Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig… Don’t mess with them!

This is why I hate going to the movie theater or live theater.  I mean, really I love it.  It’s not the theater I hate.  It’s the people attending the show.

Think that buffoon will remember to turn off their cell phone next time?

Learning About Huntsville

I’m happy to live in Huntsville.  I love my hometown with a passion, and get offended by the common phrase “nothing to do in Huntsville.”  If you can’t find something to do here, you haven’t really looked.

I occasionally find tidbits about Huntsville by doing searches in various places.  So I was pleased to find this little tidbit today:

I’m excited to announce that the gallery has sponsered a Dream panel for the upcoming Dream Rocket fiber community collaboration organized by Jennifer Marsh and the International Fiber Collaborative. Check out this website to learn more about this ambitious project and then come to the Stitch ‘n Sip meeting to add your contribution to the panel. Our work will then be installed on the Saturn V Rocket in Huntsville, Alabama!

I think it’s neat that someone so far away is working on an art project for my hometown.

So Proud Of My Family

I don’t talk about my family all that much hear because my wife doesn’t care for me putting too much personal information about us on the Internet.  I can understand that.

But I’ve got to report that my wife just finished a 6 week doctor supervised intensive diet plan on which she lost 27 pounds, or just shy of 5 pounds a week.  It wasn’t easy, but she did it.  Now we’re both going to hopefully start working a little harder on our health and continue to lose weight and get in shape.

We’ve had a rough year health-wise, but it seem that comes with getting older.  So we’re just gonna have to manage that.  As I posted in a long, rambling post yesterday. Not that we celebrated in the best way ever, going to the Mellow Mushroom here in Huntsville.  But hey, we got the Kosmic Karma, which has to be better than most pizza, health-wise.

While I’m talking about things I’m proud of, I have to add my kids.  They both participated, quite successfully, in the Autumn Chase Fun Run. I’m not sure what Molly, my four year old, ran the mile long track, in…  but Sean did it in 9:38.  I’m pleased as punch with that, and the fact that both of them ran an ENTIRE MILE without stopping once!

So there, a tidbit about the family.  Despite the yelling I’ll get about posting personal information on the net…

Sean (in the orange) Takes Of On the Autumn Chase Fun Run

Molly Rounds the Corner at the Autumn Chase Fun Run

New Lights for a New Look

So last night I wasn’t feeling to good.  And if you’ll read my next post you’ll see why. But I was up to a little trip down to the public library to see the latest beautification attempt by the Big Spring Partners.  And I’ll have to admit it is nicer than I was anticipating.

I think my family and I were the only ones there not directly related to the event.  Everyone else was either from TLS, Huntsville Utilities, or some other involved organization.  The only possible exception might be the newsies, since all the stations had a presence.  Oh, and the ever everywhere Jeff White, of Jeff White Photography, was also there taking pictures.

I was really thinking I’d be going to ridicule the concept.  While it’s not as impressive as I’d like, it is more impressive than I’d thought it would be.  For very little money, the Big Spring Partners did improve a part of downtown Huntsville.  I doubt they could have improved the section with shrubs or walls for as little.  And it seems that LED decorating is the new “in” thing.  So instead of making fun of Mary Jane Caylor like I planned, I’ll give her a heart felt high five for a job well done.

To the detractors, like I once was.  The City didn’t pay a dime for this.  Big Spring Partners footed the bill, and TLS, a local company, made it happen.  Huntsville Utilities is paying for the power to run the lights, which being LED is almost nothing.  This had zero impact on our tax dollars, and a not insignificant impact on the look of downtown Huntsville.  Again, I arrived as one to make fun of this, but in the end, I’m pleased as punch.  And if Big Spring Partners can get what they want, and I now hope they do, the current lighting is around 10% of what the final lighting plan is.  Assuming that the lights end up staying beyond Big Spring Jam.

Time will tell if this turns into a more beautiful Huntsville, or another downtown boondoggle.  For better pictures than the one I took with my iPhone, head over to AL.com, where they have a nice slideshow.

Strep Throat, not for the squimish.

