Lots of big, scary news today.

Man, I'll be glad when I go back to work (this coming Monday, God willing) for a number of reasons. One of them, the reason that's on my mind right now, is that when I go back to work I won't be sitting here all day and night watching the cable-news talking heads and clicking every link at Google News and getting the living crud scared out of me.

Today there's all kinds of bad news. I think we can all agree that the world will probably come to an end by about 6:00 PM this evening. I just hope there's time to finish dinner first.

Here's some of the news stories that I'm freaking out about:

• Russia is acting a fool
  
  This is no joke, man. This is real, this is scary crap.
  

  A roll of explosions at a Russian-occupied military base this week sent a clear Kremlin message to Georgia about the frailty of its infant military and its prospects for NATO membership.
  
  The Russian army destroyed a hoard of Georgian arms and ammunition captured in a brief war that saw Georgian forces scattered, their bases seized and equipment carried off.

  
  I really thought the days of Russia just rolling over little neighboring countries was over. Maybe the whole world thought those days were over and that's why nobody seems willing or able to respond. And I don't blame 'em; I'd hate to be the guy in charge who had to make the decision to attack the Russian army, even if they are on another country's soil.
  
  And then there's the Poland thing:
  

  Russia issued a harsh response on Wednesday to the announcement of a deal between Poland and the United States to base part of a U.S. missile defense system on Polish soil.
  
  "Russia in this case will have to react and not only through diplomatic protests," Russia's Foreign Ministry said...
  
  (Russia) scorned the decision to base a battery of U.S. Patriot missiles in Poland, saying it would provide no protection against any "imaginary Iranian danger".

  
  Holy friggin' crap. "Imaginary Iranian danger?" NATO is on board with this missile defense system, this isn't some kind of shady deal between the US and Poland. Man! It doesn't seem very long ago that the common enemy of Islamic terrorism was going to strengthen the relationship between the US and Russia.
  
  Thankfully, the memory of oppression by the USSR seems to be pretty strong in Poland:
  

  In a clear swipe at Russia, Poland's President Lech Kaczynski on Tuesday said his country would not give in to threats over its deal with Washington to deploy US missile silos on Polish soil.
  
  "No-one can dictate to Poland what it should do. That's in the past," Kaczynski said...
  
  "No-one should be afraid of this (missile plan), if they have good intentions towards us or the rest of the West," Kaczynski said.

  
  It's good to see that Poland is willing to poke back a little bit.
  
  This is bound to be part of the reason that McCain is actually polling ahead of Obama. Americans know McCain and know that he's had Putin and Russia figured out all along:




• But McCain shouldn't get too comfortable
  
  There's increasing noise about McCain picking Joe Lieberman as his running mate.
  
  Look, I like Joe Lieberman. I really do. He's a "hawkish" liberal, one of the last of his kind. It's nice to see that there are still a few realistic liberals out there. Heck, to tell the truth, I toyed with the idea of supporting Lieberman's presidential bid in 2004. But when push comes to shove, there's still one issue that rules the day: Joe Lieberman supports abortion on demand and I won't vote for a pro-abortion-on-demand ticket. Even a partially pro-abortion ticket.
  
  If McCain picks Lieberman, I'll stay home in November. I won't vote at all. I hope that other pro-life conservatives will sit this one out, too. If the GOP softens on abortion, we will need to send a strong message. Betray the pro-life contingent and you lose our vote. And you can't win without us.
  
  I'd rather skip the election and feel like I'm letting Obama win then vote against my deepest beliefs. Abortion-on-demand is the moral scandal of our time. There can't be any compromise on this issue.



• The Watchmen debacle
  
  There's some sort of power-struggle going on between 20th Century Fox and Warner Brothers about who actually owns the rights to make a movie based on Watchmen.
  
  What this means, in a nutshell, is that Zack Snyder's potentially worthwhile film adaptation of "the greatest comic book of all time" might be delayed from release:
  

  Twentieth Century Fox’s war with Warner Bros. over rights to Watchmen has sparked fan outrage across the Web following a published report that Fox is seeking to prevent Zack Snyder’s $100 million-plus comic book adaptation from ever being released...

  
  Of course, this isn't going to cause Snyder's movie to be shelved forever. There's too much money to be made from it. The studios will figure out a way to fix things so that all the invested parties get a slice of the pie. Even the article I linked to acknowledged that.
  
  But you know how things go when the Lawyers get involved. The Watchmen movie might not be released in March, as originally planned. We might have a year to wait, maybe even longer.
  
  Hey, it's small potatoes compared to Russia, Georgia and Poland. But it still sucks.



• DMB sax player LeRoi Moore dies
  
  I enjoy the Dave Matthews Band's music, and LeRoi Moore has done some sax solos that were, in my opinion, the best thing about some of their songs. I didn't even know that the guy had been severely injured in June in an ATV accident. And now he's died:
  

  The band went ahead with a scheduled concert in Los Angeles on Tuesday evening and dedicated the performance to Moore...
  
  Hours after Moore's death, Dave Matthews told the audience at Tuesday's concert that his bandmate "gave up his ghost today," adding: "and we will miss him forever," according to the Orange County Register newspaper.

  
  That just sucks. And that's all I can think of to say about it.



• Big, scary tower
  
  This photo of the giant skyscraper they're building in Dubai probably isn't scary to most people ... but in my current frame of mind I can't look at it without seeing the Eye of Sauron on top of it:

  

  Found this at Geekologie.





• The Mojave marketing trickery
  
  Microsoft has launched a big campaign to try to ease consumer fears about Vista and get people to buy their latest floundering OS.
  
  Don't believe a word of it. Vista sucks. Sure, you could take a bunch of people who've never seen Vista and let them spend twenty minutes pointing and clicking on a Vista-installed notebook and convince them that the OS is top notch. But that's not proof of anything and it's not intellectual honesty. It's salesmanship. It's the same thing that enables used car salesmen to get people to drive lemons off the lot.
  
  I'm writing this from a Dell PC that runs Vista. I've been an unhappy Vista user for months now. Vista crashes all the time. Programs lock up, fail to load, and don't run properly in Vista every day. I have constant networking problems with Vista; it's pure hell keeping my LAN and Internet connections working from this computer. Vista has lots of bells and whistles, and it comes with a really cool looking Mahjong game. But other than that It's a total lemon compared to the previous, vastly superior Microsoft XP operating system.

Labels: Microsoft, Movies, Music, News, Politics, Watchmen