Well, if I can't have any fun I might as well leave.

I started this post several times in commemoration of World AIDS Day last week. At times it's gotten pretty long so I'm going to just pare it down to it's essence.

Somebody that my wife and I knew personally, loved and lost to AIDS was Father Peter Davis. Peter was a wonderful man, bigger than life and the pastor at the Catholic church my wife and I met at.

Part of what's made it so hard to finish this post is that it's difficult to find the words to describe just how great a man Peter was. He was down to earth, charismatic and had a great sense of humor. Most importantly; Peter advocated a Christianity based on caring for the weak in our society and centered around forgiveness. He was as much a true Christian as I've ever met.

So I was thinking about Peter on World AIDS Day and decided to do the Google thingy and see if I could find a biography or maybe his obituary to share. To my chagrin the only thing I could find was a mention on the Women for Faith and Family website on what amounts to their Priestly Hall of Shame. No doubt because of the cause of his death, but also it seems because he ministered in a flamboyant manner.

This excerpt from Peter's obituary (not available online, alas) is supposed to be taken as ironic. I read it and it made me glad I knew the man. Go figure.

From auctioning a suckling pig dinner while dressed as Miss Piggy to lighting Easter fire from a trail of gunpowder, Father Peter Davis lived and ministered with passion, humor and drama. On Dec. 28, he died at a Portland, Ore., hospice of AIDS. He was 43. He loved being a Jesuit and a priest. "I absolutely love it," he told a radio talk show host. "I do it easily. I do it naturally." [obituary by Brad Reynolds, S.J., in the National Jesuit News, April 1990]

So for no other reason that it breaks my heart that the only mention of Father Peter Davis anywhere on the world wide interwebs is by an organization run by a bunch of intemperate evil shrews, I simply want to give testament here on my little corner of the digital world that Father Peter Davis was a great man. He was the kind of man who...

...would willingly volunteer to take part in all sorts of goofy, outrageous youth group activities that may have been beneath the dignity of his position but endeared him to teens in the parish...

...would light up every time he saw a baby...

...put the ministry of the poor first and foremost as the parish goal...

...would go out of his way to tell you the worst joke you'd ever heard...

...made Christianity real and not a series of hollow rituals and motions...

...when he was diagnosed with AIDS went against the wishes of the Portland Archdiocese and, trusting his parishioners, publicly announced what he was sick with and how he had contracted it...

...meant so much to Mrs. Wormer and me that even though we were no longer Catholics, nor believers for that matter, we named our son after him.

I am lucky to have known him.

Oh, some like it hot, but I like it REALLY hot.

There's a lot of stuff I like about the idea of Senator Al Franken but am I a bastard because the thing that's exciting me the most is the prospect of seeing Bill O'Reilly's head explode?

Hey, you know you're kind of a handsome man.

Happy Friday!

Regarding Tweety's new hair color...

He's Mister White Christmas, he's Mister Snow. He's Mr. Icicle, he's Mister 10 below.

If you hadn't been following the writer's strike compulsively you might have missed that the strike took a different tone in the last few days after the last series of talks "broke down. " In actuality it's become clear that the studios are following the George W. Bush model of negotiation- "Our willingness to compromise begins and ends with agreeing to sit down at the same table with you scumbags. Don't expect anything more than that." They are trying to break the union.

Patrick Goldstein has a great piece in the L.A. Times covering this conflict.

This puts all of Hollywood on the road to perdition. That still leaves the real unanswered question: Why have the studios walked away from the negotiating table? Although it seemed hard to believe at first, the evidence is overwhelming that they never had any serious intention of making a fair deal, at least the kind of deal that, as Lew Wasserman might have put it, would've allowed both sides to come away declaring victory. There is clearly a powerful studio faction that believes that giving residuals to the writers was a fundamental mistake. Since it's impossible to put that genie back into the bottle -- not that the studios didn't try -- the next best thing would be to put a tight lid on any new media revenue streams, since they will someday become the studio's biggest new source of profit.

In the broader picture the Director's Guild and Screen Actor's Guild have contracts up soon. The Director's aren't going to stand with the writers and pretty much get everything they want anyway as Overdroid pointed out to me yesterday but the actors are in pretty much the same boat as the writers when it comes to internet revenue and residuals. The studios want to break both unions.

The thing is the "new media streams" referred to above are currently democratic and inexpensive. Writers would probably be better off to break from the studios and tap these resources on their own outside of the studio system. The studios themselves seem to be signing their own death warrant. As painful as this is to watch it's akin to a slow-motion corporate suicide. You don't see that every day.