Old FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

How to respond to the AMPTP trying to break the writers union? By turning around and trying to break the AMPTP instead. “As you may know, bargaining on a multi-employer basis through the AMPTP is an option for the WGA, not a legal requirement,” wrote the Guild’s negotiating committee to the membership. “Each signatory employer is required to bargain with us individually if we make a legal demand that it do so.” Come this Monday, that’s just what they’re going to do.

I’ve mentioned it before. How the AMPTP campaign against the WGA is one of dissembling and disinformation. “Despite what the AMPTP and its anonymous flunkies would have people focus on,” I wrote, “the ‘average’ writer salary isn’t useful information of any sort.” Well, they’re at it again, unable to let go of tactics which depend entirely upon people being too stupid to know they’re being played.

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Earlier this year, I posited that Cloverfield might be the first post-9/11 monster movie. “Much of the material we later saw of the 9/11 attacks and aftermath came from such home video cameras,” I wrote. “I don’t think that Abrams going that route with Cloverfield is an accident. Or, at least, I hope that is isn’t.” Looking at the new five-minute clip (embedded below), it seems clearer than ever. The end of the sequence features people huddled inside a store to escape a rolling cloud of smoke, dust, and debris bearing down on them. Once inside, they watch said cloud black out the street outside. There is, in point of fact, a fairly famous piece of home video footage from 9/11 of exactly that.

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It seems that recent events in the writers strike remind the AMPTP “of the old lawyers’ adage: When the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When the law is on your side, argue the law. And when you don’t have either the law or the facts on your side, you pound the table”. In psychology, this is what would be termed projection, as borne out by the demonstrable truth that the studios had planned their “hissy fit” of last Friday well in advance. They are rapidly beginning to remind me, for example, of the local business community and the way it conducted itself while trying to ramrod through Major Tom’s boneheaded Curiously-Strong Mayor proposal.

According to Theo today, I am “among the rock stars of Portland bloggers”. Last night I received email from Steve Woodward informing me not to be “surprised” should I see myself on the cover of the Living section. Sure enough, they pulled out a file photo from when they wrote a front-page profile of me, back in my Portland Communique days. Oddly enough, I recently heard from the reporter who wrote that profile, looking for pointers to books on Portland history. Interesting timing, since we are just over one week away from the fifth anniversary of the first post on that site.