Workin' Thru the Holidays

OMG!

Ray Jay is an EXHAUSTED boy.

There are dumb things going on at work, so every shift is an uphill climb for the foreseeable future. But this condition is exacerbating the fact that I'm working on Day 9 of a 12-day work spree. Usually I'm taunting my friends with the fact that I work 4-day work weeks (even though I work a full 40 hours, just like anyone else) but now I'm just hoping I can make it all the way to Saturday.

It hurts.

I mean, the way my shift used to be, I wasn't going going going for the full 10 hours of my shift. But the job has been changing since last September so that my work day has been increasingly filled until I didn't think anything more could be fit into my schedule. But when I found a new groove, more duties were added (or, sometimes, formerly simple(ish) duties are complicated so that they take much longer to accomplish) until I was certain I couldn't do everything during my shift. But then I would find a new groove, and then more junk would pop up.

I'm half-convinced that someone "at the top" wants my department to just up and quit, so they can hire a whole new batch of less-experienced (and cheaper) employees to fill our positions, and they don't have to pay us severance.

But we're all too poor to quit.

Blah.

I'm just venting, I guess.

I hurt. :P

Okay, I need to get back to work.

I hope YOU are ENJOYING your Holidays!!! I wish you more fun, laughs and sheer joy than you know what to do with! If you find yourself feeling like everything is so awesome that you wonder if it's really happening, THAT is the amount of joy I wish for you!

:D

07:25 am

The last few hours of my shift were crazy, and I had to stop at the store to pick up a few items before everything closes down for Christmas, but I'm finally home!

:)

AND SANTA'S ON THE MOVE!!!



Papau New Guinea!

And you can see me on the map there! I'm off to the right, kind of two o'clock.

Oh, wait. I can see me in the picture (or, you know...Texas, anyway) but the way this blog crops pics, you might not be able to see it.

Never mind.

But when I look at the pic, I almost want to say, "Yo, Saint Nick! Over here! It'll just take a sec and I won't tell anyone!" But the dude's been doin' this a while, and I certainly understand how annoying it can be when you've got a groove going and someone messes with it.

I'm content to wait.

You know what? Since I've become an adult (at least technically) and I've moved in with my little brother, Santa doesn't bring me nearly as many clothes as he used to. Is that weird? I mean, when I was a kid, clothes were, like, the most disappointing presents you could get at Christmas (or on your birthday, or any other occasion on which you might receive presents). But as an adult, I clothes wouldn't bug me anymore. And yet all I get nowadays are cool things that I actually want. (I mean, after I received the clothes, I wore heck out of them and enjoyed them...it was just that moment when you tear off the wrapping paper and open the box that clothes were a disappointment. Nowadays, though, I might actually be excited to open a box and get a shirt or pants, lol.)

Also, I've got more questions about Santa now that I've been investigating the paranormal for a couple of years. I mean, clearly he exhibits abilities that are non-human. And some of the literature refers to him as "a quite jolly old elf". So does that put him in the realm of fairy? (What we would categorize as "an elemental"?) I mean, he appears humanoid, so I'm not leaning toward "cryptid", and we can't rule out "extraterrestrial" or "extra-dimensional" being. (Particularly with his seemingly curious ability to manipulate Space/Time.)

Still, my gut suggests "elemental".

I'm not swayed toward "psychic" because although physical teleportation falls within the realm of "psy" or "psychism", popular reports claim to have witnessed him "rise" up the chimney, not simply vanish. (It seems that if he simply disappeared, the poem would have said something like "and laying his finger aside of his nose, and giving a nod, he frickin' disappeared, dude!")

An argument against Santa being extraterrestrial is the classic old documentary Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. The EBEs from Mars seemed to assume that Santa was an Earth native. Which, again, give credence to the "elemental" (or "fairy") categorization.

Still -- like most things having to do with elementals -- the majority of the literature we have to study on the subject is mythology and folklore. (Literally, "fairy tales".) So I don't know how far I could possibly get doing such research.

See, that's one of the main reasons I'm not a ufologist: Ufologists, by necessity, are forced to study their subject second-hand, from the reports of eye witnesses. They always arrive on the scene after the fact. At least cryptozoologists can attempt to track their prey once they discover a likely stomping ground; but ufologists have to depend largely the stories they are told, and dig the truth out from that starting point.

(One of the other main reasons I'm not a ufologist is that they tend to have degrees, and a keen knowledge of subjects like Chemistry and Geology and Astronomy, and other subjects that make my head hurt.)

OOH, CHECK IT OUT!!! Santa's in Australia!!!

8:03 am



I wanna go to Australia.

First, though, there's a certain goddess in England I would rather visit! ;) Then, it would be awesome to visit Australia with her!!!

If you are deriving any amusement from this blog, you should totally go follow Santa's progress yourself!

Unless, of course, you're reading this after the fact. Then the link would be kind of pointless.

Anyway, I need to get some sleep. My shift tonight should be fairly easy, since it's Christmas Eve and everyone except for Production and the News department has the day off. Still, I need to be alert for those unexpected occasions. (That's probably the only reason my department hasn't been automated yet: Human's deal with the unexpected and the unexplainable a bit better than computer programs...for now.)

Besides, empty TV station or not, Management still frowns on tardiness. ;)

I hope you're having a LOVELY Christmas Eve!!!

And LOVE TO MY GNOMEY if you should happen to read this before we talk!!!

02:52 am

I just peaked in on NORAD's site again, and it looks like the party's about to begin!



WOO-HOO!!!

I wish I were snuggled up in my living room, watching The Bishop's Wife or Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas, sipping Egg Nog right now.

Not that I'm complaining.

I've been lucky enough to have many Christmases and New Year's Eves off the past few years, so it's only fair that I work through both this year. Besides the one holiday that I MUST get off these days is Thanksgiving, when Brian & I drive up to Louisiana to spend a few days with Mom, her husband and our Gan-Gan. And I've been lucky enough to have that week off every year so far!!!

So I'm content to work this weekend.

Plus...the paycheck's gonna be HUGE! ;P

03:11 am

02:24 am

I took a quick break to check in on Santa's progress to find that Santa and his helpers are taking a break, too!





Very groovy! :D

I need to get back to work now, but hopefully Santa and his crew will continue to blow off some steam. I think a person should be allowed to really ENJOY their work shift, you know? Not be forced to rush, rush, rush until you're stressed and ready to hurt folks.

Anyway, I hope YOU are relaxed and really having a GREAT time! (Actually, at 2:24am, I guess I hope you're sleeping comfortably.)

PEACE!!!

SANTA'S GEARIN' UP!!!

December 24, 2010
01:06 am

I'm working through the holidays, but to get a bit of the spirit, I'm tracking Santa's progress via NORAD's official Santa Tracker site again this year.

It appears that about 6 minutes ago, Santa began preparations for his annual gift-delivering voyage.



In year's past, I always started tracking Santa on what was, for me (in the Southern United States), Christmas Eve. And I never understood why I had missed the journey. But tonight, when I came into work, just out of curiosity I logged onto http://www.noradsanta.org/en/index.html to see what was going on, and I saw that the countdown had already begun!

Then I figured it out: Christmas Eve for me is Christmas Day for someone else, lol. I mean, I kind of knew this to some degree because my Gnomey-Goddess is 6 hours ahead of me. But I guess I just didn't realize that the other side of the planet might have a full 24-hour time difference.

Still, it looks like he hasn't left just yet, so maybe it's not a full 24 hours.

Anyway, I hope to continue to track Santa's progress in real-time as my job allows. I'm hoping that by the time Santa hit's Austin I will be feeling all Christmas-y and jolly.

Evidence Review Weekend...

For the first time ever (well...in the almost-2 years I've been investigating the paranormal) I am AHEAD OF SCHEDULE for reviewing evidence for our current case!!! :D

The last few times I have procrastinated until Sunday, then found I didn't have enough time to look at/listen to everything. But this weekend I spend a day celebrating the Toy Story franchise (which I blogged about), then I made myself a pot of coffee and some breakfast...

SIDEBAR:
I do not recommend Fettuccine and White Clam Sauce. I saw some in HEB yesterday and I'm thinking "I like white sauce! I like sea food! White Clam Sauce must be a culinary gift from God!!!"

It's not.

(By the way, I haven't tried the Red Clam Sauce, but I don't think it's the color that's the problem, I suspect it's the clam.)

I boiled up a big pot of fettuccine, baked a Michael Angelo's Eggplant Parmesan (always a winner, whether you bake it or nuke it!), and opened a package of Hawaiian Bread dinner rolls my li'l bro' bought for me, and I was fully prepared to be both entranced and delighted.

I had maybe 5 bites of the Fettuccine with White Clam Sauce before I had to give it up as a failure.

