The author of BEATING UP DADDY and ''The Other Worst-Case Scenario'' web site shares his random insights.
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Wednesday, May 14
Posted
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
by Gene
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They look terrible. And this is a home game, where they haven't lost in the post-season. Which is a good thing given they haven't won a road game this post-season.
Heading to Los Alamos
Any blogs from this point forward are going to be filed from various points across the country as wife Deb and I make our way to Los Alamos, New Mexico for friend Tamson's wedding. Why Los Alamos? That's where she ended up. I don't fully understand it either.
I do know the trip there involves connecting flights in Atlanta and Denver to Albuquerque, and then a drive of 90 minutes, and then we have to scale a mountain, find a rare flower, solve a riddle, and wrestle a troll. It's a long commute is what I'm saying.
Monday, May 12
Posted
Monday, May 12, 2008
by Gene
(1) comments
Yesterday being Mother's Day, the children were ordered to report without complaint to our back yard in order to assist their mother in the first stages of garden maintenance.
One of the early steps was turning up the dirt near our fence, a future home of strawberry plants (I think). Daughter Becky had at it with this turny dirty thingie we have with curved teeth and... it's not important. What is important is she came across an apparent rock impeding her progress, and so extracted it.
It wasn't a rock; it was a bone.
Wife Deb examined it, son Tim examined it, I examined it. We all agreed it was either a very lightweight and strangely shaped rock, or it was a bone.
And it looked like a human hip bone. A small human, perhaps, but a human. So Deb called the police. Two local officers came by and looked at it. The consensus by then was, "It's probably not human, but I don't want to be the one who says that." So the police brought it downtown and handed it over to a detective, who also didn't want to be the one to say it, (as I put it on the phone to him, nobody wants to have to say, "I thought it was a pig bone and I didn't even know the girl was missing") so he drove it to the coroner. The technicians also didn't want to say it, so they said they'd show it to an on-call anthropologist on Monday.
All of this trouble was for what turned out to be the shoulder of a cow. Someone had buried the remains of a roast in our yard sometime in the past whatever years, making for a very strange Mother's Day for us, two patrolmen, and a city detective.
Meanwhile, only a portion of the garden got planted. If it had turned out to be human the cops would have been back and they would have brought friends, and we would have gotten the whole yard turned for free. Tim's argument for the rest of the day in not doing more work outside was, "I was ordered by the police not to do any more yard work. It would be obstruction of justice."
Good excuse.
Friday, May 9
Posted
Friday, May 09, 2008
by Gene
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One Allegra, two shots of Flonase, two ibuprophen, one mucus reduction pill, one cold wet washcloth pressed up against my eyeballs.
Allergies are killing me this year.
If you were to pick the perfect place to kill a lot of people with a typhoon
... you couldn't do much worse than Myanmar. (Isn't "Burma" a better name? Like, lots better?) Military dictatorship kleptocracies are not known for their efficient service to their people. Case in point: there are boxes of food and medicine sitting on an airfield in Myanmar right now that is not getting to the people because the government there refuses to allow foreign soldiers or aid workers on their soil for any reason, even if it's to save the lives of the people of the country. This is the same government that knew a typhoon was coming and did not warn anybody on the military-controlled radio channels, preferring to broadcast some propaganda about an upcoming "election" instead. These people were monsters before the typhoon hit.
Hey!
Maybe there won't be any pollen in New Mexico. Yeah; that'd be nice.
Wednesday, May 7
Posted
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
by Gene
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I had to renew my driver's license last night, because if I waited until the old one was expired I would be stuck in Arizona with no valid photo identification. Which is the beginning of a Creedence song, I think.
The highlight was having to renew my photograph, which was just wrong. The old one wasn't exactly stellar, but I am currently in need of a haircut and have a touch of rosacea, AND they make you take off your eyeglasses now for the photo. So of the two images she took my choices were Obvious Child Molester or Convict In Repose.
On the plus side, it didn't take me more than an hour to do the whole thing, and I only had to go down to the mall for it. I never thought I'd say this, but the Massachusetts registry of motor vehicles, in setting up an office in the mall that is open until 7 each weeknight, actually did something that was customer-friendly.
