Well, there's that, then. I was impressed right off the bat with audacity of the flap blurb -- in lieu of any plot summary or such it simply read "We now present the seventh and final installment in the epic tale of Harry Potter." In other words, "look, if you don't know who Harry Potter is at this point, we don't need your business -- just go crawl back into whatever cave you're living in."
I found it somewhat darker and heavier* than the first six, but it's been a build to that I suppose. Now I'm off to read all the sites I was avoiding for the sake of spoilers.
The second season of Impress These Apes -- the eight-week (non-elimination) comedy competition judged by three apes from the future -- opens tonight at 8 pm at the iO Theatre. I've had four weeks to write an original song to introduce myself to the audience and judges and tonight I'll be performing it whilst accompanying myself on a musical instrument. A musical instrument that I learned to play a week and a half ago, I might add (not to scare you off). After tonight I'll be getting a challenge at the end of each show that I'll have to perform the next week. This happy look? It's from realizing that I've signed up for eight weeks of deadlines. This actually happy look? It's because my song is pretty funny and I think you'll like it. So come to the show (or wait for the inevitable video) (but really, come to the show).
So our challenge for the first week was to write an autobiographical song and accompany ourselves on an instrument.
The song came pretty easy -- I knew I wanted to do a rocking song about how awesome I am. But I don't actually play the guitar. At first I thought I'd play some sort of toy guitar, much as Margaret did. Noah loaned me a very realistic looking Fender toy that supposedly makes neat guitar sounds. But he hasn't had batteries in it for years -- he uses it as a prop for puppets -- and it wouldn't make any noise for me. I flirted briefly with the idea of building a cigar box guitar, but Ben talked me down from that one (great idea, he said, but not when we're on a deadline). But then Greg came through like the champion friend he is and loaned me a real guitar. Ben came over before Uptown Sound* rehearsal one day and showed me how to tune the guitar to an open E-flat tuning so that I could make major chords by putting one finger all the way across a fret. He also gave me a 5 minute lesson on chord progressions and left me with his mantra: "Practice makes less terrible." Erica and Kate got to hear the song a couple dozen times over and made great suggestions.
So what I'm saying is that I have awesome friends.
The Apes gave me 22 points (out of a possible 30) which puts me in sixth place (out of eight). But that isn't as bad as it sounds, because the field is really tight -- the leader (Amanda) has 25 points and then there are two people tied at 24 and two at 23.
Of note, if you followed the first season, is that the bonus point system has been radically changed. The person in last place has the chance to perform a ridiculous challenge (tonight, to recite the alphabet backwards in less than 30 seconds) to either win or lose (if they fail) 5 points. They can also pass, which passes the challenge along to the next place holder.
Our challenge for next week is to recreate a scene from a movie, adapted for the stage (much like what Bob Ladewig did for the first season's free-for-all finale). We're allowed one friend to help us perform and one of the judging criteria will be recreation of details. Good thing I'm going out of town for the weekend, or I might be able to really get started!
Can we get serious for a second and talk about how redonkulously gorgeous it was in Central Oregon? At one point, Erica had me pull the car over so she could process the natural wonder and beauty we'd already seen before we went on to any more.
Anyway, also gorgeous was Andrea Swanson in her wedding dress. We were in Oregon to attend Andrea's marriage to Michael Strening, Jr. at the Black Butte Ranch. It was one of the funnest weddings I've ever been to, and it was really convienent how close everything was on the ranch (which is more golf-resort than ranch). The day of the wedding, we helped set up some stuff and then went and canoed for half-an-hour and still had time to change into our wedding clothes with no rush at all.
I also did my 12 mile run on the ranch. In contrast to my usual half-way-out-and-back method, I sat down the night before with a map of the resort and figured out that a circuit of the bike path around the whole ranch would be just about 12 miles, so I did that. It turned out to be 11, so I had to overshoot our room and then come back. But in all it was pretty cool to get to see the scope of the whole place. I ran past horses and deer, through a meadow, around lakes, and up some easy hills. Next weekend, the half-marathon!
MI:3 opens with a terrifying torture scene. After that, it's just sort of an adequate action movie. And, not to give away too many spoilers on a year old movie, there was only a double-cross where I was expecting at least a triple- or quadruple-cross.
