RANDOM PIC OF THE WEEK
I ran across this amazing photo of Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster, and it’s getting me in the mood for “Son of Monsterpalooza” in October, as well as Halloween!
I’m not sure if this song would be considered country or rock, or what. But it sure is a great song! Sara Evans and “Anywhere” is a solid piece of music!
Tuesday the 3rd – BANK BACK-UP! – To start the day, my first stop was Taco Bell to get some food to go. Then I hit the bank to make some deposits. But it was going veeerrrryyy sloooowly. I had a job at 2, so I didn’t have time to wait around very long. It seemed like everybody who went to the window had some sort of crisis that would take a half hour to solve. I got out of line and promised myself that I’d go back tomorrow. The gig I was heading to had booked me until 5pm, and the bank will be long closed by the time I get off. Luckily, by the time I got rolling at Skylark Studios, it only took me a little over an hour to record all the material they had for my character. Since I had about an hour before the bank closed, I headed back to brave the line. Once I got up to the window I realized why it was taking everybody so long. The lady told me they had just implemented a new check scanning system for all depositors, and their new scanners only took up to 10 checks per deposit. I told her that was utterly bizarre since they’re a bank in Los Angeles, and there are a lot of actors in Los Angeles, and those actors get something called residual checks (sometimes hundreds at a time!) and that would slow things down considerably. She agreed but said it’s the bank’s new policy. (Time to find a new bank maybe?) Since I was depositing a fair amount of residual checks (unfortunately, the checks were only worth a few bucks each) it took me longer than it should have. So this is what I’m going to have to deal with each month? I think the bank needs to rethink their policy given the area in which they’re located. It’s going to be very hot this week, over triple digits, so we’re finally getting our “summer” weather. I like to observe weather patterns quite a bit, and as long as I’ve lived in my present location there’s ALWAYS about a week to 10 days where it gets over triple digits. Since Labor Day was just this week, and we hadn’t really had our traditional span of triple-digit weather, I thought it was odd. But this is the week! Luckily, I love hot weather (especially the dry hot weather you usually get in Los Angeles) so it would be enjoyable for me. I went back home and did some work around the house and then relaxed for a bit. Later I did my nightly auditions and emailed them to my agents. I typed out Wally’s Week and then headed out for my regular late-night WOG (walk/jog) and subsequent relaxation/cool-down time in the anti-gravity chair. It was a gorgeous night, and it was already starting to warm up. I went back inside to finish Wally’s Week, and then I hit the internet to get my hotel and car reserved for my upcoming trip to South Dakota. Since I got so badly burned during the big “flightmare” fiasco of last July, I avoided Delta and LAX. I booked my flights on an alternate airline and from an alternate airport. We’ll see how it goes. Fingers crossed that I actually make it this time!
Wednesday the 4th – SCORCHER! – Here come the triple digits! It was about 106 today, but I was loving it! I drove over to Studiopolis in Burbank to do some work that would only take about a half hour. After the session I hung around outside in the blazing hot day (it felt GREAT!) with two of the studio engineers just chatting. We all seemed to enjoy being out in the super-hot weather! After the session I drove over to my ENT to have him look at why my left ear was plugged. Sure enough, just like a few months ago (but in my right ear) I had another fungal infection; commonly called “swimmer’s ear.” He removed the fungus and then puffed in some magic powder and told me to keep it cool and dry. I’ll go to a follow-up on Thursday to see how I’m doing. Then I hit a local cigar shop and picked up some smokes for the upcoming warm, summer nights. I hardly ever enjoy a cigar in the cool of the fall or winter, as hot summer nights and cigars just go together so naturally for me. It dates back to a time when I was 10 and going to regular minor league baseball games in Aberdeen, South Dakota. While the game progressed, and we did our best to avoid mosquitoes, the smell of cigars permeated the stands. The fat cats would sit up top and smoke cigars while cheering for the Aberdeen Pheasants. So yeah, the feeling of those hot summer nights and the smell of cigars just kind of go hand-in-hand for me in a very nostalgic kind of way. Since we had a good week of warm nights ahead, I stocked up. Soon, those nights will turn chilly and…no more cigars. Then I drove over to Coral Café to meet up with my good pal Chris Malmin. We chatted a lot (as usual) and had a great dinner. When I got back home I did some work, relaxed, and recorded a few auditions. Since I have an appointment this Friday with my computer guy Brian to initiate the back-up protocol of my new system, I got busy reorganizing my desktop to my liking, and repopulating my main data files with all of the pertinent info I need. I figure it will take me a couple days until I get it perfect, and I want to be ready for Friday. I’m ready to have this nightmare behind me, and I hope it never