two follow-ups

Posted on By Wil

Follow-up to Radio Free Burrito Episode Four: Like I thought, I did a great job on the voice audition, and they loved what I did. Also like I thought, my voice is too deep for the character, so I didn’t get the part. Sadtimes, made less sad by the casting director telling my manager that everyone at Nick likes what I do, and they’ll bring me back until they find a project that I can be part of.

Follow-up to the Walter post: Like I thought, I sucked out loud, and they were kind enough to simply say, "it’s not going any further." I hope I didn’t suck so hard they don’t bring me back for future projects.

Walter!

Posted on By Wil

Walter

While channel surfing, I just discovered that my episode of CSI, Compulsion, is about to start on the West Coast.

So if you’d like to see me and my sweater, put on your local CBS station, and enjoy!

Afterthought: I’m having a really shitty day, which included an absolutely terrible audition (my fault, not theirs), and accidentally discovering that this is on has brightened my spirits just a little bit. I’m real proud of the work I did on CSI, and it’s nice to remember how good it felt to earn the part, work on the show, and watch the episode when it first aired.

"Finders keepers!"

Young Chuck Norris Facts

Posted on By Wil

Many moons ago, my wife and I found ourselves at a Black Angus restaurant.

I’d like to welcome back those of you who just picked yourselves up off the floor. I don’t know what we were thinking, either. See, my best friend works at The Arroyo Chophouse in Pasadena, whch is the best steak house in the entire city, possibly in the universe.

But it was a youthful indescretion, sort of like that one that that happened with that intern that one time in the elevator. Whatever, man. Like you wouldn’t have. Quit judging me!

Ahem. Anyway, the waitress came over to our table after our food had been delivered, and asked, "Is everything excellent?" She said it just like that. I mean, I could hear the italics and everything.

I know that this poor girl was just doing her job, just as she’d been when she tried to upsell us on "a half-carafe or perhaps a full carafe of Fetzer merlot" ("Thanks, we’ll just have iced tea," we politely responded) but something inside me snapped. Before I could stop myself, I heard the following come out of my mouth: "Excellent? Excellent? No," I said, "It’s fine, and in fact I’ll even tell you that it’s nice, but excellent? If I said yes, I’d really be devaluing the whole word — and concept — of ‘excellent.’"

Anne gasped. The muzak was interrupted by the scratching of a needle across vinyl.

Remember in Cable Guy, when they’re at Medieval Times, and Janeane Garafolo looks at Matthew Broderick and just says, "Dude?" and we all know that he’s the asshole?  It was like that. BUT! Before you freak out at me, I apologized for my little outburst, and over-tipped the girl for her suffering (I think it was in the 50% range.) But I did not — and I will not — waiver on whether the excellence, or lack therof.

On the way home, Anne turned to me out of nowhere and said, "Excellent? We’re at Black Angus. Let’s try for adequate and go from there."

"Well thanks for speaking up for me when we were in there," I said. "It was excellent that you had my back."

She punched me in the arm, which I whined about for the next several days.

I relate this story now, because I’ve been thinking about the word — and concept of — awesome, and how it applies to my life. Awesome is even more important than excellent, and I’ve discovered that I’ve probably devalued awesome a little bit in the last year or so.

Most of the time, I don’t feel particularly awesome, though I harbor secret dreams of one day achieving a state of hawesome, which I seriously doubt will ever come. But today, I got my very first Well Placed Anonymous Source e-mail, and I have to admit, I feel kind of awesome.

So.

In response to my post about Young Chuck Norris, Deep Throat writes:

Hey Wil,

I have some facts I can share about Young Chuck Norris that may help to clear the air.

It was written October (by Andrew Steele), but it didn’t get a green light until Lazy Sunday’s success opened the doors for shorts like these. The Lonely Island guys weren’t aware of the Chuck Norris Facts meme until after the short aired and everyone started emailing it to them.

It is a parody of 80’s hair rock videos. They liked the American We Stand As One video and thought it would be a cool homage to dress the guy like him. Also it was a convenient way to describe the look to the costume department. The total shooting budget was zero dollars. All of the non-SNL people in the video were just random people from the park (including the kids).

Other than the wardrobe, any similarities are coincidental. They are all just cliches one finds in 80’s rock videos.

Your Well Placed Anonymous Source

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my Well Placed Anonymous Source, (mine! if you want one, get your own, goddammit!) and again invite everyone who freaked out at me about my post to run as fast as they can into that brick wall over there. Trust me, it’s the first step toward picking up a sense of humor.