Now, keep in mind that I can boil up fettuccine, top it with butter and Parmesan Cheese, and enjoy it like it was fresh from Romano's Macaroni Grill! (Well...you know...maybe Olive Garden.) I've eaten fettuccine with every type of Alfredo sauce available in grocery stores, and thoroughly enjoyed the meal!

(I don't recommend Walmart's Great Value brand Alfredo sauce, though...it kind of sneaks up on you afterward.)

AND, on top of my love of pasta is the fact that I simply do not waste food. (If you haven't read my blog in a while, I don't really have tons of money to throw around.) So abandoning half my meal is simply not something I do easily. (I once made Kraft Mac & Cheese and dumped a bunch of Cajun seasoning on it, hoping to make it special. It was not special; it was painful; but I believe I choked a lot of it down. And a box of Macaroni & Cheese is about a quarter of the price of White Clam Sauce and a box of fettuccine.)

How can I describe this? Clam Sauce tastes, roughly, like the sea.

Not like seaweed, or salty, or like water...but like the sea. Have you ever gone out to the beach, run out into the waves, gotten pulled under by the undertow and swallowed half a lungful of water? That's kind of how Clam Sauce tastes.

Or if you've ever seen The Perfect Storm, those fishing boats those guys are on? Clam Sauce tastes the way those fishing boats look.

END OF SIDEBAR.

So I made myself a pot of coffee (which I'm drinking with Chocolate Mint Truffle creamer tonight) and a big breakfast of Italian (style) food, then settled into a night of evidence review. I listened to my hourS (notice the capital "S") of audio footage and a NotePad document (for taking notes) and listened.

And now I'm done! :D

Had I put it off until tomorrow (well, later today, but I haven't been to sleep yet) I would probably be wrapping up the evening with hurried notes to my teammates explaining how I would find time before or after work over the next few days to finish my listening.

But -- probably since I didn't procrastinate (much) this time -- I had time to review a bunch of pictures taken during the investigation, too!

Now I have a video camera angle to review tomorrow, and there may be some more audio that needs to be listened to. But for now, I can kick back and goof off until I fall asleep!!! :D

I just got this AWESOME audiobook: UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On The Record by Leslie Keane. (I bought the physical book a month ago, but haven't cracked the spine yet because the physical book I'm still reading now is Stan Romanek's Messages. I usually have one (or two) physical books that I'm working on and an audiobook. A like listening to the audiobooks while I'm playing videogames or driving or whatnot.) So I may listen to some On The Record for a while to relax.

I hope your weekend is going GROOVY!!!

:D

TOY STORY 3!!!

I FINALLY SAW IT!!!

:D

I wanted to see it in 3-D in the cinema, but I didn't have the money. :(

Still...AWESOME flick!!! Seriously powerful, whatever format you see it in, I'm sure!

So, I used to have this cool DVD set with the first 2 Toy Story movies, but I lost the set along with (literally) thousands of dollars worth of movies the first year Brian and I moved in here. So I haven't had a copy of either movie (well...I do still have a VHS copy of the first Toy Story from way back in the pre-DVD days of home video) for 3 or 4 years now.

And that was kind of okay, because I had seen Toy Story and Toy Story 2 several times each, and PIXAR kept putting out new flicks every year, and I was more in the mood to watch the new ones as they came out than to go back and watch the Toy Story films.

However...

Earlier last week I was grabbing some groceries at Walmart and saw The Toy Story Trilogy: The Ultimate Toy Box Collection!!! 10 discs -- the Ultimate Toy Box Edition of all three movies on Blu-Ray, plus all three movies on DVD, plus the Digital Download discs for all three flicks -- stored in a replica of Andy's toy box, for $70!

It's a bit expensive, and I might be able to buy the same set in 6 months or a year for half the price (maybe), but when I got paid Friday I simply could not resist collecting all 3 flicks (including the one I hadn't seen yet) in one fell swoop!

And I so don't regret it!

I bought Brian and myself some Domino's last night (I had the Chicken Alfredo Pasta breadbowl and the Sausage Marinara Pasta breadbowl, and the two lava-brownie things) and we watched Toy Story 3!!! It was awesome!

Afterward, we watched all the extras on the feature-film disc, then popped in Toy Story.

Brian has to work this morning, so I watched TS3 in my bedroom with the audio commentary, and am now working my way backward through the 2nd and 1st movies with audio commentary. (Those PIXAR folks are frickin' GENIUSES!!!)

BUT FIRST...

I had some unfinished SModcast business to attend to...

Back when TS3 was still in the theaters, Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier talked about in on episode #124: "Schindler's Toy Box", and at one point they announce that they will be spoiling the ending, and to stop listening to the podcast if you haven't seen it yet.

That episode has been sitting on my MP3 player ever since!

So it was with great joy and relief that I FINALLY got to finish listening to that episode!

It was cool, too. I re-listened to the whole thing, and it was cool to hear some of what they said before the spoiler alert now, having seen the film. And what they had to say about it was cool, too.

So I have had just a Toy Story-filled day today!

I should be reviewing evidence, though. I mean, I still have 2 days to do it (I haven't been to sleep, so right now is still part of my "Friday" since it's early Saturday morning), but in the past I have found that if I don't get to the evidence review early I may find myself staying up late Sunday night (which is really Monday morning, for the rest of the world) cramming until the very last minute.

Still...it's been a long week at work. I deserve some down time.

ALSO...!

My Genius Friend Dave gave me this really fascinating idea for a project. I'll probably go into it more soon, but let me just say that My Genius Friend Dave continues (yet again) to earn the moniker I've slapped on him here! (He could hang with the PIXAR folks, and not embarrass himself!)

Okay, the sun is well up this Saturday morning, which means that my night should really be done. But I still have some Toy Story audio commentaries I want to watch before I go to sleep, so I'll sign off for now and get to it.

A shout-out to the love of my life, who has been busy lately but still finds the time to make me feel all special!!! xoxoxo

May your weekend be DELIGHTFUL and delight-filled!!!

:D

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

So far, I'm having a GREAT Halloween Weekend!

...you know, in my own, low-key way...

My holiday began Friday morning when I got off work.

I'm dead broke, rent ate my whole check (as it usually does at the end of the month), but I had planned ahead for this Halloween's festivities. I dropped a chunk of change on Universal's The Legacy Collection for 4 of their classic monsters: Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon!

The Wolf Man has been a part of my Halloween celebrations since the mid-1990s, when it aired and I caught it on VHS. It's not a long movie, so I was also able to fit Gary Larson's Tales from the Far Side Halloween special on the same tape. And when that Halloween mood came upon me, I'd pop the tape in and watch.

As a result, I've become rather fond of The Wolf Man, and come to associate it with Halloween (beyond the natural association of the mere fact that he's a Universal monster and a classic Halloween costume).

But the last few years I haven't been able to trouble myself to dig up the VHS, so this year I was sort of missing Mr. Talbot. (Laurence Talbot, the name of Lon Chaney, Jr.'s character when he's not eating villagers by moonlight.) So I Netflix-ed the DVD.

But when I went to watch it, the main menu asked me which feature I wanted to see: The Wol Man, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Werewolf of London or She-Wolf of London.

Huh?!

I hadn't heard of the 3 other films. And 2 of them, it turns out, were only available on another disc. I checked Netflix, and they didn't offer that second disc.

So what is this amazing thing I have stumbled onto?!

Amazon held answers for me:

Back in 2004, as a sort of promotional tie-in with big-budget stink-bomb Van Helsing, Universal Studios apparently re-packaged their classic monster movies into these uber-packs: The Legacy Collection! As part of the Bonus Features in each package is the director of Van Helsing giving a short history of the monster, then talking about how he is going to treat the character in his film. (I was about to type, "Not well," but that's really not being fair. Mr. Sommers clearly loves the characters, and Van Helsing is clearly a love letter to the Universal classics, it's just that Sommers appears to have let the script get away from him. Toward the end of Van Helsing, I remember thinking that just watching the dailies -- after the special effects began coming in, that is -- there is no way anyone associated with the film could have guessed they were making a terrible movie! If you watched the scenes alone, separate from each other and out of order, you would be convinced that this was an awesome flick! It's just when you put all the scenes together, in order, that you become bored an unimpressed. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was good, though! I was disappointed with The Mummy, and I didn't see any of the sequels, but I dug G.I. Joe!)

Since the short promos for Van Helsing talk as though the movie isn't out yet, I'm guessing Universal released the Legacy Collection DVDs before the movie -- to remind people why they loved the classics, or to introduce new generations to them -- in order to perk-up interest in the new flick.

Naturally, when this was going on, I was unaware because I was -- as ever -- broke.

BUT...

