1. I've had no internet for almost a month now. We've had nothing but problems with the glorious corporation that is Verizon. Calls to them go something like this:
"Please enter the account number you are calling about, starting with the area code."
(Entering phone number)
"Press one if this is about a residential order..."
(Pressing one)
"Press one if this is about Verizon DSL..."
(Pressing one)
"Please enter the account number you are calling about, starting with the area code."
(Entering phone number again)
"Thank you. Press one for billing, press two for tech support, press three for..."
(Pressing one again)
"Press one if this is about your residential DSL service..."
(Pressing one!)
"So that we can better serve you please enter the number you are calling about."
(Pressing zero repeatedly and cursing)
"Hold on, you will be connected to a customer service specialist"
(Waiting 10 minutes)
"Hello, thank you for calling Verizon, can I get the account number you are calling about?"
"I've only entered it about 15 times. What was the point of all that shit before?"
"I don't know sir, can I get your account number?"
(Repeating phone number yet again.)
"OK. and what is this call in regards to?"
"I have a broken modem. I talked to tech support on saturday and they told me to call billing on Monday and order a new modem."
"OK, that sounds like a tech support problem, hold on..."
"No!! Wait..."
(Customer support specialist transfers call to tech support)
"Thank you for calling Verizon tech support can I get the account number you are calling about?"
"Can you just transfer me to billing? I already talked to someone in tech support the other day about my modem being broken and they told me to call billing and order a new one, but they transferred me he..."
"You'll have to call billing about that"
"No, I did...I was transferred here, can you..."
"Hold on"
(Line is transferred somewhere else now. Billing maybe?)
"Thank you for calling Verizon, can I get the account number you are calling about?"
"Before I bother giving you that information, let me ask if you are the person who can help me"
"Is this a billing question?"
"Yes. I need to order a new modem. The one I have, which by the way, is the third one you've sent me in the last year, is broken."
"OK. That's a tech support problem"
"NO!! I want to order a new modem! I was told that billing handles that!"
"Yes. Hold on."
(Waiting another 10 minutes)
Automated voice: "The following call may be monitored."
"Please! Monitor it! See what idiots you have working for you! For God's sake monitor this fucking call!!!"
"Thank you for calling Verizon. This is tech support. can I get the number you are calling about?"
This goes on for awhile, until finally being able to order the new modem.
Which does not arrive for a week and a half.
At which point my brother calls to check the status, only to discover that there is no record of an order ever being placed.
2. My DVD player died the other night while I was watching season 5 of "Curb Your Enthusiasm". So I had to buy a new DVD player.
3. The worst invention in the history of mankind: the car horn. People should have to roll down their window and shout obscenities at other cars. It's just too easy to lean on the horn. And little kids like to lean on that horn for as long as they can. And I would like to strangle anyone who honks their horn in front of my apartment for as long as I can. Unfortunately, every car that drives past honks their horn, and I just don't have the time.
4. Maybe I should take down the "Honk if you like Menudo" sign in front of my apartment now that I think about it...
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Sunday, November 26, 2006
New Party Hall sketch
This was fun. We had filmed some stuff last Sunday in HD and when I got home and loaded the footage into the computer I discovered we had not recorded any sound all day. (Still unsure how we screwed that one up. I thought the mic was hooked up properly...)
After the initial frustration, I got real inspired to take the sketch in a different direction and make it into a silent movie. I spent about half a day working on it, trying out different filters, looking for the proper ragtime music to go with it, making title cards in photoshop. It's not the greatest thing (there are a few problems with the way the filters worked with the HD that I'm not completely happy with) but I had fun making it.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
On the Cutting Room Floor
A lot of good stuff gets cut out on a reality TV show.
Here's a clip that didn't quite make it to any episode of "COPS"*:
*though I hear it may be included on the upcoming DVD "Too Hot For Civil Liberties: Police Brutality! Vol. 10"
Here's a clip that didn't quite make it to any episode of "COPS"*:
*though I hear it may be included on the upcoming DVD "Too Hot For Civil Liberties: Police Brutality! Vol. 10"
Friday, November 10, 2006
Self-promotion Vs. Hollywood Mega-blitz
A month ago, Terry Gilliam promoted his new movie Tideland by walking around New York panhandling.
Yesterday, David Lynch was sitting at the corner Hollywood and LaBrea with a cow and a poster of Laura Dern, promoting his new film The Inland Empire.
The lengths filmmakers must go to promote their films without a Hollywood studio backing them. And these guys are icons!
On the flip side, I can't walk five feet without seeing an ad for Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause.
Yesterday, David Lynch was sitting at the corner Hollywood and LaBrea with a cow and a poster of Laura Dern, promoting his new film The Inland Empire.
The lengths filmmakers must go to promote their films without a Hollywood studio backing them. And these guys are icons!
On the flip side, I can't walk five feet without seeing an ad for Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause.
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Self-Styled Quackery and Petty Grievances
I worked a double last night, or more accurately, a one and a half. Twelve hours of loading footage and eating a post-Halloween, 50% off bag of Starburst. Today I woke up at 9pm and quickly realized that everyone I knew was doing something else. Ah, the benefits of working the graveyard shift!
