Hey, not to make too much out of this (in case it’s old news) but did any of you iPhone users out there on the Internet notice something strange this weekend? I personally felt a great disturbance in the ‘Net, as if millions of Facebook videos were suddenly viewable on my iPhone for the first time in EVAR. I fear something very interesting has happened in the Great War between Apple and Adobe over Flash video. So. Am I late to this party or have I actually discovered something new?

This post is pretty pointless, other than to make you aware that I know quite a lot about those hated noisemakers known as “Vuvuzelas” which are currently plaguing the 2010 World Cup.

Back in the 1970s my Dad took me to a football game at Georgia Tech’s Grant Field. I don’t remember anything about the game, but I do remember that he bought me a big blue plastic trumpet that I could blow really, really loudly. It could make your teeth rattle.

Of course I only remember that he bought me that big blue plastic trumpet because the next time he took me to a Tech game we were stopped at the turnstile so that they could confiscate my big blue plastic trumpet and put it safely away for me to pick up after the game. I remember my Dad being pretty pissed off that they wouldn’t let us into the stadium with the horn since he’d originally bought the darned thing from vendors there at Georgia Tech.

What the ticket takers at Tech failed to explain to my Dad is that after one or two games filled with deafening horn wails the athletic department at Georgia Tech had issued a ban on big blue plastic trumpets – the desperate wish of many soccer teams currently enduring the aforementioned Vuvuzela phenomenon in South Africa.

Interestingly, years later, when we were shooting the period film “Remember the Titans” we bought several cases of plastic stadium horns to distribute as props to extras to give motion and life to crowd shots during game footage. For reasons which elude me now we had many (if not all) of those plastic horns painted gold. Problem was, the gold paint had a tendency to flake off the plastic horns… the plastic was either naturally slick or it still had mold release on it from the casting process. As a result, we were perpetually painting those darned plastic stadium horns.

Of course we didn’t call them “plastic stadium horns”, we shortened it down to “horns”… at least that’s what we called them until our new prop assistant James Brothers showed up. James called them “Tooters” one night and the name stuck.

The tooter you see in that YouTube video is made of blue plastic with honest-to-gosh HOLLYWOOD GOLD PAINT flaking off in patches… it’s one of the few souvenirs I have left from Titans (besides a real game ball and actor Donald Faison’s mouth guard, which had fallen behind the metal cabinets in the prop truck only to be discovered at the end of the show when emptying the truck… if anything ever happens to Donald I’ve got his dental impressions).

I’d put this thing on eBay to sell as a movie prop (starting at US$10,000) but I’m too afraid that it might find its way to South Africa to disrupt the World Cup ever further…. so best not.

Unless you have US$10,000 and really want a plastic horn.

…

I’ve recently joined the ranks of people brought to the crossroads of a life decision after being exposed to the squirm-inducing cable television program Hoarders. While grubbing around for my model-making tools I ran across a giant metal spider; the remnant of a plot by my friend Alice to take me out of the picture.

Back in the late 1990s I bought my very first cellphone: a Nokia 2160. Perusing the catalog of accessories for the phone I saw that Nokia made a car kit that would allow the phone to be mounted to your dashboard, but only if you were willing to drill holes in your dashboard or forever scar it with epoxy. Neither of these solutions appealed to me so I approached my friend Alice, an extraordinarily talented artist and metal-smith, with a request for a rig that would sit in the floorboard of my car and hold my phone for me on a platform.

Now, I may have said something about “making it cool like Batman” because that’s the sort of thing I’m prone to say from time to time… but I had no idea how much “cool” Alice would pour into the thing.

Truth was that I didn’t really care what the phone holder looked like, I just needed something that would work – so when she came back to me with her solution I was blown away! Alice had fashioned a bug-like cage out of iron, designed to cradle my phone within its curvy metal rod legs, each leg tipped with an iron ball. The entire rig was mounted atop a flexible gooseneck which attached to a flat metal base at the bottom.

It was genius!
It was artistic!
It was rather heavy.

I discovered this fact one afternoon when taking a hard left turn because the phone, riding in its awesome new black iron bracket, swung away from me, over to face the passenger door. Moments later I made a turn to the right and the heavy metal platform swung over toward me and grabbed the gear shifter with its metal legs.

I mean, totally GRABBED it.

It kind of grabbed my leg too.

This act of aggression was quickly followed by panicky shouts (mine), loud curses (mine) and a great deal of veering back and forth along the roadway (me, me, me).

Over the course of the next several months I fought several skirmishes with “Alice’s Grabby Grabber”, escaping each time with my life. I started wondering if she was sitting at home controlling it somehow and in the process I became a little frightened of her and her metal monster and I resolved to be done with the whole thing, but I was reluctant to give the rig up entirely because I enjoyed owning such a unique piece of art.

