Day: July 29, 2004

An eBay counter-scam – someone tried to buy this guy’s powerbook, but was pretty sketchy and provided a fake escrow account. So the would-be seller sent a binder with pen drawings all over it as a “p-p-p-powerbook” and shipped it express to London, with an estimated customs cost of $2000. Yikes!
Web link of note: P-P-P-Powerbook
(At http://p-p-p-powerbook.com/)

Clothing and designer bags made from human skin! Sign me up!

Strangely, this is an idea my friends and I have been talking about since high school… 1993.
Web link of note: SkinBag
(At http://www.skinbag.net/skinbag-gb/index.html)

I was talking with ShaColby this morning about an obscure aspect of Grosse Point Blank –

I was remarking that one of the funniest parts was Alan Arkin as the therapist- sort of humoring his patient the hit man, trying to not get killed.

Dan Aykroyd‘s character was very interesting for a conceptual reason: he’s trying to put together a syndicate of assassins, like a union.

Early in the movie John Cusack is on the phone while about to complete the contract on a client (how unprofessional! Hang up and drive! er shoot!). He kills an assassin who is about to kill someone who he is apparently protecting… but then Dan Aykroyd swoops in and kills the person anyway.

As a quick aside- remember those infuriatingly difficult gun games, where the gun or crossbow or what have you was mounted on the arcade cabinet, and you had to shoot all this stuff that was about to kill some random dude walking through the scene? Like a cowboy wandering into the deadliest saloon that has ever existed, filled with flying broken bottles and Can Can Dancers O Death. Damn those games are impossible.

Anyway, since John Cusack has screwed that up, he is pretty much forced to take another job to make good with whoever it is who is getting him these jobs… coincidentally the next gig is in his home town of Grosse Pointe, and his high school reuinion is coming up!

While in town, Dan Aykroyd shows up and tries to get him to join his fledgling syndicate… He tells him that it would be a way to avoid “embarassments” like the hit in the beginning of the movie, or another (unseen) episode where Cusack accidentally blew up a dog.

So – is Akroyd saying that members of the guild would all know about each others’ assignments? But that would mean it would be harder to set up jobs like the one we saw, where the client wants the assassin to kill another assassin. If there was a Guild, this would be completely impossible, since presumably the members of the Guild would be trying to kill or recruit the non-members anyway.

Maybe there would be some elaborate protocols for that exact case. But how would the Guild know you are making payments on a “secret” job, and not just sheltering money from them, like the way Cheney shelters money from the IRS?

For that matter, how would the Guild “audit” its members? How would members trust the administration of the Guild to not extort them in the first place, since they are all assassins?

Hmm… Since they had Assassin’s Guilds in Dungeons & Dragons, I’m sure someone has thought this through before!