A New Project

Memorial Day's for the dead, Veterans Day's for the living. It's weird having two military holidays in our non-military, non-war culture.

Today I sat around and moped a bit more before deciding to enact the plan that I had mentioned this weekend--toss off a really quick script, just to keep writing, to avoid the emptiness that I feel inside.

I wrote 10 pages of a very personal script, probably too personal for it to ever do me much good, but it does have teenagers, which might actually help it in today's marketplace.

Scott gives us the tidbit today that Microsoft's code name for SQL 7.0 is "Rolling Thunder," which was "the operational name of the American bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese."

I sent him mail, giving him one better. At Apple, the guys behind one project wanted to use their code phrase for it in the promotional literature: "The Final Solution." Thankfully, they were talked out of it.

I'm watching Three Days of the Condor (the kind of paranoia movie that was made when we couldn't believe the government as the bad guy, instead of the kind of paranoia movie we have now, where we believe the government is definitely the bad guy, but we're trying to accept that aliens are behind everything). It's pretty good, except for two things:

• Robert Redford keeps calling the CIA, and they can't find him. I keep thinking, Don't they have Caller ID? Or at the very least, a telephone trace?

• Redford, when explaining to Dunaway that he's not such a bad kidnapper after all, says, "What, have I raped you?" As if a woman would automatically give Good Guy points to a man who holds her hostage, but manages to avoid raping her.

• And boy, she does go to bed with him awfully fast--you get the idea it isn't part of a plan to escape from him either. I guess even women--perhaps, especially women--held hostage by Robert Redford get that turned on by him.

I'm always looking at movies like this to see if there's good material there for updating, so when I'm in a meeting with someone and they say, "Hey, got any projects you'd really like to do?" I can say with ease, "I'd like to do an updating of Three Days of the Condor" or "I'd like to do Remains of the Day as a musical...with Jim Carrey as Mr. Stevens!" or something like that.

Career Notes

I began a new project. It may not lead anywhere, but I forge ahead.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

5.3 miles again. It felt good to get out there and get moving.