Author Archives: Rob MacD

It Was A Scream

Last night, during the storm, four of the island-dwelling Sketch 22 members performed a half-hour gig at UPEI. It may have been the only event not cancelled.
We performed at The Wave for an alumni fundraiser. The Wave is not a good place to perform sketch comedy when the only means of voice amplification is one’s own vocal chords. It is basically a big empty concrete and steel room with acoustics that are dead. That means when one speaks, the sound waves, immediately upon leaving one’s mouth, dissipate into nothingness. To combat this, one must scream. Unless you’re Sam Kinison, screaming lines of comedy is not the ideal method.
Fortunately, it was only a half hour of screaming our lines, and even then the crowd seemed to enjoy us more than I thought they would. The crowd was an odd mix of old fuddy-duddy wallets and around-my-age keeners. We were introduced as improv performers, and I’m sure many of the people had no idea who or what we were, but there were plenty of laughs.
We performed
-Wessie Doucette and The Tyne Valley Motivational Experience
-Moe Gorman (Moe wrote a new song just for the event)
-The Right Eloquent Island
-Road Crew (the musical)

Tomorrow night, we perform at the Confederation Centre for Madly Off in All Directions. Looking forward to it.
While we’ve been looking forward to these performances, I believe we are moreso looking forward to having them done and in the can (so to speak), so we can get down to the business of writing for next summer’s show.

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The Thinking Is The Doing

The difference (at least “A” difference) between me and successful people (I know, I AM successful in certain ways, and every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings – attaboy, Clarence!) is my inability to finish something once I’ve initially thought about it. To me, the thinking is the doing.
I’m talkin’ artistic ideas. Tons of great ideas have bounced around in this brain, but they don’t get any further than the thinking of them. I’m too lazy to flesh them out, I guess. And if I do manage to push an idea past the thinking stage, to the actual working on it, I must ensure that I keep tight-lipped about it. The second the idea gets voiced to another person, it’s like a pin bursting a balloon, and the idea gets immediately relegated to the ‘forget about it’ pile. The thinking is the doing, and the telling is the producing.

So, I need someone to come up with a computer program, some device I can plug into my brain that will automatically make hard copies of all those brilliant theatrical and cinematic thoughts that never get done. Then I need a device that can take those hard copy ideas and silently work them up into full-fledged written text.

Once that’s accomplished, I’ll be one prolific writer. A prolific writer that has tons of shitty computer-generated plays and screenplays stuffed into the drawers of the desks in my home.

Friday Night Lights

I watched the movie Friday Night Lights the other night. It took me a while to get into it, and despite a bit of problematic story-telling, I was quite glad I watched it. For those who don’t know, the movie follows a Texas high school football team as they attempt to win the annual State Championship. Billy Bob Thornton plays the coach.
In the movie’s small-town Texas, high school football is king. The team is expected to go all the way, and nothing less will be accepted. The movie does a good job in conveying the pressures that such expectations have on the team. It focuses on a couple of the players (one in particular, the quarterback), and through their stories we get a good sense of how much pressure these kids are under.
The problem I have is that the story of the quarterback starts off, gets us interested in him, but then kind of gets lost as we montage through the game of the season, as they march towards the inevitable big showdown. I wanted the movie to remain focused a bit more on this character and felt a bit cheated that it didn’t. But this is a relatively small gripe, and one shouldn’t really criticize a movie for not being what one wants it to be.
Billy Bob, while having star billing, really doesn’t have a lot to do (although he does that well). There is a great speech at the end that he gives to the players. I really appreciated the message of that speech.

Kind of a quick, scattered review. A pretty good football movie. A pretty good sports movie. A pretty good movie.

