Two videos. The first is an honest to God real life video for babies that looks like something Tim and Eric might make. The second is a fantastic redub of The Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up."

Something I forgot to mention regarding the earlier post: sometime not too long after our encounter with the maggot lady a police officer approached us. "We saw what you guys did over there," he said, "and I just wanted to let you know that we really appreciate your restraint. What these guys - the protesters - do, they try to get people riled up so they react against them. And we arrest people enough over here in Ames, and I didn't want to arrest anyone today. So I just wanted to thank you guys. You did a good job." Thus marks the first time I've ever been commended by a police officer for doing something that regards miming.

Before we begin: originally my plan - even before all this went down - was to turn this experience into a piece for submission for publication, e.g. to a magazine or some website. I made the little mistake of trying to plan for this before said story actually took place. Not long after that happened - that is to say the story I’m about to tell you about - I realized that the experience would be far too short to make for a piece like I had originally envisioned. But still: something happened so it feels like it’s worth writing about.

A few weeks ago Jordan let me know that the WBC was going to be protesting in Ames. Exactly why they were going to be protesting was unclear. Even after this all took place I’m still not totally sure why they picked Ames, aside from the whole gay marriage thing, and one: that happened a few months ago, two: I don’t think Ames had a whole lot to do with that legal decision. To be honest with you I think they did it for the same reason they protested at Walter Cronkite’s funeral: because this is what they do. Others have gone further and attempted to speculate as to why they do what they do, but so much has been said about this that I feel like it’d be redundant and beyond the scope of this brief-ish post to go there; plus you’ve probably got some ideas of your own about their bag.

At first I was hesitant about the idea of taking part in what appeared to be a counter-protest. The whole idea of a counter-protest against a group like the WBC feels a little superfluous to me; I mean, we know nobody likes them and they know nobody likes them, so why bother, right? But that’s not the way human nature works. As visitor to Earth Ford Prefect notes in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, human beings have a way of making note of the totally obvious that is seemingly inexplicable.

But Jordan threw something else out there: this wouldn’t be a conventional counter-protest. Though there would be a group of bog standard counter protesters, he said, the group that we’d be joining up with was made up mostly of drama students and improvisors from ISU. Their purpose, to quote a note that one of said students had circulated on Facebook, was to counter a ridiculous dog and pony show with yet another ridiculous dog and pony show. Their arsenal was not to include GOD LOVES ALL signs or NOT TODAY FRED signs - instead, they opted for more creative and anarchic approaches, promising musical instruments, hula hoops and - seriously - a Jesus kissing booth.

So Jordan’s plan was for us to go up there and contribute to the fun in our own special way: that is to say dressed as mimes. Those of you who read this probably know me well enough so I shouldn’t have to say this, but: mention mimes and I’m in. It had been about a year since I’d donned my white makeup and Lycra to do some miming; coincidentally, this too had been in Ames, except for fraternity festivities rather than a protest against bigotry. When Jordan dropped the M-bomb, though, I couldn’t refuse. There’s a certain bizarre and damn near inexplicable fun that goes with donning mime gear and just messing around in public. Say what you will about how most people claim to find mimes creepy; in my experience, when a person sees a mime on the street, they smile or (obviously but charmingly) shout out “MIME!” Being recognized in mime attire is almost like a minor form of celebrity, albeit a very bizarre and generic sort of celebrity.

So I said yes. Two weeks passed and Jordan picked me up. We were accompanied by Justin, who had brought along a bongo-like drum that he’d strapped over his shoulder. Jordan had let me know that more than a few people would come bearing instruments; upon hearing this I had no choice but to grab my ukulele.

The drive up was pretty damn uneventful. One of the highlights of being out and about in a mime outfit is driving. The joy in this comes from other’s reactions than the driving in and of itself. To watch another person realize that they are at a stoplight next to a car full of mimes never fails to be hilarious. Our problem, though, was that this was a drive up the interstate. Few people have the opportunity to take note of who else is driving whilst going 60 down a highway through Podunk, Iowa; if they do get a glimpse of you all they see is a very pale face.

Though there was at least one memorable exchange that went something like this.

JUSTIN: Look at that sign. “Hindu Worship Center.”
ME: Woah. Looks kind of out of place.
JUSTIN: It looks like a barn.
JORDAN: Uh. To your left.
JUSTIN: ...oh! I was gonna say! It looked like they had assimilated pretty well.

