Bugs In Jars and All's Right With The World

What better joy is there to make a trap for fruit flies involving a jar, a paper funnel and some tape with a piece of banana soaked in vinegar as bait, leaving for work, and then coming home to find all of those disgusting little fuckers trapped inside the jar, drunk on banana but repentant and trying to get out. Ha! Now I can leave cut-up food on the counter and go to the other room to get something without imagining your filthy little bug feet all over it.

I attribute my slightly sadistic feelings regarding the bugs in question here to a science experiment in grade seven in which we put tiny translucent bugs called daphnes under the microscope and dropped more and more eyedrops of caffeine on them under their little hearts beat so fast that they died. I have never met or heard of anyone called Daphne without thinking of this experiment.

Okay, maybe the joy of having tiny trick-or-treaters knock at your door wearing costumes full of fake bulging muscles competes with the joy of the fruit fly trap. Especially when you ask them what they are dressed up as and they say something so softly and mumbly you can't even tell if it's english or spanish.

Volvosaur

I saw a scary car up in Hollywood on the morning of Wednesday the 19th. Looks like someone else saw it too.

Nice Skin... Terrible Movie

One of the incidentals I like most about the crew experience is how when you get further into the jungle of production everyone's skin goes to shit. Seeing the dark eye circles and developing zits of my fellow crew members makes me feel better about my own set. On Saturday it was pointed out to me that my eye sockets had sections of skin that were blue like pool cue chalk. It is when I see my peers staggering around Lucas looking like death that I really know they are doing a great job.

Gorillas in the Mist

This weekend we shot our pickups back in the fair town of Sunland, which is probably technically a suburb, but is so un-LA-like in terms of the people that live there being nice that it feels more appropriate to refer to it as a town.

Our crew was there at what was supposed to be the crack of dawn, but was instead the crack of an overall misty greyness that made the hills look like Japan.

We were shooting on the front lawn of this house up the street from an elementary school. There was some kind of Halloween fair at the school all day, so our touching early morning mother and child reunion had strings of "Eight Days A Week" and "Hard Days Night" in the background (maybe it was a Beatles carnival?). Little kids in costumes were spotted being walked to and from the fair.

So we're shooting and this kid walks up and we all know this kid. This is the fat kid whose shorts are too short and whose legs are yet somehow too skinny and who has a flat-footed kind of walk and no art whatsoever in interacting with other humans. In this case, she had two eyes, a nose, and a giant bright orange stain for a mouth, an orange which continued down the front of her t-shirt. Had some punch at the fair, no doubt. She carried a gorilla mask under her arm. She stood there for a while, and then Molly saw her and said hello and she asked if we were making a movie and Molly said yes and Molly asked if she had been at the carnival and she said no, she'd been at the festival.

Then she walked away.

If I had been captain of the camera ship I would have snagged her for a cameo, because no one gets that much punch dye up to their nostrils, out to their cheeks and down over their chin like a kid like that.

Colour Me Disappointed

This is saddening news.

Because the only thing better, and more appropriately Canadian, than Martha rowing a giant pumpkin across a lake for jollies would be Martha rowing a giant pumpkin across a lake for jollies in horrible weather. I like how her helper elf had to do it instead.

At least they refer to her as an ex-felon. Thank you, CBC.

I Haven't Left The House All Day: Awesome

Today has been all about harnessing my avoidance tendencies to get things done. They might not be the things I ought to be doing, no, but at least they are something. There's nothing like a deadline for a piece of writing to make me clean my room with a rabid kind of thoroughness. I just dusted the base of my desk lamp (and it was fillllthy).

But today, I have employed the strategy that only works when you have a whole bunch of stuff to get done: procrastinate on doing what it is you have to do by doing something else you have do. It totally works! Especially if you take breaks for tea, dancing and to look at the Martha Stewart website for advice on succulents.

Completely unrelated, but no less uninteresting: when location scouting in Sunland, Sierra Madre and north Pasadena (basically the freeway-accessed suburban areas to the north and east of L.A.) we frequently came across a whole buncha peacocks. Constantly and randomly. Like, walking down the middle of a street, or perched all over a house. Apparently someone in that area many moons ago had a lot of peacocks and either they escaped or were released and now they wander and squak all over place in those hills and driveways up there. Have you ever heard a peacock call? It sounds like someone being stabbed in the neck. FYI if you were planning to live there. Or shoot. Ha ha.

Tears for Nerds

An exchange from work Monday:

Me: (sitting, listening to the Mad World cover from Donnie Darko)

Angry Nerd: This a good song, have you heard the original version?

Me: Yup. I've actually got the tape in my car.

Angry Nerd: You have an original copy of The Hurting?

Me: Uh, no, I've got the one with the sun on the cover.

Angry Nerd: Oh. The complilation.

(Angry Nerd leaves)

I really feel like I let the guy down with not knowing more about Tears for Fears, but really, was my crime of owning a compilation album so grave that he had to abort the conversation so abruptly?

Dreams CAN Come True!

Hooray!

A Good Thing

O Globe and Mail website, sometimes your daily polls are a little stodgy, not unlike the nation you report to, but sometimes you really outdo yourself.

"Is it okay with you if convicted criminal Martha Stewart comes to Canada to row a giant pumpkin?"

What does this even mean? Like, row, with an oar? Or plant in a row? And a giant pumpkin: how giant? Hollowed out and giant and Martha in it and rowing like mad down the St. Lawrence?

I fucking hope so! Think how entertaining that would be! Yes! Yes! How could you vote no to that?

Why I Am A Humanist

Yesterday I was at work behind the desk in the Student Production Office and this very boring looking guy walks in, 30-something, boring hair, boring suit, nice-looking boring face with a placid smile to ask me about an address in the cinema complex. He points me to his notepad with the building and room on it and that's when I see he has the most awesomely ridiculous goth ring on: silver, takes up the entire first segment of his middle finger, lots of curlicues and bumps and christened with a giant blue cat's eye in the middle.

Is this what happened to the goths? I thought they had died out completely and I miss their extreme intensity (there's something so teenaged and therefore nostalgic about that kind of intensity) but maybe they just got haircuts and suits?

The man yesterday made me really happy with his massively intense ring. The passion of the goth lives on!