Pay Cuts will Cause Top Executives to Become James Bond Villains

The media reports that cutting the salaries of the highest-paid US executives will cause a "brain drain," forcing executives to leave for greener pastures. But where will they go? Not to a foreign country. They're foreign over there, and the wretched refuse doesn't speak English. These are American executives we're talking about: they only speak American, god dammit!

I've figured out where they're going to end up.

You know the saying: When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns? Well, when highly-paid executives are outlawed, only outlaws will have highly-paid executives.

I'm not talking about religion-based terrorist organizations. Can you imagine Jack Welch running al Qaeda? No, our best and brightest are going to the secular terrorist organizations, like SPECTRE, THRUSH, HYDRA, HIVE, and AIM!

At this very moment, SPECTRE (The Special Executive for Extortion, Counterespionage, Terrorism, Revenge, and, uh, more Extortion) needs new CEO. (The old one, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, has been killed at least three times. HMOs now consider that a pre-existing condition.) How about Enron's Jeffrey Skilling for SPECTRE CEO? A few weeks after the US Supreme Court laughs at his appeal, Jeffrey will be sitting in a secret lair, stroking a white pussy cat and giving Rosa Klebb orders to assassinate a lot of federal prosecutors.

And the mad scientists at AIM (that's Advanced Idea Mechanics, not The American Indian Movement), need someone to lead them. Right now, all they have is a Frankenstein's monster named MODOK, who looks like a floating Mr. Potato Head. AIM needs new leadership. They need Carly Floriana! (Assuming she loses her bid for governor of California, of course.) If Carly can handle Hewlett Packard, she can handle a bunch of lab-bound nerds who haven't even seen a girl in years.

Best of all, THRUSH (The Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity) can bust Bernie Madoff out of prison and put him in charge! THRUSH needs an infusion of cash; they've been broke ever since The Man from UNCLE went off the air. If there's anyone who can generate big bucks through nefarious means, it's Bernie.

(Maybe Bernie can also get the THRUSH minions to stop carrying those stupid walking sticks that shoot sleep gas and bullets. When you're busy Subjugating Humanity, you don't want to get stopped at the metal detector. Of course, if THRUSH is still using the same thugs they had when The Man from UNCLE exited, they probably need canes by now.)

If this scenario doesn't look good to you, call your Congressman and tell him NOT to allow executive pay cuts. After all, when the USSR fell apart, we used US tax dollars to fund Soviet nuclear scientists. We paid them to stay out of trouble, preempting bribes from Lybia and Iran and other wannabe members of the nuke club. Why shouldn't we do the same thing with our homegrown brainiacs?

And if we don't? Well, when armies of radioactive cyber-zombies march down Main Street, you'll know who to blame.

Full Disclosure: Helena Bonham Carter

Earlier this week, the FCC issued new guidelines for bloggers. Yes, the government is reading our blogs (even if no one else is)!

So, to keep me out of Guantanamo, let me give full disclosure: my negative review of the latest Terminator movie was entirely due to the fact that Helena Bonham Carter refuses to sleep with me.

That's right. Terminator: Salvation is the best movie since Citizen Kane. But Helena Bonham Carter has a small role in it, and I couldn't control my jealousy. I've wanted her ever since I heard her orgasmic noises in Fight Club!

So I've come clean. Now go rent Terminator: Salvation. I swear, when Stanley Kubrick died, he left all his talent to McG.

And if you don't hear from me, it's because you can't blog from Guantanamo.

Happy 80th Birthday, Da!

Even though he doesn't read this blog, I want to wish my father a Happy 80th Birthday.

Of course, "happy" may not be the right word. My mother has Alzheimer's, and my father takes care of her every day. I help out, so I know what a tough job that is. I spent just 5 hours tending to her yesterday, and I was exhausted by it.

So I hope he has as good a birthday as humanly possible, under the circumstances.

Chirps

I had to get up early this morning, so I needed to get my sleep. About two hours after I finally dropped off, I was awakened by a noise in my apartment. A chirp.

A cricket? The old house I live in is on a hill. My front door is on the ground floor, but my bedroom, in the back, is on the second floor. (And this is not a two-story apartment. It’s all on one level, but the ground drops away from that level in the back.)