If any other anonymous sources would like to communicate with me, put a red flower pot on your balcony, or a green "X" made from hand-colored duct tape in the right corner of your car’s rear window. I’ll be in touch.

peter packrat

Posted on By Wil

This week’s Games of our Lives is an extremely fun game that never really caught on, called Peter Packrat.

Gameplay: Okay, Peter, there’s a ton of junk scattered around
your neighborhood, just waiting for you to get your disease-ridden
claws on it. You can climb, jump, and crawl your way around your
neighborhood as you fill your nest with bottles, rings, watches, and
cans.

However, you’re a dirty little rat, and you’re at the bottom of the
Flatbush food chain. Enemies like Scrapper the dog, Clawd the cat,
Sticky the spider, and the resident tough guy Riff Rat would love to
make you into a nice snack. You can avoid them with deft footwork and
judicious use of hidden shortcuts, or attack them by throwing some of
your precious junk. If you manage to score a hit, you can turn the
tables and ride them around, with the exception of Riff Rat, who isn’t
anybody’s bitch, in spite of what you may have heard around town.

Could be mistaken for: Cheeky Mouse, Bagman, a walk along the Los Angeles River

It’s a moderately amusing column (the bio is the best part, if you ask me), lacking the rapier-like wit of Jungle King and Triple Punch, but not every at bat can be a home run, you know?

Anyway, WWdN:iX Reader Larry Hastings (who wants you to know that he is so old skool, he remembers
Battlezone when it was on field test as "Future Tank") sent me the following Peter Packrat story, which he’s given me permission to reprint here:

Just a personal story about Peter Packrat… a footnote to history.

At one time in my life I was Intergalactic World High Score Champion at
Peter Packrat.  That’s because there was only one–on field test at
Merlin’s Castle in San Jose right near my house–and I was the main
person playing it.

The game is deterministic; you develop patterns which will work every
time.  I had worked out patterns for, I /think/, the first five levels
or so… that was as far as I generally got.  One day while playing I
discovered a bug: the "spider" in the creepy cavern level would
occasionally stray out of its web, and if you conked it on the noggin
with bric-a-brac you could stun it and ride it around.  Since it wasn’t
on the "spider web" anymore, the game didn’t think it was a spider… so
it decided it was a bat!  It even made the bat sound effect.  This
delighted me, and it actually improved my pattern, so I worked it in.

One day I came in to Merlin’s Castle and Peter Packrat was out of
commission.  Some guy had the back open, where I could clearly see… a
Commodore 1541 floppy drive, like you’d use with a Commodore 64.  After
a minute or two of grinding and buzzing, it finished doing what it was
doing.   He took out the disk and they restored the machine to active
service  I started playing only to discover that the bug was fixed and
my pattern didn’t work anymore.  I think I mostly gave up on the game
after that.

About ten years ago I corresponded a little with Lyle Rains, a
now-ex-Atari guy, and mentioned all this.  He opined that the animations
on Peter Packrat were just fantastic–really cute–and it was an utter
shame that Atari botched it as a product.

And a bit of news that is quite exciting for me: Peter Packrat is internally known as "gool#52", which means that I’ve been writing Games of our Lives for one full year. How much does that rock? The answer is: totally.

 

the one with a lot of random bullshit

Posted on By Wil

I made the (mistake?) of ordering a Venti coffee this morning, and I feel like a little hummingbird right now.

So how about a whole bunch of random crap?

"After reviewing the Republican record, I know why Ken Mehlman and Karl
Rove want to play politics with national security in 2006 instead of
having an honest debate about who can keep Americans safe. It’s because
this is a debate Republicans cannot win.


Republicans run good campaigns, but when it comes to actually governing
and protecting Americans, they have a record of incompetence."

Right on, Senator. Think you can get the rest of the Democrats together on this one, or are you guys going to totally screw it up again?

  • Those people who freaked out at me because of my last post? Get a life. Failing that, get a sense of humor.
  • I’ve read two amazing books recently, which I’ll mention and recommend later on this week.
  • One of the points Stephen King makes in On Writing . . . over and over again is that people who wish to be writers must make time to read. I find that the more I read, the more I want to write, because my writing monkey only digs his claws into my brains when I read something and think, Oh! I can do that, too! Watch me now! I can’t wait to write about Friday night.
  • Stephen King has a new book out today, about people who become zombies because of cell phones. It sounds really fun.