The challenge for tonight's Impress These Apes is to reenact a scene from a favorite movie as accurately as possible, with the help of one friend.
Right after last week's show, Erica and I left for Oregon for 4 days, during which time there was little opportunity to even think about what scene I was going to do, let alone actually research movies. So I really only got started on Monday night. Once I had picked a scene, I needed a collaborator who would be willing to jump in with both feet with minimal preparation. Like, say, a Neo-Futurist, used to preparing and performing 2-12 new pieces a week (depending on an audience's roll of a die) in their signature show, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. Fortunately, I got one. The versatile Bilal Dardai will be joining me in a scene from... come to the show and find out!
P.S. I made my main prop out of a cardboard box, two three-ring binders, and some spare computer parts. What could it possibly be??!?
After he saw the video of Fuzzy Gerdes is Totally Awesome, my friend Scotto reminded me by IM about a song Joey Adams and I wrote and performed together (Joey, being an actually talented musician, did most of the writing and performing) loosely titled the Ba-ba-ba-ba song (after the chorus). The song was about an epic journey he and I made to Michigan and then Chicago one Spring Break. I learned to drive a stick shift at the start of the trip. Epic! There was a sudden snow storm when he was dropping me off in Chicago (where I was visting my old roommate Enio Rigolin) and his windshield wiper broke. Even more epic! All that and more was in the song. We performed it a few times at the Guru Java and such, but as far as I know, no recording of the song exists.
Two:
The Icemakers of the Revolution were a funky-hippy-political band back in West Lafayette, IN while I was going to school at Purdue. I got to be friends with the band and went on a couple of gig roadtrips with them. On the way back from one such, just a couple hours down the road in Indianapolis, my darling little Datsun 210 got a flat. I was giving some of the band members a ride in my car and the other car, a giant Suburban that easily held all of the band's gear, saw that we had pulled over and got off at the next exit and circled back. So I had the whole band standing around me while I dug through my trunk. I had a spare, and it had plenty of air, but I couldn't find a jack. I was sort of half-living out of my car at that point, so I had plenty of, ahem, junk in my trunk. Eventually I had to give up -- I had no jack. We tried the one off the Suburban, but at its most-collapsed state it was still too tall to fit under the Datsun. In the end, 3 or 4 band members just lifted up the Datsun while I hurriedly changed the tire. Embarassing. And then the Icemakers put a song about it on their third (and last) album, Fisheye Frenzy.
Dogrocket is a beeps-and-loops side-project of R. Buzzy's Phil Schuldt. For some reason (perhaps my awesomeness (see below)) Phil wrote a song about me.
You've watched the video about 300 times already, but I just know that you want to carry Fuzzy Gerdes is Totally Awesome everywhere you go on your iPod. So you can be reminded of how awesome I am. All the time.
I'm half-way through my training and for this weekend's long run I'll be running in the LaSalle Bank Chicago Distance Classic (which happens to be a half-marathon) on Sunday morning. My bib number is 7648 if you want to find my results before I blog them.
A common suggestion from friends and the marathon books I've been reading is that to get prepared for the size of the marathon and the details of running an organized race it would be a good idea to run a smaller race ahead of time. This last weekend, my planned 14-mile training run coincided with the Chicago Distance Classic half-marathon, so I signed up.
As an experience, it was a blast. Erica came along to cheer me on, we got to run on city streets and Lake Shore Drive, I got a medal with a penguin on it, people handed me water just like you see on TV, etc., etc.
As a run... it was OK. I didn't get a lot of sleep the night before (stoopid 6:30 am start time) and I think I was a little enthusiastic out of the gate and ran a little too hard. I ended up with a ton of knee pain starting at mile 11 and did a fair amount of walking in those last two miles. My "chip time" for the 13.1 miles was 2:29:40, which means I finished 6504 out of 8720 finishers. I've been trying really hard to not care about time and concentrate on finishing, but as I was hobbling though mile 12, the 2:30 pace group caught up to me and I decided that I didn't want them to beat me to the finish line. So I hobbled a little faster and beat them by 20 seconds. In your face, 2:30!
Best t-shirt I saw:
Front: Length: 13.1
Back: That's what she said.
