 (An) alma mater hasn't exactly qualified for a big top ten party schools list, but it has at least won placement on a dubious achievement roster of ten schools where studying isn't encouraged (courtesy of Robyn).
Of any school I've attended, graduated from, or fled (and two of them don't actually exist under the names they had when I was matriculating there), Emerson is the one that has gotten me the most work. That has been especially helpful in paying off my student loans from there. Thanks, Emerson!
Bloodletting
 For the past week or so I have been having some pretty vivid nightmares (one of which, involving ghosts, will make an excellent screenplay). Saturday I had a painful headache. "What is wrong with my mind?" I wondered, taking care not to say it out loud lest someone pipe in with an opinion.
Sunday morning I proceeded to hack my middle finger with a cleaver whilst chopping onions for my family's breakfast. The arterial spray, in a cinematic 24 fps, covered the walls and frightened the cat.
But my headache disappeared and I've been sleeping soundly ever since.
Next week I'm going to work on my feet.
The Admirals' Club
 One of the worst things about air travel is the perp walk one does when making one's way back to the Economy section. I could never mask my anarchic thoughts when I viewed the people in first class, whom I felt were both 1.) paying way too much money for the dubious honor of the few extra comforts afforded to first class passengers, and 2.) the only people on the plane who were treated with respect.
My pal Molly Beck Ferguson flew first class when she went to New York for a Nexium commercial and said, "They heat your nuts."
That the person in the seat next to me might have paid hundreds of dollars more or less for his ticket is also unfair. There are few places where an unjust class system is more purely manifested than on an airplane. That is why I like JetBlue and Southwest.
That said, I'm taking American Airlines to Austin for the improv festival, and I researched their Admirals' Club when I was making my reservation. For 50 bucks I can get a day pass, so I thought I'd see what membership has to offer and what delights I could partake in on my layover in Dallas.
The answer is: not much. Complimentary snacks and access to a fax machine. You can buy food and rent Wi-Fi access. The chairs are probably comfier than in the main terminal. But the $450 and up yearly fee only guarantees that you won't have to feel like the poor people even if you are only being given token acknowledgment of your buying power. In other words, the only real reward is having paid more.
That sitting in seats that don't promote airplane thrombosis requires a much heftier fare is insane.
119
 We put 119 miles on the car today, making a more or less impromptu visit to the beach and driving around the canyons nearby. We live in California, after all, and should probably be arrested for not visiting the beach once this summer.
This was Marisol's first visit to the ocean. What she is doing in the inset picture is smiling.
Helpful links
 In traveling the highways and byways of the web recently I found this link to a repository of Carvel commercials. The "How does Frank Carvel go to the bathroom?" joke was a favorite up and down the eastern seaboard for several years.
I also found this big list of American and British TV theme songs with some very good commentary in between. This was not where I found the Hulk "Lonely Man" theme, however.
 I'll be appearing at the Austin Improv Festival with my solo show, Mavervorl's Space Island, on September 10.
 ...except, maybe, about ten years ago.
I finally have what I think is a viable freelance career, where paying the rent will take a fraction of the hours a day it once did. Now for everything else. I had a crisis of confidence in the quality of my work this week, borne out of a painful aversion to working for other people, and proven too many times to count.
Unlike my infant daughter, I don't subscribe to Sartre's theory that Hell Is Other People, but I do think that working for other people is, at least under the conditions that I have been most of my life.
Of course I've always had several different irons in the fire, but the balance has only recently shifted to getting paid for writing what I choose. It's a nice feeling, and a scary one and, don't misunderstand, not jacuzzi-level income by any means.
If you'd like to continue in a Hulk vein, stare at the picture and click here for an audio snapshot of how I feel right now.
In other Incredible Hulk and Bionic Woman composer Joe Harnell died last month. That is too bad.
 A small band of Catholic nuns protested the filming of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" at London's Lincoln Cathedral, saying it was against their beliefs (see link above).
A nun is a human being, usually a woman, who has taken vows particular to the order she has joined. Nuns, like other examples of homo sapiens, are mostly carbon and water-based. Lincoln Cathedral, which was named for U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and designed by his secretary, was being used as a stand-in for Westminster Abbey, where the Beatles' "Abbey Road" was recorded. Westminster Abbey was not used due to protests from the estate of her sister, Ann Landers.
Dan Brown's execrable book has been on the New York Times bestseller list longer than Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.
 BPN is an advertising agency in Portland, Oregon. The link above brings you to the invite to the company's summer barbecue.
There are several elements missing in this "Dueling Banjos" tribute to the South, but it's a good primer if you're from Space and need to catch up.
 Everything is good, and nothing is bad, about this compilation of photos and commentary about black metal bands.
"That black lipstick makes you look like a faggoth."
 The Forest Lawn cemetery franchise nearest my house shines its burning cross into my front window every night, so my family and I thought we'd accept the inevitable a few weeks ago and visit the venerable necropolis.
Emblematic of the West in general, the cemetery has a lot of room to grow. There are plenty of wide open spaces that would be littered with corpses if Forest Lawn were an east coast cemetery. We saw families with picnic lunches, people admiring the views of the city, and folks hanging out. We didn't see any funeral processions, but there were plenty of small chapels (like the Wee Kirk o' the Heather) and even a treacly heart-shaped children's burial area.
Not willing to acknowledge the mortality of anyone in the car, we drove quickly by.