The survey also noted that iTunes Music Store customers were 2.2 times
more likely to drive a Volkswagen than any other car. They also
discovered that iTMS customers liked to drink cider and imported beer.
So I guess that on the road of life there are passengers, and teenaged
drunk drivers.

  • One of my favorite bits on Futurama was, "I’m Roseanne, your guide to the world of facts." I love that line so much, I wish I could use it whenever I share some useless bit of information with someone, like, "Did you know that a baby’s head weighs the same as a brick of gold on the moon? It’s true. I’m Wil, your guide to the world of facts."
  • I think I already knew this, but forgot: Good news, everyone! There’s a Futurama movie in the works, and there’s even a chance that Futurama could have a Family Guy-esque revival on television.
  • Nolan told me the other night, "I love it when Professor Farnsworth says things like, ‘I’m sending you on a mission to Planet Certain Death, where you’ll have your faces crushed by killer robots as soon as you land . . . Enjoy!’"
  • I got The Wilco Book + CD for Xmas, right before Santa came down and rained death upon the whole world, and it is really amazing. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, because it’s Wilco, after all, that the CD is as good as it is, but it wouldn’t be shocking if they threw together some "B" material to release with the book (which is awesome on its own, by the way). They didn’t. Several of the tracks have earned a coveted five star rating on my iPod.
  • I watched I am Trying to Break Your Heart over the weekend. The best moment in the entire film is when Jeff Tweedy’s son plays drums on his lap, and makes Jeff guess which song he’s playing. When Jeff guesses that it’s Heavy Metal Drummer, he starts to sing it while his son plays the drums on his legs. It’s one of the sweetest and most awesome moments I’ve ever seen. In fact, it was awesome and a half.
  • Mt friend Kat is taking me to see Jeff Tweedy when he comes to LA. Ding!
  • Night before last, we had 70-80 MPH gusts of wind at my house, which knocked out our power for about 18 hours and destroyed several million-year-old oak trees in my neighborhood. One of them almost took out one of my neighbor’s houses. Yipe. Last night, we expected the wind to come back, but it never did. On the way home from school yesterday, the kids and I discussed the wind, and came to the following conclusions:
  • I hate the wind, because it’s so destructive and loud.
  • Nolan sleeps through it at night, and if he had to pick between wind and rain, he’d take wind.
  • Ryan loves the wind, because it feels like it’s cleaning everything up, and it’s got all this raw, unfocused power.
  • We all love days like today, after the wind has gone away, where it’s so clear you feel like you could see to the other side of the world, if the damn horizon wasn’t in the way.
  • I had a bit of a panic recently when my Powerbook began acting weird. None of the disk utilities on my install discs worked, and I was on the verge of freaking out, when I was pointed toward Disk Warrior. I can’t praise Disk Warrior enough. It completely fixed all the problems, in about an hour, and my Powerbook doesn’t show any of the obvious signs of the abuse it takes from me, up here on the second floor.
  • Though you won’t be able to tell when you read this entry, I’m stopping right now to call Allentown, PA, to do an interview. I really liked the reporter, and we talked for about 45 minutes. I hope I made sense, and I’ll link the article when it comes out.
  • This post has way too many indents and sub-indents.
  • Bill Hicks just came on iTunes. Who is the modern day Bill Hicks? I can’t think of anyone off the top of my head.
  • Isaac Hayes’ Joy just came on iTunes. Good thing Anne isn’t home, or this post would be delayed by at least another three minutes.
  • Eww! Gross!
  • What?
  • This post is really fun to write. I think I’ve been taking myself, my blog, and everything in general too seriously lately. (Deadbeats really fucking suck, man, and they can really take a lot of the happiness out of your life) Who cares if everything I write isn’t so goddamned great or important? And who cares if I over-use italics?
  • A friend of mine just pointed out to me that I’d created another Prove To Everyone . . . rather than write an entire book about it to slay it, the simple act of identifying the existance of this beast was like turning on the light and realizing that the monster I kept seeing in the corner was just a jacket slumped over the chair. In other words, it was never really there, and only existed because I created it. Wow. I feel like I’ve been breathing through a straw, and I just got to take my first deep breath in months. Thanks, J.
  • I think I’ve said everything I need to say, and I’m incredibly satisfied right now. Where is my mind? It’s right here. Rather than push it, I’m going to hit "publish," and go outside to enjoy a little bit of this amazing day we’re having.

I’m Wil, your guide to the world of facts.