January 2008 Archives
I don't know, but I'm hoping that that's plenty will be the #1 search result for that question.
Seriously. The guy totally sucks. He's a horrible comedian. I have no idea why he's famous.
In other news: the food poisoning is slowly going away. I've just stopped wearing diapers, but solid food is still a bit of a trick.
Stay tuned!
Have you ever considered doing the master cleanse, but didn't have the time to go through with drinking nothing but spicy lemonade for a week?
Try food poisoning! Enjoy the same amount of expulsion overnight!
Yes, some of our readers were there last night at the ol' Bruckert-Lanyi homestead when I expressed intestinal discomfort and wrapped up the evening of Settlers of Catan by throwing up into a bucket in front of some of my closest friends.
I had assumed, at the time, that I was going to feel gross for a while longer but that the danger had basically passed. Boy was I wrong.
Over the course of the night I had uncontrollable completely liquid diarrhea (imagine the sound of a woman peeing) and heavy, forceful vomiting that eventually turned in to dry heaving with little gasps of stomach acid when I ran out of things to throw up.
I had probably 15 minutes of this once an hour, ever hour, from 10pm to my last session at 8am this morning.
By the end of it I had even determined a strategy for rehydrating: when my body warned me that it was time, I'd run to the bathroom, sit down on the throne and hold the bucket in my lap. Do move the vomit stage along, I'd drink a glass or two of water until I started throwing up and then eventually finished up with a good two or three dry heaves. After that, and hopping in the shower to rinse of the tortured, tormented ass I had long since given up on wiping.
But! Here was the trick: After that, I'd be good for another hour. So after the vomiting was over, I'd drink *another* glass or two of water so that I would absorb whatever I could in the hour between that session and the next.
I felt so smart! Eventually I even felt pretty okay, even in the bathroom, because I was able to get rehydrated.
The good news: I think I'm losing weight!
After tens of hours of enthusiastic preparation in Rock Band, Karen had her first real drum lesson today.
And I am commemorating the occasion with the first ever LOLkaren.
Bring on more LOLkarens!
My latest editing project is a little bit... gay.
I'm doing a 20 minute documentary piece about the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (henceforth known as GLAD) with director Seth Bernstein! Right now I'm digitizing footage, always the least exciting part of the job, but the rest of the work is going to be really fascinating.
We're going to be covering 5 cases from GLAD's archives, starting with the Boston Public Library case. From a draft of 30th Anniversary materials...
In 1978, a sting operation targeting gay men took place in the Boston Public Library, resulting not only in the entrapment and arrest of 103 men, but also in an energetic response by the gay community, and the creation of Gay & Lesbian Advocated & Defenders (GLAD).
We're going to be using what happened there as a base to bring us through some of GLAD's biggest cases (and, thus, a partial history of gay civil rights in America) all the way to today's struggle over the right to marriage and all the fun and excitement of seperate (but equal!) civil unions.
I got permission to post clips, so you'll see some of the people who actually lived the stories talk about their experiences.
Anyway, back to work!
Last weekend I had the opportunity to do makeup for a runway show (that's me applying makeup in the photo). It was for a new menswear line called Conference of Birds designed by stylist Andrew Holden.
ENK International, in collaboration with IMG (producer of the Fashion Week that takes place in Bryant park twice a year), decided to produce a men's fashion week in advance of Fashion Week for the very first time. Men's fashion often takes the backseat during Fashion Week so this was a way of bringing much-needed attention to menswear designers.
This was my first runway show. Doing a menswear show was a great way of getting my feet wet since the work doesn't involve the intricate makeup designs that so often appear in the women's shows. It's pretty much limited to redness, blemish, dryness, and shine control. Women's shows will definitely be more stressful because you often have to do difficult things (i.e. red lips, winged black eyeliner) very quickly. I can easily spend half an hour doing red lips on a model for a photo shoot, but for a fashion show you only have a couple of minutes. It will definitely be good practice for me. I'm usually such a perfectionist that I spend much longer than I need to on most jobs, so fashion shows will be a great way to teach me speed and accuracy.
I will be posting some of the runway photos to my professional site soon for those of you who want to see my work in action.
