Nevermind

My phone stopped ringing this week. Literally. I was wondering why I was missing all these phone calls that went straight to voicemail, then somebody called when I had it on Loud + Vibrate mode. It only vibrated. So I asked Lily to give me a call, and there was the answer: no ringing whatsoever.

I should have seen it coming when I used my free Sprint ringer download to get "Smells Like Teen Spirit". They had 2 options for that song: The chorus or the beginning. I opted for the beginning. You know, it starts off sorta quiet, then the drums hit and the gates to grunge heaven are kicked wide open. It sounded like shit on my lame little phone's tiny speaker.

The ringing was pretty comical at first, and I usually let it ring through to the drums part just for a laugh. Then later it wasn't so funny anymore and I'd desperately try to silence the ringing before it got to the drums part. But of course there were times where I wasn't around my phone and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" would go on endlessly until the call went to voicemail. That's probably what killed the ringing. Kurt Cobain destroying one more piece of equipment, blowing the tiny speaker on my lame little phone, from beyond the grave.

So I'm stuck with a phone that doesn't ring, but only vibrates. I missed a lot of calls this week, but I'll be damned if I'm buying a new phone right now. Anyone who saw my last cell phone knows the lengths I'll go before buying a new one. Besides, Steve Jobs has me by the balls until July 11th, when the new iPhone comes out. Hello.

Slim Shady

My wife's name is Lily. With one "L". Sorta. Meaning one L in the middle. Not two Ls. Sorta. Not with two Ls in the middle. As in not LilLy. Seems to me the default way would be the one L up front and one L in the middle. Saves time and energy over dealing with that pesky third "L".

The Lilys that immediately come to mind have the two L spelling: Lily Munster. Lily Allen. Lily Tomlin. So why would anyone use the extra L? No freakin idea. Some people even do it when they see it written on paper or on a computer, and they STILL insist on spelling it Lilly. Seriously. Lily sent an e-mail to the parents at our son's school, and she signed it "Lily". Person replying to the e-mail? "Thanks Lilly". Eesh.

Another one that really bugs the shit out of me is some people's comprehension of our son's name: Judah. I'm talking to somebody and I say "well Judah did blah blah blah..." And they come back with "oh really? Judas did that?" Ahem. Yes, we deliberately named our son with a name most commonly remembered as being a betrayer. The betrayer of Jesus. Yeah. We liked the sound of Judas and we really hate Jesus! Why the fuck would we do that? So I have to correct those people every time that they insist on continuing to say "Judas" when they're referring to "Judah". But it doesn't stick. They won't register the name Judah, but they'll remember a silly name like Judas. I'll tell 'em "Yeah, I'm a huge Priest fan." Then I'll throw the horns and roll my eyes back in my head for good measure.

My name is pretty tough to screw up. You hear Lee and you can easily repeat it, and other than the girly ways of spelling it, it's not too tough to spell either. So maybe the real reason I get so miffed at people misunderstanding the names of my family goes back to my childhood. Back when people made fun of my name. The way mean kids do out on the playground, making hurtful rhymes with the name Lee. Yep, you guessed it: Lee Pee. At least the founders of TNSC were kind enough to make it "Bee" instead. Lee Lee the Musical Pee doesn't really have a nice ring to it. Or does it?

My War

I was rolling out the trash bins last Thursday night, when I saw a little critter scamper out from where the trash bins regularly reside. Not a critter like a mammal-varmint-sized critter, but like an insect-sized critter. After rolling the trash, recycling, and yard waste bins to the curb, I went inside and grabbed my trusty humongous flashlight to inspect said critter. And the critter turned out to be a cockroach.

There aren't many things in this world that truly creep me out, but cockroaches are near the top of that short list. They have like creepy ways of looking at you and almost like a humanlike personality that way, and ick! That, and they scamper so quickly that they might just crawl up your leg and... oh man, that would be the grossest. And the fact that they were on my property just wasn't going to continue.

When we moved into our new place I noticed (with all the other crap the previous owners left behind in the garage) a can of roach killer. I remember thinking "Now why would they need this? There aren't any roaches around here." Wrong. I didn't see any roaches in broad daylight, nor did I see any in the house. But now that I saw one in the driveway in the dark, I knew there had to be zillions more. And upon further inspection of the driveway, I found at least 10 more.