However, after a particularly harrowing trip through a Wal-Mart parking lot I knew that I had to retire the darned thing.

But I still like it.

Please don’t hurt me Alice!!!

Tonight was my first time back in the gym after 16 months away and I’m embarrassed to say that I lasted all of 10 minutes on the new elliptical machines.

Seriously, it was pathetic. I’m so completely out of shape that my legs were nearly turned to jelly after my dismount, which surprised the heck out of me because when I stopped working out back in the Fall of 2008 I could have gone 45 minutes or longer on a similar machine (depending on what was playing on television at the time).

I didn’t even make it through the end of the Seinfeld episode where everyone is trying to avoid Crazy Joe Davola at the opera which was TERRIBLE because I LOVE the scene with George scalping tickets in an alley.

Still, there was a bright side to Day One: I didn’t throw in the towel.

I mean that literally. After having my ass handed to me by the new elliptical machine I walked over to toss my towel into the return bin and head back to the car when I was gripped by the realization that I needed to do just a little bit more if I was serious about trimming down a bit.

So I wobbled over to the recumbent bicycles and pedaled gamely for another 20 minutes while trying to remember how to work the television on the stupid thing. I never did find the end of that Seinfeld episode but I did get to watch a replay of International Space Station Astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson trying to repair a space dishwasher (or whatever) on NASA-TV.

Gripping stuff.

That’s the amusing thing about the Georgia Tech Campus Recreation Center – nobody bats an eye if you decide to watch NASA replays on your workout equipment’s mini-televisions and they provide FREE issues of USA Today and the New York Times in the vestibule as you leave.

Almost makes it worth the risk of getting mugged by some clown on the way to your car.

Did you know that the Late Night Wars have gone online? I didn’t. I only found out yesterday.

Last weekend I went to see late night talk show host Craig Ferguson “in concert” at the Cobb Energy Center, a poor man’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. While it was great fun to see my Twitter-pal @CraigyFerg live and in person, I was surprised to find myself annoyed at his incessant cursing. I, mean, it’s not like I don’t use foul language in my regular every day life, I’m just as clay-footed as the next person – - but there really was some part of my intellect which stood up primly and declared (in a Craig Ferguson sort of way) “Cursing? Reeeeally??”

It was disappointing to watch this clearly clever man employ a comedic “mutually assured destruction” with the dreaded F-bomb.

I considered sending a tweet to @CraigyFerg to tell him that I thought he’d be just as funny if he could cut his cursing back by 35% but I knew better than to waste my time because he has such an enormous group of followers (which he calls his “skeleton robot army”) and he rarely replies directly to individual tweets.

As one of the first 1,300 people following Ferguson I enjoyed his tweets and watching his list of Followers increase exponentially. Then, a few weeks ago I noticed friends tweeting that Conan O’Brien had also started tweeting. And then, a few nights ago, I noticed the largely lovely actress Kirstie Alley on David Letterman’s show, and Letterman was hovering over a laptop, for all intents and purposes tweeting.

By this point I’d become curious to find out how many late night hosts were on Twitter and how their individual “skeleton robot armies” stacked up against each other. Within 5 minutes I’d determined that ALL the talk show hosts were using Twitter, and using the great comparison tool at TwitterCounter.com I was able to generate several head-to-head scenarios of each host’s numbers over the past week and them compile them into the graphic featured at the top of this article.

Such surprising results!

As you can see from the graph, Twitter debutante Conan O’Brien is decimating the old guard with a staggering 650,000 followers.

But it’s not just Coco who’s in the lead!

New guy on the scene George Lopez is beating both Jay Leno and David Letterman, tailed closely by cheeky F-bomb-possessing- monkey Craig Ferguson, who has 140,000 followers.

However, things aren’t all doom and gloom for the dinosaurs of the talk show trade!

In just the last week Letterman (with 30,000 followers) has climbed out of the Twitter basement, passing Jimmy Kimmel‘s 25,000 followers and closing in on arch nemesis, demon-lord Jay Leno’s 37,000 followers. Of course anyone who knows Leno’s history won’t be surprised when the steamshovel-jawed talk-meister engineers a situation in which his parent company purchases Twitter and cancels Letterman’s account

Just when I was getting ready to publish these findings I remembered that I’d left someone out of my ciphering: that punk kid who took over Conan’s 12:30am spot. I actually had to ask Google to give me his name since I normally flip over to watch Ferguson at 12:30.

So that kid is Jimmy Fallon.

The Jimmy Fallon who has 2.5 MILLION followers…. see? ->>

These two graphs clearly delineate the future of American talk shows.

The guys who have the most followers on Twitter are most in touch with the social media addicted younger generation, the generation who will ultimately be candidates for the 11:30pm time slot (let’s ignore the entire DVR discussion here).