Least helpful supporter, who I think thought he was being helpful, around mile 10:
"C'mon runners, c'mon. There are plenty of people already at the finish line."
I carried my little camera with me on the run and grabbed a few shots along the way.
Warning: Video contains a bunch of swearing (well, one swear word over and over) and might be NSFW.
Our week 2 challenge for Impress These Apes was to recreate a scene from a movie, with accuracy and details being stressed. I decided to do the beating up the printer scene from Office Space and built a printer and recruited my friend Bilal to play Samir. I think we did a pretty bang-up job (pun intended) and the judges scored us all eights. I remain in sixth place.
The challenge for next week is create a music video for a song that we were randomly assigned. I got Dirt Bike by They Might Be Giants. I filmed all my footage over the weekend and now I've got 3 days to edit it together. I'm pretty excited about my concepts -- I think this might be an actually-good video for the song, not just a joke.
Can you break the secret code and find the word "Encryption"?
I'm in a training class in the Loop all week, if any of my Loop-bound brothers and sisters wanted to do lunch. My one constraint is that our instructor hates to wait in line for lunch and so we're taking off from 11 am to noon.
I guess we're back on the air, here. If you've tried to send me email over the last 24 hours or so and it bounced, please send it again -- I think we're back up and stable now (fingers crossed). If you enjoy car wrecks, you can go read about how my internet host had a bout of crippling slowness, thought they fixed it, discovered they had not, and then discovered that a process in their system had decided that the best response to the whole situation was to delete everyone's DNS records. La la la. Oh yeah, and all the while their supposedly off-network status page that's supposed to kept us loyal customers appraised of network problems like this got borked, too.
For future reference, if this site is ever down for any extended period of time, I'll likely post on fuzzygerdes.vox.com. Unless, like today, I'm in a training class all day without real Net access. Urp.
This week was a little different than the other weeks of Impress These Apes were (and are going to be) because by the time we got to the theater we were done. During last week's show we were randomly assigned a song and we had to shoot a music video for the song and bring it on DVD to the show. So it was very relaxed in the green room before the show. No last minute going over of lines or checking props -- all we had to do was sit back and watch.
I had the song Dirt Bike by They Might Be Giants. It was pretty much perfect for me -- in contrast to the more rock-out numbers most people got, it was an odd, dreamy little number whose lyrics don't really make sense. But one listen and I started to get a picture in my head of what it needed to look like.
I'm proud to note that this was a one-man production. I filmed, animated, and edited the whole thing myself (except for the footage at the end, which is from four different films at the Prelinger archive). Some of my friends offered to help, but I politely (I hope) turned them down. I do need to thank Jacque who made the finger-puppet of Jose. And the Knights for giving us the weird coconut-tiki-pirate-ukelele guy.
So, anyway, the judges liked it -- it got 39 out of 40 points (the extra 10 possible points this week were from the guest human judge - Miss Mia of Chic-a-go-go). I actually got a little light-headed when I got the 3rd "10". (And as impressive as that might be, I was out-scored by Brady, who got a perfect 40.)
For next week we have to make a puppet and then perform a 4 minute stand-up routine with it. S'awright.
I've reached the point in my training program where the amount of time it takes to complete each of the runs is becoming a factor. I'm a bit jealous, in fact, of the AIDS Marathon training that Kenner and Agnes are doing -- it's more weeks over all, but they never run more than 40 minutes a day in their mid-week runs. (Their training does, however, include the unbelievable-to-me final training run of 26 miles.) This week I ended up skipping my 7 mile Wednesday run because I just didn't have 80 minutes to spare, and I did my Thursday run at 10:30 pm after Apes.
So this morning when it was pouring down rain it was something of a test of will, a quick check-in of "am I really going through with all of this", to get out and run 16 miles. Fortunately, I had already arranged with Matt to run with him today and when I called to see what he felt about running in the rain his response was "I love running in the rain!"
Let me list some of the great things about this run: the rain was warm and it wasn't too bad, Matt is a delightful conversationalist, and I finished the run with plenty of energy. Let me list the terrible thing about the run: my ITBs starting killing me around mile 11. So I've been icing my knees and eating ibuprofen like candy for the rest of the day. We'll see how this goes.
