Harlan Ellison is putting his own copies of his books up for sale. Reluctantly.

I don’t agree with the politics of this video — I think Obama has accomplished a lot, especially given the challenges — but I have to say, this is a clever video, and a funny one. When was the last time you could put “right wing,” “clever,” and “funny” in the same sentence? Thanks to Joe Stafford for making me aware of this.

In which someone channeling the famed director brings us another insightful look into a children’s book we all thought we knew.

Finally, to close out the 4th of July weekend, Slate gives us the lowdown on the actual Betsy Ross — not the whitewashed demure seamstress we studied in school, but the canny capitalist mom who became an important early defense contractor for the nation. Why are the stars on our flag five-pointed? George Washington wanted six — but Ross showed her that a five-pointed star could be more easily mass-produced.

An old friend made a remark on my Facebook page today to the effect that you can judge a person’s life by what he does in any particular day. I’m not sure about that, because a lot of what I do varies greatly day by day.  However, if you extend the timeframe to include a weekend — and specifically the holiday weekend now ending — you have a fairly good overview of how I spend my days.

Friday night

1. Picked up my car from the dealership, ran back to my office to gather up papers I would need for the weekend and to wish someone a happy vacation, then picked up Kid #3 from summer care. Lent the car to Kid #1 so he could take his girlfriend on a six-month anniversary date (he’s got his own car, but, as he noted, his isn’t a convertible).
2. Took the dog for a run.
3. Ate dinner.
4. Read an exciting chapter of “Planet Hulk” to Kid #3 while Kid #2 read some teen vampire book on her own.
5. After they went to bed, read various business magazines and a business book and did some work online.
6. Watched part of “Scarface” (the Pacino version) on dvd while wondering, “Why am I watching this?” Mitigated the time-wasting of “Scarface” by spending useful time on Facebook (as well as useless time on Facebook).

Saturday

1. Led my long-running playwriting workshop, Words That Speak, now in its 18th (?) year. It’s consistently the smartest room in town; during this particular session I called someone’s idea for someone else’s script “brilliant.” It’s not a word I toss around lightly. Given that over the years many different playwrights have cycled into and out of the workshop, and that many of them have gotten published or produced or won awards, there’s got to be something in the culture of the workshop that just works. I’m proud of my role in that.
2. After the workshop I swing by my office to check the mail. I’m compulsive about the mail. Every since I was a pre-teen, I’ve been making money through the mail. I can’t imagine being without mail. I also can’t bear the thought of mail sitting for me somewhere where I can’t access it; this is part of why I don’t like holidays or Sundays or vacations. (I’m only half-kidding. Really.) No, bails of wonderment do not arrive in the mail every day any more, but when I was young the U.S. mail provided a lifeline to the outside world — it was a place where magical old comic books ordered with hard-earned money arrived. To some degree, all of us are still the children we once were.
3. After checking the mail — and noting with satisfaction that we did indeed get an important client featured in a publication that arrives that day — I stop by Popeye’s Chicken. I don’t eat a lot of junk food — hardly none — but I’ve developed an unfortunate little addiction to Popeye’s spicy chicken. Once every two or three weeks, I stop by and have two or three pieces. I don’t order a drink (I don’t like soda) or any of the sides — just the chicken.
4. After Popeye’s, I go home to take a long, hard nap. In general, I have pretty good energy, but the workshop requires three hours of intense concentration; after that, I need to pass out. But first, I note that two new comics have arrived in the mail (!), so I read one of them right away.
5. I wake up almost an hour later and play Cosmic Encounter with my wife and all three kids. This is the game that my wife and I and our friends played all through college. Kid #3 (turning 8 next month) has now discovered this game with a passion. Kid #2 (turning 12 this month) is eager to play so long as she gets an alien power to her liking (otherwise, she sulks). Kid #1 has introduced his own college-age friends to it and now they keep borrowing the set to play. As my wife says, after all these years, we’ve finally been able to grow our own ready-made group of CE players.
6. We eat dinner, my wife goes to work, my kids go entertain themselves, the dog gets another run, and I do more reading and writing. And watch some more of “Scarface,” wondering why.

Sunday

1. I send all three kids out to the supermarket with a shopping list, and settle in in the back yard with a cigar, a bottle of wine, and the book I’m writing. I get a lot done. Then they come back.
2. The dog gets a run.
3. We attend the Starlight Bowl Fourth of July celebration. The opening band is terrific. So is the symphony, and the fireworks display. My good friend Trey Nichols joins us.  We polish off all the snacks and most of the wine. We get home around 10. The kids get light sabers bought from a sidewalk vendor on the way to our cars who says “Bless you” when I buy them; he looks like he needs the twenty bucks more than I do.
4. Trey comes back to the house with us and is introduced to the intricate gameplay of Cosmic Encounter. Clearly, no one is safe. (Aside to Paul Crist:  This is something you have to look forward to soon.) We wind up playing until midnight, kids’ bedtimes be damned. (“Come on. I know you can stay awake for just one more game.”)
5. Trey then reveals the dvd he’s brought:  It’s the history of Devo, with every Devo video ever made. We watch this until 2 a.m. Later, I will go to bed with the song “Mongoloid” still playing in my head. “Mongoloid. He was a Mongoloid! Happier than you and me….”
6. I read some more and then watch some more of “Scarface.” I don’t think Pacino is actually that bad in it. How good can you be expected to be when the script and direction give you this sort of character arc:  Tony snorts a little coke; then Tony snorts too much coke; then Tony upends a little box of coke so he can snort too much; then Tony sticks his entire face into pile of coke the size of John Goodman’s ass. No, it’s everything else that makes it bad — the cheesy Giorgio Moroder music, the badly framed shots, the lame storyline, even the makeup (could his scar have been any less pronounced?). Blaming the actors is like blaming the wildlife for all the oil that got spilled onto them. With 20 minutes left to the movie, I turn it off and go to sleep at around 3:30.

