The Red Monkey

End of the Road: American Chopper chopped, fat lady sings

by Jeremy Korzeniewski (RSS feed) on Feb 8th 2010 at 4:58PM

It’s been a long time coming, but celebrity gossip site TMZ reports that American Chopper has finally been canceled. A spokesperson for TLC, which picked the show up after its first few years on The Discovery Channel, said, “The Teutuls will always be a part of the Discovery family and we congratulate them on a tremendously successful series run.” The final episode will air February 11 at 9:00 PM.

It wasn’t tough to see this one coming from a mile away. The hit show has seemingly been just a shell of its former self since two of the original Teutul trio have stopped speaking to their father and disappeared completely from the Orange County Choppers shop.

Recall also that Paul Teutul filed a lawsuit against Paul Teutul Jr. for over a million dollars a couple of months ago and it’s easy to see that things have been going south for quite some time. Finally, now that the crew has built customs that run on everything from gasoline to ethanol, diesel, compressed natural gas, electricity and even a hybrid, there just don’t seem to be any more alternative fuels left to conquer.

[Source: TMZ]

Filed under: Etc., Motorcycle, Celebrities

Tags: american chopper, AmericanChopper, chopper, choppers, mikey teutul, MikeyTeutul, occ, orange county, Orange County Choppers, OrangeCounty, OrangeCountyChoppers, paul teutul, paul teutul jr, paul teutul sr, PaulTeutul, PaulTeutulJr, PaulTeutulSr, reality television, reality tv, RealityTelevision, RealityTv, teutel, teutul, teutuls, TLC

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Its really about time. I am sick of Paul SR. not giving any credit to his sons for the business growth. No one would give two craps about OCC without the show and without Paul Jr and Mikey on there as the current episodes have proven. I hope they can reconcile their differences but I won’t hold my breath.

02.08.10 By: Scott Weinberg

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Dang, someone at Lionsgate really delved into the vault for this one. Hell, I even saw this flick during its Philadelphia theatrical run in 1986 … and then promptly forgot all about it. I vaguely remember there being a slick car. The film at hand is called The Wraith, and it’s about an spirit(?) from another dimension who visits a small town to wreak vengeance on some murderous assheads. He does it in an ostensibly futuristic sports car, if memory serves.

Initially rated R but released as PG-13 after some trims, The Wraith does boast a pretty colorful cast: Charlie Sheen, Sherilyn Fenn, Nick Cassavetes, Randy Quaid, and (woo hoo!) Clint Howard are all involved somehow. Written and directed by Mike Marvin (whose filmography includes deliciousness like Hot Dog: The Movie and Hamburger: The Motion Picture, with a Six Pack to wash it down), The Wraith is nobody’s idea of a cult classic — and yet I’m very curious to give this flick a re-visit.

According to DVDActive, Lionsgate will unleash The Wraith on March 2, and the DVD (no blu-ray to speak of) will come with interviews, featurettes, and a Marvin commentary. Oh, and according to Dictionary.com, a wraith is “an apparition of a living person supposed to portend his or her death.” I hope that’s not a spoiler.

(Post-jump trivial tidbit: Horror fans may recognize Mike Marvin’s name, as he’s produced a handful of recent indie titles like Timber Falls, Autopsy, and Night Train.)

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Filed under: News/Reactions, DVD News

Tags: charlie sheen, CharlieSheen, dvd, lionsgate, wraith

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Clive Barker’s ‘Nightbreed’ Screens (Uncut!) for the First Time Ever

by John Gholson Feb 4th 2010 // 4:32PM

Filed under: Horror, Exhibition, Newsstand

Back in June, director Clive Barker announced through his Twitter account that lost footage from his original cut of the film Nightbreed had finally turned up, after being assumed missing for more than a decade, “I thought there was 25 minutes missing. I was wrong. Phil and Sarah Stokes called. They possess a video copy of my work print, 44 minutes longer than the theatrical release.” You can read his full reaction to finding his long-lost footage here.