I kept my Team Fortress to an hour today. The rest of the time I spent cleaning the house, helping the neighbor out with an A/V installation, playing chess with the neighbor, cooking Karen dinner or cleaning the apartment.
I seem to be making progress.
Maybe I'll be a fully functional adult by the time I'm sixty.
I have a meeting in the afternoon tomorrow. I'm starting on an exciting new project. It should be great. I'll write more about it later.
I'm going to stop the post here. I know I'm kind of phoning it in again tonight, but I'm tired and I want to get up early tomorrow so I can have a nice full day.
Have a good Monday, everyone!
Not as cool, but can you see the arrow?
I used to read this magazine in middle school called something like Science Fiction Quarterly which, along with a penchant for wearing golden rod colored turtlenecks, kept me very lonely, had a story about those magic eye books, trying to see jesus. some guy finally sees it, but unlocks a whole world of hidden geometries right before his eyes, and this world is populated by dragons, and if they see you seeing them, they'll do everything in their power to scare you into oncoming traffic.
Went out to a party tonight with some friends. It seems like something that should be so rich with detail, the G train, bodegas, an ex-fire station loft apartment building, an incredible view of the Manhattan skyline, but I just rest my chin on my hand and try to think of what to say about it.
I'm getting older. When I was 18 years old I could drink half a litre of hard alcohol over the course of a night and be chipper and perky the next day. Last night I had three beers with Eric and woke up with a screaming headache after sleeping in to 1 in the afternoon. And the morning after taste of all those cigarettes... like I had been licking dried pigeon shit the night before. I went to the party tonight and had five smokes and drank a liter bottle of water.
I never cared about doing all the things that were bad for me. I always seemed to be really invincible, even a real terrorfest of illicit consumption left me bright as a daisy the next day, but now just a few drinks will ruin my day. Now I'm much more cautious about drinking and smoking, because I really feel every little puff and sip.
I don't really mourn the loss of my intemperance, but I've never been very social in large groups and I've found that when people say "party," they mean "an informal gathering during which the primary activities are smoking, drinking, dancing, and sometimes talking (depending on how loud the music is)".
I had a good time. I'm glad I went, I don't want anyone to misunderstand. But at times I felt as though I were a bodybuilder at a tupperware party.
Also: I'm getting too good at Team Fortress 2. I think I have to cut back. Plus, the loading screen between maps shows you how many hours you've played as each of the nine classes. It makes me cringe every time, counting all those hours up as the next map loads...
15 hours medic...
19 hours engineer...
It's a very depressing loading screen. It reminds me of the summer I was 19 years old, and as I was packing up my Playstation to bring back to college, I went in to clear out the save game files from my memory cards, and all those wasted hours were staring me in the face. Like:
Final Fantasy VIII, 72.5 hours
Metal Gear Solid, 23 hours
Crash Bandicoot 3, 16 hours
And all I can think is: "God, there are a lot of things I'd rather have done with all that time. I'd have a novel, or at least a few good short stories. Now all I've got is character data I'm about to erase."
That put me off video games quite a bit for a good long while but, clearly, I've still got some work to do.
I take some solace in the fact that I'm here, writing, now.
Good night!
From the unpublished archives:
Last night the White House Radio TV-Correspondents Dinner was off the hook.
I've been doing the blog-a-day thing for less than a week and I've already fudged it up. I missed yesterday!
Well, today I'm going to post twice. But one of them will be a cop-out post.
Guess which one!
Spoiler alert! (highlight the text below if you are ok w/ spoilers)
Boring for anyone not in my immediate family.
He has been for a while. I mean that more in the fatalistic long-term kind of way, the way we're all dying, except not. I mean, he's had some serious problems and, at times, it seems as though he's going to be checking out at any moment. He calls to tell me how much he cost the insurance company that month, and rattles off maladies and treatments I can barely pronounce, never mind identify or explain. His identical twin brother - his genetic match - checked out almost two years ago, but the ol' dads is still ticking away. So when I say he's dying, he really is. But at the same time we have no idea (12 days? 10 years?) when he's really gonna fall asleep for keeps.
I wanted to shoot an interview with him, but not until we were sitting on my couch bullshitting, and it was already too late to get a camera before he went back home.
