Small Victories

One of the things you learn to do when you hit rock bottom, is to relish any chance you get to stick it to The Man. Today I got revenge on one company whose product I've been using daily for as long as I can remember. They've been trying to use forced obscelence to squeeze extra money out of me for years now. I'm as big of a technophile as the next geek, but two blades were plenty. Now they're up to 4, and trying to do away with old-fashioned customers like me.

Anyway, things with this fine company have gotten out of (quality) control. The little artificially intelligent hair preparers aren't glued in right half the time, and the extra protrusions end up leaving a 1/16th-inch sideburn all down my face. And a scar if I'm lucky.

So I bought a pack of 8 of the Sensor 3 for $15.99 the other day b/c they were out of the sanely priced ones. Sure enough, after taking that hit (which was before I ran out of money, although it probably helped propel me thataway), two of the mil-spec blades turned out to be duds. This from the guy who invented the safety razor.

Anyway, I used the six that worked, and took the other two back. Now my receipt file has paid for itself. I rule.

Not one of my best stories, but there's no point in a blog that's interesting all the time. I've got to make the good entries stand out somehow.

Traces of love...i wish. My sincerest apologies to Yui Ichikawa. I'm only posting this to remind people to haggle me to keep at it, or quit while i'm not too far behind.

Good ole friday the 13th.

Well I got rear-ended by another Accord, but since it was the same year, they must have known to be nice to each other, because there's no visible damage. I'm gonna have Tameron Honda look at the paint to see if they see anything, though. The dude who hit me had already stopped at the red light behind me, but took his foot off the brake when a cockroach fell into his lap. Pansy.

I started selling stuff, at least in theory. All my customers have left happy so far, but that's because most of them didn't buy anything.

Oh, and I realized that, no matter how dumb my ideas may be, they can't be too stupid for the Sharper Image. Behold, the solar-powered flashlight.

I started drawing, or practicing drawing. Got some great 60-lb. paper and pencils of all softnesses. If that doesn't make me an artist, I don't know what will. Right now I'm concentrating on lines that are straight and circles that ended up where they started. Pretty much everything else can be built with that stuff anyway. Also got some tracing paper, so I can prove to myself that my muscles are capable of going throught the right motions. I started with ugly people, so i wouldn't feel bad for messing up, then moved quickly onward to gorgeous ones. I figure sketching could be a better ice breaker than dancing when there's no music, or no floor. Pretty good scheme for getting a captive audience, if nothing else.

I guess it was inevitable that I try visual arts again. My Renaissance manhood depends on it. Plus, I don't want to be embarrassed in another job interview where they ask me to sketch something.

Go Bucs.

A certain high school has just been listed in a certain magazine for its prowess in certain activities. I'll give you a hint: it ain't web design.

I was almost 5 minutes late to work...

...but then they told me that I was supposed to have been there at 9 instead of 1. Oops. They were really nice about it though, and since I was just doing training anyway, it didn't inconvenience anyone.

I hope that bad luck in writing down the hours for today means that my interview with a local staffing firm went well. I had called them at 9 and they told me to come in at 10. What's cool is that if I hadn't written the wrong schedule down, I probably wouldn't have gotten the interview in the first place. Good karma I guess.

I haven't been writing for the last couple of days, b/c I've been busy filling out the "Best Ideas" forms for my employer. Every time I submit an idea that they later implement, they're supposed to give me $100. I've come up with about 45 ideas so far, and I've only been there 4 days. Despite my track record, many of these are great ideas, and my managers are already trying to get me transferred to the product design team in San Francisco. In the meantime, i have a better chance of making ends meet by submitting ideas than by selling. The commission is more of a theory than a form of payment this time of year, although in december it works much better.

Tomorrow is my first art lesson, or really a pre-lesson interview. I hope it goes well, b/c I need to be able to sketch my hair-brained ideas.