It was time to test out the can of roach killer. Apparently this stuff kills with mint, not some nasty chemical, so it's safe to use around the boy. Not that I was gonna spray it within a 50 ft radius of him outside at all, but at least the label made me feel better about spraying the life out of the cockroaches. As an added bonus, the can said it leaves a fresh minty scent. What's not to like?

I went around spraying the critters, which only seemed to make them scamper around that much quicker. But the label said to soak them with the stuff, so I did. And they didn't scamper around so quickly and then they stopped scampering altogether. I left a trail of about 15 dead roaches in my wake. I waited until the next morning to clean up the trail of dead, so's the sun could dry up the mint spray.

The spray seemed to have put a serious dent in the roach population outside. But if I so much as see one of those things skittering across the floor inside my house, I'm going gunslinging with the spray on a nightly basis.

Magic Johnson

I grew up hating the Los Angeles Lakers. HATING. Up there in the woods of the Pacific Northwest you rooted for the SuperSonics or you maybe liked the TrailBlazers. But you certainly didn't like the glamour boys from Hollywood. You HATED them. They were dominating our division and they were winning championships with flash and with a bunch of players everybody knew by name. We had guys that nobody knew, but they played with heart and the fans up there believed the Sonics could win it all. And they did. In 1979. Long, long long ago. So long ago that I was just a kid, and I didn't really follow sports and I didn't know that your city doesn't win NBA championships every year. Unless of course your city was Los Angeles.

Now that the road of life has driven me to Laker-land, I find my stance on that team softening. Call me a bandwagoner or whatever. I could really care less if it were the Lakers or Clippers winning a championship. With the exception of the aforementioned '79 Sonics team, I've never had the experience of:

A. A city that I currently live in win a pro championship
B. A team from a city where I previously lived and currently root for - win a pro championship

Maybe it doesn't matter. But it would be great to experience that once as an adult. So my hatred of the Lakers has waned just enough to root for them as they appear in the Finals this season. I rationalize it as not really wanting the Lakers to win, but the city that I currently reside in to win. Because I could give a shit about the Lakers. In fact, maybe it's my little way of putting a hex on them by rooting for them which, based on my track record, would actually cause them to lose. Go Lakers.

First In Flight

My mom called last week to tell me that my first childhood friend had passed away. We didn't necessarily stay close after my family moved away, but we were lucky enough to cross paths from time to time as we became adults. One time getting reintroduced to each other in college by members of the University of Washington crew team who were looking for shrimpy guys like us to sit in the coxswain seat.

College was the last time I saw him. And seeing him in the obituary page in the hometown paper really made me look at my own mortality. He was born about 2 weeks before me. He had a daughter about the same age as my son. And my mom said that he was like a son to her. At least when we were around 5 years old. Rest in peace, buddy.

Hurts So Good

You may or may not have had the luxury of hearing me tell the neverending story of my gum surgery. Either way, it's something you don't want to ever experience.

Thanks to my mom and dad, I have gums that don't seal to the teeth too well. So no matter how much I follow mom and dad's strict teachings to brush and floss every night, their genes don't allow me to adequately clean whatever gets way down in there and attacks the roots of my teeth.

And so I had to find this out from a periodontist 20 years after I left home for college. And this periodontist was required to surgically open up the gum tissue surrounding my molars, clean up the bad stuff, and sew up the gums tighter than mom and dad's DNA ever did.

The result has been laborious in terms of me not being able to chew food on whichever side of the mouth that the periodontist decided to work on this month. Two weeks ago it was the lower left quadrant. He took the stitches out last week and gave me an "A+" on my recovery so far.

In the past couple days I've been able to start chewing soft things like pasta on that side. But the thing that seems to be taking the longest to get over is the cold sensitivity. It ain't no joke. Try chewing on a piece of aluminum foil, and that begins to give you an idea of what I go through even when I drink water that's room temperature. But as I found out with LLMB Reader #1 this week, the one cold beverage that doesn't put the deep freeze on my teeth? You guessed it: A frosty beer. Must be the alcohol. So you know what I'll be drinking until this winter in my mouth is over. Let it snow.

Travelling Without Moving

A couple weeks ago I wrote about my TV. My lack of a TV. Well despite my efforts to remedy my lack of a TV, I continue to buy a TV on what seems like a bi-weekly basis. Artificially propping up the US economy is what I'm really doing.