I want to get this killer interview of him, something so spectacular and complete that it can be some kind of weak proxy of him, so when I miss him I can watch and listen, he can fill me in on everything I forgot or never thought to ask. But that's the catch. There will never be anything more than what I capture on tape, and I have to ask all the questions myself. There are things about my father that I'll never know or understand, and the thing that drives me crazy about it is that it is impossible for me to know what to ask him to get at the things I don't know I'm missing.
I wasn't able to get a movie camera together while he was here so instead we went outside and I took some pictures of him. This is the best one.
The Daily Show has fallen to pieces. I must admit I'm coming from not an entirely educated standpoint: I haven't been watching it since the first three or so sans-writers episodes aired. But I didn't laugh. I was even kind of bored. I mean, I love The Daily Show. I used to watch it every day it was on. It's, really, more important now than ever because of all the campaigning stuff that's happening. But without writers, the show really feels like... well, like no one's writing it.
Here comes The Soup to the rescue. The E! writers aren't unionized, so the show must go on! The Soup is an E! Show hosted by one Joel McHale, who recaps the week in television through clips and snarky commentary. The mood of the show is basically that Joel & crew all have jobs at E! but they hate all the dumb shit on television. It vacillates between gleeful mockery and pained annoyance that the writers have to watch all this stuff to make the show every week.
The clips you can see on youtube and on their site are pretty great, but if you really want the full experience you should buy them through the iTunes store. You can get the current and next 7 episodes (they air weekly on Friday nights) for $5.99, a super deal considering that archive shows cost $1.99 a piece and you can't get them for free on bittorrent because nobody uploads them. Not current episodes, anyway. Sad!
They come with DRM, so I can't play through them with VLC which burns my ass, but whatever. At least I don't have to watch the commercials.
P.S. I totally support the writers strike, as sad as I may be that The Daily Show suffers so horribly because of it.
Does anyone out there know CSS?
I've been doing video editing for so long that my technical skills are really sub-par at this point. It has taken me all day to get the site up and stable. Right now what we have for the site is a built-in template called "New York" or something like that. Of course, I want to get our pictures up at the header, and it'd be nice if it could be an image map so that you would go to an author archive when you click on a picture.
But I have no idea how to do that, and I've spent the last hour banging my head against a wall of CSS. I managed to get a white background in front of the old That's Plenty banner, but it looked so bad and didn't offer any clickability (like to get back to the main page) that I've just gone back to the default css.
Now I know why people hire people like me to do their computer work. I know if I bought a CSS book I could figure it all out and get it looking exactly how I want it, but my time is limited and there are about 500 things I'd rather do than learn CSS.
*sigh*
Anyway. Come! Celebrate! The grand re-opening of That's Plenty! Watch your step, I haven't covered up the manholes yet...
So, the site looks a little weird. I know. And some stuff might not work. I'm sorry about that.
But we're now running on Movable Type 4! Which is very exciting. But we're still getting frequent 500 errors, so I may be shifting the hosting to another company. I thought the update would fix that problem but, alas, it didn't.
Please excuse our dust and enjoy...
My very first felted critter. Isn't he cute?
The site is in a state of crisis. Nothing, of course, compared to the global environmental crisis, the crisis in Iraq (or lots of other countries where things are even worse for the general population on a day-to-day basis), the current American leadership crisis, etc. But insofar as That's Plenty can have a crisis, it is as bad as things can get.
A few years ago, when Ryan was visiting he suggested that we start a blog. I thought it was a great idea, but was unsure that he and I could provide sufficient content to make the site interesting or worthwhile, so I invited a bunch of people that we went to school with to be writers. Dylan and Michelle moved on to another project that requires most of their time, so I invited my sister and Missi St. Pierre to join the staff. Julie Lou and Wythe wanted to be a part of the site, so I asked them on too.
The contributors who make the site run are all some of the most intelligent, funny, interesting people I know. There is a feeling of mutual respect and admiration among everyone who posts here. So why is it that, lately, no one is posting?
ninety minute ride
stuck inside a paint mixer
cost: eleven bucks
why movies aren't
shot handheld by amateurs:
it sucks to look at
unlikable cast
annoying dumb dialog
piece of shit movie
Everyone probably already knows about this, but some evil random funny is here at the Fatal Farm. Duck Tales and Alf and Knight Rider and Golden Girls and... all of them are recommended.
