new place to Grand Central...

feed to another site...

I'm just checking to see if a feed is working or not.

poem for guy at the gym...

I am sure Lee will be all giddy because I am now writing poetry to guys, but what the hell...

Poem For Guy On The Precor Next To Me
By Swarvey

I am sure you are a germaphobe
You clean your Precor before you ride it
You spray it down quite thoroughly
Meticulously scrub it and then dry it
To me, though, you are a paradox
Because, while you seem so clean
You smell like a metric ton of bananas that has been allowed to rot and ferment in a hot box full of dead, heavily-perfumed goats and homeless people.

speaking of zombies...

When I was in St. Maaarrttenn, I met a guy named Mark. I believe Mark lived at the resort where Jenn and I stayed.
I have a t-shirt of which I am very fond. It says, on the front, in plain white letters, ZOMBIE.
I have another shirt which says in plain letters across the front POLICE and people always ask if I am a cop when I wear it. So far, no one has asked if I am dead when I wear ZOMBIE. Don't tell me people aren't smart.
Mark sees me in this shirt and asks the other question you might ask seeing such a shirt. "Is that because you like Rob Zombie or is it just for ZOMBIE?"
I tell him it is just for ZOMBIE, but that Rob is fine, too.
Later that night, he finds me again. Apparently he had been thinking of our exchange all that day. He says, "You know. The reason why I asked about Rob Zombie was because I read something wonderful on the internet about him. He has a whole biography out there."
"Oh, really? Huh." I say.
"Yeah. At the bottom of it there were, and I'll never forget this, Rob Zombie's Five Rules to Having a Good Life. I can't remember four of them, but I remember this one. It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice. Isn't that great? I use that all the time now. I work in a casino and if I see someone yelling at a lower employee, I ask them why they did that. And they'll have some reason and I'll tell them, you know, it's nice to be important........ but it's more important to be nice. And they look at me, like, wow. So I use that all the time now."

So remember. Rob Zombie said that. It's hasn't been around for decades.
I wonder what the other four rules he couldn't recall were...
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
A stitch in time saves nine.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
E=MC2

another acting class...

I am in another scene study class trying to stave off the immense frustration of attempting to put some kind of voice-over gig together. Working toward that goal is walking down a brick road built out of brick walls with brick walls on either side that ends in a brick wall.

This is a quick entry about one of the guys in my new scene study class. This guy is something. I can only describe him as frantic. He is like 100 superballs in a blender.
He is nervous and stammers and makes odd, eyeballs-bulging-out faces. He kind of reminds me, appearance wise, of Anthony Michael Hall, after the Breakfast Club, but before Johnny Be Good. Out of Bounds, maybe.
He was wearing an all black suit, and by suit I mean black pants and a black suit jacket. Under the black suit jacket, he had one of those T-shirts where the entire front of the shirt is a characters face. The character he chose was Elmo from the Muppets. (My sister decided to be a Critical Cathy about this sentence, so I must now edit. Elmo is a Muppet, yes, but is not from The Muppets. He is from Sesame Street. I feel so much better having cleared that all up.)
This makes two classes in a row where there was some reference to The Muppets in one way or another on the first night. I wonder if that is a trend.
Adults who are enamored of Elmo from the Muppets should have to put their name on a list so parents can look up where they live and keep their children away from there.
This guy works with children. I actually believe he is harmless, unless causing extreme annoyance is considered harmful. In that case he should carry a license, because he's got some deadly annoyance mojo working.
He makes little popping sounds with his mouth, on purpose. Like it's not that his lips smack together and he can't help it. He accentuates points with a little mouth-pop, eye-roll to the sky, finger pointing maneuver.
He also does the two handed quotes in the sky thing. People tell him he is "too crazy". He needs to "tone it down". He should "jump off a building".
I am sure there will be more about this guy. He is one of the many people I have come across lately who fascinate me.
I have an idea that everything he is doing is part of an elaborate performance art piece.
We are all tasked on the first night to present some monologue to give the teacher a sense of who we are, what level we are working at and how we might respond to direction. His monologue was about a person who has been tasked with selling tofu brains to an auditorium full of zombies.
Now, I am all about zombies. I love them. Love zombie artwork and movies and music and literature. I like zombies.
Zombies have rules. Although those rules are becoming more and more liquid, they are still there. This guy's scene and the way he was presenting it defied all the rules and basically made no sense whatsoever. The sales person is supposed to convince the zombies that tofu brains are every bit as good as real brains.
The dude cannot get the motivation down to make this make sense.
There is only one way this scene makes any sense, but I didn't want to pull out the massive I AM A ZOMBIE GEEK card on the first night of meeting these people.
Here's the only reality you can put behind the scene for it to jive.
Zombies are taking over society. You are a salesman. You have to convince the zombies to like the tofu brains. The government has assigned this job to you.
Your motivation is, the government will probably kill you if you don't do a good job, or, more likely, the zombies will kill you and eat you if you don't do a good job.
Coming at it from this direction puts all kinds of tension and tense humor on the lines and actions of the actor.
Elmo-shirt-ed annoying person decided the best way to present it would be to do an impression of Sandy Duncan on QVC selling Salad Spinners and nervously tap-dance at the same time.
Perhaps a zombie punched him on the way home, but in disdain didn't eat him. That would teach him.

mullet sighting...

