Facebook

Okay! Fine! After much haranging and mild verbal beatings I finally joined Facebook.
It was easy and I am surprised that I wasted hours and hours on it today. I also waited with anticipation after sending friend requests. Would they be my friend? or would I be ignored? I'm still trying to figure out how people I don't know thought I would okay a friend request. Could they make a new category? Acquaintence's request? For people you know but may not consider a friend.

Because, really, some people have hundreds of friends. But how well do they really know these people? Do you invite them to 4th of July fireworks? Labor day barbques? Kareoke at the neighborhood bar? Probably not. I don't have hundreds of friends, but those I consider friends I might help moving, or drive them to the airport. Maybe not at some real awful hour. Though with the 405, that is virtually all the time.

My friend Shele says I need to figure out how this will fit into my life. I'm kind of thankful I don't know how to do it on my phone... Seen some crazy Facebook checkers lately...

Tahoe 2

On my second day off I took Jeff's inflatible kayak out on Lake Tahoe. Of course if you have a mountain bike in your car, you just might have a burly kayak.

He told me what to do, and I got in. The lake was smooth as glass and very clear. I started paddling and I could see it was shallow. My shadow slid along the bottom of the lake next to me. I got into deeper water and the shadow was still there. I cruised south of the Hyatt. On the shore are really big houses owned by really rich people. Billionaire types with docks and boat houses at the end which house jet skis and fast super boats.

I went about a quarter mile within 200 yards of the shore then turned into the lake. I wanted to see at what point the shadow underneath me disappeared. The lake has some drastic drop off points. Somewhere around 300-400 yards out my shadow was gone. Didn't see it happen.

I looked around and floated on the lake. It was very quiet and peaceful and kind of primal. There were only 2 boats that whizzed by. When they passed by me I would turn perpendicular to the waves that would soon to be rocking my world. It was a fun little blip to break up the glass-like ride.

On the way back I saw a katamaran parked out in the lake. It's used for 2 hour tours on the lake. There was no one one the boat, so I paddled underneath the center of it, between the 2 hulls of the boat. It was kind of cool.

Didn't dump in the lake. Didn't get cold or wet. Didn't die.

Another fun day.

Tahoe

I'm in Lake Tahoe this week for a job. It's really lovely up here. The lake is fantastically blue and very cold. 64 degrees on average. That is, probably, the first 5 inches. It's going to be colder as you go deeper.

I had a day off onTuesday. So one of my co-workers convinced us to go mountain biking. We rented bikes from the hotel. Jeff brought his own. Tells you how seriously he takes this sport. The guy at the sport shop suggested the Flume Trail. This was how water got from a man-made lake above Lake Tahoe to Virginia City. We were told it was a bit of up hill then, all down hill. It sounded fun. I haven't mountain biked since my friend Terry tried to kill me in Colorado Springs. So, basically, I am a pussy.

A bit of uphill was actually 5 miles uphill. And I will admit, I walked the majority of that. At 7000+ feet, I was breathing hard, my heart was pounding and I wanted to go back. I told Jeff that the Donner Party would still be alive if someone had spoken up and said, "fuck it, I'm going back." But they didn't and there's a bunch of stuff named for people who died.

After the 5 mile hike up it flattened out and the thin trail went along Lake Tahoe at about 1-2000 feet above the lake on a slippery track. It was fun and beautiful. When we posed for pictures we all used Jeff's bike. It doesn't have a kickstand. (Ask a mountain biker if mountain bikes have kickstands.) Jeff had to leave us behind. He had a conference call back at the hotel at 3 pm and we were slowing him down. I stayed with Mike. That is to say, I would wait for him to catch up to me. When we got to the end of the cliff trail, it was a steep downhill that was 3.3 miles long. Since I love speed, and being reckless, I booked down the trail with little regard for my own personal safety. The danger of faling off a cliff was nil. I would stop and wait for Mike. It took him longer for him to catch up to me. I was going 20+ mph, I think.

It was fun. Didn't die. ;)

Extra Annoying

I was working on a commercial yesterday as an extra. It's a fun job. You meet all sorts of people. And some who end up annoying the shit out of you.

