This story concerns two characters on the show.  The first is Tom Tucker, the anchorman of the local TV station.  He’s a healthy-sized man with a mustache.  He’s on maybe two or three times in a season.  You might remember him from the episode where Meg gets an internship at the station and develops a crush on him. Or when he was dating Peter’s mother.  He’s also known for verbal sparring with his co-anchor Diane.  The other character is the doctor on the show.  I forget his name, but he’s kind of a bad doctor.  He’s a heavy-set man (though not as heavy as Peter) with a mustache.

So, the first episode of this current season is a murder mystery that takes place at James Woods’ house.  All of the regular characters are there and many of the part-time characters also make appearances.

The beginning of the episode shows the characters arriving at James Woods’ house for a dinner party.  A heavy-set man with a mustache gets out of his car and walks to the front door.  As I watched that, I said “Boy, Tom Tucker sure put on some weight, huh?”

I said that out loud.

I was alone.

I was watching a cartoon.

I realized later that the man I saw was the doctor, not Tom Tucker.

It wasn’t until a few hours later that I realized how silly my statement was.

But, back to German 101.  The textbook we used would introduce vocabulary and grammar through dialogues between Maria and Gunter.  Maria und Gunter would talk about all sorts of things, but pretty much all of the dialogues involved Gunter asking Maria a question and Maria answering in such a way as to make Gunter feel bad.  When we were learning about locations, Gunter would ask Maria to the movies or to the library and Maria would always say “No.”  Maria always had a flimsy reason for turning him down, or no reason at all- she would just say “No.”  Or “Nein.”  When Gunter wanted information about something, Maria would speak to him in a condescending way and treat him like he was an idiot.

At first, I would laugh at Gunter’s misfortune.  Probably the German in me.  At the end of the dialogue, when Gunter got the inevitable rebuff, I would say “Oh, Gunter, rejected again!”  As the semester wore on, I started to feel sorry for Gunter whenever we started a new section of the textbook.  I would wish that Gunter would finally get the hint and maybe start talking to Heidi.  Come on, Gunter, Maria is so cold hearted!  But he never learned.  What did the textbook authors have against poor Gunter?

Once the semester was over, I got over the whole Gunter thing.  But I always remembered about Gunter. Nowadays, whenever someone does something  foolish, is publicly rejected or always seems to miss the point entirely, I call them a Gunter.  No one knows what I am talking about.

Anyway, since my netbook is slower than I like, I tend to drag the Arkham file onto my desktop to do whatever edits I want, then copy the file back to the thumb drive when I’m done.

On Sunday, I used a different computer (a faster one) where I didn’t need to copy the file, but apparently I did copy the file, but failed to copy it back.  I learned this today when I tried to work on my outline- I discovered that none of the work I did on Sunday (arranging the parts in a chronological order and removing anything that didn’t belong) was on the thumb drive.

So, I had to re-do it.  Bummer.

Now it’s done (again) and I have added most of the rest of the outline (scenes I think should be added to what I have).

My next entry for the Arkham Project will deal with the opening of the story.

Instead of watching Leno or Letterman, you should check out Chelsea Lately of the E channel, which is a half hour show that mostly focuses on celebrity gossip.  It is often very funny.  I think a half hour is enough for any talk show.

At 12:00 or 12:05, there is Jimmy Kimmel.  I never really liked him when he was on the Man Show, and I never really checked out his show.  The first show I watched, happened to be the one where he dressed up as Jay Leno and did a great imitation of him (not the voice so much, but he had the mannerisms down exceptionally well.  I watched another couple of shows in the following week and I’ve found that he’s a really good interviewer.

As for 12:35-1:35, I can’t decide between Craig Ferguson and Jimmy Fallon.  Both are very funny.  Craig Ferguson’s show is unusual- he employs a lot of close up shots of himself while he does his monologue and doesn’t have a house band (which is actually refreshing).  I watched one of Craig’s anniversary episodes, where Craig did the whole show as a puppet.  He also frequently features Aquaman, which is interesting.  He’s sometimes a little hard to understand, but he’s gotten to be a pretty good interviewer.  Jimmy Fallon is more traditional, though he does a lot game show type skits which is cool.  He also has the Roots as his house band, which is interesting.  In an episode last week, Jimmy played a game with the audience where he took information from the audience and had the Roots write a song instantly using that information.  While not necessarily funny, it was cool to see the Roots do that.

So, even though each of the “Big Three” have been in the news lately, we shouldn’t ignore the rest of the landscape, which is actually pretty good.