So I’m at the doctors. My throat has been midly hurting since Wednesday and yesterday it got pretty bad. But the kids had an event. So I roughed it out. But today, I’m in the doctors.

Besides being the typhoid Michael of the Autumn Chase my kids ran in (pictures soon) I didn’t do much. Now I’m stuck at the doctors with both ass checks full of some thick brown liquid they tell me was antibiotics. And a steroid shot. And then it was was spinny spinny, how’d I end up in here with drool on my checks?

Weeeee. Don’t blog while having a reaction! Owww. It hurts to swallow. Oh my, is that the room spinning?

Alright back. Hey it hurts to walk and my ass feels like someone shoved five pounds of water under the skin. Oh wait. They did.

I felt better before the shots, evil witchy nurse lady.

Who is now an angel putting cold compass on my forehead after I nearly passed out. Nice nurse lady.

Strep throat. So it’s not sexy like swine flu, but hurts like a mother.

I’m going to drive home and be sick now. Thanks!

The 9/11 Post I Didn’t Want To Write.

I didn’t want to write this post, but I felt I had to.  It’s something that’s bothered me for a while, and I’m going to put it down and get it out of my system.  I’ve thought about it every year as the anniversary of 911 roles around.

911 was a great horror.  The idea that religion of any kind could lead men to kill so many people is appaling to me on more levels than I can count.  The resulting two wars that followed sickens me at levels I can’t express.  The entire affair is disgraceful and horrible.

But I’m biased.  I’m irrevocably skewed in my worldview by my upbringing and experiences.  I’m an American, and a fairly patriotic one.  I felt the attacks of 911 as a personal affront to the well being of both my country and myself.  I was personally impacted by the attack when the Venture Capitol firm that supported the company I worked for was destroyed by the attacks.  Within three week I was without a job, directly because of that attack.

Above and beyond that, the two wars since then have taken friends and family far away from home to kill people.  Those same people tried to, but so far haven’t succeeded in, killing my friends and family.  The impact of 911 is still felt every time a soldier gets on a plane to head toward the fight.

But if I try really hard, I can remove the glasses of my background and look at things through a less filtered method.  When I try, I can begin to see times in our own past when we acted in ways similar to those lunatics that flew planes into our buildings.  And it makes me wonder where we are headed.

Long ago, a group of fanatics under the cover of night attacked a boat anchored at harbor in Boston.  In what became a symbol of opposition to a tyrant, these men were acting with neither official recognition or direction.  They stormed the ship, dressed as natives instead of wearing any kind of recognizable uniform, and attacked the source of revenue for a government they didn’t agree with.  In effect, they were terrorists.  I am speaking of the Boston Tea Party.

To think that this event, a symbol of our early drive toward a new country, is anything but terrorism is to remove it from its cultural context.  Leaders of the day, including future leaders of our new country, did not support the action.  In fact, Ben Franklin demanded that restitution to both the company impacted AND the crown be paid.  The sum was some 90K pounds, a massive fortune for the fledgling economy of the “New World.”

The Crown reacted badly to this act, and increased its tyrannical hold on the colonies.  This increased the resentment toward a far distant land and lead us further down the road toward war, just as the reactions of our own government after 911 lead to the war in both Afghanistan and Iraq.  And once there, our soldiers faced something very similar to the British Soldiers in the southern theater.

In Afghanistan our troops never faced an army of uniformed soldiers in the field.  Instead, non-uniformed fighters of the Taliban squared off with a small number of our troops using loyalist militia to rapidly push the Taliban out of power.  The British weren’t so lucky.  The British initially took to the Southern Theater with a small number of regular soldiers and bolstered their forces with a loyalist militia in what was really more of a Civil War than a Revolutionary one.

In the south they went to battle not with uniformed soldiers of the Continental Congress, but instead with the local militias who had, to put it politely, an informal hierarchy.  At times, Colonels in the Militia outnumbered privates.  This is not to say that the patriot militia was ineffective.  Quite the opposite.  Much like the early successes of IED’s and suicide bombings, the patriot militia acted in ways completely contradictory to the rules of war of the day.

