I've Been Hacked

Imagine my surprise when I logged into my blog account about an hour ago and saw an unpublished draft I had apparently written just before I suffered a bout of amnesia. However, the shallow comments about hair and Owen Wilson soon helped me realize that it must have been written by one Jessica Allen. Since I had caught her in the act before she managed to post it, I started to edit it but she must have been editing/posting it at the same time because all of a sudden I got a big red ERROR message at the top of my screen. I then refreshed the screen, and it was too late - she had already published it. She had even added a picture of me on the floor in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil trying to select a roll of cookies (I recall going for a chocolate sandwich cookie with a coconut filling). But the question is, where did she get the picture? Facebook? Picassa? She's got me all confused. And I just looked at it again and in the last few minutes she gotten three of my friends to comment on it. Well played, Allen. Although I do find it ironic that someone who is so reluctant to update her own blog would be so eager to update someone else's.

I guess I brought this on myself. I went over to Jess's house, where a movie party was about to start, wanted to show Jess something from on my blog, so I logged in on her laptop. The mistake was not logging out afterwards. I never intended to stay around for the movie because I was planning on going home to watch the Jazz game on my roommate's laptop. I explained that I hadn't been able to watch the Jazz in weeks and I wanted to see Deron Williams playing again, but I guess they didn't find that sufficient cause to ditch a party. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the game feed to work, so I ended up just watching the continuously updated box score on ESPN.com. It was pretty lame, except for the part about the Jazz winning by 26. And as I'm typing this the Lakers are down by 13 to the weak Dallas Mavericks.

And that's why you always log out of your blog account.

P.S. - The reason I logged into my account was so we could watch this clip:

The Jazz Suck

The Jazz suck, I've had a sudden epiphany that the team for me is the Lakers. I also think the Owen Wilson deserves an academy award for his performance in Zoolander as Hansel and my favorite movie is Twilight. I am secretly in love with Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana. Finally, Jessica Allen has the most fabulous hair in the world and I owe her my life.

Unfinished Business

When it comes to Brazil, it feels like I always have unfinished business. Back on July 7th I started a blog entry about the Amazon. This was the opening paragraph:

Greetings from "O Norte," the North. I had never been to northern Brazil before last Thursday, but I had always heard a lot about it - about how it´s killer hot, it feels like a totally different country from the rest of Brazil, and it´s dirty and less organized than the South. Guess what - all those things are true!

But then we went down to southern Brazil and I never finished that post. On July 12 I wrote the following: "When I am settled back at home I´m planning on posting more pictures and recapping other parts of the trip including: The Amazon! Iguaçú Falls! Other stuff! Stay tuned..." I guess four months should qualify as enough time to get settled back at home, so I'll make good on my promise. Apologies to all that have been in suspense for all that time.

Since a picture's worth a thousand words, I'll let my pictures from my trip to Brazil do the talking:



If a picture's worth a thousand words, a video must be worth, like, a gajillion. Here's a video from down inside the Garganta do Diabo at Iguaçú Falls:



I still feel like I have some last words to say about my return to Brazil, but for now that too will remain unfinished business.

Life's Great Mysteries

Can someone please tell me how my apartment ended up with four Nintendos?

(The one on the right is Conrad, the triple-decker stack belongs to Seth, and of course the Buffy DVDs are mine. Not pictured: our two non-functioning Nintendo 64s our one functional Sega Genesis.)

X-Ray Vision

Here is a detail my first x-ray, taken on October 17:

If you look at the base of the last metatarsal on the right, you can see a pretty messy crack going all the way across it. If you have one of those, it means your foot is broken.

Last Friday (November 14th) I went back for another round of x-rays:

This picture is not as good (I took it up against the light in my kitchen - you can see the circle), but you can see that the crack looks a lot cleaner and the fracture only goes about half-way across the bone now.

My doctor said that I should be able to ditch the walking boot in about 3 more weeks. I got a second opinion on Sunday confirming that diagnosis from my friend Stephanie Rhodes' dad, a podiatrist who coincidentally works at the same clinic as my mom in Salt Lake. When I first broke it, my Mom went down to the podiatry department to ask them some questions about the type of break I had incurred, and neither one knew at the time that Stephanie and I knew each other. Their conversation went something like this:

My Mom: My son broke his foot.
Stephanie's Dad: That's too bad.
My Mom: He's in Michigan.
Stephanie's' Dad: So is my daughter.
My Mom: He studies music.
Stephanie's' Dad: So does my daughter.
(Light bulbs appear above both of their heads)

I obviously missed my calling as a playwright. After that, Dr. Rhodes told me that he would be out here in Michigan for Stephanie's recital, and he coincidentally arrived here the day I got my new x-rays. So he spent some time with me looking over my x-rays and answering my questions, which was really awesome of him. He told me that the break was not a Jones Fracture as the doctor had previously told me, which usually requires surgery and a 6 months or so to heal, but that it was something a lot less severe. If I had to break my foot, he said, I pretty much picked the most desirable place to break it.

