Touching Sentiments

Lately I have been seeing a wonderful new trend emerging in the world of blogs: spam couched as posted comments. I LOVE getting these things. My heart jumps when I realize that my blog entries are touching spammer's in a way that was unavailable to me before. Now it's like having a "conversation" with your spammer. They come to your site, read your entries, say something really nice about it, in effect they are joining the dialogue and then they tell me something or point me to a great new web site about divorce in New York or Erectile Dysfunction ointments. I would have never have found these great websites without their help so I want to thank all the blog-trolls who creep through the "Next Blog" button up top, searching for like minded fellowship.

Da Boom

Ah, the Boom, remember the Boom?

It seems like only yesterday when I was surfing online and easily ordering my videos, snacks and bags of groceries to be schlepped to my door through the rotten Chicago snow via Kozmo.com and Webvan.com. So as you can expect, I was genuinely bummed when both companies tanked with nary a whimper (both within the same time frame - during what historians will always call the DotCom Bust). The ugly writing was clearly on the wall for all of these folks, as it really did not take a Harvard MBA to see that the grocery delivery/everything delivery thing was surely a doomed business model from the get go.

For instance, my girlfried and I used to order our groceries from Webvan.com, to be delivered at a certain time on a certain day and I would watch as the guy hauled up box after box of victuals up the stairs and then spend another five minutes unloading the boxes on our kitchen table and floor. Now this show took about 10-15 minutes minimum, not including the 5 to 10 minutes that flashed by when he drove by the apartment three times looking for the number, the backing up or the not being able to get close enough to park and then having to rummage through the truck a block away in the snow. So by the time the guy left our apartment, he'd now wasted at least 20-30 minutes bringing us $100 dollars worth of top quality (it generally was) groceries.

Now, go to the grocery store down the street and see how many people they can blast through the checkout line in the same amount of time. At least 6 or 7 or more with a good checkout person. That's probably a cool $1000 every 20 minutes at each checkout counter (let's just say four are open for the exercise) and well, do the math ($4000 every twenty minutes during the busy rush hours). By the time Mr. Webvan drove his gas sucking truck to the next location ten blocks away, he MIGHT, just might be able to make TWO deliveries per hour for a total of maybe $200-$300 bucks.

Voila, shitty business model that was so doomed to fail it boggles the mind that they were able to burn up over 300 million bucks.

Same with Kozmo.com. The orginal idea started in New York: put some kids on mopeds delivering videos and snacks. Good idea in New York, bad idea in LA, Chicago, Atlanta and all the other places where they quickly expanded. The Kozmo catalog was a trip. You could order a new DVD player for god's sake (at full retail markup) to be delivered to your door at 11 o'clock at night. Their catalog began to resemble the Sharper Image catalog. It was geared towards people who were drunk, lonely and had no fear of their credit cards: "Mmm, uh yes, like I'd like to order the movie Stripes, two 2-liter cokes and uh, oh yea, toss in a friggin massage chair please and some high end audio equipment while your at it. How long will that take to get here? Thirty minutes, great."

The bottom line is that they all sucked through a gazillion dollars of venture capital and every one of them tanked. I used to follow all the high dollar shenanigans on the old FuckedCompany.com website. It's actually still around, but I'm not so sure it's as funny or relevant as it was during the good old dot com bust. Anyway, I saw this list today on MSN and it brought back some "old" memories (not even five years ago - ancient!)

N&^%$S With Attitude STRIKE BACK!

Ice Cube, Dre and even the late Easy "Mutha-fuckin" E decide they have had ENUFF! And even blue collar white guys are down wit dat shit.

Mr. Oldham, your highly respected thespian talents are needed on the set ASAP.

click on the pics to see them better

So it looks like I am going to be in another Andy Muto film. This one is called The Lion and The Princess. I just got the script and I like what I have been reading so far. My character is "The Advocate" and he is apparently the main heavy: a sort of high-octane, flowing robe wearing cult leader in a leaderless world of the (not so distant?) future. The entire film is going to be shot in front of green screen using the same camera that was used to shoot one of the recent Star Wars flicks (super high end digital), and with everything else added in post-production (Andy keeps referring to Sky Captain and the World of Tommorow for the post-produciton technique they will be using) so I have a feeling it's going to look really cool.

Andy mentioned that I might want to view Omega Man with Charlton Heston again, as my character can be loosely compared to the Anthony Zerbe character in that classic genre film from 1971. Anyway, it looks from a quick read of the pages that I have some speeches that I will be giving to a stadium of crazed/hypnotized followers, which should be fun. I also have a lot of one-on-one solid bad guy dialogue that I will be tossing the hero's way. Anway, it sounds cool, Snap was good, and so I told Andy, "Hell yes, I will come when called."

He sent me a few mock-up pictures to give a feel for what the film might look like and here are two (see above - I don't think I am giving anything away by revealing these) to whet your apetite for The Lion and The Princess (which, according to the script is the first in a series of films).

August is always a good time to...

Dress like a Pirate

Smoking Kills

The computer I am sitting at right now has no sound, but this looked rather funny and I have no idea what it sounds like, but I liked it without the sound. Enjoy, or not.

Smoke Kills

Just another good reason why I love the internet

I mean, how else would I know about this cheery organization with perhaps the best tag line working today. If these nice folks ran TV commercials, like the pharmaceutical industry does to saturation levels, they'd probably use a spokesman like old Wilford Brimley, clad in an old courdoroy jacket, sitting at a kitchen table, or on a sunny porch, and grimly telling you with that stern Walrus-like face of his that: "Explosives Make It Possible!"