The 1990 film has gained a reputation as one of cinema’s most notorious Director’s Cuts. Nightbreed was intended as a large-scale horror-fantasy, with a much heavier emphasis on the fantasy, but suits at Universal wanted something more akin to Barker’s popular Hellraiser franchise. Barker’s more fantastical cut was somewhere in the three-hour neighborhood, but it was trimmed down to 102 minutes for theatrical release. You can feel it in the film, for sure. While chock full of unusual ideas and mind-blowing creature design, Nightbreed suffers from choppy pacing and plot points that don’t seem to make any sense.
HorrorHound Magazine, along with Clive Barker, will be playing the uncut version of Nightbreed for the first time ever to those attending the Indianapolis HorrorHound Weekend (March 26-28, with the screening on Saturday). The website touts the screening as a one-time only event, with cast and crew in attendance for a Q and A. Fans are naturally pushing for an eventual DVD and Blu-ray release. I’ve been curious about the original cut for years. Nightbreed is so damned weird that I like it despite its flaws, and I’m very curious to see if the cut material would make me love it.

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Tags: cabal, Clive Barker, CliveBarker, horrorhound, nightbreed

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SACRAMENTO — State Controller John Chiang issued a stern warning Friday about California’s cash reserves, telling legislative leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger they must act on nearly $9 billion in budget cuts the governor is seeking by March — or the state will run out of cash to pay its bills.

Without making those cuts — which Chiang says will pump $1.3 billion into the state’s checking account — California would be broke by April 1, no fooling.

The state wouldn’t climb back to what’s considered a safe level of cash on hand, $2.5 billion, until later that month, when tax revenues are expected to begin flowing into Sacramento.

“While our current cash condition is marginally better than it was one year ago,” Chiang wrote to leaders, “it is still precarious.”

Even with the budget cuts, the state’s cash reserve would still be far below that cushion in March and April.

To that end, Chiang is calling for an additional $2 billion in cash-flow “solutions.” Looking at previous cash crunches, that could mean some payments, like income tax refunds, would be delayed for a few weeks to keep the cushion intact.

“Call it overdraft insurance,” said H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the state Finance Department. He stressed that officials are still huddling over specific solutions.

If the budget gridlock lingers all the way to July, then IOUs could come back into play.

And because many budget cuts

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require months of ramp-up to take effect, delaying action on a new budget could inflate the state’s overall $19.9 billion deficit by $2 billion, Palmer warned.

“Inaction ignores the projected cash shortfall which we face in less than 70 days,” Chiang wrote. “Only you can prevent history from repeating this year.”

Contact Denis C. Theriault at 916-441-4651.

This must be what living in the movie Groundhog Day must feel like. Is anyone surprised by this?

The Legislature’s budget analyst on Wednesday recommended that lawmakers go along with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposal to cut state employee pay, even without labor unions’ consent, saying the state’s fiscal distress warrants the action.

The report by Diego Martin and Jason Dickerson of the Legislative Analyst’s Office suggests that the state’s finances are so grim and Schwarzenegger’s bargaining position so weak that the Legislature should use its wage-setting powers to reduce state workers’ pay.

“Under the current budget climate, with state employee unions at odds with the governor, and given the unprecedented level of personnel cost cuts sought by the administration, it is virtually impossible for the administration and state employee unions to reach the level of savings assumed in the governor’s budget through bargaining,” the report concluded.

Schwarzenegger’s budget plan envisions a 5 percent payroll cut across the board starting in July that would chop costs by $945 million overall, $530 million of it from the general fund. If the federal government doesn’t funnel more money into the state, Schwarzenegger would cut wages another 5 percent.

Normally, unions and the administration bargain over pay and benefits, then the Legislature signs off on those deals.

Now the bargaining atmosphere is “dysfunctional in (an) unprecedented budget climate,” the LAO’s report said. It noted that the state has little to offer in exchange for union concessions, and Schwarzenegger is in the last year of his term.

The unions can resist concessions “if they think they may have better bargaining prospects with the next governor,” the report concluded.

But state Senate leader Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said he opposes imposing lower wages on the state work force and that labor unions and the administration have to bargain.

“We need to save money in a way that’s effective,” he said. “That means working with the people on the front lines. Don’t go around them.”

Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear said that the administration has approached legislators and the unions to talk about the governor’s budget proposal.

“We’ll be negotiating on dual tracks,” he said.

Schwarzenegger’s 2010-11 budget plan would affect about 230,000 state workers paid from various sources.

Without budget cuts, tax increases or a mix of both, the state’s general fund, which Schwarzenegger has proposed at $83 billion, is still going to come up short by an estimated $20 billion by the middle of 2011.

