Honest-to-goodness updating!

Mostly just little things around the site. Did some work for the fine folks of Project Nightlight this past week:

Home, and back again.

I took a trip from the LA (to the Phoenix to the Chicago) to the Cleveland to the Columbus (to the Phoenix) and back to the LA lately. On the way home, I took pictures of all the empty aeroports. I also took some pictures of joyously reuniting family members, but you can just get a copy of Love Actually if that's what you're looking for.

The things the terminals had in common were being empty, festooned with holiday decorations, and being ever-so-slightly creepy. Apparently I wasn't just flying United anymore:

And over here, the stanchions keep people from walking through the big empty space:

The most remarkable of the considerably-larger-than-I'm-showing-you-here set of empty airport photos was this. I meant to capture the frustration of being in an airport for a couple hours and able to see food and beverages, yet unable to obtain them. Instead I seem to have captured the image of a child and his dog in the midst of a great adventure.

And last is something fantastic available in Chicago's O'Hare-port. There's a little placard nearby that explains that the bones are totally fake.

While I was home, I collected a lot of heavy books and DVDs that I then hauled back across the country. I saw more family than I expected to, and some other peoples' families who were all super, super-nice to me. I spent some time with Kristy, who is my favorite, and I gave her an enigmatic Christmas present that she has not yet solved. We found a geocache together and were finally rid of a cursed (dancing) pirate DVD. I won games of scrabble with words like 'squeeze' and 'zulu' and lost games of Mario Party with spaces like 'this one means you don't have stars anymore.'

Most of all, the weeks spent back in Ohio cast into sharp relief what I'm giving up in order to be in California, making movies, or jokes, or terrible terrible video projects that nobody will ever see.

I remember having wondered...

...given my utter lack of relevent scientific knowledge, but supposing that a given country DID possess a stockpile of world-ending doomsday machine weapons, IS it safe to drop huge and horrible explosives all over, on, and around said weapons? Maybe factories and processing facilities can be razed to the ground for the Good of All, but isn't a powerful explosion the first step in detonating the contents of an atomic bomb?

Could one reasonably infer that such a device ISN'T present if a sufficiently horrible bombing campaign is being undertaken? Could bombing runs on other lands NOT known to have such incredible weapons accidentally trigger something that our politicians would suddenly have to object to and explain, long and loud, was not our direct doing...kind of like stepping on a mine, except orders of magnitude greater?

Just curious.

Pacific Time

(first things first) It never occurred to me, until last season when I was actually in the pacific time zone myself, that the ticking clock seen on 24 wouldn't be EST (or EDT, depending).

Spinning around in my chair with my eyes closed in order to be surprised when I opened them by how far I did or didn't travel (despite the audio clues of the computer fans) made me dizzy, which is something I can't remember the last time I experienced. That's not unlike the summer, oh, maybe 15 years ago, when I couldn't remember the last time I coughed. Aren't blogs great?

The only thing that would make this entry even worse would be to include a link to some tired wannabe meme. So of course, I did, but I put it at the top of this entry so that you'd hit it first and be compelled to hit the back button to read the rest of this, which triggers an especially loathesome series of events. Thanks, internet!

Wrong holiday.

As I recall, and can piece together from historical fact. I got the NES title Dragon Warrior for Christmas 1989. My dad and I played that one together a lot, and more accurately, he completed the game and I watched. Fair enough, I may have been too young to properly grasp everything going on in there anyhow. On New Year's Day, I recall us spending the entire day down in the basement, where the NES lived, chipping away at that game. At least all during the day up until dinner, which was a turkey-and-all-the-trimmings kind of spread, which my mom cooked while she watched the Macy's parade and we hid out in the basement, hitting slimes with a stick, hoping to earn enough money for a copper sword in case a wolfman showed up on our way to Ridmular for keys.

Anyhow, just thinking of that. I hope everyone's having a SpooooOOOooky ThaaaaAanksgiiiviing!