I have completed Phase One of the Arkham Project.  I can’t believe that it has taken me a couple of years to finally transcribe the stuff that I wrote in my notebook while on business trips.  For this, I have been using Open Office’s word processor on a semi-new Dell Netbook.  I am using Open Office because it is free and similar enough to Word that I don’t really have to learn anything to use it.  My Netbook came with Microsoft Works, which allows you to save a document in word format (for use on other computers) but does not allow you to open a Word document in Microsoft Works.  Quite the annoying conundrum.  Thanks Microsoft…

Phase One involved not only typing pages and pages of notebook scribblings (which sadly, does not translate to a lot of typed pages), but also putting the various sections and scenes in some kind of narrative order.  When I am writing in my notebook, I tend to just write whatever pops into my head, regardless of how it fits into the overall story.  In fact, after completing the ordering exercise, there are two sections that do not necessarily fit into the overall story.  So I may delete them altogether or use them for something else.

Phase Two, which I will start this week, involves figuring out which sections/scenes still need to be written.  In other words, I need to complete the outline.  I don’t think this will be a particularly long story, but there are a few different plot lines and I have to make sure there are enough scenes for each plot line in order to make the overall story make sense.

As I mentioned, this is an Elseworlds Batman story.  Elseworlds is sort of a “catch-all” term used to describe stories of comic book heroes that diverge from the accepted continuity.  A good example of an Elseworlds story is the graphic novel called “Red Son,” which is about what would have happened if Superman crash landed in the Soviet Union instead of the United States.  There have also been a few Batman-themed Elseworlds stories where the World’s Greatest Detective took on Dracula and crossed over to the Danger Girl universe (a sort of female version of James Bond published by Cliffhanger Comics).  My story includes a number of existing characters from the Batman Universe and a couple of my invention, including a new villain.

When I started this blog, I wanted to have a place where I could document my trip to Japan.  Those of you who saw my first post, about podcasts, may doubt this.  But, the original idea was about the trip to Japan.  I had expected to write some entries in the days leading up to the trip, but as you can tell, that didn’t happen.  Regardless, upon returning to the US, I made good on the original plan for the blog and posted information and pictures from my trip.

It’s been a few months since my trip ended and I’ve been a bit directionless with respect to blog posts.  Until now.  I recently experienced a bit of set back in my job hunt (I was laid off back in July) which had made me re-evaluate some things.  This is the result of that re-evaluation.

I am now embarking on a new project, which I am calling the Arkham Project.  The goal of this project is to write a story called “Escape From Arkham.”  This is an “elseworlds” Batman story.  I’m not sure if this will ultimately be a comic book, animated film or a novel.  Part of the project will be to determine that.  I’ve had the idea for this story for a long time and I have hand-written a few parts already.  I think it’s time that I concentrated more on completing the story and figuring out what to do with it.

The blog entries from this point forward will deal with my process while creating this story.  I may include a few excerpts from the story, but the point of the blog is to reveal how I write the story.  Hopefully at the end of this, I will have refined my process and be better able to get the ideas in my head onto the page.

Back in 2001, I was diagnosed with cancer.  The treatment was pretty standard (chemotherapy and surgery only).  My outlook was not the best; I was in Stage 2 of 3.  I volunteered to be part of a clinical trial that included a more aggressive form of chemotherapy.  This more aggressive chemo required me to stay in the hospital for the duration of the treatment- for me, that was about a month (3 days for treatment, the rest of the month for recovery).  It was during the first of two of these more aggressive forms of chemo that our story takes place.

I suffered a few side effects from the chemo.  I lost all my hair, I got even more pale than I was, and I lost a bit of weight.  But, no side effect was more severe than nausea.  I usually felt better after throwing up, but I never liked the feeling of being nauseous, but then again, who does?

For the first two basic rounds, I was given a drug to combat the nausea, but it never worked.  The nausea wasn’t that severe, but the drugs had no effect.  For the high dose round, I expected the nausea to be worse, and after a couple hours into the first day, I felt very bad.

Prior to administering the high dose chemotherapy, the nurses gave me a drug called Ativan.  Ativan was originally designed to be an anti-anxiety medicine, but the hospital found that it also helped with the nausea symptoms of chemotherapy.  Since the nausea feeling was so much worse this time, I figured it was worth a try.

The night I took Ativan for the first time, I weird and horrible dreams.  I can’t really describe them anymore, but a few years later I listened to the first album by The Mars Volta, “Deloused in the Comatorium,” the lyrics and music of which were very reminiscent of these dreams.  Every time I listen to that album, (the sound is a mix between Tool and Santana), I remember my time in the hospital getting chemotherapy.

