Let's hear it for common sense...

So the verdict is in on the Dan Brown Plagiarism case. The judge, from what I gathered in the article, found a very dignified way to laugh in the face of the claimants.

Speaking as someone who still hopes to make a career as a writer, I can only just begin to express my relief. I can safely use research sources without having to worry about someone coming at me and claiming I stole their book to write mine. (Doesn't mean it wouldn't happen, just means it's much less likely.)

The claimants are still coming out of the case in good shape. That might be impacted if they're ordered to pay court costs (which would be reasonable, I think)--costs that ran in the neighborhood of $1.75 MILLION. But their book has been selling 7000 copies a week lately, up from a couple of hundred before the case was announced...if there's any poetic justice in this case, people will realize what kind of ego-bloated, opportunistic lampreys they're dealing with and stop buying...but the old adage is true. Bad publicity is better than no publicity, in this case.

But it's reassuring to see that, occasionally, a court of law can still function as a court of justice. It's a distinction that gets more and more blurry these days. Nice to see that there's a judge out there who's still willing to say, "That's a very well-organized and lucid argument, Counselor...but it's still bullshit."

Unbelievable...

I've spent the last two days thinking I should really write something on here, and arguing with myself about what. Thank goodness for Congress--my dilemma is solved.

Once again, while browsing the online news, I stumbled across a nugget that struck my sense of the ridiculous so hard I had to react. The sad thing is, it should have made me irate--but I'm so used to it now that it just irked me.

There's a government watchdog group, Citizens Against Government Waste, which every year releases a 'Pig Book'--a list of porkbarrel spending that got shuffled into bills passed by Congress. Now, their definition of 'pork' is a little loose--it's any project that isn't specifically requested by the President--but some of the items on their list are enough to make you laugh, or cry, or curse, depending on what your initial response to congressional gluttony may be.

Some of the real winners on the list--
Water-free urinals-- $1 million
A teapot museum-- $500,000
The Museum of Glass-- $550,000
The National Cattle Congress-- $250,000 (This one I could sympathize with--I love a good
steak every now and then...)
The Arctic Winter Games-- $500,000

The last one is particularly noteworthy, as Alaska leads the pack in pork projects, for the fifth consecutive year--both in terms of raw dollars spent, and in terms of per capita dollars spent. At least they don't get away with everything--last year, the Alaska senator responsible for most of these projects wanted $223 million to build a quarter-mile bridge from Ketchikan to an island just off the coast with a grand total population of 50. The request was dropped when other senators called him on it (though they were probably all wishing, inwardly, that they'd had the raw audacity to ask for something like that).

Not everyone is that bad...Georgia averages only $12 a head in pork spending. Utah wasn't even mentioned in either of the articles I saw. The national average is $31 a head.

Once again, our national leaders are practicing the kind of double-talk for which politicians are despised. On one hand, they're calling for great fiscal responsibility; they're even financing a two-front war on terrorism (regardless of whether or not you agree that's the end goal of it, that's what they're calling it). In the five projects listed above, there is over $2.5 million that could be spent on equipment, or on helping repair infrastructure in the countries involved so that we'd have less negative publicity. I mean--c'mon--a TEAPOT museum? What kind of annual expenses could they have? And if they can't figure out a way to finance them on their own, then maybe they should realize that there just isn't a demand for a building to go look at teapots. Water-free urinals? Talk to NASA, they've already tackled that problem. Or just buy a chemical toilet.

And the Arctic Winter Games? I bet they're even held in the summer...

So much for the American Dream...

In a sudden fit of curiosity, spurred by some mild discontent with my current accommodations, I decided to take a look at what kinds of properties were available as foreclosure sales in Davis County. I figured there'd be a few...

As of five minutes ago, the site (one of several!) had over 1000 houses that were up for sale due to foreclosures, bankruptcies, and similar financial causes. Some of them had been listed for so long that they were classified as 'inactive' (I can only assume this means that the realtors didn't find the properties appealing enough to purchase and they've been sitting vacant, with no further action being taken...)