There was one guy on this job. He said he'd worked with me before. Could be. I meet a lot of people who I might not see for a year, or maybe never again. After the job and a comment or two from Howard, I remembered vaguely

When this guy talks, which is a lot, you don't get much chance to have a conversation. It's more of an urgent monologue. If your attention starts to wane, he has the tendency to touch your shoulder or whatever is close. Could be a knee if you are sitting near him.

1. Don't touch me. If I am losing interest, notice that the audience is getting restless and get to the point if there is one. But touching me to reconnect me to the story I have no interest in is just going to piss me off. Do you poke a bear with a stick if it starts to walk away?
2. When you say "to make a long story short" wrap the story up in 2 sentences. Do not use that as a launching point to continue the story of how you bought your car for really cheap, and don't know for certain if it is stolen.
3. Telling me what Kanye West did to Talor Swift at the VMAs this week is similar to what happened to Jaycee Lee Dugard is going to get a vehement response from me. The 2 things have nothing in common except they both happened on planet Earth.

Howard told me later that I apparently got into it with this guy on a job back in January. I can see why, but I don't remember it.

35% of all Republicans in New Jersey...

Think President Obama is the antichrist.

18% said yes he is, 17% weren't sure, but didn't discount it. This was reported on Rachel Maddow's show tonight. I am shocked, but I can believe it. Considering evangelicals have overwhelmed the Republican party, and the base is a small rabid group, it's not that surprising.

Republicans used to be fiscally conservative, wanting smaller government. How did they get crazy?

When Egos Attack

First off, this has nothing to do with race. I don't care what color a persons skin is, don't be an ass.

Kanye West: If you look at the pictures of his red carpet walk to the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, you will see in his hand a bottle of Hennessey. If you look at other pictures later, there's less booze in the bottle. So, he was being all edgy and rappery and gettin' his drink on. Asshole.

He jumped on stage and took the mic away from an giddy 19 year old who won, Taylor Swift. Beyonce had the best video ever? Really, drunk boy? I disagree. It glorifies the objectification of women. "If you like it then you should have put a ring on it?" Women can be owned? Hmmm... didn't get that memo. And with the frentic dancing in the video was just shy of stripping. I like strippers. I've had friends who stripped. It's not a big deal. But the video wasn't that good.

Taylor Swift is 19 years old. And she won. She was shellshocked by your boorish behavior. The people in the control room had no idea what to do with your outburst, they shut off Taylor's mic and went to the next video cue, stomping on her chance to recover. Beyonce was a class act and had her come back to do the speech she didn't get the chance to do.

And Kanye? 3 half hearted apologies, but none were a simple, "I'm sorry. I fucked up." He gave excuses and said he needs a break.

Let's give him one. The entire world should take a break from Kanye. Don't pay any attention to him. Don't write about him, listen to his music, please ignore the "celebrity" that is Kanye. He called himself a celebrity. I don't think Elvis called himself a celebrity. Elvis was a singer. Kanye loves that people are talking about him. Even President Obama weighed in and called him a "jackass". That is right up there with Kim Jung Il having a picture taken with Clinton. It puts Kanye on the world stage.

Kanye is a long time, repeating interrupter. In Europe a few years ago he jumped on a mic and said, "If I don't win, the awards show loses credibility." That's a nice ego you got there. What do you do? Rap? You aren't curing cancer or finding ways to get to Mars? You just take other peoples music, tweak it, and talk about how cool you are, how much money you have, how many women you sleep with... Hmm...

Give me back the pissed off days of rap. NWA. Guys with street cred. This guy is the Kanye show. Much Ado About Nothing.

Strange Audition

I went to an audition at a little store front theatre in Hollywood for a Shakespeare type thing. In the email it said you "would be auditioning with more than one person in the room." Well, not just one person, everyone who was auditioning was sitting there watching the monologues. Of all the things to do, having to sit thru a bunch of Shakespeare monologues performed by actors of varying levels was difficult.

A cattle call for non union theatre? Really? Auditions aren't tough enough but to wait and watch other people make mistakes, or worse do your monologue before you, is an invitation for disaster. The whole thing made me not want to be there. I lost respect for the director running the thing. In my mind, it showed poor decisions on his part.

And though I find watching auditions fascinating, I don't like watching them before I have to work. The audition went okay. I dusted of Leontes, which no one does, and left hoping not to be called back.

