Last night I had the pleasure of attending a VIP Gala at “The Next Cool Event“, the second half of a 2-night affair filled with music, food, and fantastic surroundings. The stated mission of this event was to introduce Georgia’s “film friendly” interior design and event design industries to people from the state’s burgeoning Motion Picture Industry.  I believe the event’s mission needs a bit of massaging, but more about that later.

The event has grown since I first heard of it (last year) and this time around the organizers elected to use the Atlanta Expo Center on the southern edge of Atlanta’s perimeter highway, site of the popular Scott Antique Market. This large facility is a well-traveled hunting ground for set decorators and propmasters working in the Atlanta area, hardly the sort of place you’d imagine as the destination for a swank event.

My date for the night was an archaeologist by trade and Dragon*Con royalty in her spare time. She was carefully packed into a sexy blue cocktail dress and 5 inch designer shoes and I felt like a confidently pudgy James Bond strolling around the place with Ursula Andress by my side. Despite her sexy outfit my friend was ready to devour every cupcake in the building so we scooted from exhibit to exhibit, rating the production design while jamming food into our mouths and candy into our pockets. It was awesome! I had a lot of fun.

Since The Next Cool Event is all about “the movies” it should come as no surprise that each vendor’s display was themed along the lines of a feature film or television program. Some setups were modest, others were pretty spectacular and demonstrated a mastery of display art. (Check out the Feb/March edition of Oz Magazine, which features some great concept sketches by Javier Santos of Pink Frog Design)

Several camera ready communities had exhibits. Of those, my favorite was the one for the city of Covington, which was distinguished by a giant physical model of the town’s signature courthouse. Anybody who has worked in the Atlanta film scene for long will find themselves in that town square, it seems as if 75% of the shows shot in Georgia end up there. I saw some of the grown-ups from The Vampire Diaries at the event but I never really learned anybody’s names because I’ve only day-played on that show. I did spot a big whack of my friend Joe Connolly’s director’s chairs (he’s the propmaster).

Another of my favorite camera ready community exhibits (for all the wrong reasons) was the circus themed lounge for the city of Athens, Georgia, entitled “Athens: Life Unleashed” featuring “circus performers”. In Athens the term “Life Unleashed” apparently means “Apathy Unbounded” because the trapeze artists were as pudgy as me, and they were moving in slow motion through a few basic aerial silk routines. Off to one side a girl was swaying her hips to keep a pink hula-hoop in motion, cracking bubblegum in time to her gyrations… she made us giggle. They were all so bored and it was all so sad that we pulled up onto a couch to watch them suffer through a few routines. It felt like an act of cruelty to sit and watch those poor people try to live up to such a bold catchphrase. Still, if you have a chance to shoot in Athens, do it – it’s a fantastic town with great history (and this is coming from a Georgia Tech graduate who believes in the importance of veterinary medicine).

But for every dozen miscues there was one masterpiece, for instance I found the Marie Antoinette exhibit by the folks from Paris on Ponce to be astonishing (which didn’t surprise me). It was the sort of thing you’d expect to see in the store window at a high end retail store.

Regardless of quality, it was obvious that most vendors had put a lot of effort into their movie/television-themed displays and despite the great food and the entertaining people-watching, the recurring question from every “real” film person I met was:

“Why are they doing this?”

Seriously, I had more than a dozen people (including the archaeologist) trying to figure out the point of this entertaining evening of spectacle. We were all wondering exactly what it was that the vendors had hoped to accomplish when they first signed up, because there’s absolutely no way that any of those people are going to get hired to decorate a legitimate feature film or television show.

It just doesn’t work that way.

It’s not because they aren’t talented or resourceful – it’s because they don’t know the system. They don’t the customs or mores of the business. They don’t know the rhythms of production, the roles of all the players, the places where their job ends and someone else’s job begins. The thousand little things that make the job work. Every industry on the planet has its own culture and traditions and filmmaking is as regimented as a military operation and people don’t have time for  someone to learn on the job… it’s the sort of business where you must come up through the ranks, as much for the journeyman process as for the experience.

If you were a talented event designer would you be willing to take a drop in pay to spend a few years as a set dresser, then move up to being a lead man before getting an opportunity to decorate a show? No, of course not. Perhaps you might be able to get yourself a job on an independent film, which always rely on the kindness of strangers because they have no art department budget to speak of and expect you to work miracles. That’s probably the best “in” that I could think of for someone from outside the business, trying to infiltrate the world of cinema.

And I honestly wouldn’t begrudge anyone trying. You just have to get hired… go for it!  Just be ready to join a union. Even if this is a right-to-work state you won’t get far by avoiding getting into the “club”. That’s also a part of film culture. You’d best not fight it.

The most realistic outcome I’ve been able to project for one of these vendors is that there might be some real instances in which a (motion picture) Decorator might be able to hire one of these independent Event Designers to set up for a wedding scene, or a shop window in a set – something that requires a spectacular level of artistry that outstrips the skills of day to day set dressers (and some of those folks are quite skilled).

A propmaster might find the caterers useful as a supplier for a big food scene, or perhaps a commercial producer is looking for a new caterer to incorporate into their crew lunches. But by no means are the companies who do catering for film in any danger from these event caterers – it’s two different worlds.

About an hour before we arrived at The Next Cool Event I was getting a haircut from my friend Amber down at Serenbe, and she had a friend in her salon who had exhibited at “The Next Cool Thing” last year. It was more or less suggested to him that he might very well find work in the film business by exhibiting at that event, which is unfortunate for the aforementioned reasons. While he did end up meeting a future client at the event, he said that he wouldn’t want to participate in it again and I can understand why.

With as strong a turnout as The Next Cool Event had on Saturday night I can’t help but imagine that they’ll continue to do it for years to come, but I think that they should figure out a new position from which to pitch the event to the industries in question. Perhaps a Comic-Con style media-driven event that retains the film/television theming, but is used by studios to pitch their Georgia-lensed productions. Have their casts appear onstage for panel discussions. Interview the directors and producers. Do panels with the crews to discuss special effects, stunts, costume design, you name it.

There’s a great opportunity to present an event that’s more relevant to the motion picture industry, and perhaps the folks behind this event are the ones to do it.

Or maybe someone else is…

Look what my film industry friend Karen and her daughter Perri recently made: a gingerbread TARDIS!! I’ve known Karen since the mid-1990s when I began working in the film industry, and was amazed when I found out that she and her husband Scott had named their little girl after the Colin Baker era companion named Perpugilliam (Peri) Brown. You can click here to see more photos of their delicious gingerbread TARDIS at Perri’s Tumblr page devoted to Dr. Who.

A few days ago I wandered over to Google+ to see who in the heck was still posting there, when to my great surprise I encountered a shiny new Google tool (which has apparently been around since this past July). It’s called “What Do You Love” and it has its very own domain (www.wdyl.com). This special new website asks you to tell it what you “love” and in return it fetches everything that it can find about that topic (let’s call that variable “X”) from Google’s search engines.

Instead of throwing a long list of hyperlinks about “X” at you like Google typically does, WhatDoYouLove.com groups the data into clumps according to data type, putting each data type into a friendly little white box with titles like “Find X Nearby” (using Google Maps), and “Watch Videos of X” (on YouTube), and “Explore X in 3D” (in SketchUp, from the Google 3D Warehouse).

As you can see, Google isn’t just returning search results for occurences of “X” online, it’s also showing you where you can find “X” on its own various sites, which is actually very convenient if you use Google much because they have their fingers in so many pies. Speaking of pies, it’s a lot of fun to search for naughty words on WhatDoYouLove.com just to see what happens! What you can’t tell from the search results shown in the screenshot from this article is that my original search term wasn’t “kitten”. It seems that the Google programmers behind WhatDoYouLove.com have a sense of humor and a passing awareness of popular Internet memes.

Have fun with WhatDoYouLove.com and share this article with your friends!

