FuzzyCo

Still in Mississippi. Home soon.

My new favorite spam subject is "that mcgrady is garyville". I think I'm going to start using it as a disparaging remark. Oh man, that mcgrady is so garyville.

Waiting for our take-out dinner tonight (oh, Hellas Gyro, we love your greasiness so) we got the treat of watching 10 minutes of Fox News' The Lineup. First up, the correspondent they had on to talk about how kerazy and librul Rosie O'Donnell is was wearing the same outfit as the host. Embarrassing...

Then, their riveting* "internet correspondent" came on with a story that I read debunked four days ago. Which, in internet-time, is a hundred years ago.

* More sarcasm. He was a walking sleeping pill.

What's not to like about Over the Hedge? Great voice cast, cute animals, slapstick action, original Ben Folds songs, and a heart-warming message about family. Now I need to check out the comic strip. Team Gerdes score: A.

Our meal Friday night was so good I'm almost wondering if the Reids have been holding out on me -- in however many visits down here to Vicksburg we've never gone to either of these places.

First, running errands today we kept driving past the Goldie's Express* (3313 Pemberton Blvd, Vicksburg, MS) and there was a sign on a trailer out back that they had "HOT BOILED CAJUN CRAWFISH". On the way home for dinner I wondered aloud if we could try some over the weekend and the consensus in the car was "no time like the present". So we pulled through the drive-through (can you even walk up to Goldies Express?) and got two pounds of crawfish and some corn and potatoes.

Something about that order reminded my father-in-law David of tamales. Since he hasn't much of an appetite for much of anything lately, we all decided to scrap the planned hamburgers and go for an all carry-out dinner. We swung by The Tamale Place (2190 S Frontage Rd, Vicksburg, MS) and picked up a dozen hot tamales and some shrimp and pork Boudins (a Lousiana rice sausage).

(The Tamale Place's menu notes that it is "owned and operated by Margerey Sollys Brown and family - Not Associated With Any Other Business" which is confusing to the outsider, but my Vicksburg sources tell me it has something to do with some drama around Sollys Tamales (1921 Washington St, Vicksburg, MS) - "since 1938".)

We sat out on the patio and ate our carry-out feast. The crawfish were a lot of work, as peel-yourself crustaceans always are, but tasty and peppery (are you really supposed to suck on the heads, or is that something you trick yankees with?). The tamales were small by Chicago standards, but spicy and cheap. The boudin, both flavors, were delicious. The Shiner Bock was refreshing. All in all, an amazing dinner.

* We've been to Goldie's plenty of times, but Goldie's Express seems to be a related but different animal.

How's this for a lucky break, I was planning on seeing a certain show anyway, but they asked me to come tape the show so they comped me and paid me (a little) to do it. Score! (Shh... don't tell them I was going to pay them to see the show.)

I finally got my Nike+ dongle for my shoes and a (refurbished) iPod nano and now I can showing off to the world the miles I'm racking up in an automated fashion. Whee!

Shaun gave me a running log a few days after I had started running and I've logged 55 miles (mostly 3 mile runs down to Lawrence and back) over the last 5 weeks. And I've run in 3 states. And I don't think I had ever run 3 miles, in a row, before. So I think I'm doing fine.

I know I had mentioned the Hal Higdon training schedules, but for my marathon training I'm going with the program set out in the Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer. This is a book that comes out of a class at the University of Northern Iowa that is a joint class between a psychology professor and a phys. ed. professor -- the phys. ed. professor brings the training you need to complete a marathon and the psychology professor brings a lot of self-helpy stuff about the mental preparation you need to get through the training process and then the race itself. I'd make fun of the self-helpy stuff, except that it seems to be helping already. And the book is aimed squarely at the non-runner and getting you to complete a marathon. Not do it with a great time or lose a lot of weight or any other side goals -- simply complete a marathon. Since that's what I'm trying to do, it seems like the perfect training program for me.

