Welcome Gentle Readers

This blog tends to wander from its main purpose -- updates on my fiction. I do have updates and excerpts of my work. But I also write about my obsessions -- food, friends and pop culture and my weird life in Los Angeles. Enjoy!

Sunday, February 03, 2008

Secret Service, Pixels and Codpieces

Warning: If you find yourself here via a google search for such things as TV shows or films, recipes or cities, this blog has some facts. However, this blog is one author’s very twisted musing on many weird things. It is sometimes graphic in content. If you read on, don’t write to yell at me.

Bush Vs Brentwood

There was a short but intense skirmish in LA’s Entitlement Zone (I cover the definition of that terms in the sybpress Blog entry Our Vida Locas). Bush was in town for some sort of Republican function in Bel Air. That’s not a large portion of the Zone, but his travel plans caused a monumental disruption to the entire area. We thought our commute would be affected, but the street we were on was cleared mid-way to UCLA. We found out the extent of Bush’s travel arrangement when we spied Marine One parked on a ball field a short distance from Sunset Blvd. Then were the Secret Service dudes and a phalanx of LAPD motorcycle cops. And they were all there to guard an empty helicopter. We couldn’t imagine how much firepower he had riding with the car. Our colleagues never saw any of this. They were caught in the mother of all LA traffic sams when the 405 was closed as was Sunset Blvd while Bush was on the move. There were no signs indicating why everything was standing still and goodness knows the Entitlement Zone doesn’t listen to AM news radio. They just do what they always do – try to plough through as if nothing was going on. There were near accidents and a lot of screaming and cursing. I don’t blame the Secret Service for closing the roads to traffic. In that neighborhood, someone driving a Hummer while on the phone, listening to an ipod and drinking coffee is likely to broadside the presidential limo and then be annoyed at being made late for a massage.

We got a kick out of seeing that big helicopter. And I have a soft spot for the Secret Service. I had more than one opportunity to interact with them while I worked at the Center City District in Philadelphia. The first time was during the wedding of Max Kennedy (son of Robert) to Victoria Strauss (heiress to the Pep Boys fortune). The Secret Service was with Ted Kennedy and I was part of Papparazzi control. They were very polite and professional for being really heavily armed.

What’s in a Name – Codpieces!

I’ve been shopping for the Hidden Passion Films (HPF) shorts since the mass visit to the costume house last week. I knew I was in for a long and strange internet journey when the costumes for the western proved to be a more difficult search than I thought. Vendors sometimes have different terms for clothing items. The search under old west gets far different listings than western. But the key word I really needed was frontier and I only got that while looking at the image results from one search. That took hours after last week’s blog, but it wasn’t the most frustrating search of that day. Finding fantasy clothing for The Gift of Surrender (GoS) has been surreal. Again, terms were a problem. Tunics mean different things to different vendors. Much of the clothing is custom made and thus either too expensive or too long to wait for delivery. The search was annoying because many of the men’s items like bracers for Everquest and Warcraft characters. I can’t have David wear pixels! There’s no protection against a horse’s saddle. I had no idea that there was a whole cottage industry behind elven-style wedding dresses. It was interesting, but not very helpful. And almost every site I found had a fine selection of codpieces. One had a zippered pocket for your renfaire bucks. Why, I asked myself. This was one answer:

What IS a Codpiece anyway and why do men prefer them?
Firstly, they are comfy. Ask any man brave enough to try one on.
They are a "Boxers~ not Briefs" expression of personal freedom. AHHHH!
They are also quite useful in attracting attention to your...ahem...best feature. Kind of like the Wonder Bra, if you will. AND... Chix dig them. 'Nuff said.


Okay, that’s their story, but it wasn’t helping me with my costume issues. I’m stilly searching off and on. However, the focus is on The Gunslinger. We’re four days from the trip north to do the short. We’ve got all of the costume issues solved and have almost all of the props. I’m going to have a practice run at food styling this afternoon. I’ll post photos of the experiment on the myspace page for HPF.

Caption Contest

I’ll post the results later today and a new one in two weeks. We’re just too busy with the shoot right now.

Holiday Posts

It's a crazy week with Mardi Gras and the Chinese New Year coming up. I'll have a rare mid-week post about those. I am of the Year of the Rat, so there must ne celebrating. As for Mardi Gras, it involves sybaritic indulgence. Of course, I'll be celebrating.

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