...my broke-ness actually worked in my favor this time!!! :D

If you look on Amazon right now, you can get all these amazing collections for just under $20 each! And if you buy one of Amazon's 3-fers, you can get a whole mess of them for less than that!

Which is what I did with my birthday money this year! :D

I bought the Frankenstein collection, the Dracula collection, the Wolf Man collection and the Creature from the Black Lagoon collection!!!

But what's amazing is that I wasn't just buying 4 classic movies, I bought ALL the (official) SEQUELS, TOO!!! :D

So going into the Halloween season this year, here's what I'm working with:

Frankenstein (1931)
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Son of Frankenstein (1939)
The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)
House of Frankenstein (1944)

Dracula (1931)
Dracula (1931 Spanish Version)
Dracula's Daughter (1936)
Son of Dracula (1943)
House of Dracula (1945)

The Wolf Man (1941)
Werewolf of London (1935)
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)
She-Wolf of London (1946)

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
Revenge of the Creature (1955)
The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)

That's the better part of 3 decades of Universal Studios classics!!!

It's insane, too, because though most of these flicks really wouldn't sell on their own (the and Son of... and House of... flicks, especially) Bride of Frankenstein and Revenge of the Creature really should be sold separately, from a value standpoint! One could argue that in both cases, the sequel somewhat eclipses the original!

But I'm immeasurably glad that Universal made this minor oversight, since I feel like I've gotten away with highway robbery, lol. (When was the last time you paid for entertainment and felt like you were the one on the better end of the bargain?)

Naturally, I broke into the DVDs long before they came. I watched the Making-Of featurettes for all 4 franchises, and watched Creature, Wolf Man and Dracula with the film-historian audio commentary. I even watched Dracula with Philip Glass's score, and I love it!!! I didn't know who Philip Glass was when Southpark dissed him in a Christmas episode, but that guy is a genius!!! (Well...at least, his score for Dracula is genius. I'm not familiar with the rest of his work.)

One more thing about the classic horror flicks: Every time I watch the original Halloween (John Carpenter's version, the real one) I can't help but notice how all the TVs are playing old black & white horror flicks, and it makes me kind of want to experience that. I mean, I watch black & white flicks all the time (whenever the mood takes me, anyway) but I've never spent Halloween that way. When I was a kid, a teen and in my 20s, Halloween was always about going out, not-being-home. Then in my 30s, when I didn't have the money or sleep schedule that allowed me to go out, I usually gravitated to newer horror flicks, stuff that still scared me.

So this year, I'm reveling in the Classics!

And reveling I am! here's how my Halloween is breaking down this year:

Friday, October 29, 2010

I started out by logging into Hulu and watching the latest episode of Castle, assuming this macabre-yet-fun show would surely have Halloween episode, right? Wrong. Oh, sure, the episode was good! But it was too good, in the wrong way. It's this deeply moving character piece that had me in just the wrong mindset for a Halloween-y good time.

But I recovered, and watched House of Frankenstein, the first of the "monster mash-ups" with most of Universal's line of monsters: The Mad Scientist (played by Boris Karloff, interestingly), the Hunchback (the Mad Scientist's assistant, naturally, but in a subplot clearly lifted from The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Dracula (played by a cowboy in an Abe Lincoln hat), Wolf Man and Frankenstein's Monster!!! It was the second-to-last of the "Golden Age" of Universal's monster films (excluding the Abbot and Costello Meet... parody pics, the cycle wouldn't start back up again, in earnest, for almost another decade with Creature from the Black Lagoon), so it was guaranteed to be a bit of low-quality, schlocky fun!

And it didn't disappoint!!! :D

And watching all the behind-the-scenes stuff about the making of these films -- particularly the Frankenstein films -- I had to watch Gods and Monsters finally, the film about the end of James Whale's life. It didn't really have much to do with the making of either of his monster films -- except to sort of suggest where some of his creative inspiration for bits of them came from, and why he was such a master with macabre imagery -- but the film was really good.

Too good, though, in the wrong way.

So I followed Gods and Monsters up by watching the rest of Them!, and that movie is just surprisingly great! Made in 1954, it's clearly the 2012 of its time! I was seriously surprised at what they pulled off with that flick! Now, I mean, my daughter and her friends aren't going to watch it and be impressed. (I fell asleep the first time I tried to watch it.) They can create more convincing special effects on their iPhones. But for what they were working with back then, Gordon Douglas must have been the Michael Bay of his day!

Then I fell asleep to House of Dracula.

When I woke up Friday night, I listened to a couple of episodes of Spooky Southcoast, watched It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown on Hulu, then tracked down "the Halloween episode" of Quantum Leap and watched it on Netflix (because Tim Weisberg mentioned it on one of the SSc eps).

And I'm blanking on what else I watched...

Is it possible that I went to sleep to Invasion of the Body Snatchers? No, I remember waching Gods and Monsters and Them! Friday morning, so I must have fallen asleep to Body Snatchers Thursday morning.

Actually, I think I'm getting some of this out of order. Hmph.

Okay, I know for sure that tonight when I woke up, Brian and I watched the end of Young Frankenstein (he was watching it when I woke up, so he saw the whole thing) and then we listened to Spooky Southcoast live!!! :D We almost never get to do that. And tonight was a psychic who has what she believes is new information about Ron DeFeo (the guy who lived at 112 Ocean Avenue and murdered his entire family back in 1974, before the Lutz family moved in and left after 28 days, sparking off the "Amityville Horror" phenomenon). It was a creepy show than ran half an hour longer than usual (probably because they somehow knew Brian and I were listening).

Then after that, Brian & I enjoyed Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein!!! HALLOWEEN FUN!!! :D

When Brian went to sleep (poor guy has to work tomorrow) I popped in Son of Frankenstein, The Ghost of Frankenstein and I was partway into Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man when I paused to write this entry.

After I finish FMTWM I will have seen ALL of the Frankenstein series! :D (Actually, I need to rewatch House of Dracula, because Frankenstein's Monster appears in there, but I fell asleep long before his scene popped up, lol.)

AND THE COOL THING IS, I STILL HAVE PLENTY TO WATCH!!! :D There are several awesome classics on Netflix that I queued, and there are plenty of horror flicks in my Hulu queue, too! (That's completely leaving out my vast DVD library of horror titles, intentionally.)

So whatever happens between this moment and All Saints' Day, I know I'll be having a funky-fun time!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

:D

PARRRRRR-DEE!!! *hiccup*

When I was young, I could not imagine what my 40th Birthday might be like. I mean, I couldn't even imaging being 40, much less the details of what turning 40 might be like.

Well, this weekend, I have found out.

IT'S AWESOME!!! :D

When I was growing up, turning 40 officially put you "Over the Hill" and meant you were now on the fast track to senility, a retirement home, and DEATH. You're 40th Birthday party was, inevitably, an Over-the-Hill party, and every single card, present and party favor in someway reflected this. (We threw such a party for my Pops when he turned 40.)

Now, the unspoken spirit of the Over-the-Hill party wasn't actually mocking a loved one who was now, officially, "Old", is was more a subtle mockery of the idea that the loved on in question really was old just because of the number of years he had lived.

But I lucked out, on a couple of counts:

First, thankfully for me, "Middle Age" has been pushed back another decade. I think it's because women closer to my age simply refuse to wither and look not-hot, so people like Teri Hatcher (this is my guess, anyway) forced the Middle-Aged limit to be pushed back.

Secondly, that whole "Over the Hill" fad seems to have simply vanished, like parachute pants or something.

Also, I could never have imagined, when I was younger, that turning 40 could feel so young!!!

Like, I heard "older folks" say things like that when I was a kid. Say that they didn't actually feel old. But I could never have guessed how literal they might have been! I don't exercise, or eat particularly well (thought I don't eat particularly badly, I don't think) so my body isn't in the type of shape I think it should be. But even still, I'm not short on energy, and there aren't any activities I fear taking part in. (Besides, you know, moshing, gang-rapes, self-mutilation, robberies, that sort of thing. But that's really nothing to do with how healthy I think I am.)

So anyway, how did I celebrate?

Like the past few birthdays, I kept it low-key. I don't have the money to throw myself a lavish party, and honestly, the party would just be getting started for me about the time everyone else was saying Goodnight.

So my B-Day started with some well-wishes from my little bro' Friday morning when I got home from work. There was a bigass Birthday card waiting for me! The envelop was covered with Brian Edwards ORIGINAL artwork!



Front...

...and Back...





And then the card itself -- IT'S 3-D!!!

:D

So as Brian's getting ready for work, he's also making sure the weekend of my 40th gets off to a fantastic start!

Since Brian bought us a Blu Ray player a couple of weeks ago, I decide it might be cool to watch a Netflix movie on the Big Screen.

