Random Things For Friday

Bloggers like to do "Friday Random Tens," but as I've mentioned before, I don't have an iPod or listen to that much music, so I guess I'll just offer ten random things for Friday (a "Weekly Roundup," if you will)...

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1. I finally rented Tideland by Terry Gilliam last night. Although it's a better movie than The Brothers Grimm, I can't really say I'm a big fan. For one thing, even though it could best be described as Alice in Wonderland meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (I'm not kidding), it's pretty slow, plodding and dull. There are some interesting scenes in it (like the one where the girl first meets her neighbor, who's a mentally retarded young man with epilepsy and they visit his homemade fort/submarine), but for the most part I was just thinking, "Where the hell is this going?" while watching it. A lot of the time I was just creeped out (and not in a good way).

2. I wanted to take this time to wish Nosedivians Patrick and Steph happy birthdays. I'm looking forward to partying with you guys (and the rest of the folks at Nosedive Central later this evening).

3. As previously promised, here are a handful of photos from my San Diego trip. A couple of them are from the zoo. Sorry they're not better; as I had mentioned before, I can't take pictures worth a damn.

4. For all you Star Wars geeks out there (like me), this made me laugh. (Hey, I did say this entry would be random, didn't I?)

5. In addition to being excited about seeing Men of Steel by the Vampire Cowboys, I'm also very much looking forward to seeing Isaac Butler's direction of Clay McLeod Chapman's play Volume of Smoke in the near future, possibly next weekend. I'm also looking forward to seeing this, written by Mr. Matthew Freeman and directed by Mr. Matt Johnston in April.

6. And yes, I'm looking forward to seeing this as well.

7. One of the reasons why I haven't been offering substantial posts this week (even though I promised otherwise) is because I've been up to my eyeballs transcribing a roundtable interview I conducted on mortgage fraud (yes, mortgage fraud) for work. The interview took an hour and it's extremely time consuming to transcribe an hour's worth of people speaking. With a little luck, when I'm done with it I can resume writing 1,500-word entries on why you all need to see Suburban Peepshow (I'll give you a hint: because it's the Most Important Play Ever and the fate of the world depends on it).

8. A few weeks back I had started to write an entry on the nature of copyrights and trademarks but it became this unruly unending document. I'm hoping I can broach the subject on this page at some point in the not-too-distant future, but it's looking as though it's either a subject I have either far too much or far too little to say on the subject (which seems to be the case with many a blog entry; a number of times I can either sum up everything I have to say on the subject in three or four sentences or I need seven or eight pages just to get started).

9. Rehearsals are going quite well so far for Suburban Peepshow and Mac's curtain-raiser, "Trailers." I'm looking forward to people seeing this. Here's to hoping I can get off-book soon for my one scene that has dialogue.

10. Did anyone see the pilot for Raines last night? If so, what did you think?

And that's my random ten. Have a good weekend, everybody.

Blathering all over the map,

James "Chatterbox" Comtois