The further adventures of an earthbound alien

I have been assimilated. I am now Borg!

The orientation went well. It took about six hours, one hour just to list all of the divisions and companies associated with this company. Boy, are these guys well fixed.
The show looks pretty good. There are a lot of good people working on it and I have good feeling about this one.
I’ll tell all what it’s called and when it will air closer to the premier date. For now, trust me when I say I’m pooped! I might just go to bed early.

I finally got the phone to download pictures. So here’s what you missed.
Somewhere in Utah Tony and I got it into our heads that it was rock star, album cover posin’ time. There is Tony’s tribute to U2.
And this is my tribute to the Doors movie.
I feel it’s nice to write messages on rocks and leave them in remote locations. I know how much I’d love to find something like this.

Eventually, after Vegas we arrived in Burbank. I was given the apartment tour and was so overwhelmed by the place I couldn’t help myself. The first thing I did in my new apartment was what people with food poisoning do, as Tony and the apartment manager waited in the hall.

Saturday night I was reunited with some friends at the Rough Draft (an animation studio) Halloween party. It’s hard to spot old friends after six years of being absent, now add the costume element and you’ll know just how confusing the night was for me.
The wig in the back is me. (Just incase you couldn’t put it together) My friends Adriana (conchita Ringa-ding), Russ (Zorro) and the original Ferb (from the "Anything but OK corral") ham it up with me as my pal Patty snaps the picture. (incase you were wondering she was dressed as a witch)
Tomorrow is the big day, my first day at Disney. I’m very excited. I should go to bed so that I’ll be fresh, let’s see its 6 PM now… That would give me 13 hours of sleep, that should do it!

Sorry we didn't stop, Lucky Star. We lost the car in Kansas. But we found a new one. I had to wrassel a couple of local country boys but we were back on the road in no time.Tony held my coat.

Friday 2:30 am
Well here we are in Vegas. Garmin took us to the Casino and we wanted the hotel. What’s the diff? …you ask. Just having to put all our shit back in the car, another roundabout drive, back out to the strip and around a rather large hotel while Garmin digitally laughed at us and plotted our eventual overthrow.
After a little rest and Tony and I hit the casino floor. (the carpet was loose)
My main goal is to sit at a game long enough to get a free drink or two. Unfortunately, I not the best gambler in the world, so those drinks tend to run me about $30 each. I felt like I was back in Singapore!!
Then I hit 4 aces and made 60 bucks on a very old bonus poker machine and I felt like a millionaire. HA! Take that Vegas!! You and your $30 beers!

That’s where my luck ended. Later in the day I decided to try out this new game called food poisoning. Proving the old slogan, what comes up in Vegas stays in Vegas.
I’m not sure how Tony did but he was smiling when he came back to the room with a lobster dinner and a pair of new three-stone chandelier diamond earrings dangling from his nose. ...And no food poisening, the show off!

I’m not sure if I was delusional, but I think he may have also won a giraffe.

After about 8 hours of enjoying the sights and smells of one of Vegas’ most wonderful toilets, I seem to be feeling better. (Currently it’s 2:30am) Tomorrow’s drive to Burbank is only about 5 hours. I should be all right.
Needless to say Tony will driving (if we can make room for Mr. Necky and his earrings) I can use that time to figure out why my new picture taking phone refuses to bluetooth with my laptop…

…GARMIN!!!!

Howdy!

It’s hard for Garmin to screw us up when all we have to do is take the 70 to the 15. From St. Louis, MO to Cove Fort Utah all we have to do is go west. Piece of cake. Garmin get her big thrill when we pull off to eat. “Get back on the road”, she says. “This is no time to stop! We must get as far from St Louis as soon as possible.”
It really pissed her off when we stopped at Prairie dog Town, to look at the freaks of the plains exhibit.
Behold the snake pit. Filled with over two hundred deadly rattlers. The guy at the counter was thrilled to tell us that a litter of baby snakes had just been born. This is the guy with Tony pulling the adults away to see the babies. Turns out there was only two babies and they were flattened by the adults.

