~ is mr. bin laden trying to impress someone with his unfashionable lateness, co-opting the idea which mr. haggard had already informed us, twenty years previously?

  “the u.s. government will lead the american people in…into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”
    -osama bin laden, 2001

  “are we rollin’ downhill like a snowball headed for hell?”
    -merle haggard, 1981

~ perhaps it should also be noted here that mr. haggard has been named ‘man of the year’ for bakersfield, california, while mr. bin laden lost his chance at time magazine’s version of that title to the fascist mayor of new york city.

~ to celebrate the 2nd anniversary of our log, the angry red planet has added a dozen or so log images to the archived logs, which you can enter with the menu at the bottom of this window. as you attempt to discover the new images, enjoy the rereading and reliving of our – and your – past victories and defeats.

~ tonight in new york city, there is a town hall meeting concerning what should be done with the site where the world trade center once stood. the meeting is from 6pm-9pm at stuyvesant high school [w] at the corner of west and chambers. you can go there to tell them that you find it offensive to consider the placement of office or commercial tenancy space upon the land where so many lives were ended and where bodies still rest, just so a few businessmen get their investments returned. else, if you can accept the idea of working on a spreadsheet and shopping for shoes on a site where thousands of people were killed, then at least you can let them know that the form the structure takes should not be decided by a corporation of businesses who will profit from them, but instead by the people of the city who will pay for them, share them, and use them.

~ according to today’s cnn.com poll, 19% of internet yokels who play polls think that somalia should be the next target in the united states of america’s war on terror, a distant second place to iraq’s 59%. seems like most of them still have a hard-on for iraq after ten years of saddam hussein’s refusal to either die or stop mocking the united states. somalia probably got a few points of support as a candidate in that it might make an easy target in that it doesn’t have an army to face the u.s., but we wonder if the reports that somalias laughed at the actors pretending to be american soldiers getting killed in the ridley scott docudrama ‘black hawk down’ would help them pull ahead. what is more likely, that the bush cabinet fed the story about the somali glee american at death to drum up american hatred for somalis, or that mr. hussein hired some folks to act like riled up somalis in the hope that some attention is taken away from what he’s got going.

~ time for an aclu take action! aclu action update: oppose attempts to allow unchecked domestic spying! click here to read more and to send a fax to john ashcroft, an attorney general who doubtlessly has much concern for input from the aclu in particular or from american citizens in general.

~ we have made a couple of mistakes recently: ‘nurse betty’ and ‘free enterprise’

~ as we have mentioned previously, some aspects of our lives are still un-digital. anyone wishing to donate the proper equipment to alter this should get in touch. we recommend donating one or more of the following:
canopus ADVC-100 [w]
sony dvmcda2dv [w]
dazzle hollywood DV-bridge [w]
ads tech USB Instant DVD [w]

~ the number of visits that can be made to westside supermarket before the angry red planet rips off some heads and defecates down some necks has reached the threshold of 10.

~ rasterweb [w] tangentially shares our dilemma about the new ‘digital hub’ being offered by apple. we don’t see any breakthroughs being made for those of use without and ipod or a digital video camera. regardless of all the digital satellites that you need to buy before the imac begins its function as your digital hub, when you do get them all, being able to rip and burn cds and dvds does not seem like the most productive thing for a computer to be doing. the new imac is a step down from the old one; now it is just an entertainment center; consumer electronics packaged sleekly seems like nothing progressive to us. if this imac – or any ‘computer’ – was hidden inside the wall with the fusebox and simultaneously delivered to our kitchen a cake recipe from vegweb [w], duplicate our friend’s franco nero dvd while it was being watched in the rumpus room, and printed and collated 1000 copies of our latest publication in the office…that would be a digital hub for us.

~ by the way, ‘american history x’ and ‘bad lieutenant’ turned out to be rife with beatings and murders.

~ r.i.p. john buscema. the library at redan elementary school was missing its copy of ‘how to draw comics the marvel way’ from 1981-1985 because it was getting worn out with #2 pencils over sheets of onion skin by a certain member of the angry red planet – who never did learn how to draw that way…

~ our attempts to view less violent films have ended in failure. though we thoughtfully picked ‘the french connection’, we could not miss the unmistakable tinges of violence throughout the film; in a far worse case, we, in a moment of extreme weakness, demeaned ourselves with a viewing of ‘con-air’. our casual tally of 23 on-screen deaths (not counting the dozens of trained soldiers in armored cars with automatic weapons killed by slovenly cons in abandoned cars, and not counting the untold hundreds or thousands who would have perished as a plane plowed through cars and pedestrians on the las vegas strip) notwithstanding, ‘con-air’ would otherwise still make it into the top 10 worst things with which we have wasted our time. we hope that tonight’s viewing of ‘american history x’ is a more fruitful – and non-violent – expenditure of time.

~ go find a copy of marvel’s ‘a moment of silence’ and see if you don’t also find yourself a blubbering mass on the floor.

~ our kingdom for the first person to explain to us how we have accumulated so much crap in our offices.

~ movies since x-mas:
‘easy rider’
‘fistful of dollars’
‘for a few dollars more’
‘the good, the bad, and the ugly’
‘casualties of war’
‘guadalcanal diary’

‘guadalcanal diary’ had the most on screen deaths, which were countless; ‘easy rider’ had the fewest, with only three. the most lives taken by a single man would have to be in ‘fistful of dollars’, with the distinction going to the man with no name, clint eastwood. in each of the eastwood films, there is one woman who serves as either a pawn between men or as a tool to aid in the destruction of a man. one actress is featured in ‘casualties of war’; she is raped, stabbed, shot, and then she falls from a train trestle. women fare the best, respectively, in ‘easy rider’; they appear and powerful matrons of a commune, as lovingly cared for prostitutes, and as teenagers who are not abused by jack nicholson – whereas they would have suffered at his hands in ‘real life’. not a single woman appears on the screen in ‘guadalcanal diary’. we would like to move into more light-hearted fare, but ‘groundhog day’ is not yet available at our local dvd lessor.

~ the traditional new year’s day essentials used to be simmered on the stove for hours before gathering with family and friends for an afternoon meal. this year, we opted to choke down the lukewarm morsels alone, seasoning them, of course, only with our tears of shame.