Willis.

For me, he just stepped out of the festering Hollywood swamp by saying something intelligent about his own, and fellow actors’, intelligence and cerebral capacity.

BRUCE WILLIS is fed up with listening to outspoken actors – and believes their opinion shouldn’t mean “jack shit” to the general public. The Die Hard star understands some of his colleagues want to do good for various causes, but wishes others would keep their thoughts to themselves. He says, “I don’t think my opinion means jack shit, because I’m an actor. “Why do actors think their opinions mean more because you act? You just caught a break as an actor. There are hundreds – thousands – of actors who are just as good as I am, and probably better. “Have you heard anything useful come out of an actor’s mouth lately?” He adds, “Although I liked George Clooney’s documentary on Darfur.”

(emphasis mine)

I should add that acting is not exactly a prerequisite for, or the strong side of, the “actors” Willis is talking about; you just have to be good looking and know who to sleep with, and when… which, I suppose, requires some talent, I’ll give them that.

Damn it, I love starting my day with a good rant! ;)

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Last night I happened to watch Rambo: First Blood. Of course, this is not the first time I’ve seen it, but it has been a while. The cruelty these vets suffered from the population upon their return always struck a chord with me. For the record, Rambo I is a good movie; it has what we would call today “moderate violence” and a decent message and dialog (unlike its successors). I dare say that even the acting was good. These were the times where they (Hollywood) had to produce a good script because they couldn’t distract the audience with visual effects like they do today.

Anyway, I remembered that as a child and young teenager, I was convinced that the Vietnam War was invented by the movie industry as a ruse to produce war movies. I think I had the notion of this “fake” war because I only heard about it in the movies. Then I grew up and found out the sad truth. In Israel, they didn’t teach us about these wars; we had plenty of our own.

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The first patent I submitted while I was at Xilinx was finally awarded. It was frustrating to wait nearly four years for the system to process it, though. The patent system is kind of broken and bad patents do manage to go through, but this one was actually useful. We’ll see how the other five I have in the pipeline take to be approved ;)

“Method of measuring the performance of a transceiver in a programmable logic device” (USPTO, PDF)

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