Vikings vs. Jack Bauer

Do you remember Hagar the Horrible? He's that cute Viking frm the newspaper comic strips. This morning I had this really immersive dream that Hagar the Horrible stared in this dark, violent, intense, and very, very good CGI direct-to-DVD movie. It was more like an actual Norse saga then the Sunday funnies. I basically got to watch an entire commercial-quallity movie in my sleep. Nothing like free entertainment. I was even watching the screening in this very nice room on a big screen, like at a convention or something. After it was over the director gave a speech, and he was this big, muscular guy dressed in a Greek robe with tattoos and those body-modifications implants they put under the skin to create ridges. Not a guy who's going to be directing romantic comedies any time soon.

Yesterday we went and saw Mirrors. I didn't know anything about this movie except that it had Kiefer Sutherland and ghosts coming out of mirrors. It turns out Kiefer plays a depressed, lonely guy who takes a job as an overnight security guard at a huge, dark, burned-out building and then starts getting harassed by the undead. Yeah, that hit a little too close to home for me!

It was a far better movie than I was expecting to be. I was expecting it to be like almost every American horror movie that's come out in the last six years: a cookie-cutter production; sleek and with pretty special effects, but a wafer-thin plot and no real scares. I was pleasantly surprised. Mirrors is a pretty scary movie with good acting and some serious gore in a few places. There were one or two plot holes, and I don't think the ending quite achieved what they were aiming for, but still one of the better American horror films of the current decade.

Otherwise the weekend was spent reading/listening to the works of Richard Matheson, (best American writer no one's heard of,) playing World of Warcraft, and watching Shin-Chan. Fun times.

Writer's Block: Running Things

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Oh boy, a day in der Uberreinigerreich where all my adolescent power fantasies come true. Let's see...

-I'd fix the prison system and I'd fix it hard. You go to prison, you don't get to do drugs. You don't get to be in a gang. You don't get to just eat the taxpayers' food. You go to prison, you're going to be productive and you're going to face what you have done, not learn how to do it better when you get out.

-I'd secure the border by giving border police the resources and manpower that they need. Citizenship for illegals who want it, deportation for those who don't. It's just as simple as that. For unscrupulous employers who exploit illegal labor while keeping citizens unemployed, criminal prosecution. For the drug lords and human traffickers who use illegal immigrants and profit from their misery, well, I can't promise that black ops teams won't find and eliminate them in their countries of origin. But I will deny it in the event it does happen.

-Schools might be even harder to fix than borders and prisons, but I'd start where I feel it matters most: the teachers. Get them decent pay, decent benefits, budgets to meet their supply needs, and whatever incentives I need to provide to get motivated, intelligent, caring people into one of the most important fields in any society.

-I'm not enough of a strategist to know how to win in Iraq and Afghannistan, but I can at least work on getting the Veteran's medical system fixed, particularly in regards to psychiatric care. No more wars that are still claiming lives five, ten, twenty years later.