An archive of my old LiveJournal
I just realized one of my friends is touring Thailand this month, and I’m not sure whether he’s back yet or, if not, what part of the country he would have been in on Sunday.
Somehow he’s managed to be in New York during 9/11, Madrid during the train bombing, and now (maybe) Thailand during the tsunami.
I havenât done any acting in years, but I still occasionally get the Actorâs Nightmare. (When I saw the Buffy episode where Willow dreams sheâs in the play that doesnât quite make sense, I sat up and said, âIâve had that dream!â)
Last night I dreamed I was in a community theater or childrenâs theater production of Disneyâs Beauty and the Beast. It seemed to be only the songs from the movie, not the entire play. It was opening night, and there was a certain lack of sufficient rehearsal.
The canonical actorâs nightmare is like the clasic final exam nightmareâthe final exam in the class you never actually attended, for instance. The play makes no sense, you donât know your lines, youâre not even sure how the scenes go together, but everyone else knows what theyâre doing. (I never did figure out what the tanks were doing in Oklahoma in one of my dreams.) This was different: I hadnât just missed rehearsals, there hadnât been enough rehearsal. There were scenes we hadnât even blocked, never mind actually practiced.
So itâs opening night, itâs a makeshift theater (basically a conference room with a pair of doors near one end, one going to the descignated green room and the other outside), and the audience is arriving. Weâre all âbackstageâ (i.e. in the next room), Iâm running through songs (OK, we havent rehearsed this part, but I know most of the song anyway…), and for some inexplicable reason Iâve been cast as Gaston (it didnât make sense in the dream, either), and Iâm running through the song, when I realize… whoâs playing LeFou? I start asking the other actors, and nobody knows. I ask the stage manager, and he doesnât know.
Did I mention I have the vague sense throughout that this is the theater troupe from Something Positive?
So the audience is here, the lights (room lights, we donât have any actual stage lighting) are up, and people are out there starting to sing, and we donât even have the entire show cast yet, never mind rehearsed! Iâm trying to figure out just how much I can muddle through the opening scene without someone to play off of, and Iâm not even certain we have anyone playing Belle out on stage…
…and then I woke up with âGoing Through the Motionsâ running through my head.
OK, if I ever try to tell anyone that caffeine doesn’t affect me… remind me that it does.
Fortunately, my cubicle walls aren’t very solid, or bouncing off of them would probably hurt more.
Stay up ridiculously late, collapse in bed, drop off to sleep. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Not spend another hour-plus tossing & turning.
I “woke up” his morning unsure of just how long it took me to fall asleep last night, but somehow convinced that all I had to do was look at the modification time on the most recently changed files in… something. My brain, probably.
Then I went back to sleep.
Eventually I woke up and realized that the file timestamp thing was just plain silly. Kind of like the time a few years back that I half-woke up, convinced (probably from an interrupted dream) that I could manipulate reality by altering its HTML code.
Anyway, I know there are people on my friends list who have serious insomnia, and I just want to say: I salute you. I don’t know how you put up with it on a regular basis.
If you have a wireless network, you might want to go easy on the tinsel [archive.org] this Christmas. Otherwise you might not have a wireless network for the next few weeks!
From Dave Phelan’s “Insuffucient Time” blog regarding a Pier To Pier network outage:
“Window” was the codename for strips of foil dropped by Lancasters on D-Day to fool German Radar into believing there was an attack on Calais. Radar bounces off the foil sending the radar waves in random directions.
Nowadays we don’t call it Window, we call it “Tinsel”. Lots of small reflective strips. Tinsel is an effective blocker of microwaves as Window ever was. Yesterday’s network outage was caused primarily by the addition of some, very tasteful, Christmas decorations to the antenna of node 4!
Note: Added the quote as part of the archiving project.
Roads Gone Wild: a traffic engineer discovers that, in some circumstances, if you design the road right, you can actually make it safer by removing signs, lane lines, curbs and the like. The comments at Photomatt.netare interesting as well.
The History of Mathematical Symbols. Some of them are more recent than you might think.
Top 10 cheesiest movie lines—though they should probably be renamed the top 10 high profile cheesy movie lines. I think âIâm just the cookâ in Under Siege (or was it the sequel?) is at least the equal of âNo, Iâm a postmanâ in cheese level. And once you get into the realm of B movies, thereâs a wealth of cheese to be found.
Ursula Le Guin doesnât like what Skiffy did to the Earthsea books. She really doesnât like it She really, really doesnât like it. She really, really, really doesnât like it. And sheâs not alone.
Daniel Handler, however, seems okay with the screen adaptation of his books.
Hmm, so Isuzu has a new car called the Axiom.
It seems to me that âDesigned from basic principlesâ would be a perfect slogan.
Well, weâve hit a milestone. The last few holiday seasons, thereâs always been something preventing me and alenxa from putting up a Christmas tree. At long last, weâve managed to accomplish this difficult feat.
You see, the way our furniture is arranged, we only have one spot in the apartment suitable for a tree. The broken desk that blocked it one year has long since been repaired. The boxes that blocked it another year have been unpacked. This year looked grim as well, but for once everything fell into place. Since we hosted a âRefugee Thanksgivingâ for our friends, we had to clean the corner out. And the apartment management owed us a free carpet cleaning, so we waited a week before looking for a tree. And when we visited my grandparents that following weekend, they asked if we wanted a tree, since theyâd been putting up a small one instead of a large one the last few years.
So we set it up last night, and went hunting for ornaments today. First it was storage, then my parentsâ house (to pick up a collection Iâd been making since childhood), then shopping. And so, I present to you: our first Christmas tree!
The Hollywood blockbuster formula:
The end result: tons of substandard movies that nobody really likes, but that make plenty of money. More to the point, there’s not much incentive to make anything better
I had an idea on how to deal with the problem, based partly on mine and alenxaâs viewing habits: Unless you’re reasonably certain the movie will be worth seeing, wait until the second week it’s out. Aside from saving you from ghastly lines, it gives you a chance to pick up the word-of-mouth. If it turns out to be lousy, you save yourself 2 hours (more like three when you throw in parking) and 10 bucks. More importantly, if enough people wait for week 2, films will need to keep second-week ticket sales, which should encourage studios to make films that will have first-weekend people saying, “I loved it! It was better than Cats!” and recommend it to all their second-weekend friends.
It’ll never happen, but it’s at least an idea.
Saturday night: Driving home from a day with parents & grandparents. Two blocks from home, we made a left turn, and someone coming sideways ran the red light. They slowed down, we sped up, and disaster was averted.
This morning: After talking, for whatever reason, about car crashes and why you shouldn’t stop on the side of a bridge if you can help it (the chance of being hit and knocked over the edge, which happened to the younger brother of someone I knew in high school) during the carpool section of the morning commute, I watched an SUV plow into the center divider, hitting its right front wheel and, I’m fairly certain, knocking that wheel off.
This evening: Driving home from work, the right front tire went flat while we drove over a bridge.
Overall damage: I need to buy a new tire, and my shoes are scuffed up. But the level of coincidence is disturbing.