There are a jillion articles out there about Facebook’s new Timeline format. Some good intros are on USA Today, PC World, and The Guardian. I recently activated the new feature and have a few notes for the rest of you, as everyone will be moved to this new format by December 22nd.

Cover Image
After confirming that you’re ready to upgrade (or when you’re finally pushed into making the change) the first thing you’ll want to do is set up your “cover image”, the giant HD format photo which acts as the banner at the top of your wall. I spent 10 minutes looking through past photos before deciding on an image and was delighted with how it classed up the page. Several of my friends have made the move and I think that their images are far cooler than mine, so this is your chance to shine.

People who fancy themselves to be photographers should really love the new layout as it gives you a great opportunity to show off your work. The old design technique of allowing one large image to define a space really works in this instance, and in my opinion the new Timeline easily outclasses the stingy little strip of images which appeared at the top of the previous design of the “Wall”.

That’s the other thing that’s changed: your Wall is gone. Facebook has changed all references to your personal page from “Wall” to “Timeline”. We’ll all continue to refer to our own page as our “Wall” for some time to come, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself using the new name at some point.

Time Travel
The “killer feature” of Timeline is its ability to move through time, all the way back to (and beyond) the day you first joined Facebook. On the right side of the Cover Image is a stack of dates, counting backward in time as you move down the column.

Clicking a year takes you to posts from that year. You can zero on content down to the month and year, it’s pretty awesome! Before you realize it you’ll be clicking back in time to see what you were saying a few years ago, at least that’s what I did. Within seconds I was scrolling through posts from the mid-2000s, banging my head on the keyboard in embarrassment at how we used to fill in the end of the sentence like “is about to eat a sandwich!” and “really, really likes boobs!!” and “is wondering if there is such a thing as a boob sandwich??!!”.

Everything you’ve posted to Facebook is there, from the most hysterical, to the most tragic. It’s like picking up a photo album and getting lost in memories.

Stalking Refined
You’ll love it… and so will your friends, because they will have exactly the same ability to surf your Facebook Timeline. And that’s what has some people freaking out. One friend called up to tell me that (after stalking around my new Timeline-enabled wall), “This new Timeline thingy is going to get people killed!!”

Well of course it will. Every technological innovation worth a fig has led to people being killed because it’s unfamiliar and people aren’t good at predicting the long-term effects of their short-sighted choices. Whether it’s having your neck broken by an unexpectedly rambunctious crank to a Ford Model A or having your jealous girlfriend Donna choke you for innocently clicking “like” on a photo of her best friend Karen’s sexy prom dress, technology, when misapplied or misused, can prove dangerous.

Because people are stupid and mean and jealous and by gosh, they can’t seem to understand how to use to/too/two in a sentence.

In this case, the danger exists because Facebook continues to defer to the model that “everything that you post is going to be made open to God and everybody on the ding dang Internet” instead of making it private first, with the option to share it with others. Sure, the new Timeline allows you unprecedented ability to quickly stalk some of your friends – but the ability existed before if you were patient and obsessed enough to continue scrolling to the bottom of a person’s page and clicking the link “Older Posts”.

The danger has been there all along. It doesn’t live in the technology, it lives in the people. If you don’t trust them, don’t share your life online.

While I’d like to say that nothing has really changed with Facebook Timeline beyond the new navigation model (and it really hasn’t) you may be shocked to see that a lot of information that you previously considered to be marked as “Friends Only” or “Friends of Friends” was actually marked as “Public”. Photos, notes, links – as I explored Facebook Timeline I found that some things may have been online and public for years – just pictures of my cat, mind you, but still… what a drag. Look through your own things for the telltale “Public” icon and change it to “Friends Only” or “Friends of Friends” or some other custom setting… just change it!

To be clear: Facebook and Zuckerberg continue to take advantage of the people who use their site. You really are a commodity to them. As your content continues to default to the “Public” setting you can rest assured that it means that more people may see (and then share) your post(s) with their friends, leading to more clicks on the Facebook site. More clicks means more ad exposures, which means more income for Facebook and Zuckerberg.

So if you want to narrow down the number of people stalking you to those you actually count as Facebook friends, you’re going to need to see your Timeline the same way it appears to strangers on Facebook. Fortunately, this is rather easy to do!

Fix Your Content’s Privacy
Navigate to your Timeline by clicking your name in the right corner of the blue toolbar at the very top of the page. Look for a little white menubar located underneath your cover image – it should feature 3 buttons: “Update Info”, “Activity Log” and the image of a gear, which has become the international sign for “settings”. When you click the gear you’ll see the options of “View As…” and “Add a Badge to Your Site”. Select the first option (“View As…”) and you’ll be rewarded with a note which reads “This is how your timeline looks to the public, including subscribers.”

Scroll down slowly, allowing Facebook time to pull up information it has stored about you in its database. If any of that data (including photos, notes, status updates or check-ins) have been marked as “Public” they’ll show up in chronological order, between light blue boxes labeling each month’s posts.

This is going to take some time. You may need to do it over several sittings since Facebook has not provided a global change wizard (seriously, they don’t like you).

If you really want to steer clear of “stranger danger” you may also want to make sure that your “Favorites” are visible only to your friends (or only to yourself for that matter). Favorites includes things like Music, Books, Movies, Television, Games, Athletes, Sports Teams, Activities, Interests, etc, etc. and can be accessed either by clicking the small blue word “About” below the bullet list of work history and education history found underneath your “cover image” – or by clicking “Update Info” in the little white menubar we used earlier.

Here you’ll be able to decide how public you want to be about where you live, where you attended primary school and where you pursued higher education. You can let the world know (or not) what languages you speak, which gender you prefer to pursue, your actual date of birth, your religion, your contact info, and the list goes on.

Since swapping my profile over to Timeline I’ve had to trim back a bit of information, but it was a real wake-up call to realize how many things were already made public. There were a few cases where I was unable to get an image to stop showing up to the Public in my Timeline, but I ultimately realized that the images had been used on someone else’s page or in a note which had been made “Public” – with a lot of clicking I was able to deactivate most all of them, leaving only some of my artwork albums open for viewing.

Gripe as much as you want about Timeline, it makes the past come alive.

Will Facebook Timeline tear apart a few relationships? Absolutely. Will boyfriends catch girlfriends posting on ex-boyfriends’ walls? You know it will! But this already happens and those two would have never lasted anyway if you asked me. Could Facebook Timeline get people fired? I should certainly hope so. But those punks shouldn’t have posted a photo of themselves pooping in the McDonald’s drive-thru 6 months before applying for a job there. Will Facebook Timeline lead to increased friend-stalking? Sha!! Isn’t that why we love it in the first place?

The bottom-line for me is that I don’t care about you… wait, that’s not true. I actually do care, I just think it’s up to you to learn to integrate technology into your social lives. I can’t help you do it and I can’t make Mark Zuckerberg change his broken views on privacy.

The best you can do is to keep your nose clean. Don’t demean or speak poorly to others about your friends online, lest that opinion be made public by some errant click, costing you a friendship. Gossip the old-fashioned way, in public, face-to-face. Or be frank with people. Be civil. Don’t tell everything you know, or else make it really, really funny. I’m done teaching Civics for today.

One Last Warning
One last warning about the Ticker on the right side of the News Feed page, as requested by my privacy-minded friend who has requested that we use the unlikely pseudonym of “Wilma” when referring to her.

Let’s say a guy named “Fred” has a neighbor named “Betty” who is married to a man named “Barney”. Now let’s say that Fred posts a photo of his bowling trophy to Facebook and the security setting of his photo is set to “Public”. When Betty goes to comment on how much she admires Fred’s bowling balls (get it? He really only has ONE bowling ball), her husband Barney will be able to see her comment, because while he doesn’t know Fred (I know, I know, just play along), it doesn’t matter because he knows Betty, and since she’s commenting on a Public discussion it appears in Barney’s Ticker. If Barney clicks on that Ticker he will see Fred telling Betty how much he wants to “go bowling” with her.

My advice is to panic.
Panic and run. In circles. TIGHT circles.