After the whole Sears-returning-the-first-TV ordeal, I ordered a Philips TV from Dell. Two weeks ago in this space I described the liar Dell salesman. I canceled the order. I then ordered the same Philips TV, the one that's called the EcoTV because it uses far less power than regular TVs and enables me to hug a tree by sitting on my ass watching SportsCenter on a daily basis, from Amazon.

I didn't realize this before I bought this sorta big-ticket item from an online retailer, but Amazon actually farms out that type of order to a storefront who can take care of it directly after the money has been spent. Being that I was missing all this great HDTV resolution by having to cancel with liars at Dell, I paid extra for expedited shipping: 3x as much as regular shipping to get it in 3-5 days.

The storefront vendor is ANTOnline, based in Atlanta, GA. I get an e-mail from them updating me on where my TV is. The e-mail links to their website which says "Shipment moved from regional warehouse to local". Great. It's so close now I can smell the High-Definition.

But then a day later, the web message changes to "No information available at this time", and stays that way for the remainder of my 3-5 day expedited shipping process. 5 days turns into 6 and then the jig is up. I call ANTOnline and ask them what the holdup is. The nice lady on the phone tells me she'll find out and call me right back. And when she calls me right back, she tells me that they made an error, I needed to pay another $150 to ship this TV, they don't really have expedited shipping, and I'd receive it in another 7-10 days. After another round of customer service hold sessions, I cancel the order.

The next TV vendor turns out to be Buy.com. Buy.com is based just south of Los Angeles. Close enough to walk the TV over in a few days. I order the same Philips EcoTV, I check my shipping status online during the 5-7 day period, and the end of the 7 days comes and goes. And on day 8, the shipping message changes to "Estimated Delivery Date: May 23". I can only venture a guess what my e-mail asking why they say 5-7 days when they really mean 18 days will get. Canceled.

How to Disappear Completely

Because I like to waste a lot of time managing my music in iTunes, I've found yet another way to focus even more of my attention on that application. I wanted to listen to all the music I have at least once, so I created a smart playlist that holds every song whose playcount is zero. After the song is played, it then has a playcount of one, and it disappears out of the playlist.

Essentially this playlist left me with mostly songs that I really didn't care to listen to. And it turned out to be around 10 gigs worth of music. So it's been a grueling couple of weeks as I listen to the likes of Janet Jackson, The Dandy Warhols, and a metal band called My Dying Bride that co-worker-bee Brady likes to call "church-burners". And Johnny Cash pops up from beyond the grave in chunks of about 7 songs to not only sing in Folsom Prison, but also to take on covers of songs from bands like Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, and Depeche Mode.

But in listening to this Underplayedlist, how did I not ever listen a song on Kid A? And how the hell did I acquire every Squarepusher album? Anyhow, I've managed to get the list down to around 2 gigs, and under 400 songs left. But if I have to endure one more Elton John ballad, there won't be anything to read here next week.

Bad

Last week was grueling. I spoke with around 12 customer service reps from Sears when I wanted to return the replacement for my TV of 10 years. The new TV had an amazing picture, but the vertical line running through the middle of the screen didn't look so great. In trying to get Sears to pick up this faulty set, they referred me to delivery, who referred me to the national customer service line, who forwarded me to repair, who sent me to delivery, who forwarded me to the store where I bought my TV, who told me to call delivery, who sent me back to the store. I went into the store with receipt in hand and the Sears employee told me I had to call delivery. He probably saw the steam starting to emanate from my ears, so he called delivery himself and told them to head over to my house to pick the damn thing up.

Later in the week I spent probably a total of 3 hours on the phone with Dell for the replacement for that replacement, after I found out the sales rep had lied to me about how long it would take to deliver the TV. He said it would be the next day. The e-mail said it wouldn't even be shipped for another three. I canceled on the sheer principle that I don't wanna give money to liars.

And the capper of this stellar week was FedEx on Friday. A director friend of mine was shipping a firewire drive that had footage for a music video. Unfortunately for me, the FedEx way is to try to deliver to workplaces before most workplaces are open. I tracked the package and found out that they attempted delivery at 7:40 am, but they would re-deliver by 3 pm. 3 pm comes and goes. No package. 4 pm comes and goes. I was losing a whole day of editing on a music vid that was due on Monday. Sweet. I called FedEx and discovered that the package was still sitting at the facility and there would be no other attempt to deliver that day. Needless to say, it was a fun conversation that ended in me putting on my FedEx hat and driving to the facility and wasting more time there while they attempted to locate the box. Then I got to work all weekend and avoid the nice weather everybody else enjoyed down here.