And yet, our society is being encouraged to hurry out and spend, hand over fist...why buy a car, when you can lease? At the end of four years, you won't be any closer to owning anything...but if you were only going to drive the car for four years, you'd be making new payments all over again, right? (But what about those of us that will buy a car we REALLY like, and drive it until the wheels fall off?) Buy on credit...it's good for the economy! You, too, can have this nifty new toy, just like your neighbors...in fact, we won't even charge you a cent for it until the start of next year!

But only an occasional public service announcement points out that all of this excess DOES have a price, that people need to try and save...or, at the very least, stop going further in debt! The prices of some of the homes that had been foreclosed were astonishing...most had not yet had prices posted, but out of those that did have them, at least two were well over $600,000. Who NEEDS a home that expensive? The average seemed to be somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000, but that's just off the top of my head--I didn't keep a list and calculate. Those just seemed to be the numbers I saw the most (at 2 am, that recollection may be suspect...) That's still close to a decade's worth of income for me.

It's no wonder our country's screwed up. It becomes a 'chicken or the egg' problem, whether our own fiscal frivolity worked up the line to Congress, or started there and worked down...but within ten miles of me, a thousand homes are vacant right now, because their families couldn't manage to live up to their own dreams. Someone convinced them they could...and someone lied.

I don't know...maybe I'm the only one that will be distressed by this. I doubt it. I don't see how I could possibly be the only one who would like to have a more permanent, secure, spacious residence, but can't afford it because our national taste for the good life has put the price tag well beyond my reach.

Yes, I'd love to own my own home. But you can bet I'm going into the idea with a healthy dose of skepticism. I can think of a few things worse than my current living situation--and one of them would be to think I'd finally escaped it, only to have it thrust upon me once again. We'll see what the future brings...

Flashbacks...

I got a chance to catch the New Play Festival at USU tonight...I've been looking forward to it for a while, now--Mark emailed me back in December to tell me it was coming up and invite me to attend, and it's been in my plans ever since. It was kind of an odd experience, sitting there and watching the plays--a lot of the playwrights were also acting in the pieces (some of them were even in their own works), which I can only imagine would be really stressful--I know, when my stuff was being performed, I was very agitated, mentally, about how it was going to go over. I can't imagine compounding that with having to remember lines and blocking from a bunch of other works.

The format this year was VERY different from anything I've ever seen before. It was a combination of ten-minute and 'flash' plays (flash plays are even shorter than ten-minute plays...Mark, in the program, kind of equated them to the stand-out scenes in movies, where it's only a two or three minute sequence, but it really defines the character in that moment). On top of that, it was in the Black Box Theater...so it was extremely minimalist, and very disjointed (the plays were not arranged to have any relationship, one to the next).

There were a lot of the players that reminded me of old faces, too...one guy (Brandon) reminded me of Paul Filan, in his mannerisms and delivery...but he was built more like Aaron Martin. It seemed really odd, to me, watching him, because of the similarities...and it really kind of made me homesick for my time up there. I think someone's trying to tell me it's time to go back to grad school...because every time I go see a college production, I remember how much I miss doing them. (Either that, or I need to find a rich backer or three and start my own theater, doing simpler fare--I can count the number of theaters around here that DON'T do a constant diet of musicals on the fingers of one hand...EASILY...)

Another thing that was fun was being able to sit down next to Kevin to watch the shows...there were moments that I almost missed in some of the shows, and caught only because Kevin let out a wry chuckle that made me open up my 'field of focus' and try to figure out what inspired the laughter. In case I haven't said it before, Kevin, I really miss working with you.

In spite of (or perhaps because of) the presentation being so different from anything I'd experienced before, I really enjoyed the evening. I hope Mark hasn't entirely abandoned doing one-acts in favor of ten-minute plays, because I also have, in the past, really enjoyed getting to take the time to get to know a character through the course of the play...there's not much time for that in a ten-minute play, and even less in a flash play. But it was a lot of fun to see this less-publicized style being explored and developed, too.