Bri

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:47:10 GMT

Piece of Information #1: Sometimes I am an idiot.

Piece of Information #2, VERY VERY CLOSELY RELATED TO #1: I have two free passes to the CT Ren Faire on my fridge door.

Why Oakenguy, didn't you go to the CT Ren Faire yesterday?

Yes, yes I did. With my niece and her two friends. Who spent nearly the entire day shopping. Six hours of shopping.

And when your niece wasn't shopping, what happened to her?

She...oh god. I can't say. It's still too painful.

Go on. We're all friends here.

...she was chosen as the "Designated Barely Legal Hottie" for Poprah, brought up on stage and given a seat on sotpchris's lap.

Oh my god.

I KNOW.

You're a horrible, horrible uncle.

I KNOW.

Anyhow. When did you realize you'd left the passes at home, and would have to pay full price for you and your niece?

About a half hour into the trip.

Not your best day, was it?

No, no it was not.

Anyhow...as a reward for having read all that, are there any locals who'd like those passes? The Faire's got one more weekend to go, and (trauma aside) it's really REALLY good. Worthy of a whole other post, in fact, but that'll have to be later.

Cirque vs. Cirque: BATTEL

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:16:27 GMT

Friends, this has been a long time in coming. It's been what, six weeks? since I spent a weekend in NYC and I still haven't posted about it. That's totally wrong, and my only excuse is that ~~I am very, VERY lazy~~ when a 4-hour span includes a pedicab ride down the middle of 42nd Street, singing waitresses stepping on my hair *and* a Broadway show that was designed by Liberace on peyote, it's hard to even know where to begin.

Well, drinking. Yes. But after that.

Folks, there's a show now touring the country called Cirque Dreams-Jungle Fantasies. Since it's impossible not to compare a show with that title to Cirque du Soleil, let's just jump right in.

WAYS THEY'RE SIMILAR

'Dreams' involves a jungle with performers scampering about dressed like forest creatures (like Varekai), an "audience member" who gets sucked into the show (like Saltimbanco), and musicians and performers who wander to and fro about the stage while the acts are underway (every Cirque du Soleil show ever).

The Playbill's "Who's Who In the Cast" sections are much, much more interesting than, say, 'Urinetown', from the role each actor plays ("percushroomist", "blackbird hairialist") to entries like, just as a random example: "Uranmandakh Amarsanaa (contorting lizard, aerial bird) is a recent graduate of the Mongolian State School of Contortion." Screw Harvard, I want *that* school sticker on my windshield.

WAYS THEY'RE DIFFERENT
Buckle your seatbelts, kids. Okay, you can pretty much visualize your typical Cirque du Soleil performer by this point, right? And even if you haven't seen pictures of 'Varekai', you can probably intuit what their jungle costumes look like--tights, elaborate makeup, maybe a headdress.

Here, on the other hand, is the Cirque Dreams cast:

It's like the H.R. Pufnstuf cast and a Mardi Gras float got drunk and had babies, isn't it?

Next up, the "audience member" who's the main focus of the show, our surrogate up there on stage, the person who in a Soleil production would probably be played by an androgynous gamine who acts about 12? Not so much. Try this guy:

Okay, yes, that's actually Carmine from Laverne & Shirley, but it's the closest picture I could find. And let's be fair: the *real* Carmine had the ability to be on stage without his mouth open, a skill "The Adventurer" doesn't seem to have mastered.

And then there's...well, let's pull up the transcript from the casting call:

PRODUCER: Let's see, you're 6'5", you've got washboard abs, and with your long hair and chin you look like Legolas on steroids. And your talent?

JARED: I play the electric fiddle.

PRODUCER: You're so fucking hired. Get your bags, you start tomorrow.

JARED: Yes! I have been working on a character concept.

PRODUCER: ...oh?

JARED: I shall be SOUL TREE, part of the jungle.

PRODUCER: A musical tree? That could work...it'll offset Mother Nature, give her someone to look at while she walks around singing.

JARED: My costume is already designed. See?

PRODUCER: Okay, love the bare chest. But, a floor-length brown skirt?

JARED: My TRUNK. I look more TREE-LIKE.

PRODUCER: This also explains the tiara?

