This is fall, the season when spiders try to come into the house. So see a spider on the wall. You don’t want it wandering around so you grab a glass and trap it. Cool it’s trapped. Then it starts to dawn on you that you can’t reach anything to slide under the glass. If you lift the glass the spider, now terrified will run away. So you call out for some help but nobody’s there. You just know that the spider, should it escape will seek you out in the night for terrible revenge.

These are the things nightmares are made of.

So anyway, we were talking at rehearsal last weekend and one of the other actors mentioned that she thought she’d have trouble playing against type. Her current character was similar to her own personality, hopeful, but with a very rational subtext. She thought she’d have trouble playing someone silly, a comic character full of quips and jokes. I told her that I was the opposite. With my background in comedy I would have no trouble with a clown, a comic, a wise guy. On the other hand, a dark, nasty, terrifying character would be much harder for me. I’d have trouble playing, for example, Hannibal Lecter without feeling like I had to say something to break the tension.

“Take my knife, please.”

So this week I was playing with the computer when I had a brilliant idea. You see with Apple going into the high end watch / jewelry business. Elon Musk from Paypal is re-inventing the space launch and electric car industries. I got thinking about what other fields tech companies could go into. Then it hit me, what do people think of when they have an embarrassing blemish? What name comes to mind when there’s a spot of colour they want to hide? What name do people think of when they aren’t projecting the image they want? Photoshop. That’s why the next revolutionary idea should be:

Photoshop Brand Cosmetics.

And speaking of computers and tech I noticed that Microsoft released the first preview of the next version of Microsoft Windows. Much to everyone’s surprise they are going to call it Windows 10. Apparently Windows 8 was such a disaster they skipped 9 altogether to put more distance between it and the new one. I also think that they wanted to prevent twits like me from making Windows Nein! jokes. What I find most interesting though, is the innovation in Windows 10. They’re introducing this thing called a Start Menu. Click on it and you have access to your programs and settings and printers and such WITHOUT having to hunt through a bunch of random sized tiles on the screen. It’s amazing. I wonder why they didn’t think of this before now, like with Windows 7,

or XP, … or 98, … … or 95.

So then this week we saw on the news that some guy broke into the White House. They have film of him scaling the fence, running across the lawn, through a door, down the hall, and into the Oval Room. Multiple witnesses saw him before, during and after they tackled him inside the building. The thing I found funny is he’s pleading not guilty. Not any "by reason of" …either. He’s just saying not guilty.

I can’t help but think of Bart Simpson saying, “I didn’t do it.”

And lastly I came across the movie High Plains Invaders. Essentially it is a remake of The Birds. It’s exactly like The Birds in nearly every way. Identical except it’s set in the old west, not rural California. Well, that and they aren’t birds, they are more like twelve foot tall mechanical insects. OK, and these insects technically don’t fly into town, they drop out of a flying silver spherical spaceship. Oh and these giant bugs get drunk on Uranium and fire stone spear points out of their tails. And, well, the people don’t flee into the morning light, they blow up the bugs, the town and the spaceship, with one short stick of dynamite. But other than that it’s exactly the same as The Birds.

I love bad science fiction movies.

PIX: OK, this Pumpkin Spice thing is getting out of hand. Orange doesn’t seem too sure about it either.


YAY!
Fall is here