busy bee

I cannot yet divulge the new developments at work, but I am exceedingly excited about them, to the point of being unable to sleep. While I’ll hopefully be able to post more in the next couple of weeks, allow me for now to simply fall back on metaphor in saying: we’re grabbing the bull by the horns, kicking back into high gear, and jumping into the deep end without water wings.

[Addendum: Following writing that paragraph, the dangerous combination of the power of Google and an overly inquisitive mind led me here. ]

[Addendum to the addendum: My inner eight year old is endlessly amused by this one: “I’m shooting from the seat of my pants.”]

another costume story

Previously mentioned in my Easter-time discussion of Marshmallow Peeps:

Two years ago, for Halloween, one of my then coworkers seized upon the idea of taping Peeps to his clothing, thereby dressing as a ‘chick magnet.’ Sadly, Peeps are only produced during the Easter season, and he was forced to use marshmallow black cats instead. Apparently, while most women find the Peeps idea cute, they are not similarly amused by a ‘pussy magnet’ costume.

shaken, not stirred

Question: What’s the ideal costume for a Halloween benefit ball wherein you’ll be spending the first half of your evening playing with the swing band (requiring you to wear black and white) and the second half drunkenly womanizing in usual style?

Answer: Tuxedo + Martini Glass + Toy Gun = James Bond. Clearly the fastest route to Pussy Galore. (My apologies for perhaps the worst double entendre in the history of this site.)

The problem, however, seems to be that, post 9/11, toy guns are in rather short supply in NYC. So, having exhausted my neighborhood options, tomorrow I’ll be swinging by the Mecca of all red-blooded children – the worlds largest Toys R’ Us, in Times Square (the place is so big, it has room for an indoor ferris wheel; had I visited at the age of seven, I’d doubtless have fallen to my knees and kissed the ground upon entering) – in search of the perfect pistol (one that says, “please take this costume as a playful endorsement of martinis and baccarat rather than of right-wing, NRA nut-job gun ownership ideals and secret-agency-driven subversion of peaceful, productive, legislatively-driven foreign policy”).

Oh, and I’ve got to pick up my good bow-tie from the cleaners. The key to pulling off Bond is a hand-tied bow-tie, which you can leave undone towards the end of the evening for a rakish tilt that women, inexplicably but universally, dig.

daily zen

Po-chang needed a master for his new monastery, so he called all his monks together and set a pitcher before them saying, “Without calling it a pitcher, tell me what it is.”

The head monk replied, “You couldn’t call it a piece of wood.”

The cook walked up and kicked over the pitcher spilling the water and walked away.

The cook was put in charge of the new monastery.

Holy ill-informed digital rights policy, Batman!

This morning, taking advantage of another day at home, I worked my way through the pile of Daily Variety (the film industry’s trade rag) that had accumulated on my desk over the past few weeks. And, in particular, I was struck by the ever increasing number of film-industry-driven inane digital media bills, lawsuits and corporate initiatives that seem to have sprouted up recently.

As an industry member myself, I find it all a bit embarrassing. Isn’t there even one senior studio exec who remembers how ill-conceived this whole anti-tech song and dance was 20 years back, when the VCR was first introduced? At the time, MPAA prez Valenti testified to congress referring to the new technology as “the Boston Strangler of the American film industry,” apparently slightly underestimating video sales & rentals eventual role as a significantly larger revenue stream to the movie biz than theatrical distribution (video currently represents a whopping $16.9 billion market vs. box office receipts’ still quite healthy $8.4 billion). Undaunted by facts or history, Valenti’s doing it again, now painting digital technology as, I suppose, the “Washington Sniper of the American film industry.” Worse, he still seems to be receiving equally unanimous film industry support.

Of course, when I’m wearing my tech hat, chairing the newly formed Paradigm Blue foundation, I’ll be working hard to piss in Valenti’s eye, lobbying for more level-headed digital rights bills based on a better understanding of the underlying technologies and their likely consequences. But I’m a bit worried as to how whole-heartedly I’ll be able to throw myself into that task. Valenti and the MPAA have significant power over the other half of my professional life, providing the all-important G/PG/PG13/R movie ratings for Cyan’s films. And, similarly, I don’t want to piss off any studios to the point where they’ll be less likely to distribute something that Cyan produces.

Quite a dilemma, and one with rather significant impact on my professional life. For the first time, the whole Batman / Bruce Wayne secret identity plan is starting to make a whole lot of sense.

music soothes the savage beast

A sick-at-home-all-day addendum: For some reason, my feverish brain feels much better while I’m playing Aimee Mann in the background. In particular, “Two of Us,” a Beatles cover she performs with her husband Michael Penn on the I am Sam soundtrack. I must have played that song some 100 times today. I have no good explanation.

strep poker

While I had planned on heading up to New Haven for the weekend to catch up with some college friends and to swing by a birthday party for the founders of a company I previously sat on the board of, I instead spent the day at home, feeling like crap, cooped up inside my apartment with a pretty good case of strep throat. As I’ve been running a fever and feeling too crappy to focus for long on anything important, my FreeCell game has been improving immensely.

down and dirty

My kitchen is in serious need of cleaning. As is my bathroom, and to be honest, my bedroom and living room as well. Which is to say, my whole apartment could use a serious scrubbing. And, normally, I’d be happy to get down to business, Windex and Scrubbing Bubbles in hand. I actually kind of enjoy cleaning, find it oddly soothing, almost therapeutic. While most of the other things I accomplish day to day are nebulous achievements, at best small, cumulative steps, in cleaning, with less than one day’s work, I can make dramatic progress, achieve impressive results, even finish the job completely.

The problem, though, is that I only live here for another month. Come December first, I’ll have brought everything I own to a new (and presumably pre-cleaned) place some ten blocks West. Plus, I figure, by even mid-November, I’ll have started boxing and wrapping preemptively, my floor by then covered with piles of everything I own. Which basically saps my will to clean. Why put in the effort when I’ll have so little time to appreciate the results?

Of course, with each passing day, the layer of grime coating my stove and bathroom sink thickens. But with each passing day, I’m also that much closer to the move, allowing me to rationalize one step more easily why cleaning just doesn’t make sense.

Sort of like taking a taxi. Say you’re fifteen, twenty blocks from your destination. A long walk or a short taxi ride. And the thing is, if you’re going to take the taxi, you have to commit to it right away. Because if you just start walking, wavering over whether it’s worth hailing a cab, you’re getting closer and closer with each passing step, making the cab ride harder and harder to justify.

If I really wanted to have the place clean, I would have needed to pull out the mop three or four weeks back. By now, it’s just the cockroaches and I in a long, slow slide to when I finally get the hell out.

search string update

Ah, the power of Google. In the good old days (say, last week), the only bizarre search phrases driving more than thirty visitors a day to this site were ‘urinal etiquette’ and ‘fat naked guys.’ This week, thanks to my lesbian swing band rehearsal post, I’ve now also become a veritable Grand Central for searchers seeking ‘lesbian self photography.’ And I’ve got to assume those visitors are leaving this site more than a bit disappointed.

While I don’t have any immediate plans to remedy that, I have been thinking about the next best thing: namely, ‘playgirl guys’ – which today brought 16, soon to be disappointed, visitors. Yes, while I don’t know any lesbians willing to take pictures of themselves naked (actually, now that I think about it, I probably do, but that’s a whole separate post), I certainly do own a digital camera, am pretty sure I look my best when naked, and am awfully tempted to just bare it all and give those visitors what they want.