And as part of that, the training schedule is actually lighter than many of the others I've seen. The official "training" is only 16 weeks and so doesn't begin until June 18. Right now I'm in "pre-training", where I'm just supposed to get comfortable running for 40 minutes and/or 3 miles. Which is where I'm at. (I ran 4 miles in Vicksburg, but it was in the form of run 2 miles - stop at the Highway 61 Coffeehouse for an Italian soda and conversation - run 2 miles back.

I'll put a copy of this Nike+ widget on the sidebar, so you can always see how many miles I'm up to.

This is kind of apropos of nothing, but I just really like the icons on the website for the Festival of Sanfermin in Pamplona, Spain (best known for the "running of the bulls" that happens during the festival). It's the work of clothing/design company Kukuxumusu, who have plenty of other cute designs. Cute!

While we were in Vicksburg this last visit, I scanned in David and Tricia's wedding album. Dig it, man!

Oh, how I love movie lists, because it always makes me realize how many movies I haven't seen. Which also makes me kind of hate movie lists. What, movie list, do you think I'm made of time?!?

Ahem.

Here's a list of the 25 Best Movies You've Never Seen and yeah, they're right, because I've only seen 3 and a half* of them. Which is odd, because this list is full of the kinds of movies I usually end up watching when I'm not watching the kinds of movies that are on the "100 best movies of the century" lists. OK, time to add a bunch more movies to the queue.

* Some of you may know about the part of my job that involves fast-forwarding through movies. I've done that with Bully.

(via Outside Counsel)

Once was recommended to Erica and she decided to wanted to see it on a date night last week. I took a glance at Rotten Tomatoes and saw that it had gotten 97% on the critics tomatometer. I immediately closed the window -- if a movie is recommended a couple of times, I'd rather see it without any extra information that might color my experience of watching the movie. The next day the Regular Guy on XRT reviewed Once -- I managed to miss the review, but heard the DJs say, "wow, the Regular Guy really liked that movie". Great -- another data point in favor of the movie.

So, with the provisio that you enjoy patient (some might even say slow), intimate movies, I'll add my voice to those saying "go see Once".

If you are the sort who wants more detail before you see a movie, I'll note that this is a sort of a kind of musical -- but no one bursts into song for no reason -- the two main characters ("guy" and "girl") are both musicians and so they burst into song for reason. The guy is played by Glen Hansard of The Frames and the girl is Markéta Irglová, also a musician, and they really wrote all the songs they perform in the movie.

Oh, and I was a little distracted during the first part of the movie, because it was filmed with handheld (digital?) cameras and it looks a lot like a Neutrino Project (with better sound than we ever get).

Andrea, Jin, and I acccepted the city's challenge this weekend and rode down (and back) the entire length of the lakefront path. I got a little sunburnt and nearly got in two accidents, but otherwise we had a grand time.

(If you're thinking of doing the trip, I wrote up some more detailed suggestions for the Chicago Metblog.)

Sometimes you need to just tell people in the office why they might be interested in a show.

I've got a Flickr set up of photos from our trip to Vicksburg a few weeks ago. It's mostly pictures of cats. (It just happened that way.) There's also a nice couple of before and after shots of Woofer's trip to the groomer.

We're coming up on our 1st wedding anniversary. I'm not sure if you're aware that the 1st anniversary is traditionally matching clothing (s'true -- look it up). Fortunately, my sister is aware of this. Thanks, Heidi!

I saw David O'Doherty do his show "World Champion of Some Things" at the Edinburgh Fringe back in 2004 and I was an instant fan. English (and Irish, I guess) comedy has a delightful space in-between what we would call "stand-up comedy" and "a one man show" and that's where David and his "Very Low Energy Musical Whimsey (VLEMW)" reside. So, anyway, I'd call myself a fan, but as I haven't been back to Edinburgh nor Ireland since 2004, I've had to content myself with memories of the show. Now, however, David has finally released an album, recorded in his flat in front of a few friends: Giggle Me Timbers (Jokes Ahoy!). There are some songs (the aforementioned VLEMW) and some jokes and remarkably little pirate material.