Not such a great week, eh? I thought so until the IT guy at my work came in with a cast on his right wrist & hand. He had just had surgery on his wrist the day before. Apparently he had to walk to his surgery appointment in the morning because his neighbor had his car towed for blocking his driveway. And he probably won't be getting his car back soon, because he has a bunch of unpaid parking tickets, and he'll have to part with a good chunk of his cash if he wants it back. Oh, and on the walk to his surgery appointment he stepped in dogshit and had brushed some on his pant leg while strolling. But he didn't notice the dogshit until he arrived at his doctor. I'm sure the surgery wasn't much fun either. In light of that, my week was a cakewalk.

Freedom

On Monday I got a chance to see what it was probably like in Mayberry back in the Andy Griffith days. A town hall meeting with the mayor of Culver City and 4 council-persons was to decide whether our street could be closed off to make it a cul-de-sac. One of the councilmen said that in his eight years service he hadn't received as many letters, phone calls and e-mails as he had surrounding this issue.

The main reason for the potential street closure is the fact that in our neighborhood, our street is the only one with a traffic light at the end of it. And that light leads to a road that eventually takes you to the 405 freeway. Our street was never intended to be a collector road, and its narrowness has caused several sideswipes, car wrecks and lawn-driving maneuvers by agrro motorists driving at speeds up to 70 mph. This on a residential street where the speed limit is more like 25 mph. Add to that the fact that there are around 25 kids on this street, many who are skateboarding age and they like to ride their skateboards in the street. A street two blocks away is the logical collector road for this traffic but there's only a stop sign where that road ends, and motorists tend to choose the street that they have the best chance of blowing through - ours.

On moving to our new neighborhood, we were introduced to many of our new neighbors through visits from them asking us to send in a ballot card to say "yes, we'd like our street closed!" Who the heck wouldn't want that? So I checked the yes boxes and sent it in. Soon afterward the proposition passed, but the Culver City council thought it might be good to hear from all sides first. And our neighbors on the surrounding streets weren't too happy about this possibility of inheriting our traffic, as was evidenced by their numbers in attendance for the town hall meeting.

It's interesting to go to a town hall meeting and experience politics on such a small scale. It's politics that you actually have a voice in. In fact, there were 30 or so voices going up to the podium for three minutes each and speaking their minds about the street closure. There were the neighbors on my street telling the council that they've been dealing with the traffic and working over seven years to get to this point. There were the neighbors on the surrounding streets telling the council that they don't want our problem. And there were the five elected representatives stuck in the middle. The discussion on this topic had started at 8:25 pm and it ended at 12:15 am.

At one point it seemed as if the council was going to do nothing. The mayor, who was set to finish his term in two weeks, piped up and said "Well, it's approaching midnight and we're all tired here." At which point we knew that our street closure wasn't going to happen. Then he continued, "Except I can't leave office knowing that some kid might get killed on that street if we don't do something". The neighbors from the surrounding streets were probably letting out an inner "fok", knowing that we were gonna be there much longer and much later. One member of the council came up with a new plan that wasn't exactly closing the street, but it was a good compromise. And the mayor threw in to the proposal adding more traffic cops in our neighborhood to crack down on speeding.

It came to a vote, which required a simple majority. And when the voting lights in front of each council-person came on, we had won: 3 yes, 2 no. But one of the council-persons mentioned that her vote was incorrect, that it showed yes when she had voted no. Boos from the crowd. Re-vote came up 2 yes, 3 no. More boos from the crowd, until another member of the council felt the heat and asked the crowd, "who on the neighboring streets are in favor of this new plan?" There was a surprising amount of applause. The councilman requested to do a re-vote. 3 yes, 2 no. The crowd erupted in applause, and everybody left City Hall shaking hands and smiling. That is, everybody but the city council, who still had a few more items to discuss.

The next day, I spoke with several of my neighbors and they all felt happy about the decision, but they didn't believe it would really be implemented. And the following day Lily said she saw at least seven cars pulled over by cops giving tickets. Either that's progress, or I'm getting old. Maybe both.

