Got a Condo Made of Stone-a

I finally got to go see the King Tut exhibit at the De Young Museum in San Francisco last week.

Some friends and I went, and thank goodness we all agreed to go early. I got the tickets for us to go in at the earliest time available on a Tuesday morning, and we were there 45 minutes before they even opened the doors. Once we got in, we each bought headphones for the audio tour, and wended our way through the maze of artifacts.

The Tutankhamun exhibit from Egypt is so small, only 50 pieces, that they filled it in with artifacts from other royalty. Some of those pieces (particularly regarding his father, Akhenaten and stepmother Nefertiti) were outstanding. But the piece de resistance, the pieces of the Tut exploration, lay at the end of this maze, and were truly awesome.

Of note:
Inlaid Pectoral with Winged Scarab necklace
Coffinette for the Viscera of Tutankhamun
Chest for jewelry made of ivory
Box in the shape of a cartouche (ebony/ivory)

And my favorites:
Child's Ebony/Ivory Chair with Footrest
Inscribed ivory Game Board with 20 squares.

I kept staring at the pieces, some of them laden with gold, shining in the carefully placed spotlights, wondering how such artifacts could have survived more than 3,000 years. Many of the artifacts are just wood. It is truly amazing. And piecing together what the Boy King was like during the ten years of his reign -- king at the age of 9, and dead by the age of 19 -- is a mystery unravelled.


King Tut (song by Steve Martin)
King Tut (King Tut)
Now when he was a young man,
He never thought he'd see
People stand in line to see the boy king.

(King Tut) How'd you get so funky?
(funky Tut) Did you do the monkey?
Born in Arizona,
Moved to Babylonia (king Tut).

(king Tut) Now, if I'd known
they'd line up just to see him,
I'd trade in all my money
And bought me a museum. (king Tut)

Buried with a donkey (funky Tut)
He's my favorite honkey!
Born in Arizona,
Moved to Babylonia (king Tut)

Dancin' by the Nile, (Disco Tut)
The ladies love his style, (boss Tut)
Rockin' for a mile (rockin' Tut)
He ate a crocodile.

He gave his life for tourism.
Golden idol!
He's an Egyptian
They're sellin' you.

Now, when I die,
now don't think I'm a nut,
don't want no fancy funeral,
Just one like ole king Tut. (king Tut)

He coulda won a Grammy,
Buried in his Jammies,
Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia,
He was born in Arizona, got a condo made of stone-a,
King Tut!

Preparing for Comic Con 2009

Comic Con is in less than 2 weeks, and I have started preparing. There are many challenges inherent in the largest convention in the world. Those who have been know what I mean.

1. There is too much to do. I know, having all those choices is a drag, right? The only solid advice I can give to Con goers is to find one thing in programming, and stick with that. That's if your beloved so-and-so panel is in a large room, like Hall H. For Hall H, or some of the other large rooms (Ballroom 20, for instance), getting there at 6 am, and having a seat outside on the grass is not a bad plan. Particularly if it's Twilight Day.

My plan is to let my nephew Rick decide which programming hall we're going to go for, and get in line with him. EVERYthing at the Con is just easier if there are two people.

Why Hall H? All the movie programming. Why Ballroom 20 ? or 6ABCDE? All the TV programming. And the best giveaways at any convention.

2. Lining up for Hall H at 6 am. No food. No toilets. No chairs. Cold. Need I say more?

3. Making your way through the vendor's room. It's massive. My legs will be sore on Friday, if not Thursday. They will be downright dead on Saturday. The good part about sitting in Hall H all day is that your legs and feet can rest. However, your butt will hurt.

4. Making your way through the vendor's room on Preview Night. On Wednesday night, all the 4-day pass people can get in. It used to be that all you could do on Wednesday night was wander through the room, picking up a freebie here and there. But now there is programming at night at the same time. There are also freebies galore, but some items disappear quickly. For instance, the big bags for Warner Bros. went within minutes. And you need a big bag to carry all your freebies from the vendor's room.

5. Making your way through the vendor's room: worth repeating one more time. Because on the busy days -- Friday and Saturday -- people upon layer of people will be in the aisles, pushing and shoving. The worst will be people with backpacks, who, when they turn, can take out a whole row of Hobbits with one swish. Those are probably the only days in my life I'm thankful for large girth.

6. Gathering up all the freebies on the vendor floor. Each booth has its own giveaways. Some have great ones - the major studios like Sony, Warner Bros., and the Sci Fi Channel (now the SyFy Channel) - others give out crap. I try to determine immediately what's worth keeping and what isn't, especially since that bag gets heavy after awhile. Then we make the circuit time after time again.....all in the same day.

7. Collecting the freebies and putting the best on eBay. I used to take it back to my hotel room, which was across the street from the convention center. Now my room is 2 miles away. So, I'm going to try something new this year: posting eBay items there at the convention. There should be WiFi all around the halls. I'm bringing my little computer, which weighs just a couple of ounces. And today I practiced posting photos I had taken with my camera on eBay (a totally different system than I'm used to). I also discovered last year that the first people to post stuff will get the most watchers, the most bidders, and the most bids. And it will mean that I can fill dead time during programming with posting.

8. Going to and from the hotel. I'm not sure how this will go. I'm hoping to take the free con shuttle, which stops about 3 blocks from where we're staying. But I don't know how the hours will work. It will certainly be a challenge.

By the time Sunday gets here, I will most likely be sick of the place and wanting to rest. That has happened every year. But by then we're already planning our trip next year.

A Visit with Joshua Roberts, Professional Actor

We got up rather late on Wednesday morning, and called Josh to set up a meeting place. As it turns out, he doesn't have a car -- he's a poor, starving student, remember -- and so we had to meet him at his dorm room several miles south of the playhouse.

