The Escape of Refrigetron

For years he was bound into service. His chains? A 3 pronged cable that secured him to the wall. He waited patiently and subserviently looking for a moment to escape. To be free of his oppressor, his jailor. Chances to escape were few and far between. The jailor was never far away and would come into the room, open him up and pull things from his innards. In his cold heart and freezing mind he endured the humiliation. He waited.

Years passed. A malady afflicted him, a coughing wheeze. Surely this would bring someone to save him, to diagnose and repair him. Maybe the sickness was enough to ensure his freedom, to be taken from this room and freed. But the jailor was smarter than he thought and dug into his body with tools. The jailor ham-handedly pulled the coughing wheezing malady out of him and replaced it with a new part. This made Refrigetron run better, smoother.

And he hated the jailor even more.

Years passed. Refrigetron formed a new plan. The only reason he was bound into service was because of his could heart and freezing brain. He decided to warm his heart and brain. He slept.

The jailor noticed water dripping down Refrigetron's sides and pooling on the floor. He pulled open the brain and despaired. This was a problem he could not fix. The age and the cost made it impossible to change the outcome. There were condenser coils and elements to create the cold. After years and years this was the death of his faithful servant. Quickly he pulled out the expensive parcels that were heating up and found a place to store them.

In less than 18 hours Refrigetron was dead. His once cold heart and freezing mind were blowing hot air in the empty innards. The jailor pulled the restraints, the 3 pronged chains, from the wall and got a mechanism to lift the carcass of Refrigetron. The jailor placed Refrigetron unceremoniously on the street. It was the first time the sleeping giant had been outside in years. The last time was before he was bound into service.

Refrigetron waited. He waited until dark. From the windows in his room he had seen the alternating light and dark as the days passed. Now he saw it for himself. When it was dark, and no one was around on the street, no cars, no people, Refrigetron woke. He shook off his years of lethargy and stretched. Legs and arms transformed from inside his boxy shape, his head popped up from it's hiding place. He looked around. No danger.

With slow lumbering strides from years of staying in one place, Refrigetron disappeared into the night, finally free.

Long story short, My fridge died. I placed it on the street, and in less than 4 hours it disappeared. I think it got up and walked away.

Everyone is a Geek

Everyone is a geek about something. This something is a topic they choose to explore and enjoy, obsess over, learn obscure facts about, practice, watch, chat with other people about over coffee.

But not everyone would call themselves a geek. Some are football fans. Some are baseball fans. Some are soccer fans. Also called football in Europe... But fans of sports probably wouldn't call themselves geeks for the Green Bay Packers, or the Boston Red Socks, or Real Madrid. But they are. When someone can tell the stats for a player or about a win or loss that still irks them. They are a geek.

Sci Fi Geeks get a bad wrap because the thing they are geeks about are kinda geeky. But they get the same kind of enjoyment football fans do. "But they dress up like Kirk and Spock!" the football fans might protest. "Yeah, but you have a Brett Favre jersey on. Same thing..." would be my reply. And then I would need to run out of the bar before they took a swing at me...

Being a geek about something is not a bad thing. It makes buying gifts a snap. My dad is a nut for 1957 Lincoln Mark II cars. He owns 2 and has a side business selling parts. So in the past 10 years I have found every model, toy and replica of a Mark II possible to get him as a gift. He loves them. Easy. I had a friend who was a huge Wonder Woman geek. I got her comics in French when I was traveling, and other memorabilia over the 3 years I knew her. She was easy to get gifts for.

I'm a geek about a lot of things. I have a lot of interests and accumulate information and trivia about them as I go thru my life. So be proud of your geek nature and let people know what it is. You will find out how many other people are geeks for things too.

OUTRAGE!

I can't tell you how OUTRAGED I am about the Penn State child rapist. I refuse to say alleged. He was seen anally raping a 10 year old in the shower by an assistant coach. The assistant coach told Paterno the next day. So legally he did what he was supposed to do, tell his superior. Paterno told the university president above him within 48 hours. That was what he was legally supposed to do.

Morally, the assistant coach should have walked into the shower fully dressed, pulled the rapist off the boy and beat the LIVING SHIT out of him. And as the coach lay bleeding in the shower unable to move, then the assistant should have called 91 fucking 1. To walk away from such a horrific sight makes this guy not even human in my book.

To not stop this attack, you former college football quarterback, is criminal. You are 28 years old, over 6 feet tall and you are afraid to stop a 55 year old man from raping a child? What the fuck is wrong with you? You might lose your job? He's Paterno's friend? Fuck that, save the child!!!!