The patriots acted without “honor” (as defined at the time) and openly targeted high ranking officers.  They attacked supply lines and civilian run posts.  They refused to meet on the field of battle, instead favoring hit and run tactics.  The British were unprepared to face such a foe, and failed to adapt to the new rules.  As a result, they lost the south and then, in a more conventional way, lost the North forcing Cornwallis to give up his sword to Washington and establishing our country, as it was.

But to think that we won that war by fighting “fair” or following the “rules of war” would be incorrect.  Just like our adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, we flatly refused to fight on the same terms as the British.  We fought our war our way, and to hell with the idea Britain had on the “proper” way to fight.  Are the Taliban or the Iraqi Insurgents really acting all that differently?

I’m no longer sure.  Now, I’m not trying to pass a moral judgment just yet.  To simplify the American Revolution down to the Boston Tea Party and how we fought is to much like a Schoolhouse Rock version of the war.  It was much more, and involved more reason, concerns and decisions.  Just like Al-Qaeda In Iraq, we had other groups and organizations running to aid us not out of some sense of pride or belief in our new way of life, but because we were fighting a common enemy.  The French Fleet didn’t arrive in the nick of time because France loved us, but because France hated the British.  Remember, many of the same men who fought with the French against the British in the Revolutionary War, fought against the French a few years earlier in the French and Indian War, including George Washington.  We were bloodying the nose of a common enemy, not sharing a ideological ideal.

So I’m having a hard time with the wars we are currently engaged in.  And I’m not naive.  I can see some key and extrememly fundamental differences between American Revolution and Al-Qeada’s attack on 911.  Putting my bacground eyeglasses back on, those differences are extremely important to me.

• Al-Qeada attacked us because we believe in a different world than they do.  The Boston Tea Party attacked because they believed in a different form of government.  That difference, at least to me, is massive.  No one claimed a Divine Right to attack, they did so because they were angry at what they viewed as mistreatment, but not immorality.  To Al-Qeada, we had to be attacked for the way we think.
• Even when provoked, the Patriots tended toward offering quarter to wounded surrendering enemies.  Not always, though, but in general the American’s may not have fought with honor, but they won with honor.  They also typically surrendered with honor, although there were some cases of perfidy.  The Patriots did not actively target civilians, at least not for death, unless they held valid military significance.  While it could be argued that the Tea Party targeted civilians, the intent was economic, not true terror.  The attack on the WTC can be defined in no real Military terms, and served no military purpose except to cause terror.

These are not insignificant differences.  At least to me, and my ability to sleep at night.  Regardless of the how, the result of the American Revolution was “a good thing.”  The result of 911, while history may prove me wrong, is not good.

So why did I write this post?  Because I’m sick of the holier than thou attitude I hear all to often concerning the ongoing conflicts.  I completely support our troops in every way.  I can even accept, and could possibly argue, that the fights are someone just… or at least justifiable.  But the idea that those we fight are somehow less than us is to ignore our own history and how we came to be.  While there may be major motivational differences, the fact that we are fighting a group of people who use methods we find dishonorable and, frankly, often despicable, doesn’t make them subhuman.  It makes them different.  We were once looked upon with the same level of disdain by a far greater power.

So does writing this change anything for me?  Not really.  I still think Islamic Fundamentalism is a dangerous movement, and a far cry from the Islamic thinkers that saved the worlds knowledge during the dark ages of Europe.  I still think there is no finer military that the one the United States has kept in the field now for 8 long years.  I think the young men and women in that military are some of the most amazing people to ever walk the earth.  And I think most of them will do what they need to do, even though they would rather be anywhere else in the world but there.

But I also think that Islamic Fundamentalism is not all of Islam.  And that we need to remember that when the fighting is finally over, the only way to continue to improve the lives of the people of Islam is to befriend them, not destroy them.  And that much like the post Revolutionary period (forget 1812, will ya?) meant the friendship between the British and the Americans created one of the most ethical and moral superpowers the world has ever seen.  (I didn’t say perfect.  And I didn’t say ethical.  Just the most ethical)

So to surprise many of my friends who know me quite well and know my views on politics, I’m going to have to say that I agree with President Obama on the need to reach out to them with the hand of friendship and understanding.  Of knowing that once we were on their side of the battle.  And to figure out a way to lift them up into the modern world instead of continue to explode them into the past.

