June 23, 2008Zero effort on my partPosted 5 months, 3 days ago on June 23, 2008 It's been a week since the improvathon ended and I'm pretty much recovered. I stayed away from the theatre this weekend and was pretty lethargic on the whole, although I also attended the first of three weddings I have scheduled for the summer. I wore my classic five-dollar tuxedo (replete with stripes, polka dots and red suspenders) to that one... I'm enlisting a fashion-savvy friend to help me purchase a new suit for the other two.I'm pretty captivated by the new iPhone coming out next month. Enough that I'm taking a long, hard look at breaking my contract with Helio to get one. It now boasts a GPS, which is one of the things that helped to sell me the Ocean in the first place, and it looks like it does a far better job of maps, directions and the like. What's more, I've been consistently disappointed in the Ocean's interface and that I'm locked out of the operating system. Right now the only thing it has going for it is the tactile keyboard, and that it costs me less per month than an iPhone would. But I could also conceivably write software for the iPhone... I've got a couple ideas brewing that I won't get a chance to explore unless I get one. So it's something I'll consider when they launch next month. My boss wants me to play World of Warcraft to get a better grasp of some of their techniques. I've been resisting it as I try to avoid the sink for both time and money that those sorts of games are. He makes the argument that I just need to see how certain things are being done, but I suspect that it's impossible to really get a handle on those things without dedicating a significant amount of time to the game. I feel like I'm in a rather unique job where my boss's biggest complaint against me is that I'm not playing enough video games. In truth, I actually have been playing more video games this past week or so, but mostly because I found out that it was possible to install Linux onto the PlayStation 3 that the company had given each of us last year. It turned out to be quite the harrowing process, but I now have it working to the point where I can play old Super Nintendo games on my 37" television with the PS3's wireless controller using an emulator, which is pretty darn sweet. It's also hooked wirelessly to my Internet connection and network hard drive, which means I could potentially use it as a multimedia server if I ever got my hands on some multimedia to serve. I've been finding ants in my living room... small ones, and only a few here and there, probably not more than a dozen in total. It's a bit distressing because I find them in the middle of the room, with no indication where they're coming from but enough that it doesn't seem like a single soldier has randomly gone astray. I vacuumed, put down some traps and bought some Raid and I haven't seen any since earlier this weekend, but with summer just getting started who knows what I can expect. It could be a wake-up call that I need to clean more proactively... I try to keep my place reasonably clean on the whole but I've been rather lax these past few weeks, and instead just tried to keep the status quo with regards to laundry, dishes and taking out the garbage. I recently purchased a Scrubbing Bubbles automatic shower cleaner, though, and with its help the status quo over there has at least improved somewhat. Although I'm not convinced it's made much of a difference on the tiles, at least the tub seems to keep relatively clean with absolutely zero effort on my part, which is the sort of effort I can consistently count on. That's most of the news... hope everyone that reads this is doing well! Dan. June 17, 2008The only sleep I needPosted 5 months, 1 day ago on June 17, 2008 I suppose it's time I wrote about the Improvathon that happened this past weekend. It was a rousing success and I spent Monday at home recovering... it's Tuesday now and I'm mostly better at this point but I was still a little woozy and trembling then.First of all, I don't have any romantic or nostalgic feelings distorting my memory of it. It was hard and it was brutal, and I'm really glad I did it but I'd have a tough time envisioning a circumstance that would ever make me want to do it again. All in all, what I remember most is how long it felt, and how 14 or 15 hours into it when it felt like forever and I was ready to drop dead, I couldn't believe that I still had nearly 40 hours to go. And when I was 40 hours into it and the end should have been plainly in sight, all I could think about was how long that first 14 or 15 hours had been and that I still had that entire grim march ahead of me. I was lucky that both Tony Beeman and Laurel Ryan accompanied me for most of it, but in the end I turned out to be the only one who would do the entire stretch. The final few hours were awesome. Adrenaline kicked me into overdrive and it felt like everything before that point hadn't even happened, even though my ability to construct meaningful sentences with the correct words wavered every now and then. The first 50 hours or so were pretty brutal, though. Probably the worst part was my feet and legs. They ached near constantly from all of the standing, and are still sore today. I brought three pairs of socks but I did a stretch barefoot because my feet were still utterly disgusting in my shoes. Barefoot made my feet hurt far worse, though, so I went back to wearing the miniature greenhouses. I sat whenever I could, but about half way into it whenever my rear end made contact with a flat surface my eyes would automatically start to droop and I'd be in danger of falling asleep. Everyone tells me I did some phenomenal improv over the course of 54 hours, so I choose to believe them, even though my memory is blurry. There were definitely some good scenes that I do remember, and the ensemble and the audience basically turned me into a rock star during the final few hours or so. I've never had an experience like that, and it was awesome... everyone chanting my name and the audience going wild whenever I did just about