Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Wednesday, November 04, 2009 Happy Birthday Spooky Halloween Slide Show Magic Fun Time  Greetings! Captain Rex from Star Wars: The Clone Wars welcomes you to his fifth birthday/Halloween carnival extravaganza! Or I would, if that were one of the prerecorded phrases programmed into my helmet. Or if I could do an inexplicably Kiwi clone accent. Which I can't yet, because I'm just turned five this week.  Walk this way! And tell me if I'm about to run into something!  That's my dad. He looks good, doesn't he?     Behold the terror of the haunted garage! It didn't make that many kids cry (not shown). And I promise none of them were me, because I wouldn't go in it.  That's my friend Chao. He's the one who taught me that the word "pirate" begins with "R." You can't even tell his fly was open.  Check out the birthday cake my birth mom made! I think my dad ate the solid rocket boosters. That would explain a lot.  Thanks for coming! I hope you enjoyed the party! See you next year! We're going to do it all again, only bigger. Wait, dad, I'm not done yet!  Most photos by Lisa McCulloch posted by M. Giant 7:01 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:That is great!!!
By Incredible! So much work. And that cake! You guys are great parents.
By That all looks incredible! My favorite part is that you wore loafers with your Darth Vader costume. That made me giggle. :-)
By I don't know, the kid in red in the haunted house looks close to crying. Had someone jumped out at him?
By Monday, November 02, 2009 Cheap Flick This is kind of embarrassing to admit, but I entered the Project Greenlight contest years ago. Not once, not twice, but three times. As you may or may not recall, the goal was to write a screenplay that could be produced for a million dollars or less. Back then I didn't understand how such a thing was even possible. But having recently seen Paranormal Activity, I've been thinking about how big movies with a five-figure budget come about, and what I know now that I didn't know then. Make people multitask. Professional camera operators are expensive. Professional movie actors are even more expensive. Even an amateur actor and an amateur camera operator can eat up a small production budget in a hurry. But if you can make one guy be both the leading man and the cinematographer, you've more than slashed your budget; you've disemboweled it. And it's not like you're asking anyone to do anything you wouldn't do, because if you're directing a movie like this, you're probably also the producer, editor, writer, and caterer. Have a small, no-name cast. Paranormal Activity and its spiritual predecessor, The Blair Witch Project, each had a total cast of about four or five people. Even their characters were no names; they had to go by their real names on camera. I don't know how that saves money, but obviously it does. I may have even read somewhere that this was how they were able to afford some additional special effects in Being John Malkovich. Don't show anything. Obviously everyone knows that crashes and explosions are expensive, and even the cheapest CGI gets spendy when Geek Squad charges by the hour. But you'd be surprised at the kind of other things that can run up the tab. Any kind of violence whatsoever, for instance. Which is why neither The Blair Witch Project nor Paranormal Activity ever let us see any actual killing. Even Kevin Smith's Clerks, which I think came in at about $17,000 despite breaking most of these other rules, abandoned the original ending in which Dante gets shot in a random hold-up. Sure, he filmed it, because I've seen it, but actually distributing it with the original release would have somehow cost an extra half-million. Shoot in sequence. Most big productions shoot out of sequence, to make the most of the availability of actors and locations. If the movie has an aircraft carrier at the beginning and at the end, they film the beginning and the end at the same time rather than renting the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln twice and doubling the chances of losing their security deposits. But word has it that both Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity were shot in sequence, and that couldn't have run up the tab too much. Although maybe if they'd "saved money" the way the big studios do, they would have cost six figures instead of five. Minimal locations. Blair Witch just went out into the woods to shoot, and I'm sure the production didn't cover nearly as much ground as the characters did, if you know what I mean. Paranormal Activity didn't even go that far, trapping the cast inside the director's house as though the camera were plugged into the wall. Sources disagree on whether the final budget for the film was $10,000 or $15,000, but either way I'm sure most of that went into renovating the house. So the issue then is how to translate these lessons to other genres. I've been brainstorming cheap screenplays all week, and now I just have to decide whether my next project will be a romantic comedy without kissing, a spy movie cobbled together from security camera footage, or a Western shot by the side of a freeway, or an historical epic that's about people who have the same names as my friends. I'll keep you posted. posted by M. Giant 8:41 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:You are correct about clerks. Did most of it using credit cards and filmed in the store he worked at. I'm a bit of a Kevin Smith nerd....Ok Ok a huge nerd for him