So, sign up for Timeline before it signs up for you… get your private crap sorted out now.
Clean up your acts, people.
Do it for “Wilma”.

I look forward to seeing the pictures you choose for your page.
Please share this article with your friends if you think it will help them!

I’ve recently uploaded several albums to Facebook of fantastic weekend adventures with my supermodel bikini girlfriends and tonight I noticed a phenomenon that’s new to me… some of the girls have gone through and tagged dozens of photos with the names of people who aren’t in the photographs!! This puzzled me so much I got up and finished off the bottle of champagne from the Lear jet. While I was polishing off the caviar I suddenly realized that the reason my friends were tagging people who weren’t with us in Paris was because this was the only way they could figure out how to share the photo album with people they thought might like to see the albums! If only they’d checked with me first I could have shown them this very simple trick!

Go to the main page of a Facebook photo album (that’s the page with thumbnail-sized snapshots of all the photos in the album). Now, scroll to the very bottom of the page and look for the two links called out in the image above.

1. Share This Album – This option will bring up a pop-up message that allows you to send a message to any of your Facebook friends, inviting them to look at the album with a handy link they can click on.
2. Post Album to Profile – This option posts the link to the album on your wall, allowing all of your friends (who may not be friends with the person who originally posted the album) to see the album.

So there we go! Two great ways to share an album with your bikini supermodel friends without having them clutter up the album(s) with tags of people who aren’t in the album!

One More Thing…
You can also share individual pictures in this same manner! Scroll to the bottom of the page with a photo on it and look for the links… they’re still there, the words are just a bit different: “Share”, “Tag This Photo” and “Report Photo” (for when people post photos of themselves doing inappropriate things with bikini supermodels in Paris).

…

I worked in the motion picture industry for over a decade while listening to music by They Might Be Giants and never, ever noticed that the graphic “badge” on the cover of the album “Flood” is a barely reworked version of the IATSE logo (referred to as “the bug” by those in the union). I’m certain that there must be Wikipedia articles and fan sites devoted to plumbing the mysteries of the symbology of the album, so you probably ought to go there…. because if you came here looking for an answer as to WHY John Flansburgh and John Linnell (or their graphic artist) decided to use the bug on their cover, I’m as clueless as you!

Are you having a hard time using Facebook? Are posts by your favorite people being “covered up” by a tidal wave of crap from other friends who post stuff to Facebook every five minutes? Don’t be embarrassed, you’re not alone! Most importantly, don’t get so frustrated that you start unfriending people!! Keep reading to learn how to make custom “channels” on Facebook – from now on you’ll be able to “tune in” to see updates by the people you care about the most! (Trust me, I’ve made television shows!)

Now, before we begin let’s establish what I mean by “channels”….

Cable television is composed of many channels dedicated to (and named after) specific topics of interest. Examples of topic-specific programming include Cartoon Network, CNN, the Food Network and the Science Channel.

It’s human nature to label most all of the people we know with the context in which we normally interact with them; that’s just the way that our brains are wired. This explains why we become so flummoxed when we encounter friends and acquaintances in unfamiliar settings – our brains rely on these people remaining in the place where we originally filed them!

Before we can begin to make Facebook work for you, you’re going to have to invest a few minutes going through your collection of friends and organizing them into groups similar to the manner in which you’ve already organized them in your mind.

Facebook refers to these groups as “Friend Lists”.

Statistics indicate that very few Facebook users ever go to the trouble of creating Lists of their friends, meaning that most people bumble their way around the site, powerless to control what they see. (This means that you’re about to become an “elite” user!)

Making Lists
Log into your Facebook account then look for the words “Home”, “Profile” and “Account” in the top right corner of the page (they’re white letters on a blue background). Click on the word “Account” and a list will pop-down. Move your cursor to the option in that list entitled “Edit Friends” and click on that selection.

The screen that comes up next will be the main administration page for your Friends Lists – this is where the magic happens!

If you’ve never build a list of friends it’s really quite easy. I’ve numbered the important areas of this page for you.

1. The left hand column contains all of the friends lists that you’ve already created, like playlists in iTunes.
2. The middle area displays the contents of any friends list you select in the left hand column. the default view for this area is to show the friends with whom you have most recently interacted.
3. The column on the right hand side is for advertisements. This is where Facebook helps you find a busty young woman and buy a log home.
4. The “Create a List” button will be important for our next discussion, please note its location.

I’ve been meaning to add a new Friends List… why not follow along with me and make one for yourself?!!

First, we want to click the button marked “+ Create a List”.

A window entitled “Create New List” will pop up and instruct you to “Enter a Name” for this new list.

Select something descriptive of the circle of friends you intend to add to this list. Perhaps it will be “Fishing Buddies” or “My Ex-Wives” or perhaps “The Halitosis Club”. In my case I’ll be making a list called “Bikini Supermodels”.

After naming the group you need to scroll down through your list of friends and click on the ones who belong in this group. Once you’ve selected everyone who belongs just click the button “Create List” located at the bottom of the pop-up box. Presto! You’ve made a list!

Note that it’s super easy to assign future friends to existing lists, and best of all: you can assign your friends to multiple lists (for instance after this lesson is complete I intend to go back and add a few of my friends from the ‘Bikini Supermodels’ group to my ‘Poker Night’ group).

Once you’ve organized your friends into lists there are a lot of very powerful things you can do with Facebook. For instance, we can narrow down what we see in our News Feed!! “What’s a News Feed” you ask? Why, that’s just a fancy name for all the posts made by all your friends. The News Feed can display all sorts of things, from status updates and notes, to photographs and videos…. even links to other websites.

To see your newsfeed just click the Facebook logo in the top left hand corner of the page.

There are two ways to view your News Feed. The default view is what Facebook calls “Top News”.

Top News includes posts by your friends which have attracted a lot of attention by other people. If a friend’s status update announces that she’s getting married you can bet that you’ll see that post listed in Top News because there may be dozens of comments made by her friends.

The alternate view (and the one that you should be most interested in understanding) is called “Most Recent”. Go ahead and click that selection to see how Facebook displays a chronological list of comments, links, photos, etc, from ALL your friends, with the most recent additions showing up at the top of the list.

After selecting Most Recent comments you’ll see a small triangle next to the words “Most Recent”. This is called a “disclosure triangle” and indicates that this item does more stuff if you click on it…. so go ahead and click on “Most Recent” one more time! You should be rewarded with a pop-down list which offers you options on what your News Feed will display.

You can now instruct Facebook to show you the “Most Recent” posts by all your friends, the most recent “Status Updates” by all your friends (and nothing else but status updates), the most recent “Photos” by all your friends (and nothing else but photos), the most recent “Links” by all your friends (and nothing else but links) and so on.

But here’s the BEST part… the part that we’ve been building up to over this article: using your new Friends Lists you can now control WHO you see in your News Feed!!! In my case this means that I can click on my Bikini Supermodel Friends List, eliminating the garbage that the rest of my friends are always posting!! Now I can just follow along to what Heidi and Helga and Inga and Kate and all those groovy supermodel girls are always posting….. ::sigh:: it’s mostly Farmville…

But Wait, There’s More!
Do you see that little thing at the bottom marked “Options”? Click it to reveal a very important control panel!!

This dialogue box provides way to block specific people permanently! Eliminate the embarrassing social faux pas of unfriending someone who annoys you by simply hiding everything they post! Preserve the illusion of friendship whilst totally turning off those people who push all your buttons!

Or perhaps there are people whose posts delight you beyond belief? Fulfill your stalker appetite by telling Facebook to make sure and show you every little thing these people post! If you’ve made a Friends List with your most favorite people on it you can just type in the name of that List here and everyone in that List will be given Superstar treatment on your News Feed!

But Wait, There’s Even More!
In addition to being able to control whose updates you see in your News Feed you can also use your Friends Lists to control who sees your posts. I might cover that in another post if you, the people of the Internet, demand it.