anything. They all loved it, but I wouldn't say I was doing especially strong improv... it's just that when both the audience and the cast are on your side like that you can pretty much do no wrong, and as I slipped further and further into psychosis I could just substitute the rule "louder = funnier" whenever technique failed me. At the end, I was given the "ultimate" challenge to play the game Dead Bodies, where the entire ensemble comes out and strews themselves over the stage, and I was required to run around the stage puppeteering everyone's limp, dead-weight bodies to recreate (as was the audience suggestion we received) the first Lord of the Rings movie. I'm told I received a standing ovation at the end of that, but I don't recall seeing it from where I was lying collapsed on the stage. At the end I was given a couple of awards that included a sweet body pillow. One improviser who'd been uber-supportive of me almost the entire way vowed to buy me 54 drinks over our lifetimes, but I don't think I'll hold him to that, heh. It would seem I now unofficially hold the world record for longest continuous improv performance, which is pretty cool. I'm contacting the folks at Guinness but I don't know if we'll meet their standard of evidence. In any case, I'd only hold the record until someone decides to go for 55 hours, at which point they're welcome to have it and with my blessing. There's a lot of it that I can't remember and I'm trying to get the people who played with me to fill me in on the details. In the meantime, here're some highlights of the experience that I do remember:
I'll go back and edit this list as I think of more stuff or get feedback from friends. The article in the Seattle P-I wound up being pretty cool. I was quoted directly twice, and a third time if you count the police captain she quotes at the beginning of the article that I played. (Good thing she didn't mention it was about the worst film noir scene I'd ever done.) The online version lacks the picture, though, so I scanned it in from the newspaper (full-resolution version). So I had my fifteen minutes of fame, and I have to admit I enjoyed it. At hour 53 I came out and told the audience in my biggest rock-star persona that "I'm permitted two half-hour breaks where I sleep on stage, and I haven't taken either of them yet, so if I wanted to I could just sleep through this last hour and still complete the improvathon. But I won't do that, because you people are the only sleep I need!" Which of course got a massive and hilarious response. I don't know when - if ever - I'll have the audience in the palm of my hand like that again, so I'm glad I was able to enjoy it, even if I had trouble keeping my eyes open. Dan. June 16, 2008Still alivePosted 5 months, 2 days ago on June 16, 2008 I'm still alive. More details when I think I can manage them.Dan. June 9, 2008Miniature vulturesPosted 5 months, 2 days ago on June 9, 2008 The baby goslings I posted photos of earlier are still coming around at my work, and look like miniature vultures in their adolescence. I wonder if adorableness is some kind of defence mechanism in baby animals that they lose as they age past their phase of greatest vulnerability?(I was also able to get within inches for a photo of a baby bunny that lives with its family in a thicket by the river, but it was shot from my camera-phone so the quality is a bit lame. Bunnies are cute at all ages, but baby bunnies are priceless.) My car has been the source of some financial grief... I took it in for its 30K-mile maintenance and wound up $400 poorer after they'd done the extra maintenance which is required at that point and also changed my transmission fluid. They also found things that they're recommending around another $500 in work for, namely:
Matters are not improved by the fact I got my first speeding ticket two weekends ago. I totally did it to myself, too... I normally go around 70 on the highways, but it was 1 AM and I was tired and going out of my way to drop off a friend, so I was doing 80. The lady knocked the infraction down to a 70 which significantly reduced the fine, but where I really got nailed was on driving with expired tabs. I hadn't even realized the tabs were expired and I'm certain I never got a renewal notice... and sure enough, when I went to the DOL website to renew them they didn't appear to have my mailing address on file. The speeding violation was only about $130 but the tabs were another $250. I sent the ticket in with the request to plead guilty but with mitigating circumstances I want to explain to the court... hopefully I can get it reduced somewhat. I worry mostly about the impact this will have on my driving record and insurance... does anyone know what I can expect? In any case, I figure more than three years of habitually doing 10 over the speed limit without a ticket diminishes the significance of this. So much for my stimulus payment, though. This was another improv-heavy weekend, in part because the Ghost Tour in Seattle has partnered with Unexpected so we're now running an extra show for them on Fridays and Saturdays. I worked every show this weekend, performing in five shows as well as running lights for one and judging for another. The three smaller shows I played in weren't especially strong, but I'm pleased to say that the two more important ones (Theatresports and the Sunday show) went very well. This was the weekend that we had the Japanese contingent visiting and playing with us, and they were fantastic... they were incredibly high-energy, and just brought a different cultural style to everything. Plus most of them spoke very little English, so the stakes of everything were constantly raised when they performed (the audience loved how their best English-speaker would translate for them in hushed tones as scenes were already in progress). Friday night Theatresports was a Japanese team versus an American team, and the Japanese team won both in the judges' score and in the audience's esteem. (Which is no slight on the American team; rather it's a compliment that they were able to create an environment