese fisherman when it went down.

But despite all that the film just wasn't interesting. The characters were dehumanized. The filmmaker had a clean slate for dialogue since none of the men survived. Yet all he could do was bullshit lines that weren't memorable at all. There could have been much made of the fact that, aside from Tyne, all the other men didn't much like fishing. It was a dead end job that they wanted to get clear of as soon as they could. Bob Brown's character was accurate but his animosity toward Tyne is not. Most sword boats are only in port for afew days at a time anyway.

Vice Presidents

Ford: pardon's Nixon and loses to Carter.

Bush: wins war against a dumpy little nobody and loses to Clinton.

Gore: Comes off as smart during VP-hood but reverts to Og the Cave man in Florida.

Andrew Johnson: Follows assasinated Lincoln and is Impeached.

Lyndon Johnson: Follows assasinated Kennedy and wins big against Goldwater, but blows great society with Vietnam.

Truman: Okay he's a nice guy and a straight shooter but his lack of attention to the details of the founding of Isreal has lead to fifty years of the crap that is going on over there. And bombing Nagasaki!? Not to mention the 50,000 troops killed in Korea.

Probably the best VP to take the helm from a President was Theodore Roosevelt. But even he gave us a legacy of overseas intervention that is dubious at best. He almost got that thrid term as an independant. What is it with them Roosevelts?

Usually VP's make lousy Presidents or, at the very least, one-termers. Early on it was the secretary of state that was slated to follow his boss. But look at ol' John Adams. What did his federalists contribute? He gave us the Alien Sedition Act making it a federal crime to criticize the government. Thankfully that dead waterbuffalo was repealed.

Even when they come back form the dead they usually cause problems. Look at Nixon, the zombie of American politics. For a while it looked as though not even a silver bullet could rid the nation of that dude.

I don't think we should allow members of the current Executive Branch the ability to run for office for at least eight years after their term ends. Frank Roosevelt hadn't been in an administration since he was secretary of the Navy under Wilson.

Washington...well...there was no administration for him to follow.
Lincoln was not a part of any administration.
Jefferson: Okay so this guy was minister plenipotentiary to France but he was Jefferson. And he didn't have an easy time either.
Andrew Jackson was just a war hero.
Ike: Just another war hero.
Grant: war hero
TR: yeah he was a VP but he was also a war hero

X-Men

As far as I can tell this movie is totally historically accurate. Interesting effects, though I feel sorry for the poor bastards in any effects lab. No effect is cool anymore. They're so predictable that your brain just says "oh thats an effect...now what" This movie is okay. I guess I give it a 6. One of the better comic book movies.

Gladiator

[6]

Okay so this is a remake...sort of:
1964 "Fall of the Roman Empire" gets an 8

This movie starts out with the final vitory of Marcus Aurelius over the germans and the untimely death of Marcus Aurelius. The hero of this film is the general Livius. Livius vows to carry out Aurelius' wishes to reform the empire. Commodus shows up and fucks things up and the two end up in a duel in Rome, surrounded by praetorian gard. Commodus dies as does Livius. In 1964 things are more pragmatic for after the duel a new emperor is proclaimed and the so goes rome. The art direction for the 1964 flick is awsome and is probably better than Gladiator.

Truth: Commodus was chosen by his father to succeed. Commodus was as much a fighter as his father and had taken part in numerous battles. He was not the eldest of Marcus' sons but he was the only one left alive at the time of his father's death. At nineteen he was not very experienced at statecraft. He fell victem to his position and, like a later Nero, let the power go to his head. He did fight many gladiators and killed all of them. He was a powerful warrior but rather simple minded. He was murdered but not by a gladiator . He was drowned in his bath tub by a hired assasin. Despite his murder he was a very popular emperor. The commoners loved him. The Senators hated him. His reign signified the end of the golden age of the Roman Empire. The five good emperors that preceeded him spanned 84 years. I think there was around a 25 or 30 in the next 100 years. I would fault Marcus Aurelius for this. He, alone of the five good Emperors, chose his son to succeed him.

