OK, gang, you know how I feel about 7 passenger vehicles with 1 passenger in them (and that person is called a driver, by the way) and I know with the price of gas going up my friends from Orlando, Sarasota, and all over FL are going to have trouble getting to Tampa for the free sneak peak at Savaged and Premiere of Alarum. So, I want you to meet up here. Post if you need a ride or are willing to give one. Let's fill those cars...and those seats. Carpool to the screenings. It will partying afterwards easier with all those designated drivers ;)
What are you going to do with it? I'm not even sure I'll get one, but if I do, I think it will be going to something I'm going to buy with or without it anyway. Have you really stopped spending because everything costs more or are you just getting less things for your money?
I think $600 or so per person per household will mean some people will be able to make more than the minimum payment on their credit card this month. Others will finally be able to make the minimum payment. Maybe some people will buy a CD (the investment kind). Make a car payment. Actually fill the tank a few times instead of running on empty and hoping for the best.
These checks are supposed to stimulate the economy, but they may not do much if people need them just to get by. Make the most of it. Some stores are offering 10% more than face value of the check if you use it to get a gift card. That can be a nice chunk of change and get you some extra groceries.
What would I suggest? If I were smart? Well, first things first. Pay any credit card or auto loan debt you can or have to. Interest and penalties are just wasted money when they can be avoided and a necessary evil to get some big ticket items, such as cars and houses. If you've got no interest baring bills, think about spending the money to streamline your costs. Maybe get those energy effiecient bulbs if you don't have them. Have your car tuned and get a good air filter. (Save yourself a lot of money and put it in yourself or have a friend do it. It's really easy.) Better mileage will last for months after things like this and that will add up to more than you spent. Think about it: if your car gets 20 MPG and gas $3.50/gallon it costs you 17.5 cents to drive a mile. Increase effiiciency by 10% and you save 1.6 cents per mile. Doesn't seem like much, right?
(It's 3 AM. Somebody check my math)
.016 x 15000/miles per year = $240 for the year. That's $20/month. It might take 6 months to earn it back, but as the price of gas goes up, that 10% increase in mileage becomes more and more valuable.
Same with energy efficient lights.
Also, keep an eye on the price of your products that come in plastic. Especially things like water that sometimes travel long distances. Maybe it's time to invest a few bucks in a glass jug for the fridge and a good sink water filter.
These investments will also stimulate the economy in two ways.
1. You'll make initial investments, which is what the government wants you to do with that money.
2. You'll free up a few bucks every month so you want have to sit home as often because there's nothing you can afford to do.
So, how will you be using your check? Give us your great ideas.
Did we really need a genius to tell us this? I mean playing the odds there's bound to be at least a germ somewhere out there. Now, he does say it must be primitive because our communication efforts have failed to detect them. I say, maybe they're so adavanced they know how to avoid us.
Either way, let's build that KFC on the Moon, so astronauts can eat genetically engineered space chickens while waiting to fly to Mars.
I hope Lloyd Kaufmann reads this, so Troma can make a movie about space-chicken zombies next.
Poultrygeist II The Bunker Strikes Back
Poultrygeist III Return of the Chicken or would those be V and VI?
By the way: If so many different animals "taste just like chicken" why do we only pick on the poor chickens? It's not like they're particulary big and feed lots of people. Well, maybe the genetically engineered ones are. You know when you get one of those bucjets with 10 legs they all came off of one super chicken and that chicken fills 3 of those buckets.
Wesley Snipes, his conviction/sentence and my problem with it.
OK, so Passenger 57 is going to jail for 3 years (I doubt he'll really do much time) for tax evasion. He was part of a group protesting what they percieve as the government's illegal collection of taxes.
