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We have a new (to us) car.  It is a very nice car, and it betters our old car in every way.  One way in which it betters our old car in is its ability to refrain from causing our iPod/iTrip FM transmitter to squeak and squawk and tune out at every inconvenient moment.  In our old car, I’d have to (acting as an antennae) constantly hold the iPod with iTrip in a very precise way, in a very precise part of the front seat in order for the thing to play.  Even then, there’d be infuriating buzzes and squelches interrupting the music a lot of the time.  Still, we got used to it.
Now, though, the iTrip works significantly better.  I don’t have to hold it at all.  It can sit independent of human contact, and gives out (in comparison) wonderful FM transmission.
So, yeah, we were pretty happy.  Until this morning.
This morning, driving into town, happily listening to a Dolly Parton song on the iPod, it allofasudden freezes.  Hmm?  Nothing I do fixes it.  I try to reset it, but to no avail.  It’s no-go.  Plus, the hard-drive is making “I’m broken” noises, and an image of a sad iPod appears on the screen, with the address of Apple iPod support.  Since it sounds so unhealthy, I suspect that the thing is toast.  I take the news pretty well, I find.  I go off to work, without the iPod, and don’t fret about it until I get home.  I’m hoping that when I connect it to the computer, I can reformat the hard-drive and all will be well.  Even as I hope that, though, I’m thinking that the problem is more significant than that.  Still, hope upon hope.
I get home, plug the iPod into the computer.  It doesn’t register as being connected.  All it does is whine and crack, like the hard-drive is spinning and broken and all I get is the sad faced iPod on the iPod’s screen.  Going online to seek solutions proves unfruitful, and the only solution seems to be sending it away for repair.  I begin to debate whether or not it’s worth the time and money.  I think it’s not.  I begin to imagine my world without portable music and I get sad.
Then I remember seeing a page online somewhere, sometime ago where a guy talks about how he fixed his non-responsive iPod by dropping it.  Hmm?  I had pretty much convinced myself that the thing was now useless, and that I probably wouldn’t send it off for repair.  So, I decide to be brave and drop it.  I hold it about chest high and let it fall to the linoleum, where it lands flat on its back.  I pick it up and try to reset it.  Nothing but the whirring, cracking hard-drive misfiring.  I am just about to put the thing down forever, and run out the door to a meeting I had, when I decide to drop it again.  This time so that it lands on the bottom corner edge.  I find it difficult to let it drop again, as I suspect it is ready to splinter into pieces and then it’ll be truly garbage.
But drop it I do.  On its corner edge.  I pick it up, try to reset it, and it makes some new horrible sounds, blinks a couple of times and then, low and behold:  it works!
It works!  As if it was never broken.  Dropping it seems to have fixed it.
I drove to my meeting happily listening to great songs coming clearly through my new (to us) car’s sound system.

Technorati Tags: iPod, repair

Here’s a link to a video of the stage performance of Sketch22’s The Charlottetown Festival’s Young Company’s Performance of the Island Waste Management Corporation’s Production of Canada Rocks Garbage.
Canada Rocks Garbage

This was how we opened our show last summer, 2005.

Technorati Tags: Sketch22, PEI, IWMC, Confederation Centre, Canada Rocks, comedy, Rapper’s Delight

What was number one on the UK Top 40 the day I was born?

The Number 1 single was:
The Rolling Stones – “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”

The Number 1 album was:
Beatles – “Help”

Pretty good music that day.  How ’bout your birthday?

Recently seen, briefly, on the tower marquee for Empire Theatres in Charlottetown.  Instead of The Fast and the Furious, someone had changed it to “Ass and the Curious”.
Funny, I say. 
Enjoy the simple things in life.  Although, I might have been tempted to change it to “Ass and the Fist”

Tomorrow night (Thursday), Sketch22 premieres its third
successive season’s production of all-new sketch comedy.  Like past shows, it will combine both video sketches and live on-stage sketches. And, like past shows, I’m excitedly nervous about presenting these new sketches to our audience.