The movie: Rome never looked so good. Nice costumes, cool fight scenes, good acting, awe the glory of Rome! I just wish the story was more interesting. Once I new it was a remake I new the end. A few months back I read the Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus and there is so much material in that book that would make a great movie....oh yeah...I forgot....They made I Claudius. But still there is a lot that could be done with that bombastic, hauty, splendid Empire.

President Who?

I don't want to tell you who to vote for but just let me say that if you want:

Drilling in the arctic.
No increase in the minimum wage.
No tax cut.
Increased regulation against organized labor.
No progress on national healthcare.
No progress on inner city poverty.
No attention payed to developing alternative fuels.
Money taken away from public education and given to the rich to offset their private ed costs.
No reform of campaign finance laws.
No vision of national community IN short no leadership.

Then, by all means, vote for Ralph Nader.

I am voting for Gore. Why? Well the answer is clear. Subterfuge. I do not like Gore much, although he is superman compared to the dickwad Bush. Witchever candidate wins the man is going to be a very weak president. He will have to deal with a deadlocked congress and will have no mandate to do jack shit. However if Gore wins then in 2004 I can confidently predict that John McCain will be the parties nominee of choice. If Bush wins then, no matter how badly he sucks, and he will suck, he will be the nominee in 2004. Who will apose him? ON the democratic side I see no fire or intelligence. Monkeys would be flying out me ass if Nader some how became a viable force. No it would be a D vs Bush race and it would produce nothing, just another lost opportunity. So I am wanting Gore to win so I can have the pleasure of ousting him in 2004.

Vote Gore for McCain in 2004 !

Magnolia

[6]

Really long and well acted. Did I mention this film is long? Another dark little movie. It's long too. I don't know how to take the ending. It has one of the most truely surprising and bizzare endings of any film I have ever seen is it a good ending? I am not sure about that. This film is really long.

Orphans

I don't know what I detest more, films that truely suck or films that are merely lame? The former gives me more ammo to hurl at it, but getting that ammo mean actually watching it. The latter gives me little ammo but is damn boring that it might be a worse experience that watching a really bad film. Well whqat have I got to tell you this week about the cinematic epics I did watch?

Orphans: A Scotish movie so scotish it needed subtitles.
(1-10) gets a 8. The scotish dudes just know how to make good dark-humor.

Survivor

I was hoping for squadron Air Cav gun ships to fly over the beach and pepper the last bunch of incipient freaks to death with settling rounds. "Survive this you backstabbing scum bags!" the gunner would scream over the rotor wash. CBS Videobroadcast van explodes as two missiles hit it. Kafooom! Survivor cast runs for cover in rat infested forest only to be nap'd into foamming, firey goo balls. Choppers land and the air cavelry commander gets out. "I love the smell of Survivor in the morning. It smells like......the end of the series."

Autumn in New York

The winner of the "Absolutely No Chemistry between leads" Award goes to this little dreadful work. Grew plays himself. Can he play anyone else? Ryder plays role of young dying person who knows everything about life.

Story: Guy who is a homemaker falls in love with dying lady. He cheats on her. She tells him to be a nice person. He says ok. She dies. The end.
Rating: 4 for the cinematic.

This was not a love story since there was no story and no love. Just a bunch of crap that was boring to watch and unrealistic when the dialogue did happen. Yuck I want my money back! I did come across a thought that gave me the shivers. Since seeing the 9th gate and Eye of the Beholder, I think my movie mind has been bucked up so that a really bad movie like this one might not get the lowest rating it should get. The afore mentioned movies were horrible. If my mind compares autumn in New York to those dopplegangers from hell then the rating might not be accurate. Oh who really cares.