So hooray for getting out of the boot in three-ish weeks. I don't feel any pain in my foot any more and my boot-less morning routine (walking from the bed to the bathroom, taking a shower, walking back to the bed to put my boot on) is getting easier and less limpy. I'm really glad that I won't be in the boot for Christmas. You might even say it's a Christmas Miracle! (Cue heavenly choir)

Now if Deron Williams' foot can just heal...

P.S. - A special shout-out to Sister Connett, my bishop's wife, for sewing me up a fleece booty to go over my sock. It was starting to get really cold with my toes all exposed like that.

Brian Presents: Sherlock Jr./The Gold Rush

Warning: The following contains a really lame boxing extended metaphor. Please proceed with caution.

Saturday night was a first in the history of Brian Presents: a double feature. It was a classic throwdown between two heavyweights who have been endlessly compared for the last 80+ years.

The contenders:

Buster Keaton

VS.

Charlie Chaplin

We first watched Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr., immediately followed by Chaplin's The Gold Rush. The 20+ people present (it was the largest Brian Presents: crowd ever) reached a pretty unanimous consensus moments after the movies were over: they liked Buster Keaton better.

I was both surprised and delighted that everyone liked Buster Keaton so much. In the past I have found that of the two, Keaton is the harder sell. Chaplin's Tramp character is instantly lovable, but Keaton's characters are so stoic and dispassionate that they don't seem to care if you if you love them or not. Maybe that's why Keaton seems to have aged better - he fits in better with our more ironic, less sentimental modern world. As Roger Ebert has said, "He's like a modern visitor to the world of silent clowns."

I wonder how much everyone's opinion was influenced by the fact that we watched the 1942 reissue of The Gold Rush in which Chaplin composed a musical score and replaced the written title cards with ridiculously overwritten voice-over narration. I did this in the interest of running time - it makes the film 30 minutes shorter - so that I could comfortably pair it with another movie and not have the evening get too long. Everyone ended up staying so long afterwards that I might as well have shown the original, cheesy-narration-free 1925 version.

But the night wasn't about which one was better - I was overjoyed that many participants finally got a chance to experience Keaton and Chaplin. It's a great testament to their genius that these films, over eighty years old and made with primitive techniques by today's standards, managed to elicit a non-stop stream of laughs, sighs, gasps, and "how did they do that?"s. And that's what Brian Presents: is all about (unlike the Hokey Pokey).

The evening also involved another battle of heavyweights: B. Tanner VS. E. Downie in Dr. Mario. A lot of people played Dr. Mario that night, but I feel that I can objectively say that Elizabeth and I are in a completely different weight class (wow, this boxing analogy keeps getting worse) than all the others, and, I must admit, Elizabeth is better (heavier, to follow the analogy? - sorry Elizabeth!) than me.

We played three matches. I won the first match by close margins in each game (she claimed that her controller was bad - whatever). In the second match, Elizabeth absolutely blasted me off the face of the earth. Not even close. But in the third match, after almost everyone had left, Elizabeth and I were tied at 2 games a piece and I had a solid lead in the final game. Unfortunately, Elizabeth, cunning little vixen that she is, got started on telling this big long story during the game. At one point I quickly turned my head to look over at Micah, the subject of my story, and in that split second my pill got lodged on top of this big pile and all of a sudden I lost. So thanks to her mind games, Elizabeth pulled out the victory.

But I played much better than at the previous Brian Presents:, so I feel confident about our inevitable rematch. En garde, Elizabeth! Oops, that's fencing. Time to KO this post (yuk yuk). No, seriously.

A Different World

We all woke up this morning and the world had changed. Nothing would ever quite be the same again, and we wondered what our lives would be like from now on.

I refer, of course, to the expiration of the free trial period of NBA League Pass. NBA League Pass is a (pricey) cable package that allows you to watch every NBA game of the entire season. This is a most valuable commodity to a Utah Jazz fan who is stranded in the Detroit area, since the only time I can see the Jazz is when their games are nationally televised, which is only 10 times this whole season (compared to 24 times for the Lakers and 25 for the Celtics), and the first nationally televised game isn't until December 5th! December 5th?!? I can't wait that long to watch them play!