A cricket I could ignore, but it seemed unlikely that a cricket could’ve made it up to a second-floor bedroom.

I listened. Another chirrup. It was too regular, too automated. No cricket: a machine.

Wearily, I forced myself out of bed. I have two smoke detectors, one carbon monoxide detector, and innumerable other gizmos. I had even gotten a new cell phone that very day. It was charging a room away: could it be chirping that it was fully recharged?

I checked: no noise from the new cell. So it was probably a detector, its batteries low, emitting a warning. I make it a point to change the detector batteries every spring, but perhaps I forgot one.

I thought I heard the beep from the bedroom smoke detector. So I opened it and took out the battery, and got back into bed.

Chirp.

I got out of bed again, restored the battery to the smoke detector, and went to the next closest unit – the carbon monoxide detector. I took it off the wall and held it in my hands until I heard it chirp. This was it: the malefactor, the culprit, the thief of sleep!

I removed the batteries. One of the AA batteries had leaked; I had to clean the corrosion off the contacts. I checked that the replacement batteries were fully charged, installed them, and put the detector back on the wall.

Unfortunately, as much as I needed sleep, I couldn’t seem to doze off. I ended up reading for two hours until I could get back to sleep.

And the last thing I saw as I fell asleep was the carbon monoxide detector, happily sampling my air for signs of poison.

Good-bye, Mr. Movie

Last night I was driving home from managing the South Jersey Comedy Cabaret when, as usual, I turned on the radio to listen to Steve Friedman, "Mr. Movie."

It was then that I learned that Steve Friedman had died last week at the age of 62. I hadn't caught his obituary in the newspapers, and he wasn't quite famous enough to make the national news.

He had suffered from kidney disease for years. He was on dialysis and needed a kidney transplant, but was unable to find a viable match. This wasn't for lack of donors: his radio fans loved him so much that several offered one of their own kidneys.

Steve loved doing his radio show, sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of movies with his fans. His nationally-syndicated show originated here in Philadelphia.

Steve Friedman was also a guest at my writers organization, the Brandywine Valley Writers Group. In fact, he was our first guest during my administration as president.

Last Saturday night Steve finished his radio show, went home, and died in his sleep. I'm grateful that I got to listen to his final show.

He will be missed. I will probably end up listening to the BBC as I drive home from New Jersey. There's no one who can replace Steve Friedman.

Bad Fruit

I know that all the rain this summer we’ve had has affected most crops. Still, I was getting really annoyed at the fruit I was buying.

The peaches were bland. The plums were uninspired. The grapes were dull. The cherries were sour…even the legendary sweet Rainier cherries were sour.

My favorite fruit of the season, the plum-apricot hybrid called the pluot, were bad. Not only were they not sweet, they had a chemical odor about them.

The blueberries were fine, but honestly…they’re freaking blueberries. Does anyone (aside from blueberry farmers) care? If you told me that blight had exterminated the entire blueberry species, my reaction would be, “Eh.”

I was starting to wonder if the problem was me, rather than the fruit. As we grow older, we lose taste buds. Had I gotten to the point were I’d lost the ability to taste the sweetness in fruits?

Thankfully, no. Today I had a terrific white-flesh nectarine. It was as sweet as any fruit I ever tasted.

So my decrepitude hasn’t eliminated my taste buds. Yet.

Hard Case Money Shot

Just finished reading Christa Faust's rollicking mystery novel Money Shot, which has been nominated for multiple awards. (Yes, its protagonist is in the porn industry.) It's published by Hard Case Crime, which puts out some terrific new and reprint mystery fiction, with painted covers reminiscent of the 1950s. If you like hard-boiled crime fiction, their line is worth a look.

Author Christa Faust has led an interesting life. The dust jacket of her book says she has "worked as a filmmaker, a model, and a Times Square peep show girl." (This is a much more prestigious resume than that of screenwriter Diablo Cody, who was a stripper and peep show girl in Minneapolis.) Faust's blog is Deadlier Than the Male: Torrid Confessions from the Underbelly of the Pulp Racket.

Question: Why is everyone who performs in adult films called a "porn STAR?" No one is ever a "porn second-banana."