My response to that is, if you don't want to pay taxes, fine. Stop driving on my roads and don't call my cops when you're in trouble. Don't send your kids to my school or your grandparents to my senior center. Don't walk in my parks, ride on my buses or trains and don't drink my water. See, all those things are yours and mine because we pay taxes. If you can't pay taxes or aren't obligated to because you don't earn enough, chances are someone is taking care of you and thus paying your share. You get less money from them because they send part of it to the government and you are a "Dependent".
Now, I can see Wesley Snipes not wanting to part with $2.7 million. It would have left him roughly $3million a year for those three years, which in LA is like $20 thousand in the rest of the country. So when someboday said, "Hey, you don't have to pay taxes", I'm sure he was thrilled. So, taking the advice and a lawyer and believing he was at least legally in the right, he didn't pay his taxes.
Cheap? Maybe. A protest against illegal tax collection? I don't think so, but it's possible.
So, for my problem I will quote the end of the yahoo article:
"Prosecutors said Snipes' case was important to send a message to would-be tax protesters not to test the government."
Do you see that? They refer to him and his lawyer and accountant (also in legal trouble over this) as "tax protestors" and are trying to send a message that we should not test the government. Whoa! America was built on two things. Slaughtering the natives (we were wrong to do that) and questioning the government, especially in the area of unfair taxes (that was a good thing). So, while I wouldn't support Snipes going around kicking Native Americans out of their homes, I do think he has the right to protest paying taxes in non-violent ways. I also think if you break the law you should pay a penalty, but in the case of protest the punishment should be payment of restitution and a PSA on why not paying your taxes is wrong.
That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
PS Do you think I can deduct the cost of my water filters from my income taxes since the water the government supplies is so substandard?
OK, so you all remember a year or so ago the giant spider in my wife's new "truck". Well tonight I stayed up late to do some work. I got bored and went up to bed for a little while, but I knew I wouldn't be able to fall asleep.
At about 3 AM I decided to come back downstairs. As I past the skeleton (yes there is a skeleton currently in my living room) and rounded the stairs I saw the second biggest spider I've ever had the pleasure of welcoming into my home. This was weird looking though. Weirder than the last (no, I don't have pictures. It was 3 AM and I was barefoot...and a little scared)
I decided to drag Nancy into this mess. I knew she was probably still awake too. Anyway, she came down and asked, "Is that a brown recluse?"
I had no idea, but I knew it looked funny. I wanted to see if there was a marking on its back, so she grabbed a flashlight and shined it on the beast's back. Keep in mind, this spider has been past by me twice and her once, had the lights switched on and now a flashlight was beaming down on it. It didn't move. I was still scared.
It was covered in bumps. Almost scaley looking things. OMG...this thing had to go and it had to go now!
Nancy convinced me that there was no way we were sweeping this thing out the door. I was pretty sure what was on the spider's back and there was no way I was letting this thing run off.
Wham! It was dead and the little black bumps on her back shot all over the hallway. And they started scampering. I was right. She was carrying her babies on her back.
Before you think me cruel for killing her babies, consider this, she didn't move. The whole time. They did as soon as they were shaken from her back. I think she was dead all along and I caught the little cannibals in the middle of eating their mother.
The mess is all swept now, but I've been itchy ever since.
Personally I think it is all BS. Stand up and Boycott. Don't give them more foreign money as a reward for mistreating people who want to be free. We're at war with Iraq to free people who don't want it, but we won't give up participation in a sporting event as signal of support for people who do WANT freedom? That's just wrong thinking.
I'll let the article speak on most of the points, but I have to comment on this one. It's stupidy is astounding to me.
ECONOMICS
Global leaders have denounced the Chinese for having exported tainted products such as pet food and children's toys with elevated levels of lead. But jeopardizing China's role as a major trade partner could devastate the global economy.
For starters, China purchased $65 billion of American-made products in 2007, and U.S. consumers snatch up more than $100 billion per year of products made in China. Giving up inexpensive products made overseas is one thing, but finding someone to buy billions of dollars of American products is another.