happens again. I’m taking mitigation procedures to ensure that it doesn’t. But for some reason the two USB portals on the front of my unit weren’t working for some reason. Ugh. It’s always something with these infernal machines. I checked the weather forecast and it’s going to be 109 on Thursday! YES! I relaxed a bit, recorded more of my nightly auditions. I took my nightly WOG and enjoyed a nice cigar in my anti-grav chair. Remember that I routinely take my WOGs in the dead of night, so it’s always quiet and peaceful. When I finish my mile-and-a-quarter brisk walk, I get an iced tea and sit out in my anti-gravity chair just relaxing, cooling-off, and looking at the sky and thinking and meditating. As I sit facing the western sky, there is a studio directly in front of me. This studio is usually very well-lit and it’s a bit of a problem when you’re trying to observe those heavenly bodies. But tonight was a special night. As I was sitting there, all of a sudden I noticed that a good portion of their lighting just popped off. BOOM! Very little lighting coming from the studio! It was nice! The dark skies above them looked beautiful. However, I don’t think the power outage was intentional, and it could be because the studio’s power supply was overloaded due to the hot weather. Regardless, I enjoyed not seeing any garish, white lights for the evening. I came back inside to clean up and hit the hay.
Thursday the 5th – MY BUDDIES BOB & DENNY! – After I picked up a few packages at my box, which included a new jacket I bought that’s very similar to the military-style jackets Jeff Lynne wears during the ELO concerts (I’ll be doing a little Jeff Lynne cosplay-kinda thing at his final concert). Then I went to Bob’s Big Boy to meet my friend Edi and to catch up. She had wonderful news! She said that the band Yacht Rock Revue would be in town at the Forum opening for REO Speedwagon and Train. Her husband Elliot Lurie has played with YRR many times as a special guest. He’ll come on stage and sing his hit song “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” – always to a rousing response. Well, the guys asked if Elliot would come by and sing “Brandy”…AT THE FORUM! This is HUGE news! I wish I could see that! It was very, very hot out, but both Edi and I seem to love this kind of weather. She and Elliot lived in the desert for a while, and actually got sick of the unending triple-digit-days every summer, but she still likes that kind of weather occasionally. Then I headed over to see Dr. G the ENT to have a follow-up examination of my ear. The previous day I told him that a 4:15 appointment time on Thursday would be perfect, since I had a 2:00 lunch scheduled at Bob’s Big Boy – right in the area! He told me how much he loves Bobs and he particularly enjoys the shakes. So I picked up a few gift certificates at Bob’s while I was there and presented him with them. He was elated! I doubt that patients bring their doctors gifts very often. He phoned in a prescription for some ear drops and I took off. First stop was getting Spook some more food at the vet’s office. Then I hit the hardware store to get some very specific type of light bulbs for a fixture in my bedroom closet. These types of bulbs aren’t easy to find, but luckily I found two. The guy at the store scanned them and said they had been discontinued – no doubt because they don’t comply with California state laws on light bulbs. This dopey state. Then I went to CVS and picked up a bunch of supplies, and then got a few groceries. When I got home to unload everything I realized that I had forgotten to pick up my ear drops while I was at CVS. What a dummy! Maybe the hot weather was melting my brain! My 19 year old cat Spook has been peeing and pooping around the house at times. This could be a sign that he’s near the end, but he doesn’t seem like it. I have potty pads down and he uses those, but I want him to keep using his box. Maybe his old-man brain forgets from time to time where the box is located. I don’t know. I’ve never had a cat before so this is all new. I did my nightly auditions and waited for my friend Amanda to show up. She was passing through the area doing a dog-sitting job, so when she’s in town we always like to get something to eat and chat. We had a delicious dinner at Denny’s, and I even got an order to go for later. I got home and relaxed and did my nightly WOG later. At 3am it was still 82 degrees outside! WOW! I spent some time in the anti-grav chair, but around 4am it started to get very noisy. (By the way, the studio fixed their lighting problem, and those garish lights were back!) I went back inside and did some prep for an interview I’d be doing with my old pal Gary Weckwerth on his morning radio show in Watertown, South Dakota. Because of the time difference, I’d need to be ready to rock at 7:15am. Gary used to be the sportscaster at KELO-TV in Sioux Falls, South Dakota when I was at KELO-AM as a DJ. He wanted to get me on his show to talk about the upcoming “Collector’s Call” episode on ME-TV. I spent some time on the computer organizing my main data file for the back-up process that would happen later that day. I’m assuming that, given the amount of stuff I have, it will probably take all weekend to fully back up to both of the RAID drives. The interview with Gary and company went very well, and then I enjoyed my Denny’s salad while watching another “Incredible Hulk” episode before bed.