I think I will be out of town during one of those weekends... Darn.

9/11

Eight years ago today we were attacked in an unprecidented and very successful way. No other attack on anything in the US had this kind of body count, or damage.

I learned about it shortly before 7 am. Someone called me and said, "turn on your TV." Bleary-eyed I did so and saw one of the twin towers burning. Then I saw the second tower get hit. It was shocking and unimaginable on so many levels. I got ready for work and put a tape in the VCR to record the news. I listened to it on the radio, but I wanted to see it later. I still have the tape, and I never looked at it...

While working that day it was strange seeing the sky devoid of planes. And a woman I didn't know in an elevator of a building I was in started talking to me, "Isn't it awful? How do you fight this?" I didn't know what to say. I agreed it was awful. And as far as fighting it, well, I figured we'd do something.

Work that day sent me out to buy an American flag for the window. I don't know, but I think it still might be there at Gartner. I wanted to do something like give blood. Not that it would do anything for the wounded in NYC, but I felt pretty helpless. Also, a friend had moved to NYC 9 months before so people were trying to find out if Jen Boutell was okay. She was, but it wasn't until the afternoon that this was learned.

The events of 9/11 made me thougthful and weirded me out for a long time. Played out as a fatalistic mood swing. 9/11 broke the invincible shell America had. We recovered, lost some liberties, are in two wars, and are no longer an invincible superpower.

Time Travel

On the Today Show, uh, today, there was a story about Time Travel and the people trying to make this a reality. There was one scientist in particular, Professor Rob Mallet, who was working on it for a reason that is almost a time travel cliche. When he was 10 years old his dad died of a heart attack. It destroyed his world at a very young age, and he wants to go back in time to see his dad. This is something in almost every time travel story. Going back to see a loved one.

He said he wants to send back information on disasters so that people won't die. The video showed the tsunami in Indonesia that killed 250,000. I have some problems with this idea.

Firstly, you would have to be able to convince the people living in the past that this really is a message from the future. And that we know what is going to happen and all these people should be saved... Normally when you say you are from the future you get locked up. If it was a message sent back without a person, why would anyone believe it?

Secondly, where do you stop? At what point does someone say "these people are worth saving, but these people are not?" Are you going to try to save the 6 million Jews killed by Hitler? The 3000 killed in 9/11? How about the people who were killed by Vesuvius in Pompei and Herculaneum? People die. That is the only thing undeniable in the world. To try to go back in time and save these people just messes with the time line.

Thirdly, if someone in the future had figured out how to travel back in time to stop all the tragedies in history, wouldn't all these terrible things been avoided? Hitler still killed the Jews. 9/11 still happened. The tsunami killed 250,000 people. Let the dead stay dead. Though... if someone had changed time, we wouldn't know it... because all events afterward would have changed too... Hmm... Paradoxes are a bitch. The people in Star Trek have it right. Don't fuck with Time.

It's a terrible thing to lose your father when you are 10. But it's not a good reason to go monkeying around with Time. Unless you are the Doctor. He does it with such panache!

A Game

There is a game I play in my head when I work certain places. Now I work in production, rigging specifically. This puts me on I-beams 100 feet in the air, or on loading rails in theaters also 100 feet in the air.

The game I play, hypothetically, is "How Would I Get Down?" The premise goes something like this... I can't use the stairs, ladders, or elevator to get down from this grid 107 feet in the air. If you look at the above picture, you will see there are a lot of options. And the answer goes something like...

"Leap from the rail to the ropes that are 6 feet out. Catch the rope, swing over to the I-beam that is 4 feet out and 10 feet below. Walk on the I-beam to a point where I can leap out, catch the thick electrical cable; slide down that to another rail. Walk along the rail to the wall. Climb down the large electrical conduit to the floor."

This is a hypothetical mental excercise. I would never do such a thing. Without an harness with the hang point in the back, a rope, and someone on belay. If I know the guys I'm working with on the fly rail, or the beams, I might pose this question. It is interesting to see how their minds work. If I don't know the guys I don't ask the question. I don't want them to think I'm nuts.

I'd ask you the next time you are somewhere unsual and high, look around and ask yourself that question, "How Would I Get Down?" But really, how many people go the strange places I do?