For my dedicated readers, I'll paste another article from the archive. This one is about MacHomer, a hilarious and brilliant one-man show that came to Tech during my tenure.

The concept is foolproof: take a play that’s so renowned that no critic in his right mind would attack it, and cover all the rolls with characters from a show that’s at least ten times as popular The sum of the works of two of the greatest creative minds of all time, Matt Groening and William Shakespeare could not possibly result in anything short of brilliance. Starring the theatrical talents of Rick Miller, MacHomer provides the audience with impeccable Simpsons impersonations, hilarious and convincing acting, and a sophisticated use of multimedia. The end result is a creation that transforms the Scottish play from a tragedy into a sitcom, without losing respect for the masterpiece.

The fact that he managed to preserve the dignity of both MacBeth and The Simpsons is a testament to Miller’s outstanding vocal talents. Characters drawn from all over Springfield are imitated in a manner that is acutely precise in sound and true to the personality of the character. From the half-gargled nagging sigh of Lady MacHomer (Marge Simpson) to the evil yet senile tone of Duncan (Montgomery Burns), Miller has virtually all of them nailed. Although I was skeptic going in to the performance, I was amazed at the level of professionalism with which the Simpsons universe was adapted and presented.

There were a few characters whose imitations could have been better, notably Bart and Lisa Simpson, who had only minor roles. Originally cast as Fleance, Bart actually rejects the part, causing an on-the-spot tryout process to commence. (Eventually we are left with Rod Flanders handling the role, whose innocence is every bit as annoying on stage as he is in cartoon form.) In virtually every instance, the character speaking is immediately recognizable to a dedicated Simpsons fan, but for the sake of the unenlightened, Miller provides pictures of each cartoon character when introduced, along with the name of the role that character played. Surprisingly, the quality of the drawings flashed on the screen rivals that of the original animators. It’s something of a miracle that Miller has been able to take the show on tour for six years without getting sued. The Simpsons is one of the few consistent money-makers in the Fox arsenal; it’s surprising that an actor can borrow their trademarked catch phrases, and even their images, and make a profit in the process. However he does it, more power to him, because he does it extremely well.

The pace of the performance is at times faster than most American audiences can handle. In the span of a minute, Miller seems can go through five different characters, each with different accents, facial expressions, voices, and non-verbal noises. Unfortunately, sometimes I seemed to detect delay in the transition between different characters’ voices, but this problem may due more to my mind being slow than to Miller’s voice(s). Perhaps there’s also a lag due to the physical limitations of the range of the human throat, especially when switching between characters with radically different speaking styles.

Another impressive feat is the actor’s synchronization with the multimedia; music, video, and sound effects are timed precisely with the performance via a custom DVD. While the use of automated effects may be considered cheating to one-man-show purists, it proves invaluable background information on the scene and setting of the play. Without this visual information, those of us who haven’t read MacBeth in a few years would have had a much harder time keeping up with things.

I’m sure that had I managed to re-read MacBeth before attending the performance last Friday, I’d have been able to catch any number of clever adaptations of the script. MacHomer weaves in and out of the script so much that the viewer at times doesn’t notice when ridiculously out of place lines are inserted into the Elizabethan text. My personal favorite comes at the end of an especially well-metered soliloquy when MacHomer does Homer’s drool-voice and declares “Mmmm…iaambic pentaameter.” It’s funny, not only because it’s true, but because it’s exactly what Homer would say there.

In addition to the play itself, the audience is treated to two additional performances. In the first, the Simpsons sing “We Are the World,” a song that raised awareness for something back in the eighties. This song would be impressive by itself, but after an hour of Simpsons impersonations, the audience is both fully convinced of the man’s Springfield adapting abilities and tired of hearing them. As an encore Miller presents twenty-five of the world’s most annoying recording artists (chosen by him) singing “Bohemian Rhapsody.” While the artists chosen may be a few years out of date, the ones I recognized were extremely well impersonated. The Mick Jagger dance alone makes the whole evening worth it.