Severdia

Oscar predictions

It's Oscar time again and here are my predictions for this evening's award ceremony:

Best Film: LOTR: Return of the King (But I hope it's Lost in Translation)

Best Actor: Sean Penn (But I hope it's Bill Murray)

Best Supporting Actor: Alec Baldwin

Best Actress: Charlize Theron

Best Supporting Actress: Ren?e Zellweger

Best Director: Peter Jackson (But I hope it's Sofia Coppola)

Best Foreign Film: The Barbarian Invasions (But I hope it's Zelary)

Pirates of the Caribbean will probably win some technical awards. These are hard and fast choices in each category and not necessarily who I would like to win. I'd like to see Lost in Translation win a few awards just to show the movie studios how a small, independent low-budget film can conquer over all their blockbuster approaches to moviemaking. Also, the Czech film Zelary is a nice film and it would be great to see another film out of the former Czechoslovakia to get the Academy Award (along with Kolya and Divided we Fall).

Van Gogh?

No . . not really the lost Van Gogh photo. It's a long lost picture of Wil Wheaton (remember Wesley Crusher or "Stand By Me"?) getting into makeup for his 1996 movie "Mr. Stitch". (Oops, they spelled his name "Will") On my latest trip to Kryolan to pick up some makeup for my performance, which premieres next month, I picked up Tom Savini's latest book "Grande Illusions 2". I have the first one and I'm told it's pretty rare and out of print.

I'm in the process of designing 3 different web sites right now . . . not to mention my own site (and my real job!). So updates to this blog are going to be sporadic until I get those up and active.

I got called for jury duty yesterday. But I was excused from it, thank God! Now, it's not like I'm trying to shirk off my solemn duty as an American citizen, but it couldn't come at a worse time. And when I got home, my wife had received her jury summons! How's that for timing? The thing is, her English isn't perfect and she isn't even a "real" citizen yet so she can't be asked (...yet...) to do jury duty. This is the only time I'm glad that the INS is the slowest bureaucracy on the planet, otherwise she'd have her permanent green card by now.

Extending life . . .

The worst thing in the world is not backing up. It's actually the second worst thing in the world right after having a hard disk totally crash and burn. My Powerbook hard disk tanked the other day and I've been trying to recoup ever since. I didn't realize I had so many applications and documents until I was forced to start reinstalling all of them. I lost tons of documents, but I managed to back up my email about 3 weeks ago so that was a minimal loss. I called DriveSavers and they are way overpriced (between $500-$2700) for someone who is not a company with business-critical data.

There's an article on Wired today about John Sperling and his life-extension programs. It's a shame he didn't plug his latest project a bit more-- a political book about the great divide in the United States. I worked on this book a lot and it should be in stores in the coming months.