So we got there and it became pretty clear where the protest and counter protest were taking place. The first thing we saw were the counter protesters - nearly thirty or forty of them, I’d say. The next thing we saw was the WBC guys. The next thing we saw after that was one of the funniest WBC signs I’ve ever seen.

On the sign was a picture of a burger. “Does that say ‘bitch burger?’” Jordan asked. It did. Cue laughter. The sign was so absurd - especially coupled with a picture of a literal burger - that it totally dampened any riling-up that the WBC may have intended. That sign - with the words “bitch burger” - is prime evidence as to why the WBC no longer piss me off. It was as if they were screaming for passerbys to notice the absurdity of what they were doing - absurdity the church noted in a way that few skilled counter-protesters could ever dream of pulling off.

Jordan parked; Justin grabbed his drum; I grabbed my ukulele; a security guard that happened to be patrolling the parking lot smirked. This was a good sign of things to come. Indeed, the counter-protesters who saw us consistently seemed pretty pleased. No one asked “why are you dressed as mimes?” or anything of that sort; they just accepted it and moved on. Fittingly enough, “accepting it and moving on” is one of the best rules an improvisor can know if they want to create something hilarious and memorable. It should only be fitting that the rest of the protest seemed to be structured like a bizarre longform piece gone guerilla.

So on one side of the street were forty-ish counter-protesters; on the other side we had eight or so WBC folks accompanied by a few police officers and photographers. At first Jordan seemed unsure about the prospect of crossing the street. Neither of us were fully aware if this was legally permissible; maybe the WBC had booked that particular corner of the street for them and them alone. Then two things happened: one, a herd full of hula hoopers made their way across the street. Two, a counter protester donning a sign and a piece of duct tape over his mouth made his residency next to a woman holding an OBAMA=ANTICHRIST sign. This, I think, was our go-ahead.

We made our way across the street pulling on an invisible rope. Think the rope-climbing scenes in the live action Batman except without the camera turned sideways. Justin decided to come with us. And then we were there. Jordan had mentioned earlier that it might be fun to put them in an invisible box; this is what we did. We put up walls on four sides of the WBC protesters (the street side with its traffic was a little tricky) and secured them with invisible hammers and nails. Justin accompanied us with some drumming.

The protesters seemed to be trying to ignore us. The police looked concerned. It seemed like they weren’t sure where we were going with this.

Then Jordan attempted to give me what the Baker’s Dozen calls a dip-kiss; a overly dramatic fake make-out that works best when a crowd can only see one side of you. I was totally unprepared the first time, resulting in what looked like Jordan attempting to give me CPR, but the second time went a little better.

At this point it became clear that there wasn’t much more for us to do on the WBC’s side of the street other than dance. After a little bit of dancing we made our way to the street corner. There stood a woman - the one holding the bitch burger sign - talking to a student journalist holding a videocamera. She was trying to explain why the WBC had chosen Ames for their protest; she said it had something to do with giving gay people scholarships, which is kind of like PETA hypothetically protesting at the animal cracker factory. There may or may not be a connection to the group and the cause, but in both cases it’s very very loose.

I also heard the first and last thing that a group member addressed to us directly; unfortunately all I could hear was “Something something something Spandex something something.” I considered informing her it was actually Lycra, but hey, you can only fight so much ignorance for one day.

On the counter-protester side of the street we were greeted by a relatively sane looking woman in her early sixties. She was wearing a tan vest. “Mimes,” she said - not addressing us, just noticing us. “You see that sign that man has? The one that says ‘Fred Phelps is a Bigot?’” Jordan and I both nodded. “Well,” she said, “I think it should say ‘Fred Phelps is a Maggot.’”

Jordan and I just stood there. If she was expecting conversation, she had come to the wrong place.

“Fred Phelps is a maggot,” she repeated in a palilalic sort of fashion. “Fred Phelps is a maggot. What do you think of that for a sign?” At this Jordan began miming picking a maggot out of thin air while I assembled an invisible sign and began brandishing it in her face. “Now that’s a maggot,” the woman said to Jordan. And maybe she missed what I was doing - you know, putting the sign together - but she just turned to me and stared, so I handed the sign to her. Apparently she missed the memo that I just had established that I was holding a sign, because when I tried to “give” it to her, she just stuck out her thumb so that my thumb pressed against hers in a blood-brothers-ish sort of way. And then she laughed.