Politically corrected into oblivion

Ah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"You should never joke about that kind of thing..." The big fat slob said with extreme, selfrighteous, nose stuck up in the air, she-is-better-than-us, attitude. Donna and I had been talking about fleas and how we do not like them. We then made a crack about either killing the fleas or the dog upon wich the fleas live. Ha Ha Ha. Then the lady flipped her crap at us about how we should not "joke about thaty kind of thing" In Donna's office, about ten feet from the lady in question, Donna said, "I guess she doesn't like our humor." I then said, being the levelheaded watercalmer that I am, in a louder than normal voice "Big deal. If she doesn't appreciate our humor thats her problem. It's not as if I was seriously thinking about blowing the dogs head off or anything. Or stomping in it unitl it was flat! I love dogs! I love to eat'm! On a slice a'corn bread wisom ol #7 and slab a fatback on the side. MMM MMM good!" People who bristle with anger over a couple jokingly discussing flea infestation suck. How much angst can they generate over the billions of fleas that will die as a result of chemical armegaedan? Do they use mouth wash? Fucking a they do. How abou the trillions of bacteria they kill off and then spit out into the sink. Do they mow grass? I am sure they all have fucking gardens full of flowers and you can bet your sweet ass they're out there pulling weeds on the weekend. You know I don't like off color jokes anymore than the next dufus but come on! Can't people mind their own business? Do they have to feel it necessary to stick their hypocritical noses up the ass of life whenever anyone around them spouts off about fleas and dogs? Is this what the greastest experiment in human history has got us? The right to be a pest? To be, in a literal sense, a little anoying bug that bites you and makes you scratch? I will now make another off color remark. Perhaps we don't need bug bombs so much as.....oh hell somebodies probably reviewing the emails today anyway.

Law Suit!

Bail Jumper was and still is under contract with Rotten Banana Films. His appearance in Covert Operatives is a direct violation of his contract and we intend to file suit against him or squash him with a hammer. Even though he was a bit player and was killed in the first few seconds of the film he still should have asked if it was okay.

As for the film Covert Operatives. Animation wise it is not up to RAP standards but what is? Story wise it is a bit plebian too. Art direction wise it sucks. Sound wise it really sucks. Comparing Star Adventures to this film would be wrong but I am going to do it anyway. Our story has much better characters, a deeper script. Better art direction and sound. This film does have technically more blood but there was no scene in it more macabre than the elevator scene. This film looked like it took about a month to shoot.

Finally: If wuch a film is viewable on iFilm.com should not the REAL thing be available as well? It would run 39 minutes but so what. Thoughts?

Milk - It does a body... good?

The stench of milk drying in 85 degree heat can only be matched and surpassed by the following true story:

Two weeks ago Donna and I worked for two days cleaning up the the basement. We hauled out old nonsense we did not need. We vacumed where we had not vacumed in months. We shipped old books off to the Goodwill. And in the end Jessica could have a sleep over in the basement with all her friends. Cool!

To make it easier for us to clean we propped the door to the garage open so we could easily enter and exit from the basement. We used a small board for this purpose. Just a unassuming peice of 1/2 inch pine board. Near the end of the last day of cleaning the door closed. Oops! I went to prop it open again. Board? Couldn't find it. Where had it gone? Who knew. Maybe Donna was using something else. Okay a shoe will do just fine. Party went great.

Weeks passed, (Weeks). Then, four days ago I decided to boil up some ravioli's. I go down into the garage to our freezer to get the suckers out. I open the door and picked up a package of ravioli's. Brain first uses sense of touch to determine that A: package is warm and B since it is warm it cannot be frozen. Sense of smell is then hit by the equivelent of a tsunami. The olfactory center of the brain is wrecked, neurons scrambling for cover as the cascade of stench has to be processed. Nerve impluses are quickly sent to the left arm to slam the door shut as a last desperate attempt to stave off the oncoming horror. Higher neural functions then process the data.

Food not frozen, stink comming from freezer really nasty. All this means a catastrophic event has occured. I check the back of the freezer to see if it is plugged in. Oh...there is the board that went missing. When the door closed, a whopping two weeks earlier, it had propelled the board behind the freezer and uplugged the unit.

After several minutes of extremely nasty cursing, I take a safty breath and open the door. It is like the physical incarnation of an HP lovecraft novel. The call of Cthulu wafts out from that dank coffin of decayed meat. We had about seventy pounds of beef, lamb, and other meats in there. They have all thawed out and created a black lake of moldering blood in the drip pan at the bottom of the freezer. It only take a few seconds for me to mentally right off the entire contents.

