Gas Woes

I've been seeing (happy?) stories about gas prices expected to go down 25 cents by this summer.  That's better than nothing, but hardly anything to get excited about. Let us not forget the last time gas was over 4 bucks a gallon (mid-2008?).  Less than a year later, it was back below two bucks, as this blurry picture -- that's 1.85 for regular -- from my aborted picture-a-day project shows; this was 02 Jan 2009.  Now that's a real reduction.

Shakespeare

I haven't had any reason to update my auditions list in a while, but I did last week.  And so this summer I'm going to be in another Shakespeare production, "Twelfth Night".  Not having brushed up on my Shakespeare, I don't really known much about this play, other than it's one of his standard "A loves B who loves C who loves D who loves A who's actually a woman pretending to be a man" deals.  Based on the character list, my character, Fabian, is not part of the big love polygon. He's a "gentleman" (servant?) of a main character's house and they were looking for someone 16-60 to play him.

As always, I don't think I need to remind you (as laid down by the Furious Five), that I'm like Shakespeare, I'm a pioneer. Because I made rap something people wanted to hear.

And then I got my Ph.D. in Phunk.

Cary Grant Project

Hmm.  Another movie about wanting a kid, among other things.  "Born To Be Bad" is one of Cary Grant's early movies.  And it's only an hour long! Loretta Young (in real life, only 21!) is surprisingly bad.  Like, criminally.  She does whatever it takes to get ahead; like fraudulently trying to squeeze big bucks out of a company over an accident, which leads to losing her no-good kid.  And she tries to use men to get ahead, too, just as much as any woman in a modern movie.  The only difference is that today the movie would be longer because they'd actually show all the stuff she does instead of just (blatantly) hinting at it.  I probably would have ranked this higher, except it's much more of a Loretta Young movie than a Cary Grant movie.

1. "North By Northwest", 1959, also starring Eva Marie Saint and James Mason
2. "Bringing Up Baby", 1938, also starring Katharine Hepburn
3. "Charade", 1963, also starring Audrey Hepburn
4. "The Philadelphia Story", 1940, also starring Katharine Hepburn and James Stewart
5. "The Awful Truth", 1937, also starring Irene Dunne
6. "Notorious", 1946, also starring Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains
7. "His Girl Friday", 1940, also starring Rosalind Russell and Ralph Bellamy
8. "People Will Talk", 1951, also starring Hume Cronyn
9. "Houseboat", 1958, also starring Sophia Loren
10. "My Favorite Wife", 1940, also starring Irene Dunne
11. "Father Goose", 1964, also starring Leslie Caron
12. "Indiscreet", 1958, also starring Ingrid Bergman
13. "Suspicion", 1941, also starring Joan Fontaine
14. "The Bachelor And The Bobby-Soxer", 1947, also starring Myrna Loy
15. "An Affair To Remember", 1957, also starring Deborah Kerr
16. "To Catch A Thief", 1955, also starring Grace Kelly
17. "The Talk Of The Town", 1942, also starring Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman
18. "That Touch Of Mink", 1962, also starring Doris Day and Gig Young
19. "Operation Petticoat", 1959, also starring Tony Curtis
20. "Arsenic And Old Lace", 1944, also starring Raymond Massey
21. "The Bishop's Wife", 1947, also starring Loretta Young and David Niven
22. "Monkey Business", 1952, also starring Ginger Rogers
23. "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House", 1948, also starring Myrna Loy and Melvyn Douglas
24. "Walk Don't Run", 1966
25. "Destination Tokyo", 1943, also starring John Garfield
26. "Only Angels Have Wings", 1939, also starring Jean Arthur
27. "I Was A Male War Bride", 1949, also starring Ann Sheridan
28. "Once Upon A Honeymoon", 1942, also starring Ginger Rogers
29. "In Name Only", 1939, also starring Carole Lombard
30. "The Amazing Adventure", 1936
31. "Topper", 1937, also starring Constance Bennett
32. "Born To Be Bad", 1934, also starring Loretta Young
33. "The Grass Is Greener", 1960, also starring Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum
34. "Kiss Them For Me", 1957, also starring Jayne Mansfield, Ray Walston, and Werner Klemperer
    