I've started getting sick. Every day I wake up I can feel that pre-illness, scratchy-nasal-cavity sensation at the back of my throat. I have been successfully battling the onslaught of a sore throat by chain-smoking. This is part of a holistic medical breakthrough I discovered in college. In those days, when I would feel the sickness developing I would just get really drunk, the theory being that you get the germs in your body drunk as well, thereby impeding their efforts to sabotage your immune system.
By coating my throat with a film of nicotine and tar I have hindered the ability of said germs to implant themselves and begin their work. Crazy you say? Perhaps. But, to quote George Bernard Shaw, "All great truths begin as blasphemies"!
In other news, my latest pet-peeve is the existence of inner pockets in most of my pants. Is this a new phenomenon? I don't remember these existing before. But every pair of pants I've bought in the last year has an extra little piece of fabric sewn in at the base, creating a tiny pocket where loose change and keys inevitably get stuck. I hate being at the checkout counter and struggling to retrieve change from there. I always have to pull the pocket from my pants, turn it inside-out and try desperately to fish those nickles and dimes out.
Why even bother paying with change when I can just break a bigger bill you may be asking? Because when my Grande drip coffee at Starbucks costs $2.05, I don't want to be stuck with even more loose change in that cursed extra little pocket.
These are the things that bother me.
This is how exciting my life is.
I recently stopped being strictly vegetarian. Not because I wanted to eat meat again, but because I'm tired of having my eating habits scrutinized. When you're a carnivore, nobody says to you, "Hey, you know there's no meat in that minestrone soup you're eating, don't you?" But when you are classified as a "vegetarian", it seems that everyone is focused on your failure. They seem to revel in finding ways that meat or meat by-products were involved in the making of your meal. "You know those fries are cooked in lard?" And often, people confuse the idea of living a predominantly vegetarian existence with being a vegan or an environmental terrorist. If people find out you don't eat meat they always want you to justify why you don't eat meat. They want to know the reason you are unlike them. Most people I know who don't eat meat could care less about saving the world or challenging people on animal rights. It is always the meat-eaters who get upset and want to start a conversation about the issue when confronted with another's vegetarian lifetsyle.
I still believe that a vegetarian diet is healthier*, and in many ways cheaper. And as much as I say I don't care, I suppose I have some moral issues with the way we harvest sentient creatures for food. But if I steal a chicken finger from you at a meal don't berate me. They are tasty. And I'll sleep better knowing I didn't contribute financially to the slaughter myself.
*I know that the idea of having a "healthy" diet is in direct contrast to my prescribed method of illness prevention as described above, but so be it. I'm a walking contradiction. Deal with it.
I've started getting sick. Every day I wake up I can feel that pre-illness, scratchy-nasal-cavity sensation at the back of my throat. I have been successfully battling the onslaught of a sore throat by chain-smoking. This is part of a holistic medical breakthrough I discovered in college. In those days, when I would feel the sickness developing I would just get really drunk, the theory being that you get the germs in your body drunk as well, thereby impeding their efforts to sabotage your immune system.
By coating my throat with a film of nicotine and tar I have hindered the ability of said germs to implant themselves and begin their work. Crazy you say? Perhaps. But, to quote George Bernard Shaw, "All great truths begin as blasphemies"!
In other news, my latest pet-peeve is the existence of inner pockets in most of my pants. Is this a new phenomenon? I don't remember these existing before. But every pair of pants I've bought in the last year has an extra little piece of fabric sewn in at the base, creating a tiny pocket where loose change and keys inevitably get stuck. I hate being at the checkout counter and struggling to retrieve change from there. I always have to pull the pocket from my pants, turn it inside-out and try desperately to fish those nickles and dimes out.
Why even bother paying with change when I can just break a bigger bill you may be asking? Because when my Grande drip coffee at Starbucks costs $2.05, I don't want to be stuck with even more loose change in that cursed extra little pocket.
These are the things that bother me.
This is how exciting my life is.
I recently stopped being strictly vegetarian. Not because I wanted to eat meat again, but because I'm tired of having my eating habits scrutinized. When you're a carnivore, nobody says to you, "Hey, you know there's no meat in that minestrone soup you're eating, don't you?" But when you are classified as a "vegetarian", it seems that everyone is focused on your failure. They seem to revel in finding ways that meat or meat by-products were involved in the making of your meal. "You know those fries are cooked in lard?" And often, people confuse the idea of living a predominantly vegetarian existence with being a vegan or an environmental terrorist. If people find out you don't eat meat they always want you to justify why you don't eat meat. They want to know the reason you are unlike them. Most people I know who don't eat meat could care less about saving the world or challenging people on animal rights. It is always the meat-eaters who get upset and want to start a conversation about the issue when confronted with another's vegetarian lifetsyle.
I still believe that a vegetarian diet is healthier*, and in many ways cheaper. And as much as I say I don't care, I suppose I have some moral issues with the way we harvest sentient creatures for food. But if I steal a chicken finger from you at a meal don't berate me. They are tasty. And I'll sleep better knowing I didn't contribute financially to the slaughter myself.
*I know that the idea of having a "healthy" diet is in direct contrast to my prescribed method of illness prevention as described above, but so be it. I'm a walking contradiction. Deal with it.
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