Here are some of the other things we saw:
Two headed calf (dead and stuffed)
The world famous Jackalope (stuffed)
The six-legged cow (Just fed and still alive)
Steak, beans and rice (I was stuffed)
And, of course, the worlds biggest Prairie dog (and young, apparently) That’s me in the middle.
The thrills didn't end there. There were other animals running all over the place but since they had the right number of appendages, I'll skip over them.
After the thrilling sights and smell of the prairie we headed to Denver and the great Rocky mountains.

Typical Michigan farewell:Day2 1pm SDT: Our cross-country odyssey finds Tony and I dining at a north St Louis Steak and Shake. What happened to Memphis, You ask. Ask our on-board GPS guide Miss Garmin. She’s the one who suggested the shortest route to Las Vegas was through Oregon, the bitch! (By the way Garmin is an 800-dollar GPS device, and one screwed up electronic dame.) First stop, super 8 motel, Bloomington IN (last night) she steers us toward Kansas then forgets all about the hotel. We end up driving all over Bloomington trying to decipher what we can see from the freeway and what Garmin is telling us. Finally, we decide to pull the power supply and squelch the bitch. And what do you know, we found a pretty nice Irish pub close to ISU campus. Tony did shots with a guy who owns a place in Peoria who was waiting for his girlfriend to arrive on the train. I watch in envy because I have no idea where we really are. It’s not the cops that make me cautious it’s the thought of what Garmin would pull on someone who didn’t have his wits about him. Who knows where we’d end up. Meanwhile the Tigers slowly roll over the KC Cards while Tony cheers them on, at increasing volumes. Every single person in the bar was not cheering for the Tigers. Ironically, they were cheering for the team that calls the place home that is roughly 70 miles from Bloomington. We were outnumbered but manage to escape without incident. As do the Tigers.
This morning we started simple, I asked Garmin to tell us how to get to Denver and she takes the strangest route, through Peoria, onto a road that came to a dead end at the Missouri border. It was pretty obvious that she was avoiding St Louis. My guess is that she has a thing about St Louis. Maybe she had an unhappy affair with a pocket calculator, twice her age, in St Louis. Tony just thinks she hates us.
8pm SDT
I think we have Garmin figured out. We only tell here where we plan to have our next meal. I think she’s mad at us. I don’t trust her. I’m not shre, but I think she was talking shit about us to the PSP while we were at dinner. Just a few minutes ago, while trying to navigate the “Liberty City Stories” on the can, I felt something was wrong. The PSP hesitated at a particularly desperate moment. I’m hoping it was my imagination.


Tony enjoys a very famous Barbeque in Kansas City. Do I remember what the joit was called? NO!

OK so a guy needs to Fed-X a DVD to me from Singapore. He sent it yesterday (October 19, to my new Burbank address). (Singapore time is 12 hours ahead of Detroit time, 15 hours ahead of LA) Fed-X promises three days transit time from SE Asia (usually it’s 5). My pal Tony and I get in a car on the 21st and drive for 50 hours from TC (Detroit time) to Burbank (LA time). We average 8 – 10 hours per day, driving time. Subtract two meal stops per day (roughly 1 hour each) include late starts (roughly 1 -3 hours) and fuel breaks (usually one every 8 hours). Add to this equation a short stay in Vegas (to do what ever it is people do in Vegas).
Now here’s the question: Will I arrive at my new address before the package?
Right, the answer is no because I can’t move into the place before the 27th. I know I left that out because I forgot.
Of course, the real question is, what happens to the package? Guesses anyone? This is where being a cynic really pays off. If you expect little of people then you can find comfort in usually being right. And if someone comes through for you without your guidance, you find yourself pleasantly surprised.
Uh oh, it looks like winter's coming!

OK here’s the next question. Which route to take? There are three basic ways to cross the country: the northern route, the central route and the southern route. The main difference between the three is that the southern route is pronounced “the southern root”. I actually toyed with the idea of taking a car ferry across Lake Michigan. That would put us in Milwaukee in about 4.5 hours. That’s a pretty good jump on the old trip. But, from there, all roads lead to Denver.
The northern and the central both go through Denver and the Rocky Mountains. This could be a problem given the time of year. If you don’t understand, refer to the wikipedia entry regarding the Donner party. (I like Tony, But I don’t want to resort to eating him. His wife would kill me.)

