"Hell no, we won't go", say civil servants

I hear that if you join the army then refuse to follow orders, you can be punished pretty severely. Of course, if you follow an order that's later shown to be wrong, you can also be punished pretty severely. I haven't heard so much about punishments for issuing unjust orders, though...

Anyway, it seems that desk jockeys are also balking at being sent to Iraq. While the article mentions possible punishments for diplomats refusing this posting, it doesn't really mention what the government will do if they can't get enough people to keep the Baghdad embassy open. Will they pull people from other, cushier posts? Start drafting armed servicemen/national guard types to fill in behind the (heavily armored and shielded) desks there? Why isn't there some munitions company working on some sort of military robot diplomacy machine?

Corporate incoherence

I've been doing a little freelance transcription work lately. That means I get sent a piece of video and then I write down everything that gets said in the video, and the time that someone says it. Then the script I've made gets sent to an office in Tokyo where it's translated into Japanese so that the video can be subtitled.

I'm sure that anyone who took that class for screen writing who remembers the exercise on real-life dialogue will back me up on this, but most people rarely speak in complete sentences. "So, like, when it's, yeah, like what they were saying when that happened, but, not like, yeah?" is pretty common in the European Tour behind-the-scenes videos I get sent. But even the corporate videos may be worse. Take this gem:

There’s still some variability, both in approach and in the caliber of people, to improving consistency would be a real boon, to Schmucktronics.

Except for the company name, that was all verbatim. And it came from an upper-echelon executive. This clown probably has an MBA, but he can't string a sentence together that actually means anything.

What really kills me is that these executive welcome videos are almost identical, in terms of theme and content, to the video I was shown when I started at KFC in high school. Exact same rah-rah bullshit, only instead of power ties everyone was wearing matching polyester polo shirts and pin-on name tags.

Punk as FUCK

Click here to see a picture of a Hiller Platform, a one-man flying disc designed and tested by the US Army in the 1950s. Now click here to see one that a guy built in his garage and flew in a couple of festivals this year.

Flatpack furniture? An Old El Paso Fajita Dinner kit? You've edited together a swell home movie with flare effects and your own clever closing credits?

Bullshit. Talk to me about Do It Yourself when you've slipped the surly bonds of earth in a machine you put together yourself.

Is Fox still looking for pilot ideas?

One of my friends once claimed I lived a sitcom life. At the time I thought it was just commentary on the sort of goofy hi-jinks that tended to happen week by week. But looking at it from another angle, he may have been issuing a prophecy.

See, I'm a deadbeat graduate student prone to cracking bad jokes who likes cartoons and drinking too much, who's moved to England to be with my special lady, a belly-dancing polyglot who works for a major media company. My friends here include the perpetually-slightly-taken aback Londoner, the sassy gal with the northern accent, and the crazy Iranian guy who's always cooking up some new plan or scheme. Also, my next door neighbor is an ancient Chinese lady who speaks without ever using indefinite articles or conjugated verbs, and has repeatedly told me that only thing wrong with the job market here is all the foreigners.

Oh yeah, the old Chinese lady made it a point to tell the American that it was all the foreigners who are ruining the UK job market.

The first season was mostly fish-out-of-water jokes about trying to get acclimated, with lots of cheesy gags about accents and cultural misunderstandings about pants. But for the second season? Well, naturally you need to up the wackiness stakes. Which is why my special lady-friend's sister, the conservation biologist who practices Shorinji Kempo, is moving in with us.

By the way, did I mention they're identical twins? I kid you not, I live with identical twins, I date one, the other practices kicking the crap out of people. Right next door is a crazy old lady who dispenses financial and romantic advice in broken, Charlie Chan English, and I can count on regular calls from my crazy scheming friend can't go a day without breaking in some new idiom he's picked up.

Where's the Burbank kid or Jer-Dogg now that I've finally got a concept to pitch? Forget waiting for a table or being sentenced to be a butler, this is comedy gold, Jerry, it's gold!