february 2005
A fresh start
Ah, a new banner and colour scheme for the start of my three months in Canada. I’ll arrive there this coming Tuesday, the first day of March.
I’m sad to leave San Diego, but I’m trying to see the positive in all the opportunities coming my way. The chance to explore a new city, and to immerse myself in a different culture. The chance to get outdoors in a different type of landscape: rivers, lakes, expanses of lush parkland. The chance to work on myself: build my web portfolio, plan my job search, go to a couple of conferences and network with people. And the chance to meet new friends.
Posting will be a trifle sporadic until I’m established in Vancouver. See you then.
25 february 2005 ~ 12:48 
It's all in the game
So, The Price Is Right was pretty much as I expected: tacky yet fun. Definitely worth going, just for the totally surreal experience of actually being on that set and seeing Bob Barker in the flesh.
Our group got in by the skin of our teeth. The studio holds 325 audience members, and my ticket number was 315:
A lot of people behind us didn’t get in, so they had stood for hours in the rain for nothing. Even the waiting wasn’t bad, though; it was pretty interesting to see how seriously a lot of the audience members take the show. There were more than a few painstakingly sequinned blouses and hand-printed t-shirts proclaiming “I LOVE BOB BARKER” and other declarations of affection. We also got interviewed by a “funny” man and the show’s producer, but by the time we got there they had already picked all the contestants; the producer didn’t even look up from his notepad.
Anyway, I got my name tag, and had to run to the studio itself, as the taping was already starting by the time our group had been processed.
The best way I can describe entering the studio (after running up a flight of stairs and bursting through a curtain) is that it was like the scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where the children and their parents enter the Chocolate Room for the first time. Just a total sense of wonderment. It was crazy: bright lights, dazzling colours, people dancing on that set, and over 300 people jumping up and down, screaming at the top of their lungs. It was so bizarre that I just stood there, frozen, before realizing I had to find my seat, which was at the front, next to Robbie.
A few observations about the show:
- The set is tiny. It looks so much bigger on TV, but in reality it’s like a small theatre stage. The audience looks much larger on TV as well.
- The set is also really cheap-looking. Close up, it looks like so much cardboard and painted plywood. The cameras really iron out a lot of the wrinkles.
- The show is taped in real time. Each hour-long show is recorded in exactly one hour. They even overlay the credits and captions on the screen as it is being recorded, which surprised me. During what will be the commercial breaks, Bob Barker chats with the audience.
- When you’re in the audience, you can hardly hear anything that happens on stage. Not only is the audience shouting and screaming, but the crew also keep the monitor volume down so that it doesn’t feed back through the audience microphones.
- The contestants seem just as excited whether they win or not. After playing their games, they left the stage and sat in the seats right in front of me. They all seemed ecstatic, even those who had lost their games.
- Bob Barker is really old and small, but he’s still quick-witted and very entertaining.
- What you don’t see on TV is that the stage is constantly full of people, behind the cameras: stagehands, producers, people telling the audience to applaud or stand, and people just standing there drinking coffee. At times there were so many people that you couldn’t see Bob Barker or the contestants at all.
Obviously, I wasn’t picked as a contestant, which was really rather a relief. I played the games in my head, and I wouldn’t have won any of them. Well, I would have won the jacuzzi, but that wouldn’t be much use to me at the moment.
The show airs March 10th on CBS, but I don’t think I’ll be visible because of where my seat was, right against the wall at the front on the right, where the camera never seemed to pan, unless I missed it. Still, keep an eye out for me if you watch it, and let me know if you see me!
24 february 2005 ~ 09:23
Culture shock
Having people to stay always means sacrificing what you really want to do in order to accommodate the wishes of your guests. However, the last few days have been a real eye-opener.
I’ve been shopping at Wal-Mart (alien and frankly depressing territory for me), watching NASCAR, “dining” at all-you-can-eat buffets, and enduring children running around the house breaking things, then trapping their fingers in doors and screaming. Oh, and being around smokers, which is something you rarely encounter in California these days. You know someone is visiting from out of town when you see him start to light up a cigarette in a restaurant, only to have it practically lassoed from his hand by a glaring waitress.