By Wednesday, October 28, 2009 Party Time After months of prep, stress, and work, the party finally came and went. Trash and I knew that the two hours we'd been working for all this time would fly by. And, in fact, it did. This is not to say that there weren't a few hitches. With thirty-odd kids coming, Trash would not be dissuaded from her insistence that there needed to be one thing to do for every 3-4 kids. At the same time. That comes out to like ten different things she wanted to have going on. I tried to tell her that long lines are the sign of a successful party, but since she refuses to wait in those kind of lines on philosophical grounds I wasn't about to convince her to set one up for people whose ages are in single digits. But she was able to mastermind ten or so different activities, from the haunted house whose intellectual genesis dated back to June, to a photo scavenger hunt that she came up with that very morning. That left only the issue of how to staff everything, because a few of the adults we'd lined up fell through for various reasons, and there was nothing we could do about it. For instance, when Bitter called that morning and said that maybe she wasn't up for being the centerpiece character of the haunted house due to having Captain Trips, we couldn't really argue the point. I suppose we could have still stationed her there, with her pajamas and a pile of tissues instead of a witch's costume and a cauldron, but it wasn't the adults we were trying to scare. EyeHeartPizza stepped up to fill that void (and admirably so, by all accounts). But there was at least one other station that got filled when one family showed up, the mom asked Trash if there was anything she could do, and immediately got dragooned into service. This was a new experience for Trash in more ways than one. Normally she works a party pretty hard, mingling and moving around and making sure everyone's good. She even does this at party's she's not hosting. But not this time. Even though she'd assembled a major work force, the fact that we were short-staffed meant she was pretty much stuck at the entrance to the haunted house, controlling the number and timing of the kids as they went in. So this time she had to wait to ask if everyone was good after the fact. I still don't think she's gotten around to everyone. But the highlight of the party for her was Chao. He was running both the pin-the-tail-on-the-pumpkin game and the photo scavenger hunt, in costume as a pirate. This consisted of a tricorn hat, an eyepatch, his late girlfriend Gerd's pirate corset, and a pair of cutoff jeans. The jeans worked surprisingly well with the costume, up until the point when EyeHeartPizza, near the end of the party, noticed that his fly was conspicuously down. And he was the best person for this to have happened to, since he just happened to be the one in charge of blindfolding little kids and then spinning them around. Hearing about this after the fact made Trash's night. In fact, she was planning to go around to all the parents and tell them, "Thank you so much for bringing the pirate! He was such a big help. What, you mean you didn't bring him? Hmmm, I wonder who did…" Trash is aware of a change in her status among the moms of the neighborhood and the school. She always felt like she's kind of viewed as a slacker mom. Now she's suddenly been promoted to "that mom," the one who makes the other moms look bad. She's unaccustomed, but not entirely displeased. And it won't be a permanent status anyway, because as we told everyone who complimented us on pulling this off, "We are never doing this again." Because we all learned a lot from this experience, and I think the most valuable thing we learned was a new and completely unexpected appreciation for one towering figure in children's birthday parties: a rodent purveyor of pizza whom Chao refers to as Charles Edward Cheese. posted by M. Giant 1:56 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:
Major kudos to Trash for achieving that mom status. It sounds as though the party was of sufficient legendary proportions that next year, when you are in Chuck's domain for M.Edium's birthday festivities, people won't think any less of her. They'll just say "remember the party they threw last year? WOW that was something!"
