During this fortnight of my oblivion, the following earth-shaking events have captured the conscience of mankind.

Andrew Card resigned as White House Chief of Staff and was replaced by his Mini-Me in a typical Bush non-attempt to respond positively to advice.

Israel elected Ehud Olmert to make another attempt at peace and thereby brought down upon him the impending curse on Israeli peacemakers. Have you noticed that the moment an Israeli Prime Minister takes sincere, successful action toward peace, they are struck down by some otherworldly occurrence of fate? Rabin shakes hands on the White House lawn and is assassinated. Peres, the one Israeli leader who you can trust to always be fair loses his party. Barak jumps with gusto on the peace train and is hammered in the next election. Sharon puts behind him a lifetime of warmongering to hand over Gaza and now he's in a coma after a freak stroke. In case you didn't know, Ehud Olmert is starring in the new Superman movie coming out this May.

Everybody is still fumbling with Iran even as Bush fails again, this time with his team messing up on the Moussaoui case. This week in Salon, Sidney Blumenthal has a great article comparing Bush's and Hoover's similar responses to criticism. You see, until our friend George came along, Herbert Hoover was considered the biggest presidential foul-up in the past hundred years. You will notice that this sounds eerily familiar: in June 1930 he announced that, "The Depression is over," and then proceeded to veto public works and unemployment insurance. It says it all when the current American president is given the nod over Hoover's Depression denial as the most blind and rigid chief executive for a century.

Teri Hatcher is going out with Ryan Seacrest, not George Clooney as the tabloids at Oscartime supposed. You know you're on the B-list when you score a major actress and everybody thinks George did it.

Joey seems to have disappeared again after one new episode and Brad, Angelina, Jen, Nick and Jessica are, oh, who cares.

Coming up tomorrow, Sharon Stone returns as Catherine Tramell in a much-anticipated sequel that will either mark her comeback at 40-something or the formal end of her career.

In their final attempt to stave off eradication from the popular consciousness, the gay cowboys release their DVD next Tuesday, a month less a day after their party really ended.

Oil is up, CNN has upped their home page to 1024x768, and the pandemic hasn't struck yet.

If you are wondering why I have been absent the last two weeks it is because I have been moving. Finally, however, things are beginning to settle down and I expect to be slowly resurfacing with new entries here on the blog. Other than moving, I haven't done very much else in the past two weeks, other than see Inside Man and start a couple of new books. The real event for me, though, is unpacking my books, 400 of which I brought home with me from Italy a year ago and kept in storage. Hopefully this means that I can now start to write and post the book reviews for whose purpose I created this web site in the first place.

This is the fourth time in four years that I have moved, and I think I am getting it right. I am repacking all my remaining storage, and next time moving should be easy.

Stay tuned right here for a slow reawakening over the next couple of weeks.

V for Vendetta is the latest in the string of graphic novels vaulted to the screen, and is the most hyped movie of the year so far. But whereas Sin City and Running Scared claimed only to be Frank Miller's imagination set in motion, and Aeon Flux and Ultraviolet were only ever meant to be action thrillers, V for Vendetta wants to be more, something more intelligent, a political commentary in an age of terrorism and jeopardized civil rights. It is billed as "An uncompromising vision of the future from the creators of The Matrix Trilogy." I found it extremely disappointing, therefore, that it only succeeds in being just another screenwritten graphic novel.

Twenty years ago the United States disintegrated in a chain of events beginning with a misjudged Middle-eastern war, and having turned inward on itself England embarked on totalitarianism. Now a terrorist with style will save his people by sowing too much chaos for the government to control through an intelligent program of popular empowerment. V blows up ancient buildings in inspiring fireworks displays, exposes the government's lies by commandeering Big Brother's media network for his own eloquent purposes, and conducts a campaign of serial justice against high profile figures. He also saves a twenty-something girl from a group of government bad guys, adopts her, and then partly through charm, partly through collaboration and partly through torture frees her from herself and makes her a terrorist, sorry, a freedom fighter, just like himself. And yet through it all, we feel sorry and keep on rooting for the compelling figure who is V.

Right at the very end he fulfills his destiny by bringing down the government, blasting the Houses of Parliament to the beat of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and giving the country back to its people.