FuzzyCo Grade: A

Kristen's friends found a kitten in an airshaft in a house they're renovating and no shelter would take him, so Kristen is taking care of him. The kitten's working title is "Fish" (so that Shaun can say, "I didn't know my girlfriend was getting another cat -- she said it was a fish.") but I think Shaft might be more appropriate. Since he was found in, you know... Shut your mouth!

There were just a very few moments in the second season of The Wire when I thought an acting choice or a camera shot was un-subtle, which is quite a testament to all of the other perfect moments that made up the show.

I didn't really expound on the show when I finished the first season, because I kinda figured everyone in the world but me had seen this show. Since recent conversations seem to proven that untrue, I'll summarize for you. The Wire is set in Baltimore and each season follows a single criminal case from investigation through whatever arrests and charges are made. It's not a mystery, because we get to see things from the criminals' perspective just as often as the cops. Both sides of the law are filled with politics, drama, personal issues, and lucky/unlucky breaks.

The first season delved into the world of a mid-level drug dealer and his crew. This season expands the scope to include the smugglers who are supplying the drug dealers, as well as smuggling human traffic and stolen goods.

Tonight I'm in the MAELSTROM (yes, the all-caps are part of the show title) -- the impovised story-telling portion of WNEP Theater's SKALD (ditto) story-telling festival. Five other contestants and I will tell 3-, 2-, and 1-minute improvised story, about topics pulled out of a hat. I'm a little nervous, but I think it's just that normal pre-improv show nervousness of "I don't know what I'm going to say," which is, at some level, the point.

8:00pm at the Chicago Cultural Center - Studio Theater, 77 E Randolph, Chicago.
Tickets $15.

SFW*:

NSFWITHNSOH**:

* Safe For Work
* Not Safe For Work If They Have No Sense Of Humor

(via Superpunk and Don Hall)

photo by Erica Gerdes

A couple of things happened tonight at the MAELSTROM. For one, for reasons no one is sure of yet, Mike Rosolio didn't show up to the show. Patrick Brennan had just come to run the lights for the show and he bravely stepped up and joined us on stage.

For another, I won.

Yippee! I'm still a little surprised -- everyone's stories were great. It was great to win, with the extra nice bonus that the prize gift certificates were all to places I already shop: Intelligentsia (I went there twice tonight), Chicago Comics, and Threadless.

I told a 3-minute story about murder by giant robot (since people asked, a mecha is a giant robot controlled by a person riding inside it, like in Robotech or Voltron), a 2-minute story about "cicadas and 4 am at Taco Bell", and a 1-minute story about the creation of the world, the founding of Chicago, and "truck stop love".

Everyone had awesome stories -- Jen told her 1-minute story about "a pet 3-legged mule" in a made-up language, but we all knew exactly what was going on. Bob launched into his 3-minute story tying together surfing, coffee, world hunger, and the Boy Scouts with nary a skipped beat. Mike fit the entire history of childbirth from ancient times to the present in a 2-minute story. Patrick had a hilarious 60 second introduction to his 3-minute story about how great it would be to win because it would surprise his wife. Mary Jo wove "Mongolian love with flute and fish" into a charming story of 3rd Grade love.

There's one more event in the SKALD festival -- the SKALD proper, where 10 storytellers each tell a prepared 7-minute story. I can't be there, but you can! (Maybe -- price and participation may vary. Check local listings.)

P.S. I won!

Update: Don has more pictures.

Saturday morning all of us Don't Spit the Water comics hauled our costumes down to the Playground to record character introductions that Steve is going to be using for something... that... I didn't quite understand... Anyhoo, since all we were doing was saying our character name, more or less, it took about 10 seconds to record a 10-second bit. Right?

Usually when I audition for a show, I don't mention it until (that is, if) I've been cast. Because, you know, it's hard to keep up this image of a stellar entertainment career if y'all know about all the shows I don't get into. But Impress These Apes have posted a teaser video for their second season that includes everyone who auditioned this last weekend. So there's no hiding now. I'm at 1:01 if you just want to catch my 4 seconds of glory.

