Sick Bay

Why this photo of Marilyn Monroe, from the archives of Life Magazine? Because I feel like shit right now -- and looking at Marilyn always makes me feel better...  


Once again the long journey back from the Home Planet, down Interstate 5, through the mountainous wormhole of The Grapevine and on into Hollywood, where it was nearly 90 degrees in the depths of "winter." Still awaiting the long-promised drought-busting deluge of El Niño, Southern California remains as dry as the sun-bleached concrete ditch of the LA River.

Before dawn the following morning, I was awakened by police sirens -- lots of them, the first I'd heard in over a month. LA is a long way from home, all right... but a month without a paycheck has drained the fiscal aquifers of my bank account, dragging me back on a tractor-beam of necessity. It's time to bust my own personal income-drought.

Actual showers came that night, and although a single night of rain is nowhere near enough to cure what ails Southern California these days, it's better than nothing -- and very welcome. Considerably less welcome was the nasty cold that materialized later that same day, filling my head with cement and laying me low with the usual hot-and-cold aches and pains. Suddenly I feel like I'm a hundred years old, and needless to say, am out of the job market for the time being.

Remember this? Yeah, it sucks.

I hate being sick, but it's better to get this out of the way while not working rather than have to miss work -- or worse, go to work sick and be utterly miserable while spreading the contagion to the rest of the crew. That won't help me feel any better right now, of course, but this too shall pass.

And work will come, one way or another. Of that, I'm confident.

Given my current illness-induced mental deficiency, there will be no fresh tales of life below-the-line today. Instead, I offer this very brief-but-entertaining Utube clip (courtesy of Grip Rigs), starring the late, great Hal Needham and his then-revolutionary Shotmaker Camera Car. It was while riding the arm of just such a Shotmaker that this adventure took place -- and it was a blast.

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A couple of boring but useful notes for new and regular readers: If you're reading this on your cell phone, scroll down to the very bottom of the page to find a tiny link labeled "web view." Click that, and the page will refresh to what you'd see on a laptop or home computer screen, thus revealing all the links on the right side of the page -- links to many other industry blogs and some terrific podcasts, among other things. The standard cell-phone view cuts all that out.  BS&T isn't meant to be merely my own personal soapbox, but a portal to the industry blogosphere and beyond -- a resource, if you will. Those who only know this blog from their cell phones are missing out on this.  If that's you, give "web view" a try, and check out some of those links.  You'll be glad you did.

Nearly seventy people have signed up to "follow" this blog over the years -- a feature Blogger.com offers, but is rather misleading, to say the least. Actually, it's nearly useless.  I signed on to follow two other sites on Blogger.com a long time ago, but see notifications of new posts only if I go to my Blogger.com home page, which I rarely do. So if you want to receive each new post, ignore that "follow" button and scroll up to the "e-mail notification" box on the right side under the photo of those tattered gloves.  Click that, and you'll receive an e-mail from FeedBurner with a link to confirm the request and activate the service.  Once you respond to that link, each new post will arrive in an e-mail. I tested this using my personal e-mail, and it works -- albeit a day late, meaning the Sunday Post arrived on Monday morning.

Better late than never, I guess.

Now, pass me the kleenex, please...