Since we never see Hugo Weaving's face, Natalie Portman is the de facto star of the movie, and V for Vendetta proves that she can headline her own film. After her Oscar-nominated role in Closer and now this, the little girl whom Jean Reno died for is on her way to the A-list. Before long, Natalie Portman is going to be a major star.

V for Vendetta is a fun film to go and see, but it is something you are more likely to expect from the creators of The Matrix: Revolutions than the creators of The Matrix itself.

Now that I have been unconscionably flippant about the worst criminal act and human tragedy of the second millennium, let's return to the issue in all its severity.

Most of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany were labour camps attached to German industry, such as production sites for building materials like bricks, gravel, steel, armaments and other war products such as shoes made by the Bata shoe factory. Many evolved into extermination camps. By 1944, there were 385 concentration and extermination camps in total under the supervision of Heinrich Himmler.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, near Cracow in Poland, was initially a prisoner of war camp for Russian prisoners of the Eastern Front. But Himmler was an intelligent man, and he soon realized that his concentration of cheap, captive labour would be attractive to IG Farben, the third largest company in the world, and he arranged with them to build a factory to take advantage of it. It was never completed and instead the camp turned into the largest extermination camp of the war, with 1,250,000 deaths.

Only a few camps were founded purely as extermination sites for the Jews of Europe. They were:

Sobibor (Poland) 200,000 killed
Treblinka (Poland) 750,000 killed
Belzec (Poland) 550,000 killed, and
Kulmhof (Wartheland, now Poland) 150,000 killed.

The most infamous of the remaining camps were Dachau (near Munich), Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen (in Oranienburg, a brickmaking centre near Berlin), Mauthausen (near Linz, Austria), Majdanek (near Lublin, Poland), Buchenwald (near Weimar), Gross-Rosen, Neuengamme (near Hamburg), Ravensbruck, and Lichtenburg (a women's camp between Bayreuth and Weimar).

My grandfather was in one of the British Army divisions that liberated Belsen.

For those whose families never actually suffered in the camps, the real horror of the Nazi crimes is that most of the people who committed them were just ordinary Joes doing their ordinary jobs. And if Joe next door is capable of such consummate evil, then maybe any of us are. In her famous articles in the New Yorker on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt revealed that Eichmann was not a flamboyant mass murderer as everyone wanted to believe, nor the demonic monster of everyone's imagination: he was a bland functionary whose life consisted of pushing paper and carrying out the administrative drudgery of an ordinary bureaucracy. The primary difference is that his employer was in the business of exterminating people and he had no problem doing his job. She called it "the banality of evil."

Another author has written of the men who designed and built Auschwitz that none of them were born to be mass murderers: "They inched their way to iniquity."

Given that this week saw the death of one mass murderer, here is an off-colour joke about another.

[Warning: This will probably be offensive to several million people, so read on at your own risk.]

One day Adolf Hitler wanted to know when he was going to die, and so he called one of his German soothsayers to ask the question. The gentleman came and said, "Oh, Herr Führer, if you really want to know that, you need to ask the world's greatest soothsayer." "Who is that?" asked Hitler. "His name is Moshe Shalom, and he is in Auschwitz, but he is going to be executed tomorrow." So Hitler says, "Alright, send him here today, and if he gives me a good answer I will spare his life." And so Moshe Shalom arrives in Berlin and is brought in front of the Führer, and the question is asked. "Herr Führer," says Moshe Shalom, "I can see that you are going to die on a Jewish holiday." "I see," says the Führer, "but which day will that be?" And Moshe Shalom says, "Herr Führer, any day that you die will be a Jewish holiday."

If anyone would like an apology, please ask and I will be more than happy to provide one.

As much as I tried to pretend that The Hills Have Eyes constituted a satisfactory movie-going experience for one evening, I just couldn't bring myself to believe it. So after the closing credits last night, I went back to the ticket machine and bought one for the late showing of Failure to Launch, a romantic comedy starring Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker.

Trip is still living at home at the age of thirty-five, and so his fed-up parents hire Paula, a domestic interventionist whose specialty is simulating the romantic experience that many young men need in order to finally build the confidence necessary to leave home. What follows is a fun comedy full of all the satisfying twists and turns, mistakes and slip-ups that you pay for when you go to see a romantic comedy.