We decide to plug the unit back in and refreeze the abominable contents so that when I clean it out the disguto-meter will not be destroyed. The inquest into what happened, and what should be done to make sure that so tragic and accident does not occur and again, determined that the gap between the freezer and wall should be covered. I used the same board for this purpose. The inquest also determined that the plugs should be screwed into the wall so that they cannot easily be unplugged. Gory disguting meat is now languishing in the dump.

The End.

Good Bye Alec Guniess

Oh crap now Alec Guiness is dead. I wonder if he'll be walking around in a blue arua?

2 for None

Okay, I am fucking pissed (Fist slams into wall with blood and plaster) Some ass-munch needs their gray matter exposed to the light of day. Who makes people like the dick wads that made the last two movies have had the grotesque misfortune to have to sit through. No sit through is not the proper term. Remember in A Clockwork Orange when malign McDowell is strapped into a movie seat, his eyes forced open with metal wires. That is how I felt. I was vomitsously sick. I needed a colon's after this mambo-fucking-jumbo nonsensical crap fest. I mighty has well have had my mouth stacked to the ass end of a Mr. Ed all night long. This was horrible, not in the 'oh that was a bad movie' way, but in the "give me the shotgun now!" sort of way.

There is no way I am rating either of these two non-films. They suck so bad that there is no number, or fraction there of, existent in the universes that could rate these bucked up drums of shit.

9th Gate - Johnny deaf

Book slug, who goes after rare books is hired by a total Fuji head to determine if his devil book is the real deal. Okay so far. So what happens? NOTHING! Nothing happens. The story is totally intelligible and useless. There was no bucking script for this hunk of dung. I hate this movie and want to excoriate it's memory from my brain.

Eye of the Beholder - Ewon McGregor

You know what you behold? NOTHING! I beheld the movie trailers before the movie and that was it. This movie stunk even worse than the 9th Grunt. I wanted to gouge the eye of the beholder out of my head. To behold this trash is to behold fly larva living in shit, to behold a pussy wart , to behold the total vacuum outside the universe. It is the total perspective votes in reverse. This was a bad film. I hope that none of you had the near total misfotune of having to sit through either of these abominations, these mental route canals.

Short of drinking a gallon of saline I don't know how I can purge myself from the effects of these squalid events. I feel impure, filthy, mired in some kind of artistic hell, I was shown the seventh seal of Morton picture Amageadan. Yuck!

I kept waiting for the steady hand of teanibopper action-flickism to take over but I couldn't even be allowed that. Not even a cliche' ending with lots of CGI. Only the cold, moldering, oblivion of non-movie. It was as if both movies ended at the end of their opening credits and there was nothing left but the gaseous emissions of the set carpenters and chatterers.
To know that, as Alec guineas lay dying in England, I was sitting and wasting these travesties of sublime mediocrity, is to die a little myself.

Barny Imagination Island

[10]

From the high quality cardboards sets, to the giant foam packed dinosaur suit, this film has it all. Cheesy computer graphcis, kids who sing and dance to songs I have heard millions of times before. A nutty professor who makes toys to play with. Harsh TV stage lighting. This is entertainment for the American masses. Who needs Shakespear!?

American History X

[8]

Edward Norton plays a neo nazi, bashing heads and spewing propaganda. His little bro is quickly turning into him. Their family is falling apart. Then he kills two black men and goes to jail for 3 years. This film is great in that it gives a totally believable picture of nazism. The main character. Far from being ignorant white trash, is smart, articulate, and charismatic. The dialogue is perfect and is so well thought out that you can really see the seductive nature of the white power movement. The arguments that are made by the Nazi's dove tail so well into modern American politics that it is scary. The film is pretty brutal and has a very sad ending. It is simple story done really well.

The "Puzzling" Mr. Ripley

[3]

Puzzling because we are given so little info about this idiot. He lives in a dump in NYC and he makes cash on the side by impersonating people. Okay. So what? His actions in Italy are never put into the context of his life. There are a couple of good things about this film. One is dicks Greenleaf, the American expatriate, jazz loving, rich kid. You'd think his character would be typical and suck but it is actually a great character and it is too bad the movie couldn't have been about him. Matt Damon's insipid little character deserved to be shoved off the back end of the Queen Mary. The visuals are nice too. Speaking of the Queen Mary there was a nice bit of composition of the worlds best liner, at birth at Long Beach CA, sliding through New
York Harbor. The Italian unit had fun shooting at all the save locales and the film did a good job of convincing us that we were in 50's Italy. I just wish the story wasn't so fucked up.