Really, though, there would have been no better way for me to end my time living in the US than to step out of my hermetically-sealed home life and jump in at the deep end of mass-culture American living in this way. And to put three inches of sickly sweet neon-pink icing on the cake, tomorrow I am going to a taping of The Price Is Right at CBS Studios in Los Angeles.
It would be funnier if I didn’t have to get up at 2:30 in the morning in order to get to the “audience containment area” (which makes us sound like cattle) by six, stopping to pick up some other people on the way.
Still, it should be a massively entertaining experience, and a fitting end to my stay in this country that in my last week here I should get to experience first-hand what is perhaps the pinnacle of unashamedly consumerist, ruthlessly sponsored, money-grabbing televisual entertainment. And if I’m especially lucky, maybe I’ll actually be selected to “Come on down!”, and win a walnut-veneered entertainment centre or a double-wide trailer with 9-volt electricity.
Fingers crossed!
20 february 2005 ~ 20:51
Busy bee
The last week has gone by in a bit of a blur. We have guests from out of town who aren’t renting a car, and Robbie is at work all day, so it’s like a full-time job keeping them entertained, fed, and laundered. The rain is supposed to return with a vengeance today, so I’ve no idea what we’ll do indoors.
I finally secured an apartment in Vancouver. I don’t think I’ve ever received so much email as I have over the last couple of weeks while trying to sort that out, answering dozens of classified ads in search of a place that:
- is in or near downtown Vancouver;
- is furnished (I don’t want to have to buy a bed for three months’ use);
- isn’t extremely expensive;
- has high-speed Internet access; and
- has a roommate who seems decent and easy-going.
I tell you, you have to plough through a lot of crap to find the gold. In the end, however, I found a great place one block from the beach and one block from Stanley Park, in Vancouver’s West End, for less rent than I’m paying in suburban San Diego. Crazy.
I’ve bought all new luggage, and have been frantically sorting through papers and throwing out junk in an attempt to reduce my personal effects to a quantity suitable for transport. I’ll have to leave a few things in San Diego and pick them up on my way back to Europe later in the year, but everything I need I’ll be able to take with me to Canada. My needs are quite basic, really.
There are so many things to think of when you move: cancelling local memberships, changing the address you have registered with dozens of institutions, and so on. When you move to a different country, there’s even more to do: closing bank accounts, transferring automatic debits to accounts in other countries, shifting money around to take advantage of advantageous exchange rates...
I think I’m going to be busy right up until the day I leave.
18 february 2005 ~ 09:38
Sick bowl
From Yahoo! this morning:
Well, I hope they rinsed it out afterwards.
In all seriousness, I actually watched some of this year’s Super Bowl, for the first time ever. It seems that Brits are to American football as Americans are to cricket: not many of us have a clue what the hell the other country’s game is about. I attempted to understand Sunday’s game through a process of reverse engineering, watching what was happening on the field and trying to figure out what the underlying rules governing these events might be. I came away none the wiser. Honestly, I had absolutely no clue what was going on.
Other non-Americans I’ve talked to about the game have all had the same confusion about the constant stopping of the clock and standing around; why it’s called football, when the ball is rarely touched by feet; and why the players wear so much protective clothing when players of rugby and Australian football - equally, or possibly more, violent games - don’t see any need for it. Seems kinda gay, really.
Oops. Bring on the hate mail!
9 february 2005 ~ 21:03
Reading list
I’ve reorganized the “good reads” links in the menu here, and added two great new finds:
- The title of He Looks Like... The Morbid Game of Psychoanalyzing Strangers in Pictures describes the blog pretty succinctly. Suffice it to say, it’s one of the funniest sites I’ve ever read, and it’s up for a Bloggies award, for what that’s worth.
- Waiter Rant is the blog of an anonymous waiter in New York City. It’s packed with hilarious anecdotes, with an emphasis on tales of appallingly rude and mean customers who dine at the bistro where the author waits tables. Great stuff.
In addition, I’ve added more blogs to the goto links section. Explore and enjoy.
Currently buttering my biscuits:
- Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty - beautifully written but ultimately quite depressing novel about love, money, class, and beauty, set in 1980s London.
- The Rough Guide to Vancouver - helping me get acquainted with the city before I arrive.
