I’m not one to pay much attention to dreams — I don’t try to interpret them, I don’t freight them with any real significance, and most the time I don’t even remember them (I assume, however, that I do have them, because, as far as I can tell, I haven’t gone mad like you’re supposed to if you don’t dream) — but I had one this morning just before the alarm woke me that’s really staying with me for some reason. It wasn’t scary or anything, it was just… weird.

In the dream, I was in The Girlfriend’s bedroom, trying to find the source of this freaky purple light emanating from beneath her bed. I got down on my knees and, after a moment’s hesitation, lifted the bedskirt. There was an automated plasma torch under there, merrily slicing strips from this long bolt of fabric, which I somehow knew were going to be used to make underwear. I don’t know what kind of underwear, or whether it was ladies’ underwear or men’s or sexy or utilitarian. Just that the fabric would end up as… underwear.

And then an ex-girlfriend that I haven’t seen in probably 12 years showed up. She didn’t do anything, she just walked into the room, gave me a little wave, and walked out the other door.

And that was it. Weird, huh? The ex-girlfriend’s appearance makes a certain amount of sense — the media coverage for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is beginning to pick up, and I was involved with her back when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came out in ’89, so reading those articles yesterday probably just stirred up some old memories — but where the hell did the plasma torch and the underwear come from? I’m going to be pondering this one all day, I fear…

Just in case desktop computers, HDTV, and cellphones are insufficiently science-fiction-y for you, we’re soon going to have light-emitting wallpaper and vat-grown hamburgers.

I am frankly flabbergasted by this stuff. And also by the fact that I just glanced out my window and it’s freaking snowing. On a sunny day, no less. I love springtime in Utah…

My good friend and occasional writing partner Mike Chenoweth (more familiarly known in these parts as “Chenopup”) has just launched a nifty entrepreneurial venture, a company called Reel Classroom, which will produce and sell educational DVDs targeted at those who want to become film and video professionals, as well as those who are already in the business and want to deepen their skill sets. The first two DVDs — Introduction to Lighting for Film and Video and Green Screen Lighting — are available now.

Both were written, directed, and edited by Mike, and they feature veteran gaffer Carl Gundestrup as your host and narrator. I’ve seen both DVDs myself, and think they’re pretty interesting, even for people who have no intention of ever becoming gaffers or lighting techs. (Full disclosure: I actually appear on-screen in Green Screen Lighting, in all of my difficult-to-light glory!)

The Reel Classroom web site is live as of yesterday, so I’d like to ask my three loyal readers to do me a favor: click on over there and have a look around, see if there’s anything there you might like for yourself, and generally do what you can to spread the word. If you know anyone who might be interested in learning about the film industry, let them know.

One more for tonight: our esteemed colleague Jaquandor has declared me an excellent blogger:

Another terrific source of high-quality geekitude, Jason at Simple Tricks and Nonsense always brings the goods. Sometimes we agree on stuff, sometimes we don’t.

To which I say, with all sincerity, thanks, man. That truly means a lot to me. I’m glad people out there enjoy what I do.
And to everyone else reading this, if you haven’t checked out Jaquandor’s blog, Byzantium’s Shores, I highly recommend it. He’s a fine writer and seems to be a good egg. Have a look, in particular, at his on-going project to “fix” the The Phantom Menace; basically he’s writing a story treatment that retains the bulk of Uncle George’s screenplay as we saw it, but with a few tweaks that would’ve made for a drastically improved film. As he says of me, I don’t agree with everything he’s doing — I would’ve made far more substantial changes to Jar Jar Binks and the Gungan people than Jaq has chosen to do, and I probably would’ve jettisoned the midichlorians altogether rather than trying to find a way to make that idea work — but that’s the fun of these sort of geeky conversations. At least it used to be, back before everybody got so damn serious about them.
As you can imagine, this rewrite is a pretty lengthy process; he’s doing it by installments and is about halfway through the film at this point. Here’ s Part One to get you started…

My friend Erin recently started a blog, but her posting has been pretty sporadic and today she’s reached that dark midnight of the blogger’s soul, the blogistential crisis if you will, that all of us online dabblers eventually come to:

Continue Reading…

As I fancy myself something of a clever wordsmith, at least on good days, I always admire a good turn of phrase, a line that perfectly describes the subject at hand or even — bonus! — makes me smile or laugh out loud.

I’ve encountered two such items in today’s web surfing, which I’d like to share with you now.

The first comes from Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, who, in talking about yesterday’s news that scientists have successfully tested an immensely powerful petawatt laser, explains that:

…one petawatt is 1000 terawatts; peta is a prefix people will get to know in a year or two once terabyte drives prove too small to store very many illegally downloaded BluRay movies.

That’s a pretty good one, but the comparison that really earned a chuckle came from Boing Boing Gadgets:

[Item X] should cost more per ounce than heroin filtered through the limbic system of Tom Cruise.

Heroin filtered through Tom Cruise’s limbic system? How absurd! How perfect! What kind of twisted, beautiful mind comes up with something like that? I can only doff my hat in wonder and respect…

This morning as I was driving over to the train station, I heard the song “Jessie’s Girl” by my main man Rick Springfield… on KODJ. That’s the local oldies station, if you don’t know.

Then, coming home on the train tonight, I was serenaded by a couple of sweaty, pubescent twelve-year-old boys with dumb haircuts who were wearing baggy jeans and way-oversized hoodies covered in skulls. They were singing “I’m Turning Japanese.”

I honestly don’t know which of these two events made me feel more over the hill.

At least the kids weren’t being mocking or ironic — they were, in fact, behaving like this moldy chestnut was a really cool and funny song. Which it is. And at least Rick’s back on the radio somewhere.

I’m rationalizing, aren’t I?

Sigh. I’m going to go put on a sweater and lay in a supply of rocks for chasing the damn kids off my lawn…

I had a little surprise waiting in my e-mail inbox this morning and thought I’d share it with my three loyal readers. The gorgeous photo above was taken by my friend, Mike Gillilan; it’s a panorama consisting of several overlapping images that have been digitally stitched together, then tweaked in the computer to produce a “high dynamic range image.” I’ll confess, I don’t fully understand the HDR stuff — hell, I don’t even own a digital camera — but as you can see, it produces some really striking results. Don’t forget to click the image for the larger version…

Incidentally, in case you don’t recognize this location, it’s the Sandy TRAX station, a.k.a., the “end of the line, as far as we go,” the southernmost terminus of the Salt Lake Valley’s light-rail system. This is the station where Gillilan and I both begin our daily commutes. For the record, it looks much cooler in this photo than in the real world…

I know LOLcritters aren’t to everyone’s liking, but many of them amuse me, and this one seems really appropriate given the nature of my last several posts:

***IMAGE MISSING***

Yeah, this is pretty much what my commute home tonight was like. Only instead of a cute little puppet, I was being eyeballed by a scruffy guy who smelled suspiciously like onions and cheap bourbon…