By Monday, October 26, 2009 This Old Haunted House I've been putting off writing about the birthday party, probably because putting it on was such an undertaking that I fear the same will be true of an entry about it. But now I have to assume that since once the party was over I felt a lot better, that will apply to writing about it as well. First of all, it should be said that this was a group effort in every way. Trash drafted friends, parents, relatives, and neighbors to help make this happen, from having them provide food to putting them to work facilitating the activities. And writing about what went on from my point of view is in no way meant to diminish their contributions. Without which the party might still have happened, but it would have been a party of bored, angry, hungry people. So anyway, the first order of business was to build the haunted house in the garage. This was Trash and M. Edium's idea that they had way back in June, inspired by a similar effort from Trash's mom when Trash was little. Obviously that was memorable, as shown by the fact that Trash remembers it. This took a lot of prep work. Trash's mom trolled the garage sales down in Iowa where she lives all summer, snatching up cheap bed linens to hang from the garage ceiling to form narrow, spooky corridors. Maybe that's not the best use of bedsheets, but since they came from garage sales, maybe it is. About a month ago, we cleaned out the garage. We have a two-and-a-half car garage in theory, but in practice the only way to get even one car in there half the time is to tip it up onto one side and sort of slide it in diagonally. After our last camping trip in September, Trash took care of that. We even got rid of a bunch of scrap lumber by making fake gravestones and spooky signs out of it, killing two birds with one stone. By the time Trash was done, there was room in there for both our cars, without our even having to take the fire engine out. It was my job to come up with the hay bales. Ever try to shop for hay bales in a major metropolitan area? It's not as easy as it sounds. I don't know how people bought hay before the Internet, but fortunately we now have a thing called the "Hay Exchange." That's how I found a guy who was willing to not only sell me hay at $1.50 a bale, but deliver it to our house for less than the cost of the amount I was buying. When he showed up on the appointed Saturday morning a couple of weeks in advance, he told me that when he got into the city, people were yelling to him at stoplights whether they could buy some from him. So I was gratified to know I wasn't the only one in Minneapolis who had trouble getting his hands on some hay. With those three jobs taken care of, I thought that actually constructing the haunted house on the Friday before the party would be pretty effortless, especially with M. Edium off at Nana and Grandpa's until the next afternoon. I was wrong. Trash had a vision. Victims would enter through the garage's pedestrian door on the left, and would find themselves in a narrow corridor that wound around the back and to the far side, before letting them out in a main center area, occupied by a witch played by our friend Bitter. The walls of this corridor would have a double row of hay bales as their foundation, with the sheets hanging down from the rafters outside them. To cover up the multicolored effect of the secondhand linens, Trash had the idea of hanging a layer of black garden fabric -- three bucks for 200 square feet, and it covered every color but red, which was even cooler than covering every color. Now, keep in mind that the average age of the victims would be five, so we couldn't get it too spooky. That did help us save money on extra-gory effects, but the amount of Christmas lights we had to thread from the rafters made up for some of that. In addition to the witch at center stage, Trash had me hang sheets at the corners to create hiding alcoves for other cast members whose job it would be to jump out, and to operate the strings that would drop spooky items like a paper spider down from the ceiling. So this ended up taking longer than I expected, although things picked up when EyeHeartPizza showed up to help. Another thing I didn't expect? It's really easy to lose stuff when you're working around hay bales. I don't even know how many times Trash and I misplaced both hammers, both rolls of duct tape, and both pairs of scissors. Luckily I had a bunch of nails in my sweatshirt pocket, or those would have vanished too. And I still don't know where my stapler is. But it was all worth it, because by the time we were done, we had a haunted house any kid would be proud of. We even focus-grouped it with a five-year-old neighbor. And it had only taken us fourteen hours of prep time, during which we'd completely forgotten to eat anything. Fortunately, we could look forward to taking the next day easy, since that was when the party was happening. Oh, wait. posted by M. Giant 7:49 AM 2 comments 2 Comments:Only one thing to say about that haunted house: Pictures!!
By Wow, finally someone who goes even more all out that we do for a party. 8-) I'm impressed with your hay bale finding skills!