Parting Advice
Anyone under the age of 30 was born knowing how to do everything described in this article, so don’t get too cocky about your new-found skillz, honcho. Now get out there and enjoy Facebook with newfound gusto!

Happy Facebooking and Goodnight!

I received Official notification this past Thursday that I had been selected as the new curator of the Michelin Museum of Motorized Metal Collecting. Unfortunately, this particular museum was located in the general vicinity of my very, very, very flat right rear tire. After a brief acceptance speech (which I dare not print here) and an (utterly futile) attempt to re-inflate the tire, I grabbed the jack from the trunk and proceeded to replace the flat tire with the tiny rubber toy which passes for a spare tire in 21st century America. While changing a tire in the busy parking lot of a popular gas station may sound like a hassle to some folks, it was in actuality incredibly convenient because I was able to place the flat tire in the back seat, directly on top of a flat tire from my second car… for you see, I was already on my way to my local National Tire & Battery (NTB) to replace a tire on that secondary car when I discovered that my primary car had pulled up lame. With this brand new flat my day just became twice as expensive! Little did I know that the ensuing trip to NTB would cost me even more money!!

Flashback to the 50s
My Great Uncle Biffo liked having his car serviced by his local neighborhood garage. He’d been using them for years and trusted them explicitly. One day, after having his oil changed, he pulled his car out into the road and headed toward Atlanta… but he didn’t make it that far. The car’s engine seized up and the poor old thing rolled to a stop in the middle of the road, dead as a jaybird. A path of oil led back around the corner to that neighborhood garage where his favorite mechanic had failed to replace the drain plug in the car’s oil pan; every last drop of the new oil had run straight through the engine block and out onto the pavement.

Another auto adventure from the 1950s found my Dad driving through Atlanta in a Plymouth which was sporting a freshly rebuilt engine when he suddenly started hearing scraping and dragging noises coming from beneath his car. He pulled over as quickly as he could and looked under the car where he discovered that the mechanic had failed to bolt the car’s starter back into place before handing the keys back. It’s the details that count.

Back to The Present
I was standing outside a theater this afternoon talking to some friends about a movie we’d all just seen when I looked down and noticed a nickel-sized area of chipped paint on the bumper behind my right rear tire. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it… how did THIS happen???!! As I stood there, stooped over in shock, looking at the fresh boo-boo, one of my friends absentmindedly poked at my new tire with his toe. As my gaze shifted from the newly chipped paint to the brand new tire I realized with shock that the special anti-theft lug nut was missing from the new tire! There were only four lug nuts and a bare bolt!!

In a split second my brain immediately replayed the “footage” of the tire technician bolting the new tire onto my car just two days before. He’d bolted the four normal lugs on with his air ratchet and then fitted the special key so that he could bolt on the special lock-lug (I remember asking him if the air ratchet he was using was like the ones that they use on racecars). Before allowing me to leave he went and got a torque wrench so that he could snug up the normal bolts a bit more… but he didn’t torque the lock-lug, explaining that such force might damage the parts which key together.

I certainly wish that I had reached down to twist at that lock-lug because it’s obvious now that it never even snugged up to the wheel. In the perfect clarity of absolute hindsight I recall that I’d found it extremely tricky to get the keyed pattern of the special socket to snug into place on the lock-lug when removing the tire by hand, so it’s highly doubtful that the key was “catching” the lock lug when he ran his high-speed air ratchet over it at a jillion RPMs. And that same clarity made me realize that it’s highly likely that when the loose lock-lug finally flew off the bolt that its centripetal motion flung it backwards, into the side of my car, chipping the paint in the process.

Like my Great Uncle Biffo I may have finally learned the importance of a phrase made popular by President Ronald Reagan: “Trust but Verify“.

Over the last decade the guys at NTB have provided me with good friendly service and I don’t intend this post as a bash against the company or the technician who put the tire back on my car, but I realize now that the people we pay to repair our vehicles are human; they can become complacent, get distracted, or overlook a step. Double-check the stuff that you’re personally able to inspect and do it immediately after any auto service. Get the garage to walk you through the repairs. Make them show you what they’re doing or what they’ve done. Don’t be a pill or an annoyance to your mechanic, just be a smart customer. If it’s a legitimate business you’ve hired to do the work they’ll honor your concerns and be happy to discuss their work. At the very least make sure that the car isn’t upside down or backwards when they hand the keys back to you.

I’m going to get in touch with the guys at the NTB on Monday to find out if they have any sort of policy regarding replacement of missing lugnuts, but I doubt there’s anything they can do about this. Either way, it will be my personal policy from this point forward to check all the lugs on my tires before leaving the parking lot of any service company.

In fact, I’m asking Santa for some new locking lugs and a nice 4-way lug wrench… and I’m pretty sure that I’m going to have to rely on Santa to get those for me because all of my money went toward buying new tires.

Several months ago my friend Barbara asked me to design a T-shirt for her husband (my former propmaster) Dwight and his prop crew, busy on the set of the remake of that Bacon-infused 80s dance hit “Footloose”. I confessed to Barbara that, while I knew it involved dancing and people wearing Chuck Taylors, I’ve never actually seen the movie. I looked at stills and screen captures from the original movie and I dropped by set of the remake a few times. Despite having “done my homework”, inspiration didn’t strike until the film was very nearly wrapped and let’s face it, the design you see here is pretty simple: just the word “Footloose” spelled out by one particularly long shoe string attached to a classic Chuck Taylor sneaker. As long as the movie has been around I can’t help but think some artist has done this same thing at some point in the past, but it was new to me! Since I’d had recently used discharge ink for another shirt design with great results that’s what we decided to do with the Footloose Prop Department shirts. I understand folks on the crew liked the design. What do you think?

Update: there were only 20 of these shirts made, so they’re super rare!

I’d like to introduce you to a new product that I’ve only just recently invented called the “Love Ladder” – the newest erotic aid for loveplay since the…. um, well, I don’t know. But it’s a darned cracking sexy looking device, don’t you think? The box says that it’s fun for him and her! One size fits all! It’s hypoallergenic!! How can ladies resist? It’s runged for her pleasure for gosh sakes!!! Rrrrowwwrrr!!

“How do you get one of these things!!” you’re probably asking!!

Well, see, that’s where it gets kind of complicated.

Why don’t I tell you how I invented the Love Ladder first…..

One of my friends is a copy writer who divides her time between her home in Baton Rouge and a mid-rise condo on the northern edge of Atlanta’s Grant Park neighborhood. Several months ago she was shocked awake by the shriek of the building’s fire alarm and within minutes she’d joined the building’s other tenants out in the street to watch as the roof deck of their keen new building blazed away like one of those enormous signal fires from the movie “Return of the King”.

And while I’ve no doubt that somewhere in Midtown the Riders of Rohan were assembling to ride to the defense of the noble and ancient race of Grant Parkians, a bunch of Atlanta’s finest firefighters got there first and put the stupid blaze out.

The building survived, the water damage was repaired, and my friend posted several humorous stories about the aftermath of the event. She was particularly smitten by the firemen. One night I mentioned to her that she really ought to buy herself one of those escape ladders you see in all the Reader’s Digest articles about fire safety.

You know, the kind of ladders than nobody ever buys.

I went on to say that it would be a great gift to give her for the party she was talking about throwing herself before she left town to head back to Baton Rouge… so a few days later I hopped online and ordered a 2-story model. Rare is the occasion that I think of the perfect gift so when the ladder arrived I was so excited that I texted her that “a gift” I’d ordered for her had arrived from Amazon.

“You mean the ladder?” was her return text.

Dammit. The surprise of my perfectly hysterical, perfectly useful gift had been blown by my own big mouth during that previous visit…. but I wasn’t about to let her get the best of me. For the next few days I tried to think of ways I might produce the gift at the party, then I remembered that she’d been wanting to meet a hunky fireman. I figured that if I were a fireman the best way a civilian could get my attention would be through a combination of proper fire etiquette and skimpy stripper clothes.