Now, like I said earlier, my original intent was to make this story a piece for a magazine. The problem, though, was that the amount of time we spent while the protesters were there was pretty limited - approximately fifteen minutes. And the weird thing is that the protesters just seemed to disappear; one minute they were there on their side of the street, the next we talk to a crazy woman and poof, protesters gone. Jordan and I were both surprised by the brevity of the whole situation, but agreed that the experience was nonetheless satisfying.

This was followed with a walk to the MU to get some water. I won’t go into detail here, since it’s kind of outside of the scope of Jordan and Thomas going to a counter-protest dressed as mimes, but the walk there entailed a lot of people honking their horns upon seeing us or simply shouting “MIMES!”

The drive home was just about as uneventful as the drive there, and it seemed all the more uneventful compared to our time spent in Ames.

A question that popped into my head at work: is it possible for hypochondria to become a self-fulfilling prophecy? By which I mean this: can a person be so worried about becoming a hypochondriac that they have no choice but to become a hypochondriac by default?

Don't ask me why I was wondering this. My job has little to do with disease or mental anxieties. I press buttons on cash registers and give people coffee. But it wandered into my mind regardless.

I asked my coworker this and she said, "Well, no. Hypochondria is when you worry - so much to the point that it disrupts your life - that you have a disease. Hypochondria is an anxiety rather than a disease, so no."

And that worked for me. But according to the New Oxford American Dictionary - aka the dictionary bundled with Mac OS X - hypochondria is "an abnormal anxiety about one's health."

So consider this: mental health does in fact constitute one's health, to a certain extent. If one suffers from depression or persistent and grating stress, one's health is almost surely to decline, may it be thanks to eating less/more, sleeping less/more, etc. Therefore, one's mental health is a subset (and a pretty major one) of one's health. So, taking the NOAD's definition into account, it could be possible for one to worry themselves into hypochondria via a fear of having hypochondria. If one has an abnormal anxiety about whether or not they have an abnormal anxiety - which affects one's health - they must have hypochondria.

So let me break this down and pretend I am the person in question:

• I think I might have anxiety about anxiety regarding my health.
• For me to have such worries is abnormal, therefore I am to a certain extent a hypochondriac.

Remember that this is all according to the NOAD. A better test would be to see how the DSM-IV defines hypochondria - keep in mind that what the NOAD says is probably mostly colloquial. (As my co-worker said, "Like, when someone says 'that person's totally schizo' they don't really mean that they're schizophrenic.") So without taking the DSM-IV's definition into account, we're basically just enjoying some semantic shenanigans.

Anyway: does this all makes sense? Have I missed something glaring here that makes this all totally fallacious?

It’s now been a little over a year since Jordan, Dylan, Mary, Pichler, Joanna and I performed go [VERB] yourself in front of an audience for the first and last time. The show was unique in that it was - or at least I’m pretty sure it was - the first show any of us had ever put on without any real adult supervision.

On July 11th of last year I wrote a pretty brief post that didn’t say a whole lot about the show, other than the fact that it went a lot better than any of us had anticipated it to - a tidbit I still agree with 100%. But there was something more notable about that post than that pithy statement: the fact that I didn’t have a whole lot to say about the show as a whole. This, I think, was due primarily to exhaustion. GVY was one of the most - if not the most - exhausting creative projects I’ve ever embarked on. With this exhaustion came a lot of education.

Here is my attempt to relay some of those educational messages to you in the method I know best: bullet form.

• Long term schedules are good - Self-explanatory. A lack of a schedule certainly allows for a certain degree of flexibility, but with that flexibility comes a lot more headaches.
• Consistent meetings are also good - One of the big headaches regarding the sketch show involved trying to work around everyone's work and personal schedules, resulting in a meeting at 8 in the morning one day and 9 at night the next. In hindsight I'm not sure if this could have been avoided - then again, perhaps it could have if I had taken bullet point 1 better to heart.
• Divide up tasks - This was done to a certain extent, but not to its fullest potential.
• The summer before everyone leaves for college is not the best time to try to embark on an insanely huge project - Again, self-explanatory.
• Your booker doesn't give a crap about you - This may not always be true, but it certainly felt so in our case. This reads rather pessimistically. Perhaps it should be changed to something like:
• Find a booker who cares about you (if possible) - Oh, two fun stories about our booker, by the way: one, we were promised to have a person to turn on the lights/plug in mics come in at 4. I think he ended up getting in here around 5, to little fanfare, wasted rehearsal time and no apology. And two: on the calendar of events located at the venue we performed at, we were listed as SKETCH REHEARSAL.
• Don't be too concerned about making money - Luckily we weren't, but I would like to note that if we were, we would have made only about $200 to be divvied up amongst us.
• Don't be too concerned about getting noticed - Again, luckily, we weren't. This is not to say that we weren't noticed, or that nobody came to the show; on the contrary, we may have broken a fire code or two thanks to the size of our audience. But keep in mind that said audience was primarily composed of friends and family members. I'm doubtful that a single person came to our show that none of us knew.
• Do it because you love it - The prior two points have been kind of leading up to this one, so I'm hoping this isn't any huge surprise. But it's worth saying. There really was no reason for us to do that show, other than perhaps to see whether or not we could do it, which if you ask me isn't the strongest reason for investing a lot of time and effort in something.

