MIRON

Desperate for a Job? Al-Qaida's Hiring

It boggles the mind how a super power like the United States can't shut down the Al-Qaida when there they are publicly announcing job openings --- not for Osama bin Laden cave sweeper, cave guard, and official beard trimmer --- but for cushy first world jobs like video producers and editors. Jobs that possibly require broadband and Final Cut Pro.

I mean check this out!

London-based Asharq al-Awsat said on its website this week that al-Qaida had "vacant positions" for video production and for editing statements, footage and international media coverage about militants in Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Chechnya and other conflict zones where militants are active.

The paper said the Global Islamic Media Front, an al-Qaida-linked, web-based organization, would "follow up with members interested in joining and contact them via e-mail."

If you're wondering what this job would entail, it might help you to know that

Last month it issued an English-language video on the internet called Jihad Hidden Camera which showed sniping and bombing attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq, and carried comical sound effects as well as laugh tracks.

As for salaries and perks:

The advert does not specify salary amounts, but added: "Every Muslim knows his life is not his, since it belongs to this violated Islamic nation whose blood is being spilled. Nothing should take precedence over this."

Yikes.

Those Red Smurfs

I was in a deep Rip Van Winkle like slumber when Manolo woke me up with this: Smurfs were communists?
Dammit, I always suspected they were so ---  and lo and behold, they were so! I've always wondered about those mushrooms and deep inside I've always known them by their Papa Smurf's choice of hat. Who wears matching red shorts and hats? Never mind that the smurfs were uniformly blue... I think that's literally just their cover! but that red hat...
Anyway thanks Manolo. You're always a surprise, my man.
Thanks for referring me to your favorite communist blogger also. Post on penguins waddling about with eggs between their legs in life and death struggle to keep eggs from freezing in sub zero antartic temperatures absolutely delightful.
In my dreams, I will dress Joe de Veneica as a Penguin and Gloria as a Smurf, toiling the fields to bring mushrooms --- mushrooms for everyone! Told you -- it's a dream.

To All You Nuts

In the news today, an unlikely hero. A 13 year old schoolboy volunteered as today's Citizen Patrol and successfully got his local government to put a lid on an open manhole. I swear to God, the damn thing almost made me cry. These are trying times for the soul and for the handful of heroes still trying to save the world, one manhole at a time.  Here's to you crazy ones.

Watch this clip every time you start to think you must be insane for fighting the status quo. (Think-Different.mov)

Here's to the crazy ones
the misfits, the rebels,
the troublemakers,
the round pegs in the square holes,
the ones who see things differently.

They are not fond of rules
and they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them,
disagree with them
glorify or vilify them.

But the only thing you cannot do is ignore them --
because they change things...they push the human race forward.

And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world,
are the ones who do.

THINK DIFFERENT
a timely and timeless word from the geniuses at apple

(meantime, i hope our geniuses mlq3 and chuck would would recommend ways to speed up download time.)

Chicken Out?

I couldn't believe my eyes first time I saw it. A bloody knife-wielding Col. Sanders about to butcher a chicken -- in broad daylight and in a huge billboard along EDSA. "Kentucky Fried Cruelty," the billboard read. "Live Scalding..."

It must be the heat! Sure enough, the next time I passed EDSA just a few days later, the billboard was gone. What happened? Did the people who put it up chicken out? I'm determined to find out.

It took me no time to trace the billboard to KentuckyFriedCruelty.com, a site put up by PETA or People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals, based in Norfolk, VA.

PETA is "asking KFC to eliminate the worst abuses that chickens suffer on the factory farms and in the slaughterhouses of its suppliers, including live scalding, life-long crippling, and painful debeaking."

The site shows shocking video of "KFC House of Horrors," where workers at an alleged KFC slaughterhouse stomp, kick and slam birds against walls. Another video shows "live birds forced into tanks of scalding hot water while completely conscious and able to feel pain."

Until KFC agrees to do improve its treatment of animals, PETA is calling on consumers to boycott KFC.

That I've got to see. An animal rights victory in this cockfighting dogeating country. If the disappearing billboard is any indication, though, Col. Sanders has already clipped their wings.

Will the real Van Gogh please rise?

We in the television media saw them coming --- kids of a new generation armed to teeth with mini-dvs, laptops that are foldable editing suites, celphones that take video, cameras that shoot like film, all of them coming at us in quick time, riding the trojan horse that is reality tv.

This is great, we said as we hugged our huge betacam SPs. This is Power of the People. Now everyone can be a Spielberg, a Kubrick or a Scorsese.

Alas, it won't be easy.

The technology boom made startlingly new things possible like The Blairwitch Project, Jon Red movies (ASTIG, BOSO), music videos directed by Boom, Lyle Sacris, Robert Quebral, and Louie Ignacio, documentaries by Aureus, Ditsi Carolino, and student films by Chuck Gutierrez and the grads of Mowelfund...

But our high over all things hi-tech comes to a crash as we surf the endless channels of cable. What aired on TV used to be generally air worthy. Now, 90% of the video out there SUCKS.

90% of the time, this is what happens when great videocameras end up in the wrong hands: bad camera work with no creative use of the lens, shakey handheld shots for the sake of getting the effect of shakey handheld shots, no composition, no lighting design, no regard at all for the high craft of storytelling.

Just point and shoot. Just what the label in the box said.

But as the real directors and real cinematographers lament this systematic lowering of standards, I offer this dubious upside: FROM THIS SHIT, WILL GROW THE FLOWERS. AT LEAST THE RARE ROSE WILL SMELL TWICE AS SWEET.