JARED: My FOREHEAD-BRANCHES. Also, I have glued a collar to my violin so I can wear it around my neck.

PRODUCER: .....

Here's the biggest difference, though, and it might make katestine shake her head at what a circus-philistine I am: when I go to Cirque du Soleil shows, it's the central concept that I'm most focussed on, and the actual acts are secondary. With this show I wanted the dancing emus to just get the hell out of the way so the acts could get more stage time, and none more than this duo:

LOOK at that! That is two men, Vladimir Dovgan and Anatoliy Yeniy, who wear glow-in-the-dark giraffe-patterned ZOOT SUITS, balancing on a plank. On a tube. On a tube. On a tube. On a tube. On a tube. On a table.

I've never before or since watched an act where I was scared to clap or breathe because of how the vibrations and air pressure changes might affect the performers. I was FREAKING OUT.

It was glorious.

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 19:12:49 GMT

Top 5 Things Witnessed at the Salem Haunted Happenings Parade:

5. The Lawn Chair Drill Team.

4. Two people in 18th century garb from the Salem Museum contingent, him holding a harpoon, dancing in the park to 'YMCA'.

3. Oldies station WROR-FM, sending a van with a big pic of their morning DJs Loren and Wally, and marching behind the van waving...Loren and Wally? No, two poor interns wearing GROTESQUE OVERSIZED LOREN AND WALLY MASKS.

You know, White House buzz is that this is the real reason Colin Powell resigned right before the Macy's parade.

2. modpixie!

1. This family here:

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:37:23 GMT

resk, this whole post is dedicated to you.

On Saturday my chocolate-making is going to go where it's never gone before: for a friend's birthday party, I'm going to be working with bacon.

Yes, bacon + chocolate. YES. Bacon truffles.

I've even done some research, and tried a commercially-sold chocolate bar at Whole Foods that contains bacon. It was pretty good. (Of course, for $7.99 I'd expect a candy bar to contain a never-before-seen personalized Far Side cartoon and cure any three diseases of my choice, so there's that.)

There's just one thing I still haven't decided, though:

View Poll: Obaconation

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:37:43 GMT

One nice thing about the scriptwriting software crashing each time I tried to save last night, deleting hours of work, is that it gave me time to re-think the plot, realize the main conflict made no sense, and completely re-shape things.

So there's THAT.

Which doesn't mean I wasn't about three seconds away from copying this fine gentleman:

My Odd Weekend (part 2 of 3)

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:20:02 GMT

I apologize in advance for this not being a picture post.

Saturday I officially became The Uncle Who's a Bad Influence: I took my niece to the Boston Tattoo Convention.

To be fair, I should note that she's 19 and already *has* two tattoos. But still. While her parents didn't mind the trip to Rocky Horror, this was definitely somewhere in between 'trip to nude beach' and 'attend Obama rally while on shrooms' in their "Things Not to Do With Her" list.

Some of the artists were nice, one was sleazy (him to niece: "You've got a lot of pretty canvas I'd be happy to work on". EWW), and oddly enough the one artist with a visual style closest to what I was looking for was *so* hesitant and unwilling to even talk about possible ideas that she left me wondering whether she a) hated the thought of giving me a tattoo or b) was on the verge of giving up tattooing together. Long story short, after about a half hour the Sequel and I were both pretty bored. So bored, in fact, that while we wandered from booth to booth looking at the flipbooks we started creating our "No. Just...whut? NO." list.

(This is totally distinct from our "WHUT???" list, which only has one tattoo on it. When that tattoo is Abraham Lincoln wearing boxing gloves punching a shark, though, what could compete?)

BRIAN & ASH'S 'NO. JUST...WHUT? NO.' TATTOO LIST 2008

Third prize: 'Taco With a Frowny Face'. (Google: Did you mean to type 'tattoo "TACOMA with a face"'?" No, thank you for trying.) If the face had been on the shell, maybe not so bad. But the face manifested in the beans, and the overall effect was...you know those hermit crabs and how they take over abandoned shells much too large for them, and just glare out from inside with those crazy black eyes? This. This taco.

Second prize: Fetuses. Apparently they're pretty popular, since we saw examples at four different booths and a search online reveals variants like Alien Fetus, Zombie Fetus and Skeletal Fetus in a Jar. And yet there are no photos online of me being CREEPED THE HELL OUT.