Tuesday, May 6
Posted
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
by Gene
(1) comments
I would like to one day own a parrot, and I would teach this parrot to say only one thing. That one thing would be, "Help! He turned me into a bird!"
That will be all.
Monday, May 5
Posted
Monday, May 05, 2008
by Gene
(1) comments
One can argue all one wants that it was a mettle-testing series and how the Hawks were exactly the wrong style of team for the Celts to face, but the truth is it's a long playoffs, and no team with three starters over the age of 30 can afford to go seven games against a demonstrably inferior team like that. They'd better start figuring out how to win on the road in the post-season or they aren't going far.
I'd talk more about the contents of this article, but every time I see the PETA acronym, I see it followed by "a hypocritical cult-like organization that constantly makes claims unsupported by fact in order to gain more press, while secretly euthanizing hundreds of thousands of the pets it claims to protect." As a consequence, I rarely get through any article about them.
Friday, May 2
Posted
Friday, May 02, 2008
by Gene
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Here are the 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of All Time. And there goes any chance of you being productive today.
Thursday, May 1
Posted
Thursday, May 01, 2008
by Gene
(1) comments
Food rocks.
Iron Man opens today
Okay, so I won't be the first in line to see it like I said I would. But it's Thursday, for crying out loud.
Please kill me
I was chatting with friend Jenn when I suggested something that would make a good reality show, something I didn't fully realize until she said, "You should pitch that as a reality show." The Scriptapalooza deadline is May 7. I'm thinking about it.
I think Buzz Bissinger got carried away when he found out he was on HBO
It's really hard to make your point that internet bloggers are uninformed and profane when, while making the point that they are uninformed and profane, you come across as uninformed and profane.
What we need now is for two attractive homicide detectives to solve the crime, at great personal and professional risk, possibly with a big shootout at the end
It's really hard for me to see the story about the D.C. Madam hanging herself and not think It Was Murder! She Knew Too Much! I'll let you know who did it as soon as I finish the screenplay.
Saturday, April 26
Posted
Saturday, April 26, 2008
by Gene
(6) comments
The doctor called yesterday and confirmed I do in fact have diverticulitis. He also said this is not a condition normally treated out-patient, so the whole liquid diet thing makes a bit more sense. Because in hospitals they can feed you through tubes and such.
I never really realized how much of my time is spent preparing or obtaining food and eating food before this. Whenever my thoughts drift they end up on food, and it's jarring to not be able to actually do anything about it. Last night we watched American Gangster and every time they showed someone eating it just killed me. It was all I noticed. As far as I could tell this was a cops and robbers movie where people went from turkey dinner to turkey dinner killing people along the way. At one point the film cut between the bad guy having an elegant thanksgiving meal with his family to the good guy putting canned chicken on a piece of bread, spreading potato chips on top of it, and putting another piece of bread on that, eating the whole thing like a sandwich. The sandwich looked delicious to me.
Also seen
We got around to I Am Legend last weekend. (Did I mention this yet? I can't remember.) Have you ever seen a movie in pieces? Like, it's on cable all the time and every time you turn you catch parts of it but never managed to see the whole thing? We sat through all of I Am Legend and it felt like a third of it was missing. Mostly from somewhere in the middle.
Friday, April 25
Posted
Friday, April 25, 2008
by Gene
(1) comments
Diverticulitis.
Not cholera. If you all were worried about that.
A word about CT scans
What a joyous experience. I was given a fruit punch to drink in two doses, and then told I would have to wait another two hours before getting the scan. Except "wait" doesn't really describe what I did. Because what they tell you is this drink is supposed to make it easier for your bowels to show up on the scan. What they keep to themselves is that it does this by cleaning out said bowels.
Diarrhea was one of the symptoms I already had, so you know what? That was just cruel.
Then I was brought into the room with the giant white donut thing with all kinds of warnings on it (like "don't look here, there is a laser" which is funny because the only reason I was looking there was to read the sign) and then told to lie down on the platform. And they started an I.V. to inject something that would help things show up better on the scan. Which was why, I thought, they cleaned out my bowels earlier, but whatever.