But I’m not saying the Obama method is the correct one.

So ultimately, have I said anything at all?

Opening Night

I’ve got a tradition.  Opening night I get all worked up and about 20 minutes before the show opens I’m praying to the porcelain god.  Then I pull myself together and do the show, and am fine for the rest of the run.  For whatever reason, last night for opening night I didn’t feel nervous and I didn’t have an upset stomach at all prior to going on stage.

So the point is, last night was opening night for “You Can’t Take It With You.”  For those of you that know the play, I’m playing Paul Sycamore, the Father of the craziest family in New York circa 1938.  While not a leading role by ANY stretch of the imagination, it is by far the most time I’ve spent on stage in any production I’ve been an actor in.  Most of that is as Human Set Dressing, but nevertheless it’s on stage!

In fact, it was the most enjoyable stage experience I’ve had.  I don’t know if it is a comfort level things, which I doubt since I haven’t done that much and I’ve not done anything since Feb of 2007, or what, but I went out on stage and just had fun.

I’m playing with some pretty amazing people.  Our Penny is simple fabulous, and Grandpa commands the show.  The two Mr. Kirby’s are phenomenal and my daughters, Alice and Essie, are both beautiful and talented.  I’m honored to do a show with each and every one of them.

Apparently the Diva Moments have been kept to both a minimum and out of the public eye, so maybe the level of camaraderie I’m feeling is artificial.  I’ve been informed that just because I haven’t seen them doesn’t mean they aren’t happening.  Personally I’d rather be blissfully ignorant and have no real complaints about the way first time Theatre Huntsville director Nina Soden ran the show.  (Look, every actor has complaints about every director they work for.  But mine are all silly little nits that I’m not gonna list here.)

So we opened to a theatre about half full, I’m told.  It was a receptive audience, laughing at the right places.  The play really is quite funny, but haven been written in the late 1930’s it has a different view on life than our modern world does.  As a result it is interesting what jokes the audience gets and what jokes they don’t.  It references the Russian Revolution a great deal, as that was the hot topic of the day.  So it was interesting that some of the older members of opening night got some of those references.

Would I do this show, or another Theatre Huntsville show again?  I don’t know.  The whole family is auditioning for Christmas Carol today before the show, so we’ll have to see how it goes.  I’m not sure what’ll happen there.  And I’ve been approached to Tech Direct another show.  I don’t know that I really want to get back into the Theatre Scene, but it seems to be calling me back.  We’ll see if it happens.

More Eyewitnesses Including My Own!

I’ve finally seen a North Alabama Gator!

Unfortunately not in the wild.  But nevertheless, here is PHOTOGRAPHIC PROOF of a North Alabama Gator!

Finally, a North Alabama Gator

On Labor Day I took the family to a local safari park… you know the kind, where you drive through and look at free range animals in their, well not NATIVE environment but at least free range.  The exception to the free range rule was the Alligators.  As the only predators in the park, the gators were all kept behind fences and away from the other animals.

The picture above is one I snapped as we drove past.  This particular gator is, I guess, about 6 feet.  Nice and fat and I’m sure does just fine during the winter months. (In fact, I know he does since I asked.  They only collect the smaller gators and their one caiman.  And they had one very small crocodile as well.  But they don’t do anything special with the big gators to keep them healthy over the winter.  Once it gets cold, they stop feeding them, and when the weather warms up and the gators get active they return to feeding.

Better yet, they’ve successful BRED these gators.  They had a two year old in a tank inside the “Planet Reptile” exhibit.  This wonderful park is Harmony Park, and it is my new favorite family fun place in North Alabama.  For $6 a person, you get up close and personal with LOTS of animals.  And I do mean close!

An Emu sticks its head in the car

So I highly recommend that you take your kids, your date, or whatever to the park.  Click on the link for directions and hours, but the park is closed November to March.