First prize by a landslide: Someone got, on the palm of their hand, a tattoo of a pile of dog poop. I'm going to put this as plainly as I can: you could be a mixture of Nelson Mandela, Miles Vorkosigan and Mother Theresa, but if you have a tattoo of dog poop on your palm, I am never going to trust your judgement in any matter, large or small. Babysitting. Driving a vehicle I'm in. Recommending a band. Telling me what time it is. No. You have already demonstrated that your brain is capable of such EPIC FAILURE that anything, A-NEE-THING you say or do is going to be suspect.

Blurgh

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 19:54:25 GMT

I've spent the day feeling groggy because we were woken up at 3AM by a skunk in the backyard who got startled by something--a moth, its own tail, a trailer for 'The Spirit'--and sprayed liberally. It didn't drift in through the bedroom window, it BILLOWED. It was so bad that people in my DREAM were like "Whoa, what is that?"

I swear I can still smell it a little, even though I showered this morning and all the clothes I have on were on the other end of the apartment.

Still not king.

My weekend in reverse (1 of 3)

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:50:06 GMT

Yesterday Deb surprised me with a slightly-early birthday present, two tickets to Kooza! We braved the rain and wind and Red Sox traffic and broken subways and bizarre concession stands (I'm not talking overpriced popcorn here, I'm talking "Smoothie--$7.62", a number that's still crystal-clear in my head because I'm just so baffled by how they came up with that amount) and made it to the show, and wow.

Wow.

I don't want to spoil things for folks who haven't seen it yet, so I'll say that it's a very good blend of things that made me go "What the HELL?", two moments that were so awesome the hair on the back of my neck literally stood up, and three or four separate times when there were things done to the audience that I can't ever imagine, say, Ringling doing, both for liability insurance reasons and sheer wtf-ery. (Very realistic dog costume. VERY realistic dog costume.)

I'll also mention that of the 5 Cirque shows I've seen, this had _the_ best group of clowns. They had me from before the show even started, when half of them were planted in the seats portraying obnoxious audience members (!), and they just kept getting better. By the end of the show, I was composing a letter in my head that read "Dear Monsieur Petit Chapeau, I will pay cash money to watch you and your friends walk down the street. Please contact me re: prices and proposed routes."

Also also, any show that leads to sentences like "I'm not sure which I liked more, when they were shooting the cannon into the crowd or the cloak made out of rats" is a GOOD show.

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 01:44:41 GMT

The day began with shouting and blood on the kitchen floor.

Our dog Toby had slipped on the concrete steps outside and cracked his chin hard on the pavement. By the time Deb's yell woke me up he was back inside licking his scraped leg and dripping blood from his mouth, and the three of us did a little dance around each other as he tried to avoid us prodding him and we tried to figure out just how bad things were.

The bad news: besides the scrape on his leg and another small one on his nose, he knocked a couple of his front teeth OUT. It looks awful.

The good: he is much, much, much less bothered by this than I would've been, than I would've thought any mammal would be. He was wagging and asking to go outside within fifteen minutes, while we were still in shock--five minutes after that he was in the park rolling on his back in the tall grass while we stared at him. Apart from some awkwardness when he eats, he's behaving totally normally. (I, on the other hand, feel my blood pressure spike every time he hops off a curb, and he DARN well better get used to being carried down the steps for the rest of his life, because that's exactly what's going to happen.)

Gah. At least we live on the ground floor.

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 14:28:35 GMT

Posted by lilacsinmarch and too good not to share: Stephen Fry tries to finish a sentence.

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:22:36 GMT

Vacation Week! Vacation Week! Week between semesters when the upturned flower of free time meets the buzzing bee of the tail-end of summer! Or something like that.

So far, these are the only things I definitely have planned:
*catsit for morninghood for a couple days
*watch the last 4 episodes of 'Avatar'
*THE WIRE, SEASON FIVE WOOT WOOT WOOT
*Do about a gazillion dogwalks
*Get one of those el cheapo bus tickets and spend a day wandering around NYC
*buy a basketball

One of Those Things Is Not Like the Others. Didja notice? And while I'm both a strong believer in Spontaneous Fun *and* a subscriber to the 'New Yorker', a few tips about places to go while I'm there wouldn't be unwelcome. Restaurants? Shows? Troll Markets?

