The Annekenstein Monster

I think, perhaps, the greatest gig that a tv commercial copy writer could get would be to hook up with the production company that does the Five Alive ads.

They’re the ads that look like they’re on mushrooms. 3 or 4 mini-whacked-out clips, totally disassociated from each other and from reality, in 30 seconds.

For instance, here might be a typical 30 second tv ad for Five Alive (these don’t exist, but if the prod. comp. wants them, hire me and you got ’em):

scene one (8 seconds): an animated beetle wearing an ascot, suspenders and a monocle, in a psychedelic garden, gets its groove on, on a petal of a flower. A Five Alive can falls down from the sky (a la the big foot at the beginning of the Monty Python tv series shows) and squashes the beetle. Beetle tickles the can which laughs and runs away. Music: frenetic German dance beat.

cut to:

scene two (12 seconds): in a room which somehow looks like the entire world, two pretty women, each with twelve arms, and an armadillo on each of their heads, take turns spitting words at each other. The words float out of the mouth of each woman, but float up into the sky, where a huge orange juicer awaits. The words gets juiced and the juice pours into a can of Five Alive. Music: Tuvian throat singing.

cut to:

scene three (10 seconds): in claymation, a box of pens turns into an airplane turns into a medic alert bracelet turns into a belly dancer turns into a lava lamp turns into a midget with a can of Five Alive as one of her legs. Music: the Russian national anthem, played backwards.

Seriously, those are some whigged out commercials.

The local Dairy Queen at lunch hour is a sesspool of skanky, awful junior high school types. Jam-packed with pimply, terribly dressed juveniles and their attendant hyperactive ignorance.

Today it was unuusally empty. Maybe a quarter of the usual raging hormones. Perhaps this being the end of school, schedules are off. Anyway, today I ordered my food, and while I was waiting, some kid sitting nearby, surrounded by his goofy group, says “Do you watch Oz?”

At first I thought I had overheard him talking to a friend, and I thought, “My god, you’re too young to be watching Oz”.

Then again “Do you watch Oz?” More pointed. He was talking to me.

“What?” I asked, naturally suspicious.

“Do you watch Oz?”, then a dirty, yellow-teethed smile.

“I used to.” I brace myself for the ridicule.

“Ewww. Oz is gay!” Laughter.

“You think so?” is all I could come up with. Conversation over.

I’m so disappointed in myself.

I, of course, should have invited him to join me in the Dairy Queen bathroom.

The local Dairy Queen at lunch hour is a sesspool of skanky, awful junior high school types. Jam-packed with pimply, terribly dressed juveniles and their attendant hyperactive ignorance.

Today it was unuusally empty. Maybe a quarter of the usual raging hormones. Perhaps this being the end of school, schedules are off. Anyway, today I ordered my food, and while I was waiting, some kid sitting nearby, surrounded by his goofy group, says “Do you watch Oz?”

At first I thought I had overheard him talking to a friend, and I thought, “My god, you’re too young to be watching Oz”.

Then again “Do you watch Oz?” More pointed. He was talking to me.

“What?” I asked, naturally suspicious.

“Do you watch Oz?”, then a dirty, yellow-teethed smile.

“I used to.” I brace myself for the ridicule.

“Ewww. Oz is gay!” Laughter.

“You think so?” is all I could come up with. Conversation over.

I’m so disappointed in myself.

I, of course, should have invited him to join me in the Dairy Queen bathroom.

There are people who don’t like/cannot eat lunch by themselves. I can dig that. However, I have no problem being by myself, and often look forward to the solo lunch. Of course, too, there’s nothing better than feasting with friends.

Lately, I’ve been lunching sans ami more often so I can learn my lines for our upcoming sketch show. (preparing for ‘the show’, too, is one of the reasons for lack of posting from me lately). Today, at lunch, was one of those great days where it felt great to be outside in the city. Absolutely perfect weather, a bench, a gorgeous sun, lots of people buzzing about, an appetizing meal and some great tunes playing on my walkman. (who wants to give me an ipod?)

Does anyone know the artist Eamon? (sorry if you don’t like his website) I came across him today on a miix cd I have of “artists that I don’t know, but I have a song or two by them”. The song of his that played today was ‘Fuck It” (sorry mom and dad). What a great song. A smooth, kinda old-style R&B flow and groove that’s populated with all sorts of pleasingly vulgar lines. While I don’t seek out music with ‘bad words’, I do appreciate a song that makes good use of them. Aside from the great music of this song, I love his nonchalance when singing vulgarity.

Anyway, it was a chore-and-a-half to go back to work this afternoon.

I’ve been using Gmail (Google’s 1gig web-mail alternative to Hotmail and Yahoo type mail servers) for a couple of months now, and I’m liking it more and more everyday. At first, I was unsure if I’d bother with the pain of yet another email address, but I find myself casually switching my email subscriptions, etc., over to my gmail address.

It’s in Beta, still, but seems to work very well for my needs. They are now beginning to add the odd addition here and there to make it even better.

Anyway, they are once again looking for people to help test it, and have granted me a couple of chances to offer the service to my friends.

So, if you’re interested in getting a gmail account (at this early stage, there’s still a good chance you can get the email name you want), post a reply here stating as such.

I’ll only contact the person(s) to whom I’ll send an invitation, so if you don’t hear back from me, don’t take it as a sign that I don’t like you.

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Some of you who know me, may know about some of the little theatrical ideas that I sometimes express a desire to perform.

One of those ideas is to take a popular modern song and perform it as a choir, kind of in a Bobby McFerrin style. By that I mean there’d be no instruments, but each person in the choir would be responsible for verbally duplicating a tiny, particular aspect of the song. One person would handle the bass drum, another the high-hat ‘tss tss tss’ sounds, another the guitar strums, another the bass, etc… as many voices as needed to duplicate the song. The goal would be to try and reproduce all the sounds of the original, as closely as possible, but only using our voices.

I think this would sound neat. Well, now I don’t need to do bother. This guy has basically done that, with Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. He didn’t use a choir of individuals, though. He does all the sounds himself, recorded individually and then put together.

It’s an interesting version. You can click the link above, or over to the left if you’d like to download it and check it out.

This is link to a page that has a link to watch or download a video of George W. Bush. It is supposedly (and I have no reason to believe otherwise) a video of him on the morning of Sept.11, 2001. He is in a classroom watching students learn.

At the beginning of the video, an aid comes up to him and apparently gives him a piece of paper. It is said that written on the paper is: America is under attack.

Watch what the PotUS does over the course of the next five minutes. It’s bewilderingly fascinating.

I’m not sure what I would do, but I don’t think it’d involve remaining sitting on my ass. I can only assume that he didn’t know the immediacy, severity or seriousness of the attack, and probably felt it best to carry on as normal until he had an appropriate opportunity to excuse himself. Okay.

I’d so dearly love to know what goes on in his mind sometimes. This is one of those times.