werkz advice: worth seeing, although it will be just as good on dvd.

Combine the scary times we live in with some Hitchcockian suspense and a dash of Company lore and you'll arrive at the formula for The Recruit with Colin Farrell and Al Pacino. The movie sets itself up as being full of plot twists, so it doesn't make sense to waste time thinking of the few plot holes (a computer virus that infects though power lines) or why more stuff doesn't get blown up. Instead, most of the focus is simply on the training of the recruits and later, on which ones are actually working against each other.

The performances by many of the characters are fine, although the two main spies/lovers seem somewhat wooden together, a fact not quite easily explained by the constant tension between the two. Farrell is clearly the star, and manages to squeeze into his character effortlessly, as if it were written to be him. Pacino does a fine job throughout most of the film until the very end, but you'll have to watch to see why. Overall, this film is much like the agency itself: it eschews glitz for grunt work, visual effects for cinematic stalwarts. You'll leave thinking, but everything makes sense in the end.

UBL to Saddam: This is how I reward secular states! I praise them, thus ensuring their demise. Any other non-religious states want to get blown up?

All I have to say is, why didn't Dell get those damned interns some pot? They definitely needed to mellow out a little. On the other hand, it wss nice to see (as I mentioned before) that Alan Greenspan has stopped smoking the chronic. For a concise summary, check out CalPundit. Why? Because I'm no Max.

No disrespect intended, but I bet if the marketplace were in America rather than Mina, there'd be a huge cattle-chute to help the tourists stay in line. That's telling, isn't it? Hell, in DC you wouldn't even need the cattle chute. Everyone would just wait patiently, assuming that the line was going somewhere but not really questioning why there was such a hold up. In Boston though, things would probably mirror Mina. 180 people died there in 1998. 180. That number is staggering. To lighten things up a bit, how about some well-timed al Adha humor at the justice department's expense? Check out this Kerry Lutz post from yesterday. It's got a priceless ending line from Ashcroft. Nothing annoys me more than to hear all these conservative Christians bad mouthing other faiths whose ideas they support in practice. Weren't these the people that enjoyed the Secular Saddam show back when he was fighting Iran? Only now, we hate both Iraq AND Iran. And we're happy lumping Germany in with Libya and Cuba, eh? And what ever happened to Syria? And congrats to Greenspan showing some backbone while I'm at it. Clearly, my ranting has left me without a thread. Back to the regularly scheduled secular station.

Prophetically, when I reviewed Joe Millionaire, I noted that it was worth watching, but not every episode. Last night was that episode. In an idiotic attempt to keep advertisers happy with audience numbers, Fox aired an entire episode composed of flashbacks and canned edits. Even the final choice was avoided, despite everyone being aware that the fallout (Joe revealing the secret) would take place the next week. So, to sum up, nothing happened. Grr. This is the shortest series ever, and to devote an entire show to flashbacks seems idiotic. Combined with the incredibly low standards of the Fox network (Joe Millionaire made guest appearances on American Idol, Fox5 News kept plugging the show and having guests on it, and the news show even ran a segment about people watching said show, in one of the Fox5 News staff's houses!), this latest blow should have been expected. As soon as you blur the line between journalism and entertainment, bad things happen.

And, of course, I'll watch next week. And 24 tonight, as well. At least that promises to be more shocking than the "beheading" episode early on. Plus, they can't really flashback in time, due to the nature of the show.

Read this article on Hamas written by a friend of a friend. Talk about scary. The fact that we don't have a permanent Palestinian State in place is exactly what encourages these sorts of crazies to keep pushing for the demise of Israel. If an actual state existed, it could clamp down on militants and draw a clear line between peaceful Palestinians and those who keep raising the death count. Combined with this post article about the overwhleming superiority of Israeli forces, and you get a bleak picture.

No, not on Iraq. Emboldened by his boss, (who still thinks that the November election results were a referendum on core conservative values rather than on local politics) Secretary Ashcroft is proposing the Patriot Act II. Unlike First Blood, in this sequel John gets to expatriate citizens, gut FOIA and detain even more people without bail. The nightmare is starting to come true...

