I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

I had a pretty bad case of insomnia yesterday. I went to bed. Got back up. Took a shower. Went back to bed. Probably didn’t actually get any real sleep until past 4.

I half-wrote/half-dreamed this plotline for a new episode of Cakey which in the waking hour, isn’t half bad, so maybe we’ll do it.

The TV is broken and Duncan asks Cakey to teleport them somewhere fun so they beam into an illegal back-alley craps game run by the Latvian Mob. Cakey helps Duncan win by cheating…. cheating really obviously.

Mitch is a lounge singer who sings a song about how Cakey is amazing and great. (This part was proposed by Mitch earlier, so I really built the episode around it.) Montage with music. Duncan has won a huge pile of chips from a table full of shady, terrifying dudes.

Finally the floor-managers mobster asks “Why you always win? How come dice change for you.” “Oh, Cakey’s helping me. He’s magic.”
And the mob guy laughs and then shoots Duncan in the head and point-blank range. Duncan dies… really extreme bloody gore.

Cakey raises him from the dead and Duncan says it was a crazy adventure. They teleport back to the house and Cakey fixes the TV, but a religious broadcast is on and Duncan—being raised from death by artificial and unholy means having rendered him soulless—instinctually recoils and his eyes turn red. END OF EPISODE.

Don’t buy these…

The fluted shape is attractive, I like the idea of “light texture” and I keep getting tricked into thinking they’ll be MORE delicious than regular Walker’s. Like a dollar-fifty more delicious because they are fucking $6 a box. And there’s only 12 cookies in the goddamn box.

Unlike regular Walker’s shortbread, which taste mainly of butter and are basically a socially-acceptable way of eating logs of pie crust, these have vanilla in them. Which somehow tastes very cheap and phoney… like an off-brand yellow sandwich cookie you’d get at a shady bodega for some weird amount of money like 87 cents or 53 cents.

Also gross – Stoneyfield Yogurt’s “Caramel Underground.” Half-filled, unpleasantly-colored barf-water cups. Couldn’t find a picture online. Use your imagination.

Oh, fucking shit. I lost my driver’s license. Of course, I didn’t realize this until I was about to go to a rock show and got carded.

I’m trying to think of the last time I had to show ID… Valentine’s Day, maybe.

I’ve torn this place apart looking for it.

So I got tagged to write out 3 Three Things That I Learned the Hard Way on my blog. I just wrote mine and now I’m “taggin’” you to write yours (if you want to). You definitely don’t have to do it. But it was actually more fun than I thought it’d be. Here are mine:

http://www.roblathan.com/2008/02/22/three-things-ive-learned-the-hard-way/#comments

A lot of stuff I almost wrote here boiled down to “don’t do design work for crazy people,” but I still haven’t learned that and managed to take at least one mentally-unbalanced client every six months.

1. I should never agree to proof-read anything

I’m not a good speller. I’m not a good proofreader for things like bad punctuation and typos.(I never proof anything I’ve ever written in this blog, for example) My mind works faster than my hands, y’see, so I skip words and run them together. I had a poster I did hanging up on the wall and I didn’t even see the typo in the copy until 6 years of looking at it every day.

I did help a successful screenwriter friend do his WGA arbitration. Basically, he was one of many screenwriters who worked on a big Hollywood movie and he had to prove he had written X% of the filmed script (the number is different depending how many total writers there are and how late you came into the process) to get a screen credit. My job was to read every version of the movie… a coulda-been summer blockbuster based on a 70s cop duo show… and record which scenes appeared for the first time in which versions and which scenes made it into the final. No proofreading involved, just patience and note-taking.

Another set of friends were looking for someone to proofread (as in, for errors) their script before they submitted it to some studio that was interested. The successful screenwriter friend nominated me, citing my work on his arbitration, and I reluctantly agreed but added that I wasn’t a professional but I’d do my best. Then they told me I only had 2 days. And they didn’t have a printed out script, I had to proof it on my screen. And I didn’t have FinalDraft so I had to proof PDFs so I couldn’t correct errors on screen, I had to make note of them (page and line) in another document and send it to them. It was a Rube-Goldbergian set up for what should have been a simple task.

