Back From the Dead

To adapt the famous (and possibly apocryphal) quote from Mark Twain, “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

At least one factor in my extended absence has been my utter disillusionment with the political arena since last month’s debacle in the Senate. I was going to say something dramatic, like the Senate vote on the flag-burning amendment was the last straw, but I don’t think it was anything quite so poetically justifiable. I just gradually came to the realization that there are no honest men — or honest motives — in American politics. Not a single, solitary one. To appropriate another quote, “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.” (Ten points to the one who remembers the source of that one.)

So I’m not playing the game any more. I’m done. Not going to lend any semblance of legitimacy to the cesspool of corruption by settling for a “lesser evil.” That’s not necessarily to say that I won’t take the occasional potshot here, but in terms of political debate being the cornerstone of this blog’s existence, those days are gone.

Unfortunately, that leaves a bit of a vacuum here, but I’ll worry about filling that as I go. For now, I did want to make a couple of quick announcements.

• Tohubohu’s short film “Quite Contrary” has been picked up for inclusion in the DC Shorts film festival. Pretty damned exciting, if you ask me. My sincerest congratulations to director Nello DeBlasio, producer Bjorn Munson, and the entire cast and crew. The film screens on Friday, September 15 at 4:00 p.m. at Landmark’s E Street Cinema.


• I’ve become pretty active in a poker chip design competition over at ChipTalk.net. Sidepot Gaming Company is getting ready to produce an ultra-high-end clay chip line (a level above their already-elegant InPlay Clay line), and they decided to partner with ChipTalk to design the chips from the ground up. After an extensive process of selecting chip colors and edge spots, they moved on to the design of the inlays themselves (the center graphics on the chips, for those of you who aren’t avid players or chip collectors). At this stage in the competition, out of 25 submitted designs, they’re down to the “final four” — and my design is one of those four. This week the four finalists are tweaking the chip colors and edge spots to best complement our specific inlays, and if everything stays on schedule, we should have the final results by the end of this week. You can follow along at the official competition forum, though you won’t be eligible to vote (in order to prevent ballot-box stuffing, they’ve limited eligibility to those who were already members of the ChipTalk community before the inlay portion of the contest). My moniker’s “Magus 23.”


• Patton Oswalt is coming back to Virginia for another engagement at The State Theatre in Falls Church. If this performance is anything like last year’s, it’ll be absolutely hysterical (and it’s a decent venue to boot).


• Pam’s MotherReader blog has taken off like wildfire — within a select audience, of course, but still. Her relative success has been nothing short of astonishing. Go give it a read.


• Clerks 2 kicked ass. Got a chance to see it with my old college buddies John and Dan out in Annapolis, and it most certainly did not disappoint. If you haven’t gone out to see it yet, I highly recommend that you do so — assuming, of course, that you’ve got a strong tolerance for the juvenile humor couched in semi-respectability that characterizes all of Kevin Smith’s pictures.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for now. Entries may be coming forth a little more sporadically, but I’ll try not to let my loss of purpose completely derail this avenue for communication. Sometimes it’s enough to just keep going — let the purpose take care of itself.

Technorati tags: Politics, Film, Tohubohu, ChipTalk, Patton Oswalt, MotherReader, Kevin Smith, Clerks 2