The President and School Children

President Obama is Going to talk to school kids all over the United States this week. Isn't that nice?

What? Glenn Beck says that they are being indoctrinated to Obama's Socialist Agenda!?!

Can someone tell Glenn Beck to shut the Hell up? Please? This speech is to tell kids to stay in school, study hard, get good grades, and anything is possible. Even becoming the President of a bunch of paranoid fear mongers who have nothing better to do than make outrageous claims about talking to some school kids.

Presidents have been talking to school kids for years. Regean, Bush 1, Carter. To say Obama is brainwashing children and keeping your kids out of school so they don't see the broadcast is just plain stupid.

Someone like Walter Cronkite, RIP, should go on TV and say, "don't be stupid." Because the furor about all this is just ridiculous.

And now back to your regularly scheduled program, America's Got Talent, already in progress...

Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag

Who the fuck are these people? Seriously, what have they done to merit this kind of attention from the press? I only have a vague idea who they are, but they don't seem to be very talented in anything other than self promotion. But in LA that can be everything...

Firstly, Heidi Montag appeared in Playboy recently. She was getting paid a lot of money to appear nude. Um, there is nudity in her pictorial, sort of, but she didn't show a nipple or anything lower. The pictorial could be in Maxim. And she was interviewed by Pratt. (which is a hugely appropriate name, if you think of the English meaning.) She says she has 20-30 orgasms a day. Well, hmmm. If you are awake for 16 hours, getting a recommended 8 hours of restful sleep a night, that boils down to 1.25 to 1.875 orgasms an hour for the time you are awake. Unless she's bundling them into groups of 10. Really? don't you have a job? Self promotion takes up a lot of time. And speaking as a male, Pratt would be in a lot of pain after the 4th or 5th hard on. The erectile tissue just isn't meant for that kind of abuse. So she's a liar,or has apparatus that supercedes the need for a man.

Pratt. I know even less about him. But it's reported today that he wants to change his name to King Spencer Pratt. King Pratt. Still hugely appropriate. England has a queen, a few princes, America has nothing like that. Larry King! Hello? So he is volunteering to be King. We kicked all the kings out of this country. Maybe we can start that tradition again.

There needs to be a mandatory blackout from the press on all these self agrandizing losers. If we don't pay them any attention whatsoever, they will go away.

Probably too late though...

LA Fires

The Los Angeles fires have been going on for days now. I live maybe 15-30 miles from the large Station Fire, and ash is floating its way over to my neighborhood. The sunlight on the ground is tinged orange. There is a plume of smoke from the fires and the smoke has created what are called Pyro-Cumulus clouds. Its' pretty amazing.

Because the air quaility is so bad I picked up breath masks from a hardware store. My lungs felt tight as I did everyday things out in the polluted smoky air.

But there are somethings that are kind of funny and awe inspiring:

I saw a guy on the street selling a bubble gun at an intersection in Burbank. My car was stopped at a light and hundreds of small soapy bubbles were floating on the breeze with small bits of ash. A strange mix.

At night you can see the plume of smoke lit up by the fires below. The plume is colored orange and pulses as the fire beneath ebbs and flows.

The almost full moon is sort of orange red and the sunsets are a spectacular bright red from all the particulates in the air.

But you really shouldn't be breathing in all this.

Jaycee Lee Dugard

I have been watching and listening with horror to the coverage of the 11 year old girl who was kidnapped and held captive for 18 years. Became a mother as a teenager by this kidnapping child rapist. Then you have the recrimination and second guessing that comes when something like this is uncovered. How was it not found earlier...

She is going to have a long road back to whatever "normalcy" she might be able to find. It's not going to be easy. But what about the child rapist? He has already pleaded "not guilty." So has his wife. Now in situtations like this that are so apparent that this fucker is guilty, he should have instant capital punishment. It's not as if the girl were camping in his back yard for 18 years and he didn't know. He fathered her 2 daughters. Guilty. (sound of gunshot to the head.)

I hope and pray this girl, she might be 29, but she is still a little girl in so many ways, gets help. And I hope this guy, who was a registered sex offender, goes away for the rest of his life. Which can be shortened by putting him in with the rest of the general prison population. It's kind of ironic, but in prison, convicts don't like child rapists; they don't last very long...