Bicentennial Man

[5]

It is a very nice film and tells one of the great Sci-fi stories of all time. However, unlike Green Mile, it trys to shove the whole story into a digestable 90 minutes. Argh! Not good at all. It made a great story as digestable as white bread that has been sitting in warm watrer for five days. The only redmeaming aspect is the quality of the story, the acting, and the set decoration; music isn't bad either. If your going to tell the story of the life of a two hunred year old robot you better take some time!

Best Sci-fi / Futurism films:

1. Star Wars Episodes 4-5-6 - 'nough said.
2. 2001 - mind-blasting even today.
3. Metropolis & Things to Come - (the reigning glory of Deco-Nuvo Futurism, you gotta have both)
4. Blade Runner - (Syd Mead unbound, wholly crap man.)
5. Alien - really dated visual effects, mumbled lines, simple story, fucking scary even now!
6. Close Encounters - Best of the happy-aliens genre, better than ET
7. Forbidden Planet - Captain JJ Adam's finset moment.
8. Planet of the Apes - Charlton Heston inherits the NRA's future.
9. Contact - Should be higher than number 9 but look at its competition!?
10. Gattaca - Nice use of late-FL Wright's buildings housing an interesting story.
11. Lathe of Heaven - Very simple story but very well done.

The Green Mile

[9+]

The best 188 minute long movie I have seen in a long time. It takes a pretty good filmaker to fully utilize 188 minutes of movie to tell a story. I am having trouble marking this film in the 1-10 scale. Many aspects of it were in the 4-6 catagory.

What was the point of the film?

Why have the John Cauffy character super natural? etc.

Yet the whole of this movie is greater than the some of it's mundane parts. It was almost a throwback to a thirties meledrama. Where force of character and dialogue had to carry lame stories and non-existent effects. In this way the movie is amazing.

Even though the story was middle-of-the-road the characters were very well difined and superbely acted. Compared with American Beauty this film kicks ass. Both films are based on subject matter that has been done to death, no pun intended. But where as American Beauty had characters right out of angstfilled-central casting, Green Mile's gards and prisoners were much more interesting. Where American Beauty, in my opinion dehumanized people into unrealistic sterotypes, Green Mile humanized every thing, including the mouse. It was fantastic (Arthorian legend style )

I'd like to have this movie on DVD. I guess I'll give it a....roll on one......a.....roll on two! I'll give it a 9+. Not many movies get that...not from me anyway. I think I thought of giving Shawshank redemption a 9 too. Hmmm?

Best Prison Films I have seen:

1. Shawshank (1994) Redemption
2. Green Mile- (1999) tied with the above, sort of SR part II with more special effects
3. Midnight Express- (1978) ouch!
4. Coolhand Luke - (1968) What we got here is a great movie
5. Stalag 17- (1953) A Billy Wilder Best
6. Papillon - (1973) Oops I almost made this movie 5
7. Dead Man Walking - (1995) Susan Sarandon as a Nun? The world would weep.
8. Gideon's Trumpet -(1980) H Fonda
9. Each Dawn I Die - (1939) Really old Cagney film I saw on chanel 12 when I was a kid.

The World Is Not Enough

(1-10......gets -550 billion on general scale)

Bond Scale( 1-10.....Gets a 5)

If you could view the score I gave for this movie in 3-d it would be so small that you would need a scanning electron microscope to see it. Or maybe that couldn't view it either. Physicists would be using quantem mathematics to hypothesize of its existance based on how it's potential existance may, or maynot, interfere with larger particals, such as..I don't know say sub-atomic nuclei. This film was really hokey. The bad-line-o-meter, back in operation after months of rebuilding thanks to Lost In Space, was instantly vaporized at the end of the film when Bond says to his girl of the moment, named Christmas Jones, " I thought Christmas comes only once a year." Blech! However Bond films can be terrible and at the same time rudely entertaining and this was that.

