A variation on a post on books I did earlier:
A movie that made you cry: It’s a Wonderful Life made me cry for joy the first time I saw it. Remains of the Day made me weep.
A movie that scared you: The Innocents, the blood-chilling adaptation of Turn of the Screw. And Snow White, when I was a kid.
A movie that made you laugh: Only one? I’ll go with Fierce Creatures (”We have eliminated the non-event interest deficit!”).
A movie that disgusted you: Deep Throat.
A movie you loved in elementary school: You Only Live Twice, my first Bond film.
A movie you loved in middle school: Captain Blood.
A movie you loved in high school: Blazing Saddles.
A movie you hated in high school: Can’t think of one.
A movie you loved in college: Casablanca, Citizen Kane. Or for contemporary movies, Logan’s Run and Foul Play.
A movie that challenged your identity: Dark City raised a question that’s always fascinated me: Are we who are memories say we are, or are we who we really are?
A series that you love: Marx Brothers, Thin Man films, Star Wars (original trilogy).
Your favorite horror film: The Innocents. Or Carl Dreyer’s silent movie,”Vampyr”
Your favorite science fiction film: Star Wars (Episode IV), Dark City, Nausicaa in the Valley of the Wind.
Your favorite fantasy movie: Cast a Deadly Spell or Spirited Away.
Your favorite mystery film: Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely (Robert Mitchum’s shot at Raymond Chandler) or a TV film called Killjoy.
Your favorite biopic: Seabiscuit or Life of Emil Zola
Your favorite “coming-of-age” film: My Life as a Dog.
Your favorite movie not on this list: Hellboy, Speed, Double Indemnity, Young Frankenstein, Being John Malkovitch.

Mailing off my sword-and-sorcery short story, “The Love that Moves the Sun,” yesterday means all my finished shorts are now out. It’s been a while since that happened.
It’s good because it increases the chances of a sale, of course, but it’s also encouraging I’m finding that many compatible markets. So, huzzah!

“To say my country right or wrong is something no patriot would utter except in dire circumstance; it is like saying my mother drunk or sober.”—GK Chesterton

An assortment of political odds and ends:
•The Washington Post reported Sept. 21 that Homeland Security is gathering and storing information on air travelers—people who aren’t suspected, accused or charged with anything—down to who they visit, what they carry with them and even what books they’re reading on flights. One man’s file, for example, including a note that he’d carried a book “Drugs and Your Rights.”
DHS spokesman Russ Knocke’s response: “We are completely uninterested in the latest Tom Clancy novel that the traveler may be reading (but) If there is some indication based upon the behavior or an item in the traveler’s possession that leads the inspection officer to conclude there could be a possible violation of the law, it is the front-line officer’s duty to further scrutinize the traveler.”
This is the same logic Bush supporters use to explain why eavesdropping without warrants is no big deal: Of course they’re not interested in what someone says to their mother! They’re only interested in phone calls about serious criminal matters!
And the logic is flawed in both cases, because there’s no way to know in advance that someone’s having an innocuous conversation, or reading a harmless book: If the government doesn’t check, it can’t be sure.
That’s why we have warrants, to make sure the government doesn’t spy or collect information on us without good reason. Because the temptation to watch us “just in case” we’re doing something wrong or in order to “connect the dots” is always going to be there. Never mind that gathering information on law-abiding travelers doesn’t connect any dots, it just provides more dots.
And I don’t for a minute trust whoever gathers and joins these dots to make sensible inferences from what people read, unless it’s someone carrying “Osama bin Laden’s Secret Plan for Total World Domination.” Police departments have listed Quakers and soup-kitchen managers as subversives, and used Homeland Security funding to spy on Greenpeace (which is nonviolent) and in one case, a vegetarian protest outside a Heavenly Ham. What would they make of someone traveling with a book critical of Bush?
•Some lobbyists fighting the Hometown Democracy Amendment, which requires major changes to growth and land-use plans be approved by public vote, have taken to claiming the amendment is the work of “big developers” out to turn land-use rules over to “special interests and their slick lawyers,” in the words of former legislator John Thrasher.
So an amendment that calls for a public vote on future development is some kind of plot by developers? Wow that would be pretty devious … but it’s also nonsense. OK, it’s a flat out lie.
I’ve heard plenty of rational arguments pro and con about the amendment. Wouldn’t it be nice if those shaped the outcome of the vote and not these kinds of cheap tactics?
•Sen. Mel Martinez explained recently that he refused to vote for the Webb Bill — which would have required the military give the troops home leave as long as their most recent deployment — because it would be a slap in the face to the troops to say they needed more time away from the battlefield.
Putting in all those long months in Iraq, Martinez said, “is a testament to their courage, to their valor, and their sense of duty to their country. I think we would demean their service if we were to say to them that there had to be a parity between the time in service out of the country and the time at home.”
I have read arguments that the added home leave might be a bad for practical reasons, but apparently the senator thought he was better off claiming that maintaining the current grind of deployments is his way of supporting the troops.What an insult it would be to say they might want more time spent with their spouses and children!
Of course, Martinez also said it’s a bad thing to have troops sent on 15-month deployments, but he isn’t proposing anything that would change that.
•Back in 2004, two Texans, Jeff and Nicole Rank, attended a Fourth of July Bush speech wearing anti-Bush T-shirts (”Regime change begins at home.”). When they refused to remove them, White House staff had them handcuffed, photographed, fingerprinted and jailed for trespassing for several hours, even though the event was public and taxpayer-sponsored.
Last month, the government paid $80,000 to the Ranks to end their lawsuit over the incident.
Which is good: The Ranks didn’t do anything wrong other than exercise their free speech, and neither Bush nor any other elected official has a right to ban people for confronting them with criticism.
But it’s also bad: $80,000 of public money paid out because White House staff were afraid of exposing their boss to someone who didn’t agree with him?