World of Entertainment (W.O.E. is Me)

So I'm on the plane back from Sea-Tac, on a relatively new Virgin America airplane, and I sit down in my comfy black seat with the uber-hip white panel in front of me containing their Audio-Visual system called Red. Not shortly after reaching our cruising altitude of 36 thousand feet, the crew came through with the drink cart to offer refreshments.

After ordering, the three gentlemen in the row directly in front of us - who seemed not to know each other - all started asking questions about the capability of Red to do what they needed to do on this 2.5 hour flight.

Man #1: "Do you offer broadband?"
Crew member: "Sorry, we don't offer broadband yet, but it's coming. In like 6 months or so. But that's not soon enough for you, yes?"

Man #2 (To Man #1): "But you can chat on the plane if you want"
Crew member: "Oh yeah, you can chat with the other passengers"

Man #2 (repeatedly pressing his Red touch screen): "My chat isn't working"
Crew member: "Would you like me to restart you?"
Man #2 (still pressing the screen): "Yes please."

Man #3 (repeatedly pressing his Red touch screen): "How come these TV channels don't work?"
Crew member: "Sometimes we lose reception up here"
Man #3 (repeatedly pressing his Red touch screen): "Well CNN comes in, why don't the other channels?"
Crew member: "Would you like me to restart you?"

What the fuck, people. Two of the three of these men had their laptop computers open. Is that not enough? Do we need somebody to come over and perform magic tricks for them as well? Just be like Lily and play 50 games of Mahjongg. That'll keep you occupied for a couple hours.

You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire

In my recent attempts to save every penny possible, I've located the most obvious place, and that's at the Extra Space Storage facility in Marina Del Rey. Now that we have enough room in our house to store all those boxes of useful junk, I can nix the $77 that we were paying.

And due to an oversight in their accounting department, I was credited an amount equal to the 2 months rent I would have paid for breaking my lease early. So those extra pennies will help out with the increased cost of housing, the new TV I'll have to buy because my old one blew out, the cost of flying the family up to Seattle for a funeral, etc etc. But I get to keep an extra 77 bucks a month? Somebody up there likes me.

Stardust

I take no credit for the creation of anything in this post.

Three Car Jam

1. As I careened out of the Target parking lot on a Sunday morning, apparently I went through a red light. I didn't realize it at the time, but the authorities were kind enough to send several pictures at different angles of me and my car taking a left through the intersection while the light was clearly red. Luckily I wasn't doing anything incriminating like picking my nose, or like the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry is photographed going through a red light while looking at his passengers ass, which was up in the air because she was reaching into the back seat. The little series of pictures will only cost me $380 plus another $50 for the privilege of spending some time at traffic school.

2. About two weeks later on my way to our new abode, I had the sensation that the car wasn't handling well - like it had a flat tire. I got out of the car at the nearest intersection to inspect the situation and unfortunately I was right about the tire. Torn sidewall. Fortunately I was close enough to our old abode to change the tire in our driveway. To get at the spare tire, I removed all the crap out of the car trunk: Bottles for recycling, grocery bags, a skimboard.

The resident homeless guy that we like to call Burnout - because he can spend days reclining in the sun, and his black clothes and hair appear burnt - came up to me and asked if I had seen a guy he described as looking exactly like me. The guy apparently took a grocery bag (which Burnout said looked like a grocery bag that was sitting next to my car with the flat tire) that was full of money. Burnout would have used this grocery bag full of bills to go somewhere around Christmas. Burnout repeatedly asked me if I saw the guy around anywhere, and I repeatedly told him I hadn't seen anybody (who looks just like me).

I put on the spare, and lowered the car with the jack, only to find that the spare was flat. I figured that the spare isn't much bigger than a mountain bike tire, so I grabbed my bike pump and got to work. My triceps hadn't seen a workout like that in months. That afternoon I went to Big O Tires and spent $380 for 4 new tires because the 3 working tires probably didn't have much longer to live.

3. Last weekend we went to the nearby Sherwin-Williams paint store to buy one more can of white semi-gloss for the interior of our new abode. Because Lily had been choosing all the paint to this point, she went into the store while Judah and I waited in the car. It was hot, so I pressed the buttons to roll down the windows. The rear driver side window had some trouble going down, but it eventually made it all the way down. When Lily came back I rolled all the windows up. That is, all but the rear drivers side window, which didn't come all the way back up. It sounded like it wanted to close, but the crunching noise led me to believe that it wasn't gonna. I still haven't taken it in to the shop for that one, but my guess is that it's probably going to cost $380.