13th Warrror

[8]

I can't remember if I wrote a review of this movie but I was thinking of both American Beatuy and 13th Warrior so here we goe. This move is one of the best barbarian movies ever made. It is a great story of Vikings. It has an intelligence to it that floored me. If this movie had been a foreign import with sub titles it would have been hefted into the catagory of films by likes of Akira Kurosawa. Visually it had a great primordial look to it. The sets were proper for the period as were most of the costumes, some license being taken with armor. Another nice part about this films was that so many characters were played by people of the proper ethnicity. Old king Hrothgar (Same king as in Beowulf?) was played by Sven Wolter. Antonio Banderas came off well as an arab. The story has mild Beowulf overtones to it; a wayword warrior and his band have to return home to fight off a mysterious force that is terrorizing Hrothgar and his men at night. The force in this fiom is not a single monster and his mother but a host of thousands of canibalistic cave dwellers. This sounds kind of campy but it is pulled off in a scary realistic way. This film is the best Michael Chriton book-to-film thingy that has been made.

American Beauty

"To die, to sleep --
To sleep, perchance to dream, ay there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause; there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life."
-William Shakespeare,

Oh crap now John Gielgud is dead. Not many left from that godlen age of English theatre. Not many at all. Here is a photo of the big three. All having "shuffled off the mortal coil" [Image] Gielgud, Olvier, and Richardson.

I hope that heaven has a place for performing arts.

Now onto other matters:

American Beauty, (1-10.......gets a 5)
Why did this film win all those awards? It is a basically just another in a long line of "suburban family goes nuts" movies. The only saving grace was that this film had an end to it. It was unrealistic with cahracters that needed little in the way of passion or ability. The creepy voyer-dope dealer was the best character in the film. Kevin Spacey I really like as an actor, however his character was so badly developed an d thrown together that I had trouble choking down his story. There was no event that lead up to his transformation from dweeb to dynamo; unless you count smoking pot behind the resturant with voyer-dope boy.

Vader aye

How the hell can I be scared of Darth Vader when I am given the knowledge that he is a Canadian!? I can imagine the scene in the Daeth Star in Episode 4 when Vader is talking to Motti and Tarkin:

Vader: "Don't be to proud of this technological terror you constructed..aye"

However if you have a copy of the original art of star wars check out one of the cartoons in the back. The one showing Vader as a goalie in a hocky game, pretty fucking prophetic if you ask me.

The maple leaf that is going to play Anakin MrkII is 19 and so can have legitmate sex with Portman and thus cause all hell to break loose. I am hoping for a couple of NC-17 scene's. I think a couple full frontal shots would really jaz up the whole saga.

Reading some of the QA shit on the star wars sight makes me wonder about the overall sanity of people who dig star wars. I mean, I do, but I could care less about the origins of Boba Fett. Yet this is a big deal. Why? The dude says one line in Empire and gets KO'd early on in Jedi andthere are people who really give rats ass about the guy? I suppose the next QA will be about the origins of the Ugnaut that was playing with Threepio's head. How about Greedo? At least that guy had a decent chat with a major cast memeber.I'd like to think that he was the grown up version of the little one that hung out with Anakin when he was a slave-boy.

Another telling sign in the Episode II stuff I read was that the production was gearing up to get started in the next couple of weeks. In another paragraph there is mention that nobody has seen a script yet. Typical.

In my own story youngSkywakler has just had part of his leg and most of his left arm blasted away in a space battle. He has had to eject after his fighter slammed, kamakazee style, into a supposed alien battleship. His mentor, B. Kenobi is right on target for loseing control of Skywalker's training. Palpatine has just killed a Jedi on Cursicant. Mace Windu is wondering if he is the only Jedi on the council that has not been under some kind of mind control. Amidala is awaiting the certain doom of her miserable little clod. General Penaka is discovering his own latent Jedi ability, he's really the only steady guy in the story. Jar Jar Binks is no where to be found for his character is too silly. The story is taking on a kind of grizzly nightmare nature, sort of a cross between The Shining, Sixth Sense and Saving private Ryan. The lead character, Mandan Telayni, a personage who will not be around in the next story, so to speak, is at the center of it all and hasn't figured out the real problem yet. He know's who the sith lord is, aka palpatine, but he isn't in a position to do much about it. The really scary part hasn't happened yet.