That leaves the southern root. The problem there, besides Texas in general, is that it gets a little dull out there in the desert. I personally love the desert. There, that’s something a lot of people don’t know about me. I love it out there. Especially when you’re out there by yourself. (…because the people who live out there are a little scary and you want to avoid them. Mostly, they’re out there for a reason and it’s best not to ask them why.) The problem with the desert, like I said, is that it’s a little dull to drive through. (That and the garbage never breaks-down.) But, I won’t be out there driving alone. Tony can drive too. He’s also a stunning conversationalist, and if that doesn’t hold up he’s also coming armed with a maxed out i-pod.
I figure it’s about 25 hours from Memphis to Las Vegas, and the average I pod holds about eleventyseven million hours of stuff. We should be OK.

Usually, it’s good to have some sort of a vague plan in mind like, having a beer in every state. Or finding something that is the biggest in that state, like the 500-pound prairie dog, the largest petrified tree stump or the largest nuclear waste dump. ( ...note to self: recharge dosimeter)

Tony suggested we look for barbeque. That route would be TC, MI to Wilmington, NC, to Memphis, TN, to Kansas city, KA, to El Paso, TX. A bit of a twisted rout, but eventually it does head west. I plotted that rout and I figure that will put us into Burbank roughly about the same time I’ll be fired from Disney for not showing up.

I suggested that we take the same route that “Frankenstein” and his navigator “Annie Smith” took in “Death race 2000”. But, I don’t think we’ll have time for that either. …Even it we don’t slow down to run over fans.

I guess we’ll just have to see!

I know I wasn’t going to use this blog as a political forum, but I have to break with that for this entry. But there’s a proposal on the Michigan ballot that I feel needs to be examined. …My apologies in advance.

As I paroozed my absentee ballot for the state of Michigan I was drawn to one of the proposals. I don’t know if anyone knows it but there’s a heated debate raging in our state.

I’m talking about Proposal 06-3. This is a referendum that would allow the hunting of mourning doves.
The debate also rages within me. I think hunters should be able to shoot animals. If they can’t, they wouldn’t really be hunters, now would they? They’d be forced to wear their goofy-ass, camouflage jump suits for nothing. A lack of hunters could have a serious effect Michigan’s alcohol, gambling and stripping related businesses. In atrium county alone the effect could be devastating. Plus they’d look foolish all out there in the woods, shooting at nothing. They’d be just a bunch of wet guys with nothing to kill.

The state would profit from the hunting of Mourning Doves because they would put a $2 stamp on existing bird hunting licenses. This would give more money back to the Michigan DNR. They could use the money to print up more stamps. The DNR thinks that new hunters will be drawn to the sport because there are a lot of Mourning Doves. Other game birds are pretty scarce in Michigan because… well because hunters have killed most of them.
With every stamp you buy, the DNR will include a booklet that will have tips about management and propagation of the species. This booklet will be so effective and full of information that hunters all over Michigan will take steps to manage and propagate the species, so that there should be some doves left to kill next year.
So there’s that.

On the other hand, there is the sad little morning dove. The morning dove was voted Michigan’s official “state bird of peace” in 1989, and they’re pretty. That’s pretty much all they have going for them, the fuckers! They’re mostly just feathers and some tiny bones. There isn’t enough meat on them to round up a cup of bouillon. Even Kate Moss’s “Chicken in a thimble” cook book doesn’t include any dove recipes! And you can’t really mount doves because they usually explode when you shoot them.
And there’s that!
My personal dilemma is this, what do you do with them after you’ve killed them?

I feel proposal 06-3 should suggest what people should do with these shattered dove fragments once the hunters have finished with them.

I suppose if every hunter carries a pillowcase and picked up all the feathers, the Michigan pillow manufacturers might profit. And hey! That supports the local economy, right.

The feathers could also be molded back into the shape of a bird and used as a decoy that would attract other doves that could also be shot. They might even excite the doves into the act of propagation, and that would be OK with the DNR!.

The tiny bugs and scavengers of the forest would profit from the small chunks of dove meat they find scattered around and imbedded in tree trunks. Those are nature too, right?
So, I guess we should all vote yes on this proposal. After all what’s more important a small bird that doesn’t really have any meat on it or the strippers of Atrium county?

Coming to DVD this fall. The director's cut.