For several years now, I’ve been a member of Mensa, the high-IQ society. One of the best parts is going to the “regional gatherings” Mensa chapters around the country hold, such as the one I attended last weekend in Atlanta. Among the highlights:
•Playing a game called Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow, which is much like “murder” or “assassins” (if you’ve played either): Two or more players are secretly werewolves who kill a villager each night, then the survivors try to identify the werewolves in their midst and have them killed. The surviving villagers win if they destroy the lycanthropes, the werewolves win if they’re the last ones standing.
As usual, I wound up dead both games I played, but I was pleased that I managed to identify two werewolves in the first game—unfortunately it was a large group so there were two werewolves left after that—and one in the second game (when my very competitive and sharp friend Courtney became so vague about her suspicions, it was a sure sign she had to be One Of Them) before I died.
•Playing in one of those boxed murder-mystery games where everyone dresses up in character (in my case as Victorian actor “Hamilton MacTorr”) and tries to spot the killer. Great fun and a delicious meal (cold acorn squash soup, hummus with cheese, vegetables over rice), but I’m hopeless at spotting the murderer when I play these things.
•Totally kicking butt on one of the teams in a quiz-bowl contest. We won handily both rounds (Best comment overheard: “All the other team needs is a single 120-point bonus question and they’ll retake the lead!”).
•Participating in an “extreme problem-solving contest” where the referee gives teams an assortment of odd items (Play-Doh, wooden cubes, plastic eggs, PVC pipe, a miniature umbrella), a technical challenge (build six objects and a launcher that can throw them 10 feet into a cardboard box) and an artistic one to come up with a story to explain everything. Okay, artistic may not be the right word—our storyline involved our being toys sacrificing the objects to the Great Box in the Attic to prevent us being put away forever—but we must have done something right, because we won the contest, despite only landing one item in the box (one team managed five—I’m very impressed with their launcher design—but they ran out of story after about two minutes).
•Eating a lot.
•Hanging out with my fellow Mensans and just talking: Jolie and Doug from Atlanta, Terri, Courtney and so on, playing board games wandering around for food or just chatting.
Even after dragging in at 10 pm. Sunday night, I still feel jubilant.

This is a topic Iraq-war supporters love to bring up, with some variation of “Imagine if Eisenhower had been criticized like Gen. Petraeus has been!” or “Imagine if liberals had fought FDR during World War II after Pearl Harbor the way they’re fighting Bush since 9/11.”
The best response, in the words of journalist/blogger David Neiwert: “It would now be 1949 and the president would probably be explaining why they hadn’t yet captured Hitler (he’s not that important, you know) and the invasion and continued occupation of India was the major battle front in winning the war.”