By Friday, October 23, 2009 Karma Trash again. What a week. Sorry for the delay on the update, but we had a wild rumpus around here last weekend, including a Halloween birthday party for M. Edium that included more than 35 kids and an almost equal number of adults, as well as a haunted house and semi-carnival in the back yard and a cemetery with creepy actors in the front yard. No, it isn’t something we routinely do and no, it will not happen again, but I will leave that story for M. Giant. Anyway, YOU GUYS! I can’t believe how many of you donated in M. Edium’s name. We spent a considerable amount of time looking through projects to see his name, and he was so charmed whenever it showed up. Thanks to each of you for making a little boy’s day. He would call out to M. Giant whenever we found his name and say, “Isn’t that sweet, dad? And it’s for my BIRTHDAY.” Additionally, someone won the Barnes and Noble mini-card and asked that it be given anonymously to M. Edium! I can’t express how cool that gesture is, and what a great, great lesson in karma for M. Edium. We had fully intended to reward him for his giving this month, both as part of the Donors Choose drive and his birthday party (in place of gifts he asked for book donations for a local school) but to have someone else give him a reward? Best lesson ever. He is so excited to buy a couple of Star Wars books (sigh) and maybe another dinosaur stuffed animal. And he gets it – he understands that it’s the direct result of his giving to others. So thanks again (and thanks to the person who donated the card and made it all possible.) Well, on to his weekly list. A couple of his big ones were recently funded (including the Christmas gifts, a rocket project, and the school supplies) but he is pretty excited about the new ones, including another school that needs basic school supplies which is so wrong. Real Biology: DNA and science Marco Polo: Swimming and pool supplies Basketball: completed Rocketry and Space History: His current favorite Space Exploration: completed Guitars for Students: another favorite, since daddy plays guitar Food for Robots: closed Touching Their Way Through Learning: completed Reach for the Stars: completed – an old favorite Think like a Scientist: completed Engaging Explorations: completed AP Chem Labs : completed posted by M. Giant 4:11 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:And I just want to thank Trash for helping with the blog maintenance the last few weeks. Her karmic reward is a marginally less grumpy me.
By Send M.Edium over the Rocketry and Space page - he may see his name there....
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You'll see another tribute at M.Edium's favourite project, and one at "Individualized Learning Made Possible" which I could not resist funding out.
By So delighted to see the guitar project getting more attention! M. Edium, it's so awesome that YOUR daddy plays guitar too; you'll remember that forever. Happy belated birthday!
By Wednesday, October 21, 2009 A Good Walk Spoiled Trash and M. Edium and I decided to go for a walk to the library on Sunday, motivated by the combined euphoria of having his party behind us and the fact that it was looking like one of the last really nice days of 2009. Now that the party had been successfully brought off, the main thing we had left to stress about what kind of workspace we're going to come up with now that Trash is telecommuting to her job almost as much as I am. But we came upon a potential solution to even that, barely a block away from our house. Trash's typical work space when she's at home is the kitchen table, but it's far from perfect. Aside from the fact that it's an ergonomic nightmare, there's the noise issue. Meaning, she can't tolerate any. If she's on a conference call, I can't run the dishwasher or the sink or the microwave or the trash can lid or the cupboard doors or even the refrigerator, as far as I can tell. I joke about how when she gets on the phone I'm suddenly living in the Flowers in the Attic house, but she's half deaf anyway and I can kind of see her point. Especially when the high school marching band used to go blasting past her window (not kidding). At her old job, she would telecommute on her own desktop in our upstairs bedroom, but our current employer requires her to be on her work laptop to access the network, and there's just not room for that on her upstairs desk. So it's either the kitchen or the living room love seat. Until we came upon a miniature computer desk that someone had left out on the sidewalk during our Sunday afternoon walk. I suggested bringing it home, and we'd find a place for it later. And I knew we had to hurry, because of how fast the Jawas in this neighborhood move when it doesn't involve M. Edium's dresser. I started rolling it down the sidewalk back to our house while M. Edium and Trash went on ahead, Trash promising, "We'll go slow." "So will I," I said. Some time later, I got it back to our house and just parked it in the front yard, among the gravestones and fence sections (though far back from the curb, just to avoid any confusion). Then I headed back out to catch up with Trash and M. Edium. This didn't take as long as I expected, because by the time I saw them again, they had found a child-sized plastic Adirondack chair that someone had turfed. So I had to bring that home before coming back to rejoin the walk. "This is going to be the longest walk to the library ever, isn't it?" I said. Trash suggested that this time, I should come back with the car. "Good idea," I said. "Then I can just follow along next to you, and if you see anything else you want, you can just throw it in the back." They didn't find anything else. I met them at the park that's on the way to the library, and M. Edium played there while Trash went on ahead and returned his stuff. Then she came back and he played for a while longer, and we all drove home. Trash didn't know that I was being careful to drive the same way we went, lest we see a discarded refrigerator that we just had to have. But this is how it starts, isn't it? posted by M. Giant 6:27 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:
Aha! Get rid of one thing, bring home, that's our problem also!
