While it is true that my actions are orchestrated by a marionetteer who, when not twirling his proposterously waxed mustache in fits of gleeful villainery and laughing to the accompaniment of thunderclaps behind which, if you listen really really carefully, you'll hear an orphaned kitten mewling, it is not true that my words are held captive to the same maniacal machinations. Neither a ventriloquist nor a ghost writer is on my payroll. (However, both a charming manservant and a large animated carp with a penchant for puns are. But that, as they say, is neither here nor there.)

Sometimes, however, I plain ol' just don't want to say much. I want to sit back and listen to someone else spout and spew and flail and froth. Today is one of those times. So without further ado or adon't, I present to you an entry written by my go-to "guest blogger", the always enchanting and opinionated (and, okay, dashing) "Ds". Ds first "guest blogged" for me back in June.

*   *   *

Ds - Star Commenter and Resident Guest Blogger

Being a writer by trade (or at least I was a writer by trade until recently, when I sold my soul to a non-profit devil,) I watched the recent Hollywood Writer’s strike with great interest. No one knows better than I how hard it is to create something from nothing, and I agree that those who do so, be it with pen, brush or chisel, should be suitably compensated for their work. But three things struck me mightily during the strike that I’d like to take the opportunity to discuss here…

#1: The main sticking point of the writer’s demands was compensation for rebroadcast of their material on the Internet. Call me an old-fashioned fool, but last time I checked, the way one made money off of broadcasting your stories was through the support of advertising. There are very few business models on the Internet that work long term, and broadcasting is not among them. So unless you’re a travel company, Amazon or porn, I don’t see how you can expect to be compensated for your work. The Internet is the new Wild West, full of freethinking, free-spirited, free entertainment. Some of the things I’ve seen on YouTube are amazing, and save for their production quality and limited budgets, easily rival most of the drivel these so-called ‘professionals’ are thrusting upon us in the mainstream broadcast media.

#2: As the strike wore on and the networks expended their libraries of banked shows, they turned more and more to ‘reality’ television. I’m sorry, but as I sat their watching these shows, I often notice they have very little to do with reality. So little in fact, that if you watch the credits you’ll see titles like, “Executive Producer,” “Segment Producer,” “Reality Coach.” Seriously, Reality Coach? Last time I checked, reality just happened. And it’s often about as thrilling as a root canal without benefit of Novocain. There’s a reason only those who been frontally lobotomized can handle watching 60 minutes of C-SPAN. That’s reality television. These so-called reality shows are packaged, staged and scripted. Which means by definition that somewhere lurking in the deep dark recesses of the production studio, someone is writing at the very minimum, outlines for them. So how do they get off putting this stuff on the air, but eliminating things like awards shows? The sheer duplicitousness boggles the mind. And let’s not even talk about commercials… A lot of my friends are members of SAG/AFTRA. I’m even a member. But at no time did anyone tell us we couldn’t be writing and/or creating those multimillion-dollar spots that underwrite the Superbowl.

#3: Now the strike is over, and surprise surprise – The networks are telling us that some shows, mainly comedies, will be back on the air in as little as 10 days. The dramas are considerably harder to produce, so they’ll take 2-3 weeks. Again I ask, “Seriously?” Two weeks ago the television season through 2008 was dead and 2009 was in dire jeopardy. And then POOF!, the writers come back and everything is hunky-dorily chugging along so well that we’ll have shows back on the air in the proverbial blink of an eye. All this leads the average viewer to wonder how hard a profession this could actually be, where one could recover so quickly when we’d been told for so long that it would take so long. And I share that sentiment. What kind of quality can we expect when the networks are knocking each other over in the rush to get original material back on the air? When mediocrity is the norm, our collective expectations are lowered each time a writer or a network takes a shortcut, and the declining and fragmented audiences of both mainstream and cable media outlets support that hypothesis.

So sure, the writers are now getting a couple of extra bucks for each time their work is viewed online. But the fact remains - if the material wasn’t worth watching in the first place, who’s really getting short-changed?