It's like that, and that's the way it is

Moving on Monday, taxes on Saturday, clients in all week. See you next Thursday.

Third Eye

Walking back from the Third Street Promenade, I approached the intersection at the post office and I noticed a blind woman with a cane. She tapped the white cane around the edge of the sidewalk, seemingly unsure which direction she wanted to go. She looked flustered. She did a 180, then stopped and did another 180, and she seemed on the verge of a panic attack. Several people walked by without offering any assistance.

I walked up to her and asked "do you need help?" She took a deep breath and said yes, thank you. She said "I need to find 5th street". I looked up at the sign at the intersection and it said 5th Street. I told her she was on 5th Street & Arizona. Then she told me "Can you point me in the direcction of 4th Street?" I turned her in the direction of 4th Street and told her "now you're facing toward 4th Street, toward the beach."

She said "Thanks so much" and tapped her way toward 4th Street. As I turned and continued on my way, I realized that probably nothing going on in my little world was as bad as what she just went through.

Pac-Man Fever

On Monday night a work project fell into my lap at around 5:45 pm. The project was the video component of one of those newfangled rides where you're sitting in a movie theater in a small group of theater seats that move in relation to what you're seeing on screen. Luckily for me, I was stoked to work on the project because it features a character from a TV show who says "Doh!" starring in it.

The "Doh!" part was about as good as it was gonna get. Because then the real work began. Taking a series of still frame rough animation files and putting them together isn't really what I consider "editing", but it falls under editor duties and thus falls into my lap at 5:45 pm on a Monday night.

I was to take a sequence of still images and compile them into a 5 minute movie, and then attach the existing sound bed so that it was in sync. Sounds simple, right? Too simple? Too simple. It wasn't in sync, and the production manager and I spent the next three hours trying to figure out why.

We slipped the audio this way and that until it was about in sync as it was going to be for this stage of the animation, so that the sound designer/mix people could do their job and then the whole thing could move forward again. At 9pm we were laying off to tape and I assumed I was done. And I was, until the next day at noon.

One of our production coordinators walked into the editing suite at noon and told me that a two-minute chunk of the sequence with revised animation was being sent over the network. All I had to do was import the sequence, cut it over the existing sequence and lay it off to tape. The Executive Producer of the TV show that this "ride" is based on with the character who says "Doh!" would be waiting for this tape on the studio lot at 3 pm. Sounds simple, right? Too simple? Too simple.

I import the new animation into the edit system (Avid) at around 1 pm. I line up the spot where the new animation goes over the old stuff, and I quickly realize there's a problem: The new piece goes way longer than the old piece. And then I quickly discover that every 5th frame is a repeat of the 4th frame.

So I call our producer for this "ride" and tell him what's up. We talk tech mumbo-jumbo (different than this tech mumbo-jumbo) for 10 minutes before he decides to get off the phone to see what he can do on his end. The clock is rapidly ticking toward 3 pm, so I start trying different compression techniques to see if that'll work. The producer calls me back about 45 minutes later only to tell me that it will take 2 hours to recreate the animation correctly. Hm. Two hours plus 1: 55 pm equals pissed off Executive Producer of a ride and TV show with character who says "Doh!" DOH!

I tell the producer that I'll take care of it, and we hang up. If you know anything about how editing works, then you know that there are a few very basic commands: Mark In, Mark Out, and Cut. And probably the last remaining thing that Avid has going over Final Cut Pro is a little routine where you can punch in plus or minus then a number on the keypad then Enter (i.e. +5 Enter), and you'll go that number of frames ahead or back. Then every time you just press Enter it'll go that same distance. Every 5th frame a duplicate? No problem.

I remap my keyboard so that it'll be Mark In, Mark Out, Cut - using the ring finger, middle finger, index finger (in that order) on my left hand. After that left handed sequence I'm pressing Enter (for the +5 frame advance) with my right index finger. Repeat ad nauseum. I knew playing all those video games back in the day would pay off.