The arm with the I.V. wasn't supposed to go into the CT scan, but I had to have the I.V., so the highly advanced medical solution to this dilemma was to have me raise the arm with the sharp thing sticking in it and put my hand on the side of the donut near the sign I was told not to look at, so that when my body slid into the donut the arm ended up raised over my head. This was terrifying, because I had no control over how far I was going to be moving through the donut hole, and so the arm with the sharp thing that was attached to the rubber tubing and a metal spring was pulled further and further away from the starting point and I seriously wondered if they had measured everything out right because it was going to hurt when that needle suddenly got yanked out of my arm.
That didn't happen. What did happen-- and this was a hoot-- was the glasses on my face got hotter. I had asked the assistant if I needed to remove them and they had said no. That was the wrong answer; once the frames started heating up my first thought was "if they do this wrong, will my head explode?"
Thursday, April 24
Posted
Thursday, April 24, 2008
by Gene
(1) comments
We did not make it and I am stunned. Literally stunned. We made a film that was so good it doesn't even look like it was made in 48 hours and it's getting passed over for reasons that completely escape me. Sure it's a dark movie. So what? You give us drama, that's what you get.
I am also sitting in a hospital waiting for a CT scan of my gut, so this is turning into the Best Day Ever!
Posted
Thursday, April 24, 2008
by Gene
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"He's home-schooled, because he wants to join the circus."
I submit that nobody is fully prepared to hear a sentence such as this. You may think so, but no.
So maybe I do have cholera
Not at work today because frankly, it has become apparent that there is something wrong with me that goes well beyond not being in great shape to go biking. My lower abdomen has been hurting for five days now, I've been running a fever, and my bladder feels like it can't go on, thank you. Some kind of infection or... something. Diverticulitis, perhaps. Whatever it is, it's deeply unpleasant.
It was eighty degrees by yesterday afternoon. Between the outrageous pollen count, the heat, the fact that I was running a fever, the pain in my stomach, and the dehydration from emptying myself every hour, it's a minor miracle I managed to bike home without passing out in front of a semi.
Wednesday, April 23
Posted
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
by Gene
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Clearly the people who run the 48 hour film project want to hurt me, because they have still not announced who is making the Best Of Boston and it is no longer "early" this week, which is when we were told to expect one. And the tickets go on sale today for the airing of said unknown Best Of films, so you'd think by now it would have gone out.
Nonetheless, there is some satisfaction to be had, as the film is available on Youtube thanks to my tireless pestering of the director. So now you can see it and tell me I'm a bad person.
Tuesday, April 22
Posted
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
by Gene
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The Mummy 3
Really, who thought this was a good idea? Brendan Fraser is actually a pretty good actor. He shouldn't need the work.
Biking to work might kill me
My body is NOT prepared for this. My stomach hurts because I apparently use my abdominal muscles when biking a whole lot more than I ever realized, I am peeing constantly just from hydrating normally, and I forgot how very much my ass was going to hurt as a consequence of having a bike seat under it. It would appear that biking is remarkably like a bout of cholera.
Monday, April 21
Posted
Monday, April 21, 2008
by Gene
(2) comments
Speed Racer
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
X-Files: I Want to Believe
and it almost goes without saying:
Mamma Mia
Movies I am on the fence about:
The Incredible Hulk
Hancock
Movies that I'll be first in line to see:
Iron Man
The Dark Knight
Wall*E
Posted
Monday, April 21, 2008
by Gene
(2) comments
First time biking to work since the Clinton administration.
Or it seems that way. It's been about five months. Things went fine except I'm in dire need of a nap right now. Also, it appears my fenders were attached to the bike by black rubber straps that disintegrate at low temperatures like those rubber gaskets that caused the space shuttle to blow up because of sub-freezing weather in Florida.
I didn't blow up, I just took the fenders off. I have to either replace the rubber-- not easy as they were sort of part of the whole kit-- or buy new fenders. In the meantime, biking in the rain is going to be a slightly wetter experience than it should be.
I take it back
I officially no longer think having the Democratic nomination still up in the air is a good thing. Yikes.
Thursday, April 17
Posted
Thursday, April 17, 2008
by Gene
(7) comments
The NBA season just ended with the Boston Celtics holding the best record in the game and going in as the number one seed in the East.