Scenes from a Music School, Part 32

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:49:59 GMT

A teacher wanders up to my desk. We talk scheduling issues for a few minutes, and then she cocks her head and listens more closely to the song playing over my computer's speakers.

"Oh, that tune sounds fun! Who is it?"

"It's YOU."

"OH!"

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 17:30:53 GMT

Show's over.

Post-show drop should be coming along in 3...2...1...

Ooo yeah. There it is.

Time to start getting enough sleep--excessive amounts of sleep, in fact--until I start feeling more like a human being and less like a walking exposed nerve ending.

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:57:20 GMT

This is one of the best charity ideas I've ever heard of: in order to try to save Sayama Forest, the very cool forest near Tokyo where Hayao Miyazaki got the inspiration for Totoro, the Totoro Forest Project (www.totoroforestproject.org) has gotten 200 artists to donate Totoro-inspired art.

All the art is going up for auction on September 9th at the Pixar Animation Studios Campus. (Oh, Pixar, could you get any cooler?)

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:47:38 GMT

So last night I made some vegan desserts. I'd meant to dip strawberries in white chocolate, but Trader Joe's was out--they just had dark and milk chocolates left. "No problem," I decide, "I'll dip them in milk chocolate instead."

You can already see the mistake there, can't you? But I swear it took me an hour--washing the strawberries, cutting up the strawberries, walking the dog, re-sanitizing myself after the dogwalk--before the neurons clicked together in the right pattern and went "Hey wait, Milk chocolate. MILK. Vegans =/= milk!"

Sigh.

Shilling II: Electric Shillaloo

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:25:48 GMT

Opening Thursday!

Theatre@First presents Festival@First 5: Nothing Serious. 7 one-act plays by Rich Orloff showing the highs and the lows of modern life from romance to art. It's very serious comedy! Except for the romantic cavewoman. And the penguin. And my hair.

The Festival runs from July 31st to August 9th. Tickets are $12, $10 for students/seniors. Reserve your tickets now at our handy website.

Performances:
Thursday, July 31 at 8pm
Friday, August 1 at 8pm
Saturday, August 2 at 8pm
Sunday, August 3 at 3pm (matinee)

Thursday, August 7 at 8pm
Friday, August 8 at 8pm
Saturday, August 9 at 8pm

Performed at The First Congregational Church of Somerville
89 College Ave. (just 4 blocks up from the Davis T stop)
Fully accessible to the physically challenged.

Tickets: $12 for adults and $10 for students/seniors
Reservations may be made online at http://www.theatreatfirst.org
Or E-mail tickets@theatreatfirst.org
Or by calling 1-888-874-7554

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:15:36 GMT

OMFG.

FOOD COMA.

I've just gotten back from Speed's, known by some as the home of The Finest Hot Dogs In the World. Since "some" includes every newspaper and magazine critic in town, and more recently the Wall Street Journal, this is something that's been on my to-do list for a few years.

Just getting there is halfway between a trek and an odyssey. You ride the bus as far south as you can, get off before it makes its right turn, and then the fun REALLY starts since you have to....wait, no, why spoil the fun of the hunt for you? Part of Speed's charm is that he's not in Fenway or hanging out on City Hall Plaza with the Phantom Gourmet, he's just doing his thing, his AMAZING thing, in a little truck parked by the side of the road in a part of town a lot of locals have never even heard of, and the majority of his customers while I was there were the truckers and factory guys who work in the neighborhood. Honestly, more really good food should be hidden this way--everything tastes better if you've had to quest for it.

I WILL say that it's near both the Chinese Spaghetti Factory (they're wholesalers!) and the State Department of Transitional Assistance, which is so obviously bureaucrat-speak for State Department of Exorcisms that I can't even stand it.

Anyhow. The hot dog.

*pause to shudder with pleasure*

For starters it's the size of a kielbasa, which made it about 3 times as large as I was expecting. Custom-made by a local butcher, marinated and then slow roasted, *then* sliced open and grilled for the customer, before being topped with onions, chili (a special blend they make themselves), mustard (another secret recipe) and a bbq-sweet sauce (Heinz--NO just kidding).