Two days later I got a screaming phone call from one of the friends saying I had fucked them, the studio person had complained about typos and I had ruined them and I was an awful person.

2.The NYPD are not like the police on Law and Order.

I was the victim of a violent crime and had to come in and tell the detective in charge what had happened. I had to repeat it about ten times. He contradicted me repeatedly and kept implying that what I was saying couldn’t have happened. He told me he wasn’t going to put any effort into finding the guy. He broached other theories (the perp in question must have been a boyfriend I brought home that I’m taking revenge on), and at the time I was thinking, he’s testing me to see if I’ll change my story under pressure… he’s looking for inconsistancies. But actually, after I got home, I realized they just didn’t want to investigate the crime and were trying to get rid of me. I later found out that precinct in Brooklyn is one of the most notoriously corrupt in the city.

3. Don’t buy computer cables at Best Buy

I bought a $30 one the “GeekSquad” told me to get that didn’t do shit… the actual right cord from the Apple Store was $9.

I don’t know anyone to tag since Rob Lathan got everyone I know with a blog. Um, I’ll tag Stoney.

I’ve been up to my eyeballs in little annoying lingering things that need to be taken care of on the SuperDeluxe show, but it’s as boring to talk about as it is to listen to, so I’ll skip it.

I’m doing a CD package for my friend’s band. It’s a collection of all their vinyl releases going back to 1996, plus unreleased tracks. We started getting this ready as far back as 2005, but it, for whatever reason, never really happened. It’s massive… 13 pages of liner notes, 41 tracks; but nobody had any cover ideas. (The one we wanted to do was stolen… by Smashmouth).

It got a title the second time around, “Christmas for Breakfast,” so going off that I looked around for an idea. I found a kids book (the band self-describes as “kiddie pop”) from the 1960s (the main era they lift style cues from) with “breakfast” in the title, so there you go. I ran it by James, and he was game.

I drew the lettering from a vintage magazine headline which I had downloaded as research for the Madmen xmas card I did last year. Making lettering brings out the obsessive-compulsive tendancies I mostly keep in check. I can do it for hours.

So, as of about the third day working on it, this is the progress. I’m going to put some other stuff on the table. Textures and shading I’ll put in afterwards, using photoshop airbrush. The kid needs eyebrows, too.

I just finished Michael Palin’s Diaries 1969-1979, which AV got me for Xmas. I was doing a lot of reading back in January, finishing three books in two weeks, but I kinda fell off. I still have another book my parents got me and an old copy of

Pride and Prejudice

I took from their house to get through. But I made it through all 900 pages of Michael Palin’s musings.

I’ll expand on this entry later; I’m going to go get a haircut now.

It cheapens the whole having-an-astral-body-named-in-your-honor for the other honorees.

Cakey filming has, as of Saturday, wrapped.

Channel 102 is Monday night.

As if you need an additional reason to go… we’re showing a sneak preview of one of our new Cakey! episodes we made for SuperDeluxe. They won’t be online for a month at the very earliest, so the live screening is your first chance to see Cakey back in action.

After the regular Channel 102 program starting at 7, the special Cakey episode will be shown.

Channel 102
Monday, February 4, 2008
two shows—7:00pm & 9:30pm

at
Pianos
158 Ludlow Street (near Stanton)
New York, NY

If I recover, I’ll see you there. Still horribly sick.

Since Tuesday, I’ve been sick as a dog. This is the worst cold/flu I’ve had and it seems to be completely unaffected by any medicine I’ve taken.

Some of the symptom include: sore throat, congestion, sneezing, coughing, chills, shakes, hot flashes, sudden lack of balance, exhaustion, giving false hope that I’m getting better and then suddenly getting a million times worse, fever, insomnia, nausea and telekinesis.