Yes, another review is due soon, but before I beam it up I thought I'd give a quick point over to this NYT piece about the House of Saud. Seems they want to throw us out in exchange for democratic reforms. Hmm. We reduce our standing military presence in order to foster Democratic regime changes? I wonder if this would work in Iraq and North Korea...

With apologies to the good folks over at NIMA, here's another look at one of those smoking gun photos of the Al-Musayyib Sand Distribution Facility: Thanks have to go out to both TPM and Kerry Lutz. Yeah, that's right, only 7940 visitors. Hell, even the 'werkz gets more than that. And nobody, I mean nobody, links to us. A failure of nerve, I suppose.

I got up and noticed it was drizzly outside with grey skies. Nothing gets me down worse than cold rain, because if it's going to be that chilly, it might as well be snowing, right?

Well, mirabile dictu, by the time I got to my office and went upstairs, the rain had changed to snow. I'm staring at the falling white stuff right now. It reminds me (yes, I'm a materialistic American!) of the new credit card I snagged this weekend, an Amex blue card. They evidently started a new line of the cards, because the card I got wasn't the regular blue card: instead it was completely transparent with only a sprinkle of white dust near the top, as if it were snowing. A nice omen, eh?

Okay, back to work. I've still got boatloads of stuff to get accomplished today, much like always.

UPDATE: they're now calling for 1-3 inches of accumulation. God I love this winter. It's been so many years late, but better late than never. Some of my co-workers are grousing about the snow and the cold, but I'm loving it. As long as it's snowing (and not raining) I'm happy.

Yes, it's review time this weekend. First up is the werkz take on the Washington production of Stones in His Pockets. The concept was cool, and the execution good, although one major flaw did persist throughout. Read the review for more! Next, we have a quick look at the latest Jackie Chan movie, Shanghai Knights. A light hearted movie that most people seemed to think was appropriate for ten year old boys. I probably wouldn't bring pre-teens to the movie (it is rated PG-13) but for your average 20-something it's a greay way to burn a couple hours. Hopefully I'm not dating myself too much. So stop reading this and get to the theatre, movie or otherwise!

werkz advice: go see it in the theatre, but it will be still good on dvd.

I admit it. I like Jackie Chan movies. They're all mostly cheesy, yet the stunts are spectacular, the fight choreography hilarious and the whole effort is kind of like a modern day version of the three stooges. In 'Shanghai Knights' the sequel to 'Shanghai Noon', Chan and Owen Wilson provide a great chemistry together and make the film a fairly humorous sequel. It picks up shortly after the former leaves off, though quickly moves to England, where the two main characters must recover an imperial seal, prevent a royal bloodbath and find true love.

As in all in all Chan movies, the plot is secondary to the fight scenes, yet like Noon, Knights manages to weave together fairly funny wordplay in addition to amusing ladder/box/knife altercations. Wilson and Chan are comparable to Hope and Crosby (if Bing's trick was kung-fu, rather than singing!) in the buddy-guy genre, which is a difficult to master type of film. Too often sappy sentiment gets in the way of madcap mayhem in most modern movies of this nature, but director David Dobkin manages to keep things lighthearted and moving along. In the end, as the always amusing movie outtakes roll over the credits, one can't help but laugh along. Another Chan classic has concluded.

werkz advice: good first act, lackluster second.

There aren't too many ways in which I'm pop-culturally illiterate. Network television, unfortunately, seems to be one of those gaps, especially growing up as a kid. So I never saw ABC's "Perfect Strangers"...or Balki, played by Bronson Pinchot. He's now part of a one-two combo of fairly gifted actors starring in a version of "Stones in his Pockets", a fairly succesfull London play about a movie filmed in Ireland, and the adventures of two extras on the set. The rub? A local boy-dreamer commits suicide, and on stage, both main actors play every role (at least a dozen different characters between the two of them).