And speaking of the West Lafayette, Indiana band the Icemakers of the Revolution, with the permission of band member Stephen John Hartnett, here are their second and third three albums and cassingle*:
* I'd have to buy a cassette player to digitize the first one I have an imperfect setup for digitizing cassettes (the only format Door #3 was released in), but it works.
** Many thanks to Jason DuFair for finding his copy of this cassette and digitizing it.
In a similar vein, I just found (and see that Jase found them three years ago -- I'm slow) these live recordings of Robert Shannon Meitus and the Dorkestra and Carrie Newcomer from 1991, recorded by David Whittemore. I'm sure I was at that Earth Day concert. Sometimes I re-listen to music I thought was great 15 years ago and discover that it's kinda dumb. I'm happy that that's not the case with these songs, and I don't think that's just the nostalgia talking.
Parker has been 'capped' by Anton at the Lolcatgenerator. My photos of Rio and Bear have also been... enhanced. Ah, Creative Commons, what can't you do.
This has come up a few times, so I thought I'd stick this up here where I could point my friends at it if it came up again. The table below is the "Preliminary Training Program" from the Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer. It's the exercise regime they suggest for total non-runners before starting the 'official' 16-week marathon training program, which starts with running 3 miles a day. Now, I must heartily disclaim that A) I am not a trainer or coach -- I'm just a guy who started running recently and B) this chart is from a book for Marathoners, and most of my friends who are running are just trying to get to a comfortable 5K. In fact, if you google "couch to 5k" you'll find plenty of greatprograms, with charts rather similar to the one below. The other thing to note is that you don't have to do all eleven weeks -- jump into the chart at the point you feel comfortable. (Except Dan -- Dan, you are required to do all 11 weeks. Because I said so.)
Week
Walking/Jogging Pace
Training Days per Week
Total Time (minutes)
1
Moderate walking pace (17-20 min./mile)
3
30
2
Moderate walking pace (17-20 min./mile)
4
30
3
Fast walking pace (13-16 min./mile)
3
30
4
Fast walking pace (13-16 min./mile)
4
45
5
Jog for 5 min. and then walk at fast pace for 5 min. Repeat twice.
3
30
6
Jog for 10 min. and then walk at fast pace for 5 min. Repeat once.
3
30
7
Jog for 15 min. and then walk at fast pace for 5 min. Repeat once.
4
40
8
Jog for 20 min. and then walk at fast pace for 5 min. Repeat once.
Yesterday, I mentioned to Kenner that I was having trouble with my Iliotibial Band after Sunday's run and he said that he'd had some success with a foam roller and that I should pick one up at Fleet Feet. I was fretting on the way home that I didn't have time to stop by the store and pick one up, but what was waiting for me but a foam roller (with handy diagram)! Barely moments back from her honeymoon, Andrea Strening (neé Swanson) had read my post about my problem and dropped by with the solution. What wonderful friends I have.
Lots of ice and ibuprofen, and I 'rolled' last night and this morning and felt 200% better today. I'm thinking of going out for at least a shuffle around the block tomorrow, but I'm also pretty sure that's a terrible idea.
Our challenge for this week's Apes is to build a puppet and then perform a comedy routine with it. Above you can behold (as it beholds you) a teaser of what I just finished building. Kids, watch out, hot glue guns are hot, as is the glue that comes out of them. Hence the name.
Hey, we're looking for a new apartment in the Edgewater area, if you happen to know of any. Now, we're not just looking for any old place -- we're trying not to think of it as running away from this place (although, we are, kinda) but as moving towards a better place (come to the light, Team Gerdes...). So we'd like to stay in this area, probably. The cats are coming with us, of course. Two bedrooms. Spacious would be great. Lots of storage. In-unit laundry and parking would be big pluses. We're leaning towards second floor and up. Sound like somewhere you know?
Two weeks ago, I saw a woman growl a list of things she enjoys, such as “being on time.” Last week, I saw two guys re-enact a scene from Brokeback Mountain. Tonight…I have no idea. That’s sort of the beauty of the kinetic Impress These Apes. If you haven’t been yet, you’re missing out on one of my favorite activities, and one of the city’s more impressive–and unpredictable–comedy shows.