Friday the 6th – THE EV DREAM – A NIGHTMARE! – After having just gotten to bed around 11am, I was awakened at 2:30 by one of the worst possible sounds you could possibly hear in the dead of summer – NOTHING! I heard my fan and my AC shut off simultaneously. My alarm clock went dark as well. THE POWER WAS OUT IN MY HOUSE! On a 109 degree day!! This is just great. It was getting pretty warm pretty quickly, so I went outside to see if the problem was everywhere, or just my house. Come to find out, power was out all over. The manager of our complex said it was a city-wide outage. Guh-reeeeaaat. I hit the shower and laid on my bed and didn’t move. Luckily I stayed relatively cool, but I had no idea how soon the power would be restored. All the while I was thinking about how ridiculous this whole thing is. I live in a state run by an abject moron whose greasy head couldn’t be more vacant. A while back he said that the entire state of California would be compelled to have electric cars by 2035. That’s about 10 years away. Pretty arrogant for a state that can’t even keep my air conditioning on in the summer. My view? NEVER. GONNA. HAPPEN. As Scotty always famously said on the old “Star Trek” show, “You can’na change the laws of physics!” And you can’t. To compel the residents of this huge state to only drive electric cars in 10 years is implausible, considering that there is NOTHING being done to improve the state’s power infrastructure. If they truly want this in 10 years, they should have started improving the infrastructure 10 years ago. A friend of mine shared some information with me that stunned me. He said his friend is MENSA (where the super-geniuses go), and this friend did a little number-crunching. He said that in order to electrically power the vehicles for every resident in the state of California, they would need to build a power plant…the size of THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA! (Sidebar: While I have a strict “no poli-ticks” policy on my cesspool media accounts and my website, I feel that criticizing the duly elected leader of any given entity is no longer political. The race has already been run, and won. So now, criticizing the job that duly elected leader is doing transcends any poli-ticks. (Yes – that’s poli-TICKS – as in the blood-sucking vermin!) And I’ve always been very vocal about how badly our Governor nuisance has been for this once-great state. It’s pathetic to see how ineffective that grinning gargoyle has been. Enough) Suffice to say, the dream of all EVs by 2035 is just that, a dream – and nothing more. When you can keep my power on during the peak-demand summer season we’ll talk. Until then, keep your pipe dreams shoved firmly in your…pipe. The power came back on at 5, and nothing seemed worse for the wear. When we had summer power outages my main concern was always for my dogs Sassie and Roxy – who had thick fur coats that they couldn’t discard easily. Keeping them cool was always paramount. This kind of power outage crap will most likely be one of the final nails in the coffin of the EV car fad once and for all. We can always hope. I chatted with Brian and we started the process of installing the back-up system. But he hit a snag when the new program wouldn’t accept our password. Uh oh. Apparently more work needs to be done to get the main computer to shake hands with the new RAID back-up system we installed. He’s going to do some more research. I did some work around the house and relaxed, enjoying my AC once again. Later I recorded my nightly auditions, took my WOG, and enjoyed relaxing with another nice cigar in my anti-grav chair. But unlike the previous night, it was getting a bit humid. I came back inside and started working on a document, and wanted to refer to a document from earlier this year. However, the folder I wanted didn’t exist on my computer. It was the folder of photos and videos from my appearance at Weebcon in Dallas around Easter-time. It simply was no longer there. I hit SEARCH, but while it found the title, no documents were found. So that’s obviously one of the folders that I lost during the loss of my main data drive. Rats! I’m sure I’ll come across other materials that didn’t get transferred as time goes on, which makes me sad. I made a salad and watched another episode of “The Incredible Hulk.”