About $10 billion from the general fund pays employee wages and benefits. Two-thirds of that pays for staff in the state’s prison and parole systems.

Besides cutting pay, the governor’s budget plan would require all employees to pay another 5 percent toward their own pensions. That would free the state of a $724 million obligation next year.

Most state workers now put in 5 percent. Highway Patrol officers, firefighters and a few other public safety employee groups contribute 8 percent.

But boosting contributions would be “very risky” the analyst’s report said, because the courts have repeatedly turned back attempts to save money by altering pension payments for current employees. The LAO recommended lawmakers reject the pension plan.

The notion of changing the public pension system appears to be gaining traction in some quarters. A Public Policy Institute of California poll released today revealed that 78 percent of likely voters believe state and local government pensions are either a “big problem” or “somewhat of a problem.”

Schwarzenegger supports lowering pensions for newly hired public employees, and pension change advocates are collecting signatures for November ballot initiatives to do that.

Unions vehemently oppose any such changes.

The LAO also criticized the governor’s plan to reduce salary costs another 5 percent with a “work force cap” that allows each department to figure out how to meet its target.

The administration figures most of the savings would come from erasing budgeted but vacant positions or through attrition. Schwarzenegger has set Monday as the deadline for the 150 or so affected departments to submit budget-cutting plans.

The report questioned the wisdom of unallocated, across-the-board work force cuts that don’t weigh priorities.

“We recommend that the Legislature weigh its own priorities, carefully analyze the operations of each program and department,” the report concluded, “and either eliminate or reduce the scope of programs, which often would necessitate reductions in the size of the state workforce.”

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

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Buzz up!

Call Jon Ortiz, Bee Capitol Bureau, (916) 321-1043.

I guess that the public and the state officials do not want competant and qualified candidates taking jobs with the state? Pay is already low compared to jobs in the public sector and the Federal Government. Depressing them more will make the qualified and useful employees to leave while the chaff stays behind to run things.

If you think its bad now, then wait until the last worthwhile employee has walked away. Anyone who thinks that state employees are getting rich working for the state needs to do a little more research about pay and retirement. Its not as good as you think it is.

A Little Less Conversation

Have you ever invited employees to a meeting just so they wouldn’t feel left out? If so, you may be an overcommunicator.

By Joel Spolsky |  Feb 1, 2010

Josh Titus

Cross-functional or Dysfunctional? On every project, one person should be in charge of the flow of communication. You want the decision-making process to look like Figure A — not Figure B.

Joel Spolsky is the founder and CEO of Fog Creek Software in New York City.

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When was the last time you scheduled a meeting and invited eight people instead of the three people who really needed to be there simply because you didn’t want anyone to feel left out?

When was the last time you sent a companywide e-mail that said something like, “Hey, attention coffee drinkers: If you finish the pot, make another!” even though there is actually only one person who violates this rule (and she’s your co-founder)?

When was the last time you got into a long discussion over the color palette for the new brochure with a programmer, who has nothing to do with the brochure but sure knows that he doesn’t like orange?

These are symptoms of a common illness: too much communication.

Now, we all know that communication is very important, and that many organizational problems are caused by a failure to communicate. Most people try to solve this problem by increasing the amount of communication: cc’ing everybody on an e-mail, having long meetings and inviting the whole staff, and asking for everyone’s two cents before implementing a decision.

But communications costs add up faster than you think, especially on larger teams. What used to work with three people in a garage all talking to one another about everything just doesn’t work when your head count reaches 10 or 20 people. Everybody who doesn’t need to be in that meeting is killing productivity. Everybody who doesn’t need to read that e-mail is distracted by it. At some point, overcommunicating just isn’t efficient.

It’s a particularly insidious problem for fast-growing start-ups. When you’re really small and you’re just starting out, you don’t have that many people, so keeping everyone in the loop on everything doesn’t really take that much time. But as you get bigger, the number of people who might potentially get involved in any particular discussion increases, and the amount of stuff you’re doing as a company increases, and the amount of time you can waste overcommunicating becomes a serious problem.

As companies expand, the people within them start to specialize. At such a point, some managers will conclude that they have a “keep everyone on the same page” problem. But often what they actually have is a “stop people from meddling when there are already enough smart people working on something” problem.

