Close Encounters of the Forty-Second Kind

I think I need some sleep, but first I thought I'd check in with a little update.

The weekend: So Saturday I braved the ridiculous traffic on the 5 freeway (defining the term "stop and go") to head on down to Newport Beach - where I hung out with B-Raddddd (aka Bradd Kern) and fellow K-O alumnus Matt Green where we represented CT and made a Bloomfield / West Hartford-style splash at the NBC Page shindig that was happening down the road in Irvine. A good time was had by all and it was nice to have a change of pace and feel all cool since I brought my own CT-bred posse to the page program party procedings.

This week (so far): a pretty light schedule for most of the week, as the Tonight Show is once again taking a brief hiatus (aka vacation for you non-showbiz types out there), though yesterday I was once a-gain stuck with the mind-numbing job of heading the NBC ticketbox, which due to the circumstances involved telling about 4,376 people that there were no Tonight Show tix available - yes, despite the fact that they travelled 5,000 miles to get there. Today was a light day. The powers that be finally realized that I give the best tour at NBC and thought hmmm, maybe this guy should train the new class of pages. Well it was probably just random ,actually, but yeah, today for the first time ever I took a new group of future tour guides along with me for one of my patented VIP deluxe studio tours. Showed 'em how it's done, I did. Then I got home at 1 pm, and I was all set on doing SOMETHING, ANYTHING with my free afternoon but suddenly lack of sleep caught up to me and I was unable to muster the energy to leave the apartment, instead watching the entire movie of Close Encounters of the Third Kind on TCM, I guess to get my own personal hype machine rolling for Spielberg's next alien-themed opus, War of the Worlds. Damn, I had forgotten how slow, dream-like, surreal, and just plain weird Close Encounters is. Visually it's vintage Spielberg but story-wise it is totally out there, very new-agey and vague, full of forced ambiguity. Great movie though, if not very very slowly paced. Also, yesterday I managed to have a very informative informational interview at NBC's programming department, which hopefully will give me the motivation to really get cracking with my script writing. Still waiting to hear about my assignment interview for the producer's assistant job.

NBA Draft:

Honestly the only reason why I used to really enjoy watching the draft was because TNT's hilarious coverage made it a must-see event. ESPN's humorless, mean-spirited show today was just obnoxious. Okay, I understand if loudmouths like Steven A. Smit disapprove of the picks, but come on, to rank on the players out loud over an open mic, AS THEY ARE GOING UP TO SHAKE DAVID STERN'S HAND? That is a little much. And the fact is that rarely do these analysts have any cluse which players will make an impact and which ones won't. Sure, with your Shaq's and Duncan's it's easy to see what the future holds, but come on, the ragging on some of these foreign players is totally unnecessary when the guys in the studio have no idea exactly what they are capable of. ESPN and ABC need to seriously retool their NBA coverage because it has just been offensively bad in some instances, exemplified by the draft today. Wow, even though I thought I was looking forward to next year's NBA season, today's draft made me realize that as of now, I am very underwhelmed by what I'm seeing in the NBA's future. Oh well, at least the Lakers will still probably be amusingly bad once again next season.

TV Stuff:

- Despite it being a kind of okay episode as a whole, I must give a shout out to Family Guy for having references to both He-Man~! and THE SNORKS~!!! in this Sunday's new episode. Our generation is finally making it ...

- I hope you guys are catching up on VERONICA MARS on UPN. Seriously, if you haven't seen it, it's being rerun all summer on Tuesdays at 9 so do yourself a favor and hop on the Mars bandwagon.

- Also if you're a comedy fan I hope you checked out STELLA on Comedy Central tonight. Funny stuff.

- Interestingly, it's now official that NBC has to change the name of it's show Fathom to avoid legal action from Michael Turner, the superstar comic artist who created a popular comic book of the same name, which is also optioned to be made into a film (as is every comic book ever conceived of these days ...). Honestly, good for Turner. His Fathom came first, and he deserves to be able to use the name. I remember being disappointed when I found out that the NBC show was not an adaptation of his comic, but hey, that would have been much cooler than the current premise of a vague threat of unseen underwater alien sea monsters. Sucks for NBC, as the show formerly known as Fathom will now be known as, get this: "Surface." Ouch, that's gotta hurt.

- I now get the channel VH1 Megahits. Yes! Music videos on my TV again! Sweeeeeeeet ...

Definitely time for sleep.

And yet, I feel an odd compulsion to build a mountain out of mashed potatoes and play a series of five notes on a xylophone, you know the ones ... dun, dun, duuun, duunnnnnnnn, duun.