Email Sucks!

I did a little statistical analysis of my current email dilema. Last year I averaged 6 e mail messages a day. This year it is running at about 15/day. Each blessed gem needs to be opened up and responded to. Some require simple replies like "Fucking A!" or "Crap!" More often than not I am sent some fucking eight page Word document done in 6 point micro type that I need to read and resond to. Or it is the e-mail that contains eight links to different web sites that I need to delve into and respond as to which one I liked best. So I have come to the conclusion that in roughly 18 months I will need a personal secratery to handle response to all the email. It is now 9:47am and I am not finished choking all the mail down. It has taken me 2.75 hours to respond to all of it. And that isn't even responding to each message since I know that a couple are magazine companies wanitng me to re-subscribe to Omni global hyper mega net weekly.

John philosophizing

John,

Youth is wasted on the young and life, in general, on the living. Your thoughts are mirrored in almost every observation I have made of those younger than myself. As men we are slightly worse off than women. At least they reach their sexul peak in their mid thirties and are old enough and smart enough to enjoy it. Men are hardon machines until their mid twenties then the ol feller starts to say "give it a rest you midless fuck! What do you think I am? Some kinda godman jack hammer?"

As for those smoking, imortal, teenagers, I would like to judge them damned and be done with them. However they are just trying to be what society in general wants them to be. ("Ve ver just following orders.) part of me thinks we live in a pretty fucked up society where the government has to tell us not to over prescribe prozac and riddilin to our toddlers, and people still argue over the right to carry a concealed firearm. We throw every concievable kind of tawdry image at the kids, deafen them with sex and violence, then tell them to obstain from sex and settle arguments with good natured handshakes. And the idiots who still cling to that moldering mantra that it is the parents responsibility to control what their kids watch and that they are souly to blame when things go awry, obviously don't live on Earth. From a parent's point of view it is getting harder and harder to control what messages their children are getting when the bus driver listens to the morning zoo, when there are pepsi ads on the school tv, and teenage mothers are nursing their babies on the steps of the highschool. As I see it the situation has been brought about by a near cult like beleif in freedom for freedom's sake. Freedom becomes, without responisbility and the understanding of consequence of action, anarchy. Kids in particular have been so empowered as to think that they are incapable of doing wrong and if they do it is because some part of society has led them that way. There is always some kind of justification for unethical behavior. Clinton is an excellent example of this philosophy being carried out in the White house. "Lot's of presidents did those things, he's only human, what two consenting adults do..." It makes me want to vomit blood. First of all we, as humans, have fucking huge brains and the ability to make ethical decisions and if we make decisions that hurt those around us and endangers others, well we better own up to them. If we can't do that and we try and explain away our wrongs then we cease being free at all and become slaves to impluse.

Scott

Bush and his great state!

The latest Internet "gossip" - I don't know if it's true, but certainly worth finding out... has anyone seen this or know if it's factual? --sg

The state of Texas, under the leadership of Bush II son of Bush is ranked:

50th in spending for teachers' salaries
49th in spending on the environment
48th in per-capita funding for public health
47th in delivery of social services
42nd in child-support collections
41st in per-capita spending on public education and ...
5th in percentage of population living in poverty
1st in air and water pollution
1st in percentage of poor working parents without insurance
1st in percentage of children without health insurance
1st in executions (avg. 1 every 2 weeks for Bush's 5 years)

Just think of what he could do for the country if he were president!
This guy is deserves not only to lose the his election but deserves to be bullseyed by a flock of ten thousand canadian geese.

Antoher thing I hate about Bush is that he says such stupid things like this:

actual quote: "I married over my head."
What the fuck does that mean?

He is constantly saying shit like this that is absolutely nonsensical. It isn't just a case of bad grammer or haulting scentances like his daddy. It is pure weirdo shit that brings into question his sanity and whether or not he might be an alien.