It took some doing, but Sweetie can find a needle in a mapless haystack, and we indeed found him at the end of the dorm construction zone. We picked him up and he suggested a little place in Sonoma, yes, several miles from there, called Hank's Creekside Cafe. We settled in, ordered breakfast, and stayed for over 2 hours chatting about the play, his process, politics, etc.

He explained The Method to me as Lee Strasberg interpreted Stanislavski, and that Daniel Day-Lewis may be the last user of The Method in modern acting. But Josh doesn't believe in it. He did say, though, that the physical blocking of scenes helps form his character as much as memorizing the lines. Some directors don't even want you to memorize your lines, preferring instead to work out the character with you as practice progresses.

We went to see Josh play "Gooper" in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that night, getting even better seats this time, as we were right in the middle, right behind the liquor cabinet in Maggie and Brick's bedroom. That liquor cabinet is visited by almost all the players, so we got a good look at them. I thought about putting something else in the ice chest, but obviously tinkering with the objects on stage is forbidden.

It was a really nice treat after the play, too, when I got to meet informally several of the actors. They were all very good. This was one Cat that sizzled.

Plays in Santa Rosa

Yesterday we drove up to Santa Rosa to see a professional actor, Joshua Roberts, in two plays at Santa Rosa Junior College.

We saw the first one, Barefoot in the Park, last night. It was sold out.

It's a small, modern theatre, maybe about 150 seats, about the same size as the Altarena, but in a different configuration. All of the seats are stadium, meaning each seat behind us was raised, and, as you can imagine, every seat is a good seat. We were in the front row.

Josh is an old family friend. He and Jamie were in several high school plays together, usually musicals, as both have fine voices. Tonight was not a musical but a comedy, and we were anxious to see how he'd fare. We found with much deligh that the program said he would play the lead in Neil Simon's play, the Paul Bratter character, the one that made Robert Redford famous.

He was absolutely splendid. He got every beat of the comedy, as this character actually has most of the clever lines. We're meeting him in about half an hour for brunch, so I'm sure we'll talk about the play. Much fun.

Fireworks at Home

We had a great 4th of July bash, this after Maryann and Aaron got together and decided to have one. At my house.

Well, that's fine, because we can control most everything here, including what to eat and drink. And I was quite surprised when a couple of guests pitched in when the party was drawing down and washed dishes and brought in all the food. Then Sweetie figured out where the leftovers would go, something I can never decide.

So, after the picnic table outside and the kitchen table inside was cleared off, I could take over. I just loaded the dishwasher at 10pm last night, and then mopped the floor.

Another hassle, of course, was taking out the trash and recycle. The recycle pile is HUGE outside, and some of it is covered with ants. Damn things. So I took the stuff that would cause the most ant drool and tossed that into the trash can. (The trash can isn't full.)

Great food - kosher hot dogs, BBQ'd chicken, salad, vegetarian baked beans, potato salad. And Dawn & Mark brought ice cream, which was the good stuff. Plus, I drank Splendafied lemonade, sun tea, a little wine, and a little of the mint julep. The mint julep was the culprit for the sticky floor. Yechh.

Cough, Cough

After one week of feeling lousy and getting worse, and prompted by media accounts of new cases of Swine Flu, I called the Advise Nurse of my clinic and gave her my symptoms.

She advised me to take long, hot showers, and drink hot tea. Oh, and also to breathe in the tea fumes. She also made an appointment for me with my doctor the next morning.

I am wayyy beyond tea fumes at this point. This morning, my wheezing tunes woke me up. Several times.

So, Dr. Heath said I either had bronchitis or pneumonia. She listened to my back several times, and said she could hear things in the lower right lung, and then she mentioned something about the lung being collapsed. So, half an hour later, I was sitting in the x-ray place on Telegraph - yes, the very one I go each year to get those lovely but painful mammograms.

A woman wheezed her way into the seat across from me when I sat down. Her husband stormed in a minute afterwards and bellowed at her, "Give the man your paper!" After fussing with her for several minutes, she not responding, he snatched it out of her hand and gave it to the clerk. When I got to the window, I watched the clerk stamp STAT on my paperwork in big, red letters.

Gosh, I could get a stamp like that! I could mark everything medical. "URINE SAMPLE NEEDED. STAT!"

I was shown to the change room, and told yada yada yada, yeah, I know the drill. While I was sitting there, waiting for the x-ray tech to call me, the man next to me, who really didn't want to give me the seat next to him, was really non-plussed about being in a hospital gown with his pants sitting next to him. So he got up and wandered around, carefully holding the gown behind him. I should've told him that he could've placed another gown on backwards so that he'd be fully covered - like so many of us mammogram patients have learned - but I didn't know what reaction I'd get.

The x-ray itself, all 3, was uneventful. I didn't have to take the gown off, so I wonder why they couldn't have just shot the x-ray through my shirt and bra? If it goes through skin AND hospital gown, why can't it go through shirt, bra and skin? You just wonder...

Anyway, after all that, I have bronchitis, not pneumonia.

I went to Long's, where the doctor said they'd call in my prescription inhaler, and wouldn't you know, no call. Maybe they called another pharmacy. Well, that's what direct dial is good for on my cell phone, and why I programmed the number in.

I was hoping I'd get the inhaler before another wheezeful night, but it doesn't look like it.

Big Disappointment...

As it turns out, the Pres. Obama pronouncement for same-sex partners is ONLY for children of domestic partners. Not the domestic partners themselves, many of whom suffer from ailments they can't pay for, AIDS, huge financial bills caused by health issues, etc.

This is very disappointing.

They say that this is "just the beginning" of changes his administration will make. It's not a very promising beginning.