It’s not that Bob in Accounting doesn’t have anything useful to say about the photography for the new advertising campaign. Yes, Bob has a master’s in fine arts. Yes, Bob is an amateur photographer. And maybe he even has better taste than do the people in marketing. Still, Bob shouldn’t be telling the marketing manager what to do, because it’s just not efficient. In fact, it’s highly inefficient.

The cost of overcommunication within organizations was fleshed out by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book, The Mythical Man-Month. Brooks helped run the OS/360 project at IBM, building a giant operating system for the company’s mainframes. In those days, computers were large, room-size, water-cooled machines, sometimes with a massive 256,000 bytes of main memory. OS/360 was probably the largest software project ever attempted to that point. And it was monumentally late.

Every time some aspect of the project fell behind schedule, IBM assigned a few more people to the task. And what Brooks noticed, which still surprises people, is that this didn’t work. His observation came to be known as Brooks’ Law: Adding people to a late project tends to make it run later still.

Read that sentence again, because it’s not intuitive. Brooks discovered that adding people to a project will put it further behind schedule.

How can that be? Well, when you add a new person to a team, that person needs to communicate and coordinate with all the other people on the team. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is. The new kid doesn’t know what’s going on, so somebody else on the team — somebody who just last week was doing productive work — has to stop his or her work and show this newbie the ropes.

The bigger the team, the worse it gets. When you have a team of one person, you have no communication requirements. None.

Add a second person, and now you have a single connection: Adam and Mary have to talk to each other once in a while.

Now add a third person, say, Srinivas, and suddenly we’ve gone from one connection to three, since Srinivas has to talk to Adam and Mary.

Add a fourth person. I’m running out of names here to help me out — OK: Britney. If we add her, and she needs to coordinate with all of them, you get six connections.

For the mathematically inclined, the formula is that if you have n people on your team, there are (n²-n)/2 connections. This chart illustrates how this becomes a problem:

People	Connections
1	0
2	1
3	3
4	6
5	10
6	15
7	21
8	28
9	36
10	45

As you can see, the communications costs start to rise pretty rapidly until, on large teams, all anyone ever has time to do is to coordinate with everyone else — and no one gets any work done. In 2006, Moishe Lettvin, a former programmer at Microsoft, wrote a blog post describing the year he spent coordinating the list of items that would be featured on one menu in Windows Vista — the menu you use to turn off your computer. (See The Windows Shutdown Crapfest.) Lettvin figured that 43 people all had a voice in designing this one menu. Forty-three! By Brooks’s formula, that means managing 903 connections. Lettvin says he spent so much time on coordination tasks that, in 12 months, he produced fewer than 200 lines of code.

As the boss, you need to design ways to reduce communications paths. Eliminate companywide mailing lists — or at least charge $1.50 to post to them. Stop having large meetings. You need a culture in which people don’t get uptight because they weren’t included in a meeting, which means you need a culture that rewards people for doing their jobs and frowns on meddling in other people’s work.

And on every project, assign one person to make sure that communication happens — but only the right communication. Otherwise the team will just start having long meetings with everyone there and, frankly, people will socialize, and bloviate, and speechify, and argue about things they don’t really care about just to hear their own voices.

I think this is probably one of those cases in which the old, 1950s style of management accidentally got something right. In those General Motors–style companies, they at least had an idea for how information needed to move up and down neat, regimented org charts, which showed a modicum of recognition that the right answer is not that every single person in the organization needs to pay attention to everything.

When you started your company, you probably did a great job of communicating. Everybody told one another everything. And your customers loved it, because when they called in to ask about their purchase order, everybody knew where it was. But as you get bigger, you can’t keep telling everybody about every purchase order, so you have to invent specific communications systems so that exactly the right people find out and nobody else. Not because it’s confidential. Because it’s a waste of time.

Joel Spolsky is the co-founder and CEO of Fog Creek Software and the host of the popular blog Joel on Software. For an archive of his columns, go to www.inc.com/author/joel-spolsky.

Today is bubble wrap appreciation day, or “BWAD.” Celebrated the last Monday of every January, it’s the day to celebrate your love of everyone’s favorite packaging helper. Some partake in the festivities by making bubble wrap animals, bubble wrap dresses, or simply grabbing a piece of bubble wrap and popping all the pockets. And if you don’t have any lying around, you can always play the online bubble wrap popping game. Hooray for bubble wrap! You’ve filled our hearts almost as much as you’ve filled our landfills. (Thanks to GitEmSteveDave!)