4 out of 5 insurgents worldwide agree!

Tidal Bliss

Yesterday I found myself out on Little Tybee Island, enjoying some nice rough surf in my Perception Monterey 14 footer. I love the hours I spend paddling through some of the most amazing scenery on the east coast. I mean, here I am, on a pretty good sized island that as far as I could tell, I was the ONLY person standing on. Pure Bliss.

I now hold in my hand

The DVD of SNAP! I have yet to watch it as I just recieved a stack of DVD's in the last thirty minutes from the film's director and fellow filmmaker Mike Goubeaux who wore many hat's during its production. I did see the movie on the big screen a while back, at the Trustees Theater in Savannah, and I thought it was solid. Anyway, I acted in SNAP (played a cool hitman with a heart of gold - see September 2004 entry on this blog for more info) in the spring of 2003 and now I can go home and watch it on my own TV. It even comes with tons of extra DVD nuggets like "5 Filmmaker commentaries", "7 deleted scenes", production photographs, the original trailer and all presented in widescreen format. I can't wait to watch this thing again tonight when I get home. Pop a few cold ones and see what a real action hero (me) looks like in "action".

Ever wonder to yourself, "just where are my old friends now?"

If you've fallen out of touch with the old gang as the years glide steadily by, occasionally one will come out of the woodwork in the most unusual of places. I recieved this email from a good friend the other day concerning an old friend of hers from back in the day:

...I have loved the freaks.


Found something interesting on the Smoking Gun website
- just the latest "Hot for Teacher" scenario.

Sandra "Beth" Geisel's mugshot. My favorite best
friend from my early 20's. Stayed in NY with she and
her husband Tom when they first moved up there. We
went to UTC and worked at the BR together.

I am blown away...

I think the below link is some commie website that I
linked to after Googling her name, but it had several
good pictures.

I'm sure this is on all the prime time sleaze news
shows now.

Cheers!

FOX NEWS STORY

Let me state for the record that there is NO WAY a woman who looks like this can ever be accused of RAPING a 16 year old "boy" (old enough to drive in most states and definitely old enough to know what he was getting his ass into). She may have God knows how many problems, but none of them are worth going to jail for. Oh well, the book/TV movie deal with smooth the road for Sandra "Beth" Geisel I am sure.

Her circle is complete

I buried my grandmother on Thursday afternoon. 

 

She was 95-years-old when she died in the presence of my mother, her only child.

 

She was my favorite grandparent hands down. We formed an indelible bond when I was a child that was never broken. In all my years, no matter what I did, my "Meema" (the name I saddled her with as a young boy - her real name was Bessie) never judged me. I could do no wrong in her grand-matronly eyes. Not that her recent passing was unexpected, as she was very old and fading fast, but it still hurt me at the deepest level of my being, as the sense of loss was real and the lifetime of fond memories that were dredged out from the well of my sub-conscious washed over me with the sad news.

 

My brother and I were two of her pallbearers (a first time experience for us both and I must say, an honor) and the finality of what we were doing as we helped place her casket over the empty grave really hit me. This was it, I thought, the final resting place for a life that began in 1909 (she would have been 96-years-old in September).

 

What a life.

 

As I stood there and stared at that empty hole and her silver casket, the idea that the beautiful person inside had basically seen the entire 20th century pass before her eyes - with all it's trauma's, joy's, technological breakthroughs and wonders - is actually quite incredible, we should all be so lucky to be afforded the same long life. This is a woman who saw her 20's drastically altered by the stock market crash of 1929 and the accompanying Depression that devastated so many. Then as she entered her 30's, the country was off to War in the Atlantic and Pacific. By her mid to late 40's, she would finally see a television; a medium that has completely altered the DNA of every single soul affected by it since its invention - though thankfully her character was fully formed before its soulless intrusion could alter it.

 

All I know is that my Meema was a genuinely good person. I don't say this because she was my grandmother, I say this because she was. I was very lucky to have for a grandparent an almost mythologized American idea of what a grandparent is supposed to look like and be. Childhood summers in the wiregrass country of rural south Georgia visiting my grandparents were a time of real wonder for me. Fishing with bamboo poles out of country ponds for catfish and perch pretending I was Huck Finn; playing with and naming the piglets on the farm (who would grow to be hogs and then our breakfast); eating Meema's homemade flat cornbread and her chicken & dumplings (the best); the endless exploration of tea stained creeks looking under rocks for frogs, snakes and crayfish; scarfing hot boiled peanuts bought from roadside stands by the bucket; sitting on my Popeye's lap and steering his old tractor and beat up red pickup down sandy country roads; the trips into the Okefenokee swamp, the Sewannee, Ocmulgee and Satilla rivers in Popeye's old flat bottom john boat, the one with the sputtering little outboard excited the adventurer in me; the walks into town for errands that always ended with an ice cold bottle of coca-cola (in a real bottle) and all that scorching hot south Georgia weather as the noon sun beat down on my blond head like a mallet pounding dough.

 

My Meema really, really loved me, and in this life, losing a link in that chain of love can tear at the soft fabric of the heart. For no matter where I was in the world, no matter what I was doing, no matter how deep into the dark recesses and dirty corners of existence that I found myself wedged in, I always knew that down there amongst the tall pines of south Georgia, there was one little woman who was praying for me (and whether I believe in what she believed does not really matter as the energy of the universal spirit is enveloping and transcends dogma) and perhaps because of this I was able (up to this point at least) to somehow come out OK, with only a few psychic cuts and bruises to show for my battles waged.

 

I will miss my Meema. I loved her very much. I do hope she found what she was looking for and something tells me she has.