Film Crew Invasion

I KNOW I HAVE POSTED BEFORE ABOUT MY SON, EVAN, AND HIS NEW-FOUND LOVE OF ACTING.

He performed as one of the two lead characters in a Charlie Brown school play at Christmas, and he loved it...loved the singing, the bit of dancing, getting into the character.And for Evan, who's a bit like Charlie Brown himself, that wasn't such a tough challenge.

His ascent in the entertainment world has been incredibly fast, however. Because now he's in the movies. And he and his film crew invaded my apartment for some live takes that were full of laughs.

This collection of four Grade 11's and one Grade 12 are putting together some sort of school film, with the Grade 12 fellow as the director. I gathered they don't have a name for the film yet.

But they walked over with their camera and tripod and microphone and invaded my bedroom and living room and his bedroom for some footage. They were OK with me taking some snaps.

The film seems to be all about a young guy who never cleans up his room and gets into constant trouble with his dad for that (hmmm...sounds a lot like real life).

In the end, though, as far as I can understand, he cleans up his room, gets back in his dad's good books, gets the scholarship he's been waiting for and gets all his privileges restored to him.

During their time here, I had to move to different parts of my apartment to get out of their way. Harumph.

I urged the crew to actually go into Evan's room and see what a mess it was.

They razzed him endlessly and while I'm not sure of this, I think my suggestion caused the director to incorporate that scene into the film.

What I also know is these young guys were laughing like crazy all the way through as they did take after take after seemingly endless take...

Until, finally, they left.

Evan is second from left below and his best friend, Jeremy, is on the far right, foreground. The tallest guy in the back and second from right is Colby, who I coached in basketball with Evan years ago.

It needs to be added that Evan -- who worked until 3 a.m. Saturday morning, started filming at about 9:30 that morning and had to work again last night -- slept in this morning and I just got a call from Jeremy asking where he was.

Doh. Some things never change.

The Easy-Off of Life

I HAVE SO NEGLECTED MY BLOG.

IT HAS BECOME MORE OF A BLUG (AS IN "UGH") THAN A BLOG.

FACEBOOK, AND OTHER THINGS, JUST SEEM TO HAVE TAKEN OVER, CONSUMING MY TIME, MY THOUGHTS, MY NEED OR WISH TO POST.

Or, honestly, getting to other blogs I like to visit.

So I'm trying a little catch-up here.

I was going to try to do a true Snippets from Spaceship Orion with, well, snippets of what's been going on. But not much has been as winter wears on into spring and nothing much changes.

I realize I've lost touch with some of you, and I lament that, but with some of you I'm actually more in touch through FB. I'm just seeing what fits best and, well, it is what it is.

I was thrilled, though, when Canada got BAMMED by Obama last week.

I thought he was charming during his visit. He doesn't deserve the crap he's getting from the Reflublicans who left him the mess he's in now.

I LOVED Bill Mahrer on Larry King Live last week.

I think he's the most brilliant human being on the planet right now and if the power-brokers actually listened to what he said, we'd all be better off.

The book I'm reading now, Rogue Economics by Loretta Napoleoni, is quite depressing, actually.

It's very complicated.

But basically it's all about how the fall of the Berlin Wall, globalization, free trade, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the internet has turned the planet into an economic free-for-all that is destroying us all.

But enough of all that.

I'm proud to say that while I received a shipment of Valentine's Day crapola that I could really make no use of because of my consistently stubborn single status, my son is a comparatively speaking Don Juan.

Here is a portion of the love-related package I received at work from some promotion company trying to trump the swimsuit edition of Maxim Magazine.

But in real life, I'm proud to say that my son did all the right things with the cute little squeeze he's quite serious about, buying her flowers and taking her out on the town, with good old dad as the chauffeur...

I know he doesn't look very happy in this pic, but they had a good time...

Here's the flowers he gave her, which I had to keep alive for three days...

Now, onto another topic, my annual stove-cleaning disaster.

Wouldn't it be great if we could just spray a product like Easy-Off on all the mistakes we had made in our lives, heat up the oven to 450 and wipe them clean?

Just rinse all of that crap out in a plastic pail and pour it down the toilet?

And end up with something that's more or less clean again, all the dirt from the past erased?

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY INDEED

CHARDON, Ohio - A woman has pleaded guilty to reckless homicide in Ohio for exercising her 73-year-old husband to death in a swimming pool.

Police in Middlefield, Ohio, said surveillance video showed 41-year-old Christine Newton-John pulling James Mason around the pool by his arms and legs and preventing him from leaving.

Mason had a heart attack June 2 after the extended swim session.

Newton-John pleaded guilty Thursday and faces up to five years in prison.

Police Chief Joseph Stehlik says Mason's death was investigated because of previous complaints that he was abused.

Mason was a longtime friend of his wife's family.

He knew her as John Vallandingham before she had gender reassignment surgery in 1993 and changed her name. They married in 2006.

Fire and Brimstone, Snow and Ice

DESPITE MY CATHOLIC UPBRINGING, I THINK I HAVE EVOLVED INTO BELIEVING IN ONLY A PASSIVE, OBSERVING GOD.

A GOD THAT IS NOT THE DRIVER, NOT THE NAVIGATOR, NOT EVEN THE MECHANIC, BUT ONLY A PASSENGER IN DISGUISE.

I do not believe in the Bible or anything that it says, especially the absurd interpretations of it by the Religious Right in recent years which have served to make it more of a comic book than a guide for life.

I do not believe in the church, because it's a frail, human concept that fills us with guilt, promises us salvation but only in return for believing in the unbelievable, and it has more charlatans than any other group.

But I DO believe in some sort of sentient being that created all of this or at least that is watching over it all and at times laughing at our idiocy or frowning upon it.

And I'm offering up the theory that this being is frowning upon us now and that it is demonstrating that through the only means it can, this entity it controls which we call Mother Nature.

As of this writing, more than 160 people have died as a result of wildfires in Australia. Now this is not a new phenomenon in the least, but its ferocity and the toll it has taken certainly aren't the norm.

Now you combine that with last week's freak snowfall in the UK, one which we in Canada might have been snickering at to some degree (aww, that's NUTHIN'!) but which shut down schools and paralysed the people.

(Well, some had fun with it)

Now, add one more freaky occurrence to the list (and I haven't even talked about hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, tsunamis or any of that sort of thing over the past year or two or three).

Overnight and today, in Winnipeg and other areas of southwestern Canada and the northern U.S., in what should be our coldest time of the year with average temps of -20C or whatever, it rained.

IT RAINED.

This isn't the UK or Vancouver or Victoria. It's the frickin' Prairies.

The forecast high for today was plus-3C. And it caused havoc all day. I could barely walk to my car today with slipping and sliding all over on my wonky knee.

The rain coated our streets with a layer of ice that shut down highways, schools, forced people to stay home from work -- basically similar to what last week's snowfall did in the UK.

To see a really cool (short) video done by my newspaper, go to http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid10497358001/bctid10520348001

Here are a few pix of people and vehicles slip-sliding all over the place, including into ditches.

So the world's in an economic crisis, the Middle East is a mess, Barack Obama's being shit on for everything he hasn't been able to do yet to fix George W. Bush's disaster and the planet, generally, is in a surly mood.

Do you think that maybe, just maybe, this thing people like to call God isn't exactly overjoyed with the situation either and maybe is showing us that by making it rain where it should be snowing and snowing where it should be raining?