I know, I know, it’s so very wrong.
But that’s precisely why it’s so right!
Category: WWdN in Exile
make an incision, doctor limpf
I have an insane amount of work to do before Sunday night, all of it requiring a great deal of creative output. I’m already so far behind on the deadlines, I think I’m going to be up until the sun has charred the other side of the world and come back to us so I can get it all done.
I told Anne earlier today, “I don’t mind any of this. I’m incredibly grateful that I can earn a living doing all of this stuff … but I am nearing physical and mental exhaustion, so anything I do between now and Monday is likely to have a certain, um, Bug Powder sensibility about it. I’ve never wanted to crank out widgets, but right now it would be a lot easier to turn my mind off and just do that.”
I thought for a second.
“Man, I am really glad I don’t have to do that.”
It’s not all bad, though. My office is currently warm in every sense of the word because:
- I’m drinking a pot of genmaicha green tea.
- The setting sun is streaming golden rays the color of my tea through my office window.
- The air is filled with the scent of a fig candle I absolutely love.
- I’m listening to Chill Out! from Instinct ambient.
I don’t envy the task my editors have in front of them, but at least I’m going to enjoy the process of getting The Madness into their hands.
the great wheaton hockey scandal of 1991
My friends at CliqueClack did an interview with Dean Devlin, creator of the sensational new series Leverage. Dean and I played hockey on the same team (with, I’ve just now remembered, Adam Baldwin, also) from around 1989-1991. He was a forward and I was a goalie. One night in Burbank, our team gave up a breakaway near the redline. I saw it happening when the puck was still in the offensive zone, so I was ready.
When the other guy crossed our blue line, I was already way out of the net, near the bottom of the faceoff circle on my left side. I skated backward with him to force him to shoot on my terms. I guess I was near the crease when I saw him pull his stick back way over his head. “Oh good,” I thought, “he’s just going to try to blast it past me. Those shots almost always go wide, or right into my glove.”
The next thing I knew, there was an explosion in the rink, and a bright flash of light before everything went dark. When the lights came back on, I was on my knees, surrounded by a semicircle of skates. I pulled my helmet off, and watched a whole bunch of blood pour down onto the ice.
“Oh, the way it beads up is really neat,” I thought. Then, “Wait. That’s my blood.”
I’d done my job and forced him to take a low-percentage shot that went wide, just like I was supposed to. Unfortunately, it went right over the net and into my skull. My helmet was crushed, and I got to take a trip to the emergency room for something like 36 stitches in my head. I also got whiplash, which was not awesome.
Anyway, in Dean’s interview with CC, this game came up. He said:
“Wil was a dynamite goalie. When he was still shooting Star Trek, we were playing in a game and a puck actually cracked his helmet open and he needed stitches and the producers of Star Trek basically wanted to murder me. ‘You’re letting Wil stand there in front of a net while we’re shooting the series?’” Oh, the scandal.
I miss playing hockey so much. If I could justify the expense, I’d totally buy some new gear (I’ve outgrown my skates and pants, and I’d need a new helmet for obvious reasons) and find one of those leagues for guys who are in their thirties.
It may seem silly, but seventeen years after we played together, hearing that Dean thought I was a dynamite goalie means the world to me. I worked really hard to be a good keeper back in those days, and I was really proud of our team. I had a lot of free time, so I worked out at the rink almost every day, and played pick up games a couple of times a week. That season, I had a great record and a great save percentage. I even got to travel and play in an exhibition game against some members of the 1980 gold medal team in front of a sold out Boston Garden – where I was scored-on and pulled after one shot, which still makes me sad to this day. In my defense, it was Mike Eruzione who made the shot, and it was a two-on-none break. But still, I wish I’d stayed in the game.
Until I read this today, I had no idea the producers bitched Dean out, and it’s amusing to me that they did because I wasn’t even a regular on the series when this happened. In fact, shortly after the injury, I got a call from the Star Trek production office. I was surprised to hear from them, and assumed someone had heard about the accident and wanted to bitch me out about it.
They were actually calling me to tell me that Gene Roddenberry had died.
It’s weird how memories are all woven together, isn’t it?
collecting random thoughts
My brain has a lot of random thoughts it wants to spit out before it’ll give me access to the creative areas. I keep trying to tell it that I’m the cat, but it insists on occupying my mind with further duties to control my SPACE MADNESS!!!
Prepare to surge to sublight speed:
I’ve been keeping a nasty sinus infection at bay since about the third week of December. Night before last, it found a weak spot in my defenses and sent an Orc carrying a bomb to blow it up while I slept. When I woke up yesterday, I … well, I’ll spare the details, but it was horrible. Luckily for me, I already had an appointment with my sinus doctor, and he gave me some small nuclear bombs to use against the infection, and I’m feeling 100% better today.
When I went to the pharmacy to fill the prescriptions, I learned that making jokes about carrying the plague elicits a similar reaction to making jokes about bombs at the airport. Now you know.