I guess I should start watching now?
But first we're going to have to buy some hats
This article is another excellent example of how delusional gun owners can get. I think the way this will work is if everyone who brings a gun to campus legally who intends to shoot up some people that day first adorns a black hat so that he or she can be distinguished from the white-hatted people who went to campus with their firearm intending not to shoot up some people that day. Otherwise, I don't think this'll fly.
I know the idea of getting shot down in school is frightening, because schools are supposed to be safe places. But that's just it: it's shocking partly because schools are safe places. They are, in fact, the safest place your child could possibly be. And inserting hundreds of handguns into a safe environment is not just a tremendously stupid and overall bad idea, it's deeply unnecessary.
Except it makes the gun owner feel better about themselves. Which is what this is really about. Why don't we just ship a bunch of pacifiers to these guys and have them keep their sidearms at home?
Wednesday, April 16
Posted
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
by Gene
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Ninety teams entered the 48 hour film project in Boston this year. Eighty-seven turned in films, seventy-three on time. Of those eighty-seven exactly three had a plot that hinged on a child or young adult being kidnapped. Including the one I wrote. All three aired last night in the 9:30 time slot.
This was purely coincidence. The scheduled air times for each team are figured in advance, and it just so happened the horror film entry, the thriller entry, and our drama entry all had the same plot elements. We knew about the horror film because it had been put on Youtube, but the other one-- much closer in plot details to our film-- blind-sided us completely. You know how on The Price Is Right sometimes a contestant bids exactly one dollar more than another contestant? It felt a little like being the overbid contestant.
In positive news, the film looked fantastic, our plot was definitely more developed than either of the other kidnapping movies, and it was the second-to-last film to air. I've been told there is some purpose to the order the films are slotted into, so that they improve in quality as the night comes to a close. While this does not in any way guarantee a spot in the Best of Boston, it's hopeful.
And I'm exhausted again
The film experience lasted until Midnight. I then drove my tired family home and caught up with portions of the film team at a nearby bar. I didn't get home to bed until after 2:30. Director Dan had a hotel room and no place to be this morning, so he probably slept in. Today I hate director Dan.
Monday, April 14
Posted
Monday, April 14, 2008
by Gene
(1) comments
It's not that I've been too busy to blog. I've been too preoccupied. The film we made finally gets aired tomorrow night and I have spent most of my time staring at clocks and calendars and waiting for it. Sort of sad, I guess.
I have also been in fantasy baseball overdrive. I finally started a season well, and spent a day on ESPN's leaderboard, something I hadn't been able to get to in two plus seasons of play. This caused me to obsess just a touch. I'm currently ranked 108 overall and expect to plummet severely any minute now.
Or, you could, I don't know, stop selling guns? Maybe?
No, really, Window Vista is awesome
Thursday, April 10
Posted
Thursday, April 10, 2008
by Gene
(0) comments
We wrote the script in director Dan's office in director Dan's apartment. The other rooms in the house were a decent-sized living room/dining room/bedroom/rabbit warren, a small bathroom, and a small kitchen. At least 10 people, and possibly more, had gathered at his place intending to head from there to the site of the film shoot, and since it was going to be an overnight shoot, everyone who was not needed took a nap wherever they could find adequate horizontal space.
Thus, each time I emerged from Dan's office there was another person lying prostate on the floor, often in a position I could never have slept in. It was a bit like walking through a carbon monoxide leak.
The airing
As mentioned before, the film will air on Tuesday the 15th of April. It'll be in the 9:30 glut of films. The link to the theater (pre-purchasing tickets is highly recommended) is here. Make sure you select the right date.
Monday, April 7
Posted
Monday, April 07, 2008
by Gene
(2) comments
-- Two of the characters in the script are a father and a daughter, and to secure that concept visually the art department got a photo of the two actors together for the desk of the father. The actor playing the father said, "I guess the mother is dead?"
I said it didn't occur to me that it was something that needed explaining. Then I blamed Walt Disney. Because I can count on one hand the number of Disney characters with two parents. (Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmatians was all we could come up with.) This was found by many to be a somewhat disturbing revelation.
