It’s been nearly 20 years since I last spoke to or heard from George Tabb. His voice over the telephone sounds substantially raspier than I remembered. “You have to have your life go horribly wrong to want to do punk rock,” he says, and if that’s the case, then Tabb is punk as fuck.

A nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, NY, Tabb moved to Greeenwich, CT when he was just 7 years old. This may have marked the beginning of his road to ruin. He didn’t get along with his father and was bullied by the local kids for being Jewish. “The kids there had no idea what a Jew was. They would search my head looking for horns or think I drank baby blood,” says Tabb of the experience. As Tabb got older, he moved to Tallahasee, FL to go to college. Things weren’t much better there. “My college roommate’s father was the Imperial Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan,” notes Tabb. However, Tabb would soon find an escape, playing in his first punk rock band in 1979.

Oh Breaking Bad, what you do to people.

Several Breaking Bad viewers in southwestern Connecticut called 911 in a panic on Sunday night after a cable power outage occurred during the airing of the popular AMC show, according to the NY Daily News.

Did you get that? People dialed 911 – the number reserved solely for emergency, life and death situations – to find out WHY their cable went out.

According to audio from a 911 call obtained by News 4 New York, one caller said “I am just trying to figure out what’s going on. We have no TV.” When the operator replied that 911 is for emergencies only, the called said “I know that, I know that.” When asked if this was a life-threatening situation, the caller responded, “No, we’re just trying to find out what’s going on.” After the operator suggested the caller contact her cable provider, the caller replied “I tried that.”

Zero Dark Thirty
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Written by Mark Boal
Starring: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Mark Strong, Chris Pratt, Kyle Chandler, Mark Duplass
Columbia Pictures
Rated R | 160 Minutes
Release Date: January 11, 2013

“I’m the motherfucker who found this place.” – Maya (Jessica Chastain)

For over a decade, an elite team of intelligence and military operatives, working in secret across the globe, devoted themselves to a single goal: to find and eliminate Osama bin Laden.

Zero Dark Thirty reunites the Academy Award-winning team of director-producer Kathryn Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker) for
the story of history’s greatest manhunt for the world’s most dangerous man.

As I’m sure you’re aware, Zero Dark Thirty features graphic scenes of enhanced interrogation tactics that were implemented by the Bush administration after 9-11, techniques like waterboarding and sexual humiliation that are illegal under international law.

It seems like many political commentators and CIA officials are worried that, by including the dark side of the government’s hunt for Al Qaeda, Bigelow’s film may give viewers the wrong impression: that the brutal interrogation methods are the reason we located Bin Laden’s compound.

That’s simply not the case and anyone who walks out of Zero Dark Thirty with the impression that it takes a pro-torture stance didn’t pay attention to the intricacies of the narrative. Depiction is not endorsement, and if it was, no artist could ever portray inhuman practices; no author could ever write about them; and no filmmaker could ever explore them.