As amusing as it was to learn of the former Captain Picard’s fascination with female cinematic nudity, I find that I’m still looking for a reason not to re-create the famous stunt from The Poseidon Adventure (the original one, natch) by hurling myself out my office window and onto the skylight of the nightclub down below. I think I need some heavier ammunition to knock me out of my current funk… I need… the power of The Shat!

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I don’t know about you kids, but I’ve had a bad week. One of those butt-kicking, every-day-I-hit-the-ground-running, too-much-to-do-and-not-enough-time-to-do-it-in, my-pointy-haired-boss-is-talking-again-why-won’t-he-just-shut-up! kind of weeks. A big, long, five-day gruel-fest of petty annoyances and mounting frustrations that has me thinking that maybe, just maybe, it was a bad idea for that primordial ooze to start assembling itself into proteins in the first place. In other words, I’m totally knackered.
So what do I need at the end of a week that has seen me gobbling Excedrin by the fist-full? If you said, “Irish whiskey,” well, yes, of course, you’re right, but I am still at work, so I’d better hold off on that option until later. In the meantime, how about a video clip of respected, dignified Shakespearean actor (and TV and movie star) Patrick Stewart telling an aspiring writer all about his own screenplay, a vanity piece about a man with the psychic ability to remove women’s clothes? Ah, yes, that’ll do nicely…

For some reason, YouTube won’t allow me to embed this clip here at Simple Tricks, so you’ll have to click the link above and go watch it elsewhere. Or, if that’s too much trouble, you could click this one. Trust me, it’s worth the effort…

In a comment on the previous entry, Cranky Robert asked if all you folks out there in InternetLand “could get a shot of the newly refurbished Bennion Scriptorium.” Well, it just so happens that I have such a shot handy at the moment:

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A couple weeks ago, political blogger Andrew Sullivan tried an interesting experiment: he asked his readers to send in photos of the view from their windows. The idea was to try and get more of a feel for who his readers are by seeing the places they call home. The experiment was an unqualified success — he got hundreds of submissions, so many that his corporate overlords saw fit to gather some of the more interesting ones into an official feature on their website (for the record, my favorite shot is the final one, of a misty morning in the Hollywood Hills).

Never one to let a good Internet fad get away from me, I thought I’d do something similar and share with you what I can see from my home office. This inspiring vista is my back yard at the Bennion Compound; the shot was taken two weeks ago, on a drizzly Sunday afternoon. Click on it to get a better look. FYI, the green thing in the top foreground is an awning/gazebo thingie that shades my deck; the big grayish thing in the bottom foreground is the cover for my hot tub, currently drained and unplugged because it wasn’t worth maintaining for the amount of use it actually received. As I said, inspiring, eh?
I intend to post up a photo of the view from my day-job office, too, whenever I remember to bring a camera into work. If anyone would like to share their views a la Sullivan’s readers, feel free to send them along…