The next morning, I was out of it.  I couldn’t concentrate or really do anything.  I just sort of sat in bed.  I couldn’t read, watch TV or listen to music.  And, worst of all, the nausea was still there.  So, I was out of it, and I was nauseous.

Towards the end of the day, they administered the second chemo treatment and they gave me the Ativan again.  That night, I had more bizarre and unpleasant dreams.

The next morning, I didn’t wake up until the doctors were making their rounds.  There was a group of five doctors who came to see me that morning.  I was completely out of it, so I just nodded at their questions.

I barely looked at the doctors at first.  Then, one of them caught my eye.  He didn’t have a mouth; he had a beak.  An honest to God beak.  My eyes bugged out and then I quickly looked away- I didn’t want to stare.  I would sneak some looks at him during the rest of the time the doctors were checking on me.

After the doctors left, I sat up and thought “wow, people have beaks now.”  I was thinking about telling the nurse who brought me breakfast about what I saw, but her cheerful “Happy Halloween” let me know that the doctor was probably just wearing a mask.

The next day the same doctor came back and he had a normal nose and mouth; the beak was nowhere to be found.

Shia Labeouf – he so bad in everything that  he ruins movies he sees.

Transformers 2 – I thought the action was pretty good.  I like explosions.  But everything else (the dialog, the characters, the plot) seemed like it was written by a slow 13 year old.

Moulin Rouge (the Baz Luhrmann version) – a movie that teaches you to hate movies.

When I was 12, I had one year left of sunday school.  If you read my last post, you know that I decided that the whole religion thing wasn’t for me at a very young age.  So, when it came to sunday school or church, I was just going through the motions, biding my time until confirmation.

Since my “class” only had two people- me and a girl (there was occasionally a third, but that boy or girl would only come once every couple of months)- we were absorbed into another class, of people a year younger than us.  It may have made more sense to put us with the year ahead of us, but they were supposed to be getting more hard-core religious instruction in preparation for confirmation.  So Terra (that’s the girl’s name) and I found ourselves in two hells- one, we were with 11 year olds (stupid sixth graders) and two, we had the meanest teacher in all of Sunday School.

On the first or second Sunday of the sunday school year, our teacher decided to have us do some role-playing to get a better idea of what that Jesus guy was talking about.  As ideas go, it wasn’t terrible.  We were all given different characters that we were supposed to play each week.  It’s important to note that the characters we were playing were all at least in our thirties, living in Jesus-times.

Before we embarked on our role playing journey, our teacher asked us to come up with a name for our group.  An early choice was “The Amen Kids.”  I think it may have been the only choice.

I raised an objection- as a name, the Amen Kids wasn’t bad, but our characters were not kids (maybe to Methusala (sp?)), so Amen Kids didn’t seem appropriate.  In counter to my objection, the teacher and some of the students said “well, the Beach Boys aren’t exactly boys, anymore,” to which I countered, “sure, but they were boys when they came up with the name.  Our characters are already grown up.”

Though my argument was impenetrable, I was nevertheless overruled, and our group was called the Amen Kids.  I spent the rest of the class thinking “just one more year.”

I should also point out that that first class ended up being the last class that we did any type of role playing during.

I was pretty young when I decided that religion wasn’t for me (sometime between the ages of six and eight).  It was while I was at vacation bible school, which was a summer day camp run by the church we went to.  It lasted for one or two weeks; I don’t even think that it was a full day- it may have been just the morning or just the afternoon.  I don’t remember too much in the way of religious instruction.  They mainly just left everyone in a school gym to run around.

One day, the counselors decided to round up all the younger kids to watch a movie.  They wouldn’t tell me which movie, so I didn’t want to go.  They said it was a “surprise” and that we’d love it.  I was very resistant to this for some reason.  In fact, I was the only one who really protested.  One of the counselors then pulled me aside and told me that we were going to watch a sneak preview of the upcoming Superman movie.  I didn’t know they had even made a new Superman movie (Superman IV), but since I liked Superman III a lot, I was excited about it.  So, I followed the other kids.

Well, the Superman IV preview was a total lie.  We did watch a movie, but it was about Jesus.  The movie was crushingly boring.  Not a superhero around anywhere.  Not even Aquaman who, while the dumbest of the superheroes, still would have been more enjoyable to a 6-8 year old.

Even though ultimately Superman IV was a horrible movie, it was still a real dirty trick to play on a kid.

And that’s why I’m not religious.