Harvest Time As Come And Gone

By Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray

Jimmy is at a convention, which is why he's not contributing to this weeks column. So on with the show...

Harvest time has come and gone. That American holiday centered on family and dysfunction, not unlike the tenuous relationship between invaders and natives, seems to have slipped by without a single decent offering from Hollywood this year. Yes we have Hogwarts grand and magical feast of chocolate frogs and every flavor beans, but where is the next Planes, Trains and Automobiles? What are the hapless Griswalds doing this holiday season? I want my pasteurized anniversary comedy with overtones of Americana setting itself back on the path to hope and prosperity. Did some executive forget the cash rewards of sappy festival flicks with an ensemble cast? Perhaps Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanza have some greater theatrical releases in store for us this year.

GOBBLE GOBBLE MR. BUSH

As is customary, the President of the United States was expected to pardon a turkey on the eve of Thanksgiving at a White House ceremony, but lets face it folks Bush is pro death penalty and probably had said turkey fall prey to a small airline crash in some remote location. Perhaps it suffered a heart attack in the coop as a mysterious fellow in trench coat and fedora slunk away.

The tradition of presidential poultry pardons dates back fifty years to Harry Truman and has been compassionately enforced ever since. Unfortunately, this holiday tradition doesn’t apply to humans, like say…Mumia Abu Jamal who still rots on death row completely ignored and denied a retrial because of his involvement in anti-government groups long before most of you were born. I say Black Panther… you say guy in cat suit... get involved already.

Now I'll lighten up a bit as the day that has just passed is one that begins the season of over indulgence, which can only be amended by thousands of new gym memberships.  Of course those gym memberships will lapse in a months time, but until then I get plenty of Lucile Roberts commercials to enjoy.

Total Information Awareness System is armed and ready, sir.

Retired Adm. John Poindexter, the Reagan-era national security adviser who was convicted – then the conviction was later set aside -- of deceiving Congress in the Iran-Contra affair is now your Orwellian watchdog. A man that manages to escape prosecution for lying to the government is now set up to monitor your internet access as a government advisor on personal security. This reminds me of that Joke about using Charles Manson as a babysitter. Here are some complex jargon related explanations fresh from operation eye of the pyramid.

Program Objective:

The Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is a FY02 new-start program. The goal of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists – and decipher their plans – and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist acts. To that end, the TIA program objective is to create a counter-terrorism information system that: (1) increases information coverage by an order of magnitude, and affords easy future scaling; (2) provides focused warnings within an hour after a triggering event occurs or an evidence threshold is passed; (3) can automatically queue analysts based on partial pattern matches and has patterns that cover 90% of all previously known foreign terrorist attacks; and, (4) supports collaboration, analytical reasoning and information sharing so that analysts can hypothesize, test and propose theories and mitigating strategies about possible futures, so decision-makers can effectively evaluate the impact of current or future policies and prospective courses of action.

Ummm, couldn’t we just spend all this money on alternative sources of energy that eliminate the need for oil and put the terrorists on welfare? I realize this is oversimplifying a situation that has taken centuries to develop into the complex problem we face today, but hell, slapping band aids on everything isn't going to work either.

In search of things that go Boom

In global news, international arms inspectors entered Iraq this past Tuesday in what is expected to be months of difficult, detailed inspections of hundreds of Iraqi sites in the quest to discover if Saddam Hussein is developing weapons of mass destruction. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "the president has a policy of zero tolerance, and Saddam Hussein will have to figure out exactly what zero tolerance means and then explain it to the president."


Ok, holiday week so it's a short column with no comics references but I'll leave you with some cool Atari stuff.

Atari Prototype Arcade Games

Arcade Classics AKKA ARRH Bradley Trainer - Military Battlezone CyberStorm Die Alien Scum Dr. Sparkz Lab Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters Prototype

-Justin