Monday

1. I wake up with “Mongoloid” still going in my head.  “Mongoloid. He was a Mongoloid! Happier than you and me….” It just won’t stop.
2. Still in bed, I watch the remaining 20 minutes of “Scarface.” Hey, a commitment is a commitment. Here’s how fake the movie is:  In the last two scenes, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is wearing nothing but panties and a silk robe. She runs in and out of doorways, gets pounded with bullets from an automatic weapon, jerks in the air, slumps over — and never once does that robe fall open. No, it stays perfectly glued just shut enough over those breasts. Having now watched the end of the movie, I give the disk back to my son and berate him for having put it into his Netflix queue.
3. I put in more hours writing my book, again with a cigar and wine. (Don’t change what works.) The day before, I wrote about 1500 words and felt pretty good about it. Now I write 1500 words but don’t feel good about it. I think about this later for hours.
4. Near the end of that, while I’m shifting files to and from my office over our VPN, and updating this blog, and saving the book, I suddenly notice that I have no internet connection. I go into the house to discover that my eldest has chosen this precise time to, well, experiment with improvements in our wifi. I go ballistic. A little notice would’ve been nice! I reset the router and re-establish my connections and am greatly relieved to learn that I haven’t lost any files.
5. I shower and shave and suit up to go to the swearing-in ceremony for Assemblyman Mike Gatto at the Gene Autry Museum. In addition to the Assemblyman, I see both Burbank Congressmen (Schiff and Sherman), two Burbank City Council members (Reinke and Golonski), and plenty of friends from the Burbank Democratic Club. I agree to “trade votes” with another state Democratic delegate: I’m already a supporter of her candidate but now I’ll announce it publicly, and I talk her into supporting my issue at the upcoming executive board meeting.
6. I go home — and we eat dinner and play Cosmic Encounter.
7. Now I’ve finished writing this, so I’ll do some more work and some reading.

So here’s what my life is made up of:

The arts; writing; business; family time; politics; and running the dog. With a little sleep mixed in.

The video element isn’t much. But the music element is amazing: a beautiful rendition of a famously difficult (and timely) song.

I’ve mentioned here before that I’m working on the campaign for Proposition 21, an initiative here in California that will support restoring and repairing the state parks. The campaign is popularly known as “Yes for State Parks.”

Please watch this brief newscast and read the emotions on the park ranger’s face about the deteriorating conditions of state parks. Then go to Facebook and “Like” Yes for State Parks. If we want to preserve California’s great outdoors, we need your help.

Salon explains, finally, why men eat meat, while women crave chocolate.

What they need to work on next:  why some crave spicy over sweet.

Hey, don’t despair. Despite the slumped economy, there are still interesting jobs to be found. Here’s one of them:  Perhaps you’d like to be someone’s personal nemesis.

In the 2000’s, someone introduced me to Coppola’s Law. Coppola’s Law was coined by Francis Ford Coppola, and it held that in film production there are three qualitative goals, good, fast, and cheap, and one could have only two of them at any given time. If a film was good and fast, it wasn’t cheap to make; if it was good and cheap, it wasn’t fast to make; and if it was fast and cheap, it wasn’t good. Although Coppola formulated this theory to fit film, people began to apply it to any endeavor and sure enough, in my own use of it in the past 10 years or so, I have found that it is mostly true: You can’t have good and fast and cheap.

Until now.

Because what has happened now is digital technology.

Oh, we had some digital technology before. But the explosion of microtechnology and superfast processors with magnified capabilities, the expansion of bandwidth, the extension of networks, and the ubiquity of consumer offerings have put more power in the hands of more people than ever before. Put personally it’s like this: When I was a boy, I wanted to publish magazines, record songs, and make my own films, and then distribute all of that to other people. And I couldn’t do any of that. The best publishing technology available to me was the Xerox copy machine — and copies were a prohibitive 25 cents a page. (A small fortune in the 1970s. And a ludicrous amount of money, when one considers that 35 years later, copies are two cents a page.) I could play piano and a little clarinet, and I was able to record homegrown comedy tapes on a handheld cassette recorder, but I couldn’t afford a recording studio. Even when I was able to lay hands on things like a Super 8 video camera, the larger problem lay before me:  how to distribute any of this. The costs of printing and packaging and postage and audio or film duplication were enormous.

But now, in 2010, you and I can do all of that. All we need is a personal computer of some sort — a desktop or a laptop or… an iPhone. For $199, you can produce a film, and you can distribute it for free via YouTube. All the barriers to entry are now essentially lowered.

Take a look at the video below, which was shot, edited, and uploaded entirely from an iPhone 4. The storyline isn’t impressive (I could summarize it this way: old fart bores youngster with impassioned recollection of antique childhood passion). But in demonstrating the storytelling capability of the technology, it’s pretty remarkable. Watching it makes me wonder what the kid I was in the 1970s would have done with this. Because, ironically, now that I have access to all these tools — I don’t have time to do any of those things I wanted to do.