--At another point the same actor was going over his lines aloud and I suggested he try rapping the dialogue. He did. It sounded pretty good. It was at that point I realized I write iambic dialogue.
Posted
Monday, April 07, 2008
by Gene
(2) comments
We had lined up multiple potential locations in advance of this weekend, not knowing for sure which one would be the one we really needed. Because that's how it works: you don't get the genre and all of the elements until the clock has started, and if you haven't worked out your locations by then, it's sock-puppet theater or nothing.
The location we thought we had was a boarding school in Massachusetts, a primo location given the wide variety of buildings and what-have-you at our disposal. Unfortunately, that fell through about a week earlier when it was learned that the opportunity to use the location was being extended by someone who had no authority to make such an offer.
The next potential location was a campground on the Connecticut/Rhode Island border, roughly forty miles from Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods. I loved the idea of being able to film there, largely because, again, forty miles from Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods. (Not for the gambling. I was going to be pulling an all-nighter and casinos have all-night buffets.) But what was a viable location mid-week became an untenable one when we learned we would not have the use of any of the actual cabins-- kind of the reason to be there-- but could shoot on the grounds or the rec room. And then rain was in the forecast, making the campgrounds a whole lot of mud. So that was out.
I was actually on my way to the campground when I found this out. The director, friend Dan, called me as I was about to hit the highway, and suggested I go to his apartment in Providence instead.
Locations, and traffic
The locations we did end up being able to use were: a greasy spoon diner not far from Dan's apartment, but only for shoots after 3 PM, and two soundstages owned by Kay Studios, the larger of which I toured with Dan and a number of other crew members an hour after I reached Dan's apartment. In between the two arrivals was a terrifying sequence of events whereby I learned that Dan puts entirely too much faith in his car's brakes, especially in heavy traffic.
The larger soundstage ended up being where we shot the film. It had multiple areas that could be used as an office environment, and a number of airplane-hangar sized warehouses semi-occupied by furniture under plastic and Wal-Mart shopping carts. No, I don't know why either.
Genre, & cetera
Back at Dan's apartment and growing concerned as to how I was going to obtain another cup of coffee (Dan does not drink coffee and so does not have a coffee machine or coffee in his home, because Dan is a communist) we all picked up and headed to a restaurant down the street for a giant communal "pitch meeting". I was under the foolish assumption that we were going to be IN the restaurant and not IN FRONT OF the restaurant the entire time, a mistake on my part that, I think, is perfectly reasonable. On the way there we got the genre: Drama. On arriving, we got our elements: the film had to include the line, "this could get complicated", a receipt had to be involved, and one of the characters had to be a diplomat named Regina or Reginald H Higginbotham.
A word about the genre. "Drama" is the least specific description possible ("comedy" is second), which is actually an issue, for two reasons. One, in making a film in such a short time-frame it helps enormously if someone narrows down your options a bit for you, and "drama" is just not narrow. Two, you're judged partly on how well your film met the requirements for your genre. And there is only one in this category: a drama is not funny.
So that was how we went: we made a movie that was intentionally not funny.
As you can imagine, I found this a little challenging.
Writing: the last thing I can clearly recall being responsible for
After a general concept was hammered out by the twenty-odd people we had outside the restaurant (this process must have looked like some sort of cult ritual to onlookers) the official "writing team" headed back to Dan's apartment where a detailed plot was worked out and pizza was ordered.
A word about the pizza. We had had a couple of slices from the same place earlier in the day, so now I had two meals coming from the place, and my third meal was a greasy breakfast consisting of homemade bacon, eggs, and heavily buttered toast. As a consequence of this carb and grease-heavy diet, I spent the next six hours farting constantly. So if you were on the set with me and you wondered why I didn't stand still for more than a minute or two, that was why. Oh and that smell was probably me too.
With the entire film mapped out-- more or less-- I tapped out the actual script in about an hour, we edited it down a few times, and by one AM had our final script.
And then I should probably have just gone home.
On the other side of the particle cloud
You know how in science fiction shows like Star Trek every now and then they encounter some sort of cloud or field that makes their external sensors useless, which ends up being either good or bad depending on whether they're hiding from someone or looking for someone? I found one of those clouds in southern Rhode Island at around three in the morning in the middle of dense fog with an actor I had just met-- Vito-- sitting in the passenger seat.