But in addition to the regular, Failure to Launch has surprises, including a modest number of hysterical slap-stick situations which are all the funnier for being so out of place. It starts with the attack of the chipmunk and being bitten by dolphins, and then progresses to a climax when they take a bb-gun to the mockingbird. And don't forget the priceless scene when they chat about Luke taking only what he has with him into the cave on Dagobah. The movie is worth it for these scenes alone.

In yet another case this year of a supporting player stealing a film, Zooey Deschanel makes the picture as Paula's roommate Kit, an eccentric, irreverent loner whose storyline could have supported its own movie. Kathy Bates and Terry Bradshaw also shine as Trip's parents. Yes, that's right, Terry Bradshaw. Yes, that's right, he is quite good. No, as you will see, he is no longer in top form, but give the man a break: his last Superbowl was thirty years ago.

I have always thought that Sarah Jessica Parker's best film was L.A. Story, but she does a great job as Paula in Failure to Launch, and after her forced persona in The Family Stone, that is a very good thing.

The Hills Have Eyes is an example of modern dramatic genius, a story of family solidarity in a harsh world, a portrait of a father who will go to any lengths to protect his child.

No, I'm just joking. It sucks. Hollywood has given itself a tough act to follow: the studios will be hard pressed to make a worse film during the remainder of this calendar year.

The movie is based on Wes Craven's 1977 horror film of the same name, where a family on a cross-country trip takes a shortcut through a former nuclear testing ground in New Mexico, and is terrorized by a group of genetically deformed mutant cannibals.

It goes like this: family in a Suburban and renovated Airstream pulls into gas station 200 miles from nowhere; creepy station attendant suggests little-known shortcut; they are mysteriously stranded; dog takes a stroll and is gutted; father walks back to gas station and gets in car without checking the back seat first, is burned at the stake in front of family as a diversion while two mutants attack women in trailer, killing mom and eldest sister and stealing sister's baby. Son-in-law goes looking for baby with baseball bat and beats up a bunch of overinflated sacks of skin. Cool head explosions. Remaining sister and brother defend trailer but bodies stolen and mom munched on. Trailer gets blown up, dad finds baby through bloody ordeal and help of second dog, but leaves loaded gun next to body that is meant to be dead, providing the necessary plot occurrence required for mutant little girl to sacrifice herself for baby's protection by killing mean mutant who looks like Jake Busey. Everybody lives happily ever after.

Save your money.

Ex-Serbian Leader Slobodan Milosevic Dies -- The Washington Post

Read Stephen King's interesting review of the Oscars in Entertainment Weekly here.

One of the best things about his article is the insightful comment from a reader called RobG about the treatment of racism in the movie Crash:

Crash was quite simply a racist movie. Why? Because it's message was that racism is all about relatively powerless people being mean to each other with things like a white person getting upset because a black person is named Shanequa. How absurd. A real movie dealing with real racism would have addressed how people of color are marginalized by society as a whole, by right wing politics, and by racist tax structures that make sure rich white kids go to great public schools while those in poor neighborhoods are falling apart. It would have addressed how 1/3 of young black men are somewhere in the penal system (prison, parole, etc). Black people referencing the Cosby Show? Maybe because that is the only portrayal of black people the white writer could think of. Crash is racist because it tries to say to white people that see all groups are racist too and that we just need to be nicer to each other and conveniently ignore the structural enforcers of racism.

"I am a Titan. A monolith. Nothing can stop me."

If you have heard of it, you probably think Ultraviolet is another weak, futuristic science fiction dystopia that should be avoided. But you would be wrong.

Based on a comic book, Ultraviolet is a futuristic science fiction dystopia, but a very, very good one. Violet lives in an era defined by the fear of disease, much as previous eras were dominated by terrorism. She has Hemoglophasia, an ancient blood virus related to vampirism that has been reawakened in these days and spread like the plague. But the most threatening thing about it is how it endows the infected with superhuman speed, strength and intelligence. Quarantine and segregation turned to extermination, and now humans and the remaining hemophages are at war.

