As word spreads over the interwebs that the DGA has cut a deal with the studios, I’ve already had several people ask me if this is going to end the Writer’s strike.

Frankly, I doubt it, and I base that doubt on the following key analytical paragraph from this New York Times story about the deal:

Over all, the agreement was designed to reflect the directors’ belief, bolstered by an independent study of industry economics, that digital media will render the companies a negligible amount of revenue during the life of the contract, and will become significant only after 2010.

Here’s where the fundamental strategies of the DGA and WGA differ: The DGA is fighting like it’s negotiating for the next three years, and only the next three years. The WGA is fighting like it’s negotiating for a rate for the forseeable future.

Frankly, given how bad the unions have gotten screwed on the “oh, we’ll raise the rate once we start making some money” concept before, I think the writers are right and the directors are being ludicrously short-sighted.

Now supposedly, the directors have had a clause written into the contract that the numbers they’re agreeing to now aren’t setting a precedent for the next negotiation in 2010-11, but…they’re still setting a precedent.

Remember, writers have gotten the same 4 cent per VHS/DVD residual (and actors and directors have had similar numbers that have never been adjusted) since the early 80′s, with no adjustments for either inflation or the dramatically declining cost of production, despite assurances from the studios when the deal was first struck that it would not be precedent-setting.

The DGA is putting an awful lot of trust in the studios to stand by their word and not fuck around during the next negotiation, and I don’t know that the studios have done a damn thing to earn it.

Obviously, we’ll have to see how the numbers play out and how the inevitable battle between the DGA and WGA in the press goes over the next few days, but I fear this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

I hope to god I’m wrong.

“Cashmere Mafia on ABC….Brought to you by Valtrex!”

No better marquee sponsor for a thinly disguised remake of Sex and the City than a herpes medication.

That single line by the announcer made me laugh a lot harder than anything on the actual show.

Here’s how bored I am right now: I cleaned. And not just “sprayed some Lysol over the bathroom” cleaned. Like, threw out tons of shit I don’t need anymore.

You know how, when you move, there’s always a few boxes that never actually get unpacked until you move again, and you wonder, what’s in here that is actually worth moving?

I unpacked those two boxes today. Turns out the answer was: not much.

I also went through my magazine and newspaper collection and threw out anything that wasn’t of legitimate historical value, meaning about 95% of the batch is now in the dumpster.

Let me back up for a second: I’ve had several boxes of old magazines that I kept around for years (as in, the oldest one I found was the issue of Newsweek right after the ’95 Oklahoma City bombing).

I’ve dragged these boxes all over the country, since my mother moved out of the house I grew up in and into a much smaller condo, depriving me of much-needed storage space.

I started hanging onto this stuff after my dad showed me a newspaper he’d kept from the day Kennedy was shot, something I found really fascinating. I wanted to save similar stuff for the future.

But I went a little overboard: I saved dozens of issues of Guitar World, Rolling Stone, and other magazines that really are of no use to anyone. I saved every Oscar issue of Entertainment Weekly. I saved everything even moderately historic from Newsweek.

I’d long considered selling the collection on eBay, but when I went to look online today at what I might actually get for some of these magazines (answer: very little to nothing), I decided to just pitch them.

So I went through, saving a very few truly historical items, but otherwise pitching everything. I threw out four bankers’ boxes worth of crap.

What’s funny is that when I checked my email after doing that, there was email from my dad, who’d been looking for my Social Security card. He didn’t find it, but he did find a massive pile of other stuff, including correspondence from summer camp, report cards from elementary school, and various other pack-rat items.

At least I know where the hoarding instinct comes from.

After that, I went through the aforementioned drag-around boxes, digging up dozens of documents that needed to be shredded, and a whole lot of trash.

I wound up with so much stuff to shred that two things happened: First, my shredder overheated badly enough to be unusable for about an hour. Second, I filled a medium-sized moving box completely with the shredded remains of all that paper.

My bedroom is now almost disturbingly clean, and my cat is really, really confused, since all his hiding places are gone. I’ve kicked up enough dust to be sneezing like a madwoman, but it’s nice to feel like I’ve actually made progress on something.

Tomorrow, I’m attacking the living room. I expect to finish filling the dumpster sometime in the next couple of weeks.

I could have worked for a company that used Axium for its payroll services, since they just declared Chapter 7, leaving many creditors (including the IRS) with questions about where all the money went.

Defamer has been covering the whole mess pretty well (with “Rhymes With Shmembezzelment” being one of my favorite tags they’ve ever used), but the story’s barely made a ripple with most of the local media.

Pseudonymous blogger Peggy Archer, who’s a lighting tech and way better at explaining this stuff to non-entertainment-industry people than I am, explains both what payroll companies are in Hollywood:

For tax and unemployment insurance purposes, when we work, we are technically employees of the payroll company instead of the production company. This is not a bad thing – it cuts down on the tax-season paperwork (16 W 2 forms instead of 138) and reduces instances of in-house rubber checkitis (back in the bad old days of tiny shows run by fly-by-night production companies, one would pick up one’s check at the office and then drive like a bat out of hell to the production company’s bank to cash it while there were hopefully still funds in the account. When everyone started using payroll companies, the checks, when they eventually arrived, were usually good).

