'Bred Crumbs

04:18 PM The acting class I've been taking for eight weeks ended last night, and here's the main thing I learned from it -- my acting-lesson lesson, if you will:

Acting is a very technical exercise. For all the talk you hear of "motivation" and "becoming" the character, it actually boils down to assigning movements and emotions to words, then memorizing it all.

I took the class in hopes of improving my improv by learning how better to be someone other than myself. And maybe I'll find over time that I did learn some of that. Meanwhile, the only way I saw that improv applies to acting is that it helps you save your scene if things go awry.

Maybe someday the acting bug will bite again, but for now I'll stick to Dojo.

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Add 10 points (or more) to my geek cred; on Memorial Day, I'm going to the Battlebots finals.

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Wouldn't it be cool if, somehow, the sun had phases too?

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11:18 PM A new study demonstrates clearly that some gay people who have let gullibility, low self-esteem and societal pressure based on fear and ignorance cause them to become so ashamed of themselves that they'd rather conform to hateful attitudes than honor their true natures and desires can, indeed, successfully pretend to be straight.

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10:33 PM Nothing helps take the edge off a long stressful day like getting your mail and finding in it a $300-plus-interest check from your state government, which got busted by the courts for charging you (and many like you) $300 when you moved here because your car didn't happen to have a label saying it met California emissions standards.

And, on top of that, finding out that your home is in one of those special blocks that is exempt from the blackout rotation.

On this one wonderfully warm day, California bows down before me.

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What is the Web-age equivalent of a Freudian slip? Methinks the producers of the increasingly awful-looking flick A Knight's Tale have made one. The movie's URL is a smashed-together one-word version of the movie title. And at first glance, it looks like the words run together are "a knight stale."

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Old Navy is going to start selling maternity clothes. Gee, can't wait to see those commercials.

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10:22 AM It feels as if this improv thing I'm involved in is starting to gather steam. Yesterday, amid the computer tables at Busvan for Bargains, someone I don't know said to me, "You're in Dojo Fabuloso, right?" and went on to say how he'd enjoyed the show he'd seen. This is the first time this has happened to me; other Dojettes have reported similar unexpected fan meetings in the last couple of weeks. This Friday, we do our first show in a venue with actual stage lighting, theater seating, and an intermission. If we can just coax folks out to Fort Mason to see us, things should rock.

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08:21 AM Here's a sleazy new e-marketing tactic: when I checked my site stats this morning, there were two "referrers" listed that I wasn't familiar with. They both turned out to be from a desperate straight porn purveyor. Somehow, they make it look like their sites link to me; that way, when I check my stats, I wind up visiting them -- for the millisecond until I see that they're desperate straight porn sites.

I would rant about this annoying variant on spam, but then I think about how half the "respectable" sites I visit now try to throw pop-up ads in my face that obscure the content I came to see. And when you look at it that way, as far as regard for users goes, Business Week and the Los Angeles Times (which I won't link because they'll throw pop-up ads in your face) are on the very same level as Grannies and Fatties.

Oh, if only I were making that porn-site name up.

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10:30 PM In Limp Bizkit's "My Way," Fred Durst tries to rhyme "leadership" with "leave your shit." I can't decide whether to be appalled or applaud.

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