With comedy, it’s always a nervous time when you are about to present new material.  After rehearsing it for so long, the “funniness” of the sketches has more or less evaporated for us, and we have to trust that audiences will find them as funny as we did when we were originally writing and rehearsing them.  Also, with new comedy, there’s really nowhere to hide when you present it.  Eitherpeople laugh or people don’t.  You know whether it works or not.  With dramatic pieces, you can sort of convince yourself that the audience’s stillness and lack of response is supposed to happen.  

But with comedy, you pretty much know when you perform it whether it’s working or not.  Another slight worry after rehearsing sketches that you think are funny:  when rehearsing, you don’t really pause for the laughter you expect to happen after certain lines.  So, during the first performance, your timing can kind of get screwed up because you’re not used to waiting for laughter.  And, of course, the opposite
problem is expecting laughter at certain lines and not getting it.  That, too, can throw you off.  My approach over the years, I think, has been to never assume a line will get a laugh, and always assume that a line you have no expectation of laughter will get huge laughs.

I think this year’s crop of new material is our strongestyet.  There are a couple of sketches in particular that I simply cannot wait for people to see.  One of them, I’m very worried about because I have yet to get through rehearsing it even once without laughing.  Usually, I am able to control my onstage corpsing, but this sketch, particularly at one moment (which actually is a verydramatic, tender moment) just kills me every time.  I wasn’t particularly pleased with some of the video segments we presented at our Christmas show (we were too rushed, and the scripts just weren’t ready for production), but I think we have a strong bunch of videos for this summer.  A couple are pretty “out there” as far as concept go, and I’m a little worried that people won’t want to come along for the ride on those, but I think they’re really funny.

What else?  We play every Thursday and Friday until September 8, at the Guild in Charlottetown.  Tickets are only $15 plus tax .  This year, you can reserve tickets beforehand by calling the Guild box office at 620-3333.

If you come to the show (and I really hope you do), I hope you enjoy it.

Technorati Tags: Sketch22

Here are the results of The Annekenstein Monster’s Daily Trivia for June:
25 players played during the month.

1. reverseflash (332 points, 4 wins)
2. Grover (295 points, 1 wins)
3. dsoju’s sis (293 points, 6 wins)
4. Mrmovie (281 points, 1 wins)
5. Wessie (268 points, 4 wins)
6. RFTT1985 (245 points, 2 wins)
7. desperation (221 points, 0 wins)
8. dsoju (214 points, 2 wins)
9. annekenstein (191 points, 1 wins)
10. TracyJ (189 points, 1 wins)

Congratulations to reverseflash for walking away from the competition this month.

I find it interesting that in the past two months, I have performed poorly in my own game of trivia, yet in another person’s game, which utilizes the exact same pool of questions, I perform well.  On par with the top scorers in this game.

A new month of daily games begins today.  Come and join if you want, at The Annekenstein Monster Daily Trivia.

I was watching To Kill A Mockingbird (again) last night, and it made me think of this potentially interesting idea:
You have the ability to cherry-pick your ideal family: father, mother, brother, sister, etc.  Only requirement is that they all come from the movies.
So, who would be your ultimate movie family?  You don’t have to worry about whether the various choices would get along with each other.  I will stipulate, however, that the person you choose must play that role in the film s/he is in.  So, the father you pick must be a father in whatever film you choose a father from, the brother must be identified as someone’s brother in whatever film you choose a brother from, etc.  You do not have to be concerned about matching these people to your current age.  You can choose a best friend, for instance, who is 3, 13 or 53.

I’m currently choosing my list, but I’ll post this now to let anybody who wants to bother playing to do so.  You don’t have to complete them all, just any you want.  If you want to supply the reasons for your choices, we’d all love to hear them.