- Cardigans, Long Gone Before Daylight - Americana by Swedes. Thanks for the hat tip, John!
- Chemical Brothers, Push the Button - just got this from iTMS, and I like what I hear so far.
- Various Artists, Flip the Switch - unofficial remix album of the Chemical Brothers' Push the Button album, released on the web the very same day. Pretty darn good.
- Picasa 2 - amazing free photo organization and editing software from Google. Free! Lots of cool features, including easy generation of screensavers, slideshows, web pages, and contact sheets, and integration with popular blogging systems. Did I mention it’s free?
5 february 2005 ~ 12:22
Space Family Robinson
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been ploughing my way through the DVD box set of Lost In Space - The Complete First Season, which contains all 29 one-hour episodes from the 1965-1966 inaugural series. I grew up on this stuff: the UK’s Channel 4 used to show it on Sunday afternoons, and I made all my boarding school chums sit through it on the proviso that they could watch the football afterwards.
For the uninitiated - and it still amazes me to find Americans my age who don’t know and love this show - Lost In Space is the story of the Robinson family, whose voyage to Alpha Centauri in the “future” of 1997 goes awry when their ship crashes on a hostile, desolate planet, where they face and defeat one impending catastrophe after another. This massively popular show, with its traditional weekly “cliffhanger” format, predated Star Trek, and eventually went head to head with it in the ratings. It was really the first show of its kind, and went all out with its fantastic set and costume design and unprecedented special effects (the pilot, for example, was the most expensive ever filmed at that time).
While exciting enough, the show as described above needed something more, and before the show went into production, the networks demanded an antagonist, who arrived in the form of the evil, scheming Doctor Zachary Smith.
Words cannot describe how wonderful this character is. The archetypal screen villain, he lies, cheats, flatters, and connives his way from episode to episode, endangering everyone else in the service of his own selfish interests. Lost In Space is Doctor Smith’s show more than anyone else’s, and in later seasons it is reported that the rest of the cast were upset at his dominance of the show. Nevertheless, he made the show what it was, and whatever they were paying him could never have been enough.
Another element added after the pilot was the Robot, designed by the same team that built Robby the Robot for the classic 1956 film Forbidden Planet. Interestingly, the Robot delivers some of the most wickedly sarcastic and pithy lines in the show, getting ever bolder as the series progresses. (A classic line: “Marriage, and ‘live happily ever after’ ... that does not compute!”) My favourite moment in the first season, though, comes when the Robinsons are playing beach ball, and one of them tosses the ball to the Robot, who catches it in his claws, and tosses it on flawlessly to the next person. You can see the entire cast almost keel over laughing at this unexpected tour de force from the poor soul trapped inside the robot costume.
And who is this fresh-faced young lad we see in this screenshot from episode 22, The Challenge?
Yes, that’s a very young Kurt Russell playing the alien boy Quano. Well I never.
The first season is only $29.99 at Amazon - quite a bargain at about $1 per episode. The second season (in two parts) is out now too, and I just hope I have time to watch them all before I leave for Canada.
4 february 2005 ~ 10:25
This and that
So, my mini-vacation at Barona was great, very relaxing. I basically spent the entire time by the pool reading, taking a dip when it got too hot, and lolling in the jacuzzi. It was actually pretty warm, and beautifully sunny. The ambience was spoilt only toward the end of the second day, when a horde of Japanese tourists appeared at the pool, the men’s skintight Speedos providing ample supporting evidence in favour of that rather unfortunate and notorious stereotype about size. I mean, honestly, it was like being in a market selling cashews individually shrinkwrapped in black lycra. It was enough to make a grown man weep, I can assure you.
Aside from that, I ate well, slept well, and lost $20 at the slots. Fair enough really, as that was the entire cost of the weekend, other than meals. And this weekend, I’m off to another resort for three days, again free. Can’t complain!
In the meantime, I’m doing my taxes today, and it looks like I’ll be getting about $600 back from the IRS, as I predicted. What to buy? An iPod Shuffle or four? A month’s rent in Vancouver? Some really nice luggage? 50 copies of Michael Bolton’s Love Songs? The possibilities are endless!
3 february 2005 ~ 21:18