I’m in Birmingham, Alabama for the week.  A few thoughts so far… Had a layover at LAX.  Never been to LAX.  Puts a pretty serious dent in my “Airports get nicer the further west you go” theory.  Yikes.  Horrible airport.  Cranky employees.  In case I doubted I was in LA, though, 2 things happened: Someone […]

Listen, Oliver, buddy… I get it.  I do.  You’re a tough cat.  When we met you at the Humane Society, they called you Brute, because you pushed everyone around.  After we got you to our house it took you about one day to decide not to take any crap from the dogs.  You even took […]

This weekend I ran the Dirty Half Marathon.  It was intense.  The build-up got to the point where at the starting line I was ready to do an about face and run the other direction.  Why? First, my friend Mark who I run with signed us up, and I knew it was largely a series […]

**This is a continuation of the story that begins here.  I’d highly recommend reading that first to be caught up. It won’t take that long, I promise. So… The lead actress and the director arrived at last.  She wasn’t really speaking because she’d lost her voice that morning and was going to have to croak, […]

Putting together any kind of creative performance – dance, a play, shooting a film – requires such delusional, quixotic optimism, that when I got a call this Saturday asking if I was available to play a part in a scene for a web series on Sunday, and the associate producer said: I knew there was […]

With the movements towards a permanent colony on Mars, and Virgin Galactic’s progress toward civilian space flights, it seems like a good time to offer just a few reflections on space travel and its implications. I think the end of the shuttle program bodes poorly for the screenplay I wanted to produce when I was […]

4:20am:  Hm.  I think it’s time to get up.  Hm.  Yeah.  Time to get up.  Time to get up! Time to get up! Time to get up!  Gosh, where is everybody?  TIME TO GET UP! 6:14am:  I am very close to figuring out the code to the three buttons on the play station.  There is […]

The sand-colored jeans worn by Mark Hamill in the original Star Wars have gone up for auction! You might reasonably wonder why you should spend the expected 70-100,000 dollars for them, especially if you don’t happen to have a size 29 waist. But that would be because you haven’t thought it through.  Just consider all […]

As most people know, there are agreed upon nonverbal signals ranging from fairly minor – like the “okay” signal or an eye roll to communicate an “Oh, brother” reaction – to very important non-verbal distress signals. *** But the truth is, there are an incredible number of situations in which non-verbal communication is crucial.  Here […]

I had an idea.  An idea that bubbled up from some terrible dark place.  It was an idea for my own award, which I am introducing today, in hopes that people will connect with it, and pass along their own winners.  The basis of the Jafees is blogs that do something, or have some component, […]

For the school where I work, this past weekend was prom – that magical night when a girl’s dreams come true.  Assuming her dreams involve trying to walk in 5-inch heels, not eating your expensive dinner because the dress is too tight, and then listening to deafening music with a guy who thinks he’s the […]