Do I Need It? It's My Arm!

[wordwill]

Expect more titles that set up posts like this to be non sequiturs. I keep getting little quotes and things stuck in my head, so I'm going to put 'em to work for me. That should make them think twice about coming round and getting caught inside my head like a bird in the house.

(The title itself, it turns out, can't be a non sequitur, because it's the title. Nothing precedes it, so it can't follow at all, logically or otherwise. Aren't you glad you asked.)

This is one of those posts where I drop a bunch of links on you and then go eat home-made chili. It's got sweet potatoes in it. It's good.

• These things happen in threes. Film score artists Basil Poledouris (The Hunt for Red October, Conan the Barbarian, Starship Troopers) and Shirley Walker (Batman the Animated Series, numerous work with Danny Elfman over the years) both died recently. Until the, uh, third shoe drops, I'll be worried. But you can go on with your life, 'cause you don't care about the composers of film scores.
  
  
• Every produced episode of Smith, the Ray Liotta and Virginia Madsen TV show about a professional thief and his suspicious wife, are now available on iTunes. This is something I love about iTunes: the chance to catch the remainders of shows given less than half a chance. If you can find them. As part of the weird (I mean lousy) iTunes organization process, the show appears under TV shows>Smith>Smith. So good luck finding it under any menu that doesn't offer as Smith as a category once it drifts off the main TV page. If you buy all seven episodes, though, you get a booklet with the synopses for the five plotted, but unfilmed, episodes. Let me know how they are, 'cause I never even knew when this show was on -- I saw exactly zero spots for it.
  
  
• Paul Tevis (the Elvis Mitchell of gaming) has some nice things to say about The Requiem Chronicler's Guide, one of my favorites of the Vampire books I've worked on to date. Hear for yourself in episode #79 of his excellent (though perhaps too long?) podcast, "Have Games, Will Travel".
  
  
• John Oliver, one of the newer correspondants on The Daily Show is rapidly becoming one of my favorite comedians ever to appear on that show. It's hard for me to be sure, though, 'cause it's all Jo(h)ns over there, from Stewart to Hodgman and beyond, and I can't really keep them all straight. Just as long as it's not that Dan Bacchanal -- his name is trying too hard and he seems to have no way to connect with the young people besides pot jokes. Whatever, dude.
  
  
• Moleskine journals are great. You know that. But I just found about the cahiers, and I love them, too, now. Recommended.
  
  
• Steve Martin wrote, "the stupid can't write but, boy, can they act." Lindsay Lohan, I guess, can act. If you haven't read what she wrote (on her Blackberry) about the death of Robert Altman, you should. It's genuine and raw and heartfelt and, all jokes aside, I can respect that. It's also sophomoric, nonsensical dross. Besides showing a startling lack of English comprehension for someone of her age (also, her income), whose job requires her to read and communicate for a living, it seems blindly self-involved for a euology. Seriously, it's bad. I understand that this was shot from the hip (so to speak), but part of writing is thinking before you put your writing in front of people. Yet, despite that, I've still spent this time writing about Lindsay Lohan, so what the fuck do I know?
  
  
• You should be reading the blog at TVGuide.com about The Unit. That Regina Taylor sure can write. Her love of Mamet is soaked in there like blood in a sponge.
  
  
• We got a new mattress. This is the first time I've ever had a mattress that wasn't somebody else's first. (The one we've been on since we moved down here was in a friend's house when he moved in. I try not to think about it. Mattresses are expensive.) Tonight, I sleep on a new (hand-made!) mattress for the first time. Hopefully, unlike every other night I've ever spent in this house, it won't take me 12 hours to get 6 hours of sleep.