Nina Metz came to week 3 and reviewed the show for the Chicago Tribune. She seemed to like it:
The show is scripted and improvised. The talents are rehearsed (or with the videos, filmed in advance), and the host, scorekeeper, and judges offer their comments off-the-cuff. The final result is daffy and spot-on. Improvisers are notoriously lazy in preparation, but the participants here actually do the homework, tackling each challenge with a creative spirit and wicked glee.
In related news, my week 2 collaborator Bilal Dardai got a nice shoutout in Chris Jones' review of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind in the same issue of the Tribune:
First off, thanks so much to all the audience members who braved the redonkulous storms to come and see some puppet shows.
Anyway, over seven minutes? Really? Dang, I thought I was running a tight four minutes there. Oops. Also an oops (and here's your little behind the scenes insight) -- Bindlestick Joe was supposed to have the high squeaky voice and Can O'Beans Joe the low voice. So when I made Can O'Beans Joe have the squeaky voice, I knew I was sunk. And, indeed, I messed them up all through the piece. And I really want to publicly apologize to Garrett for fussing at him at the end of the piece -- frankly I was panicking a little as I was out of material and I didn't want to drag it on any longer. Why I didn't just break character and say "that's my piece" I'm not sure.
This week's Apes challenge was to build a puppet and then do a comedy routine with it. (I think the challenge exactly said "a standup routine" which I kind of stretched.) I used to make a lot of puppets with my mom when I was a kid, but I haven't made any in years. But I've had hobos on the mind lately, because of John Hodgman's The Areas of My Expertise and then Apelad's Laugh Out Loud Cats (we own, by the way, the original of this one). And I've certainly played multiple characters plenty of times in both my Sybilization pieces and in Bare shows. So I decided to make the multiple puppets and have them do most of the talking and kinda leave the hobo out of it. You can watch the video above or check out photos Erica took.
In any case, despite all of my kvetching above, the judges were impressed and I came away with a score of 35 (out of 40) which has put me in first place. (And the 35 points tied with Amanda for the high score for the week.) It's still a tight competition, as only 8 points separate me at first from seventh place. (Or fourth, depending on how you look at it, as four people have the same score.)
Our challenge for next week is to simply tell a story. It should be an interesting week, as the contestants include the winner of WNEP's 2007 Acorn SKALD story-telling competition (Jarrad Apperson) and the winner of the 2007 MAELSTROM improvised story-telling competition (humble cough, me).
This is kind of the book when it comes to Marathon information, and it is indeed a smorgasbord of advice, tips, anecdotes, and inspirational stories. I'm glad I wasn't relying solely on this book for my marathon plan, but it's a great resource.
Thanks to everyone who offered help finding a new place. I'm happy to announce that we've signed a lease on an apartment. It's another of our Big Crazy Moves, as we'll be moving about half-a-mile northwest of our current place. (Our last move, you'll recall, was one-half-block south on the same street.) We'll be living on Magnolia Street, which is apropos as Mississippi is the Magnolia State. We've even got a two-week overlap between the leases, so we'll be moving between September 15 and 30. We're getting a lot of things on our wish list, including spaciousness, in-unit washer-and-dryer, and the peace and quiet of living west of Broadway. Look for a house-warming party when we're all unpacked in, say, April or so.
I haven't played any of the Dragon Quest games, except for the weird little spin-off game/toy, Kenshin Dragon Quest, which features a sword controller that you wave around in front of your TV*. The first enemy you encounter in that game, and I'm guessing in many of the other Dragon Quest games, is a happy little blue slime ball. Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime is an adventure game for the Nintendo DS that is entirely from the perspective of one of these blue slimes. Now, this is no bold deconstruction of the fantasy game genre, ala Mary Gentle's Grunts. Rather it's a quick, fun adventure game pitting your plucky blue slime against a gang of punk platypuses who have kidnapped the other 100 residents of your slime village. The game play is fun and the recurring "tank battle" mini-game is one of the most original battle mechanisms I've ever encountered. And there are plenty terrible puns on elements from other Square/Enix games.