But the fiery cross is not the only thing that compels one to visit the cemetery. There are the kid-friendly swans and ducks, the fountain, the view, and a museum that displays decidedly non-funereal things.
It was to that museum we trekked today to see the rock album artwork of Storm Thorgerson.
The exhibit was great. There were all these album covers from Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin as well as original artwork from the Monterey Pop Festival.
But I couldn't shake the feeling that I was still in a cemetery and was painfully aware that the exhibit was not about Dance Dance Revolution, Graffiti Art of Rave Kids, or Skateboard Sticker Graphics. It was art that resonated with people who might be considering retirement funds.
I am only interested in Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin as quaint relics of an age I never experienced, of course, and appreciate them like the precocious 22-year-old scholar I am.
Forest Lawn's "Elegance" Funeral package includes your choice of several caskets and plots, full embalming, two days of visitation, and a leather memorial book for about $20k. A nice cremation package will run about $2,500.
The "Revolutions: Artists Who Rocked the World of Music Industry Graphics" (including Storm Thorgerson) exhibit is free and runs through October 9. You really should see it before you die.
 Nestled between the 405 and the 101 in Van Nuys is the Sepulveda Dam. The structure, guarded by barbed wire fences, lies about a mile across a blighted field from a parking lot near the Hjelti Recreation Area. The dam was completed in late December, 1941.
There is some additional information here in addition to the pictures linked above.
This is one of those places I've wanted to take a closer look at since I first saw it from the highway. When I hopped the fence, a kindly Army Corps of Engineers official told me I had just broken the law, and suggested I leave when I was done taking pictures.
 Ever since Britney got the lead in the Strawberrry Alarm Clock movie, my friend Alicia has felt an intense competition with her.
"I have naturally curly hair, tote, and my beats are bangin'," Aguilera said, "so what I'm sprayin' means I'm not jealous, tote. I just don't think she should have treated Justin that way."
Spears was not available for comment, but a publicist said that she and Aguilera are "dear friends" and that Spears has great admiration for Aguilera's work in the realm of digital compositing.
 After five months, there is a new story in the story section.
Back when I didn't really do any other writing I used to whip one out every week. One story I mean.
I guess that shines a light on the other kind of writing I do.
These past five months have been tough in terms of writing what I enjoy writing, so I'm glad one of my jobs is ending and another is beginning in the same location but a better frame of mind.
 I'm prepared to say that I spend too much time on this, but tonight while the house was still I was allowed a front row seat at the horrible circus that is Nature.
TAARG's cat Jonah has, as you know, been seducing my daughter's toys one by one with increasing brazenness. Tonight I watched the entire show, and it is documented in sick detail in the link above.
 It all started with this windup rabbit before ACI was born. Then it moved to the orange thing that is called Max. Max is much bigger and Jonah would sit on its face, whereas the rabbit he would nearly consume. The teddy bear has borne the cruelest marks of Jonah's exertions, however.
We are trying to keep Jonah away from the lamb puppet.
 I know it was a different time and everything, but it was tough watching the Marx Brothers' 1937 film A Day at the Races, featuring a scene in which Harpo is mistaken for the angel Gabriel and leads a group of poor, eye-popping Negroes through the colored part of town. The sweaty-but-noble, God-fearing mass of them end up in a barn where they all dance away their troubles. The party is broken up by the sherriff, who scatters the towsfolk (for dancing?) but the Marx Brothers escape, wearing blackface.
Awesome.
That the premise of this film is that the Marxes are saving a sanitarium (?) from being turned into a casino by betting at the racetrack is a head-scratcher, too.
This was considered the last of their "great" films. Zeppo, absent from several of the films and hardly a presence in others, can be seen in the background dragging a homosexual through the dirt in his pickup truck.
The Mothership
I was out and about the other night and took this photo of the hanging lights at Rokbar. I called the photo "The Mothership". Somebody saw my post and did a little Photoshop magic with it.
The web is great.
 My friend of 15 years, Major Bob Macaraeg, is back in New Hampshire for two weeks to see his wife and two daughters. Then he is going back to Kandahar with the U.S. Army where he has spent the last seven months.
"It's nice to mow the lawn without worrying about getting hit by a rocket," he says. Then: "It's nice to have a lawn."
He is going to go to Wal-Mart and Hampton Beach.
 This and other artful and/or disturbing short films are on display at the Pleix website. Pleix is a Paris-based digital artists' collective.
 So I got to perform the wedding of my friends Steve and Robyn last month, and Charla Myers' is the only picture of me in my preacher garb I can bear to look at, because I am so very vain and complicated.
One of the things I read to keep from boring the assembled guests to death was the W.B. Yeats poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus":
I WENT out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
(I will wait until their seventh anniversary to read "The Second Coming.")
 Despite how it looks, my friend Todd Bearson is not a visiting polyamory coach recertifying the City of Boston (Thomas Menino, Mayor).
In this and many other pictures of Todd, he appears Colorformed in.
This picture should be the new mural at the Jackson Square Orange Line station.
Site Compromised
 Yes, so I have added some Blogger code to the site so that I can employ the permalinks and comments features of Blogger.
For months I fretted about how to add those elements to my site without interrupting its exquisite design and flow. Then I realized I could just grab elements of the code and paste them into my own HTML.
Aside from some slight formatting issues and an awkwardness regarding multiple picture postings in one entry and lack of ease in inserting links, things seem to have worked out well.
None of this really matters, actually. I have to write an article and I'm stalling. It was either post my musings about Blogger code or write about something happening in Calabasas.
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