'Bred Crumbs

07:03 PM Why I Love San Francisco, cont.: Today was the election of the San Francisco Imperial Court. The camp-aigners were out in force, crowding every corner in the heart of the Castro with balloons, big wigs, colorful outfits, and admonitions about whom to elect Emperor and Empress. Meanwhile, with California hurtling toward a primary election in two weeks, State Assembly hopeful Harry Britt, assisted by top city supervisor and oughta-be mayor Tom Ammiano, also held fort at the key 18th-and-Castro Bank of America corner. "You realize how many votes Harry Britt's going to get for Emperor now, don't you?" I said to Ammiano when I passed. Being a successful politician, he pretended to be amused.

Dining across the street later, I spotted at that corner a man wearing a sweatshirt, leather panties, and hip waders. (And I doubt he'd just gotten back from fly-fishing.) He was standing between the Empress stumpers and the Britt backers. Here's the great, San Franciscan part: he could have been working for either campaign.

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Meet me, Faramir, in the next Lord of the Rings movie. Find your Middle-Earth counterpart with the LotR Character Test. (Thanks to Scott for finding it.)

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09:08 AM Back when I worked in the sports department of a Kentucky newspaper, we often would engage in good-natured arguments about which sports were really sports and which weren't. Two things likely to lead to such a discussion were golf and the Olympics. One of my colleagues had a sensible rule about what the real sports are; he said that if the competition's outcome is based entirely on scoring by judges, then it's not a sport. I'm reminded of this by the current controversy about the Olympic pairs figure skating, about which I'm finding it difficult to care.

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MTV has assembled two phrases that don't go together: "real world" and "Las Vegas."

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You think you've got problems? At least you don't have to deal with illegal Mexican cheese.

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11:11 AM What has been de facto for a couple of months became official this week: my improv troupe, Dojo Fabuloso, is done. (And apologies, mailing-list friends; I'm the tired soul who forgot to fill in the subject field when I sent out the farewell e-mail.)

This is not the place to tell the whole sordid story; suffice it to say that a publicist would have attributed the breakup to "creative differences" and that it was all very Behind the Music. But as it became clear over the winter that internal impasses were too raging to ford, at least most of us also realized that as a group we had made the mistakes of the naive, the kind you can learn from only by making them, and that most of us individually had, through desire, necessity, or happenstance, started focusing our energies elsewhere.

It was good while it was good, and when it became a stress source instead of a stress relief, it was time to stop, and I'm accepting that with surprising ease and almost no regret. I'm not giving up on making the funny; a few of us who worked in Project Dojo have bandied about trying to play with some sketch comedy, and someday if that amounts to anything, maybe we'll take the stage again. But this time, we won't push it. I know Dojo entertained several people, and I'm proud of that, but our drive to bigger-and-better stripped the gears. Next thing I do like that, I don't want the fun to get crushed.

What Have We Learned?

Pre-nup, pre-nup, pre-nup. No matter how friendly everyone is, and how much you hate to think the worst of anything, before starting on a group venture get things down on paper. Figure out what the work is going to be and who's going to do it. Realize that someone will have to run things, figure out who, and make contingencies to change that. Know whether everyone is on the same page before you start writing the book.
If you meet someone whose ego seems so inordinately large that a little voice inside you is expressing doubts about the person's potential as a collaborator, heed the hell out of the warning signs.
And if you're still defending the person when all your friends are onto him, wake the fuck up.
I love making people laugh. Intentionally.
The audience's expectations are not nearly as unforgiving as mine.
I don't like show business. And that's fine.
Know that your instincts aren't everything, but they're pretty damn big.
Something you're clinging to just for the sake of clinging isn't worth being clung. Let it go. It will be OK. The part you think you'll miss is already gone, and now you're just ditching the bad part. And if you pull the plug after reasonable attempts at repair, it will be the good part that you remember longer.
You learn more than you think you do.
The funniest things happen when no one is around to see them. And the camera's not running.
Relaxing is vital. And I'm still not very good at it.

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06:40 PM Over the last few months, I've become a minor fan of the series Stargate SG-1. It's not a great show, but it's OK -- easily the second-best sci-fi drama on TV, and far better than anything the Trek machine coughs up. So of course, right when I discover the show, it's going to hell. (Warning: the link contains a major spoiler.) Salon details how the producers, rather than keep a good thing going, are Seven-of-Nining it into the Dumpster and driving away its most loyal fans, just as the programming-deprived Sci-Fi Channel is taking it on.

The degree of fan loyalty to series co-star Michael Shanks, who has made the James Spader movie role his own, is especially startling. I find him oddly appealing, but it turns out there's a ton of women who'd love to have him pass through their stargates, if ya know what I mean.

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