Ozzy Ozborne and a certain talking cat need to team up.

As far as movies go, I don't think Borat has aged particularly well. For one thing, the scenes don't particularly benefit from being watched again and again a la Airplane - the surprise is all gone. And for another thing, the movie's been quoted to death. There was a period a few months after Borat was released in which shouts of "Very nice!" were freaking everywhere - so, you know, now watching it just comes off as a little tired.

That's not to say that Borat was a bad movie. Say what you will about it - yeah, it was pretty damn vulgar, we sure as hell could have gone without seeing That One Scene In The Hotel Room - but there was some pretty great satire in there. Borat's purpose was not simply to offend/gross people out; the character was also meant to raise a few questions regarding race. Specifically: when confronted with abject, undeniable in-your-face racism (particularly that of the anti-Semitic variety), what would people do? Would people awkwardly play along? Would they condemn the racism they'd just witnessed? Or - worst case scenario - would they take it as an opportunity to take down their PC shields and express how they actually feel?

I realize this is some pretty intense stuff to say about a dumb comedy rated R for quote "pervasive strong crude and sexual content including graphic nudity, and language" - unnecessary comma brought to you by the MPAA, not me - especially if you haven't seen the movie before. I can understand if you think I'm just trying to come up with high-brow excuses as to why I liked what is seemingly a super low-brow comedy. So if you haven't seen Borat, I advise you to watch this clip from Da Ali G Show, in which Borat goes head to head with the questions I posed earlier. It manages to be shocking, appalling and morbidly hilarious all at the same time. It's barely three minutes long and it may as well be Borat's manifesto.

Flashforward three years later and we now have Bruno, the next character Sacha Baron Cohen has decided to use as bait for his guerrilla comedy. Like Borat, Bruno is a foreigner - specifically an Austrian - visiting the United States. Where Borat is obsessed with Pamela Anderson, Bruno is obsessed with becoming famous. Where Borat is the stereotypical eastern Europeaner, Bruno is the stereotypical gay fashionista. Where Borat is a bumbling idiot...well, so's Bruno I guess.

Anyway: if you disliked Borat's structure - prank after prank against unsuspecting Americans, which I think caused Jordan to call it "the longest YouTube movie I've ever seen" - you are not going to like Bruno. If you were offended by the less than PC antics in Borat, you're going to be doubly (if not triply) offended by Bruno. It seems that Cohen's goal with Bruno was to top everything that he did in Borat. The pranks are more shocking and ambitious this time around.

With this excess comes a problem though: the film lacks focus in two big ways. In one scene we'll be witnessing Bruno attempting to make peace between Israel and Palestine. Fast forward ten minutes and then we'll be watching Bruno attempting to defend his decision to adopt an African baby (he traded it for an iPod) on a talk show in front of an all-black audience. This is not to say that variety is a bad thing, though; I'm all for surprise, especially in comedy. But in Bruno, these scenes don't have a whole lot linking them together, which makes the film feel more like a series of disconnected pranks than an honest-to-goodness feature film. If Jordan was right and Borat was the longest YouTube movie ever made, Bruno is the longest YouTube playlist ever made.

That shouldn't matter too terribly, though; after all, this is just a summer comedy we're talking about, not Citizen Kane. But that brings us to flaw number two: this lack of focus applies to the satire in Bruno, too.

Where Borat is mostly about confronting racist bigotry - albeit in an unconventional and somewhat awkward fashion - Bruno is about...well, it's hard to say. Your first guess might be that it'd target stereotypes of homosexuality. A bit of a problem, though: Bruno is as stereotypical of a gay guy as you get. It's hard to make fun of people who harbor such stereotypes when you are masquerading as said stereotype and presenting it as reality to the stereotype harbingers in question.