So, I did the first run of my 'official' marathon training this morning. As if to test my resolve about this whole enterprise, I had a little tickle in the back of throat last night and woke up this morning with a full-on sore throat and stuffed-up nose. "Too bad, body," I said to myself, "we're running anyway." It was just 3 miles, so it felt pretty regular at this point.

Not to be an ad for the Nike+ or anything (well, too late with all the charts and widgets I'm posting) but this morning was the first time I used its distance-goal mode. It was pretty nice because it meant I didn't have to stick to a specific preplanned route, I could just run along the path until the little lady in my ear said "halfway" and then turn around and retrace my steps.

I also ran into Kenner and Agnes on the path, again. They're training for the Florence Marathon (Italia!) and I need to see how their training schedule matches up with mine so maybe we can do some runs together.

It's been a long-standing rule at FuzzyCo that if you advertise your product or service to us via Unsolicted Commerical Email (aka The Spam) then we can't buy it, even if we might have wanted to. (It's happened -- I've opened an email, thought "hey, that's a neat gadget" and then realized that it's from a company I've never given my email address.)

In a similar vein, I'm announcing a new rule: if you advertise your product or service using fake "lost pet" flyers, then we can't purchase or support your efforts, regardless of our feelings about your offerings. Real lost pet flyers are too important to have the medium polluted with commercial messages. Not that I wanted to watch John from Cincinnati anyway, but it's definitely off the list now.

You're never going to buy Wii Sports, because it comes with every Wii. Bowling, Tennis, and Golf are pretty fun, but it might be nice if there was more to Baseball than pitching and hitting and I've never met anyone who could actually control Boxing -- everyone just flails around and whoever flails the most wins.

Wii Play has just 9 mini-games and it's a good thing that it comes with a free Wiimote, because you'd be really mad if you'd spent $50 and only got this wafer-thin hint of a game. As it is, you're really getting the second Wiimote you need anyway and getting the game for $10 -- which still might be a bit much. Though Erica did get lost in the Mii-matching/finding game (38 levels is her current record).

Soon I Will Be Invincible is Austin Grossman's debut novel and it's rather good. It's a superhero adventure told in alternating chapters by an experienced evil genius (he's in prison for the twelveth time when the book starts) and a new cyborg hero. The action of the story is straight out of a silver age comic book (the villian says things outloud like "Who dares?" and "In the coming era I will rule the world, as is my right.") but the inner lives of the two narrators are complex and authentic.

FuzzyCo grade: A

Your Movie Sucks is a sequel of sorts to Roger Ebert's earlier I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie -- both collections of his reviews of movies he enjoyed the least. The earlier book covered a few decades of reviews and so it had the stringent requirement of one star or less; the new book covers just the 21st century and so, I assume to pad out the book a bit, includes 1.5 star movies. It does mean that some of the reviews are less vitriolic and more Ebert basically saying, "eh."

But when Ebert is on a tear, ripping into a terrible movie, it's quite a sight to behold. The book opens with an extended introduction detailing a few reviews that resulted in public exchanges with the director or stars, like Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (from which review comes the title of the book) and Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny.

It should be noted that these books are, like so much these days, effectively free online -- just go to the Advanced Search on Ebert's site, set the "Star rating To" field to one or one-and-a-half stars, and click Submit. But it's harder to take your computer into the bathroom, which just might be the natural home for this sort of book. Of course, you might also want to use it as a sort of affirmational -- read one of these reviews right before you leave the house and there will be a certain spring in your step. No matter what you do or don't do during the day, at least you didn't make a terrible movie.

The artificial, extended pause just before a result or contestant's name is announced on a reality show is over. ("The next name I'm going to call is.......") I so decree. It has become a cliche, but worse, a useless cliche. I mean, the horror movie cliche of "we all jumped at that noise but it was just a cat" is despised, but it works -- you jump at the noise. The extended pause no longer works. The contestants are as nervous as they're going to be anyway. And it doesn't increase our tension, because we're used to it. It's just annoying at this point. Please note. Over.