If this sounds complex, it is. The sheer feat of two guys playing a bunch of different people with no costume or lighting changes was incredible. Sure, it's a gimmick, but it's a good one in the hands of Pinchot and his co-star, Tim Ruddy. Both are able to generate plenty of laughs throughout the performance. The real downer, sad to say, is the actual plot. The mad-cap insanity of the first act is tempered by the death of a local kid who dreamed too large for the small town, who ends his life Woolf style in a river. Each time the mood grew somber, somethings seemed wrong, as one of the characters themselves mouthed "People don't watch movies to be depressed...that's what the theatre is for!" I love self-referential humor, yet the show was quite amusing and the moments of sobriety seemed out of joint.

Pinchot, despite being incredibly funny, also lost focus a bit near the end of the second act, his faux-irish accent becoming increasingly ethereal. Of course, given the sheer number of scenes, characters and voices employed by both men, keeping it up for an entire performance is probably a hit and miss arrangement. (Interestingly, the understudy was billed as being able to play either part...a feat in and of itself.) In the end, Stones falls flat on the drama scale, but still scores well for humor. I'm not sure how the London version managed to keep people amused during the second act, but if it were up to me, I'd probably have kept things lighthearted and the audience rolling in the aisles. It may not be a movie, but some audiences like laughter on the stage as well.

Until recently, I didn't think that there was a large orthodox Jewish community in the district. I still don't. But if you want to see where they could (and do) eat lunch, I just posted a review of Stacks, a kosher deli a few blocks away from my workplace. I'm not that big a fan of the meat and cheese separation bit, or of the lousy service, but they do pile a great deal of meat onto your sandwich, eclipsing the tiny portions to be found at Potbellies. (Which also takes credit-cards, an edward fav for lunch establishments.) Perhaps Stacks will attract a more diverse community to the area. Read the review. Buy the board game.

werkz advice: if you've got time and money, try it.

Imagine you could create the perfect deli. You'd put it right around the corner, have it serve cheap sandwiches that were piled high with meats and cheese, rapid service that always knew your name and made things just the way you liked it, even during the busy lunch hour, plus the ability to pay with a credit card at the end. Now remove three of those items but add one not listed. Confused?

Stacks Deli is only a few blocks away from my workplace, and offers great sandwiches piled high with meat. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending upon your religious preference) it's kosher, which means no mixing meat and cheese. Grr. Despite the lack of cheese, the sheer amount of meat piled onto each sandwich is a great idea. Plus, you can pay with a credit card, which is nice considering that all the sandwiches are quite pricey. If my review ended there, I'd definitely say stacks was worth the extra cash.

Unfortunately, both times I've visted Stacks, around 1:00pm, near the tail of the lunchtime rush, the service has been abysmal. Despite the fact that only a few people were ordering sandwiches to go, and the restaurant side was half-empty, each sandwich took 10-15 minutes. While there, other customers who had ordered such easy-to-hand-over items like a cookie, also had to wait at least ten minutes. Both times, the Stacks employees have mostly been on a lunch break, which begs the questions: why have your employees take lunch at a lunch place? Why not simply have them start their shift later or earlier and have them eat lunch at a time like 2:00pm or 11:00am? Or why not have enough employees to serve lunch at the same speed, regardless of who is on shift? Both times I was second in line, so I didn't have to wait over 15 minutes to get my sandwich (or the aforementioned cookie incident, which left one patrom swearing loudly to all within earshot about the service) but it was still frustrating to have managers walk over evry five minutes, inspect my receipt and say "it should be ready in a minute" when everyone could easily see that the one woman working was in no way capable of preparing ten different orders within a minute.

In the end, if you like kosher food, hit Stacks. If you've got the time to burn and the money to spend, it's probably worth it. But bring your own cheese.

After my earlier disappointment with Toles, I was glad to see him return to fine form. Yes, I know I'm image poaching. But that terry tate movie is taking up too much server space, so I'm conserving what little I have left. If for some reason the graphic doesn't appear, just click this link to see it properly. The snow has picked up again, which makes me in an even better mood than before. Between the cartoon, the snow and the sandwich I made this morning which I'm about to eat, I'm flying high.