35. "Penny Serenade", 1941, also starring Irene Dunne
36. "Night And Day", 1946, also starring Alexis Smith
37. "The Howards Of Virginia", 1940, also starring Martha Scott
38. "Room For One More", 1952, also starring Betsy Drake
39. "Sylvia Scarlett", 1935, also starring Katharine Hepburn
40. "I'm No Angel", 1933, also starring Mae West
41. "Gunga Din", 1939, also starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
42. "None But The Lonely Heart", 1944, also starring Ethel Barrymore
43. "She Done Him Wrong", 1933, also starring Mae West
44. "The Pride And The Passion", 1957, also starring Frank Sinatra and Sophia Loren

April In Review

Another month, another month with no job. And this month, no game days, either -- as anticipation builds for Ludophilia 2011 the second week of May.

But I did manage to finish recording the last few songs -- and mixing and mastering all of them -- for the next Ancient Order of the Killer Owl album.  And check this out. While visiting family in Dayton around Easter, some random guy saw my dad wearing a Troubled Loners sweatshirt (ah, remember them?) and wanted to know where he could get one.  Now if I can only get my dad booked as a guest on Conan or something -- wearing the sweatshirt, of course -- I'd be sitting pretty.  Maybe I shouldn't have created a new, better band!  One dude in 20 years is quite a blip on the fan activity meter.


I finally opened the Rock Band "precision" bass that came as a bonus with the Mustang pro guitar I got about four months ago.  The strum bar on my Rock Band 2 guitar is pretty shot, which I guess can happen after a couple years of solidly regular use, even though I'm not very rough with my things. And, surprisingly, the strum bar on my Guitar Hero World Tour guitar isn't that great, either.  Which is odd, since I rarely play that, and when I did, I usually used the Rock Band guitar.  So, rather than torturing myself with those two any longer, I opened this new one which I only got since it was included with another purchase.  It's pretty nice, but the stiff strum bar takes some getting used to, and its wireless signal seems kind of weak, if you're the type to wander far from your console; hopefully the strum bar is what puts the "premium" in this model and it'll last longer.  Join me.  KillerOwl1.  On PSN.  (When it comes back to life.)

Finally, I did manage to see some movies.  A couple popular oldies -- which I had never seen before but which turned out to be pretty good -- were "Deliverance" and "Biloxi Blues".  I think "Deliverance" was playing at a drive-in when I was a kid -- or I've always believed that to be true -- but I only stayed awake for whatever movie came first. I always kind of thought of it as my first R movie, even though I slept through the whole thing back then. I would have been less than ten.

+--------------------------------------------------------+
| 2011-04-02 - Deliverance (1972)                        |
| 2011-04-03 - Quintet (1979)                            |
| 2011-04-04 - Zombieland (2009)                         |
| 2011-04-06 - Time Bandits (1981)                       |
| 2011-04-07 - Zapped! (1982)                            |
| 2011-04-08 - Quiet Earth, The (1985)                   |
| 2011-04-09 - Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)               |
| 2011-04-10 - Biloxi Blues (1988)                       |
| 2011-04-10 - Futureworld (1976)                        |
| 2011-04-13 - Fountain, The (2006)                      |
| 2011-04-14 - Amazing Adventure, The (1936)             |
| 2011-04-16 - Last Samurai, The (2003)                  |
| 2011-04-17 - Lovely Bones, The (2009)                  |
| 2011-04-18 - Catch Me If You Can (2003)                |
| 2011-04-20 - MacGruber (2010)                          |
| 2011-04-21 - Lottery Ticket (2010)                     |
| 2011-04-23 - Time Of The Wolf (2003)                   |
| 2011-04-27 - Greatest Story Ever Told, The (1965)      |
| 2011-04-29 - Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) |
| 2011-04-30 - Edge Of Darkness (2010)                   |
+--------------------------------------------------------+
20 rows in set (0.01 sec)

Black And Blue

The new Killer Owl album is done.  I'm still kind of thinking of May 17th as the official release, since that's when I expect (or hope) to have it available on cdbaby.com  (and iTunes and amazon mp3, etc.).  I'm not sure when that will actually be, since I haven't even sent them the physical CDs yet.  Anyway, this album was first conceived at the very beginning of 2009.  There was a lot of time in the last two and a half years not spent on creating it.