Unlike some films of this sort which couldn't find a competent writer if their box-office receipts depended on it, Ultraviolet bristles with short, resonant dialogue of the kind you find in captioned comics. Milla Jovovich, who gets better and better with each movie, is stunning as she delivers her abbreviated lines with almost Shakespearean dramatic skill. And young Cameron Bright, a bit of an enigma in his dark child roles, is as solemn as ever playing a pre-teen surrogate son whose blood is a deadly weapon.

Ultraviolet introduces fresh new technologies such as dimension compression, which enables Violet to sheath swords and conceal dozens of weapons on her person within invisible spatial dimensions, portable anti-gravity generators that empower motorcycle chases to climb the sides of skyscrapers, and disposable mobile phones that you print out onto paper cards from public kiosks to change your number every sixty seconds.

And if one-versus-seven-hundred gunfights and flaming swords duelling in the dark aren't enough for you, Violet wears the coolest sunglasses since The Matrix.

If you were disappointed by Aeon Flux, don't judge this book by its cover.

Paan, a mouthful of aromatic spices wrapped in a betelnut pepper leaf, is chewed after dinner on the Indian subcontinent. Each paan is popularly given a number to indicate its potency: a fifty paan is stronger than a twenty. Tobacco is sometimes added, and they say that a paan with a high enough number will kill you.

It became clear this weekend that President Musharraf has been chewing too much paan after his feeble plea for a civil nuclear cooperation deal for Pakistan, just like the one President Bush struck with India the day before.

Let's see: India is the world's largest democracy, English-speaking, stable, a major source of skilled graduate students for an America with tanking math and science scores, and an innovative, high-tech economy that will check China's rise. Pakistan is an Islamic nation of 140 million people, in other words an ant next to an elephant, where from his corner store in Islamabad, Dr. A. Q. Khan spent the last twenty years selling nuclear bomb-making equipment and blueprints to North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and Libya.

Mr. Musharraf runs a military dictatorship that is so shaky that he has to appease his populace by making hopeless pleas like this one simply to maintain political support. Once the inevitable happens and the radicals oust him, Pakistan will become the first terrorist supporting government to own its very own nuclear weapons.

Even though Bush's deal will likely start a new Asian arms race, and in spite of the obvious source of Daily Show commentary here, doesn't it sound safer to share nuclear technology with a billion people who all believe in reincarnation?

You can see the article in the New York Times here: Bush Rules Out a Nuclear Deal With Pakistanis. Of course, you have to pay for their archives, so here is a .pdf of the article for when the link inevitably expires.

The little movie that could, did. Crash won Best Picture this year, snatching the honours at the last minute from under the noses of the stunned cast and crew of Brokeback Mountain. Terrence Howard said after the show that, "The most important movie of the decade, I think, is Crash, because of its worldwide social impact." I have said before that we live in an era of the rejuvenation of film, and I think Crash ranks way up there in the most significant films of our century so far.

Beyond the ability of this film to show us how to quit the cowboys, Crash winning this evening says something about which stories are rising in importance in the common mind, and which are falling. Tonight, core issues central to the development of our civilization trumped popular socio-cultural identity politics. Someone on the red carpet said that this is the year Americans learned to think again, and wouldn't that be wonderful if it is true? It's time to go and see Crash again.

Tonight is the Oscar show, of course, and I am going to enjoy having these first impressions recorded for posterity. Besides, it will be a very good writing exercise. And since nobody has invited me over to watch with them this year, nobody is going to disturb me. And so here we go. I will update this entry continuously throughout the night, with the most recent comments at the top. [This order has been reversed for easier reading the day after the Oscars. -- JM]

Note: If you are looking for my Oscar WMD Report, with everything you need to enjoy the show tonight, scroll down. I am afraid it is getting a little bit buried by these two long articles.

6:55 pm -- I decided to watch Live from the Red Carpet on E!, and I am dismayed to see that they are already broadcasting and I have missed some. There's Jessica Alba in a golden dress that looks beautiful. And Naomi Watts in a tan/cream dress with something flowing down the front. That's a scary choice, we'll see how that pans out later.