Erica and I saw this hit documentary about a font tonight. Helvetica is a history of the 50-year-old typeface and its influence on design -- and the documentary ends up as an overview of post-war design in general. It was delightful and fascinating. Even Erica, who is not a designer, thought it was great.

We've found ourselves unexpectedly charmed by the Food Network show Ace of Cakes. The show focuses on a custom cake bakery in Baltimore and each week follows Duff Goldman and his staff as they create 2 or 3 'extreme' custom cakes. The combination of the good humor of the staff and meeting design challenges is a winner for us.

Talking about this show is as good an opportunity as any to address something that's been brewing in my head for a while. I think we've reached the point where the term 'Reality TV' really doesn't convey much about a show -- within the supposed one genre we have everything from competitive shows like American Idol or America's Next Top Model, which really owe their lineage to game shows, to shows that approach documentary work, like Ace of Cakes or Miami Ink. I'm not sure what good replacement terms are, but I think we need them to speak intelligently about the different categories of TV shows.

Here are two Food Network shows that we've been sampling (damn you, Food Network -- it's so easy to get sucked in by your shows) and one has made it onto our Tivo SeasonPass(tm) list and the other has not.

In each episode of Dinner: Impossible Chef Robert Irvine is assigned a near-impossible culinary task. Like, make 7000 hors d'oeuvres for 4000 guests in 18 hours. I think a commonality in many of the shows I really like is skilled people doing a task well, and Chef Robert really delivers on that ground. Tivo thumbs up.

Throwdown with Bobby Flay might seem to fall into the same category: each week a cooking expert is told that they're having a Food Network profile filmed, but really Bobby Flay is going to challenge them in their area of specialty. Flay is rarely an expert in the same field (wedding cakes, for example, were very much out of his expertise) and there's some interesting stuff as he researches the style in his test kitchen. And neither Flay nor the show is at all mean-spirited. But nonetheless, these folks are set up to believe that they're simply being honored, when suddenly a famous chef shows up to challenge them. One episode we saw culminated at a woman's birthday party where she thought she was going to be cooking for her friends (and the cameras) and then she was faced with Bobby Flay and a guest judge of her cooking. We don't like innocent people getting suckered around here. Tivo thumbs down.

Don pegged me in the head with this one.

The purpose of this meme is to get people talking about their passion in life. It’s called the 5/5 meme. Five questions, then pass it to five people. "Expertise" could be your profession, hobby, or area of intense interest.

Name your area of expertise/interest:
OK, so the thing is that I do a lot of different things, and I tend to throw myself into new areas with extreme vigor and enthusiasm. Last summer, for example, I decided that I needed to watch more skateboard videos and so I watched a lot of skateboard videos and researched the history of them and so on and so forth. I'm probably best known for my activities in improvisational theater, but I'm also a photographer and a graphics technology specialist/network analyst (i.e. computer guy) and a filmmaker and a graphic designer and a (new) marathoner and juggler and so on and so forth. I think the overriding story of my life has been to constantly try new things. I realize that's not quite the "I like ponys!" response this meme to trying to elicit, but I'm going with it.

How did you become interested in it?
My dad was an electrical engineer by day and a photographer on the weekends, so I've always had that close influence of knowing that people could have multiple skills -- you know, that you didn't have to be just a fireman or a forest ranger or whatever sort of simplistic career path a kid thinks one might go on. And my mom was always teaching me skills and crafts -- I learned to cook and bake and sew and garden and we made puppets and all sorts of crafts. So I think I've always just believed that, pretty much, if you saw something you thought was cool, you could learn how to do it.

How did you learn to do it?
I was about to say, "it depends on which skill you're talking about" but then I realized that (and Shaun is going to laugh at this one) there actually is a common answer -- I read a lot of books. It really is my default solution to any problem. When I decided to run the Chicago Marathon, did I sign up for for one of those big training groups? Nope, I bought a book.