So I hopped on Google and typed in “sexy ladder” and “nude ladder” and I eventually found a photo of a girl with a nice big rump holding onto a metal stepladder, looking backwards over her shoulder. One quick Photoshop session and several hours of tinkering in Adobe Illustrator yielded the first package wrap I’ve produced in a couple of years (I used to do this for the movies and commercials).

Most fun was the art direction for the device. It had to have the right blend of cheesy graphics and bewildering sales copy. My vision for the Love Ladder was that it would be a baffling backroom romantic toy whose exact purpose would remain clouded in mystery… I mean, what other frisky rig would feature a disclaimer that:

“The Love Ladder is not meant for creating lasting relationships and should not be used in emergencies or escaping from bad dates. Display of adult human genitalia from a height of more than 12 feet is unlawful in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Newfoundland and the Northwest Territories. Love Ladder may not be used for barter with the aboriginal peoples of Canada or its provinces. Please do not insert Love Ladder into your ****.”

So the party was this past Friday and my worries about the guests being offended by the Love Ladder were unfounded – the women in particular seemed to love it (though they did complain that it didn’t actually come with the “frisky shoes” featured on the packaging).

I’d consider selling Love Ladders online if the demand were strong enough, but I think the first point of order would be to find out whose picture it is that I grabbed for the cover and ask her where she bought her frisky shoes… after all, how is my friend going to meet a fireman without the entire Love Ladder package??

(I considered taking out the domain LoveLadder.com for the joke, but somebody registered that domain YEARS ago. There’s a person with vision. Maybe THEY would like to buy a Love Ladder…..)
…

A few weeks ago I was in the drive-through line at the big Krispy Kreme store in Atlanta, trying to scrape together enough money to pay for a small coffee. As I triumphantly drew forth the last floppy dollar from my wallet and turned to find some change something about that tatty dollar bill caught my eye…. I held it up in the morning light and noted that some brigand had stamped something on the bill. Holding it up to my face I saw that it read “Abolish the Federal Reserve”. Several things flashed through my mind… first was instant patriotism and anger that someone had defiled my country’s currency. This was replaced by the sad realization of my own ignorance at what might drive someone to want the Federal Reserve to be dismantled, which was quickly replaced by a fervent desire to have several more of these horribly defaced bills to put toward the purchase of a chocolate cake doughnut, which was replaced by the realization that there was yet something else wrong with this bill….. holding it up even closer to my face I saw that some wag had penned in a comment beneath the protester’s stamp: “Then why did you spend this dollar?”. Tee hee. Yeah, I saved the bill and paid the lady at the window with a bunch of change… this bill made my day

For those of you who’ve been reading me here (and elsewhere) you know that I’ve rather become a fan of science fiction conventions and the people who attend them. I love that there exists a safe harbor in this world for the myriad nerds and social misfits who communicate their innermost feelings via witty T-shirts and long rambling tirades regarding the inefficiency of Model 7 dilithium articulation frames. I celebrate the fact that there’s a place where nobody cares if you look (and often smell) funny… a place where sexy actresses are paid to sit inches away from drooling dorks while autographing photos of themselves sporting leather thongs.

However, the thing that I cannot love, that I cannot endorse, is the tacky shit that some of you nerds purchase when nobody is looking. The thing is, I’m worried. I’ve been reading about the dangers of hoarding and I believe that it’s high time that we turned the media spotlight on the sordid industry which supports your nasty little fetish.

That’s right, I’m talking to you, Dragon Hoarders… you people who are obsessed with those enormous flying lizards of myth, fabled for guarding their hidden hoards of golden treasure.

Oh the irony!

Don’t think we haven’t noticed the dragon statues lining your cubicle at the office. And the dragon mouse pad next to your dragon coffee mug underneath your dragon poster?

Seen ‘em, hate ‘em.

The “Don’t blame me I voted for a Dragon” bumper sticker is the real reason we never let you drive us to lunch, and the brand new Dragon Calendar you hung up yesterday has resulted in three transfer requests from your cubemates. The Dragon Porn that the IT guy found on your computer? Well of course he liked it have you seen him??!!!

See, the thing is, we’re not mad at you.

We’re nerds too, we understand that this is your own “special thing”. We just think that you’re being taken advantage of by the businesses which enable your particular form of mental illness.

Specifically, businesses like The Hamilton Collection, which make atrocities like “Poker Dragons“. That’s right, “Poker Dragons”. I’m not making that up, that’s not a typo, and the following image has not been photoshopped…

Did you SEE that??

It’s a bunch of dragons sitting around a card table playing poker!!!!!!

LOOK AGAIN!!!

That’s right, I’m showing it twice because it’s THAT OUTRAGEOUS!!!

In what corner of the universe did someone say to themselves “You know, it would really round out the quality of my ‘museum quality collection’ of tatty dragon figurines if I had four dragons playing cards whilst being waited on by a serving wench dragon”.

Because, I mean, who doesn’t think of poker when they think of dragons?

Or cuckoo clocks for that matter.

That’s right, I said cuckoo clocks.

Take a gander at the “First-ever Dragon Cuckoo Clock” by The Bradford Exchange (to satisfy your timeless quest for power, naturally).

The Bradford Exchange is another of these “Ivy League” rings of fiends who appeal to your dragon hoarding instincts with tantalizing product features like: “sculpted dragon ‘cuckoo’ announces each hour with a roar” (which you, should you elect to click the link, will agree sounds more like a failing water pump on a three-wheeled 1973 Chevy Malibu), and “impressively styled at over 2 feet high!” (as if anything smaller would be less tacky).

But never fear, The Hamilton Collection (another classy sounding bunch of brutes who prey upon you low-willpowered dragon hoarding freaks) returns with a real treasure: “The Fiery Youngbloods” billed as the “Ultimate Dragon Rock Band” figurine collection. By now you know that I’m not making this up… take a look…

Yes. It’s a bunch of guitar playing, leather pants wearing, big 80s hair styling rock and roll dragons – complete with keyboard, drum kit and amp. And the “issue price” for each figurine?

A snip at only $19.95 each!! (A bargain at any price.)

I mean!!

These dragon making hooligans certainly wouldn’t go to all the trouble of printing up the deluxe mailers (which inexplicably continue to show up in my mailbox) if these dragon-centric products didn’t actually exist… which tells me that somebody out there is actually “collecting” this stuff.

So who’s buying this stuff?
We’re going to find out eventually.

I fully anticipate seeing an episode of “Hoarders” devoted to one of you dragon collectors being buried alive by the thrilling “Sword of the Dragon Warrior” collection, which, interestingly, presents “sculpted Dragon plates on a handcrafted sword display”.

Yes, it’s real, and it can be yours for only $40 per plate (note that there are three plates and the decorative sword display mounting is going to cost you an additional $40).

That’s a grand total of $160 to us non-dragon collectors.

You know, the more I read how much money these dragon pimps are charging you guys for their shoddy merchandise the more I begin to think that you dragon hoarders have the right idea. I mean, I could continue to harangue you in an attempt to make you see the strangeness of your ways, or I could take advantage of your predilection for winged lizards to my own financial advantage!

So today I’m happy to announce that I will be offering my very own line of very limited Dragon-themed action figures available in the 2nd Quarter of 2011, retailing at $6,500 each (probably a lot more).

My first five pop-culture dragon sets will be devoted to popular television series, pending serious licensing negotiations:

Television

• Dancing with the Dragons – featuring Dancin’ David Hasselizard
• Battlestar Draconica – robot dragons decimate the dragon race and have a lot of sex
• The Dragonpire Diaries – angsty teen dragons run through the woods a lot
• Dragon Who – time traveling dragon saves England for the 4,353rd time
• Hogan’s Dragons – imprisoned dragons have hilarious escapades with Nazi dragon captors

I’ll readily admit that I’m still in the concept stages for these things and am open to suggestions, but doesn’t this seem like something you could use to clutter your homes? But let’s get down to business… what sort of things are you dragon hoarders missing? You know, because I’m here for you*!!