7:00 pm -- That's Isaac Mitzrahi reporting from the carpet, the fashion designer who groped Scarlett Johansson and looked down Teri Hatcher's dress at the Golden Globes. Let's see if he keeps his hands to himself tonight. Of course, he's gay, which pretty much means that he can walk up to the stage and grope a statue or two tonight.

7:06 pm -- It seems like CityTV in Toronto and Star! are broadcasting E!, CTV is showing something called "Countdown to the Oscars," but I don't know who produces that, and Global will be running Entertainment Tonight's coverage, which doesn't appear to have started yet!

7:13 pm -- After canvassing the offerings, I am going to stick with E!, until ET decides to get its act together and start broadcasting. There's George Clooney. So far Jessica Alba gets the prize for best dress: she might run away with it tonight. Too bad Playboy didn't wait until next week to lie and steal their way to a picture of her for their cover. Isaac thinks Keira is leading so far, with an eggplant-coloured dress. Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are hand-in-hand. Jessica is in Versace; and she's keeping her distance form Isaac. Did you know they have their publicists here to make sure they look right on the carpet?

Brokeback Mountain is a movie about forbidden love that is the tear-jerker of the year--at least that's what everybody seems to be falling over each other to proclaim. Yeah, big deal. The truth is that Brokeback Mountain is here because someone has finally done a movie about gay cowboys that isn't just about being gay, and that is considered enough of an artistic achievement to vault it to postmodern superstardom. In reality, Brokeback Mountain minus the gayness of the cowboys is Memoirs of a Geisha, a good dramatic film with six nominations that nobody cares about since they are all for technical and editing achievements. Remember: no gay cowboys equals no best picture nomination squared. Next year, expect a best picture Oscar to be awarded to a group of feminist penguins who choose to stay home and cook.

Crash is this year's little movie that could, and over the last two weeks it has been huffing and puffing its way to a possible upset. Crash is a story about the intricacies of racism, and how they conspire to weave a tapestry of lives in Los Angeles. But beyond that the film is hard to describe. I saw it last summer, and it stunned me right from the beginning with its two black youth complaining about how they are always misunderstood and stereotyped, right before they pull out a gun and hold up the District Attorney. Raising its arguments like a signpost, Crash is full of memorable scenes, heartrending conflicts, great performances from a brilliant ensemble cast and a realistic portrayal of America's most challenging issue. Crash deserves to win.

Capote keeps getting better as more time passes from the day I saw it. Although I didn't think so at the time, it truly deserves to be in the running. I mean, everyone knew that Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance was going to be awesome, but who could have predicted that the film was going to be, too? Capote is the story of a self-centered writer who gets the opportunity of a lifetime to demonstrate his genius thanks to a family being massacred in Kansas. If that sounds callous, just watch Truman Capote exploit everybody in order to write one of the most important books of the century. See him manipulate the situation, lie repeatedly to the simple-minded killer, take advantage of the traumatized town and use all his friends. Where do the ethical limits of artistic creation lie? Where does an artist's responsibility to society begin and end? And all he can do at Harper Lee's triumphant movie premiere is complain about how the government is torturing him because they keep granting stays of execution to the murderers. You see, he can't finish his book until he has an account of the hangings to furnish his final pages. Why doesn't anyone seem to care about what he's going through?

What's so engaging about Munich are the moral compromises that the protagonists go through in killing eleven supposed terrorists in cold blood and trying to justify it to themselves. There are many opinions on this film, one of the most surprising of which is that it has apparently made more Israelis sign up for Mossad. I don't get it. The quote from the movie that stands out for me is when Avner's mother explains to him how proud she is of what he is doing since, "They aren't going to give us anything, so we must take it." And for some reason this is a popular view in Israel. Why is this something to be proud of? If this was a story about central Europe in the 1930s, fine, but it's not. As far as the film goes, it would have been better without so much violence, and minus the gratuitous sex scenes that are made up to be meaningful moments of self-discovery. And what would Spielberg be without something completely unbelievable? In this film it is the scene in the safe house when both our Mossad team and the PLO show up and stay together for a couple of days, giving Steven a nice, clean canvas for some political discussion. The thing is, the PLO think the Mossad are ETA, the Basque terrorist group. Wouldn't they have known that they were talking to Israelis and not Spaniards? Well, we love Spielberg, and you can't have one without the other.