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Sunny Day School Closure

Yesterday was a beautiful day. Cold, but beautiful. And school was cancelled for the Eastern School District.
Some parents were upset that school was closed on such a picture-perfect day. I, howeve, completely understand the reasons and agree entirely. In Charlottetown, many roads were narrowed to one lane only; sidewalks were not cleared and walking to school would have been a desperate and dangerous adventure. Has anyone tried walking in Charlottetown when one is forced onto the roads? It’s truly a life-endangering adventure, as many drivers seem to have the opinion that the road is no place for a pedestrian. Normally
I can’t speak for the validity of closing country schools that rely almost entirely on bussing, but I can only imagine that many side and secondary roads were likewise difficult to travel down.

Yeah, it’s a bitch to have to scramble to find a sitter, but better scrambling for a sitter than for a casket for your killed-by-traffic child.

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London’s Borning of Punk

For me, watching this (it’s a 10meg .avi download) was akin to what Billy Graham might feel like if he saw a video of the sermon on the mount.

It’s The Clash performing London’s Burning in 1977. This has made my weekend. If I had a time-machine, I’d go back to that exact moment so I could see the rest of the show.

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The Icon-stein Monster

Don’t know if it’s showing up on your browser as the favicon for this site, but it’s showing up on mine.  The lovely DaveM sent me a tiny little pixellated Annekenstein Monster.  I made a couple of small changes to it, basically to make the braids bigger and make the colors contrast a bit more, but I like it much better than the blocky red face thing I had.

Thanks Dave!

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Tag, I’m It!

This is a link to a Technorati Tags Bookmarklet that allows one to add tags to their blog posts.

This is a post to see what it does.

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A Licking Pussy

Dirty monitor screen?  Get this bit of flash.

As for the title… Good Gods of Google Search, what have I just done?

Heil Harry??

Prince Harry wears a Nazi outfit to a costume party and is up shit creek for it.

Somewhere, presumably in a post-death holding tank, Bob Crane and Werner Klemperer are high-fiving each other, thankful for the attrocities they got away with.

I wonder, will there ever be a time when wearing a Nazi outfit to a costume party is not seen as an evil act, or morally reprehensible?  The world is so serious.

Shoot The Effing Ball!!!

5 to 2. 
If it was the score of a hockey game you watched, you’d probably feel you had witnessed a typical game.  If is was baseball, you’d probably think the pitchers did a pretty good job.

But a score of 5-2 in basketball?  That’s crazy.

The winning basket in this Vermont high-school b’ball game came off a three-pointer in the second quarter.

I played some rec basketball at university (and damaged a knee doing it), but basketball never really grabbed me in any way. I was a pretty big Celtics fan for the last half of Larry Bird’s career, and I’ll watch the annual NCAA March Madness games, but that’s about it.  I find the first 80 points each NBA team scores to be pretty boring, and the game only gets interesting in the final five minutes or so, assuming both teams still have a chance to win. 
I cannot imagine watching this 5-2 test of fan endurance.  I wonder if, at some point, the audience (if there were any who remained) began to hope and expect the two teams to not score.
The low-point of my basketball career came in grade 7 during gym class.  We were learning to play the game and would play quick games.  I was never really into it too much, and one time I was lolly-gagging around half-court, as the action was taking place under our net, when a team-mate passed me the ball.  I was all alone with the ball, so I began to dribble down towards the opponent’s net.  I dribblied, in fact, to right uner their net, stopped and looked up at the net directly above me.  I had maneuvered myself into the one place on the court where I couldn’t really get a good shot at the net.  So I looked around at the rest of the players, running down the court towards me.  I knew I couldn’t dribble again because I’d be called for a double-dribble.  I knew I couldn’t get a good shot, standing absolutely directly under the net.  So, I did the next best thing.  I passed to a team-mate who was in a better position to shoot.
As soon as I passed the ball, the teacher blew the whistle.  I heard, in the high-sharp tweet of the whistle, the contempt and disbelief that the teacher was about thrust upon me.  He stopped the game and bawled me out for being so stupid as to not take the shot, all by myself with no opposition players near me.  I knew that explaining my position, or rather my poor position, would be futile, so I just sucked it up, let the teacher yell at me and call me a moron and have the rest of the class laugh at my folly.
A 5-2 basketball game.  I could’ve been one of the Three Stars of that game.