The WGA strike started at midnight Sunday. I’ve never been on strike before. This will be new.

In case you’re curious and the news reports don’t make the issues clear, the deal is extremely simple. Advancing technology is constantly changing the means through which the stuff we write is sold and delivered. Our deal doesn’t cover those changes properly, and until it does, we’ll get paid less and less fairly as time goes on.

As you know from your own experience, an ever-increasing percentage of the audience is seeing our work through DVDs, downloads, streaming media, and so on. Our last agreement dates to before YouTube and its ilk even existed.

Heck, nobody even knows how the audience will see stuff five or ten or fifty years from now. It might all be delivered wirelessly through the Internet, or to our phones, or to giant glowing mandatory probes inserted in the backs of our necks and jacked directly into our brain stems. (I only pray these will be designed by Apple. I mean, who wants a giant glowing mandatory neck probe made by Microsoft? Not me.)

One thing we do know, though: new media will be a large, growing, and possibly dominant part of the future. So WGA has to demand fair payment, or face literally signing away the writers’ share of that future.

And while the studios will make money no matter how the work is distributed, our current deal simply doesn’t extend properly into new media yet. So we’re asking to get paid our fair share (and really nothing more than that, honest) for our work, no matter where it’s shown.

That’s it. That’s the heart of the issue.

Basically, when they get paid for our work, we should get paid for our work — whether it’s in DVDs, downloads, or giant glowing mandatory neck probes.

Until then, sadly — nobody wanted this — pickets.

And hopefully some fairly creative slogans. Because, well, writers. Damn well better be.

PS: If you’d like more specifics, an excellent and clear issue-by-issue breakdown, along with the basic outlines of a possible agreement, are here.

From last weekend, here’s one of the most exciting plays in football in years — an amazing 15-lateral, 62-second-long, come-from-behind last play desperation miracle to end a Division III game between Trinity University and Millsaps College:

Compare and contrast with this string of rugby highlights I grabbed pretty much at random.  (These happen to be  from the 2002 New Zealand domestic club competition.) These are all great plays, but also perfectly typical of the game’s speed and excitement, the sort of thing rugby fans the world over take almost for granted.

You see the resemblance.

The Australian dollar sat around US $0.75 the last couple of times I was down there.

I peeked back over the summer, and it was sitting around US $0.83.

Today I glance down, and it’s at US $0.92. That’s a big move — over 10 percent, just in the last few months.

If current trends continue (and thanks to enormous trade and budget deficits, they probably will), it may not be long before the Canadian dollar is joined by the Australian dollar in passing parity in its US exchange rate.

At least this one has kangaroos on it. Five of them, in fact. So, bouncy, at least.

Last year, Princeton economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman notably suggested that the dollar would eventually suffer a "Wile E. Coyote moment," when dollar holders would suddenly notice they’d long ago run over the cliff and hadn’t had anything under their feet in some time.

Here’s a recent amplification on that, including a brief look at theories as to what’s keeping the coyote in the air, by one of Krugman’s colleagues, the head of Europe’s Centre for Economic Policy Research.

Yikes.  Don’t look down, I guess.

OK, this is weird: I’ve been invited to appear this Sunday on CNN’s "Reliable Sources" to talk about the California wildfires.

I’m no expert (obviously) and have never pretended to be, so I’m not sure if this is even worth watching.  But there it is.  I’ve been paired up with a conservative blogger, so simply because of the format alone, I’m not expecting much in the way of actual conversation.  Most of these left-right talking-head things really nothing more than competitive evangelism, where two sides try to sell their talking points over each other in a very limited period of time.  I can’t stand that sort of rubbish, I don’t intend to participate in it, and I told the producer so.  Surprised she still invited me.  Either this will be surprisingly cool or the English language has its limits.

What rarely gets pointed out about the conventional talking head left-right format, although it should be self-evident: whoever may be correct in a given discussion, left or right, the severe time limitations also virtually ensure equal time for someone to spew complete crap — unless either the moderator is hip and brave enough to call shenanigans (rare), or both participants approach it with open minds and intellectual honesty (rarer still).  Most of what I’ve seen, nobody goes away learning a damn thing, and at least some absolute falsehoods get declared with sincerity and stand without rebuttal at the end.  Then we wonder why large chunks of the electorate are confused on the most basic facts of entire wars.

So I accept the invitation with severe reservations.  Frankly, I don’t care what I think about the wildfires, much less what any blogger or pundit or news commentator might think.  I have no desire to hit a bunch of talking points under fire like I’m back doing stand-up and I’ve got to get to the killer bit in the four minutes before the commercial.  It’s just not interesting.  I care about what actual scientists think, with time and perspective and research and peer review.