There was a time when you didn't have to go far to find a mullet, though it was still a treat when you did. Now, they are so rare, it's like a rainbow when I see one.
I present to you chubby, bushy-mullet man on vacation.


This chappy looks like Captain Lou Albano accidentally stepped into one of Seth Brundle's teleportation pods with the lead singer of Toto.
He was later seen singing Tow the Line and sticking rubber bands through his cheeks.

EDIT!! EDIT!! EDIT!!
I have faux pas-ed all over the place and have been duly chastised. The song is not TOW the Line, it is HOLD the Line.

Damn it.
http://play.napster.com/track/10010498

creep...

Here is some video of a creepy guy in the airport in Puerto Rico. He had been displaying this behavior for some time, and I figured he'd stop before I had a chance to get my camera out, but he favored me with one final display.
There was a girl sitting across the corridor from him, reading a book. He was surreptitiously taking pictures of her. He wins Creep of the Day.



The paradox here was that I was surreptitiously taking pictures of him. This isn't lost on me, thank you. Somewhere, you will find a video of me taking surreptitious video of the guy taking surreptitious video of the girl reading her book and I will have won Creep of the Day.
I embrace it and look forward to my award. It will look nice on the mantle next to my Ass of the Decade trophy.

By the way, that's Jenn's voice you hear. She is referring to my run in with Tranzilla.

for your pleasure...

Swarvey Meets Tranzilla
I have been to some drag shows in my day and was once apparently hitting on a person of transexual nature, although I still do not have a clear story about that. The person you see next to me here is the WORST drag/transexual/transender/man-in-dress I have ever seen. It's not just that he/she was frightening, though shim was. Person weighed maybe 100lbs and was roughly 14 feet tall. Had arms that could wrap around itself several times and toes like other peoples fingers. Combine all this with a face that Dennis Rodman would find familiar and yet STILL could not love, and you do not have an attractive... er... anything.
But, that was not the problem with this person. They were there to be a performer and they really sucked at it. Didn't even know the words to the song they were supposed to be lip-synching. That's just unprofessional.
I'm making an informed complaint to the Giant Scary Cross-Dressers Union.

on the flight home yesterday...

I was pretty psyched that the airline was showing SpiderMan 3 on our return flight from Sint Martin. It's a long enough flight and I welcomed the diversion.
At about the 1/2 point in the movie, MaryJane visits Harry at his swank residence and together they make egg-white omelets and sing cheesy Motown. Only in the American Airlines version, they didn't. They skipped right over that part, which felt both bloating and forced. I was pleased.
I assume it was edited in the interest of time and was not an editorial call, though it was warranted.
I wish American Airlines would come to my house and work on my copy of Matrix:Reloaded.

report from the honeymoon...

Thanks to everyone who came to the ceremony out at the old Blake place. It was a wonderful day for us and in general, everyone seemed to have a good time, which only made it better for Jenn and I.
I am now in a 3rd world country and I didn't know I was going to one. It's okay. We spend a lot of time at the resort. This place has been somewhat north American-ized, so I can deal, but the rest of the island looks like a major storm just came through all the time.
And it is hot. I thought I had been hot before, but I was mistaken. When we paintballed a couple of weekends ago, we were all hot from running around with helmets on in the sun shine. Right now, sitting here typing, I feel exactly the same, just without the fake machismo of a paint gun in my hand. Now I have the fake machismo of a significant tan and a pair of giant, Euro-styled sunglasses. Not the same.
There has been quite a lot of nothing going on. We are taking it easy and that's okay. It's like taking a deep breath when you're used to panting all the time. I'm generally pretty anxious to get on to whatever the next thing I need or want to do is, but as there isn't a lot to need to do or want to do, this anxiety has departed. I generally cannot sit still for any length of time, but I'm doing okay with it.

Here are a couple of interesting quotes so far.
The night we got here, there was a dance demonstration going on in the lobby. Everybody was dressed like for Carnivale and moving pretty good.
We were sitting by the pool when a largish lady came out from watching the demonstration. She said, "Wow. They really teach them eighteen year old girls how to move their pelvis. If I had a camera, and I remembered to bring it, I might have thought about taking a picture of them."
I don't think I've ever heard a less enthusiastic statement of kind of regret.
We met up with an elderly couple at the car rental place who happen to be staying at the same resort. They have been coming to the island for a long, long time and offered to show us around. It was appreciated.
Ray, the husband, offered this piece of advice concerning driving on the island.
"The thing about driving around here is this, you just need to stay on the road and remember where to turn."
This is good advice.