No, the other kind:

Film and TV writers, actors and crew members are canceling vacations, working overtime and squirreling away savings while they still can.

Talent agencies, postproduction houses and equipment rental shops have drawn up plans to cut costs and payrolls while caterers and special-effects houses scramble to find jobs that reduce their dependence on the entertainment industry.

All over Hollywood, people are bracing for a strike.

Writers could walk out as early as Thursday if their union can’t hammer out a new three-year employment contract with the studios to replace one that expires at midnight on Wednesday.

Over at Real Time, we’ve already predicted the next six weeks of news stories and are busily writing jokes to go with ‘em. We’ve already got some great material about Rudy Giuliani’s sudden December realization that abortion is Wrong.

If there IS a strike, you’ll see a bit more of me around here. But that’ll be pretty much the only up-side.

One thing I’ve noticed about much of the press leading up to the strike , though, is that the big media companies have done a much better job at getting their message out - the message being that the Writers’ Guild is greedy, unreasonable, and about to cost the rest of Hollywood their jobs.

Those media companies, I tell you. I don’t want to sound paranoid, but sometimes it seems like they control the media.

Here’s what’s really at issue:

Residuals. They are a writer’s lifeblood, because few of us work all the time, and unlike authors (and playwrights and songwriters), we don’t own what we write. Screenwriters gave up their ownership of their material in the ’30s, ensuring that we’d constantly have to negotiate to participate in the profits. I was young at the time (negative 30 or so), so I won’t take the blame for it.

And now everything’s changing. DVD’s, the internet… if writers don’t secure a piece of the proceeds from their work now.. it’s not going to happen.

It’s not an especially interesting dispute, I’ll admit it. But one canard that sticks in my writerly craw is the idea that reality television has made writers less relevant and valuable and therefore we should be willing to accept less. You hear that a lot these days.

The truth, as far as I can tell, is that studios want writers to accept less in the New Media world for the opposite reason: Because their work is MORE valuable there.

How do I get to this ridiculous conclusion? Well, amble over to Amazon and look at their top 100 DVDs. You will notice many, many movies there. A few documentaries. Dozens of scripted TV shows.

And not a single reality show. No Survivors survived. No Idols are idolized. Any Apprentices have been summarily fired.

Is this a complicated point? I don’t think so, and yet I don’t see it out there a lot in the news… again, it’s almost like those big studios have a special hold over media outlets and what is aaid about them. I know, I know, I’m sounding delusional. I’ll stop now.

And I may stop on Thursday as well.