I choose this person (name & film) as my:

Husband:
Wife:
Father:

Mother:

Brother:

Sister:

Son:

Daughter:

Uncle:

Aunt:

Best Friend:

Pet:

First Love:

Boss:

Nemesis:

Friend to be with me in a street fight:

Mentor:

Business partner:

Any other categories you’d like to add?

This, from Jason, our intrepid producer:

Free Sketch tickets! For rollerskates!
Okay, everyone remembers
Let’s Make a Deal, right? Well, if you have the right item kicking
around in your shed, attic, or basement, you can win free tickets to
Sketch-22 this summer!

We are currently searching for 3 pairs of ROLLERSKATES (not
rollerblades) for the show this summer. The sizes are: men’s 12, men’s
9, ladies’ 7. If you have one or any of these rollerskates in these
sizes and would be willing to part with them for the summer (I know,
it’s hard!) let us know. And we’ll set you up for 2 free tickets to a
Sketch show this summer. If you can help us find these, you’ll be our
hero forever. If you do, respond to this blog or email me, Jason, at
jasonrogerson@hotmail.com.

Rollerskates! You got ’em? We need ’em!

sketch3
Originally uploaded by The Annekenstein Monster.

Sketch22 Season 3 is about to tear this city a new one!
This is the poster for our 2006 summer show, designed by the wonderfully talented Laura O’Brien. I am in love with this poster.
Thanks, Laura, for giving Sketch22 such a fantastic poster.

If you were an outlaw cowboy, would you want to be Butch Cassidy or The Sundance Kid?  Butch was an idea man, and I like that.  But Sundance was the one who caused people to shake.  Plus, I’m a sucker for the one who can shoot better.  And he’s the one who got to bed Katharine Ross’ character.  So, I’d have to choose Sundance.  Also, in my imagination, when I imagine myself as I could potentially be, I imagine myself as a young Robert Redford.  Blonde hair, blue eyes, rugged good looks.  That’s what I’m all about.  Right, ladies?
Why am I thinking about this?  Because I recently watched the new Ultimate Collector’s Edition DVD that was sent to me by a marketing company, after I agreed I’d post about it on my blog.  So, that’s what I’m doing.  I’m posting on my blog about the new Ultimate Collector’s Edition DVD of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Yeah, so I’ll willingly bend over and take it, as long as I get a sandwich or something out of the deal, you know what I mean?  The only losers in this deal are people like you, who have read this far expecting another of Rob’s patented whimsies, only to discover that this post is nothing more than a (poorly) disguised advertisement.  For that I do apologize, but the lure of free merchandise was too great for me to ignore.  More sandwiches, please!
I’ve always been a fan of the movie, and was glad to receive the DVD.  (but then again, I was glad to receive the Pamela Anderson roast DVD too, even though I didn’t really like much of it.  I guess I just like getting free things.)  It looks fantastic, the picture does. And there are plenty of extra features, commentaries and such. But truthfully, I’m not much of a person for extra features and whatnots.  So, I doubt I’ll watch them.  I was glad to get the movie though.  I expect I’ll watch it at least a few more times in my life.  And now that I’m thinking about it, probably the next time I watch it, I’ll watch it with the commentary on.  Looking at some of the features, I am actually kind of interested in hearing director George Roy Hill’s commentary.  I wonder if it’s a recent commentary?  If so, I then wonder if it’s full of vague reminiscences (is that how you spell that word?).  Also, I’ll be interested to hear William Goldman’s commentary, too.
And, now, honestly, I don’t know whether I’m pitching the DVD, or if I’m actually typing honest thoughts about the DVD.  I suspect, though, that since I keep typing things like “Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid” and “Ultimate Collector’s Edition DVD”, that I’m still pitching.
It’s time to take me out, coach!  This corporate whore’s arm is tired.
I now direct you back to regular, not-so-obvious shilling.  Well, except for the obviousness of my Sketch22 shilling.