My pal Keith is running in the AIDS Marathon, and we’re doing two special J. Keith vanStraaten shows to help raise money for him and his girlfriend.
The first show is coming up on Wednesday, January 7th. All the details are here.
The JKvS Show is always great fun. If you’ve seen me on TechTV, it’s like that but without the constraints of television. Also, Keith and I have been friends for years, and when we’re on stage together, we share a bit of a common brain, and that creates fantastic comedy.
If you’re a kind-hearted person who wants to help out, but you can’t make it to the show, go here and show your love in a donation sort of way.

Well, the sickness took me down, and took me down good. After three days with fever, I went to the doctor on Xmas Eve, and he said I was somewhere between severe bronchitis and pneumonia. He put me on an antibiotic called Levaquin, gave me some mucus-thinning medication, and told me to take it easy.
Well, easy is just about the only way I could take it. I have enjoyed all of the “less common” side-effects of the antibiotic, most notably extreme irritability, inability to sleep, and my personal favorite, dizziness. Oh, the joy of the dizziness. I am reminded why taking any mind-altering drugs has never held any appeal for me.
I also haven’t been able to focus for more than one or two pages at a time, so I haven’t even been able to really dig into Wolves of the Calla, or any of the other bitchin’ books I got for Xmas.
I have watched all the appendicies on the LOTR DVDs, and I’m about to go watch some Fellowship commentary. It’s been nice to live in Middle Earth for a few days.

I’ve stayed away from editorializing in the last few months, but I suspect a lot of “off the table” topics are going to come up in the new year — there’s just too much going on in the world that’s pissing me off.
Let’s start today with this jackass story pile of crap in the New York Post:

IN this season of ecumenical brotherhood, here’s a suggestion for how to advance the cause of peace: Sell your stock in Take-Two Interactive Inc.
In case you can’t quite place the name, New York-based Take-Two Interactive is a Nasdaq-traded company in the video game business.
[…]
[L]et’s first pause for some thoughts on the core question of what this company actually does – which is to produce and market video games of such luxuriously violent and disgusting content as to leave one simply speechless.
The latest installment in the company’s best-selling “Grand Theft Auto” series – “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City” – has been on the market for a little over a year now and has already sold more than 5 million copies.
[…]
In fact, “whatever you want” is what the game is all about. Thanks to its artful and complex programming and its incredibly realistic graphics, the game creates the impression of being inside a totally unscripted, live-action drama in which you can manufacture your mayhem as you go along.
People, this is insane. This is 10,000 times worse than the worst thing anybody thinks Michael Jackson ever did to a little boy – or than any lie the feds think Martha Stewart ever told them, or any line in any song that Bruce Springsteen ever sang that rankled a cop in the Meadowlands.

Yeah, you read that correctly. Michael Jackson’s accused of seven counts of commiting lewd acts on a minor — that’s legal speak for a whole bunch of inappropriate touching and who knows what else — and this genius suggests that the content of a video game is WORSE than that.

I can’t believe that it’s already December the 24th. I guess the past few days have all blurred together, and now it’s suddenly Christmas Eve.
I wanted to give out a cool WWdN Christmas gift, but the stupid flu put a halt to that plan, so I’ll just have to leave you all with my Christmas wish:
I wish for peace on Earth, and lots of Guinness for me.
Merry Christmas, everybody. Thanks for reading WWdN, and making this an amazing year!

I have watched more TV in the past three days than I have in the last several months, and I can now declare with great authority: television is teh sucks.
My god. I can’t believe how horrible daytime TV is, and the crap the news networks show to fill their 24 hours is just plain stupid.
However, I did find two things that brightened my day just a bit. Yesterday, SciFi channel ran several episodes of The Twilight Zone, and I just watched an hour of The Battle of the Network Stars on Trio. I think it was from 1977. The hazy quality of the tape, Howard Cosell interviewing Patrick Duffy (credited as “The Man From Atlantis”) and the general weirdness my fever (moving between normal and 101 today — currently it’s at 99) casts upon everything made for a very surreal experience. I remember watching that show when I was very young, in the den at my mom and dad’s house. I remember how cool I thought that show was, and how much I wanted to be on it one day. (Everyone was on that show. Look at this cast list I found!) I thought that obstacle course they all had to do was just the coolest thing ever.
I also suffered through two episodes of The Newlyweds on eMpTyVee. That’s right: two. Holy Mother Jesus Balls. Is Jessica Simpson really that stupid? She’s 23, I think, and doesn’t know how to cook? Are rich and famous people really that lame? Why in the world is that show so popular? I just don’t get it. It’s actually more painful than that stupid Anna Nicole show.
I wonder if any sociologists have studied a correlation between the staggering stupidity of so many people and the explosion of these “reality” shows. I wonder if art imitates life, or the other way around?
Okay. Enough of my cantankerous ranting. I’ll end today on a positive note: Since I got sick, I have watched the entire extended cut, and all the appendicies on my The Two Towers DVD. It’s awesome. It’s very clear that TTT was an extremely difficult film to make, even more than Fellowship of the Ring . . . I mean, they spent three months of night shoots to film the battle of Helm’s Deep! Three months of night shoots! I once did three weeks of nights on a movie, and I was ready to lose my mind. I can’t imagine three months, in the rain, doing complex battle sequences.
The esprit de corps that the cast and crew had really comes through, and it reminded me of all the different shows I’ve worked on where the cast and crew became family. I miss that. If I get a chance to work as an actor again, I hope I get to experience that again.