Dana Milbank is awesome.

Example one: today's piece in the post pointing out the administration's illogicity. They capped civil servants pay raises, forced the rest of the government to (absurdly) stay below 4.1% growth in spending, all while proposing huge tax cuts. They forgot to mention that the White House itself would be receiving more money than ever. Let's roll the highlight tape:

While demanding that the federal government restrain its spending to a 4.1 percent increase in 2004, the Bush White House has assigned itself a more lenient standard: It has proposed a 9.3 percent increase in funding for the ongoing operations of the White House.

President Bush has proposed holding discretionary spending (excluding programs such as Social Security and Medicare) to $782.2 billion, a 4.1 percent increase.

"I will send you a budget that increases discretionary spending by 4 percent next year -- about as much as the average family's income is expected to grow," the president said in his State of the Union address last month. "And that is a good benchmark for us. Federal spending should not rise any faster than the paychecks of American families."

Among the various White House departments, the Office of Administration -- which includes information technology, procurement and other support functions -- would receive a 10.1 percent increase. The Office of Management and Budget would get a 9.3 percent boost, while funding for the U.S. Trade Representative would rise 14.5 percent.

The only unit scheduled for a cut in funding is the White House Office of Policy Development.

The Bush administration's budget would hold the category covering the expenses and salaries of the president's top aides to a 3.7 percent increase.

The line about the policy development program is priceless. Be sure to read the entire work, but once again Mr. Milbank has cut right to the heart of the matter. Where's example two you ask? Why, it's also in today's Post. Surprise! In this choice article, Dana examines how Bush blantantly lied about his numbers in the State of the Union speech. Onca again, some choice selections from a must-read piece:

Yesterday, Bush burnished his green credentials by promoting an initiative to produce hydrogen-powered cars. "I'm asking Congress to spend $1.2 billion on a new national commitment to take hydrogen fuel cell cars from the laboratory to the showroom," Bush, echoing his State of the Union address, said after examining fuel cell technologies at the National Building Museum.

But a fact sheet distributed yesterday by the White House stated that $720 million of the $1.2 billion is in "new funding." The rest -- 40 percent -- is what the government is already spending on fuel cell development.

In his address, Bush proposed spending $15 billion to combat AIDS overseas over five years. He said $10 billion of that would be in new funds.

But his 2004 budget plan called for spending $1 billion -- of which $450 million would be new funding, OMB said. The increase was partially offset by a reduced commitment to another foreign aid program. The budget proposal fell about $400 million short of the $1.7 billion that Bush had pledged for his Millennium Challenge Fund.

Is his televised address, the president said his budget "will propose almost $6 billion" to build up antidotes to bioterrorism agents. But overall spending for the National Institutes of Health, which handles much of the government's bioterrorism research and which Bush visited Monday to highlight his budget, would receive no increase in funding in 2004 when adjusted for inflation.

There are tons of other great moments from the latter piece, so be sure to check it out. A great one-two combo from Milbank and the Post.

There are few things more compelling than a chilly evening in the district, with snow on the ground and buckets more raining down from the sky. It was a distinct pleasure to find inches of white stuff growing on the ground during my attendance at a theatre performance. Even better, to awake this morning and find it still snowing, with about six inches covering everything. I walked to work to appreciate it, and it was great.

Nicely, only two other people made it into the office.

So I'm going to work today and I couldn't get two songs out of my head: Scheherazade by Rimsky Korsakov and Superunknown off the album of the same name. Needless to say, I'm in a good mood. And I'm even at work! One of these days I'll get my own office and be blasting music 24-7 inside. Just you wait...

To clairfy my earlier statement, it's not that I don't think Powell laid out evidence that was orders of magnitude better than our president, it's just that the evidence seemed a little shallow. Let's ignore HUMINT (all those "reliable sources") and focus on the imagery and SIGINT. The first conversation recorded was clearly the more damning of the two: a clear directive that something inappropriate was going on. But the heart of the discussion? A "modified vehicle", from the evil workshop, you know. Was it just me or did it sound like some sort of weird toy factory? As for the vehicle itself, it sounded like someone had lowered their pick up truck and attached some nitrous and was worried that the cops might catch them drag racing. Still, something was obviously going on that it shouldn't have....begin rant.