The HD TV Brian bought is kind of profound! It makes movies look like they're actually on the Big Screen! And you have no idea how wild this is until you watch an OLD movie on it! For the first time ever, you feel like, you are watching this ancient flick the way it was intended to be seen!

And you can tell, watching an old movie on a HUGE screen, that this is exactly what the original filmmakers had in mind when they designed and shot their flicks! On the Small Screen, it looks cheesy and, well, old-timey. But on a Big Screen, the flick seems somehow more significant, more important. It seems like an event!

So to kick off my 40th Birthday Weekend, I decided to watch what I am told is the 1950s "Giant Monster": Them!.

But first, I figure that turning 40 is one of those occasions wherein it is socially-acceptable to get krunk, so before work Thursday night I bought me a bigass bottle of Tito's Homemade. I already had a bottle of Pina Colada mix in the fridge, and when I poured the remains into a 32-ounce cup, then dropped some Tito's in it, I had me a powerful party drink!

So I kicked back with my Paint-Thinner Colada and popped on Them!! (The first exclamation mark is part of the title, but the second is meant to express my enthusiasm for this endeavor.)

And let me tell ya, this was an awesome way to start off my weekend! Them! is a surprisingly good flick! It holds up well! As the main character are exposed to more and more of the mutant monsters, I'm thinking "How could they afford to shoot all this?!" I mean, you're not going to mistake Them! for Transformers, but watching it, I think you'll see that Transformers might not have been made if not for Them! going there first!

Unfortunately, Them! was kind of too good of a movie...

See, I anticipated it being a bit more laughable, and I imagined that with that heavy-duty dose of alcohol in my bloodstream, I would be up until Brian got off work, laughing with myself and watching half of Netflix's streaming library.

Didn't happen that way.

Them! had me genuinely transfixed. It sucked me in so that I barely finished my one drink, and around 9:45am (the normal time I've been getting to bed the last week) I felt my eyes getting heavy and decided to go ahead and get some sleep.

Now before you accuse me of being old, know that I stay up way past my bedtime entirely too often! I'll get obsessed researching some phenomenon and discover that it's 2 or more hours past the time I should be asleep. So the fact that went to bed at (for me) a reasonable hour has nothing to do with being old. I just recognized, quite sensibly, that I could resume celebrating after I woke up, and I could celebrate with my brother, because he would be home from work by then. :P

And that's how it played out. I woke up Friday evening, and I slipped off to do a bit of shopping. One thing I bought was Season 2 of Castle and Dollhouse. I was looking forward to watching several hours of Castle with Brian, since we're both huge Nathan Fillion fans. (I followed Castle's second season on Hulu, but Brian didn't, and season 1 was half a season. So this was gonna be cool!)

I also bought a bald wig, 2 blood-soaked machete's and an ax.

This was the completion of my 2010 Halloween costume!!! :D

I'm not sure exactly how this became a thing with me, but I had been missing my old Jason Vorhees mask...

See, back in 1987 or so, some company released a "Serial Killer Hockey Mask" (the "generic" name for a copyrighted character's iconic trademark mask) for Halloween. It was this amazing plastic replica of Jason's mask, only it didn't have the chevrons (the red marks on the brow and cheeks of the mask). But I -- clever budding filmmaker and long-time theatre alum that I was -- figured out that I could cut the chevrons out red electrical tape and recreate Jason Voorhees's iconic mask! :D So I did.

I remember this one school costume party where my best friend Tommy and I pulled an incredibly subtle Halloween prank on some classmates of his:

He was invited to this school function, and I was not -- it was for one of his classes or extracurricular activities or something. My Jason Voorhees costume consisted of a plaid shirt, jeans, this cool gray bomber jacket I owned, a bald wig and my Jason hockey mask. (Maybe a plastic glow-in-the-dark machete that I had spray-painted silver, too.)

The idea (and execution) was elegantly simple:

We were both wearing jeans, plaid shirts and bald wigs. He brings me to the party, and I stay outside in his car. He goes in wearing the bomber jacket and hockey mask (and maybe sporting the machete, I can't remember), mingles, and then makes an excuse to come outside. Then he passes me the mask and jacket, and then I go inside. I mingle for a bit, then go back outside, and Tommy finishes off the party.

And that's exactly how it came off...except for one detail: Someone pestered him for a peek beneath the mask. He succumbed ("succame"?) to the pressure and allowed that person to see beneath the mask. (If I'm not mistaken, it was a cute chick, so I can't really blame him.)

So now it was my turn...

I donned the mask and jacket, and went in.

I found myself in conversation with folks I had never seen before. All these years later, I couldn't begin to recall what was discussed. I just remember keeping my replies as vague as possible.

Now, one thing to note is that in 198-whatever, Jason Voorhees was like a rock star! Someone sporting a semi-decent Jason costume was bound to get attention back then. And I got me some attention, lol.

And then it happened: A cute chick wanted to take a look -- just a peek -- at what I looked like beneath the mask.

Hmph.

I mean, I denied her at first, but there is a certain point in which saying "No, I want to keep the mystique" is no longer socially acceptable, and I turn into a freak-ish asshole who is way too into his Friday-the-13th fantasy. And these weren't my classmates: they were Tommy's!

So then I let the cute chick peek, and her reaction...

"Huh. Okay."

She didn't recognize me!

Why should she? I wasn't a part of her class (or extracurricular activity, or whatever it was)! I HAD GOTTEN AWAY WITH IT!!! :D

I believe I remember trying to hang out as long as possible (a small group of people had glom-ed onto me the moment I had entered the building, so I didn't want to look suspicious in my exit) but then taking the first opportune moment to get the hell out of there and get Tommy back to his party.

As a teen, this was a wonderfully horrifying and thrilling ruse to pull off!

AND WE PULLED IT OFF!!!

My exposing my face to the cute chick didn't seem to have spoiled the game for Tommy at all! This wonderful prank was a resounding success!!! :D

So successful, in fact, that none of the witnesses probably even know that a prank had been pulled, lol. (My buddy Tommy and I probably could have been criminal masterminds, if our hearts weren't made of gold.)

However...

I lost that mask sometime in the transition between teenager and twenty-something. :(

And I don't recall when it started, but I've been missing that gorgeous mask for a few years now.

I mean, look at your local Halloween supply stores! When you see a "Serial Killer Hokey Mask" nowadays, it's not made with hard plastic, and the hole configuration is barely reminiscent of the classic Jason Voorhees mask!

What's WORSE is that the "official" Jason Voorhees masks don't come close to recreating what I had!!!

The Jason masks you can buy now are either post-Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part 6 or they're made of uber-flexible rubber -- not hard plastic, like a real hockey mask!

Perhaps I should clarify: This Jason mask I had created was absolutely as close to a Hollywood prop as a middle-class kid from Odessa, Texas could create! It was blind luck that some Halloween-mask company had stumbled onto the original mold (or something very damned close to is) of Paramount's Friday the 13th series hockey mask, and that all I had to do to create this amazing replica was add some chevrons made of electric tape!

And then to realize that 20 years later, luck was less blind -- Paramount had, apparently, taken whatever legal action they needed to to make sure that any successive "Serial Killer Hockey Masks" look nothing like Jason's Red-Wings-based design, and none of the officially licensed "Jason Voorhees" masks could ever be confused with Hollywood props -- was a bit devastating. :(

I mean, it's not like my world was crumbling around me or anything. But it was a considerable disappointment.

But then, one night a couple of months ago, my brother called me, all drunk, lol!

He was thinking about my birthday, and looking on eBay to see if he could find the Jason hockey mask I most preferred...

Now, when I'm looking to buy some long-lost-something-or-other, I look on Amazon.com, but when Brian is looking to purchase the in-purchase-able, he goes to eBay...

AND, to be fair, eBay did have an impressive number of really impressive Jason Voorhees mask replicas!!! They seemed to have every mask from Part 3 to Jason X!!!

But I noticed an interesting phenomenon...the best masks seemed to come from this place called www.frightstuff.com.

It turns out that FrightStuff.com sells the raw materials you need to create your own Jason mask, starting with the blank mask from the original Jason mold!!! :D

You want the mask from Friday the 13th: Part 3? You can buy it there!!! You want the mask from Friday the 13th: Jason Takes Manhattan? You can buy it there!!! It appears that Paramount Pictures has been using the same mold for all of their Jason sequels -- and New Line altered the mold for Jason Goes to Hell and Jason X, but not Freddy Versus Jason -- and FrightStuff.com somehow scored that original mold, and offer it to you (us) for an amazingly acceptable price!!!

There was this one blog that has an EXCELLENT overview of the differences between the Jason masks, but it appears to have disappeared, but there is another one here: http://www.jason-voorhees.info/jason-voorhees-mask.html.