where the Japanese team could be so successful.) Saturday was when I played, and we had mixed teams: three Americans and two Japanese on both sides. Our team lost but performed admirably, even getting a perfectly scored scene on a gibberish opera. I didn't do the best job ever but I was solid and had the audience on my side, which felt great. Sunday's show is typically small but we had a decent-sized audience for it this time, but what was a real surprise was the reporter from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who was there to gather information and photos for a piece on the upcoming 25th anniversary spectacle. Again, I didn't exactly play a perfect game but I did really well overall, which is a nice feeling when the press is watching you. The piece comes out Friday, I think, which has me excited to see if I got into a photo or any other sort of mention (which in particular might happen as I'm doing the entire 54-hour improvathon). I think my high-school French is finally paying off, because both Saturday and Sunday I was able to use it in a game... inspired by having Japanese people on the team, I wanted to play a game where nobody could speak their native language, so the Japanese would be the only ones speaking English. I would speak my best broken French, as would another guy, and the third remaining Anglophone would speak Spanish. The game wasn't as good as I'd hoped, in part because the suggestion I got for the scene (laundry room) wound up only being conducive to having a couple of characters in it, rather than all five of us. I was surprised in the Sunday show when one of the other players brought that game up again, though (even though we didn't have the Japanese players for it). I spoke French while two others spoke German and Chinese, and while fairly simple the scene was a big hit. What was really amusing about it is that after both shows I had people accuse me of being far better acquainted with the French language than I claimed to be. Both times I was quick to excuse it as perhaps being a side effect of my Canadian French-tutelage, but I was pretty astonished nonetheless, knowing the difference between myself and legitimate Francophones as I do, not to mention people I know who did French Immersion and the like. Maybe it's all just a matter of perspective. It's not too late to sponsor me for the Improvathon! Contact me with what you'd like to donate... $5, $10, $10,000... it's all good! The Improvathon begins this Friday at 6 PM and runs till Sunday at midnight, so if you can manage it please come see me! Dan. June 3, 2008Some respectable momentsPosted 6 months, 1 day ago on June 3, 2008 A few weeks ago I found out that Cirque du Soleil had, in fact, set up camp right in my backyard at Marymoor Park for their Corteo show. What's more, they'd been there since the end of April... I'd somehow paid no notice to the giant blue- and yellow-striped tent when exiting the highway.I couldn't very well pass up on the opportunity to see Cirque when they were across the road from me, so I splurged on tickets. I didn't like the idea of driving and parking when they were so close to me (parking is $15), but heading via the main entrance was going to be too long to walk and a river surrounding the park keeps me from simply crossing from my condo. I'd explored a little last summer with my bike but not been able to find an alternate entrance that was close to me... so I scoured the satellite view of the Google map looking for some way across, but ultimately was unable to find any. So instead I drove to the east side of Marymoor and parked near the store I go to buy my bagels at, and cut into the park (and also a lot nearer to the tent) from there. The show was pretty incredible, although I got the feeling that their tour was perhaps a little less spectacular than those at their permanent venues. The ringmaster in particular needed more *oomph*. It was interesting watching the performers with their perfect bodies and their unfathomable strength and agility... I'm used to envying people I see on stage who can do things like sing and dance far better than I can, but I don't find myself envying the circus performers. They are a little too extreme, their existences a little too bound to their troupe, and it doesn't seem like an appealing lifestyle. My friend likened it to watching professional athletes... it's fun to watch, but you don't find yourself wanting to be them. In my own more mundane performance world, I've been doing as much improv at Unexpected as I can. I've had some respectable moments... including a Shakespeare scene that occurred in a special Theatresports show this past Saturday (it was celebrating the departure of one of our members, so the teams were him versus about 25 of us). This Sunday, though, I was part of a Harold that was entertaining but ultimately silly and superficial from my end. That was for a much smaller audience but it still left a sour taste in my mouth afterwards. Of course I have the Improvathon in less than two weeks, so over the course of 54 hours I should be able to purge myself of any improvisational sin many times over. Speaking of the Improvathon, I have a few discount tickets available ($10 from me instead of $14 on the web/$15 at the door), so contact me if you're interested in seeing it. Also, you should consider sponsoring me even if you aren't coming to see it (or aren't local, even)... you can sponsor me either for a flat amount or an hourly rate for however long I survive out of the 54 hours; the donations go to the theatre and are tax-deductible, and make me look important. I've been seeing more movies lately than I normally do, considering I don't normally see movies much at all while they're in theatres. I don't really have time to expound upon them, but here's my quick summary:
It's a good summer for movies. I'm really looking forward to The Dark Knight, and a couple others will probably get my ten bucks as well. Between that and new Doctor Who episodes I'm pretty much set entertainment-wise. Dan. |
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