There are some attempts at this, though: see the scene in which Bruno interviews Ron Paul, which mutates into Bruno trying to seduce Paul for a sex tape he - that's to say Bruno, not Ron Paul - is working on. Ron Paul doesn't react too kindly to this; he storms out of the room and calls Bruno "a queer." Admittedly this is less than PC language, but let's be frank: straight guys, if a gay guy tried to blatantly seduce you by presenting you with porn and suggestively dancing, would you react any more kindly? Thus this attempt at satire fails. It doesn't really prove a whole lot, except that if a person attempts to come on to a stranger, it probably won't end well.

Bruno tries to take a few stabs at Hollywood and fame seekers, but they aren't quite the focus of the movie, either. Admittedly they're pretty effective moments - a scene where Bruno tries to convince a series of parents to put their babies in harm for a photoshoot comes to mind (and frighteningly, it doesn't take a whole lot of convincing on the parents' part) - but the problem is that these moments against Hollywood/fame seekers are too few and far between. This could have been a great focus for the movie, but for some reason or another it's abandoned not too long after it's introduced. My theory as to why this is: Hollywood types are probably more familiar with Cohen's shenanigans than your average American - thus it'd take way too much to make a film entirely out of duping A-listers and their bosses.

So who does Bruno end up targeting for the movie's last third? Average Americans - specifically, southerners. Again, as far as social satire goes, there's not a whole lot of shockers here; most of us are pretty aware that if you present a bunch of blood-thirsty straight men two men making out rather than a cage fight, they probably won't be very happy.

This is not to say that Bruno's a total failure, though. It's actually pretty funny at times. There's some solid slapstick throughout the film - take when Bruno asks a karate instructor how to defend himself against a gay man. And yes, though the satire isn't as strong as Borat, there are still some great moments. One particularly "holy-shit-this-can't-be-real" scene takes place at a swingers party that Bruno drops in on. There's some great hypocrisy going on in that scene; specifically, the swingers in question are totally cool with extramarital sex/orgies, but when gay sex is raised, their reaction is basically along the are-you-out-of-your-goddamn-mind mode of thought.

So now we come to some conclusions that are, in hindsight, pretty damn obvious: if you liked Borat, you'll probably like Bruno. If you liked Borat for the social satire, you probably won't be as impressed with Bruno. If you liked Borat for the squirm-in-your-seat shenanigans, you'll probably be even more impressed with Bruno. But if you didn't like Borat? Well, don't expect too much from Bruno.

Diatribes Amongst Employees

Part 1 of X

"And you know what bothers me? When you say to a customer that you're tired, and they say back, 'Don't you work in a coffee shop? Don't you drink coffee all day?' No. No, I don't."

"'You should be so perky!'"

"Exactly! 'I woke up early. Why should I be perky?' But no. I mean, I have about as much coffee as regular people. Two drinks a day, tops. And sometimes people will ask, 'Well, don't you wake up early to have coffee before you come in?"

"I wouldn't do that. I have to wake up early enough."

"It's funny that people say that, because honestly, I don't really make coffee a part of my daily schedule outside of work. And I pay for it on those days. At noon I'm like, [joints fake collapse like one of those little wooden giraffe figurines] 'aaaugh'."

"People probably don't do that at other jobs. 'Oh, you work at a grocery store? You must never be hungry!'"

"'You work at a bar? You must be hammered all the time!'"

"I think that one's sometimes true."

"'You work at a gun shop?'"

"'You must shoot people all day long!'"

"'You work at a pharmacy? You must constantly abuse prescription drugs!"

"'You're a surgeon? You must cut people all the time!'"

"Actually, that one's true."

"Oh, yeah."

Some Thoughts

• There was a guy at work yesterday that wore a shirt that said "DON'T CONFORM." He told me he bought it at Gap.
• Speaking of work: there is a competition amongst stores in the area to sell the most cold drinks. One of our boss's many master plans to boost said sales: adjusting the thermostat up.
• Sometimes I greet customers with the amount they're to pay. Like, "Three thirty five. How's it going?" or "Two twenty, here's your drink." Now whenever I say that I pretend I'm living in a dystopian society in which everyone has numbers rather than names. Except that this particular dystopian society has coffee shops.
• Some of these thoughts would be more apt for Twitter rather than this.
• I wonder if anyone who reads my Twitter updates - tweets - regularly doesn't actually have a Twitter account. Maybe I am being Twitter stalked. Twstalked? Stwittered?
• A conversation with Jordan inspired a writing thingamijigger in the back of my mind: nursery rhymes with realistic endings. Discuss.
• David Byrne from The Talking Heads is a badass dancer. A bad assdancer.