While I don’t think that Gen. Petraeus’ presentation made much of a case for staying in Iraq, I did find the “General Betray-us” label in a recent ad by the anti-war MoveOn group in bad taste (even though I agree with a lot of the substance of the ad)
So it’s no surprise that Republicans are even more outraged: A letter to the Daily News today, for instance, proclaims the ad “libelous and shameful” and a “cowardly politically motivated attack on a dedicated, lifetime combat commander” that “trashes all of our fighting men and women.” He’s not alone in this sentiment.
I can’t wait until we see similar Republican outrage over neoconservative, pro-war pundit Michael Ledeen whose Monday post on the National Review’s blog blasts recently retired Gen. John Abizaid: “It was under Abizaid that the copious evidence of Iranian activity was suppressed, and we, let’s say, took it easy on the thousands of Revolutionary Guards killers running all over the country”
Now personally, I think these claims are nonsense. But from Ledeen’s point of view, what he’s saying is that a four-star general is a liar (if he’s suppressing “copious evidence”) and possibly traitorous (if he was actually “taking it easy” on Iranian agents running wild in Iraq). Exactly the kind of outrageous attack on our fighting forces that Republicans hate. And I’m sure just as the Senate has condemned the MoveOn ad, they’ll now vote to condemn National Review and Ledeen.
Except, of course, Ledeen was attacking Abizaid for saying that America could live with a nuclear-armed Iran. So we’re far more likely to see prominent Republicans and senators cheering Ledeen than condemning him; a military or ex-military officer who dissents from the White House view is no longer to be revered and respected but condemned as a traitor and a weakling (as has happened to John Murtha, Jimmy Carter, John Kerry and others).
For some Republicans “support the troops” means “support the troops as long as they’re a politically useful tool and no longer.”

This blog has now come to the attention of the spambloggers. I’ve had to delete a half-dozen requests for “comments” which are actually the same ad for online dealers in used car parts (or something like that) sent over and over.
Do they think I’ll get tired and let them post?
Or am I the real target and they’re hoping I’ll go check them out?
Either way, they’re wrong. And annoying.

A recurring theme among die-hard defenders of the Iraq occupation is that even if we’re seeing no progress and the Iraqi government failed to meet its benchmarks, we have to stay and fight because if we leave it will be chaos! Genocide! Civil war!
In a recent speech, Bush compared what might happen to what happened in South Vietnam when the war ended: “One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people.’”
The trouble with this argument is that the refugee crisis has already happened: Two million Iraqis have fled the country since the war started and 2.2 million have been “displaced internally.”
Syria has taken in 1.5 million Iraqi refugees and Syria only had 20 million people to start with; since 2002, we’ve averaged 191 Iraqi refugees a year (these figures courtesy of the Obsidian Wings blog).
Bush is quite right that when we pull out, there will be a lot of bloodletting and much of it will be directed at people who worked with our military or the CPA. A lot of violence is already directed at these people.
His solution: Increase Iraqi immigration to 10,000 - 12,000 a year.
At that rate we could take in all the refugees in oh, 200 years or so.
Given our responsibility for the current state of affairs, I’d think we could do better.
Then again, Bush claims we’re still on the way to victory so maybe he sincerely believes all those refugees will be able to return home in a few years. Just like he may have sincerely believed there was no need for extra troops to maintain control during the occupation, because we were going to be welcomed as liberators.
We all know how that turned out.

While flipping through an old Time magazine from 1970, I was amused to come across a list of then hip, cool, new slang words and discovers “trashed” was on the list (in the sense of “trashed the room,” rather than “drunk”). Unlike its fellow travelers “outasite” or “do your thing,” trashed has actually stayed in the language; it’s become so normal a word, it was jarring to see it presented as a linguistic novelty.
I love old and obscure words and slang and I love using them in fiction, since it’s one way to create a feel for another time or place: Throw in a slang term or a curse that’s now archaic (in medieval times, for instance, the really foul language was shockingly blasphemous phrases such as “By our saviour’s tears!” or “By the true cross!”) and it helps set the period.
While I have a lot of words books that provide examples of that sort of language, however, it’s frustrating that I’m not always sure how much to trust them. One of my books, for instance, refers to “flunkenstein” as a sixties term for a computer that grades standardized tests. Was that something that saw regular use, a name used at maybe one college or just something someone made up that never actually caught on? I can’t tell, which makes me cautious about using it.
In the end, I usually play it careful, unless I’m working with language that I know, such as sixties or seventies slang I heard growing up (or even fifties slang which filtered into TV shows a few years later). A shame, some of the old words are just so neat.