Peter Krupa

From the LA Times: Hawaii reports no apparent tsunami damage.

As opposed to the unapparent, not-immediately-noticeable variety of tsunami damage. Over at Lat/Am Daily I’ve posted a little roundup of good, relevant Chile earthquake stories, if anyone’s interested.

Dear Scientifically-Challenged Journalists Of The World:

Please stop writing that fuel cell devices are an energy source. They are not. They do not generate energy. They need input from a conventional energy source to operate, be it natural gas, electricity produced by coal-fueled power plants, or magical pixie gas from your backyard compost pile. They may be damned efficient, and that’s great, but they’re basically fancy rechargeable batteries.

Thank you.

UPDATE: “Traditionally, three sectors have led the way out of recession: automobiles, home building and banking.”

It’s not like I needed anything else to further dash my hopes about the future, but this Atlantic article added some pretty significant fuel to the house fire. Basically, we’re screwed for a generation, although I’m lucky enough to be less screwed than recent graduates, Rust Belt families, and minorities.

Still, I get the additional fun of belonging to a profession that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. If I were to return to the States to look for a job, I’d be competing with hundreds of thousands of laid off journalists with similar or greater experience than I have. I’d probably be reduced to taking an unpaid internship that only hints coyly at the possibility of full-time employment, all the while ruthlessly exploiting the vulnerable.

Meanwhile, I’d feed my family with food stamps.

As those are pretty much my options, I’m throwing a Hail Mary and starting a news Web site. Lat/Am Daily covers what happens in Latin America, with lots of links and a wee bit of commentary. It’s silly to think I can cover an entire continent, I know, but hopefully I’ll be able to whittle the site down to a poignant nub that gets some traffic.

There is almost no chance I will ever be able to make a living off of this, but it’s more fun than not making a living for somebody else. In the meantime, maybe I’ll pick up some useful skills.

Oh, and I’m looking for interns. No pay, but it’ll look great on your résumé.

In no particular order:

1. The Big Lebowski
2. Amelie
3. High Fidelity
4. Bubba Ho-tep
5. The Apartment
6. The Man Who Wasn’t There
7. The Royal Tenenbaums

“We Are the World” remake: Helping Haiti? Absolutely. I bet a lot of Haitians breathed a sigh of relief on February 2 and said to themselves, “Boy, I feel a lot less hungry and a lot more housed now that a bunch of famous musicians got together and sang for 14 hours. All I need now is my very own pony!”

Or here’s an idea! Rather than waiting for a few dollars to trickle down thanks to this once-in-a-lifetime marketing opportunity, why don’t all you bumble-fuck celebrities just sell a couple of your houses and donate the goddamn cash to the Red Cross?

And finally, Jeff Bridges? Really? Like, the Jeff Bridges who’s up for an Oscar this year for his role as a musician, but has never, like, you know, done anything else musical in his life? You people are shameless.

Reuters headline of the week: Pope tells Irish bishops pedophilia a heinous crime.

Now that James Cameron says he’ll be directing a sequel to The Most Derivative Movie Ever Made, I thought I’d throw out some ideas for the new film.

• Jawal is a Na’vi cop. He’s a rebel who uses unorthodox methods to get results. But when he crashes another winged batty thing in a madcap aerial pursuit, his superiors have had enough. They assign him a new partner: A human fresh from the academy, who does things strictly by the book.
• An evil inter-galactic emperor rules Pandora with a heavy hand. With only her pluck and indigenous  ingenuity, as well as the help of a mysterious human who can make things float with his mind, a Na’vi princess is able to mount an insurgency that frustrates the Evil Emperor and brings him to their planet. She leads her people to victory in a climactic battle against a bunch of walking machines. The emperor and the floaty human have a showdown in which it is revealed that the emperor is his father.
• A giant meteorite is threatening to destroy Pandora. The humans have to work together with the Na’vi to stop it – BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.
• Uhllanta, a beautiful Na’vi female, invites her fiancé over to spend a weekend with her manipulative mother and authoritarian father. Hilarity and awkwardness ensue when it turns out her fiancé is a human.
• Jenny really wishes her boyfriend Nummbata – a Na’vi worrier – would propose to her. After all, they’ve been dating long enough. But all he’s interested in is hanging out with his friends, smoking pot, and killing things with spears. She wishes he would get serious and take that job her dad has offered him as a mid-level manager at Staples corporate headquarters. Then, God appears in the form of Anthony Hopkins. He whisks her off on a journey through time and shows her the true meaning of Pandora, or whatever.

There’s more where this came from. Cameron: Call me.

From Oliver’s birth2

Oliver Simon Krupa Flores, born February 9, 2010.

I’ve decided I like Gail Collins a lot. She’s sarcastic, but she never quite looses her shit, which I’m afraid I would do if I had to write about the mind-blowing stupidity in Washington on a regular basis. (This is a big reason I am not – not – a columnist for the New York Times.) From her column this morning:

Now Shelby has upped the ante with a blanket hold on (all Obama administration nominations). His incredibly grave reasons were the desire to see that a defense contract for a new tanker is awarded to a bidder who will do the assembly work in Alabama. Also, he feels that a new F.B.I. facility for testing explosive devices should be conveniently located in Huntsville.

“If this administration were as worried about hunting down terrorists as it is about the confirmation of low-level political nominations, America would be a safer place,” said a spokesman for the senator.

Those two paragraphs nicely encapsulate the two prongs of Republicans’ incredibly confusing philosophy of governance, which are:

1. All government spending is bad, but some government spending is good.
2. ZOMG LOOK OVAH THERE A TERRORIST!!1!

What is going on.