But thanks to the free League Pass trial I got to see the Jazz's first three games, and so far I have been very pleased by what I have seen. Even with team leader/best player/heart and soul Deron Williams out with a foot injury (I feel your pain, D-Will!), the offense has looked remarkably efficient. New backup point guard Brevin Knight looks like he was a real steal and Ronnie Price is getting better all the time at the point too. In the second game of the season the Jazz only had 5 turnovers for the whole game (new franchise record), compared to about 15 a game last year. Andrei Kirilenko seems to be thriving off the bench - he looks like the AK-47 that wreaked havoc with opposing team's offenses and made the All-Star team in 2004.

So even though I can't watch all 82 games this season as I'd like, from the small taste I've gotten of this team I feel very confident going forward. Plus I'll get to see them in action in person on December 19th when they come to the Palace of Auburn Hills to play the Pistons. If you are going to be in Michigan that day and are interested in going to the game, let me know and we'll make an excursion out of it. And if some benefactor out there would like pay for League Pass for me, I would be okay with that.

P.S. - Whenever I write Jazz-related posts the number of comments I accrue goes way down (except for comments from my friend Aaron). If you are trying to send me the message that I should stop writing about the Jazz, nice try but you'll never stop me!

Election Flashback

The presidential election election on Tuesday, November 4th marks the fourth anniversary of another important event, my senior recital. It was my very first full-length vocal recital, given in order to graduate with my bachelor's degree. Since the it was around the time of the previous presidential election, I decided that I wanted to promote the recital with a mock political poster campaign.

My sister Amy is a graduate of BYU in graphic design and she designed a brilliant series of posters for all of my recitals and all of the Zero Budget Production shows that I directed and/or produced while at the University of Utah. For this poster, I told her a couple of elements that I wanted: red, white, and blue color palette with lots of stars and stripes, generic political catchphrases, and an Uncle Sam-style photo of yours truly. I was thrilled with what she came up with:

Amy's political soundbites sound especially prescient of this year's election - "It's Time for a Change" and talk of building bridges (Bridge to Nowhere, anyone?). I have to claim the credit for the line "An Evening of Non-Partisan Music" - that just killed me when I thought of it.

In retrospect, this was an important recital for me. Aside from the opening Bach cantata (which was way beyond me at that point and probably still is) I felt like I sang very well and chose really interesting repertoire that you don't get to hear that often: Milhaud's Trois Chansons de Troubadour (in French), Villa-Lobo's Modinhas e Canções (Brazilian songs in Portuguese), and Menotti's Five Songs (in English). I ended the evening with a fully-staged performance of "The Most Lamentable Tragedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisby," a short mini-opera within the opera A Midsummer Night's Dream by Benjamin Britten. I sang the part of Thisby, but I also directed the show, and it was the first time that I had directed anything. It was a smashing success, and it went so well at my recital that we were invited to give a repeat performance at the opera workshop's scenes concert, where it completely stole the show. And I had a great time coming up with the name for the group that performed it The Royal Shakespearean Opera Society of the Wasatch Front - I wanted something that sounded ridiculously pretentious and hopelessly amateur at the same time, just like the Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisby itself.

So mad props to my sister Amy again for a great poster, and in case you haven't heard, there is a presidential election on Tuesday, so go out and build those proverbial bridges to a better future.

P.S. - As the authority on getting free stuff I feel compelled to tell you that selected Ben & Jerry's locations are giving away free scoops of ice cream on election day from 5:00 - 8:00 p.m. Isn't America a great country?

A Very Buffy Halloween

Tips to those who want to dress up as Spike for future Halloweens: if you are at the costume store and you are faced with the choice of yellow hair spray or white, go with the yellow. Spike has Billy Idol-style bleach blond hair (Spike claims that Billy Idol stole that look from him) and I thought that white might approximate that color a little bit better, but instead it just made me look old. And I couldn't say I was Spike as an old man because vampires don't age - Spike himself is pushing 150 years old.

Other than that, I felt like my costume was a success and I had fun in my costume. I even had about a dozen people correctly identify me without any help. That showed me that maybe there is hope for America after all.

I had made it known that I was going to dress as Spike a few weeks in advance, and a few friends expressed interest in forming a Buffy group with me, namely Kristen Bates (as Buffy) and Brian Starr (as Angel):

I think Kristen has a nice season 1 Buffy vibe going (Buffy was a brunette early on before making the switch to her iconic blond hair), and Brian Starr is always drawing Angel comparisons in real life, but he really nailed the Angel brooding face for this picture.

P.S. - If you look closely, you can see that I even replicated the scar on Spike's left eyebrow, incurred while he battled a Chinese slayer during the Boxer Rebellion (as seen in "Fool For Love," season 5, episode 7). Yes, I am that nerdy when it comes to Buffy.