Unfortunately, CNN doesn’t have a Rolodex entry for the League of Attractive Scientists.  (I asked the producer.  Really.  She laughed, and I bet if someone organized such a group, she’d put them on in a second.)

So it’ll be me, balding white guy, and some right-leaning woman — who I assume is much younger and more attractive than I am, this being commercial TV — talking about things (a) other people really know about, some of which (b) we’ve read.  What great purpose this serves, I’m honestly not sure.  Also, we’ll chat about what we think about what we saw in the media this week.  Eight minutes later, HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead! for you guys, a trip back home to sleep for me.  Such a refreshing change from every other damn thing on the tube. 

I’m not even sure why I’m doing this, other than I tend not to say no to new experiences.  (This is why I’m about to spend time in England, Northern Ireland, Mexico, probably much of South America, and possibly Tanzania in the next six months.  And then probably moving to Australia.  Saying yes to unexpected things makes life fizzy.  Highly recommended.)

Ten years ago, I probably would have been excited, mistakenly seeing this as validating, even an opportunity, when it’s just the gaping empty maw of 24/7 media seeking perpetual nourishment.  Now I just hope to have one useful conversation with bright, friendly people and go home.  Is that asking too much?  I’m curious.

We’ll see how it goes.  I can only hold up my end.  I guess the point I’d like to make going in, on this show about media coverage of major issues: until we figure out how to have more actual, um, experts on TV regularly discussing the many underlying causes of the fires (or whatever the latest disaster to come may be) — dispassionately, and without a partisan agenda — we haven’t even begun to solve anything.  (Implementing any changes would be a whole other magilla.)  Not bloody damn likely, I know.

But until then, as a nation, we’re smoking in bed, and then wondering why we keep waking up on fire.

I may also sneak in a polite word about the limitations of shoehorning every damn issue into this manichean up/down left/right ongoing ceremonial argument machine.  I know they sort of have to, now that we’ve been so well polarized that they’ll get accusations of bias if they do almost anything else.  But still.  (This wouldn’t be ambushing the host; I told the producer exactly how I feel about this, and she said she was cool with it.)

If the thing turns into a partisan deal, well, I’m cramming almost as if it’s another Jeopardy! call, just in case.  Who does "better" in that exchange is probably up to Howie more than anything else.  But I really hope it’s civil and involves some actual thinking.

One positive idea, maybe: has anybody ever suggested a reward-the-good-guys, inverted version of a media boycott — buying extra crap when somebody actually does some great broadcasting?

I mean, if CNN went out and got the leading environmental scientists, urban planners, and fire experts — not partisan hacks, not talk radio hosts, not elected politicians, and not me and some other blogger, for gods’ sake — to sit not for eight minutes but for a three-night in-depth roundtable moderated by a non-partisan scientist who hasn’t registered with either major party because he’s too busy solving actual problems… I would buy every single goddam thing they advertised.

I would buy the HeadOn.  I would buy crates of the stuff.  I would apply it directly to my forehead.  Maybe a million other people would, too.

Ah, impossible dreams.  But for now, we go to media with the shows we have.

[Added Saturday, Oct. 27th: looking back in advance of a CNN gig tomorrow, the word "cause" in that headline was poorly chosen. I meant "a" probable cause, not "the" probable cause, as you can see from the concluding sentence, but the phrase "contributing factor" would have been much more accurate. My bad. Still, the point about climate change being an obvious factor in California’s future as a growing tinderbox, and the Bush administration’s resistance to climate change discussions, is plenty obvious.]

This was the view on the day I came back from the West Indies last spring:

Fire on the left, downtown on the right. Great to be home.

Now it’s fall, and there are fires in all directions, with things particularly bad down in San Diego County. I’m nowhere near the fire this time, but the air everywhere is smoky and brown and when the sun is near the horizon the whole sky looks bizarrely red. Kinda hard not to think about today.

Also, it’s 97 degrees outside in late October. According to the Weather Channel, this is 23 degrees above the seasonal average. Gee, global warming much? Actually, yes. Anecdotal evidence in isolation is meaningless, but add up everything that has been happening for years, and according to today’s Science Daily:

However, yesterday, the director of the Centers for Disease Control testified before Congress on the impact of climate change on human health. And today we learn that the White House deleted much of the prepared testimony in advance, removing large swaths of scientific information on major health risks posed by global warming.

More than two-thirds of the CDC’s testimony on global warming seems to have been deleted by the Bush administration.

I have friends in San Diego who are sheltering neighbors whose homes may not be there anymore. Unseasonable heat and changing weather patterns have turned southern California into a tinderbox, precisely the way forecast by people warning us about global warming for years:

And the White House is still actively trying to pretend that a main underlying cause [edit: contributing factor] to these disasters simply doesn’t exist.