The first bite, I found myself trying to compose a haiku about the experience.

By the fourth bite, I was thinking about Joseph Campbell and how one might create an opera about this hot dog incorporating Star Wars, Norse myth, and local Boston folklore.

By the sixth bite, I realized I'd been holding it wrong and my shirt was in serious trouble.

I think I'm going to go lie down now. On my office floor. They're musicians, they'll understand.

GOOD LUCK RITUAL: YR DOIN IT WRONG

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:02:50 GMT

Ganked from ngakmafaery:

Woman runs sword into foot during Wiccan ceremony
The Associated Press

A woman accidentally stabbed herself in the foot with a 3-foot-long sword while performing a Wiccan good luck ritual at a central Indiana cemetery.

Katherine Gunther, 36, of Lebanon, pierced her left foot with the sword while performing the rite at Oak Hill Cemetery, police said.

Gunther said she was performing the ceremony to give thanks for a recent run of good luck. The ceremony involves the use of candles, incense and driving swords into the ground during the full moon.

Gunther said was aiming to put the sword in the ground, but hit her foot instead.

"It wasn't the first time I performed the ritual, but it was the first time I put a sword through my foot," she said.

Gunther immediately pulled the sword out of her foot, and her companions took her to Witham Memorial Hospital, where she was kept a couple days for treatment.

No charges were filed, police said. The Wiccans were warned that being in the cemetery in the city about 20 miles northwest of Indianapolis after posted visiting hours constitutes trespassing.

Wicca is a nature-based religion based on respect for the earth, nature and the cycle of the seasons.

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:10:34 GMT

From a poster advertising a visiting artist at my school: "...he recently performed the world premier of Grapes of Wrath opera..."

The what of what now?

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 01:20:56 GMT

Tonight I made a trial run of a possible dessert for the Theatre@First one-acts: strawberries with the center hollowed out and then filled with cheesecake batter. For the actual event I'll dip them in chocolate, too, but tonight I mostly just wanted to see how easy it would be to carve them and stuff them, and how they'd taste.

As it happens, they taste VERY good. :)

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:48:45 GMT

My hometown's having it's "World's Fair" this weekend.

The events include a pig scramble, a skillet throw contest, an Oreo cookie stack contest, a potato salad stir-off, and "the tractor back seat driver contest, where one blindfolded child drives while another sitting behind him calls out directions."

I see no way that this will not end well.

P.S. Oh! Bonus! The fairground is on the steepest hill in town!

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:27:22 GMT

True fact: I love killdeer.

I grant, this might partly be because when I saw them this morning we'd already had breakfast and coffee at my local coffeeshop's outdoor table, complete with a server coming around with samples of their new mango-banana smoothie and coupons for a free one. So with that AND a caffeine high under my belt AND the fact that I was walking along the river watching crew boats paddle past instead of being in a car stuck in the rotary where four lanes were trying to merge down to 1...suffice it to say that I was feeling love and goodwill (and schadenfreude) towards all creatures furred and feathered.

Apart from that, though, killdeer are awesome.

Thing you need to know about killdeer: they were the first animal young behavioral scientist Oakenguy, age 8, read about in 'Ranger Rick Magazine' and then observed in real life.

When I was a little kid Ranger Rick Magazine was the shizzle. I was a nerd for the National Wildlife Foundation the way other kids were for sports teams. I even, and this is a fact I've never shared with anyone, tried writing an article of my own on my Dad's electric typewriter, thrilled by the way it hummed and buzzed like an outdoor motor and jerked a little with each key I pressed as I copied the encyclopedia entry for 'wapiti' and then added some purple prose of my own for the last line. ("Ther forests are disappearing and soon the mounrful cry of the wapiti may be heard no morr." I can't remember the name of a single kid in my class that year, but I can still remember that line.)

If Ranger Rick Magazine had a flaw, though, it was that they mostly talked about the KEWL animals. Elephants. Pandas. Sea Otters. "Sea otters float on their backs" was a fact with about as much immediate use to me as "Stormtroopers are, by and large, taller than Luke Skywalker". But then one day they had an article about killdeer.