Saturday the 7th – TECH TROUBLE! – After picking up my ear drops at CVS, and picking up a few grocery items, I phoned my buddy Joe Pendleton to ask his advice about the back-up stuff. Joe’s been an IT guy for 30+ years so I was curious what he thought about the trouble we’ve been having for what seems to be a relatively simple problem. He said he and his family just happened to be in town and they were heading to Little Toni’s for dinner. I asked if it would be OK to meet them there, and they said it would be great! I also chatted with Brian who did some more research about the back-up problem. My main system runs on Windows 10, but the new back-up system runs on Windows 11, and it seems that 10 won’t talk to 11. So Brian is going to try to do a little “reverse engineering” and see if Windows 11 will talk to 10. Good grief. It really is “always something.” If the recent “flightmare” thing taught us anything, and how Southwest Airlines was completely unaffected by the major outage, it’s that advancing to the “latest thing” isn’t always good. I believe (like Southwest does, apparently) that if something’s working, why change just for the sake of changing? We can’t find a back-up system that works with Windows 10? Unbelievable! I feel the same about my iTunes program. I found a version that I like, and one that works well. Why upgrade just for the sake of upgrading? Sometimes I like sticking with what I know, and what I know actually works. Advancement simply for the sake of advancement isn’t always a good thing. But then again, I still have a flip phone. So there’s that. I know what I like, and I don’t feel the need to upgrade just for the sake of it. Think Southwest Airlines. It was a great meal, as always, at Little Toni’s. Then the Pendletons came over for a little bit before they hit the road for home up north. I relaxed a bit, and later I took my nightly WOG and spent some time in the anti-grav chair. I came back inside and spent the rest of the night rebuilding some of my playlists on my iTunes which had gotten lost during the recent data downer. It’s very tedious work, but necessary.
Sunday the 8th – “COLLECTOR’S CALL! – As is usual with my Sundays, I slept very late. When I got up I had a fair amount of emails and text messages from people who had already seen my “Collector’s Call” episode on the east coast feed. It was still a few hours away from airing in the Pacific time zone, so I was very excited to see it! My friend Emily was in the area so I invited her over to watch the episode with me at 5:30. My gal Angi had been filming all day for a project for her film school, and she said she’d be over as soon as she could. But Angi didn’t make it until just after the episode ended, so we’ll have to watch the DVR’d version of it soon. But the show was so wonderful, that I felt like going out and celebrating. So Emily, Angi and I went out to Smoke House to enjoy a delicious meal. I had been wanting to hit Smoke House for quite a while now, and this was the perfect opportunity. I could NOT be happier with how the episode turned out – it was fun, funny and delightful! The weather will still be triple-digit hot for a few more days, but the extended weather shows clouds moving in mid-week next week, and considerably cooler temps. In some cases it will be a 25 degree difference than what we’ve been having! At that point I think it’s safe to say that summer is really well and truly over. Sad. Later I took my nightly wog and spent some brief time in the anti-grav chair. I saw a big, fluffy raccoon that was walking right towards me. Then he saw me, stopped and I said, “Hello there.” He quickly did an about-face and headed for his tree again. I also noticed the Orion constellation is coming up in the eastern sky around 4am now. As I always say, seeing Orion is always the harbinger of the oncoming fall/winter season. It’s coming. I went back inside and started rebuilding another playlist on my iTunes. I’ve also been checking YouTube for videos from the recent Jeff Lynne’s ELO concerts. Jeff seems to be hanging in quite well, and I’m looking forward to seeing them in St. Paul in just a few weeks! I made a salad and watched the final episode of “Honey West.” I’m glad I saw all the episodes in its single season, but the show just wasn’t very impressive overall. I did delight in watching the “Collector’s Call” episode again, though – and I really dig it! Hopefully you got to catch it too!
And how was YOUR week?!?!
PIX FROM THE WEEK
Here’s a great shot the crew of “Collector’s Call” took during filming in Planet Wallywood last December.
JR and Audrey always love visiting when the Pendletons are in town!
After the “Collector’s Call” episode aired, my friend and assistant Emily, my gal Angi, and a little green friend joined us for a wonderful dinner at the Smoke House!
YEAH! Those are kind of temps I’ve been waiting to see!
Hard to believe that soon I won’t be able to wear my Invader Zim basketball jersey anymore. It’ll be too chilly!
No matter how old I get, I’ll probably always retain a certain “juvenile” sense of humor. As we were leaving the Smoke House the other night, I noticed that their front door had a very odd sounding squeak. So not being one to let an opportunity like this one pass by, we filmed this little video.