Good Night, and Good Luck is the most unique film of the year not to have gay cowboys in it. George Clooney deserves the Oscar for Best Director, and only seeing Brokeback Mountain lose is closer to my heart than seeing George win. David Strathairn wins Best Actor in any year but this year. Filmed entirely in monochrome, it has virtually no score. Directing that kind of movie in our media saturated era of surround sound and immersive environments is no mean feat, let alone illuminating the complex relationships between fear, justice and freedom that Clooney does with insight and conviction.

Other than Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck is my Best Picture choice.

Don't tell me you are surprised. What other topic did you expect me to choose to write about today?

So let's say you've got your food and drink, friends to watch with, you've left work early enough to see the red carpet, and you have brushed up on recent newsworthy events in preparation for Jon Stewart to take everybody down a notch. Now what do you need? Intelligence! Not intelligence as in mental ability--we are talking about the Oscars here--but as in the stuff George W. has a lot of after bugging your phone for the last five years. Here is your Oscar intelligence report. Fully guaranteed by George Tenet, it provides everything you will need either to be an informative host or to sound smarter than your neighbours, depending on your particular bilateral or multilateral outlook on life. Colin Powell look-alike spokesperson sold separately, but very cheap.

I think the best list of nominees is the one done by the Academy themselves. You can find the official List of Nominees here. If you want to print it out, you can take the .pdf right off my site here: Printable Oscar Ballot. Some movies this year were produced by mobile film studios situated in buses and train cars, but to the best of my knowledge they have been left out of the nominations since the Academy has determined that they are not real.

See how each nominee has fared during awards season with Entertainment Weekly's Oscar 2006 Cheat Sheet, complete with the specs on their placing in ten different awards contests leading up to tonight.

Do you have money on tonight's proceedings? If so, check the Oscar Betting Odds for each nominee in each category from up to twenty on-line bookmakers.

And last but not least, Oscar Night Buzzword Bingo. This is just like the bingo we use in company boardrooms that we know by a ruder title. It's good for those in your party who really don't want to watch the Oscars, but can be convinced if you make it sound fun and stupid. It will work especially well for your friends in the Army reserves.

In this month’s Harper’s, editor Lewis Lapham explores “The Case for Impeachment: Why we can no longer afford George W. Bush” (March 2006, p. 27). Lapham discusses the report compiled by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich) which he presented to the House of Representatives on 18 December. In his speech, Conyers called for an investigation into impeachable offenses, and while it passed without much comment at the time, Lapham argues that during the last two months the dangerous "I-word" has been heard more commonly around Washington.

Here are two excerpts from Lapham’s essay which either sounded very interesting to me or caught my attention because of their flair for rhetoric. Regardless of what you think about George W. Bush or Lewis W. Lapham, the essay makes for good reading.

Before reading the report, I wouldn’t have expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don’t know why we would run the risk of not impeaching the man. We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country’s good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world’s evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation’s wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies. In a word, a criminal—known to be armed and shown to be dangerous. Under the three strikes rule available to the courts in California, judges sentence people to life in jail for having stolen from Wal-Mart a set of golf clubs or a child’s tricycle. -- p.32

“We’re at war,” the President said on December 19, “we must protect America’s secrets.”

No, the country isn’t at war, and it’s not America’s secrets that the President seeks to protect. The country is threatened by free-booting terrorists unaligned with a foreign government or an enemy army; the secrets are those of the Bush Administration, chief among them its determination to replace a democratic republic with something more safely totalitarian. The fiction of permanent war allows it to seize, in the name of the national security, the instruments of tyranny.

The question posed to the assembly is whether enough people care, and, if so, how do they respond when, in the language of the Declaration of Independence, “a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” Although the abuses and usurpations are self-evident, obvious to anybody who takes the trouble to read the newspapers, the Bush Administration makes no attempt to conceal the Object evinced in the design of its purpose, because it counts on the romanticism as well as on the apathy of an American public reluctant to recognize the President of the United States as a felon. Who wants to believe such a thing, much less acknowledge it as a proven fact? -- p.34

Bruce Willis is a beat-up, alcoholic old cop, Jack Mosley, who has to make a routine trip at the end of his shift to transport a witness to court. When he stops for booze along the way everything goes to hell, and he realizes that getting 16 blocks in 118 minutes while staying alive isn't exactly going to be a cakewalk.

