As some may have noticed, my blog is way wonky. I have no idea how long it’s been broken since I only just noticed but for quite some time now the ability to comment has probably been broken. I am in talks with both Movable Type support and my web host trying to figure out what’s up. For the moment, comments and trackbacks are disabled to try and reduce the errors that they cause.
Been incredibly busy on the acting front. Not that I’ve ever been that good about blog updating but I like to pretend I have an excuse. In the past two days I played Michael Clayton (George Clooney played him in the film) for a student directing class and also did a scene from North By Northwest where I played Cary Grant’s role. This was for a college production class where we performed in studio with a three camera setup. We rehearsed it many times so the camera people could get their shots and the control room could get their switching between shots choreography down. It was quite a lot of fun.
I’d seen “North By Northwest” but it was some time ago. The scene we did was the scene in the train car where Cary Grant first meets Eva Marie Saint. It really struck me how incredibly saucy this scene was for its time. A sexually aggressive woman industrial designer. Kudos to Ernest Lehman!
As a side tangent, Larry and I have both been trying to be healthier in our eating habits. In an effort to remain healthy yet indulge our sweet tooth, Larry concocted a brilliant treat. We had already been quite the fans of sugar-free chocolate Jell-o pudding. Now it is important to note that that pre-made stuff isn’t nearly as good as the powder that you add milk to and make yourself. Trust us. So Larry had the idea of mixing the pudding mix with some milk and ice and making a milkshake. from there we also added some peanut butter and for nutritional value added a scoop of “Muscle Milk” supplement. This has now become one of our absolute favorite treats. Totally sugar-free, only as much fat as the milk you use and can be a great dessert or a meal replacement if you add the Muscle Milk. Chocolate-peanut butter icy shakes. You’ll thank us.
Thanks to Oslowe, I have been tagged in that virulent, vampiric, spreading like the undead way known as the Internet Meme (I actually don’t mind, it was just a fun comparison).
There are Rules for the Interwebs.
The Six-Words Meme was originally started by Smith Magazine.
Legend has it that Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in only six words. His response? “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Last year, SMITH Magazine re-ignited the recountre by asking our readers for their own six-word memoirs. They sent in short life stories in droves, from the bittersweet (“Cursed with cancer, blessed with friends”) and poignant (“I still make coffee for two”) to the inspirational (“Business school? Bah! Pop music? Hurrah”) and hilarious (“I like big butts, can’t lie”).
Here are the rules:
1) Write your own six word memoir.
2) Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like.
3) Link to the person that tagged you in your post, and to the original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere.
4) Tag at least five more blogs with links.
5) Don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play.
6) Have fun.
I do not make these rules.
Heath’s six word memoir:
Master of dreams, seeker of actions
Sorry, victims!
Da Grr
Andy
Vicki
Delle
Jupe
www.vladstudio.com
You can download “low quality” versions of all the wallpapers for free or you pay a membership for “high quality” versions. I say “low quality” in quotes because even the free versions look awesome to me. I’m so impressed that I think I’ll spring for a lifetime membership to support them. Right now they’re running an Easter special of $19.99 for life.
I have always been a big fan of “The Twilight Zone”. I remember my uncle and grandmother watching reruns when I was growing up and I think that it probably stuck in my psyche somewhere pretty deep and played a part in forming who I am.
A while back I bought the entire series on DVD (box set with episodes in order of airing). We’ve started watching them from the beginning and I’ve noticed some peculiar things. Now let me first say that, yes, I do realize that TV was a completely different beast back then as well as movies and probably just general storytelling techniques. I still love this show but have noticed it’s tendency to assume that the viewer is so stupid as to be just shy of brain dead. This is kind of funny because on the other hand it can go to some pretty cerebral places too so it almost seems as if it’s catering to really smart folks and people who are dumber than a box of non-sentient rocks.
For example, in one episode, Burgess Meredith plays a man who loves to read. So much so that at lunch time he goes into the vault of the bank where he works to read. One day while in the vault, the world gets destroyed by H-bombs but he survives since he was in the vault. We see all this on screen. Well we don’t actually see the H-bombs and such but it’s all illustrated quite clearly.
Then, upon leaving the vault and seeing the state of the world, he monologues to himself (since everyone else is dead) something along the lines of:
“Oh my god! The world was destroyed by H-bombs! Everyone is dead except for me! *a look of realization* I survived because I was in the vault!”
Well. That was a bit of totally unnecessary exposition! And we just won’t mention the two dimensional character that was his harpy of a wife who refused to let him read at home.
Then there was another episode where these astronauts go missing off the radar as they launch. It turns out they’ve crash landed on “an asteroid” as they call it. An asteroid with an perfectly human compatible atmosphere and mountains and stuff. O.K. so they really should have just called it a planet. Then they have a conversation about how, from the looks of things, the sun appears to be the same distance and trajectory as from the Earth meaning that they must be on an asteroid in the same orbit as the Earth!
So basically, five minutes into the episode, they’ve just hit you over the head with their “twist” ending. OMG! It wasn’t an asteroid at all! It turns out they had just crashed in the Nevada desert! All that strife and killing wasn’t necessary after all!
As I said, I just find these things fun to nitpick. I still think The Twilight Zone is an awesome, brilliant, landmark show.
I saw a woman smoking a cigarette the other night…
At the gas station where I stopped to get gas…
And she was casually leaning on the metal cage full of propane tanks.
I fueled up and got the hell out of there as quick as I could.
I was just talking to Larry about some details of submitting “The Ruse” to South By Southwest and I actually said “Well, we’ll tackle that boat when we come to it.” We both paused for a moment before I then said “Where the hell did I come up with that?” and we laughed for many minutes.
As I was sitting here trying to think of something to say that didn’t have to do with Rock Band or my marriage, a commercial came on that I could have sworn said “Homos, want to refinance?”
I very quickly realized that he had said “Homeowners”.
Today Larry and I paid a visit to our downstairs neighbor to do some sound tests. We found that if we put our “Rock Band” drum set on a blanket, that greatly isolated the noise. We could not, however, find any good way to keep jess’s music on her computer from being annoyingly loud in the downstairs bedroom.
I’m investigating trying to find some sound absorbing materials to put the drum set on and to put our stereo speakers on (which we run the TV through).
Mitch Hedberg periodically possesses my body. Every now and then I will just say something that sounds like something that he would have said (though not nearly as brilliant as him) and it even comes out in his particular inflection. My most recent Mitch-ism: a friend was saying that she knew someone with photographic memory. I said “I have phonographic memory. I remember everything people say but it’s kind of scratchy and sometimes it skips.”