We were following the directions of my satellite navigator when we hit the cloud, and we could tell we'd hit it because suddenly the map on the navigator had us floating in a dark space where there were no roads. It kept telling me to take the next left or the next right onto streets that were not there, and then u-turn when on one-way off-ramps. Meanwhile, Vito was staring at the nav screen and asking if it did this often, checking out the farm houses we were driving past in the heavy fog, and wondering if perhaps this was phase one in a plan to have him secretly tortured and killed in a nearby ditch. I fortunately had driven this stretch earlier with Dan, so I knew the drive well enough to get us through the cloud and to a spot the navigator recognized again. Vito was happy too.
The shoot
In a sense, the only way to survive one of these film shoots is to expect things to go wrong and build in time for that to happen. In this case nothing went particularly wrong, as such. It just took four hours to get the first shot done. I am not a film director and know nothing about cameras and so I am not really qualified to judge exactly how one takes that long to get a single shot, but I have to think if anything takes that long to do, at the end of it one should have, at minimum, acquired a Grail of some sort.
I was in the back with actors in full makeup and costume huddled around a space heater for this part of the shoot. (The place was being heated only up to 68 degrees, which is fine if you're in a naturally warm space and not a cement-and-tile sort of place, as we were.) Nobody was particularly happy about how the filming was going and so there was much in the way of gallows humor that it would probably be best for everyone-- I'm thinking of Dan's psyche here, really-- that I not repeat any of it.
It didn't much help that we were also in a building with no windows at all, anywhere. At one point one of the crew hands asked me what time it was. I told her I wasn't going to tell her, but did she remember what sunsets looked like? "Because if you go outside right now you should be able to see one."
She stared at me, horrified. "I'm kidding," I said, "it's eleven fifteen."
Only after being awake all night and stuck in a place where nature cannot be visually confirmed is it possible to convince someone it is eight hours later than it actually is.
The pace did eventually pick up. All of the most difficult shots were done first, so by late afternoon most of the film had been knocked out. And if you're wondering why I stuck around as long as I did, it was in case anyone had any questions. In a normal shoot there are a fair number of people familiar enough with the script to catch continuity issues, because they have had time to really get to know the script. In this case I was the most familiar with it because I had written it. And for a seven minute film, it was actually moderately complicated.
It wasn't until the end of the day when I realized I was very nearly out of winds-- I was on my seventh or eighth wind by then-- so I'd better drive myself home before I could no longer be counted on to operate a motorized vehicle. I'd been awake more or less constantly for thirty-six hours at that point.
The film itself
I'm not going to give away any details on it right now. I will say I have seen the footage and it does not look like a movie that was made in only 48 hours. It is also definitely not funny, and I think it might piss off some people. Which is great.
It will be airing in the last batch of films on Tuesday, April 15 at the Kendall Square Theater in Cambridge. After that it may be released in other places in other ways, possibly even online. The title is "Folded In Two", so keep your eyes open for it. (Not my title, by the way. Mine was "Under Duress". Enh. Whatever.) I'm looking forward to the debut. Hope to see you there.
Wednesday, April 2
Posted
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
by Gene
(2) comments
Schadenfreude of the week
Let's step into the way-back machine to the winter following the Red Sox world series win in 2004. That was the off-season in which the great Pedro Martinez found himself insulted by an exorbitant sum of money offered to him as a contract extension, because he felt the number of years in the contract were inadequate. The Mets swooped in with a contract that most neutral observers would agree was not reality-based, and then Pedro spat over his shoulder on his way out the door. Because the Sox didn't respect him, supposedly.
Pedro broke down in the middle of last season, the third year of his contract (the Sox offered him three years and he wanted at least four) at right around the time he was supposed to. He needed rotator cuff surgery, so he got it, and spent the next nine months or so rehabbing. And yesterday he made his 2008 debut. A few innings and four runs later, he was out of the game again, this time from a strained hamstring.
I'm guessing he strained it trying to get his body to throw a fastball harder than the mid-eighties.
That three year contract turned out to be about right, didn't it?
