Can't write. In the middle of a blizzard. Perhaps later.

Yes, I know the site's pink. I'm planning to re-work the style sheet system shortly, to give users more control but in the meantime, I may be implementing a style dictatorship. Kind of like our current administration.

So I picked up this new phone a couple days ago. Wednesday afternoon, to be exact. The first thing it tells you to do is to charge the battery, then use it until it's dead, then repeat 2 more times. After this, the battery should be completely ready to accept a full charge. (It's a lithium-ion battery, so it doesn't have any memory effect...so this might be complete hooey, but I'm following the directions, okay?) The problem? Well, the phone is able to run for 14 days (excluding phone calls) in standby mode, even while on. It can keep going for 5 continuous hours of talk time. So in order to do this 3 step process, it could take two-three weeks, assuming I talk at my normal rate.

The evaluation period only lasts 15 days. So if I have a problem with the phone, I have to return it within two weeks. Grr. I won't have even finished step four of the five steps before using the phone by that point. The reception isn't the best (it's a new technology) but this could be due to the battery not being fully charged. Of course, by the time I find out, it'll be too late to return it.

A new Chipotle opened up a block away from me in the MCI Center today. So I visited, got my regular (soft tacos and chips and hot salsa) and am in the middle of a full blown metldown. But it's sooo tasty I can't stop. I'm feeling the burn.

Happy V-Day, all! Yes, it's yet another year of crazy swinging singleness on the special day. So for everyone else who claims never to have met the queen of hearts, live it up. One day you'll look back with longing. With blue skies, newly soled shoes, and the day in front of me, everything's looking rosy.

Okay, I passed my MCSE test, picked up a brand new GSM based cellphone and have only a few hours of work left in the day. And the omnibus passed today, so the office is super-busy. Back to work!

The story seemed straightforward: Ted Koppel reserved seats at a Washington movie theatre and was annoyed when another patron took them. Several people wrote in to say that Ted Koppel was an idiot who didn't deserve reserved seats, etc. And if the story had been true, they'd be correct.

But it turns out that Ted's son-in-law, Ken Pollack, showed up early at the theatre to reserve seats (knowing that his father-in-law would be a little late to get good seats). Ken managed to snag four seats near the front. The theatre manager, then proceeded to offer four better seats than the one Ken had. So, like any good American, Ken upgraded. His mistake, of course, was leaving the seats instead of staying there the entire time. But if I were saving a couple of seats for my friends at AMC Hoffman, and the manager came by to offer me better seats, with tape, I'd be impressed. And I'd probably go help carry the popcorn. And I'd be royally steamed if when I came in, the seats the manager had set aside for me had been snapped up. Yes, it's annoying when people come in the theatre and snap up seats early, but that's how it works. And we're talking four seats, not an entire row. The rules work like this: if you show up early, you should be able to get 4-5 seats. Ideally, you'd need 2 people to pull off the 5 seat deal, but 1 person should be able to save at least 4.

And if something's roped off, despite being egalitarian, it's simply rude to sit down there. Nothing gets me more annoyed than the people who sit in the handicapped seats (or, even more frustratingly, in the seats next to the handicapped seats, as if people in wheelchairs don't have friends!) and aren't disabled, or who show up early enough to get a choice seat in the center and yet take those same seats marked with the wheelchair symbol. I could go off on a movie watching rant, but I'll stop there. People need to learn proper movie watching etiquette.

From the "Shouldn't Someone Have Thought of This" department comes the news that the easiest way to poison our troops is to simply let them drink the water from our beloved Water Buffalos. Go figure. Next thing you know all soldiers will be forced to wear camelbacks under their protective garments...although at the rate people sweat under those damn things, they'll be lucky to make it a half hour before dying of heat exhaustion.

Survey says: we'll be fighting at night.

I find this highly ironic, given the (in my mind) idiotic suggestion that people go out and stockpile duct tape and plastic sheeting. Any household without duct tape is probably doomed anyway, and most households have anough trash bags to improvise. Of course, then there's the oxygen problem, but no matter. (How one could survive with food and water for 3 days but no oxygen is beyond me.) Not that I like to quote from Republicans, but in the words of Christopher Cox, (R-CA) "The mission of the Department of Homeland Security must be first and foremost to prevent another deadly attack on the territory of the United States. A dollar spent on preventing the next terrorist attack is vastly superior to spending that same dollar on cleaning up the mess when we fail to do job one, which is preventing terrorism." Perhaps the dollars we spend propping up the plastic sheeting industry would be better served by giving the money to the agencies designed to prevent terrorism. Of course, there's no mention of the dollars going to tax cuts, is there? They probably already have shelters constructed with food, water and air.

What's especially idiotic about preparing for a dirty bomb is that, unless the terrorists in question are prize idiots, it will probably be detonated during the middle of the day, to create as much panic as possible. Dirty bombs actually can't kill that many people, but the panic that ensues could. So the fact that most people are at work in sealed buildings means that plastic sheeting and duct tape won't do a bit of good. You'd probably have to either shut off the air handlers entirely for the building (and cover them with plastic) and then hope that the building had enough pressure to keep leaks from coming in. Plus, you'd have to hope that the oxygen levels remained high enough to keep breathing. Of course, with a dirty bomb at street level, the chances of airborne contamination 15 stories up might be lower. Or they could be higher. What we really need is a government plan to evacuate the city. Until then, duct tape is a quick fix for a problem that doesn't exist. More people, surely, would be injured attempting to flee the site of a dirty bomb detonation to get home than would be killed from the bomb itself.

Back to my dangerous existence.

Yes, a new review of the movie The Recruit is now up. A good film, with the most actual District of Columbia footage I've seen in a long time. They manage to get the Metro system right (something no one has done in years), have decent shots of Union Station and Georgetown and manage to avoid to many of the omnipresent DC cliches, like talking in front of the White House or the popular memorials. I'm still waiting to see a movie that will have people visit the TR Memorial...but that could be a long time off. Between the dvd releases of Minority Report & Collateral Damage, the district is starting to get a lot of celluloid time to back up the TV presence it's seeing in The West Wing and Mister Sterling.

Fairly soon our population may actually get the bounce Tony's been calling for!

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.