Alex McVeigh’s posterous

I love taking photos of "No Photography" signs. This one comes to you live from the Pentagon.

The infamous A-Hole bandit strikes again! And this time, he's hit my Honey Nut Cheerios!

IS NOTHING SACRED?!?!

What's next, my beloved Foreman Grill?

Could be this be a crime wave sweeping Annandale, the Mecca of western Fairfax County?

We'll be back with more as the story develops....

Yep, it's summertime. And nothing says summer like a red hot grill. And when that grill has steak and vegetables alternating on a wooden stake, well then, now we've got something special.

And for those of you saying, "But Alex, you're grilling steak, but you have a glass of white wine next to it," well, you got some nerve buster.

It's not actually white wine, it's mead Mr. Know-It-All.

What's mead? Well, well, well, all of a sudden we're not so smart now, are we?

Mead is a wine made from honey and other herbs. It's delicious, and a perfect nightcap which I need, since I've got to go in at 5:30 tomorrow morning.

Any other questions?

The throng of people you see before you represents the most dangerous kind of people in today's modern age: people deprived of their cell phones.

Allow me to explain. Last night I went to the premire for the movie "Bruno" to review it for my newspaper. I used to do premires a lot more, but we're short on space of late, so we don't do reviews as much.

I've never been to a premire like this one, because they conficate all cell phones at the door. My companion for the evening didn't bring one, but I did. So I had to give them my cell phone which they catalogued and sorted with the precision you might expect from a collector of rare antiquities.

That is, they put in in a small paper bag, wrote my name on the bag, and tossed it into a box.

The movie was pretty funny, although I saw more male genatalia than I usually prefer to see on a Tuesday night. 

Let me digress for a second and tell you about the people who sit with me on press row to review these movies. They are horrible, horrible people. Generally, I like to disassociate myself from most reporters in large media gatherings, because most of them seem to be a different breed than you or me.

Where I might have on a polo shirt and jeans, these jackasses are wearing heavy-rimmed glasses, and sport scraggly hair that is meant to look unkempt, but in reality they spent hours gelling it to perfecftion that morning.

They sit there, with their hemp shoulder bags, dressed in a sport jacket and slacks, but with beat up leather shoes or sandals, thinking they're being ironic or something. I hate them so much.

Their conversation is even worse. They talk about artsy films, or other things they covered that have high cultural impact. Have I mentioned how much I hate these people.

Sometimes I'll be in on some conversation where they're talking about the how their fascist editors won't let them use words like 'eleemosynary' or 'constabulatory' for effect, or some garbage like that, and I like to chime in with something like, "So, do you guys think that the Celtics adding Rasheed Wallace combined with a healthy Kevin Garnett will put them back in the Finals next year?"

If that had been a movie trailer, that's where the record needle would have scratched and the music would have stopped. You'd think I just dropped an n-bomb.

While I enjoy being a reporter, I like to think of myself as pretty down to earth. I enjoy sports, rock and/or roll, and most normal things. I like art and jazz music, but I wouldn't be caught dead talking about them in public, much less in that fake, "I'm pretending to be quiet, but really I'm speaking loudly enough for everyone to hear my opinions" voice like so many of them do.

When the theater cleared, I knew I was in for a treat. 400 people all without cell phones, gathered around a small tables while security guards passed out phones to people who may or may not have been  their owners.

The look on these people's faces once they got their cell phones back was a disgusting site to see. It was like they had been deprived of oxygen for the past two hours, and now they could finally breathe. They immediately ripped their phones out of the paper bag, and began dialing furiously, ready to explain to their myriad of jerk friends why they were out of touch for so many hours.

When I got mine, I had a missed call and a few texts to reply to, but no one I had to call immediately and apologize for not answering.

I felt like screaming to people, "You know, somehow humans managed to survive for thousands of years without cell phones!"

Sure, having a phone is a good time killer. I can play a game (my phone has this game called "Word Mole" which is a ten out of ten) or catch up on my twitter posts (you'd be amazed at how much news breaks on twitter now). But I can live without it, unlike most of the people.