Jack Mosley is a character who could have been in a cartoon, but instead is played with grit and earnestness by Willis and becomes a real, serious human being. Mos Def plays Eddie Bunker, the witness, who talks like Truman Capote but probably won't win an Oscar for it. He is either a hardened criminal trying to play Mosley, or an innocent, petty thief who only wants to open a bakery in Seattle to make birthday cakes for kids. Regardless of who he is, he really makes the film, both through his compassion and his ongoing, self-directed conversation that is actually quite a lot of fun.

One thing that is really nice about 16 Blocks is how it shows the kindness and gentleness that is what I have always noticed about Manhattan. In Toronto, or God forbid, Europe, if you say hello to a stranger on the street, they will often either avoid you or reply with a curt politeness. In New York I always found that I could strike up a conversation. Most movies dwell on the toughness of New York City, you know, with it being Babylon and all, but 16 Blocks reveals a softer side. From Eddie on down to the cop in the subway and the Japanese tenant, you can see that a lot of good people live there.

I have had a beef with director Richard Donner ever since he exiled the gods from Troy for no apparent reason and turned Thetis, the political genius who was the first Titan to throw in her lot with Zeus, into an absent-minded lady doing her washing in the shallows. When I saw that he directed this movie, I half-expected him to carry on his massacre of fundamentals, replacing all the yellow cabs in New York with bicycle rickshaws and making his policemen carry bows and arrows. Thank goodness he didn't.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and our buddy George today agreed to cooperate on nuclear development. With his usual deep understanding of the processes and possibilities in a democratic lawmaking system, President Bush said that he is looking forward to working with Congress to make the deal possible--by changing decades of law. Maybe he will demand it.

Critics are asking why India, which never signed the non-proliferation treaty, should be rewarded for its renegade actions. Obviously, these people don't know much about India.

Why should India be allowed to bend the rules? Because that's what it means to be an Indian.

Sisyphus is the figure in classical mythology who spends his time perpetually pushing a rock up a hill, only to have it roll down again every time. In other words, he is the epitome of futility.

Likewise, today is the first day in, what, 37 days that I have not been able to find anything that can motivate me to write. So instead, I have decided to steal something! This is from Hepzebah, over at Ludricious, a blog I found through my friend Corey. I can't seem to post a comment on her blog, so hopefully she won't mind me stealing this great story about a Chinese man who chops down a tree.

Here is something to make even Sisyphus take a vacation.

There was a great story (apparently true) told at my retreat, about a Zen teacher from China who moved to Tennessee. He bought a little old house with a big old oak tree on the front lawn. His neighbours told him, "That tree's gonna blow down. You gotta chop it down."

He nodded, in his inscrutable Chinese way, and said, "Good. I chop."

The next morning he went to the local hardware store and bought a hatchet. One of his neighbours came by and saw him chopping away at the biiiiig tree with the little weeny hatchet, and said, "Don't do it that way. It'll take ages. I'll go get my chainsaw and have the tree down in half an hour."

But the old man shook his head and said, "I chop."

His neighbour rolled his eyes, but left him alone, figuring that after a few hours of this futile chopping, the old man would have had enough and would come asking to borrow his chainsaw.

Instead, every morning at 9 am, for exactly an hour, the whole neighbourhood would hear a steady chop chop chop from the old man's front yard. It got so that if he missed a morning they'd come over to see if he was okay. He went from being "that crazy Chinaman" to being part of the community.

Eventually he explained to some of his new friends that this is how he taught meditation: every day you chop away just a little more, and sooner or later a great tree falls.

Well, after months of this it became clear that the great tree was due to fall. On the last morning the neighbours all gathered around to witness the last few hatchet chops. (I visualize a neighbourhood jamboree, with the womenfolk bringing sandwiches and jello molds, and the menfolk leaning on the fences and offering advice, but that's pure invention.) At last, with a mighty creak and splintering noise, the tree crashed to the ground.

After the cheering died down, someone asked the teacher what he would do now.

"Make firewood" was his reply.