My scholarly opinion, steeped in intellectual ellitism, is that he is, as Socratese would say, a big dufus...possibly from another planet.

Super Tuesday Results!

Now its Bush II vs. Gore III. Watch them fumble all over themselves trying to co-opt McCains supporters and his message. The truth is that neither of these dandified princelings has a grasp of what the voters really want. So they have both spent a lot of time looking over McCain's shoulder trying to figure out what they should be doing.

McCain's suppopprter, far from being soft and easily turned, are a tough bunch who are so p'offed at the republicans and sick of the democrats that I doubt, even if McCain were to support Bush, they would do it. McCain, for his part, is a man of integrity and will undoubetly support Bush because Bush is in McCain's party. Yet there is absolutely no love between them. McCain will not actively stump for Bush nor will he accept a VP spot.

At the luncheon I attended there were a lot of Republicans who will not vote for Bush no matter what. There were many independants who told me that if McCain isn't the nominee they would vote for Gore. A few Republicans actually stated they might vote for Gore in protest over Bush.
Bush and the gothic machine behind him has alienated a large sect of Republicans and has belittled the voice of independant voters. When he loses to Albert Gore there will be lots of finger pointing and I will love every minute of it. This whole process has given me a greater respect for the diversity of opinion in the Republican party as a whole. Comming form a strictly Democratic background I find that a good thing. The media tends to want to paint all party people in one color or another. What I have learned, being in both, is that the media is full of shit. The real world wrangling behind the doors of luncheons, comittee meetings and debates is far more intelligent and uplifting than the media will ever admit. They want gossip to report on not issues and character.

I will most likely right in McCain's name in November however that is a protest vote and will not count for much. I like the guy and admire him. Do I agree with him on his social stands? No, not all of them, not even most of them. I am using the lipness test of Character for who I am going to vote for. I don't want a dandified princeling who thinks he's owed the white house.

Political system needs to be fixed!

Should a founding father drop through a warp in space time "like a stone thorugh a wet paper bag". He would be flumexed to note that the current system for electing a President is about the same as in his own day. He would take off his wig, scratch his stubbly head, and ponder why the hell things have progressed in so many areas of life yet not in the electoral process. This would, I think, go for either a federalist or democratic republican.

As lord emperor of the universe I would change things thusly:

1. 1 get rid of the electoral college, an outmoded check on mobaucracy.
2. Force each prospective candidate to vist each of the fifty states and hold a debate in each state. This process would take seven weeks and go in alphabetical order, Alabama to Wyoming.
3. Hold a national primary in May. It would be a paid holiday too. It should be a totally open primary and delegate count would be delved out by percentage not winner take all.
4. The parties can still hold their conventions. There is nothing wrong with parties arguing over stuff.
5. The general election should be moved up to September and held as a national holiday too.
6. Candidates should be graded on their views and the man or woman with the best GPA wins.

I am sure the b'wigged founder would be pleased by that turn of events. However this would screw over the existing two party system pretty bad so it won't happen. At least not until the revolution comes.

For what it's worth I urge you to vote for McCain. I attended a luncheon for McCain and got to know the type of people who are supporting him in Oregon. Compairing them to the bunch I delt with in the Vancouver DP, I would honsetly say they are more intelligent, and thoughfull than the Vancouver bunch. Due to party politics McCain has not had any support by his party in Oregon and they have, infact tried to block him from getting on the ballet at all. Donna and I are the defacto McCain corrdinators for Gresham.

If McCain is not the candidate the choice will then be between Gore and Bush and I find that not at all a happy one. On principal I cannot bring myself to vote for Gore eventhough his politics are more to my liking. Yet Bush is such a slug that to cast a vote for him is like voting for a lump of dog shit. I am sure that there will be other candidates out there from the Green Party or the Socialist party or whatever and perhaps I'll vote for one of them. yet I think that no party is going to change the system unitl the electorate demands it and makes it a lipness test issue. Either you are for reforming the electoral process or I won't vote for you. It's going to have to come down to that. Because there is simply no other incentive for those we select as law makers to change.