---------------------------- Let;s look at the Math. Say we, as Americans bought NOTHING made in China anymore and instead bought all of those products made in America. That would leave the country as a whole $35 billion more floating around our economy than the current set up. How is that bad? Well, products will cost more, so for that same $100 million we'll all have less. Possibley 35% less, for awhile. Eventually that extra $35 million would find it's way into paychecks meaning that Americans would have more buying power and more control over their goods.
Play a game tomorrow. Go to Target, or Wal Mart or K Mart and grab a shopping cart. Try to find 10 unrelated products Made in the USA. Take your time. You'll need it. I bet you give up before you accomplish it. Maybe try to find 10 things NOT made in China. Not as tough, but not as easy as you would think. If you make it five, look for the Chinese equivelants of the products and compare the prices...the do your best to compare the quality. Then, when you realize all you really needed was milk and bread, put the rest of the crap back on the shelf and go home with money in your pocket.
So, I'm in my office, such as it is, editing "Shelter", the short we shot last weekend.
I know, I know, INDISCRETIONS isn't finished yet, but I have a plan. I have edited enough of INDISCRETIONS to get our composer started on the music for it. While he's working on those samples/segments and coming up with an overall theme I thought I could get "Shelter" into picture lock, since it's only a short.
With "Shelter" together a second composer (Third of you count SAVAGED, which just got its score) can start work on that. Both of them can be scoring while I'm in OK helping clean out animal enclosures for a few days. At night I can finish some scripts. I can't edit because my laptop is HDV challenged. Capable, but nothing I'd want to struggle with when I have writing to do.
When I get back I'll have inspiring tracks for INDISCRETIONS, enough to give notes on "Shelter" to that composer and the script for my next feature, STOPPED DEAD.
Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, the Editprise. External harddrives and jump drives and now even those little hubs all have so many different colored blinking lights that I feel like it's 1966 and I'm on the bridge of the fame Starship. I've even got this big screen in front of me.
Hmmm. The actual reason I started writing this wasn't nearly as interesting as I thought.
I think this should be a blog, not a bulletin. Oh well, I'll make it both since nobody reads either anyway.
So, about this time of the year I usually start to feel overwhelmed. Projects from the year before (ahem....Savaged) are being put to bed production-wise, but now it's time to show the world. Projects for the current year are getting into production and this year I have the added even of a project from late last year being in post.
Being distracted by personal things I can't do anything about (you know what some of them are) doesn't help. It shouldn't help, but it does make it hard to focus.
Then's there's the promises you make to try and help people out that you wonder how you're gonna' fulfill. I do my best to be honest about how much time I have, but I'm usually wrong. There's always something I didn't think of. Like downtime. Or chasing down more work...or billing clients, paying taxes, reporting sales tax and all the other wonders of running a small, very small, business.
The things you want to do start to conflict with the things you have to do, and ultimately the things that fall into both categories get the best of my attention.
So it's near 4 AM and I'm typing a Blog because if I start to write a script I'll never get to sleep, but if I try to sleep I won't.
I shoot Shelter in 6 days. I'm excited about it, but I wish I had more time to prepare. It seems like I always do. Since I make the schedule it would be easy to just take the time, but then what happens to the rest of my schedule? What will the people who were in my last people do while I put off finishing it because I screwed up my schedule? What about the people who need the exposure of my next movie?
What about the three or fans I have that actually want to see these things when they're ready?
Sometimes it seems like I can't get it all done. But I will. "I am Hank." My year will end with 8 (yes that says 8) new features under my belt. 2 Directed by me and 6 produced. 7 shorts will be directed by me. Lots of new photos will flood these pages too. It WILL all get done. I may be wrong about when, but it WILL get done...unless that flight lesson I'm planning in June goes bad.
Thanks for reading.
Oh, and busy or not, I still want to be IN more movies. If you need me, we'll try to make the schedule work. I don't have time to put myself on the screen anymore.