How weird is this: last night, after I’d declared a sick day and decided to stay offline and on the couch to let my body fight the Sinus Orcs, I walked through my office and took a quick glance at Twitter. It was then that I learned, through the Twitter and not e-mail, that my friends are having a baby.
Bad Gods Monster Manual comix are fucking hilarious.
I see via CliqueClack TV that all seventeen episodes of The Prisoner are now online, in their entirety, for your viewing excitement. There are also one-minute recaps of each episode. The Prisoner is my favorite television show of all time, and it’s the show that made it possible for me to truly grok fandom, because I was such a dork for it. I have both volumes of The Original Prisoner Scripts, I’ve had a map of Your Village since I was 15, I think I’m the only geek on the planet who really loved the graphic novel miniseries DC did in the 80s, and I’ve read through GURPS The Prisoner too many times to count. I’m cautiously optimistic that AMC’s remake will stay faithful to the show that I love, and I think it’s awesome that they’re putting the original series online this way in advance of their own show.
The best argument in favor of Panetta to head CIA: “Few things could reflect better on Panetta’s selection than the fact that Feinstein and Rockefeller — two of the most Bush-enabling Senators — are unhappy with it.”
Feinstein is one of the most worthless Democrats in history, and I can’t believe she represents one of the most liberal states in the nation. I hope she retires, but if she doesn’t, I’ll be working for her primary challengers with great vengeance and furious anger.
Edited to add: I was trying to articulate this thought earlier today, but couldn’t make it go. Andrew Sullivan: “The more I think about this, the more it seems to me that the snub of these two was a deliberate signal. Their oversight of Bush’s war crimes was pathetic. Ditto Harman. Obama is telling us he is serious about both improving intelligence and drawing a clear line – for the entire world to see – between the United States and the war criminals who will soon be leaving office, and those who enabled them.”
On the off-chance that one person in the universe doesn’t know this already: Apple’s taking everything in the iTunes Music Store DRM-free. Great jorb, Apple! Now, about iMovie 08 and how much it sucks …
Speaking of music, I’ve been listening to Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra’s Beethoven Symphonies No 3 Eroica and No 8 from Magnatune most of today, and now you can join me if you like, through the magic of embedding media:
Beethoven Symphonies No 3 Eroica and No 8 by Philharmonia Baroque
Nolan and I watched the World Junior Championship gold medal game a couple days ago. Goddamn do those kids play with passion and ferocity. Yesterday afternoon, I watched the history of the Philadelphia Flyers on NHL Network, and thought the exact same thing about those teams, especially in the mid-70s to mid-80s. Then, last night, Nolan and I watched the Kings skate against the Ducks. I say “skate against” instead of “played hockey with” because neither team looked like they gave a shit about the game. After watching intensely passionate players leave everything on the ice in the gold medal game (and congratulations on 5 in a row, Canada) it was especially underwhelming. The Kings seemed to forget how to forecheck, and they managed three – THREE – shots on goal in the third period. In the post-game interviews, the commentators and players from both teams talked about how the game was some kind of great defensive battle, but I grew up watching Adams Division defensive battles, and this wasn’t one of those games. I mean, hit someone for fuck’s sake! You’re supposed to be rivals, guys. This kills me. It’s like watching the Dodgers and Giants phone it in; we fans expect you guys to hate the other team as much as we do, goddamit.
Nolan kept complaining about how boring it was, and I had to agree with him. I hope the Kings feel humiliated by their pathetic performance so they actually show up to play tomorrow; I’m taking Nolan to the game.
I plan to leave the Sinus Orcs at home, but I’ll bring rain gear to give the people in front of me, just in case. Eewww. Gross.
i really love trader joe’s
This week’s LA Daily is all about an awesome cookbook Anne and I discovered entirely by accident, and how it’s made cooking fun again:
When I was in my early twenties and had the dual luxuries of copious time and disposable income, I loved to cook. I cooked different things all the time, experimented with various styles of cooking and ingredients, and wasn’t afraid to take a chance on something exotic. “What’s the worst that could happen?” I thought. “I’ll just make something different if this doesn’t work out.”
Then I got married and had kids. My days got longer, my responsibilities grew exponentially, and the whole concept of free time became a memory so distant, I wondered if it had ever really existed at all.
I still cooked, but I had a new set of priorities. Instead of grabbing a cookbook and picking out a recipe that looked interesting, I had to ask myself: How long would this take to prepare? How much is it going to cost to feed two growing boys in addition to two adults? How likely is it that the kids I’m working so hard to feed are going to complain about the uniqueness of the meal I’ve prepared? Wouldn’t it just be easier to order take out or throw something in the microwave?
I had resigned myself to a lifetime of culinary boredom until last month, when my wife and I came across a cookbook that singlehandedly made cooking fun, easy, and affordable again. It’s called Cooking with All Things Trader Joe’s, and it is exactly what it sounds like: choose a recipe, head into your local Trader Joe’s to pick up the ingredients, and make your friends and family think you’re a hell of a chef.
We’ve been making something different every night since we got this book, and it’s just awesome. I wish I’d discovered it years ago.