I'm cruising through this little 5 frame edit exercise (and I'm amazed at how the Avid can keep up with this insane tapping), and I get the slightest tinge of carpal tunnel. Every now and then I take a break to check the frame numbers to make sure I haven't gone astray, and every now and then I have gone astray, so I stop to fix it. After a few minutes of speed metal finger tapping, I'm grimacing and letting out the occasional scream because nobody is supposed to edit like this. But I'll be damned if that deadline is missed.

My fingers thoroughly fatigued, I finally get the cutting done and I'm ready to lay off to tape. But some stupid Golf commercial is using the tape deck I need to lay off to. Looks like Mr. Executive Producer of the TV show with a character who says "Doh!" in it would have to wait. At least he wouldn't be waiting because of me. DOH!

Independent Worm Saloon

After a semi-tough day at work and a completely tough drive home in the rain, I walked in the back door to our apartment and saw the usual sight of Lily reading a book to Judah as he attempted to finish his dinner. A stack of children's books about 12 high stood on the counter next to them. I took off my backpack and set it on the floor, and I had removed one of my loafers when Lily said "Could you return these books to the library?"

As any good husband and father would, I pulled on my recently removed shoe, grabbed the stack of books and headed out the door. The Abbot-Kinney Library is right across the street from our driveway. It's also the place where, in the rain or in any other kind of weather, a group of homeless folk call their home. And being that it had just rained, a group of 6 or 8 homeless guys were standing off to the side of the entrance to said library.

And as I crossed the street toward the library, one of the smoking homeless guys stared me down. I returned the stare as I made my way toward the entrance carrying the armful off books. As I passed the guy, he shrugged his shoulders, looked back toward his buddies and muttered "bookworm". The group erupted in laughter. Great. Like I wanna be made fun of by a group of homeless guys. Actually, it was a good one. Bookworm. I'm gonna keep that one for a rainy day.

Run To The Hills

At the risk of pigeon-holing myself as a closet metal nerd, I need to get this off my chest. I've been to a lot of concerts. A ton of concerts. So many concerts that when I turned 21 (many moons ago) I decided that I wasn't gonna go to concerts anymore. That didn't last long.

I still go to plenty of concerts. Especially now that I live in a place where every single band comes through. But the one concert I didn't go to, if I could go to one concert that happened in my lifetime? Iron Maiden - Powerslave tour - 1984-85.

If you've ever seen pictures from this tour, then you know that the stage setup was a spectacle of the Spinal Tap variety. You don't have to like heavy metal to appreciate monstrous stage setups with fog machines, flamethrowers, fireworks, and a huge animatronic Eddie.

That concert eluded me, and I'd been trying to go to an Iron Maiden concert ever since. I came close in 2003, but the realities of a tight work schedule nixed my drive down to Shoreline Amphitheater. It looked like a live Eddie sighting wasn't in the cards. Until this year.

Iron Maiden at the Forum in Inglewood. Perfect. The parking lot was like a scene from 1984: muscle cars and jean jackets. The Forum looked like 1984. When we walked in, I imagined Magic Johnson no-look-passing to Kareem for a Showtime slam dunk. Kobe Bryant would never play here. Jack Nicholson probably wouldn't be caught dead here now. The Forum stinks and after you get 10,000 Iron Maiden fans spilling beer everywhere, it's treacherous. No lights on the slippery soaked stairways tells the whole story.

So after the obligatory horrible opening band, Iron Maiden came on and played mostly songs from around 1984. Rocked the house. Everybody looked a little older, but after the 10 foot tall animatronic Eddie walked around the stage with a laser gun, nobody noticed anymore. And now I can cross "See Iron Maiden Live" off my to do list.

These go to eleven

In plowing through my ever-expanding music collection, I've discovered some songs that aren't really songs. They're silence. They're tracks on albums which, on vinyl or cassette or 8-track or CD, might go unnoticed. But in digital music file format, they're bona fide "songs" which take up space on my hard drive.

And in researching some of the new albums I have, I've noticed that digital music stores such as Amazon & iTunes sell these silent tracks. You can buy them as part of an album or as individual tracks. "(Silence)" by Ciccone Youth: Only 99 cents at the digital store of your choice. "One Minute of Silence" by Soundgarden: Same price. "(Silence)" by Juno: Again, just 99 cents.

And they really are just that. Silence. So here's my plan. For a mere 50 cents - that's 49 cents cheaper than any digital music store - I'll sell you a track of silence! 50 cents! Can't beat that.