–

*not really

Wow! 80% of the ennui and angst and critical assessments regarding our favorite annual event just went POOF! tonight when Joseph (one of the folks mentioned in my last post) alerted everyone to the fact that Troy Bradley, Director of Dragon*Con On Site Preregistration, has made an announcement on the Dragon*Con LiveJournal Community tonight that Dragon*Con will indeed be putting on her Big Girl Panties* and stepping up to a barcode system for next year’s pre-registrations!! This is huge and indicative that that the people behind the convention recognize a need to step it up a notch. These folks love the convention as much as you and really do listen. Echoing some of the suggestions from the incredible wave of comments to my last post, next year’s convention should try to adopt at least 5 Best Practices from the convention industry (not just Comic-Con) to make Dragon*Con 2011 the best one EVER!! A special thanks to Troy for putting it out there!!

Of course, I *am* going to miss this sight next year…..

* a phrase I neglected to mention I’d stolen from writer Tracy Wilson from HowStuffWorks.com

Updated Sept 5th, 2010 at 7:02pm – thanks to all of you who have contributed to the discussion!

It’s the Sunday morning of Dragon*Con 2010 and I’m spending my morning recuperating from having walked 5 or 6 miles around the East Coast’s fan-driven answer to Comic-Con yesterday. I woke up thinking about how much my beloved nerdfest has changed over the past five years and thought that I’d jot down some notes for later discussions with my friends who are also attending this year.

Truth is, I suppose the old girl has been changing ever since I first started going in the late 1980s, but lately it’s becoming hard to see what first made me fall in love with Dragon*Con. During a stopover at Trader Vic’s I participated in an impromptu panel called “Dragon*Con Might Just Suck” regarding how this year’s convention has been particularly lackluster. My fellow panelists Carl, Joseph and Timmy made some very good points and I’m distilling that conversation into the following five points:

• Invasion by Non-Fans
• Economy & Events
• Social Networks
• Scale
• Age

Before I elaborate on what the ‘con has become, let me say that I’ve come to know a lot of the people who volunteer at the convention. These people have become my friends and without them the event would collapse under its own weight. I’ve known the convention’s Director, Pat Henry, since the mid 1980s (it was at Pat’s comic book shop that I found the contest flier for the Batman competition that I won back in 1988) and I have nothing untoward to say about him or the Dragon*Con staff. They all bust their asses to make this thing happen and I appreciate it. What follows is simply an evaluation of the experience of the event from a long-time attendee’s perspective.

Invasion by Non-Fans

Is the “social order” of the convention in jeopardy?

The “invasion” of the convention by non-fans is the most obvious challenge the event is facing and it has drastically diminished the quality of my own experiences there. The thing that made Dragon*Con so special, that makes any science fiction/fantasy convention so special, is that the rest of the “real” world goes away for a weekend; you’re in a safe habitat, surrounded by your fellow Fans. Even if you’re not fans of the same comicbook/movie/book/game/etc, there’s still a very special language that all true nerds share, be they gamer, costumer, Trekkie, comicbook geek, horror fan, etc, etc

Over the last five years the rest of Atlanta (the non-fan element) has discovered that the best party of Labor Day weekend is at Dragon*Con and as a result they’ve invaded the convention in sufficiently large numbers as to make the costume-to-person ratio ridiculously low. I can’t tell you how many young punks and urban hipsters I saw running around like they were in Disneyland, eyes agog, drinks in hand. Joseph remarked that: “At least 50% of the people I see here at DragonCon dont even have a badge.”

Bingo.

It looked like most of East Atlanta Village had crashed the party (I personally knew more than 10 people who were there without badges). Added to the mix were a bunch of drunken football fans who were in town to see the game between LSU and North Carolina… Dragon*Con costumers became playthings for them. I was personally accosted by a drunken brunette who kept grabbing at my costumed face and yelling farm-bred hoots which must pass for verbal communication at her chosen “college”.

So how did we get here?

In the end, regardless of what brought them to Dragon*Con, non-fans don’t understand or appreciate what really happens at the convention. They have no understanding of the programming that occurs in the bowels of the Hyatt. They don’t know what filking is. They don’t know about The Masquerade. They don’t know who Dawn is, or of the subtle irony that her talented creator is an overweight male version of his own goddess character. They don’t know about Pie. They haven’t watched Trek fandom wane as the Star Wars fandom grew, or that the steampunk movement is beginning to overshadow both of those franchises. These “outsiders” have no idea that the dealer’s room exists or why it is made of awesome for so many fans.

The gatecrashers just come to drink and gawk and enjoy “Nerdi Gras”.

With as many badgeless attendees as I encountered yesterday I can’t help but think that Dragon*Con (the company) might be experiencing a sag in revenue this year, which takes me to our next point….

Economy & Events

Fans face many events with limited resources

While queuing up for this year’s parade it was quite apparent that there was a significantly-reduced turnout for the 501st, the Imperial Stormtroopers from Star Wars. The reason for this was that the Lucasfilm-sponsored convention called Celebration was held in Orlando, Florida, two weeks prior to Dragon*Con, shredding the bankroll of a good many Star Wars fans.

Our friend Bob, known in Star Wars circles as Vader Painter, told me that like many of his fellow Star Wars fans, his Dragon*Con budget for this year had been made razor thin in the wake of Star Wars Celebration, and that he wasn’t alone in that. You needn’t be a financial genius to realize that the fragile personal economies of many of our hardcore sci-fi/fantasy fans continue to suffer in this relentless recession.

And like Celebration, there are other events that clamor for the discretionary dollars of fandom: gaming conventions, renaissance festivals, comic book conventions, animation conventions, pirate festivals (I host one called PiratePalooza every year and recently started up Cardboard*Con this past March), toy fairs, horror conventions, the list goes on and on… and a dollar only stretches so far.

Social Networks

Social networks are ruling our actions

Carl and Foe asserted that Social Networks, specifically Facebook, have played a role in diminishing the excitement of the convention. Prior to Facebook our convention friends’ lives remained a bit of a mystery to us and so part of the fun of ‘con would be spent catching up on what had changed in their lives since the year before. Familiarity via Facebook isn’t necessarily breeding contempt, but it is certainly robbing us of the need for face-to-face communication and that’s at least worth a smack on the forehead.

Maybe we’ve seen so much of each other online that we have no patience left for each other in person?

To that point, Timmy pointed out that a lot of people have their noses buried in their smartphones now, walking past super heroes and vikings and cardboard troopers so that they can post things on their friends’ walls or send a text message. My friend Juliana railed at fellow fans who were live-tweeting a panel, their faces buried in their screens, instead of being there in the moment to listen to the actors discuss the show. It’s like going to a concert and then watching the video screen the entire time.

That’s how addicted to our social networks we’ve become… and I’m as guilty as the next person in this regard.

I suppose our new reality is unavoidably augmented these days?

Scale

Remember when you were a teenager? Transitions can be ugly.

As Joseph said, “Dragon*Con is a large con that’s operated as if it’s a small con.”

Exactly.

If you get to thinking about it, it’s a miracle that Dragon*Con has been able to handle 30,000+ people per day without a major incident during this decade’s growth spurt. This unlauded success required boatloads of dedication and energy from a volunteer workforce. Now increase the size of the crowd you’re trying to control and try to anticipate the problems that you’re going to encounter. With a volunteer staff numbering less than 200 and a guesstimated 2010 crowd size of well over 50,000 people you’re looking at an assignment of at least 250 attendees to every volunteer (some of whom grab their staff badges and then go AWOL).

[NOTE this article has attracted a lot of conversation today and several people who work on staff were kind enough to post replies and send messages correcting my understanding of staffing numbers cited in the previous paragraph. The main point is that my numbers were far too low in regard to the number of people working staff. BrundelFly commented that "I’m a 7th year staffer at D*Con, and it’s important to know that there is significantly more than 200 folks on staff. 200 individuals compose the volunteer staff of our technical operations department alone. In total there’s over 1,250 folks on staff. I know this still might seem low, but a 1/50 ratio is MUCh better than a 1/1000!". So, my apologies to the staff for my ignorance (I blame the fatigue I was experiencing from the previous day of tromping through hotels in cardboard armor). My suggestion to folks just arriving to this conversation is to make sure to read the comments for more viewpoints on this topic.... now back to the article...]