So, 2008 isn't that special of a number. It's not like 8 years ago when we started a "New Millenium" or like it will be in 2 years when we stop saying "two thousand and eight" and start saying "twenty ten, twenty eleven" and so on.
2008 just sort of exists like a lot of years, but that's no reason not to do something with it.
The Superbowl always has a bunch of great commercials and this year was no different. For the past few years Budweiser, which I haven't drunk since I've earned enough to have a choice, always has great commercials. If you like the beer to boot, good for you. Obviously I like the commercials because of my attachment to animals, but this year's commercial, combined with some people in my life, has really inspired me.
My nephew, who is 11 years old, is literally fighitng for his life, as many of you know. He's battling cancer and so far smiling through it and staying pretty positive, at least in front of extended family and strangers. His brother, who is a couple of years older is stepping up and becoming a bone marrow donor, if the final tests go well this week. It's a lot for kids their age to go through and they're facing it like champs. Just doing what they have to.
My good friend, a person I look up to and someone I work with whenever I can, the iconic Debbie Rochon, has gone public that she has a brain tumor and requires surgery. In the face of this she still found time to start the year with a blog about following your dreams and making things happen. Despite what life throws at her Debbie has always worked hard at making her acting career grow while finding time to help budding directors. Wihtout her appearance in "The Lunar Pack" it likely would have been the last movie I made and I think people will agree, at least after Savaged, that I've come a long way since then.
So, anyway, what does all of this have to do with Hank and a Superbowl commercial?
Hank has a goal and with the help of one friend he spends a year turning that goal into an achievement. This year be HANK! or Be the Dalmation! Set a goal and work at it. Help a friend achieve their goal (I can always use some help, but I'm really bad at accepting it). Make 2008 your year to get things done. And then do something bigger in 2009 and so on.
Actually, I love my VAIO, when it's working. Windows always seems to be the real problem.
About a month ago, when I was just getting into editing for "Indiscretions" and trying to reorder my life after the wonder that was 2007 I had a catastrophic night when my screen went...let's call it "hinky".
See, I downloaded "updates". But not just the automatic ones, I decided to be responsible and search out any that my computer might have missed. Microsoft suggested this cool new thing from ATI to make my graphics card work faster and better. Instead it turned my screen into something that looked like a commadore 64 was struggling to send a message through my computer. I think it was 4 or 8 bit. I would make adjustments, but when I restarted the computer so they could take effect they were always gone.
I tried rolling back my settings and everything. After awhile it became clear. The only thing to do was dump the new download, but it had attached itself to my current driver software. It could not be undone...without a total clensing.
I tried it and things were happy in Hocus Focus world...for awhile.
My nephew and some other family business and some photography distracted me from "Indiscretions" for awhile. And that was to be my downfall.
Without working in High Definition my computer was fine. I had deleted the evil software and installed the original, 4 year old driver for my graphics card. Things worked. I forgot about it.
When my HDV editing software starting running slowly and missing frames (showing them, not capturing them). I didn't put the two together. I figured it was the processor being too slow or heat effecting the RAM. Some of my friends tried to help, but they didn't know about my screw up a month past, so they were flying blind as was I.
Last night I finally put the two incidents together and by lowering my graphics acceleration I got back my HDV editing and smooth playback. I was happy, but the footage still didn't look right. I needed everything working correctly.
I couldn't upload the update because it's evil. EVIL! I TELL YOU!
I went to ATI's page and looked up the archived updates. I took the second newest one and it worked. Thank goodness it worked! Of course I had to dump and reinstall MySPace Messenger for some ridiculous reason I still don't understand, but I don't care. I just edited the heck out of scene 5...several times.
We're a little behind and I have other stuff coming up, BUT this time I have a contract with a composer starting now. He's already read the script and will be looking at clips on Monday. By the time we have picture lock he should have a good idea of the music he'll be dropping in.
And the footage looks pretty good too, I must say.
Expect something to see by Valentine's day. CLips or still caps, or something.
