Unannounced. Unheralded. Barely mentioned. We’re to that point now, were you don’t even acknowledge that more of this happened today:
I don’t even think that was in the forecast. So, naturally, it snowed all afternoon and into the evening. At least it will be sunny tomorrow, and we may hit 60 degrees on Sunday.
I was thinking of that as I walked up the street to Studio 5, where this took place.
We tell students you have to do a lot of boring work to get the good stuff, sometimes, and today was one of those times when it paid out.
For two years this show has wrapped every episode with the joke “Tune in next week when Jesse Eisenberg and I …” and some silly activity. Tucker’s said that for two years. Today the punchline paid out when Eisenberg, who’s in town visiting family, declined a dozen other requests and spent a few hours with our show.
At the end of the show he did a bunch of the things the show had been promising. The production went well. That video was from my phone; the actual show will be released Sunday and it has real production value. The crew were thrilled.
It was a great moment for them, and he was so gracious with his time and input. We’re all terribly excited with how it all came together.
After work it was to the grocery store. I bought many items and nearly broke the self checkout system because of it. One needs supplies, though, and sometimes a great many supplies. A problem with the self checkout is that you must put your item in the bagging area, which is finite. And if you move things out of the bagging area, or don’t put an item immediately in the bagging area, the register is not pleased. Do that enough and you start getting warning sounds. Donk! Donk! And if you do that enough an error message appears on the screen: someone will be coming to assist you.
Not that I need the assistance.
Not that anyone is coming.
It’s a symptom of our times, I suppose. A system designed to element staff has reduced staff to such a degree that there’s no one serving in an oversight capacity.
And if you’ve ever stood in line behind a person in the self checkout area — or me, this evening, I suppose — you’d wonder how prudent that is. But, hey, Friday. Weekend ahead, groceries going in the trunk …
I had to type it three times. The first two managed to come out grocers. As if I was stuffing people in the back of my car just because of where they worked. What a way to begin a terrible short story: “He never liked florists. Or butchers. Something about the way they smiled and smelled. Cashiers and stockers, they were guilty by association, and so they’d have to go, too. Not all at once, of course. There was only only so much you can steer in a cart, just so much you could put in the trunk of the car. But if you are precise, if you are crafty, you could manage before the next bulk mail circular went out, or the store owner really noticed.”
Which, hey, for the first draft of a bad short story, might be OK. Feel free to work on it this weekend, punch it into something good.
News! News! It was a night for the news! Campus news, anyway. It was a television night, as Tuesdays are all fall and winter terms. (It doesn’t seem right to call this a spring term, since we’re going to have snow tomorrow. But, by that metric a substantial portion of the fall term would also be a winter term.)
Oh good, he’s talking about the weather. Again.
Yes, it is a light day, and that is what I am allowed to complain about in late February, the weather. Plus, in four or five more weeks I won’t have that.
We all agree, that can’t happen soon enough around here.
You’ve no idea, gentle reader.
Anyway, to the studio! (Because the other seven-plus hours of my day were in a featureless office!)
They brought in a campus improv group for their second show. That episode should be out tomorrow. But here’s the gist of it. The woman in white left the room and the performers solicited a person, place and activity from the crew. When she came back in, the other member of the troupe had to guess all of that. She was a therapist, you see, and all of Sarah’s inner-characters were trying to give her clues. It was amusing.
Also, the studio audio will be better than my phone’s microphone from 12 feet away. That’s because they were wearing microphones.
Also, this is interesting:
I'd like to talk about the compression of time.
At what point in this brilliant @PMJofficial video did you think "That's not exactly representative of that decade" or "They could have tried _______ for that one"?https://t.co/JYsOfX4QYq
Last night Phoebe yawned at all the wrong times. And, otherwise, couldn’t be bothered to cooperate. That blanket is cozy. So cozy that this is how she wants to be cuddled.
I wonder how that will work in the spring and summer after they are accustomed to a long winter. She can’t be bothered to worry about that in between her naps though.
But dig those two little freckles on her nose.
We went to Chipotle for lunch today — this is a problem with it being a block-and-a-half away. You visit a lot. Gerald is still causing havoc:
So the last four times we’ve been there — again, a block-and-a-half away — something has been out of order here. Got my order wrong, too. Gerald’s attention to detail is catching. At least they had forks this time?
Believe me, if I knew this Gerald character was going to become a real and so blatantly reoccurring thing I would have created a full backstory for him.
He has one, of course, he’s the third shift leader in charge of drinks at the local Chipotle. The rest is going to write itself. But I should have started detailing that aloud. If this keeps up I’m going to have to, aren’t I?
Television tonight. In addition to the two shows, they had a comedy troupe do a bit of improv. So the gimmick here is that everyone is in on the bit except for the woman in white. She left the studio while the improvisational bunch got a person, place and activity and she had to figure it out based on the context clues of Sarah’s inner characters.
To see the whole thing, which should be online soon, is to get the whole joke. It’s pretty clever, really. But, mostly, I’m impressed that the show that invited them in is now doing different little things every day. Last week they had the furry exotic animals, the week before they had musicians and they did a food feature the episode before that. It’s always nice to see the student shows feeling empowered to spread their wings, and to keep doing it. Better than doing the same thing over and over.
Chili tonight. And a lot of shouting on TV. Only some of it the debate.
We’d been having a conversation, as television people, about how you might obscure the other candidate from scoring points. Because, as we know, the real impact of a debate isn’t about the night of, but about the replay, the day after. Or, these days, the social media clips and the next day’s television replays. If you’re a producer, you’re looking for glib and pithy lines that fit in an appropriate length. You want clear audio. Not a lot of crosstalk.
So, really, if you’re getting whupped on the campaign station, turn it into a continual shouting match. And the closer we get to votes that are sincerely impactful the substance of the “debates” becomes less and less substantive. Sounds like the country of late, really.