My daughter finds someone slower but not uglier than her father!

But I also got another comment about seeing a gator in the wild here in North Alabama.  This one really excites me because its late in the season AND in an area I know.  Here’s the comment form Charlotte.

Just last night around 9pm, we were at the boat launch on Sharp Ford Road in Morgan County and spotted a 5 foot alligator. It was under the bridge appearing to be trying to hide until we shined the light on it. We then watched it as it swam around like we were not even there with the light shining directly on it. There are here. We were considering gigging some frogs but that quickly changed our minds.

- Charolette, September 7th, 2009

Now I know where the boat launch on Sharp Ford Road is.  Clearly they were there at night, which I’ve been told is the easiest time to find a gator because their eyes reflect light so well.  So I continue to get eyewitness reports of gators here in North Alabama.  Here is a map of where the boat ramp is.  It’s the bright white square just north of the road and east of the water.   I’ve actually put the boat in close to there.

View Larger Map

So I’m still not sure if I’ll ever see a wild North Alabama Gator, and with my current run in a play, my weekends are sorta full. till the end of September.  So it is unlikely that I’ll make it this season unless September remains unseasonably warm.  But gator hunting 2010 sure looks promising.  And I’ll leave you with some more photos of gators from Harmony Park.

A "little" gator

There are two gators in there, hard to see in the picture.

Our Set

The set for “You Can’t Take It With You” mostly finished.

Set is up…

Well, I don’t have a picture yet, cause it hasn’t been painted, but the set came together finally.  Two long days of construction and it’s standing.

There may be a sight line problem here and there since large portions still seem to be missing, but for the most part, its built.  Which is better than I thought it would be on Thursday.  I was quite upset with it being not apart when I went on Friday to load the truck, but ultimately I think that was a good thing because the knowledge of taking it apart helped as we put it back together.

People who are much better at reading plans than I am had serious trouble with the plans left behind by the Tech Director.  Seems set pieces didn’t match their designation on the plans.  My character enters through the “cellar” door, which according to the plans should have been labeled “Q” as I recall.  It was labeled “K”  or something.  In the end we were putting together the set mostly blind.  And we had lots of doing the work twice because we couldn’t or didn’t figure it out right the first time.

But that is all behind us!  A bunch of mostly actors showed up on Saturday and we cobbled it together.  By the time we were so tired we were stupid the bottom floor of the set was up, and the top floor had a few walls.  The next morning  back at it early, and we got some serious help.  The AD’s husband, Chris, showed up and I must confess to having a bit of a man crush on him.  Lordy, that man knows how to sling wood and use power tools.  Chris is a finish carpenter by trade, and did the work of 20 actors on Sunday.  And the work of at least 4 of our normal techies.  And 2 of our better techies.  Chris was awesome.

For a while on Sunday Morning, it was just Chris and I working.  After slowing him down for 15 minutes, I just got out of his way and let him work.  He fixed the stairs we never could quite get right.  He trimmed, cut, pounded built and otherwise perfected the set for at least 12 hours.  I know it was at least 12 cause I gave up after 12.  As I left I still heard his DeWalt cordless power nailer slamming its way through the set.

So for the first time, less than a week before the open, the cast got the chance to rehearse on the set.  Not horribly unusual, but as I mentioned the plans weren’t that great and there are some serious issues with it.  For one, the thrust isn’t as wide as what we rehearsed on.  So since I helped build the thrust, guess who was the only person to fall off it during the run through?  Yep, me.  Went to hug my “daughter” and stepped right off into space.

Oh, and speaking of daughters, my real one didn’t like me having a fake one.  It was cute, and kinda fun, to see Molly so upset that I had another “daughter.”  She didn’t realize I had two!  (I hardly ever even acknowledge the other one for the whole play.  It’s kinda bizarre)

So anyway, that’s been my Labor Day Weekend.  Not exactly what I had in mind, but it’ll do.  Today I’m spending it with my kids doing something fun.  As of now, I have no idea what that fun thing will be, but it should be fun!  Right?