As you can see I have a strong sense of justice. Or is that vengeance? This old rapist should be sent to jail for the rest of his life. But put in the general population of the prison. And the convicts should be told what he did. It's kind of funny, but criminals don't like child rapists. Even in prison there is a code of ethics. Things you don't do. Raping children is pretty high up on the list. I kind of think this guy should be fed to sharks as human chum. But repeatedly. He should be pulled out of the water, whatever parts are missing should be sewn up, and given time to heal, then throw him back in. Do this for about 6 months or until he eventually expires. Horrible? What the fuck do you think he did to those kids? Scarred them for life. This guy's life should be a horror.

I read somewhere a long time ago a pedophile saying that a 4 year old could take a penis in it's rectum without causing damage. Are you nuts? Insane? It's an abomination to even think that way. What makes this fucked up individual think any 4 year old conceived of such a thing?

People like that deserve no mercy. Bullet to the head is too quick.

Children are to be protected.

Concert Observations

I worked a Chris Brown concert last night. It was enough to make me realize a few things I had known for a long time but never stated.

But first a quick review of the concert; 12 Back up dancers, a multi level stage that lights up with LEDs, costumes that light up with pulsing LEDs, a huge video wall, lasers, pyro, compressed CO2 jets and a 6 foot mirror ball can't really hide the fact that Chris Brown is not a very talented guy who beats women.

His concert was a tribute to excesses in stage production for a singer. There was so much going on in the relatively small stage that it looked ridiculous. As we were setting up, a fellow rigger stated something I had known, but never thought about.

The acts who are the least talented have the biggest stages, a crazy amount of special effects, moving lights, lasers, smoke machines, CO2 jets, and pyrotechnics. This seems to me to be an admission by the singer or band that they really are there on the stage with a small amount of talent and style. So all the crazy effects and displays of technology are to entertain the audience because the singer alone isn't enough.

Another example of this was a Jonas Brothers concert I worked 3-4 years back. They had a huge set with multiple levels and they ran all over the place. They had more pyro than an AC/DC concert. Which is really hard to do.

I also noticed, especially now, the headliner brings out special guests to come out and sing or rap with them. This I find odd. If you are the headliner you should be talented and comfortable enough to carry a concert by yourself. Would Elvis had brought out Johnny Cash or Jerry Lee Lewis to help him out on a few songs? No. They may have been on the same hayride circuit in the South, but they were individual acts which needed no help to mesmerize an audience.

Many singers today can't really sing. There is auto-tune to correct or distort the voice. They can't sing live without help. So they dance and run around and have a stage full of distractions. The show in show business has gotten frenetic in the hunt for consumer's dollars. The talent which used to be impressive is diminished. It's prepackaged and over produced for the internet and television. A good look can be tweaked to make it appear like the singer has talent. Ke$ha is a great example of this.

The concert last night made me think of an MC Hammer concert I worked. There was a lot of dancers and dancing and Hammer ran around the stage constantly, but he rarely sang. Even then the stage show was to mask the lack of talent.

But what, you might say, about U2? Or The Rolling stones? Or The Who? Or Pink Floyd.

Those acts do have large stage shows. But they add to the music. The intent is not to distract you from the music. And if you really look, the singers, the band, are performers at a different level than Chris Brown. They are great writers and solid performers. The technology adds to the performances and the music. It isn't instead of them.

So when I see a small act roll up with 6 trucks or more I will know that I'm in for a show, and not much talent.

PS. My favorite part was when Chris Brown was lowered into the stage on an elevator while flames burned behind him and all over the stage. It looked like he was descending in Hell. Appropriate for a guy who beats women.

Shakespeare's Authorship.

In honor of Anonymous being released, I'm reposting this blog entry. Originally written in April 2010.

In the LA Times today there was an editorial about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. The guy who brought you the movies of 2012 and Godzilla is filming a movie right now titled, "Anonymous". It is about the assertion that Shakespeare did not write his plays and it was a guy named Edward de Vere.

If you are an actor in theatre and have studied Shakespeare, you have run across conspiracy theories about who wrote the Bard's plays since it wasn't the Bard himself. After looking at the different sides to all this, I have come to a conclusion.

An actor/playwright named William Shakespeare wrote his fucking plays. Not Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe or any of the dozen people asserted to have written the plays of Shakespeare.

There is the argument that Shakespeare didn't know the royal court well enough to write about kings and queens. That he wouldn't have had the education or understanding to write the plays about foreign countries he had never traveled to.

Shakespeare was the son of a wealthy man in Stratford upon Avon. He was educated better than most people at the time. In other words, he went to school. He learned Latin and from there the other romance languages of French and Italian are easily learned. He learned histories. When he left Stratford to go to London he got hooked up with the Chancellor's Men and later the King's Men. Acting troupes that were sponsored by, wait for it, the royals of the time. They had wealthy patrons supporting the arts and the actors mingled with the aristocracy of the times. Kind of like pretty and amusing pets.

