....For four cents.
Yes folks, that's what the 12,000 voting members of the Writers' Guild of America want.
A lousy FOUR CENTS.
Don't listen to the joke, the jabs, the jibes.
All they want is four cents.
C'mon Murdoch, Redstone and the other members of the tiny alliance responsible for the strike that started at midnight.
As I write this, all my gainfully employed writer friends on various TV shows and movies are literally hysterical. Some have been galvanized into picket lines down the street outside Universal Studios and CBS gates here at Radford. 
Some are huddled in bed figuring out where to hide the Hummer from repo guys no doubt ready to descend by the end of the month.
Who was it that said that most of us are one paycheck away from disaster?
Writers have been getting a crappy four cents on each unit of videos sold for twenty odd years. We all know most movies have a number of writers on them, which means they are all fighting like street pigeons over four cents.
Sooooo, why not give them another four cents? FOUR CENTS!!!
Considering they don't get DVD rights or internet downloads etc. I think they deserve the few extra pennies.
Without writers, there wouldn't be anything to shoot.
There wouldn't be books, songs, poems...nada. Nyet! Rien!
I pray for a swift ending to this catastrophe.
I also pray that Dog the Bounty Hunter is not really a racist, but it looks like he is.
WAAAH!
In my time of distress however, nothing gives me comfort.
A friend turned me onto author Mary Gentle's novel 'A Sundial in a Grave 1610' which has rather startling and vidid descriptions of man-man love and some rather graphic seventeenth century rough man-man sex, if you get my drift.
Imagine my dismay to find that the men getting all that er...action...are actually women.
Nothing is as it seems.
Nothing!!
So stand up for the little guy - stand up for your rights to watch good shows, read good books and listen to beautiful songs and poems.

Aloha oe,

A.J.