Rayman Raving Rabbids is an engaging series of mini-games that utilize the innovative Wii controls in a variety of ways. The design and style of the game is delightful, with the grotesque "Rabbids" filling all sorts of roles, along with pigs, cows, and sheep. There's a slight, but reasonably satisfying framing device that ties all the mini-games together, and it ends with one of the most unsatisfying and frustrating FMVs I've ever experienced in a video game. It's all "our princess is in another castle" with no "just kidding". Seriously, after Erica and I had had a great time playing through the entire game (the story mode is single player, but we'd switch off playing the games and cheering each other on) and having a great time, I wanted to throw a controller out in the window in frustration at that ending. Jerks.
FuzzyCo grade: A- (and the minus is solely from the ending.)
If you were one of the two people who read my sub-blog Fuzzy's Media Consumption, you don't have to anymore -- I've folded the existing content from that blog into the main blog and updates on my nigh-obsessive inventory of books, video games, and movies I've consumed will appear here.
The latest book, game, movie, TV show, and comedy album I've finished are listed on the main page's right side bar under "lately I'm ..."
Due to some this and that at work, I now have a Treo 680 for a few days instead of my (lately becoming not-quite-so) trusty Treo 650. A small, but important, difference in Blazer (the Treo web browser) on the 680 is that you can turn off style sheets. Ostensibly for speed, it means I can finally get to my blogging interface from the phone. Of which process this post is the test, so I won't get too wordy, in case it doesn't actually work.
Well, we're more than half-way through this crazy show. Tonight's show's challenge is simply to "tell a story" and that's so wide-open that I guessing it's going to be an awesomely varied show.
I really owe Erica for being my sounding board last night -- I thought I had my story all set in my head, but I ran it for her just to check the timing (half of us went really long with the puppets and so the word came down this week that we really needed to keep it under four minutes) and I discovered that not only was it long, but it didn't make any sense. I had a lot of good parts, but they just weren't fitting together into a good story. So I did some re-thinking and, as so often happens, I had to kill a baby and chop out the part that had gotten me into the story in the first place. With a re-focus, and a cut-to-the-chase, I ended up with a much better story that clocked in at 3:50. So please, come to the show and laugh in the right places, but for a total of 10 seconds, please.
I'll leave this here as a pointer until I get the site search working a little more comprehensively: if you came here looking for improv games or group games, you're probably looking for the Games List on the New Improv Page.
Before you watch my story, it might help to know that Jean Baptiste du Sable was the first non-native resident of what is now Chicago. I had thought that it was just one of those names that people would sort of recognize as a Chicago-y name. Like Anton Cermak or Italo Balbo -- you recognize the name, even if you don't know that they're an assassinated Chicago mayor and a Italian fascist who flew to Chicago once (respectively). In any case, some conversations after the show revealed that that had been an incorrect assumption.
Anyhoo, the judges (two apes and guest judge Jonathan Messinger of the Dollar Store) liked the story barely enough (21 out of 30 points) to let me slip just to second place despite Jarrad's 30 point surge.
Next week's challenge is to choreograph and perform a dance to a randomly assigned song, with a randomly assigned partner from one of the other contestants. I got Jarrad and we were assigned Jump, Jive an' Wail by Louis Prima. Now this is interesting because a) Swing is very much a leader/follower dance (at least the way I learned it) and we're two guys and b) the challenge instructions emphasized that we should "tell a story" and this is a song that doesn't have any sort of narrative built in. Now, we are fortunate that I happen to be related to a great swing dancer. That's gotta rub off somehow, right?
Oh, and the story I told was not the one I polished and practiced on Wednesday night. I scrapped that one Thursday morning and decided to go for a more "Paul Bunyan" feel than a Native American mythos style. But as part of polishiing, I typed the first story up and so, as a special bonus, I'll include it after the jump. But first, everyone's stories...
Far Cry: Vengeance has a certain "let's rush out a game to get it on the new platform" feel about it -- the main character has these "feral" powers that are never really explained, and is he supposed to know this Semeru guy? Anyway, whatever. The real question here is, how are First Person Shooters on the Wii? And based on this one, I think the answer is going to be "pretty good". I'm a FPS fan from way back, and having been raised on mouse-and-keyboard controls, I was never really able to make the leap to the less-accurate controllers of console FPSs. But the Wiimote feels very natural to point around the screen and KAPOW. And hey, this game is cheap. (And I've got a copy if you want to borrow it.)