The one that influenced me (that doesn't, apparently, exist anymore, gave a phenomenally-detailed explanation of just exactly what was different from film to film, which gave me a more precise understanding of what I really wanted out of a Jason mask: For me, I wanted a mask. My favorite movies are Part 3The final Chapter (Part IV) and Jason Lives (Part 6), but the look of Jason is Part III! While he's still a living human, before he becomes a super-zombie.

I mean, from a cinematic standpoint, you can bloody-up the mask after Part 3, but you can't ever take it back to that level of cleanliness. So, for me, the Jason I want to capture is the pre-ax-to-the-head, pre-machete-to-the-brain, pre-resurrected-from-the-grave Jason of Part III.

In short, the mask I used to own as a teenager...

But here's where it gets COOL...

The drunken conversation with my brother tips me off to this one-off site that is working from the original Paramount Pictures molds...

So I can spend $50 there and buy an completely NEW, unblemished copy of the mask AND (included in that price) a copy of the chevrons!!!

I CAN MAKE A PRISTINE JASON VOORHEES MASK, THAT LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE THE FIRST MASK IN PART III!!!

(Of course, I can also dirty it up to look like any version of the mask from III to VII. But what I want is Part III.)

So, with one paycheck, I buy the mask kit and not only recreate the blind luck of my childhood, but recreate a masterful replica of one of my childhood icons! (Like, I could sell this thing on eBay, if I weren't as invested in it as I am.)

So then, my next question is this: What the hell did Jason wear in those movies?

It took a couple of days of research to discover than Jason Voorhees had, basically 3 outfits: 1-With the sack over his head, he wore overalls and a blue plaid shirt, 2-with the hockeymask he wore a Hunter Green overshirt over a white T-shirt with brown pants, and 3-after he was a zombie for a while, he worea gray overshirt over a black T-shirt and gray/black pants.

My Jason is Part III, so he was wearing a Hunter Green overshirt over a white T-shirt and brown pants. (He continued to wear this for The Final Chapter and Jason Lives: Part VI, with the exception that in Jason Lives he had picked up a web belt (containing more weapons) that gave him a more slimming look than he had sported in Part III or The Final Chapter.)

So this weaves into my narrative in that I had used one paycheck to buy the $50 Jason mask, and then I used another paycheck to buy the Hunter Green overshirt, the white T-shirt, and the brown pants to complete Jason's wardrobe. (I normally wear black worker boots, which blend right in with such a costume.)

So with my Birthday money, I needed to buy a bald wig.

I also bought a couple of props...



My favorite prop urns out to be an official Paramount Pictures "bloody machete". You'll see why...



I dig the fact that this machete is "property of Camp Crystal Lake", lol.

So, the completion of my 2010 Halloween costume was quite an exciting aspect of my birthday celebration for me!

(Yes, I'm a nerd...)

So then, after I got home from shopping, my li'l bro' put on The Wolf Man, the remake of the original 1941 Universal Studios monster flick. I dig on the original because it's highly atmospheric and not the least bit scary (attractive to me because I'm so old, lol). But the remake is super-awesome because it seems to capture the atmosphere of the original and provide a mystery that keeps you guessing until the end!

Then I watched a couple of episodes of Castle: Season 2 with Brian, until he fell asleep. At that point, I realized I had a couple of Season 3 episodes I could watch on Hulu but I got sidetracked...

There was this live episode of 30 Rock that aired before I got to work, and that I wanted to see. I adore 30 Rock, but I couldn't imagine how they might pull off a live episode, so I was dying to see this! When I logged onto Hulu, I saw that the new (live) episode of 30 Rock was up, too. So I watched it.

THE EPISODE IS ABOUT LIZ LEMON TURNING 40!!! :D

How cool is THAT?!!

So -- via one of my favorite shows, doing a live episode -- I got to enjoy a star-studded 40th birthday celebration online! (Seriously, what are the odds on one of my favorite TV babes turning 40 on an episode of TV that I don't end up watching until 2 days later, which happens to be my 40th birthday?!! Seems a little coincidental, no?)

I watched both the East Coast and West Coast feeds, and after that I was tired of messing with Hulu, so I switched to the last 4 episodes of Dollhouse (DVD) and saw how the series played out.

That took me into Saturday, the 16th...

I woke up Saturday, and Brian already had himself a meal planned, so I grabbed me some takeout from Texas Road House -- Country-Fried Sirloin, plus side -- and settled into an audiobook I recently purchased from Audible.com, The Grays by Whitley Strieber. This unabridged audiobook wrapped-up most of my attention for the remainder of Saturday night and Sunday morning. In fact, I finished the book Sunday evening at Moonie's Burger House, where I enjoyed a Plain Jane combo -- no onions, mustard, no mayonnaise -- as my li'l bro' slept a home. (The meat isn't really different than the nukebale patties you might buy at H.E.B., but the veggies are fresh and the buns are to die for! Making the meal, all in all, quite enjoyable!)

And that brings us up to NOW...

When I started writing this blog entry, it was around 2:00am. At the moment, it's 6:30am. So some of the ideas I had about what I might do to finish out my 40th Birthday Weekend (such as watch some new Castle on Hulu or watch some No Ordinary Family) seem a bit frivolous, considering...

But is has been and extraordinarily cool 40th Birthday for me!!! :D

I hope your work week -- however old you are -- is AMAZING!!!

Ray Jay :D

UNHOLY SMOKES!!!

I have a new favorite videogame:

LEFT 4 DEAD!!! :D

It's like Resident Evil back when RE was mostly about fighting zombies!!!

The fact that I'm a fan is kind of funny because I've had this game for quite a while now, and I'm only just now playing it.

I bought it near the beginning of the year. I had purchased a USB controller for my 2 newest Tomb Raider PC games (2 od the Crystal Dynamics titles), and I was loving them so much now that I could play them the right way (the keyboard/mouse way wasn't working right, like with the old Edios games) that I decided to look for a Horror title. Left 4 Dead 2 was being advertised at work all the time, so I thought I'd try out the first one.

It sucked! Even with this amazing new controller I had, it was all but impossible to manipulate!

So I let the game sit...

Then, maybe a weak ago, two different friends told me that they could play the game just fine with the keyboard/mouse.

So I finally tried it...

...and OMG!!! AWESOME!!!

It had never occurred to me that some newer games might still be designed for old-school maneuverability! (THOSE are some visionary cats there!)

So now I have a new zombie game! And an AWESOME ONE, too!!! It's more what I hoped RE would grow into, but CapCom went in a different direction. (You're killing more human-like creatures now. They're just sick people, not really zombies.)

It's like I'm in the most badass Romero flick ever! (Except for 2 things: These zombies run, and they're infected with a "zombie virus"; Romero would never let his zombies run, and zombification isn't an infection, as many people assume. In Romero's world, zombie bites kill you like any other bite would, and once you're dead, your corpse is reanimated by whatever reanimated all the corpses in the first place; but it's not a virus.)

Um...

I did some other cool stuff this weekend, too...but I'm kind of still buzzin' on my zombie-shootin' high at the moment.

Ghost Whisperer: Season 2

One thing I really, really dig about Ghost Whisperer is the town of Grandview, NY! I've always been a sucker for fictitious small towns, particularly ones with quaint town squares! I don't know why, but I think I can trace it back to Back to the Future.

But Grandview is particularly cool to me because every day in Grandview feels like sometime around Halloween!

No idea why that is. Maybe it's the cinematography, maybe it's the art direction, or the color timing. No idea. But it's neat! :)

So I'm just getting into Season 2, which means I'm almost done with the series.

I've watched it kind of weird.

See, I rented the first 2 discs of Season 1 from Netflix some time ago, just to see if Brian & I liked the show. Brian never ended up watching them, but I watched those first two discs, and I dug the show.

But...

After the first 8 episodes, I was exhausted from crying, so I gave the show a long break. (Mock me if you must, but the nobler nature of Man moves me to tears, and I'm not ashamed of it. So nyah!) Plus, I think there was other stuff that I was more excited about at the time.

But this last 2 years, my paranormal research and investigation got me thinking about the show again. Particularly when I started working on my own fictitious paranormal story. Just how did Ghost Whisperer manage to tell believable, true-to-real-life-accounts stories week after week? I kept running into walls with my paranormal novel because real-life paranormal events might be scary for, like, 5 seconds, but not for 21 chapters! I have a great deal more sympathy for writers of Supernatural Horror, because real-life ghosts just aren't that scary. (Unless you've never experienced one before and/or firmly believe they don't exist; then they can be quite frightening, I'm told.)