Looking westward, a question hangs heavy in the air: “When will Dragon*Con put on her big girl panties?”

When will the convention ramp up their staffing and hire professionals to operate the ticket lines? When will it hire crowd control experts and maximize the experience for its patrons. Notice that I’m not asking IF, I’m asking WHEN. This would seem to be the only logical step an event of this size could make to wrest control back from the situation it’s in.

The question is whether the con should, as my friend Tony suggested, move the blasted thing to the Georgia World Congress Center, away from the lookie-loos and gate crashers. This scenario would put the con into an entry-controlled space where only badgeholders would be allowed, but in the process it would likely diminish the party atmosphere that the convention has enjoyed for the past decade, forcing many mobility-impaired fans to endure countless shuttle trips or long walks between the hotels and the convention spaces. It’s certainly not a favored option, and it smacks too much of Comic-Con which is the soulless, Hollywood-shilling black sheep cousin of Dragon*Con.

Wouldn’t it be a better experience to stay put and identify then resolve the problems experienced this year? (maybe we could ask the entire floor of gamers to strategize the potential issues the con might face, from actresses storming out of panels to attendees falling off of balconies, to Mecha-Godzilla eating the Hyatt)

I don’t know if a paid army will fight with the heart of a volunteer army, but this change does seem inevitable.

Age

Been there, done that

We humans are funny beasties: without change we get bored, with too much change we’re beset by nostalgia.

I’ve been going to science fiction conventions since the mid 1980s (shout out to DixieTrek!) and in that time I’ve witnessed and participated in more crazy and wonderfully hysterical antics than I could ever hope to remember or set down to paper. I’ve been astonished at people’s costuming creativity, been blown away by the unexpected (like the animated film AKIRA in its original Japanese, sans English subtitles), reduced to tears of laughter by the inventive heckling that used to happen in the Masquerade, delighted by late night video shows and unexpected role playing situations. Over the years I’ve met so many bright and shiny minds and made so many new and creative friends.

This year was different.  I didn’t have a “zoo crew” to hang out with and that was good, I needed a break and a chance to stand back and experience the convention on my own again. My first thought going into this year’s convention was that I was becoming like the character Louis in Interview with the Vampire; tired of life, tired of Dragon*Con. But, even with the systemic problems the convention is experiencing, and my feeling that there’s nothing new under the ‘Con, in the clear light of day I remembered that the experience of Dragon*Con isn’t made up of the events or the guests or the hotels, but of the people who are there.

The best memories of the convention are the ones that you make with your friends.
Now let’s get out there and be weird.

…

I’ve recently joined the ranks of people brought to the crossroads of a life decision after being exposed to the squirm-inducing cable television program Hoarders. While grubbing around for my model-making tools I ran across a giant metal spider; the remnant of a plot by my friend Alice to take me out of the picture.

Back in the late 1990s I bought my very first cellphone: a Nokia 2160. Perusing the catalog of accessories for the phone I saw that Nokia made a car kit that would allow the phone to be mounted to your dashboard, but only if you were willing to drill holes in your dashboard or forever scar it with epoxy. Neither of these solutions appealed to me so I approached my friend Alice, an extraordinarily talented artist and metal-smith, with a request for a rig that would sit in the floorboard of my car and hold my phone for me on a platform.

Now, I may have said something about “making it cool like Batman” because that’s the sort of thing I’m prone to say from time to time… but I had no idea how much “cool” Alice would pour into the thing.

Truth was that I didn’t really care what the phone holder looked like, I just needed something that would work – so when she came back to me with her solution I was blown away! Alice had fashioned a bug-like cage out of iron, designed to cradle my phone within its curvy metal rod legs, each leg tipped with an iron ball. The entire rig was mounted atop a flexible gooseneck which attached to a flat metal base at the bottom.

It was genius!
It was artistic!
It was rather heavy.

I discovered this fact one afternoon when taking a hard left turn because the phone, riding in its awesome new black iron bracket, swung away from me, over to face the passenger door. Moments later I made a turn to the right and the heavy metal platform swung over toward me and grabbed the gear shifter with its metal legs.

I mean, totally GRABBED it.

It kind of grabbed my leg too.

This act of aggression was quickly followed by panicky shouts (mine), loud curses (mine) and a great deal of veering back and forth along the roadway (me, me, me).

Over the course of the next several months I fought several skirmishes with “Alice’s Grabby Grabber”, escaping each time with my life. I started wondering if she was sitting at home controlling it somehow and in the process I became a little frightened of her and her metal monster and I resolved to be done with the whole thing, but I was reluctant to give the rig up entirely because I enjoyed owning such a unique piece of art.

However, after a particularly harrowing trip through a Wal-Mart parking lot I knew that I had to retire the darned thing.

But I still like it.

Please don’t hurt me Alice!!!

Tonight was my first time back in the gym after 16 months away and I’m embarrassed to say that I lasted all of 10 minutes on the new elliptical machines.

Seriously, it was pathetic. I’m so completely out of shape that my legs were nearly turned to jelly after my dismount, which surprised the heck out of me because when I stopped working out back in the Fall of 2008 I could have gone 45 minutes or longer on a similar machine (depending on what was playing on television at the time).

I didn’t even make it through the end of the Seinfeld episode where everyone is trying to avoid Crazy Joe Davola at the opera which was TERRIBLE because I LOVE the scene with George scalping tickets in an alley.

Still, there was a bright side to Day One: I didn’t throw in the towel.

I mean that literally. After having my ass handed to me by the new elliptical machine I walked over to toss my towel into the return bin and head back to the car when I was gripped by the realization that I needed to do just a little bit more if I was serious about trimming down a bit.

So I wobbled over to the recumbent bicycles and pedaled gamely for another 20 minutes while trying to remember how to work the television on the stupid thing. I never did find the end of that Seinfeld episode but I did get to watch a replay of International Space Station Astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson trying to repair a space dishwasher (or whatever) on NASA-TV.

Gripping stuff.

That’s the amusing thing about the Georgia Tech Campus Recreation Center – nobody bats an eye if you decide to watch NASA replays on your workout equipment’s mini-televisions and they provide FREE issues of USA Today and the New York Times in the vestibule as you leave.

Almost makes it worth the risk of getting mugged by some clown on the way to your car.

Did you know that the Late Night Wars have gone online? I didn’t. I only found out yesterday.

Last weekend I went to see late night talk show host Craig Ferguson “in concert” at the Cobb Energy Center, a poor man’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. While it was great fun to see my Twitter-pal @CraigyFerg live and in person, I was surprised to find myself annoyed at his incessant cursing. I, mean, it’s not like I don’t use foul language in my regular every day life, I’m just as clay-footed as the next person – - but there really was some part of my intellect which stood up primly and declared (in a Craig Ferguson sort of way) “Cursing? Reeeeally??”

It was disappointing to watch this clearly clever man employ a comedic “mutually assured destruction” with the dreaded F-bomb.

I considered sending a tweet to @CraigyFerg to tell him that I thought he’d be just as funny if he could cut his cursing back by 35% but I knew better than to waste my time because he has such an enormous group of followers (which he calls his “skeleton robot army”) and he rarely replies directly to individual tweets.

As one of the first 1,300 people following Ferguson I enjoyed his tweets and watching his list of Followers increase exponentially. Then, a few weeks ago I noticed friends tweeting that Conan O’Brien had also started tweeting. And then, a few nights ago, I noticed the largely lovely actress Kirstie Alley on David Letterman’s show, and Letterman was hovering over a laptop, for all intents and purposes tweeting.

