Musings and Mirth

About Me

I spend way too much thinking about me. This is the blank space where that paragraph should be.

Leafenstein

I have two nieces. One of them has been wanting a little dog for years and years. Her mom and dad have three other very big dogs, like German Shepherd big. Finally, my niece wore her mom down and they zeroed in on this little rescue dog named Leaf. She is tiny but mighty. She runs faster than you’d imagine a little dog could.

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My Mel Gibson Encounter

There I was, a quick run down to Whole Foods to buy some stuff – you know, hadn’t showered and all of that. It was the small Whole Foods in Valley Village (or Sherman Oaks or whatever you want to call it). Tiny store. So small you can’t really walk past people without rubbing or bumping. It is awkward. I have seen many a celeb in there before but no one with the kind of star power of Mel Gibson. Nevertheless, there was that familiar voice. And I turn around and there is Mr. Gibson. He is chattering on his cell phone and acting fairly “normal,” if it’s possible to act normal and be a celebrity.

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Jim Carrey Goes BOING

Okay so sometimes non-internet people wander into the online realm and I think they aren’t quite sure how to filter properly. Famous people especially. Maybe they are already in too big of a bubble that they are already so out of touch they can’t fathom what it is we people actually do in the real world. And then there is the internet. And then there is Twitter. Twitter is bizarre. It’s like trying to cross, or stand in the middle of, a freeway. It moves fast and people all over the world are connecting to each other with 140 character tweets. And so it happened one day Jim Carrey started saying BOING. Over and over and over. The thing is, he was just being playful. Dipping a toe into the world of the humans. But on Twitter, where you are better off having a reason to tweet than to tweet just for the hell of it, it doesn’t really come off that well.

Put it this way: even David Lynch and Yoko Ono have meaning to their tweets. Jim Carrey trended BOING. And then today he got pissed that people were wondering whether or not he’d lost his sanity. And so you have Jim Carrey’s angry tweets (my advice to Jim – either have a reason to use Twitter or stop using it). Reading backwards from newer to earlier – we can do that now. We can read things backwards! But if it freaks you out, feel free to read upwards.

JimCarrey that some1 might create something with lasting impact in this world, something u cannot find the faith or the courage to dream of…cont–>

JimCarrey I’m so sane in fact,that I have managed to transcend the pettiness of your kind my whole life! U suppressive types who r so afraid…cont–>

JimCarrey The truth is I’m an intuitive,creative,and spiritual person.I’m healthier,smarter,and YES much more sane than u who say I’m crazy.cont–>

JimCarrey #BOING WORLD! I’m so grateful 2 u who bounce the big blue ball with me but I’ve had it with u who need 2 chalk me up as crazy. cont.–>

JimCarrey Some say I’m weird on twitter.But it’s all just art to me.Freedom of expression.If my #BOING offends u, feel free to unfollow me. S’okay ;^)

JimCarrey @Jeremylg007 Things have never been better Jeremy. Really! I am my fully creative and authentic self. Happiest I’ve ever been! #BOING ;^)

JimCarrey @gladman Tell ya what. I’m going to do whatever I feel compelled to do here and your free to leave! Sound fair? Glad to help! #BOING {B^P

JimCarrey #BOING IS TICKLED PINK BY HIS OWN FINGERS! 8^}7

JimCarrey#BOING FOLLOWS IT’S OWN PATH AND DOESN’T TRY TO BE PLEASING FROM EVERYONE’S POINT OF VIEW! ~B^]>

JimCarrey #BOING MAKES A MEAL OUT OF LIFE AND SETS THE TABLE FOR YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS!

JimCarrey #BOING LOOKS FORWARD TO THE NEXT FACE IT MEETS! 8^]

I feel badly for Jim Carrey only because I just don’t think he is aware of how the net works overall – meaning, everyone has a mask on and everyone filters – they have their identity and then they have their internet identity. And he could hurt himself this way.

But Jim Carrey has a lot of fans. His fans far outweigh those who are freaked out by the boinging going on. Read onward to hear what his many fans had to say.

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We Sort of Live in Public

The doc We Live in Public, which never really had a shot at Oscar this past year, is currently on my cable company’s On-Demand and I don’t mind saying that it freaked me out more than just a little, and for a variety of reasons. I thought the film was going to be about how public and scary our lives are now, what with Facebook and Twitter and video chat or chat roulette (what is worse than chat roulette, though?). But it isn’t really so much about our lives now — except as an artist’s prophecy. In a way, we do live in public. Where the prophecy goes slightly wrong is that we don’t really live our actual selves online: we are inclined to live as avatars, or our fake selves. I think. I never believe that the blogs I’m reading are the real lives of those people. They show a segment of their ideal selves – even when their ideal selves are failures at life — that is still entertaining. And of course it doesn’t tell the whole picture. How could it.

We are more than our language, which is really what the internet about. Our languge. Our lives are so much bigger than what we write.

Anyway, the film is really bizarre. The artist who created the We Live in Public experiments, first with a bunch of lab rat volunteers, and later with himself and his girlfriend, the notorious Tanya, was Josh Harris. Ondi Timoner is the film’s director. The film sifts through all of the footage of both experiments.

The Quiet: We Live in Public was the first one. It didn’t seem to prove anything beyond what we already know: if given the chance, human beings exhibit the best and the worst of themselves. Probably holed up together like that, with lots of drugs, food, sex – no law and order, no sunlight — they might have gone crazy.

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Airline Hell

So, I accidentally made my plane reservation for the wrong day to fly to the Cannes Film Fest. Now I have to change it to a day earlier, if you can believe. My chaotic mind knows no bounds and cannot be tamed, despite my own verbal abuse, and sometimes physical. So yesterday the plane fare was under a grand. Today when I to an Expedia search it has soared to $1600. I am now looking at the possibility of missing the first day of the film festival because I’ll be damned if I’m going to shitcan $600. Am I being cheap? It’s all a write-off, I say, pretending to actually be a person who makes money and has write-offs.

Here I sit, broken hearted, trying to change my ticket but only…

This might be a good tie to pray to that God I don’t acknowledge. Yeah, good luck with that. On the upside, Expedia told me I had until May 9 to make this change and maybe, just maybe, the prices will drop again.

There is always the chance that the airlines have travelers by the balls right now due to a certain volcanic eruption.

Bloggers Never Stop Working

That’s the thing about blogging that occurred to me last night, as we stumbled out of California Adventure — the souls of our feet aching, our psyches bled out, our wallets drained – my thoughts were on the Oscars. Or they were on this other site I’m trying to get launched, or they were on a part of a site that I know needs a lot of work but if it works it will be great. My thoughts on it never end. That either makes me driven or it makes me a maniac. This is one key aspect about blogging that is different from being a journalist.

Journalists don’t have to build things from scratch. They are always getting credit — mostly from so-called PR guys – but really, most people who bag on blogger and praise journalists give the credit for doing the actual reporting. That means they make phone calls, ask questions, write a story, get paid. Lately, many of them have been getting laid off yet the bloggers remain. Why? Because most of us did it before we were making money, and many of us would do it even if we weren’t making money.

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