in politics, sometimes, you just can't win. scroll to the bottom of this article to read about how a Missouri felon managed to become the republican nominee for state auditor. no wonder the republicans hate nation-building: they are too afraid that they might accidentally screw up an entire region with their idiocy, and so end up messing things up regardless. meanwhile, the dems need to get with the program and embrace some much needed reforms for our country. they could even use some of the tactics that spinsanity deplores to further their cause. if you're going to make a political omelette...

i ran into an scottish lass last night at dick cheney's secret underground restaurant who was participating in one of those 'blind-date-esque' television shows where two couples are randomly placed together and the ensuing madness is filmed for the audience's pleasure. evidently things hadn't been going so well for the winsome duo, and although the cameraman had been distracted by a hotel employee (and was subsequently awol) sparks weren't in evidence sans voyeur. in fact, midway through the evening, the lad from london merely asked for his half of their nightly funds to go have a good time by himself at a club the young lady wasn't interested in. after striking up a conversation, i managed to ascertain that the man in question 1) was a cad and 2) seemed to be pretty high on himself. plenty of romantic gossip was divulged, and truth be told, us yanks were getting the better half of the bargain. i did feel bad that the producers had flown the two over to the district for naught, and then i remember that there would be plenty of interesting commentary afterwards, so perhaps it wasn't a wash at all. in other news, the logo contest is still collecting entries, so send yours in today! okay, back to work...yes, i know it's a sunday but i'm working. argh.

the time has come to finally move beyond the old logo to a new one that doesn't say (logO). with that in mind, i'm inaugurating the first annual dredwerkz logo contest. the rules are simple: suggest a unicode or latin character code that refers to a logo. for instance you could use the codes "☣" , "★" , "�" , "㊯" and "堡" to represent:
to see more unicode symbols and how to code them, go to the unicode charts page and just download the appropriate pdf to see your codes. then e-mail them to the e-mail address at the bottom of the main page. i'll gather together the suggestions and narrow them down based on my own priorities and then we'll vote for the best one. got it? get going!

i returned from west virginia yesterday...a nice place to vist, but not where i'd want to live. for the past three days though, the weather has (here and in wv) been incredible, the sort of blue-skied eighty-degrees-highed light-breeze-dried weather that makes you feel good for no reason whatsoever. but there are plenty of good reasons anyway, like dc suspending its huge 10% sales tax for many purchases. or the the latest from jmm about the bushies' incompetency. plus, my credit card company raised my credit limit last month to almost two times my after-tax monthly income. why do i need such a high rate? who cares! maybe i want to corner the tesla coil market...

i'm off to west virginia, my left contact has been replaced by an older one and i'm super tired from a bonking cycling ride yesterday. be seeing you!

my left eye is preventing me from wearing my contact lens at the moment, which of course means i can't wear my right one or things will get funny looking. so i'm awol for the moment. check out the new review of signs that i posted pre-blindness.

first: go see m. night shyamalan's signs.

back yet? good. for those of you too lazy to get up and go see this movie without reading an extensive review manging to connect time, space and dick clark together, follow along. in your typical movie, there is a smidgen of foreshadowing, a few plot points, a title moment, some key scenes, perhaps a climax, and maybe a denouement. really good movies tend to throw in some cinematography, more foreshadowing, good dialogue and sometimes a plot twist or two. great movies, like milton's paradise lost, tend to generate strange numerology rants so that each time you watch you discover another hidden moment revealing that the movie must have taken years to write, direct and edit until it became a seamless whole. a really great movie doesn't simply sand over the welding marks, it appears instead to have been forged from a solid piece of metal.

the amusing part of all of this is that cinema, unlike life, can actually be edited to the point where everything makes sense. watch memento and revel in the nature of a highly-edited film. life, unlike art, doesn't tend to make sense at the end, or at any point in between. instead clues tend to lead to dead ends, and death simply open voids instead of providing meaningful insights. (as anyone who has ever experienced pain learns, often a tough experience doesn't end up being rewarding in any character-building sense...it just leaves scars). how strange then, that the entire concept of coincidences, of life handing us clues, would become fodder for m. night shyamalan's latest work: signs.

although signs is ostensibly the story of some crop circles in a farmer's field, the story revolves around the idea of coincidences, and whether things happen for a reason. when i thought the movie was simply a thriller about crop circles, i was more excited than when reviews came pouring in mentioning 'god' and 'faith'. i held my breath, mainly because the god behind unbreakable and the sixth sense was fairly ambiguous. good and evil mixed together, bad things happening, etc. the strong point between both movies though was that everything happened for a reason. watching either of those two movies felt natural, because movies tend to operate in this manner. yet in signs, mel gibson as a fallen reverend divides the world into two groups: those who see random occurences as signs, and those who merely see them as happenstance. where the movie comes down on this rather thorny issue is nicely resolved. both believers and non-believers alike should enjoy the prospect of an alien invasion, coupled with some of the best thrills available this summer. far from being a campy remake of a tired concept, shyamalan manages to keep the tension mounted from beginning to end. watching the film as a mere fright-fest would still be entertainment. coupled with a thought-provoking idea though, the movie shines.

about the only negative i could think of would be if a viewer had recently lost someone, if only because the ending of the movie might catch them off-guard. in attempting to paint an even picture, shyamalan manages to move one side in a direction that implies a moral ambiguity. while this is well and good, strict moralists may take offense at the implication...the rest of the movie though, deals with death in a fairly reverent way, so it wouldn't prevent one from enjoying the film. art, like life, seeks to find answers to the ordinary questions that plague us. signs manages to put a new spin on those old questions.