Tuesday, April 1
Posted
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
by Gene
(0) comments
Pollen season is upon me. Like, right upon me and following me around like the Pigpen's dirt cloud in the Peanuts strips. I had a headache yesterday and was even more grouchy than usual (if you can imagine) and didn't figure out until today-- when I woke up with a hangover having consumed no alcohol-- that it was time.
I am, of course, already ON medication for this. So what we have here are some rather overachieving trees.
Getting better with each episode
Battlestar Galactica. We're only a quarter of the way through season three-- I expect season four, which I believe has started airing, will be viewed by us some months from now on DVD-- so don't spoil anything for us. This show is amazing.
Four more days to 48hfp
Still terrified. We have some locations that are not the back of my Honda, so that's good. It doesn't make me less terrified, though, oddly enough.
Monday, March 31
Posted
Monday, March 31, 2008
by Gene
(0) comments
Done. Done done done. My best remaining bracket is the chalk one I fill out every year to determine how bad I am in comparison to it. Chalk might beat everyone this year.
But whatever. Baseball's started, and all is right in the world.
Just about the worst headline you'd ever want associated with news about you
Just add the words "kicking puppies" and you have a real winner.
Five days from this year's 48 hour film project
Me, terrified? Yes. Yes I am. Maybe this is because the location we wanted to use fell through three days ago, and there is an outside chance we will be filming this in the back of my Honda Element.
Which would be fine if we got "Road Movie".
Friday, March 28
Posted
Friday, March 28, 2008
by Gene
(4) comments
This Davidson team can shoot. I'd heard about this Curry kid, but the whole team is just lights-out right now.
Seems less unlikely now
My best remaining bracket has Louisville beating Xavier in the finals. I'm sure it wouldn't win me anything-- there are over three million brackets in play on ESPN.com-- but it'd still be fairly cool.
Posted
Friday, March 28, 2008
by Gene
(0) comments
Yes it's real.
How about just assassinating my brackets?
Already done. Thanks, Louisville, for taking all the suspense out of the rest of the weekend for me. Bastards. It will take a major miracle for me to pull out a win in the money bracket without Tennessee, who I had losing to UCLA in the finals. I believe what it will take, actually, is for Louisville to go on a rampage.
So: go Louisville! You guys rock!
Baseball season begins for real this weekend
Yaay. Another fantasy game to get pissy about!
Thursday, March 27
Posted
Thursday, March 27, 2008
by Gene
(4) comments
CBS just switched from an exciting 38-35 game between Xavier and West Virginia to the start of the second half of a North Carolina-Washington State game that is 38-21 and not as close as that. There is no rational explanation for such a decision, and I'm guessing somebody important called them and told them that, because when the Xavier score went to 41-40 they switched back.
Go Xavier, by the way. A win from them and from Tennessee later will help my bracket-- the important one, with money on it-- greatly. In fact, a Volunteers loss will pretty much do me in completely, as I have them getting past Louisville and North Carolina, losing in the finals to UCLA. A run from them is just about the only thing distinguishing my bracket from everyone else's.
I'm told my niece has Davidson going all the way in her bracket. If that happens she's filling out my bracket for me next year.
Wednesday, March 26
Posted
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
by Gene
(2) comments
This is quite possibly the greatest news article ever.
Thanks to friend Tamson for the link.
In an unrelated note
Rumor has it friend Tamson may actually be getting married in May. These are unconfirmed reports at this time. More details as events warrant.
Tuesday, March 25
Posted
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
by Gene
(0) comments
I don't want to freak anybody out or anything, but can someone check our ICBMs and make sure there aren't helicopter radio batteries installed in the nose cones? That's not really the sort of thing you want to screw up.
From the start we were told there was an air marshal on board but we weren't allowed to know who it was because it was a secret. So, much like Santa, the boogeyman, and Gypsies, our security was based at least partly on the fear that someone was real rather than the fact that they were.
Oh, um, except Gypsies. They're real, I think.
Red Sox win
The Sox won the season opener early this morning in Japan. Early this morning here. Last night in Japan. Or tomorrow night? AT night, certainly.
Right. Anyway. They won. Or they're about to. Or something.