'Bred Crumbs

01:04 PM

*** FARSCAPE OBSESSION ALERT ***

The suddenly burgeoning brood of female Farscape babes has been acknowledged with the elusive "It" of Entertainment Weekly. While it brings joy that the mag is finally starting to notice the show, it's unfortunate that the womenfolk get all the attention with no mention of series star/writer/fanboy/hottie Ben Browder. Had EW given Browder his due (and written twice as long as usual) it might have gone something ... like this ...

 

BEN BROWDER

It Space Cowboy

AGE 39

WHY HIM? As lost-in-space astronaut John Crichton on the Sci-Fi Channel's Farscape, a show known for being both smart and sexy, Browder is an all-around contributor. While battling extraterrestial evil in black leather, he ad-libs some of the funniest lines and has become a creative force on the series, writing two episodes so far.

THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES "Farscape has a wonderful anarchy about it. It's evolved radically since the inception, taking on a life of its own," Browder says.* "[I]t's a fantastic journey to play. I got to start out as the guy who couldn't open a door, then get to a certain level of competence, then they sort of stripped it all away."**

WARNING: SPIT-TAKE DANGER Farscape illuminates its darkness with ongoing bursts of hilarity, many provided by Browder's quirky character. "No drinking while Crichton is talking," Browder warns. "It's dangerous for your furniture."***

HUMBLE HUNK Browder downplays his sex appeal, even though castmate Gigi Edgley (Chiana) has precisely pegged him as "the Ultra-Cool American Handsome Hunk Boy." "That's all makeup and hair," Browder says. "That's all lighting."****

CHEMISTRY TEST "I love John and Aeryn. It's a great relationship – a strange one but a great one." Joking about his off-screen rapport with Claudia Black, who plays his on-screen romantic combatant, he adds, "We fight well. It's just a natural extension of what Claud and I do all day long. Ours is a classic Hollywood rivalry – the trailer war we're having is humongous. Hers is six inches longer than mine. I'm out there with the tape measure! She's got a bigger trailer!"**

ON SHOOTING IN AUSTRALIA Though the American South will always be home to him, "Sydney is a fantastic place to live and we are very well settled into life here. ... And two of my three surfboards are here."***** On the other hand, "Let's be honest, they do not have Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch in Australia. If I'd known, that would be in my contract.**

THE WRITING LIFE Browder wrote Season 3's excellent "Green Eyed Monster" and a Season 4 episode, "John Quixote," set to premiere on July 26. "I thought it'd be easier the second time round but it's absolutely nerve-racking, because you're shooting stuff and you're thinking, 'Oh God, is this gonna work, is this not gonna work?' and you're hung out to dry because you wrote the script. And when you're shooting a scene and there's something wrong and I'm in it, I'm going, 'All right, the script sucks. No, wait, maybe my acting."******

EARTHLY ROLES Browder played a house-building boyfriend of Neve Campbell's character on Party of Five as well as "the last geeky guy on Melrose Place. ... I was [Allison's] old boyfriend. Billy came along and got jealous, so they had to make me geeky. I had clothes that were ten years out of date. And I was dumb – I made Billy look smart in comparison."**

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10:48 AM Something I wish this site had, but it doesn't, even though it was found by this search query:

funny deli lingo

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America, you may now return to your previously scheduled lack of interest in soccer. (I never left.)

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12:39 PM You could sit in your car and fume about a study needlessly reminding us that big-city traffic takes a lot of time, or you could cast your perspective net wider and consider the possibility that the time of the average commute hasn't changed significantly in centuries – when travel becomes faster, we just wind up with jobs farther from home.

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12:10 AM "International" signs entertain me. Two of my all-time favorites are the one for Don't Let the Soda Machine Crush You to Death, and this one, from poolside at a Key West hotel, indicating that diving could decapitate you:

Those are joined now by the one in airplane lavatories, on the bottom of the toilet lid, imploring you not to throw untoward things into the toilet. What's great is that the guy behind the red circle-and-slash is throwing everything in at once: a cup, a bottle, a tampon (which I guess his wife is too ashamed to dispose of herself – and how strange it is that I recognize the universal drawing for tampon), a sealed lunch bag (no, not the Chicken Whopper!), and what I guess is supposed to be a diaper but looks at first like a whole turkey. And they say airplane food's bad.

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Here's last week's partial solar eclipse, courtesy the trees next to my balcony, who conveniently cast multiple images of the celestial blockage on my livingroom floor.

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05:27 PM Spent a long weekend in the birthtown. I had hoped to 'blog on the road, but I didn't realize the degree to which civilization refuses to come to Frogtown.* Not a Kinko's or a coffeehouse to be found. (Though the cable system kicks the fiber-optic ass of the sorry one in SF. But then, they all do.) And of course, my parents don't have a computer and remain barely aware such a thing exists. They continue content to let reality blast past their tiny myopic time-stopped bubble world, which makes discussion of certain topics not merely difficult, but hard to even work out an approach to. It's as if you had to precisely plot an assault on Everest from a beach in Jamaica. Another bad analogy – not only can they not see the image in the Magic Eye; they don't even acknowledge that someone is waving the pattern a foot in front of their faces.

And, sadly, I missed the earthquake they tried to throw for me. It was weird enough that I drove out of town to the airport through fog. I guess they were just trying to make me feel at home.

There was one interesting hometown development: a strange lack of gas stations. Seems that one company owned most of them in town, and then a holding company bought that company, but it bit off more than it could afford and went bankrupt, closing all the stations. Easily two-thirds of the stations I drove by were closed. It added further to that eerie, lost-in-the-past** feeling I get more and more when I go back there. It's the sort of place where you see a marquee like this

HEAVEN OR HELL
IT'S YOUR CHOICE

on a car dealership.

The trip there was fine. It was my first flight Since, and I admit a little trepidation. But by the time I got to Kentucky, I was feeling less scared and more violated; I and my luggage got searched at every stop. (Weirdly, the second post-check-in search, in Cincinnati, was more thorough than the one at the gate in San Francisco.) I was beginning to fear I fit some sort of terrorist profile, but I guess it's just that the lucky winners in the random-search lottery are chosen at check-in and followed through. Coming back, I was unassailed. Besides, what room do I have to complain? If it's good enough for Al Gore, I can take it.

On the return trip, I did have to to deal with a quite long, cowboy-hat-filled line going into the departing security checkpoint. I'd made the dual mistake of picking Nashville as my airport and picking this particular weekend, which unbeknownst to me was the time of Nashville's annual Fan Fair. Think of it as a sci-fi convention for country-music fans. And given my choice of obsessive freaks, I greatly prefer the former.

Oh, and there may be Starbuckses in airports. It is allowed. There, they belong.

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