Before we begin: I'd just like to point you in the direction of this wonderful 20 minute-ish talk by Merlin Mann regarding doing creative work. If you do any sort of creative stuff - or hell, if you spend more time thinking about doing creative stuff than actually doing it - listen to his talk. Seriously. Put it on your iPod, go on a walk or a drive, and devote the time you'd spend watching TV or replaying Super Mario 64 for the umpteenth time to this little recording. Maybe that even means stop reading this blog for a little bit. Again: seriously, listen.

Alright, the real post now.

So I recently finished watching the third season of Dexter with my mom and sister - I know, I know, a quality family show. And it was pretty good. I mean, it's one of the best shows on TV right now, but all that being said, it wasn't amazing or mind blowing or anything; it was just pretty good.

I realize that Pretty Good is a lot more than most shows on TV, but Pretty Good is nothing compared to Dexter's first season. As far as individual seasons of TV shows goes, Dexter Season 1 just might be the best one I've ever seen. It's incredibly well filmed/acted/written - especially well written. The impressive thing about that season (though this applies to every season of Dexter thus far) is that the entire season is a self-contained story arc. Though I do love shows that require time commitments for an awesome payoff (e.g. Lost, Twin Peaks), I'm really impressed by the fact that one can watch the first season of Dexter - and the first season alone - and go, "Wow, that was satisfying." There are basically no loose ends that need tying up. I mean, the show does continue from there, which is awesome and all, since seasons two and three are both really enjoyable - but the series could have ended there and story wise, everything would be a-ok. In that respect it's almost like a mini-series.

But the most impressive thing about the first season of Dexter: it messes with you. In case you're unaware - which I'm kind of doubtful you are, if you've made it this far through the post - the series' titular protagonist is a sociopath and a serial killer. This is made abundantly clear in the season's incredibly brutal first ten minutes.

It goes without saying that most of us would be less than willing to root for a mass murderer who is superficially charming. And yet the writers of Dexter make us do just that. For their sakes, this is a good thing; I'm not sure many people would want to watch a show in which the protagonist does nothing more than disgust us. But for our sakes: this is kind of fucked up.

Every so often throughout watching the first season of Dexter, I'd find myself realizing just what exactly it was that I was doing: connecting with Dexter. This is not to say that I found what he was doing right; instead, it'd be like this: say that it seemed Dexter was just about to be caught. Inevitably I'd hope he wouldn't get caught. And then that thought would prompt another thought, something along the lines of, "Wait a second - is this right?"

It's not unlike what Nabakov does with Humbert Humbert, the pedophiliac narrator and protagonist of Lolita: we don't agree per se with what he's doing, but we continue to follow him/watch him/be entertained/charmed by him. So anyway: the fact that the writers of Dexter can pull off these sorts of cognitive dissonance shenanigans is pretty damn impressive, not to mention troubling on the audience's end.

But here's the thing: the more I watched Dexter, the less this thought popped into my head. My initial thought was that I was just getting desensitized - you know, used to the idea of "rooting" so-to-speak for a sociopathic killer. But not to get all self-critical, there's another possibility: it could be that as the series has progressed, Dexter has become less sociopathic. After all, without giving away too much, he does do more than a few personal favors for close friends and family; not to mention that Dexter actually seems to love his girlfriend Rita more and more as the series progresses, something that an actual sociopath would probably be incapable of doing.

So maybe that's why the third season of Dexter was only Pretty Good. Maybe a part of me sort of enjoys the moralistic mind-fucks that the writers force upon their audience. Though the implications of said mind-fucks are a little troubling, the mental acrobatics required to confront them are buckets of fun.

I recently realized that making movies is sort of like an amalgamation of my major interests; it involves writing, theater, music, photography and (to a certain extent) computers, for starters. And so Jordan and I present to you the latest result of our amalgamations of interests: the Frogdrum Productions YouTube channel. So far there's not a lot on there, but we hope to update it on a regular basis. For starters, we have our standby Taffy as well as a new one called Phone.

And you bet your buns that I'll let you know when new ones are posted.