Also, my paranormal studies have sort of given way to more metaphysical topics lately. You read everything out there about ghosts and paranormal investigation, and you're eventually going to run out of books for a while -- until they write some more. Plus, everything you learn in fact-based paranormal research is going to lead you to ask tons of questions that, currently, only faith-based research offers possible answers for.

So, when this desire to pick Ghost Whisperer hit me again, I had a little extra money, and Walmart had a (marginal) sale on Seasons 3 & 4. So I bought them.

And I dug them!!!

Well, I prefer Season 3 to 4 -- and if you've seen the show, you can probably guess why.

Btw, SPOILER ALERT!!!

I don't plan on giving away any specific spoilers, but I'm feeling lazy, so I'm going to write this as though you've already seen more of the show than I am.

So if you haven't seen the first 4 (of 5) seasons of Ghost Whisperer and intend to watch it, please turn away now for your own entertainment safety!

So anyway, Season 3 is a bit more Horror-y, kind of. And Season 4 is good, too, but I was a bit bugged by what they did to Jim (her husband).

Also, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Jay Mohr was a frickin' regular on the series by Season 3!!! How cool is THAT?!! I've always loved that guy and felt he was underrated as both and actor and a comedian! I mean, people who know who he is love him and give him credit, but many people don't know who he is.

After finishing Season 4, I went online to see how much it would cost to pick up the first 2 seasons, and saw that they cost more than what I got the 3rd & 4th seasons for! :(

So I took another Ghost Whisperer hiatus.

But this hiatus turned out to be blissfully brief! Maybe a month and a half after I finished season 4, Walmart had the first 2 seasons on sale for $20 each!!! :D YAY!!! I could own almost the entire series! (I don't know if 5 is out yet, but I haven't seen it.)

Also, Season 3 was a bit disappointing because it apparently went to air around the time of the Writer's Strike; it only had 18 episodes instead of 22. So the fact that Seasons 1 & 2 were both pre-strike (and each contained at least 22 episodes) AND were both before the Thing-That-The-Writers-Did-To-Jim was more cause for cheering!

But I didn't immediately hop back into the series. Not because I was adverse to going backwards, chronologically, but I've spent the past couple of weeks immersed in books. I tore through Dark Woods: Cults, Crime and the Paranormal in the Freetown State Forest by Christopher Balzano, Witness to Roswell, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up, The 30-Second Commute, Jay Mohr's memoir of his 2-years on Satyurday Night Live called Gasping for Airtime, and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. At the moment, I'm only reading Messages: The World's Most Documented Extraterrestrial Contact Story by Stan Romanek, so I've got some free time to get back into the show.

I pretty much went through Discs 3 & 4 this week after work a couple of mornings. So I finished up Discs 5 & 6 yesterday and today.

Which puts me on Season 2.

I watched what I thought was the first 2 episodes of season 2 and was curious that the writers didn't do more with Season 1's cliff-hanger. They just breezed past it! Which was more realistic, I thought, but it seemed uncharacteristic: I tried to get Brian to watch Season 3 right after I bought it, thinking he would dig on the ghost-story like gangbusters, and would probably appreciate the spiritual aspect of the show; but he was immediately bored because the first episode of the 3rd season was a "clean-up" episode, where they untangled the continuity knots that Season 2's cliff-hanger had created. (Most of the show was a good, stand-alone episode, but Brian had had a long day at work, and the way the episode started just made him feel like there was tons he had missed out on. So he passed out. He still hasn't seen a full episode. Also, he may be a bit turned-off because I warned him that every episode made me cry, and I don't think my brother is quite as unabashed about crying as I am. We're Texas boys, after all.)

So anyway, I was a bit pleasantly surprised that the writers had simply glossed over a cliff-hanger maneuver that could so easily be turned into a high-drama episode or two. (Particularly after what they did to Jim in Season 4!)

THEN...Jay Mohr's character, Dr. Payne, walks into Melinda's shop and says "Remember me?" and I'm wondering if maybe he had shown up in one of the first 2 discs of season 1 (which I watched years ago)!

So I went to Wikipedia.org to read about his character, and discovered that he had, indeed, been introduced in Season 2. Introduced.

Also -- and this should have been a dead giveaway -- Camryn Manheim's character Delia was just part of the cast all of a sudden! I mean, there was a place for her character to fit into the cast -- one that had been made very apparent by the end of Season 1 -- but it it had sort of been implied that over the course of the summer, the character had slipped in and now she was there. I've watched enough TV and movies to fill in the blanks for myself, but writers usually make some sort of a deal out of the introduction of new characters. (Still, to my credit and the credit of the writers, the thing they changed about the show at the end of Season 1, they did with a great deal of skill and subtlety!!! They didn't spoon feed us, their audience, they gave us credit for being able to follow along! it was really impressive!!!)

But when Dr. Payne walked in -- for the first time in the series, I thought -- and started talking to Melinda as though he were referencing events in a previous episode, I had to wonder if I had somehow missed some episodes, or maybe I was watching...

I checked the DVD case...

The brain-trust that designed the DVD cases used an efficient, no-waste design in which both covers of the case held a single DVD. No wasted plastic, very "green". BUT, they chose to put Disc 1 where you expect the DVD to be on regular one-disc DVD cases (you open it up like a book, and the disc is on the right side, attached to the "inside back cover", if you will, because the "inside front cover" doesn't have a place to hold a disc) and they placed Disc 2 on the "inside front cover". But this is stupid, in my opinion, because Westerners read left-to-right. So we're going to assume that the disc that's on the left is the first disc in the series of 2!

In other words, I had popped in Disc 2.

So now I'm going to watch Disc 1, which means I'm probably going to have to sit through at least 45 minutes of untangling-the-cliffhanger-mess before they settle into the Season 2 normal-episode groove.

I mean, it will all be worth it. I know I like episodes 5 & 6, because I already watched them, lol. But that Episode 1 mess...blah.

The lesson: Don't do season-ender cliffhangers, kids! I know logic dictates that this will ensure your audience follows you to the next season, but it's really just a waste of story time! Check out Buffy Season 7: Joss had a 3-episode arch, with the 3rd- and 2nd-to-last episode BOTH being cliffhangers, and then the last episode just being one long Climax! THAT is how you do a fulfilling cliffhanger! Ratchet up the suspense within the season, and then send your audience off into the summer hiatus talking about how great your show is, not "what's going to happen next year?" Next year?!! Screw that noise! The Batman sitcom in the 1960s had a cool idea: The wrap-up to the cliffhanger occurred that same week! You didn't even have to wait 7 days to find out what happens next!

I know, I know: I watch TV shows on DVD so what the hell am I complaining about?

I dunno, really. I just have a long-standing grudge against season-ender cliffhangers, going all the way back to Star Trek: The Next Generation. It feels like insecure storytelling to me. It's not real storytelling, because -- as I said -- the first episode of next season is less about telling a great story and more about untangling the needless mess you created at the end of last season and getting the show back on track. It's a waste of my time. You could be telling me a GOOD story instead (rather than an obligatory story).

The-Thing-They-Did-With-Jim happened within the season, PLUS I felt like they were earning something. They made a very creative choice -- I didn't like it, but maybe the actor, David Conrad, was getting board with his character or something -- and then the writers eanred the right to keep the actor on the show. We wanted something to happen, story-wise, and it was something that shouldn't be allowed to happen by story logic. So the writers had to put the characters, the world, and us through a lot of emotional turmoil to make this story-thing happen, and that makes sense to me. In all the Indiana Jones movies, Indy fails; but the writers (and the characters) put up such a heroic fight that by the end of the flicks, we don't mind that Indy didn't achieve his goal: We're just happy he made it out alive!

But these season-enders are, I feel, just page-filling. Harve Bennett said that Star Trek III: The Search For Spock practically wrote itself, because Spock was dead, we wanted him back, the Klingons new about the destructive potential of the Genesis devise, so there ya go! The moment we, the fans, discovered that the Klingon's new about Genesis' destructive potential, we could have written Star Trek III. I think Bennet and Nimoy and company did a splendid job with the flick, so I'm not complaining, I'm just pointing out that if I hadn't been 13 when ST III came out, I might have been bored with the story.

I am now 39 (soon to be 40), have studied writing for 18 years, and "clean-up" episodes seem like a needless waste of time.

Stay in school, don't do drugs, and don't write season-ender cliffhangers, kids!

Okay, I have now bitched about season-ender cliffhangers for as long as it would have taken me to watch the damned Season 2 clean-up episode and get on with the good stuff, so I'm going to stop now.

SOME EXCITING NEWS:

I'm broke this week, but Brian is willing to take us to see Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D Sunday!!! :D WOO-HOO!!!