This in a country run by a CRAZED MADMAN.

That's what I keep running though my head: the guy murdered thousands of his own people. Yet we're focusing on two army officials talking about modified vehicles? End rant. Back to the evidence. The second signal intercepted was much harder to decipher. Someone was telling someone else to clean out a rubbish yard and then to destroy said message. Not much detail, overall. Something bad, right? Because otherwise they wouldn't want to destroy the message. Of course, North Korea is flaunting the fact that they pulled out of a nuclear non-prof agreement and are now building weapons grade plutonium with no answer from us. No answer? Why the disconnect between NK and Iraq? Sure, we were shown satellite imagery of possible chemical weapons bunkers. Yet the "after" pictures, which should have shown the bunkers without the decontamination vehicle or the security box, mainly showed the UN convoy approaching. What was in those bunkers? Clearly, the Iraqis would have had to say something, right?

Far more damaging, in my mind, were the images of convoys of trucks at different facilities. Let's speculate, for a moment, that any additional evidence the US has actually pinpoint where these munitions are being held. And, assuming that we're going to war shortly, there'd be no reason to tip our hand to the Iraqis, because presumable we'd want to secure these areas as quickly as possible in the ensuing conflict. What does this mean for today? Well, for starters, it means that both the US and Iraq want the inspectors to be merely "frustrated" than to actually find banned munitions. So the inspectors were probably an idiotic solution to begin with.

But, as much as I think the Iraq situatino needs to be dealt with, at the most we're talking about biological or chemical weapons. Meanwhile, those crafy NKs are assembling plutonium bombs courtesy our anti-terror allies, the Pakistan government. Go figure. Maybe we're about to go to war there, too, and we just don't want to tip our hand. Or maybe, just maybe, this administration lacks the courage to fight a fight that might be politically costly, instead of one that can be easily won in a matter of weeks.

Powell's "evidence" was fairly shallow, overall. But he did have at least something to show to the UN, unlike the president during the State of the Union address. And, in the end, I think we will move on Iraq within the next week. Of course, he continued to trot out the idiotic iraq/al qaeda link, which serves no useful purpose, save to convince simpletons that Saddam is behind the World Trade Center bombins. There are so many other, better reasons for taking care of Iraq it's silly to bring up the al qaeda nonsense. With that said, I wanted to go back to Iraq well before September 11th. I also thought we should attempt to solve the North Korea problem. Maybe then we could take on Syria, or terrorist groups like Hamas. It would be the right thing to do: to shoulder the responsibilities of being the world's superpwer to actually encourage democracy abroad.

Alas, it appears the administration is single minded. Surely, if we're a country that can fight multiple regional wars simultaneously, we should be able to handle the variety of threats out there today while still having a sensible fiscal solution. Right? Yeah. Of course, this is the same president who remembered going to Johnson Space Center, even though he hadn't:

Q Have you determined whether the President has visited Johnson before? There is still a dispute.

MR. FLEISCHER: Thank you. The Texas staff all recalls a visit. I was asked to get the date. I am not able to find a date. And so I think right now it's somewhat murky.

Q Because Johnson has no record of it, and we don't have any record of it in the Chronicle files, and things like that.

MR. FLEISCHER: I'm aware of that. And that's why I say this is now somewhat murky.

Q With due respect, how could it be murky? How would you forget going to the -- whether or not you went to the Johnson Space Center?

MR. FLEISCHER: Obviously, the Texas staff that was with the President at the time remembered it, which is why I said it.

Q Has anybody asked the President?

MR. FLEISCHER: The President, or the Governor repeatedly had briefings from NASA officials where they would come to Austin and brief him -- these are the Texas officials from Houston -- traveled to Austin to brief him on the NASA programs.

No wonder our country is in bad shape. Or, "murky" as some people prefer...