Addenda

Some stuff I didn't mention in other entries but feel I should.

There were a couple of things that happened over the past couple of days that I keep thinking, "Hey, I didn't include that," but I don't want to forget it, so I'm including it now. (This is, after all, my journal.)

• Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel: Ganz mentioned that one of the thing that separates the good TV from the bad (and he was primarily referring to sitcoms, because that's what he knows best) is that the performers come out every week and they want to "kick your ass." Meaning, make the audience love whatever it is they're doing. (BTW, he was embarrassed and blushed whenever he said that, maybe because his son was there.) Whatever you thought of Laverne and Shirley as high art, Penny and Cindy came out every week and gave it one hundred percent. Every week, the guys on Frasier are going to make you laugh if it kills them. They don't take anything for granted, and if the material stinks they work that much harder.
  

  He also said that when he wrote for sitcoms, he really cared about those characters. He cared what they did and how it turned out, and he couldn't have done it if he looked down on it or thought it was trivial. I found myself thinking, "He cared about those characters?" but then I thought about it -- I care about the characters on the shows I watch, the one hour dramas, and I can understand that mentality. I don't care for characters on sitcoms, but I'm sure there are people out there who wonder how I can care about what happens to Scully and Mulder.

• Setting up my bedroom furniture: When it came time to put the mattress on the bed, Fernando asked me, "Do you want to flip the mattress? You're supposed to do it once a month, but Nancy and I don't flip it that often." I said, Sure, let's turn it over. However, I'm very concerned about this mattress-flipping ritual: I don't think Darin and I have flipped our mattress once in four and a half years. Yeesh. Anybody know how to say "flip the mattress" in Spanish so we can ask the housecleaning team to do it?

• How large is LA? Dept.: I had to drive by LAX this weekend to drop a friend off. I passed a freeway sign that said "LA International Airport - Next 5 Exits." There are some cities that don't have 5 exits off the freeway. This is apropos of nothing.

• The current heat wave: I had to call my apartment manager this morning to get someone in here to fix my air conditioning, which isn't keeping me cool enough in this heat. I heard on the radio today that Cleveland is getting snowed in. Permit me to laugh.
  

  However, the air is so dry right now -- the weather lends new meaning to the term "dry heat" -- that on Saturday I scratched my calf. And scratched and scratched because it itched so much. Until I scratched right through the skin. Ooops. I'm wearing lots of lotion now, and I have to go buy a thick, greasy moisturizer for my hair, which is dry and brittle.

• What a factoid is: I know that CNN has little factoids that they put on screen during commercial breaks, but that's not my definition of factoid. I define factoid to be a miniscule, completely irrelevant piece of information. Darin defines factoid to be a piece of information which has an indeterminable truth value -- it may or may not be true, and whether it's true or not does not affect the fun of knowing that bit of info.
  

  Which one of these people is a computer science genius?