Uh-oh

Found this at www.latimes.com upon returning to the hotel:

Germany orders arrest of 13 CIA operatives
By Jeffrey Fleishman, Times Staff Writer
9:50 AM PST, January 31, 2007


BERLIN -- A Munich court has ordered the arrest of 13 U.S. intelligence operatives in connection with the kidnapping and beating of a German citizen who was interrogated for five months at a secret prison in Afghanistan, prosecutors announced today.

The suspects belong to a CIA-sponsored team that allegedly flew Khaled Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, from Macedonia to Afghanistan in January 2004. Each of the accused, all but one of whom were identified only by aliases, were charged with kidnapping and causing serious bodily harm.

Well, we could send them to Gitmo. That would keep their testimony off the record and out of open court, which is the whole point of Gitmo in the first place, right? I think now I'll be able to sleep.

Shakespeare & Co

Still awake redux. I am transfixed by the image of President Bush giving a speech on the television. I am wanting to right-click on the remote to check properties, but the administrator has apparently blocked access. When I listen to the President, I get the impression that a program is running out of control on the hard drive and there is no Ctrl/Alt/Delete that can stop it.

Torn between further attempts at sleep and a coffee and croissant at Les Deux Magots, I climb out of bed. Picasso used to sit in a cafe and sketch people. Maybe I'll write about someone I see there and hand them the pages as I leave.

In the same spirit, I determine to visit Shakespeare & Co, which I've wanted to do since Kathleen O'Hara described living there. It was on an invitation-only basis and the quid pro quo was that one had to work a certain number of hours in the book store and write a book during the stay. I always thought that telling a writer he had to write was like commanding a dog to 'speak'. What you end up with is a barking dog.

The meaning of life

Still awake. Had I been out clubbing, this would be the normal hour for retiring, but spending the night pondering the meaning of one's existence puts a rather different slant on it. I just got a call from a co-worker--I like using this highly inappropriate term for a fellow screenwriter--who just landed at CDG with a fresh and invigorating case of jetlag and needed to scold me for staying in what he deemed to be an extravagant hotel. Understand that he is compulsive at the game of one-upmanship and since he was temporarily without the means to afford a better hotel, he had no choice but to book into a room with a view of a Parisian blight that he could use to leverage an argument for his fiscal responsibility.

I mute the television and tune into the body-count channel intending to fall asleep to images of our victory in progress.

The Oscars

It's getting late and I can't sleep. I'm expected to communicate my decision on whether or not I shall be attending the Oscar ceremonies within the next few minutes as whatever I decide will have repercussions for people in a number of different time zones. My preference would be to send Sacheen Littlefeather though she would have to go as a seat warmer since I'm not nominated for anything going on that evening. I would go if I thought they might reprise "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" as Best Song.

Le Figaro

Le Figaro referred to me as a réfléchisseur enragé. I have to think about that before I counter-attack.

the Chad

My agency just called. Not my agent, but his assistant the Chad as in, "Hey, it's the Chad on the line with something for you." It seems no one is clear on when my agent will be released from rehab or what put him there in the first place, though I have my suspicions.

What the Chad had for me was a rewrite note for a script that the agency was going to send me.

"The problem is it's written in three acts with a protagonist and antagonist"

"That's a problem?"

"Yeah, nobody wants stories anymore; they're too much work for the audience. What they're looking for is a brilliant idea for an opening followed by lots of scenes with characters in the target demo age group. Three acts don't work."

"What about Euripides?"

"Hey, don't get the Chad started on the Golden Globes. Those people don't know what's going on outside of Stockholm and we're presenting you as mainstream mega-bucks, so soft-pedal that, OK?"

"By the way, if you-know-who calls..."

"Don't worry; we don't want anybody to know where any of our clients are."

We had already tripled to maximum amount of telephone time usually allowed by the Chad and it turned out he wanted something.

"Is there any way you can help the Chad pry Catherine Millet away from her New York literary agent?"

Diane Lane

I ran into Diane Lane in the lobby, who asked me if there was some reason I was hiding out in Paris and not returning emails after cutting off my cell phone. I told her, yes, there was.

iPod mishap

I am having trouble downloading Skype on the hotel computer, which rejects any and all attempts to import alien content onto the hard drive. I tried getting in touch with Jean-Pierre Soutric, but he was off to his apartment in the Marais and therefore unable to intervene on my behalf.

I need the Skype software because my iPod coach is in Egypt giving a seminar that seems to have been organized, indirectly and for motives that are sufficiently vague, by Clive Davis and he won't talk to me on the phone for fear of incurring punitive roaming charges. The problem is that I somehow downloaded 60GB of electronica onto my iPod over-writing all the play lists that he spent hundreds of hours orchestrating after several comprehensive and exhaustive consulting sessions with me, which included psychological and aptitude testing along with recommendations from no less than three independent focus group specialists located in Los Angeles, London and Caracas.

This mishap occurred after a fille sympa discovered the Credence tracks I had covertly added to a play list, knowing that my iPod coach would have decommissioned if he'd known about it. She was down to her thong and escarpins when she asked if I'd mind her listening to music whilst she submitted to my will. I had no incentive to decline her request, but neither did I have cause to think she'd stumble onto 'Run Through the Jungle' and suffer such an adverse reaction. This horrible gaffe on my part not only ruined what promised to be a perfectly historic evening with the top left-foot model in Europe, but my reputation as well if she turns out to be half the gossip I believe her to be.

Al Gore

I wonder if Al Gore still plays touch football with his family or if it was just that one time.

Note to agent

They say you can fool some of the people all of the time. Accordingly, I think we should concentrate on this group initially. We can move on to the people you can only fool some of the time at a later date if we deem it necessary. I hope to hear back from my agent about this as soon as he's out of rehab, as I don't think my messages have been getting through.

The Kurds

We have inherited Saddam's problems without having access to his solutions. I say let's gas the Kurds and be done with it.