By this point I’d become curious to find out how many late night hosts were on Twitter and how their individual “skeleton robot armies” stacked up against each other. Within 5 minutes I’d determined that ALL the talk show hosts were using Twitter, and using the great comparison tool at TwitterCounter.com I was able to generate several head-to-head scenarios of each host’s numbers over the past week and them compile them into the graphic featured at the top of this article.

Such surprising results!

As you can see from the graph, Twitter debutante Conan O’Brien is decimating the old guard with a staggering 650,000 followers.

But it’s not just Coco who’s in the lead!

New guy on the scene George Lopez is beating both Jay Leno and David Letterman, tailed closely by cheeky F-bomb-possessing- monkey Craig Ferguson, who has 140,000 followers.

However, things aren’t all doom and gloom for the dinosaurs of the talk show trade!

In just the last week Letterman (with 30,000 followers) has climbed out of the Twitter basement, passing Jimmy Kimmel‘s 25,000 followers and closing in on arch nemesis, demon-lord Jay Leno’s 37,000 followers. Of course anyone who knows Leno’s history won’t be surprised when the steamshovel-jawed talk-meister engineers a situation in which his parent company purchases Twitter and cancels Letterman’s account.

Just when I was getting ready to publish these findings I remembered that I’d left someone out of my ciphering: that punk kid who took over Conan’s 12:30am spot. I actually had to ask Google to give me his name since I normally flip over to watch Ferguson at 12:30.

So that kid is Jimmy Fallon.

The Jimmy Fallon who has 2.5 MILLION followers…. see? ->>

These two graphs clearly delineate the future of American talk shows.

The guys who have the most followers on Twitter are most in touch with the social media addicted younger generation, the generation who will ultimately be candidates for the 11:30pm time slot (let’s ignore the entire DVR discussion here).

Sure, over the next few months Leno and Letterman will gain followers on Twitter and I fully expect them both to overtake “youngsters” Ferguson and Lopez, but at the end of the day it’s obvious that they and their producers missed the boat with social media. To be fair, a lot people didn’t get the Twitter thing and will gleefully continue to not “get it”. Frankly, it isn’t incumbent of the old guard to latch onto new technology because they’ll inevitably come off looking like Pat Boone trying to do a Beatles song. These guys know what their audiences like and they needn’t change the recipe too much; Letterman will continue to attract people who don’t realize that he’s been phoning it in for the last 10 years and Leno will continue to attract retirees, beloved toothless quarterbacks and seriously bad writers. I’m not sure what will happen to Jimmy Kimmel, but I’m pretty sure that he’s safe.

Because he’s YOUNG.

In 15 years we’ll be watching Fallon, O’Brien and Kimmel, because they represent the future…. and as much stink as we’ve raised about the shabby way that NBC treated Conan O’Brien, they’d be far dumber than we already think they are if they don’t realize that they’re sitting on top of a Secret Weapon with Jimmy Fallon.

But don’t worry Craig.
I’ll watch you as long as you want to do your show but you’re never going to win, even with the F-bomb.
(tweet at me @drewprops!)

For over a year now I’ve been using a neat plug-in for my web browser which hides advertisements on websites, cutting out the clutter and increasing my surfing speed. However, several weeks ago I realized that this marvelous plug-in was causing weird behavior whenever I tried making comments on Facebook so I disabled it and was astonished to discover what I’ve been missing out on all this time: women!!! But not just any type of women; these are women who are looking specifically for guys who are 42 years old.

Holy crap!!! I’m 42 years old!! What are the odds??!!

I never knew that such women existed! Just look at the attached valentines card I made from the army of women I am now considering for romantic liaisons. They’re sassy, sparkly, smiling and besides the fact they’re completely obsessed with men my age they all have one thing in common:

Bewbs.

Just look at ‘em.

Wow.
I don’t even know where to start.

I was recently surprised to find myself blurting out the name “Oscar Goldman” to the television. As this is not something I typically do I feel it important to explain that I was (finally) watching the film “The 40 Year Old Virgin“. In the movie there is a scene in which the main character explains the importance of one of the hundreds of collectible toys lining the walls of his apartment. In this case it was a bland looking doll wearing a garish sports jacket; the epitome of 1970s men’s fashion and I recognized it without hesitation.

That little guy was Oscar Goldman, the boss of Steve Austin, aka “The Six Million Dollar Man“. Take a look:

As you may suspect, I not only knew who Oscar Goldman was, I had my very own Oscar Goldman toy as a kid… complete with the exploding briefcase seen in Jim Emmon’s video (above).

It’s important that I point out that The Six Million Dollar Man wasn’t just a formulaic episodic television show from the mid-1970s, it was a glimpse into a future in which the notion of “handicapped” had been redefined to mean “bad ass” for an entire generation of kids. We left the 1970s believing that nearly any physical handicap could be overcome through the proper application of high technology combined with enormous stacks of money (never mind that we also believed that giant robotic Sasquatches roamed the Pacific Northwest).

When word got out that Kenner was releasing a Steve Austin doll it immediately shot to the top of my Christmas list. This doll would be a game-changer!! It had a telescope for an eye, an arm that could lift practically anything so long as you kept jabbing the big red ratchet on the doll’s back, and (even better), you could roll back the skin on his arm to reveal the bionic circuitry beneath. This was the sort of doll that proved you were living in the future and I absolutely had to have one.

What I didn’t count on was that my parents might not be able to find me a Bionic Man action figure anywhere in town because every kid my age had asked for the same damned toy. Every store was sold out so they came up with a Plan B…. guess what I received instead…

I received a Mike Power “Atomic Man” action figure, made by the GI Joe people, who were committed to cashing in on the bionic fever sweeping the land. Their strategy was to crank out a GI Joe figure with prosthetic limbs. Good old Mike Power had one clear arm, one clear leg, two kung-fu grip hands, and one eyeball which did not function so much as a telescope but rather as a signal mirror. His right hand was articulated so that it could spin a “personal helicopter blade”… but it really didn’t help much.

This “counterfeit Six Million Dollar Man” had zero curb appeal.

The thing was a complete dud in my eyes… more of an “acrylic man” than an “atomic man”…. check out this video and see what you think….

Needless to say that I was let down a bit, but a week or two after Christmas I did eventually receive my own Steve Austin doll and later on an Oscar Goldman doll complete with exploding briefcase.

And yes, if you must pry… I still have all of them.

Shut up.
Shut the Hell up.

(For all you folks who grew up in the 70s and 80s you really need to visit Sean’s site ToysYouHad.com for a great trip into yesteryear)

…

Last month, for the first time in over 5 years, I was officially back in the movie business, if only for few days. My friend Joeprops was in Atlanta, having taken over as propmaster of The Vampire Diaries. After completing a few small graphics jobs Joe pitched me on cool new project: illustrating a prop journal that one of the characters was slated to find in an upcoming episode (now known as “The Turning Point“, which aired on November 19, 2009). After thinking about the job for a day I agreed to have a whack at the drawings and spent the following weekend studying old woodcuts, peering through antiquated investigations of human anatomy, prying into the secret code of the Philosopher’s Stone, learning the vagaries of pentagrams, and generally trying to inhabit the mind of the book’s fictional author.

Next, I dug up my collection of Speedball inking nibs and a jar of good old-fashioned black ink and started in to drawing. Each drawing was done without penciled-in sketches – it’s just straight from the pen to the paper, just like in my real sketchbooks. I’m not a commercial artist, but neither was “Jonathan Gilbert” the character who supposedly created the drawings, and I thought the book’s drawings should feel genuine, not overly art directed (which is actually art direction in itself).

The prop department did some light aging to the pages but the grownups wanted them to look much older, so we employed my personal favorite method of aging paper which involves a strong brownian solution, a simple newtonian time machine and good timing. Out of all the pages we treated there was only one mishap – one of my ancient vampire curses lingered too long in our secret aging device and began smoldering with the hate of a thousand slain vampires until we doused it in the sink…. for the next 30 minutes every person who walked through the break room remarked on the lingering scent of charred vampire poop.

That’ll sure make your eyes water.