Killdeer are ground birds. They're about as close to a roadrunner as you'll find in New England, zipping around everywhere on their little legs. They build their nests on the ground, and when they have an egg or chick to protect they'll do so by pretending to have a broken wing and luring the predator away. Also, some lived in the abandoned construction site across the street from me.

Armed with this knowledge I went across the street, and in one of those sequences that never happen in fiction or in real life everything went just the way it was supposed to. Gravelly landscape, check. Speedy little brown and white bird fluttering and hopping with a dangling right wing, check. Looking over my shoulder in the opposite direction from where it was leading me and spotting a fluffy chick, CHECK!

I subscribed to 'Ranger Rick' for four more years, but it never got better than that day. (For one thing, it turns out that in real life raccoons aren't allowed to be forest rangers.)

So today on the riverbank we crossed paths with a couple of killdeer, and it turns out that even when there aren't chicks around they seem to like being followed. One would sit down, wait until I got within ten feet, zip away on his little legs and then sit down again, waiting for me to catch up. Maybe they like to keep in practice, or maybe they just like messing with people. But it's weird how just following a bird can take me back 20ish years to the North Waterford gravel pits.

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:47:20 GMT

Oh, Stillman Farms. I want to love them, I really do. I love the thought of just going to the farmer's market each week, buying some local organic meat, and eating some local organic meat.

There's just one problem, and it's this: I seem to be totally unable to try to buy something from them without it turning into Monty Python's Cheese Shop sketch.

Here's how events transpired this Saturday. I went up to their booth. Before I did, I (remembering other occasions) took the time to study their hand-written sign. I repeat: hand-written, looked like it had been drawn up fresh that day. It listed about a dozen different types of meat. This gave me false hope.

ME: Hello. I would like some ham steaks, please.

CLERK: Sorry, we don't have those today.

ME: Ah. Bacon?

CLERK: Nope, all our smoked meat is in New York. Mostly what we have today is sausage.

(A-ha, thinks I. A Clue.)

ME: Great! I'll have some of your Italian sweet sausage.

(Pause while they rummage in the cooler)

CLERK: Nope, we're out.

It's at this point that the balalaika music begins playing in my head.

CLERK: We do have hot sausage! (handing me some)

ME: (handing it back) Thanks, but no.

CLERK: Kielbasa?

ME: Yes. YES. Just...yes. God yes.

If all my food purchases went like this, I'd be 75 pounds lighter. Or dead.

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:49:45 GMT

Ohhhhh man, it's a rocky day today. I was up all night because I, of all things, *ate ice cream* before bed. For future reference, when the carton says 'Mocha Java' the key word is java, as in coffee, as in BIRDS? SHUT UP BIRDS ITS TOO EARLY I HAVEN'T EVEN STARTED TO FEEL TIRED YET AAAAA I STEPPED IN THE DOG'S WATER DISH AGAIN.

So um where was I?

Rocky. Yes. That's it.

Fortunately, I guess, it's slow at work. My big project today is learning all the lyrics to "Put On Your Sunday Clothes". It's been stuck in my head since we saw WALL-E on Friday, and the only thing worse than a normal earworm is an earworm where you don't know a single word, no not one, and no matter how loving and tolerant your spouse is, listening to you scat sing it over and over, not even aware you're doing it, OH how that can test a marriage.

In fact, come to think of it, it's been since I started doing it that the waterbowl's started to migrate at night.

Nahhh. Coincidence.

Oh! Have I mentioned that Toby's intestinal whatsit has blown over, and he's back to whatever passes for normal? It's true! I could go on for about 2000 words about how happy his poo makes me these days, but even in my condition of total sleep-dep I still can recognize that as a bad idea. And now D and I, against all logic, are thinking of the imaginary money we didn't spend at the vet as 'found money'. Like, "let's celebrate by buying $3000 worth of pie and clean socks!" found money. This is a dangerous time, financially.

Okay. Back to lyrics and googling for tattoo ideas.

An Open Letter

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:53:26 GMT

Dear Hollywood Folks Who Make These Decisions,

Please be advised, when you issue DVD collections of TV comedy series, that I would happily pay an extra $5 for the option to turn the laugh track off.

Dear Folks Issuing the Muppet Show Collections,

Make it $20.