The press people, as you'd expect, were particularly obnoxious. One next to me snapped up his phone, unwrapped it like it was an f-ing Christmas present, and immediately made a call to his 'editor', which I am 100% sure was a fake call, just to impress the people around him.

"Yeah, Bill, it's me Frank. Sorry about that, they didn't let us have phones in there. What's that? Yeah, I know I'm on deadline, look, I can crank out a 500-word review in a few minutes, and have it to you by deadline. Yeah, for tomorrow's paper."

How do I know it was a fake call? Because you can't publish reviews until the movie opens. Since "Bruno" doesn't open until Friday, no paper is going to run the review until Friday.

Now look, I'm not above using my job to impress people, particularly young ladies. I've brought people to reviews, and it always make me feel like a big deal when I walk to the ticket-taker, and say, "I'm here for the premiere," and they let me right through.

Then I get to bypass the line of people who won their passes through a radio station contest, and go to the person running the line and say, "I'm here from the media. My last name's McVeigh, you've probably heard or me, I'm sort of a big deal around these parts. I've been called the voice of a generation when it comes to reviewing movies."

Okay, I don't say that last part. But that's how I feel. My personal favorite is when I go to a screening, and they have a sign with my name printed out on the seat. Nothing makes you feel like a bigger deal than that. I even saved one of those signs, but I lost it a while ago.

Point being, I don't mind looking like a big shot at these things, but there is a limit. The key is subtlety. You let your status go unsaid, unlike the jerks who talk loudly on the phone to their "editor" that have all the tact of an elephant falling on a piano.

Wow, this post really got away from me, didn't it?

Unless you have a giant monitor, you can't even see the picture I'm talking about. Sorry about that.

What do you see in the picture above? Well, besides the subtle, yet refined classy dress that is my signature, you might as well be seeing an orange jumpsuit with numbers on it.

For you see, the very presence of a collar on the shirt and pants that have belt loops represent a journey back into the day-to-day running that everybody know, as Neil Young so eloquently put it, is nowhere.

For the past week, I haven't worn pants once, and only wore anything that requires a belt when I played golf on the fourth of July. I haven't worn shoes except to play golf.

No, my vacation attire consists of rotating pairs of basketball shorts, T-shirts with obnoxious slogans on them (like the one my mom got me from a cigar store that has a picture of a burning cigar and the caption, "Nice Ash." Sometimes, you can't put a price on classy), and sandals. That's it.

Now, when I put on my watch this morning, I might as well have been putting on the shackles, putting on shoes and socks like getting fitted for cement boots.

And I like my job. I can't imagine what it's like to go back to one you hate.

If you think I wasn't blasting Iron Maiden's "The Prisoner" (where the title of today's post comes from) on repeat as I rode into work, you're wrong.

What better way to end the fourth of July than with "The Return of the Jedi?" That's right, there isn't.

Thanks to Spike TV's Force of July (A+ title by the way) weekend, I've been able to catch up on a lot of the struggle between the rebellion and the Galactic Empire. And if you don't think there are parallels between our own American Revolution and the Galactic Civil War, you're crazy.

I like to think of Luke Skywalker as George Washington, Darth Vader as General Cornwallis, and Emperor Palpatine as King George III.

I remember being a young boy in history class, learning about the pivotal Battle of Yorktown. About when George Washington won our independence when his father, Gen. Cornwallis turned on his dark master King George and threw him into a pit on the newly constructed British Death Star.

Who says history is boring?

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Fireworks, live from Ocean City. These people down the street put on a show themselves, fifteen seconds of which you can see here.

Nothing like spending the fourth of Joo-ly of the golf course. Let freedom ring.

I don't know if there is anything more classy than drinking a can of beer at a restaurant. And if that beer happens to be Natty Bo, the beer of choice for white trash Marylanders, well then, bring me another one.

What's that you see? Just a little article by yours truly in the Washington Times, that's all.