Month: June 2010

June 8th

All I know is, today was Tuesday.

I didn’t sleep so great last night, waking up sometime after 3 am and finding that I was, amazingly, wide awake and unable to get back to sleep for at least another half an hour. That I didn’t oversleep this morning is, in itself, a minor miracle.

Beyond that, it was a pretty boring day. This evening, after a longer short story stalled out on me, I brushed off a shorter piece that had been rejected back in late March and sent it out again. We’ll see what comes of that.

Onward, now, to Wednesday.

Tuesday various

  • I don’t imagine this is going to end well — FlashForward fans plan to fall over and act unconscious:

    According to Variety, fans of the show will assemble in front of ABC network and affilate offices in New York, L.A., Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta on June 10 and for 2 minutes and 17 seconds are going to pretend to be passed out—just like the 2-minute-17-second blackouts on FlashForward.

  • Am I the only one who thinks “celebrate originality” is maybe a weird tagline to an ad that basically just repurposes the Star Wars cantina scene?

  • I’m not sure I agree with everything Christopher Miller suggests on how to write a rejection slip, but I am amused by his contention that “rejection slips are the most widely and attentively read short literary genre.” [via]

  • Warren Ellis suggests asking these important questions when writing:

    1) What does that character WANT?

    2) What does that character need to do to GET what they want?

    3) What are they prepared to DO to get what they want?

  • And finally, a fascinating profile of Haim Saban, still perhaps best known as the man who (curse him) brought us Mighty Morphin Power Rangers [via]:

    At twenty, while he was serving in the Israeli Defense Forces, Saban made his entry into show business. He told the owner of a swimming pool where a band played that he was a member of a far better band. Saban didn’t really play an instrument, and he didn’t know a band. But he found one, and took the businessman to a club to hear it, claiming that he wasn’t playing because he had hurt his arm. He named a price that was double what he had learned the band was making, and then approached the band members with his offer and his condition: let him join. “They said, ‘For double the money, we’ll figure the whole thing out.’ ” He eventually learned to play the bass guitar a little, but occasionally during the first few months he performed with both his speaker and his microphone turned off.

Happy birthday, Dad!

Today is my father’s sixty-third birthday. He’s diabetic, but I managed to get some sugar-free chocolate muffins which stood in for cake, and my mother gave him some presents. He’s difficult to buy for, but he enjoyed HBO’s recent The Pacific miniseries, so I bought him the companion book and With the Old Breed, one of the two books the series was based on. Now I just need to figure out what to buy him for Father’s Day.

Monday various

  • There’s no lack of unpleasant news still spilling out of the Gulf and the colossal fuck-up that is BP’s effort (or lack thereof) down there. From these New York Times photos (“Putting a Face on the Gulf Oil Leak”) to this Google Maps application (“Visualizing the BP Oil Spill Disaster”) [via] to just about every evening’s news broadcast, it can be incredibly disheartening when faced with the overwhelming scope of the disaster, and the apparent ineptitude of the people in charge of cleaning it up. That’s why Cherie Priest’s list of Things you can do about the oil spill — from volunteering to donations to consuming less petroleum overall — is so important, a welcome reminder that there is something we can do.
  • Meanwhile, in other environmental catastrophes…don’t call it a sinkhole [via]:

    Instead, Bonis prefers the term “piping feature” — a decidedly less sexy label for the 100-foot deep, 66-foot wide circular chasm. But it’s an important distinction, he maintains, because “sinkholes” refer to areas where bedrock is solid but has been eaten away by groundwater, forming a geological Swiss cheese whose contours are nearly impossible to predict.

    The situation beneath the [Guatemala’s] capital is far different, and more dangerous.

  • As if that wasn’t bad enough, now it turns out children’s books are incredibly eco-unfriendly [via]
  • But at least they’re recycling in Hollywood. And no, I don’t mean the endless parade of reboots, like this wholly misguided Alias one. (Even though I’ll be the first to admit the Rambaldi stuff is what eventually did the show in.) I mean this: Every actor reads the same newspaper. [via]
  • And finally, if things get too screwed up here on Earth, maybe we can go stay with our neighbors on Saturn’s moon Titan. [via] Presumably they’re hanging out with Winston Niles Rumfoord…though, frankly, I think they get the better company on Jupiter’s moons.

The steady approach of Monday

The most exciting thing that happened today was my driving out to Huntington, for my weekly writing group, only to discover I’d left my wallet (and by extension my driver’s license) at home. Luckily I wasn’t pulled over for anything, there or back. Otherwise, it mostly just reading, finishing the Sunday New York Times crossword, and watching episodes of Party Down on Netflix.

Such was my Sunday.