Who has been your biggest influence?
Besides my mom and dad (as mentioned above) I think my biggest influence for multi-disciplinarism (like that? I just made it up) was all the sci-fi I read as a kid. The heroes of the juvenile sci-fi of that era were always jack-of-all-trades. There's even this list that Lazarus Long, the hero of several Robert Heinlein books, gives that's all the things a well-rounded person should be able to do. Oh, here, I found it:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

I now peg in the head Katie, Christopher, Erica, Noah, and Lawrence.

Some photos from Tuesday's Chicago Underground Comedy. No photos of Dan, because I was busy filming his set. You can check out Dan's bits and hear how much the crowd loved him. It's worth noting that Hans Holsen also knocked it out of the park -- pretty good for two guys who just started doing stand-up a few months ago.

This is largely a note for myself. Vatterott has four Ts and one R.

The good news is that I don't have to be embarrassed that I let y'all know I was auditioning for Impress These Apes, because I was cast. The shows will be Thursdays from August 2 to September 20 at the iO Theater (3541 N Clark), at 8 pm.

If you aren't familiar with the show from when Erica was a contestant, the show consists of 8 weeks of comedy challenges. We get our first challenge later this week and we'll have a month to work on it before the show opens, but after that we'll get each challenge at the end of the show and have just a week to prepare.

It looks like it's going to be a great show, simply based on the cast. It's too bad I'm going to have to destroy them all.

If you'd like to see my audition in full, here it is.

Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel Without a Pulse was built with the Halo engine, which means that some of the levels have vehicles you can drive, and that I couldn't drive any of them for shit. (I'm sure it's sacrilege, but I can't stand the controls in Halo.) It was fun to play the other side of the usual zombie film motif and eat a bunch of brains. FuzzyCo grade: B-

You might remember Jin Kim as "one of the zombies in that FuzzyCo short" or "the guy who fights Death in that other FuzzyCo short" but now he's a "Hollywood voice" in a high-profile video game. Jin was already the voice of Lui Kang in Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks, but this puts Jin's name in the same article (and game) as Chow Yun Fat.

Slither is a really good scary monster movie. Amazingly, for a movie of its genre, nobody does anything dumb. (Or at least, nothing dumb that's out of character.) FuzzyCo Grade: A

I can't get enough of this show. I watched the penultimate episode of the season and should have gone to bed, but I just had to finish out the season and watch the last episode. This season veered a little back towards conventional television -- stuff like Colvin's tour of the Western for Carcetti just happening to be on the same day as a police/community meeting was a little bit of a stretch. And it probably had the most obviously happy ending of any of the seasons so far. But there's was so much going on, I forgave them that. And, oh, the drama! And the betrayals! And the redemptions! I can't wait to start watching the next season.

The Wire - Season 3.

(Originally published on the Chicago Metblog.)

The Chicago Park District is running a challenge all summer (Memorial Day to Labor Day) to ride your bike along the entire 18 mile Lakefront Path, from the Margate Fieldhouse (4921 N Marine Dr) to Rainbow Beach & Park (3111 E 77th St) (or vice versa). Complete the challenge and you'll get a t-shirt (they call it a "yellow jersey", but it's a t-shirt) (and they were out of smalls).

Two friends and I completed the challenge this weekend and it was a great way to spend a Sunday morning. Path traffic wasn't too bad except in the Belmont to Navy Pier stretch, and even there I only got into two near-accidents.

I'll add to the official information a couple of hints:

• Coming from the south, take the next underpass to the left after Lawrence to get to the Margate Fieldhouse. If you get to Foster, you've gone too far.
• Coming from the north, when the trail ends, just keep going south on the sidewalk until you get to the northern corner of Rainbow Park. Follow the dirt path to the basketball court, turn right onto the path past the handball courts, take a left at the memorial to the Rainbow Division and follow the road down through the parking lot to the main building.
• The hours for the two buildings are more complicated than what are listed (for example, the Margate Fieldhouse doesn't open until 9 on weekends). The hours are changing throughout the summer, too, so it'd be best to call ahead and make sure the buildings are open when you plan to start out on your trip.
• Don't forget sunscreen -- my elbows are pink.

The staff person at the Margate Fieldhouse told us that about 14 people had completed the challenge so far. So there should be plenty of t-shirts left.