Month: May 2004

Found this while surfing. The best collection of just plain wrong T-shirts in a while:

http://www.cafeshops.com/stuct

Favourite quotes from the story:

Moore describes “Fahrenheit 9/11” as a comedy, and, according to Variety, the film examines the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and paints the Bush administration in an unflattering light. […] Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, told the New York Times that Eisner asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Emanuel said Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where President Bush's brother, Jeb Bush, is governor.

S'good to be the king…

Reports: Media company attempts to stop Miramax from releasing Michael Moore documentary.
May 5, 2004: 10:07 AM EDT

Original Link: http://money.cnn.com/2004/05/05/news/fortune500/disney_moore/index.htm
Reuters Link: http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=DTNLHCMPN0IROCRBAEOCFFA?type=politicsNews&storyID=5046951

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore's documentary linking President Bush with powerful Saudi families, including that of Osama bin Laden, is sparking the latest fight within Walt Disney Co..

The film, set to debut at the Cannes film festival later this month, has yet to be released. The New York Times and Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety said in their Wednesday editions that Disney has moved to prevent its Miramax Films unit from distributing “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

The controversy had little effect on Disney (DIS: Research, Estimates) stock, which was little changed in early trading Wednesday.

The Disney edict could herald the bloodiest political battle yet between Miramax's feisty co-chairman, Harvey Weinstein, and Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who oversaw the purchase of Miramax a decade ago, Daily Variety said.

“Fahrenheit 9/11,” is Moore's follow-up to his Academy Award-winning “Bowling for Columbine.” Rumors had been circulating of a July release in North America, but the film does not appear on Miramax's summer schedule, the Variety said.

Moore, a vocal critic who denounced Bush and the war in Iraq during his Oscar acceptance speech, caused a controversy during the Democratic primaries when he called Bush a “deserter” for not finishing his National Guard service during the Vietnam War.

Moore describes “Fahrenheit 9/11” as a comedy, and, according to Variety, the film examines the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and paints the Bush administration in an unflattering light.

The Times quoted a Miramax spokesman as saying that the company was “discussing the issue with Disney. We're looking at all of our options and look forward to resolving this amicably.”

But the paper said Disney isn't willing to budge on the issue.

“We advised both (Moore's) agent and Miramax in May of 2003 that the film would not be distributed by Miramax,” Zenia Mucha, a Disney spokeswoman, told the newspaper.

Officials from Miramax and Disney were not immediately available for comment Wednesday morning.

Independent stock analyst Dennis McAlpine said that there has always been a tension between Miramax and Disney since the media conglomerate bought the independent studio in 1993.

“They've done their own thing for the most part. Disney has been content to leave them alone and give them money and pull in all the Academy Awards,” said McAlpine.

He said that despite the shareholder criticism of Eisner, he doesn't think that this battle will necessarily cause the embattled executive more problems.

“If there is a fallout, it's that some of the creative types say, 'I'm not going to take my next pic to Disney,'” said McAlpine. “But Hollywood is a wonderful place for saying one thing and doing the opposite the next time.”

McAlpine said that he could see Miramax releasing the film under a separate label, as it has done with some controversial films in the past. The controversy and the attention the battle is getting will help draw viewers to the film, according to McAlpine and other box office analysts.

“There is no better way to do this,” said David Mumpower, president of box office tracking firm Box Office Prophet. “They're taking a page out of Mel Gibson's play book for 'The Passion of the Christ' to let the media coverage sell the movie. All the coverage is better than ads.”

Mumpower doubts that Disney will be able to stop the film from being released altogether.

“I'm absolutely certain it will be released. Whether it's done by a Disney subsidiary is another question,” he said.

Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, told the New York Times that Eisner asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Emanuel said Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where President Bush's brother, Jeb Bush, is governor.

The Times reported that Disney executives denied that allegation. One executive told the paper it did not want to be seen taking sides in the election and risk alienating customers of different political views.

“It's not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle,” said the executive, who was not identified by the paper.

But Moore said he believed the protection of tax cuts was the reason for the media conglomerate's position.

“I would have hoped by now that I would be able to put my work out to the public without having to experience the profound censorship obstacles I often seem to encounter,” Moore said in a statement Wednesday, referring to his agent's charge against Eisner.

“The whole story behind this (and other attempts) to kill our movie will be told in more detail as the days and weeks go on. All I can say is, thank God for Harvey Weinstein and Miramax, who have stood by me during the entire production of this movie.”

Oh joy, oh rapture.

I'm a coder again. This is what I love to do, and this is what I do best. Finally, I've gotten a reprieve from writing boring analysis docs and I got to play with code.

Basically, I had to write a JDBC connection framework to connect to mySQL from openKnowledge, our flagship product we're working on. I could have used something vanilla, but I wanted to do something with a bit more umph. It took a while, but I managed to figure out how to do proper connection pooling configured by user-overrideable property files. The examples given from the mySQL website were shit. The JDBC through JDNI code never worked properly (probably because the documentation is shit), so I ended up using something from the Apache DBCP group. It works, and all is well. 8 hours just went zoom :D

Now my day is done, and for the first time in a long time, I'm happy with the work I did today :)

Just wanted to share two little comics that really hit the nail on the head these days :)

A warm bed on a cold night
Mom's homemade chocolate cake
Fresh laundry smell
A book that makes me laugh in the metro
Feeling a cat purr on your chest
Watching a fire burn down to embers in the fireplace

… nope. Still feel bleh.

My seasonal allergies moved in during the weekend. I'll be saddled with them till mid september or so. Yaaaaay. I bought a half-dozen boxes of kleenex at wallmart this weekend. I'm thinking they won't last the summer.

Edit: I just realized why I'm feeling so out of it today. I stopped drinking coffee in the morning, except on rare occasions. Without the jolt of caffeine, the meds are leaving me a lot more groggy. This SUCKS!

Time for a little weekend update.

Spent the major part of the day yesterday with hyde_grrl, shopping at Wallmart and Ikea. I swear, that girl is the queen of impulse shopping :) Did some groceries, cooked a bit, watched a boring movie and spent the night chatting with kaliko_mel. It was really muggy yesterday, and that's never good for my allergies (which have started paying me a visit recently), so I was fairly doped up on benadryl. Apparently, I was in fine form last night while we were talking. i'll have to go over that chat log, because I remember saying some fairly outlandish things :) A notice to all my friends then, please don't hold any absurdities I say against me. I might not have all my faculties when I'm talking^†.

Slept in really late today. Even if I did wake up at 6:30am again, I managed to go back to sleep and get up at a more reasonable time. Made a pot of pasta sauce, and my kitchen smells heavenly again. Did some laundry, so now my kinky bed is draped in crisp, clean-smelling sheets. I'm going to head downtown to deposit my paycheck and drop in to the Linen Chest, to investigate a possible purchase that was suggested by my late-night chat partner, and then meet T., the physiotherapist I met on LL for coffee.

Back later.

† yes, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Edit: So I had a pint with T. She seems like a nice girl, but I somehow doubt that it'll lead anywhere. We'll see, but I doubt it :)

Oh, and Mel? It seems that the purchase we talked about is going to be tougher to make than I thought. The Linen Chest doesn't have any, nor does Simons. I'm going to try Ogilvy's next. I'll keep you informed :)