Also, my daughter turns 20 today!!! I don't get to celebrate it with her, but I know she's going to have a good time! (Hopefully not too good a time.) ;P

You know, if you asked me how old I am, I feel like maybe 29 or 30. So there's this real disconnect for me about the fact I have an adult daughter. I mean, every year she gets cooler and easier to relate to, but i don't feel proportionately older. I remember as a teen watching the original Planet of the Apes and that joke about "Don't trust anyone over 30," but now that I'm significantly older than 30, the joke seems pointless to me. (Plus, Heston was 45 when he delivered the line.)

Okay, so it's getting late, so I should stop rambling and get back to the clean-up episode so I can move on to the rest of Season 2. (I usually eat my vegetables before I even start on my steak, just to get them out of the way.)

I hope your weekend is FILLED WITH LAUGHTER!!!

:D

There is Something WRONG with Nathan Fillion!

I know, I know "You like him so much, why don't you just marry him?" right?

But Nathan Fillion fascinates me!

It's been WAY too long since my last dose of Catsle, and Hulu has been bombarding me with clips and teases for Season 3 (so close, yet so far away!), so I popped in Season 1 on DVD and watched the first 6 episodes, then I went back and listened to the audio commentary on episodes 1 and 5, and on Episode 5, at the end, Jon Huertas claims to be playing the guitar for that kickass theme music they have, and actress Molly Quinn picks up the joke and claims that she whistled on the track.

If you listen to enough DVD commentaries, you hear this type of thing: The artists doing the commentary jokingly claim to have performed other tasks, and it always gets a laugh out of me!

But just the split-second after Molly says "I whistled," Fillion declares "Through her nose."

WHY?!

If you've seen the show, you know that Molly C. Quinn (Castle's daughter) is a gorgeous young woman. And the way she plays Alexis Castle makes you either want to call your daughter and just tell her you miss her, or if you don't have a daughter you just want to go out and have one immediately! She's just smart and fun and funny, extremely lovable!

So Jon makes his joke, which catches you off guard and makes you chuckle; then Molly makes her joke, which is funnier because she's lying about having performed a lesser musical task; but then Nathan comes in and thrusts the mental image of this beautiful young redhead whistling through her nose into your mind!

Again, WHY?!

My brother is the same way: You make a joke, and then he immediately tops your joke with an entire run on the subject that create the most ghastly mental images, until you can't breath because you're laughing so hard!

There's this perverse part of me that wants to be envious and resentful of the man who is Captain Malcolm Reynolds, Caleb, Bill Pardy, Dr. Pomatter, Alex Tully, Captain Hammer, Steve Trevor, and now Richard Castle...enough, already! Shouldn't there be a ceiling on how many iconic characters an actor gets to play in a career?!

But it's that "Ferris Bueller" thing I mentioned in an earlier blog entry: How can you begrudge the seemingly unending fun of a guy who's life's mission seems to be to make sure you're having as much fun as he is?!

I think maybe Nathan Fillion figured out, as a young child, that this world is filled with unimaginable amounts of fun, but that most of us will never have the balls to go out there and enjoy most of it. So he made it his mission to have enough fun for the rest of the world (the entire planet!) and be sure to take every opportunity to share all that fun with us!

He's like the opposite of a sin-eater: Instead of taking away out sins by taking them into himself, Fillion takes as much pure joy into himself as possible, then spreads it out to as many of us as he can reach! He's a fun-spewer! That's what his is!

Nathion Fillion, Fun-Spewer! New, from HASBRO!

OMG, when is Castle gonna start up again?!! :P

Mystery Legends: Sleepy Hollow

I just finished my first Hidden Object Game -- Mystery Legends: Sleepy Hollow!!! :D It was cool!

I hadn't really played a Hidden Object Game before, so my closest frame of reference was the Where's Waldo? books from the late 1980s. Except that once you find an object in the game, the object disappears after you click on it, so you don't accidentally find it again.

(Note: Half a second of researched reminded me that Where's Waldo? was actually originally Where's Wally? as the creator/illustrator, Martin Handford, is British. Just in case my sweety's reading this, I want to give her -- and any other non-US readers -- a frame of reference.)

I really enjoyed the Where's Waldo? books, because they not only provided puzzles to be solved -- puzzles that always yielded to dogged, relentless perseverance (my favorite kind of puzzles) -- but also each image (which, itself, told a story) provided the viewer with any number of micro-stories within the macro story. Like those tiny illustrations in a Sergio Aragones did outside or in between the panels of Groo the Wanderer!

The Sleepy Hollow game wasn't as deft at storytelling as Arogones or Handford, but it was a lot of fun, none the less!!! Whoever composed those images was kind of genius (and kind of a bastard, too, cheating as they did from time to time), but the games has a system of "Hints" that you can collects, so that you can accrue Hints throughout the game that help you find some of those less-clever, more-diabolical hidden objects.

If I were trying to write a review for Amazon.com, I would be less honest and probably write something like this:

I gave the game five stars but it doesn't deserve them. It only took me nine and a half hours to finish the game what a jip! The artwork is amazing and the levels are challenging and that music really provides a cool atmosphere while your [sic] searching for the items and once or twice the voice of the headless horseman made me wet myself but I'm not going to admit that to you because I want you to think I'm cooler than I suspect I really am and did I mention that I solved the game fast? Grammar is for wimps.

Something like that. (I sometimes suspect that sites like IMDb and Amazon must have de-editors: persons who are employed to go through all reviews written and make sure they don't contain an overabundance of proper grammar, spelling or punctuation (which falls within the purview of grammar, I know, but punctuation on the Net sucks and I don't believe I can emphasize that quite enough).)

[I know: I like to use parenthesis a lot, but I believe you will find that my use of it is grammatically correct.]

This weekend I also watched The Losers with my brother, spent a day in bed, ill, and also watched Death Race! great fun! (Except the being ill part. Nothing to worry about, just a mild infection of the gum on one side of my mouth where I've had a root canal and crown. Never -- so far -- lasts longer that 24 hours, and I'm good now.) Brian just bought this HUGE big-screen TV (I believe he said it was 32 inches) and, luckily, Netflix had just sent us a few Action flicks! And they were both AWESOME!!! :D It was like seeing these movies in the cinema!!! :D

I also finished reading this book called Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the Government's Biggest Cover-Up, which firmly lifted me off the proverbial fence and set me down on the side of the certainty that extraterrestrials crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico in July of 1947, and the United States government (or, parts of it) retrieved the craft and the bodies!

AWESOME book!

Skeptics of the paranormal decry that if there are these strange things going on in the world -- ghosts, UFOs, cryptids (cryptozoological animals), etc. -- where's the proof? Well, as far as the issue of extraterrestrials visiting our planet is concerned, Witness to Roswell is the proof! Using the same standards of proof that the United States Justice System uses to send a human to be executed (or not) for his/her alleged crime, the authors Thomas J. Carey and Donald R. Schmitt provide a preponderance of evidence -- as well as a staggering amount of evidence -- intended to cast "a shadow of a doubt" upon the 4 official explanations that "debunk" the Roswell incident as mundane.

When I say this book floored me, please understand that I "hunt ghosts". I have recorded numerous inexplicable voices and sounds, and thrown them out as possible evidence because a skeptic could possibly concoct mundane "explanations" for them.

AUTHOR'S RANT:

No kidding, in the attic of an historical building, I recorded what sounded exactly like an old-time radio or TV news broadcast! I am a huge fan of OTR, and I have worked for TV stations that broadcast the local news since 1995, so I am uniquely versed in the speech patterns of news broadcasters from the 1940s-1960s and 1990s-2010s. Watch Good Night, and Good Luck and then watch Dateline and/or your local news, and you will see that there is a cadence that news anchors and reporters adopt or affect that is vastly different starting around or during the 1980s. This EVP -- and it is an EVP, even though we decided not to present it to the client -- was maybe 2 minutes long, in this droning male voice using the same cadence of speech as a 1960s newscaster reading a news story! There is no other sound like it, and no reporter or news anchor nowadays uses that same cadence (no one anywhere does; it's a wholly unnatural way of speaking)!

Then to top it off, there were no TVs in the building that the recorder could have picked up on. And if there were a radio in the building, we never once heard it turned on over the course of 2 investigations. AND, if it HAD been turned on, it would have had to been tuned to an OTR NEWS STATION to produce the sounds that this recorder recorded! (Because, as I have emphasized before, no newscaster uses that cadence anymore, not even NPR, or BBC News.)

So I remain convinced that I recorded the sounds of the Past on my RCA digital recorder. Maybe it was a radio news broadcast from the 1960s or earlier, maybe it was a TV news broadcast from the 1970s or earlier, but it wasn't mundane or natural.

AND YET...

And this is the important part...

When my fellow investigators voted to chuck it as evidence -- after I put up a minor fight, of course, explaining my reasoning as eloquently as possible -- I obliged. Because when a skeptic (read "cynic") can explain away your "evidence" it isn't really evidence.

