Madam Speaker, I rise in response to recent calls for new offshore drilling. These arguments for new drilling hit a dry hole for several reasons.

First, we are already drilling offshore. Eighty percent of the known offshore reserves are in areas where leasing and drilling is allowed. Today, the oil companies have nearly 6,000 untapped leases in the Gulf of Mexico alone.

Second, with 3 percent of the world’s resources and 25 percent of the world’s demand, there is no way we are going to just drill our way out of this problem.

Third, even the Bush administration admits consumers would see little savings at the pump from new drilling.

Yesterday, Guy Caruso, head of the Energy Information Agency, said this about the impact of new drilling: ``It would be a relatively small effect, because it would take such a long time to bring those supplies on. It doesn’t affect prices that much.’’

Democrats have a better plan. Let’s pass legislation that moves America in a new direction on energy by closing the Enron loophole on Wall Street speculators who are driving up prices. Let’s reduce mass transit fares and build the infrastructure there, and let’s force Big Oil to use it or lose it on drilling permits.

I urge my colleagues to join with me in bringing America to a new, more affordable energy future.

Seriously, have the people who made this ad ever been high school students? The kids at the school I went to had no problem saying things like this in person—even to the kids who were supposedly their best friends—and being completely serious about it. It’s a way of asserting dominance and marking territory, and I’m sure that if you honestly look at adult life, too, you’ll find that the same thing happens there, largely because those adults have risen to maturity being told that their own violence, stupidity, and petty meanness as adolescents was “just part of growing up.” And, indeed, it was. The behavioral part that was ignored, justified, and tacitly endorsed by the adults in their lives.

Take this track – which I just can’t seem to get out of my mind, but is getting universally bad reviews from the folks on Amazon.com. I dig it, though.

It’s a bluegrass rap. It’s by Snoop Dogg, so if you’re at the workplace some of the lyrics might get you in trouble. Otherwise – enjoy.

...

Above is the point where I would usually put a quote from the original article – which, in this case, might be a good thing for them, since it might contain some pearl of wisdom that I had missed that would completely justify the difference in how the two candidates were treated.

The AP, however, has decided that the thing they truly hate is having their own words quoted when people critique their journalism. To that end, they have created a bizarre, counter-intuitive, and definitely counter to fair use policy that they will license quotes of more than five words for a fee – a license which they reserve the right to revoke if they feel it shows the AP in a bad light. Given these new guidelines, I can in good conscience only give the AP four or fewer words to state their case – and that’s three quoted words in the first sentence. Tsk. Too bad.

To atone for this, Cindy fired a hapless intern. But the problem was systemic! Cindy has contributed another recipe, to Parents magazine. This recipe for Oatmeal Butterscotch Cookies was, of course, directly cribbed from Hershey’s website.

Hey, a lot of us go to websites for our favorite recipes. Of course, we don’t usually try to pass them off as traditional family recipes – or if we do, we give a source for them. For instance, I have told people that my family recipe for pumpkin pie is the one on the Libby’s can “with a twist.” Or that my oatmeal cookies are the Quaker Oats recipe with all-fresh ingredients (fresh raisins – very important).

And, just wondering, is butterscotch the food of the common people?

We are working on a fix for this and your breasts should be back to normal soon.

Priceless.

Consumers are balking at the $300-plus cost of most Blu-ray players especially because only limited movie titles are available in the format.

“People aren’t going to pay three times as much for a platform that’s only half-baked,” said Steve Wilson, a consumer electronics analyst with ABI Research.

The problem with both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats, of course, was largely the library. Perhaps it’s only obvious to me, but when you’re touting the superiority of the platform as a prestige format, you might want to consider releasing Citizen Kane – a movie with a long history that most people would display proudly in their collection, and something more likely to be cherished by someone who just dropped $399 on a player – instead of, say, Ultraviolet – a movie whose design concept can best be described as “blurry, obviously fake, and designed above all to not be viewed in HD.”

This in turn feeds the price question. Why should people pay a prestige price for a player where the majority of titles are movies that people just flat don’t care about seeing in HD – many of which are $20+ on the new format when they’re already in the bargain bins on the old? I just purchased Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3 on DVD for $5.99 each – movies I care about having in my collection (well, Alien 3 more for completeness’ sake). With the already high quality of DVD picture and sound, spending $25.99 for each of them on Blu-Ray would just feel wrong.

Of course, Blu-Ray could get an extra push from indie producers. More and more indie directors shooting on HD would mean an influx of content – some of which would be kept inexpensive to draw in new audiences, and which would help sell the new format to off-the-wall and indie film fans. Of course, it could provide this extra push – if Blu-Ray didn’t seem determined to exclude these producers from the new market.

Where are the POD solutions for Blu-Ray at this point? No, I’m seriously asking – where are they? CreateSpace, which is owned by Amazon, is still negotiating a deal to allow them to offer POD Blu-Ray. Kunaki? Lulu? Who knows? Neither one even mentions it. Why not?

It may have something to do with the $3,000-a-person entry fee the industry is imposing, otherwise known as the AACS DRM scheme. It appears that there’s been a real problem playing Blu-Ray discs that don’t include AACS, so everybody who wants to publish to the medium has to purchase an AACS license, and every title must include AACS – regardless of the wishes of the publisher and/or the artist.

Creative Commons-licensed material? Who cares? You’d better slap some copy protection on it.

Want to release a public domain film to Blu-Ray to help preserve our film history (or make a quick buck off of an HD release of The Last Man on Earth)? Sure. As long as that public domain film is one you’re willing to pay $3,000 to copy protect.

And forget about a sales system like EZTakes, that provides its DVD images DRM-free – but with the purchaser’s e-mail address embedded in the burnt copy.

Forget, too, about the share-friendly independent spirit that provokes legal statements like this one (found on my newest DVD, available soon, plug plug).

Low- and Micro-budget filmmakers will find themselves blocked out of the new next-generation disc market for as long as AACS is an expensive necessity and the artists are blocked out of making their own decisions as to how their content should be treated. The result? Well, unless the major studios wise up on their releasing schedule, a homogenized blend of movies nobody cares about seeing in High Definition, and a marketplace completely priced out of the range of the regular consumer.

After all, there’s one further aspect I’ve barely even touched on that is just as blocked by this current model – one could argue that DVD’s would never have become the consumer mainstay they are today if not for the bins of $1 DVD’s at the front of every major retail chain today…

For now, here’s a bit of the opening sequence to the upcoming Three Shots Fired Point Blank: The Special Edition DVD. “Adult Content” will be posted to YouTube later.

So here’s Shaolin Boogaloo’s student film. A tale calculated to drive you hungry!

PBM – Take Two from Glen Williams on Vimeo.