By Monday, October 19, 2009 The Dresser Five years ago, when we learned that M. Edium was coming to us early, one of the first things we had to do in the rush to get ready was fix the hand-me-down dresser that was in his room. The drawers were off the tracks so badly that some of them didn't even open. And the ones that did fell clear out. I went and got some little boards and some hardware from Home Depot, and patched it up. The following months may have been studded with new-parent fails, but that dresser held up. For weeks. And then M. Edium came home from the hospital. I haven't fixed it since. But we did discover over the years that having the drawers full of clothes (whether it's a dozen pairs of 5T pants or three hundred preemie-onesies) acts as a kind of ballast, preventing them from being too dangerous. The drawers that got stuck again, we simply yanked free by brute force, because getting a preschooler dressed in the morning is no time for finesse. And any fears we might have had of M. Edium hurting himself with it proved unfounded, as it turned out that he hated the thing so much he never touched it. By now you've noticed that I'm speaking of this piece of…furniture in the past tense. That's because EyeHeartPizza, who just moved back to Denver, didn't want to bring her five-drawer dresser along and gave it to us. She was even apologetic about little stuff like the broken handles on a couple of the drawers. I don't think she realized how much we appreciated the giant step up to drawers that slid out instead of tipping out. This was last Thursday night, when she and Chao came over for dinner. We had the old dresser out by the curb by the time The Office started. Given the way the Jawas operate in our neighborhood, I figured it would be gone, drawers and all, by the time Jim and Pam said their vows. Even though three of the drawers were still in the house. But it was still there the next morning. Huh, I thought. That's weird. Maybe it'll go faster if I bring the drawers outside and put them next to it. No, I didn't put them in. It was cold, okay? Too cold even for Jawas, apparently. It was still there on Saturday. Coming home from an errand that day, I thought I saw what the problem was. I had placed the dresser facing the street, so that anyone driving by could see the bashed-in fiberboard that comprised its backing. It looked like I'd shoved someone's head through it, and who wants to pick up a used murder weapon up off the curb, free or not? I probably would have put the drawers in right then, but I think it was still snowing. Sunday I put the drawers back in. At first glance, it looked like a perfectly serviceable item. Anyone driving by fast enough wouldn't even notice that half of the drawers had their faces cast disconsolately down at the street. Surely the Jawas would not be able to resist this prize. And after all, maybe they just hadn't made the rounds yet. Monday is garbage day, and Sunday -- the day before, and a weekend to boot -- is the sweet spot. Monday morning, Trash watched out the window as the garbage man picked it up and tossed it into the back of the truck, where it was instantly crushed into splinters. The rest of the way, I mean. We were kind of ambivalent about its end. We prefer to either donate stuff directly or park it on the curb to give away in situations like this, and it felt like we'd committed some kind of environmental fail by letting it get squished. On the other hand, it had been out there for four and a half days. The reclaimers had plenty of opportunity, if they'd wanted. But I think what bothers me the most is that if this was what was going to happen to it, I would have liked to do it myself. Preferably with an axe. posted by M. Giant 10:49 AM 2 comments 2 Comments:I had the same dresser experience in South Mpls this summer. Crappy dresser but it looked GOOD. and they wouldn't take it and it ended up being crushed and disposed if and it made me sad too.
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We have a tendency to keep most things to the point where, whatever it might have started out life as, it's on the verge of complete collapse by the time it exits our life.
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