…and the worst case scenario:

…although the taxes were deducted from my checks, as of right now there’s no way to know if I fall into the happy group who had the deducted monies actually paid to the gub’mint. Since I doubt the IRS cares that I had the money deducted, they’ll probably make me pay twice.

‘Cause that’s how the IRS rolls.

As fucked as I am being unemployed, I’d be super-duper fucked if I had to somehow magically come up with my taxes twice because some douchebag embezzled all the money from the payroll company that was supposed to KEEP me from getting fucked.

My deepest sympathy goes out to Peggy (or whatever her real name is) and everyone else in this town who’s about to have a real pleasant tax season because of these schmucks.

As part of my Continued Adventures in Killing Time, my friend Lisa and I went for a little hike in Griffith Park (a moderate one was about all my ankle could take), and I decided to use the opportunity to practice taking some decent pictures.

More on my Flickr site, but here are some of my favorites (click to go to each picture’s Flickr page):

Two things I realize now, after going through my budget with a fine tooth comb to try and kick out a few extra pennies, that I probably should not have done:

1. Moved out of my old Russian-Mob-Owned shithole apartment in Venice. I might have wanted to strangle my neighbors on an hourly basis, but I’m paying almost half again more rent than I was, which is definitely in the category of Not Helpful when unemployed.

Also, the dipshit management company here is just as unresponsive to maintenance issues as the mobsters were, so why the fuck am I paying them all this money? I mean, other than to live in a neighborhood with fewer drive-bys.

2. Fucked up my ankle, requiring me to pay exorbitant COBRA rates instead of finding cheapo individual insurance because my ankle turns into a monstrously expensive preexisting condition if I get the individual coverage.

These two things alone are absolutely killing my unemployment budget. I’ve just looked at how much I’ve spent so far this month, and realized I can’t leave the house again until approximately February.

I just had the fifth person I know tell me unsolicited that they watched Juno and she reminded them of me. I take it as a compliment, since I really liked the character.

However, this raises two related questions for me:

1. How much weirder does this trend make it that this movie made me have a huge crush on Ellen Page?

2. As a subquestion to the above, does that somehow make me a narcissist?

Being unemployed in January is probably a good thing for the average gadget geek like myself, since the twin peaks of lust for shiny things both take place during the first couple of weeks of January.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is taking place in Las Vegas this week, where almost every electronics company is unveiling its product lineup for 2008.

Next week brings the annual MacWorld Expo, where Apple faithful come to drool over whatever lickably shiny object Steve Jobs deigns to unveil during his keynote address.

Both of these events lead to an absolute orgy of gadget blog coverage (Google Reader is buckling under the weight of the feeds just of Engadget and Gizmodo), and to try and keep up even without having a job to do on top of it is a bloody nightmare.

I mean, it is fun to read about crazy shit like the leopard-print Taser with mp3 playing holster, the LCD you install on your car bumper so other people can watch what you’re watching, or the 150 inch plasma TV that is over five times the size of my Gigantic Damn TV.

What would have been even better is to have seen these ridiculous items in person. Alas, it is not to be.

The thing that really sucks is that theoretically, if I had the money, I could have gone to both CES and MacWorld and at least gotten on the exhibit floors. This is also one of the very few times I would actually be able to attend either conference.

The problem is, between rent and COBRA, I’m burning through my unemployment checks completely before the first of the month is even over, and every other expense I have comes straight out of savings.

So burning $40-50 on admissions fees per conference plus approximately one billion dollars per tank on gas (just over two tanks to Vegas and back, more like three to SF) is not really in the cards.

I tell you, it is going to kill me next week to be sitting here, knowing that I could have been in San Francisco groping the goofy gadgets I’m simply staring at pictures of, but my stupid fiscal responsibility is winning out.

I was famished when I got back from the gym today, so I poured myself a big bowl of milk and Cheerios. I got about three bites into it when I realized, “Gee, despite the fact that it smelled okay, this milk tastes awfully sour.”

I realized how sour as I was pouring the bowl into the garbage disposal. The milk wasn’t pouring, it was oozing. Hopefully the few bites I had aren’t going to come back on me later.

I was out of non-cereal breakfast food besides eggs, so I said, okay, I’ll just make myself some scrambled eggs. So I scrambled up the eggs, and go to turn on the stove. Of course, the electric stove starter isn’t working.

I broke out my headlamp and looked behind the stove, and somehow it’s managed to come unplugged. My arm is neither thin nor long enough to reach back to the plug on its own.

I MacGyvered up a poking stick from some vacuum cleaner parts, but I couldn’t get enough leverage to actually push the plug back in far enough to get it working.

I tried to pull the stove out, but it’s firmly wedged in. Finally, I gave up and decided to use my big long lighter to just light the damn burner.

I looked all over the place for the big long lighter. Couldn’t find it. Finally gave up and used a normal lighter, almost burning my thumb off in the process.

But at least I had my eggs, which I ate while calling the landlord and telling him to send over some guys to help me plug the damn stove back in.

In case the fact that the national news keeps harping on it has so far escaped your attention, it’s a little rainy here.

How rainy, you ask? As of about an hour ago, Los Angeles has reached phase, “Animals fleeing, two-by-two.”

Phase, “Hey, look, there’s an Ark floating down Pico!” should come sometime Monday.

Seriously, I fear what four straight days of rain will do to this town that freaks out when the relative humidity rises above 70%.