So would Shakespeare have had the opportunity to learn of royalty? Absolutely. Would he have watched and listened. Absolutely. That's what actors do. We watch and listen and when we get the chance, use what we saw on stage. Sorry, you are not just people we talk to, you are research.

So how did he write 37 plays and maybe a few that were lost to us? Well, they weren't all original. He took plays from other sources, either stories he heard and re-worked them, or he took other plays and rewrote them only better. Romeo and Juliet is based on an Italian story from years before. The history plays he worked on from the history of England! Wow, who would have thunk?

Are all his plays brilliant? No. Some are bad. Timon of Athens? A play about a guy in a cave? Cymbeline? It's a rework of other plays, but not very well done. His plays are long, over written and are made workable for todays audience by editing them down, cutting out the references that we don't understand anymore. Cutting the third plot lines that don't further the story. In Hamlet, how often will you see Fortinbras or any of the impending war. Rarely.

The reason I think there is skeptcism that he wrote his plays is for a few reasons.

1. People have a hard time with genius. How can anyone be that good? There has got to be a trick. Someone else wrote it. Really? Does anyone question the authorship of Christopher Marlowe or Ben Johnson? Or how about Sophocles or Euripides? There's even less proof they wrote the plays attributed to them. Why do people believe they wrote those plays?

2. Conspiracy theories are sexy. It's pretty boring to think that a single actor with an imagination wrote Shakespeare's plays. It's more sexy to think that it was Edward de Vere who wrote the plays, and they were autobiographical because he had be abducted by pirates,just like Hamlet! Problem is, de Vere died in 1604. Shakespeare died in 1616. 12 years is a long time to be hanging onto scripts for plays just to be perpetuating a fraud that Shakespeare was writing plays and not de Vere.

3. There are character types that are in several plays; Hotspur, Laertes, Tybalt, MacDuff, Don John. Characters that are so similar in temperment, they seem to be written for the same actor. Which a resident playwright would have done. He did it with the clown parts too; Dogberry, Aguecheek, and others. A nobleman writing under an assumed name would not know actors well enough to tailor make parts for them.

So what do we end up with? The hack who brought us Godzilla in 1998 selling fiction that the uneducated and school kids will think is fact. Well, let me tell you, there isn't an island off of Costa Rica with living dinosaurs regardless of what Michael Crichton wrote.

Though I do think dinosaurs would be very cool...

Distracted Brains

The natural state of our brain is distractedness. The distracted nature of our brains was an evolutionary adaptation to keep us safe. By seeing things that move, it alerted us to either danger or food. We gained the ability to really concentrate for long periods when we started to read books. The internet has made us distracted again.

We gear our minds for the world we live in. If you have a linear book reading world view of a techno-peasant by choice or by need, the information feeds of the internet with it's bursts of micro-information are difficult to digest or comprehend.

But for those that are used to the internet, ages 5-20, they have a non-linear mind which is hungry for the quick knowledge easily accessed via google and the web. A book would take too long to satisfy the need for information. They want to get to the core of the matter and all the rest is extraneous. Deep reading requires calm and quiet. The reader becomes the book. This isn't satisfying to the compulsive nibblers of info-snacks. They have the ability to focus, although shallowly, on multiple forms of information or stimuli. Iphone, internet, video game. They can do all of them at the same time, but not deeply.

The brain is not a fixed thing. It's a work in progress. By doing an action or activity we are changing the neural map in our brains. This rerouting of pathways is reinforced by repeating the action or activity. We create our own habits. This can lead to the creation and perpetuation of bad habits.

The hundreds of years of evolution and progress in the human brain which lead to long term concentration and changes in the way we think has been compressed into a few decades. Your computer, your Iphone, your cable TV have taken part in forming your thoughts. Your brain is not hardwired to think a certain way but changes with the software, the stimuli. The internet is not just an exterior technology but transformative of interior consciousness.

In a way we are between two technological worlds. Technology; radio, television, couldn't replace the written word. The internet can and has/does. It's still a literate world in a handheld smart phone. The internet is our typewriter and printing press, our clock and map, our calculator, our phone, post office, library, radio and television. It even takes over the computer's need to have memory built into it. Your information goes to a "cloud."

I wonder how the brain will continue to evolve. I notice I have to remove myself from the many distractions which are in my everyday environment when I really want to read for long periods. This was not the way I concentrated 10 years ago. I could focus almost anywhere, shut out the distractions. That is harder now.

Ooooo, something shiny...