END OF RANT.

My problem with the Roswell incident is in my ability to imagine the events of the 4th of July weekend and beyond.

Early on, I heard a theory, liked it, and bought into it. Aliens crashed at Roswell; cool!

But then I hear someone else speak -- someone who claimed to be a witness of some sort -- but they didn't fit into my understanding of the events. And after a while, there were so many "eye witnesses" and they were claiming all kinds of (seemingly) tangential events that my mental construct of the events couldn't hold them all.

"Okay, I can imagine a nurse at the base seeing the aliens, but who is this woman who claims to have been a girl who visited the site? I remember one boy and one girl, so how could this other girl have been there and gotten a piece of the memory metal? Wha--?!"

I have to admit: It became easier, after a while, to simply believe the skeptics. "The reports claim that a boy and a girl were at the site, so where did this other girl come from all of a sudden?"

My problem (and theirs) was one of scope.

My mental image of the Roswell incident was, I am embarrassed to admit, formed largely by movies and "dramatic recreations" of the events. My mental image was limited to the 5 to 15 minutes any given visual entertainment medium could allot it. I didn't pursue books on the subject, so if it didn't fit into a movie or a podcast, I wasn't exposed to it. And if it could be squeezed into a podcast, but it didn't fit into my pre-conceived timeline, then it was easier for me to take the skeptic's way out. "I dunno, maybe something happened there, but it might not have been an extraterrestrial crash."

So then Mr. Carey and Mr. Schmitt compile their decades of research into a coherent timeline that even I can follow and DAMN!!!

Seriously, if I weren't already a believer in the possibility of alien visitation, I would be now!

AWESOME book!

OH! And I watched this great documentary called What On Earth? Inside the Crop Circle Mystery!!!

The documentary isn't really about the UFO phenomenon at all. It examines the circles themselves, asking more metaphysical questions presented by the appearance of inexplicable crop circles. For instance, if they are from any non-human means, why are they being left?

Now, first you have to get over the question of the apparent "debunk" back in the early 1990s that 2 English dudes created all the crop circles since the 1970s, but I believe the documentary handles that question nicely.

Once past that, you get to ponder the really cool questions and ramifications.

Wow, I guess I've had a pretty full weekend for someone who spend a whole day sleeping, lol.

So here's to an even cooler week! May yours surprise you with an embarrassment of abundance!!!

:D

IT'S BEEN 4 YEARS NOW!!!

On this day 4 years ago, Gnomey agreed to be my RL girlfriend!!! :D

What do I mean by "RL girlfriend"?

If you weren't reading my blog 4 years ago, you may not know that my brother Brian and I spent 2005 in SecondLife. Before that, I had spent my non-working time writing, playing videogames, and watching movies.

Actually, the writing-thang has been my main avocation since 1998. I chose a job that allows me time to think and daydream and imagine during my shift and pays me little enough to keep me motivated to switch careers as soon as I figure out how to get into writing as a career. But the downside of devoting my life to writing is that I developed an acute lack of any actual LIFE. I couldn't afford to go out with friends, and I certainly couldn't afford to date (chicks, apparently, prefer not to eat Jack in the Box or Taco Bell when they're on a date), so my social interaction consisted of email/phone conversations with my friends, workplace interactions and my relationship with my brother/roommate.

Then we learned about SecondLife, and that changed things! The interface is like a First-Person Shooter, but everyone in-world is a REAL PERSON somewhere on the planet! PLUS, if you owned land, you could CREATE YOUR OWN ENVIRONMENT! So imagine you could create your own videogame for yourself! You want to be in a haunted ghost town? Then you make it! You want to be in the jungle? Go make it! Wild West? Get busy!

Or, you could just wander around the hundreds of environments others have created, meeting people or hanging out with friends.

I've published too many posts on the wonders of SL already, and this entry isn't about that.

The most important person I ever met, however, (aside from my daughter, when she was born) I met in SL: MY GNOMEY-GODDESS!!! :D I met this smart, funny, kind, caring, fun-loving, adventurous woman in SL and got to know her, then developed a crush on her, and then one day she told me she had a crush on ME! Then very quickly we became bf/gf in-world, then very quickly after that we began talking on the phone and emailing and video-chatting as RL (or "Real Life") bf/gf, and when SecondLife stopped working on her computer and she couldn't go in-world anymore, I re-joined the "real world".

It's been an interesting ride, so far! For a year or so we video-chatted or voice IM-ed every day, but then my life got crazy, then her life, and we don't get to chat daily anymore. But I love her as much as I ever have, and seems to still tolerate me, lol. ;P

And today we've been a couple for 4 YEARS!!! :D

We don't get to do anything particularly splashy to celebrate because she's busy taking care of stuff that isn't my story to tell. But she wished me a happy early-anniversary yesterday and then wished me happy anniversary today! :)

And I just want to say, God bless you, sweety, for continuing to put up with me this long! ;P

It's been a while since I've blogged, so I'll give you a quick update on what I've been up to.

Um...there's work.

And writing.

Brian's & my mom has been recommending this TV show for a few years now: Two and a Half Men. We finally Netflix-ed it, and we've spent this weekend watching it. I literally started Friday morning, after I got off work, and have been watching it since. (It's 4:02pm Saturday afternoon as I type this.) We had already seen Season 1, so I started with Season 2 and am almost done with the 1st disc of Season 3 at the moment. (I took a break to sleep, then do some writing.)

On the writing front, I may have discovered the first (and perhaps ONLY) FREE online screenwriting course!!!

I had reached a wall in the development of the novel I'm working on, so i was looking for inspiration, and I came across Steven Barnes Free Writing Class! It's a 9-week course that he encourages you to download all at once, and then do the work week by week.

I read through the first 2 lessons in 30 minutes (each lesson is 3 or 4 pages long) and I did the assigned homework for Week 1 when I woke up a couple of hours ago.

I really dig it so far!

The lessons are short, but packed with concepts! If you've never studied writing or screenwriting before, you may want to do some additional reading in order to fully appreciate many of these concepts. But it's a simple and direct method (from what I've read so far, anyway) so the additional reading may not be necessary at all. (I started studying writing in 1992, so I don't really remember the questions I had back then or how much I could have or could not have comprehended.) I'm sure that taking his UCLA course would be much more instructive since you would be hearing his explain each of these concepts in detail, but who knows: If I had access to this free online course in 1992 (before the World Wide Web existed) I might have been working as a writer for well over a decade by now!

So anyway, I'm sort of starting back up from scratch with my novel. I'm not ignoring the work I've done, but I using it and adding to it as the class dictates.

And once I sell my novel (and probably a screenplay or a couple more novels, realistically) I will buy a house, then go get Gnomey and drag her over here to the States! And with luck, maybe we can celebrate our 5th anniversary TOGETHER!!! :D

I hope you are enjoying your weekend, and that your week is delightful, too!!!

:D

P.S. Did anyone catch the meteor shower? Friday morning, between 5:00am and 5:30am I climbed up onto the roof of the TV station I work at (my shift was done and there wasn't anything for me to do but ride out the clock) and saw 3!!!

The first I saw was this really fast-moving flash of gold that streaked across the sky and then vanished.

The second was and intensely bright white ball that appeared to cork-screw into the Earth's atmosphere and then disappear. But it left a sort of com trail that faded slowly from vision.

Then the third was what you think of when you imagine a meteor, the tiny falling star.

It was AWESOME!!! :D

HAPPY 4th OF JULY!!!

I'm having the bestest, most awesomest 4th in years!!! :D

My bro' & I are watching a DVD of fireworks displays while listening to John Williams' Star Wars scores! (Specifically, we lined up the End Titles from each of the 6 movies and are listening to a sort of sampling of all the main themes from each movie, back-to-back. The way the music and the fireworks displays line up at times is profound!)

Brian got home from work around 9:30pm, and I was about halfway through The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle (which is a magnificent flick!!!), so we watched the rest of that together, then went out on the porch and watch some of our neighbors perform their own fireworks shows.

This year, our neighbors weren't quite as enthusiastic as in previous years. And the ones that went all-out were obscured by trees. :(

But Brian pulled out some firecrackers he had left over, so we amused ourselves for an hour or so by hurling Blackcats and Cracker Balls off our balcony. It was pretty cool. :)

Then, after Brian waited a bit too long to throw one Cracker Ball -- resulting it in igniting in his hand, so that he had to throw it downward, so that it exploded as it passed the bottom two apartments, entirely too close for comfort.

After that, we came inside and started the fireworks DVD. ;)

But I'm having such an AMAZING time I just had to blog about it!

I hope your 4th was really, really awesome, too!!!

:D