Sure, over the next few months Leno and Letterman will gain followers on Twitter and I fully expect them both to overtake “youngsters” Ferguson and Lopez, but at the end of the day it’s obvious that they and their producers missed the boat with social media. To be fair, a lot people didn’t get the Twitter thing and will gleefully continue to not “get it”. Frankly, it isn’t incumbent of the old guard to latch onto new technology because they’ll inevitably come off looking like Pat Boone trying to do a Beatles song. These guys know what their audiences like and they needn’t change the recipe too much; Letterman will continue to attract people who don’t realize that he’s been phoning it in for the last 10 years and Leno will continue to attract retirees, beloved toothless quarterbacks and seriously bad writers. I’m not sure what will happen to Jimmy Kimmel, but I’m pretty sure that he’s safe.

Because he’s YOUNG.

In 15 years we’ll be watching Fallon, O’Brien and Kimmel, because they represent the future…. and as much stink as we’ve raised about the shabby way that NBC treated Conan O’Brien, they’d be far dumber than we already think they are if they don’t realize that they’re sitting on top of a Secret Weapon with Jimmy Fallon.

But don’t worry Craig.
I’ll watch you as long as you want to do your show but you’re never going to win, even with the F-bomb.
(tweet at me @drewprops!)

For over a year now I’ve been using a neat plug-in for my web browser which hides advertisements on websites, cutting out the clutter and increasing my surfing speed. However, several weeks ago I realized that this marvelous plug-in was causing weird behavior whenever I tried making comments on Facebook so I disabled it and was astonished to discover what I’ve been missing out on all this time: women!!! But not just any type of women; these are women who are looking specifically for guys who are 42 years old.

Holy crap!!! I’m 42 years old!! What are the odds??!!

I never knew that such women existed! Just look at the attached valentines card I made from the army of women I am now considering for romantic liaisons. They’re sassy, sparkly, smiling and besides the fact they’re completely obsessed with men my age they all have one thing in common:

Bewbs.

Just look at ‘em.

Wow.
I don’t even know where to start.

I was recently surprised to find myself blurting out the name “Oscar Goldman” to the television. As this is not something I typically do I feel it important to explain that I was (finally) watching the film “The 40 Year Old Virgin“. In the movie there is a scene in which the main character explains the importance of one of the hundreds of collectible toys lining the walls of his apartment. In this case it was a bland looking doll wearing a garish sports jacket; the epitome of 1970s men’s fashion and I recognized it without hesitation.

That little guy was Oscar Goldman, the boss of Steve Austin, aka “The Six Million Dollar Man“. Take a look:

As you may suspect, I not only knew who Oscar Goldman was, I had my very own Oscar Goldman toy as a kid… complete with the exploding briefcase seen in Jim Emmon’s video (above).

It’s important that I point out that The Six Million Dollar Man wasn’t just a formulaic episodic television show from the mid-1970s, it was a glimpse into a future in which the notion of “handicapped” had been redefined to mean “bad ass” for an entire generation of kids. We left the 1970s believing that nearly any physical handicap could be overcome through the proper application of high technology combined with enormous stacks of money (never mind that we also believed that giant robotic Sasquatches roamed the Pacific Northwest).

When word got out that Kenner was releasing a Steve Austin doll it immediately shot to the top of my Christmas list. This doll would be a game-changer!! It had a telescope for an eye, an arm that could lift practically anything so long as you kept jabbing the big red ratchet on the doll’s back, and (even better), you could roll back the skin on his arm to reveal the bionic circuitry beneath. This was the sort of doll that proved you were living in the future and I absolutely had to have one.

What I didn’t count on was that my parents might not be able to find me a Bionic Man action figure anywhere in town because every kid my age had asked for the same damned toy. Every store was sold out so they came up with a Plan B…. guess what I received instead…

I received a Mike Power “Atomic Man” action figure, made by the GI Joe people, who were committed to cashing in on the bionic fever sweeping the land. Their strategy was to crank out a GI Joe figure with prosthetic limbs. Good old Mike Power had one clear arm, one clear leg, two kung-fu grip hands, and one eyeball which did not function so much as a telescope but rather as a signal mirror. His right hand was articulated so that it could spin a “personal helicopter blade”… but it really didn’t help much.

This “counterfeit Six Million Dollar Man” had zero curb appeal.

The thing was a complete dud in my eyes… more of an “acrylic man” than an “atomic man”…. check out this video and see what you think….

Needless to say that I was let down a bit, but a week or two after Christmas I did eventually receive my own Steve Austin doll and later on an Oscar Goldman doll complete with exploding briefcase.

And yes, if you must pry… I still have all of them.

Shut up.
Shut the Hell up.

(For all you folks who grew up in the 70s and 80s you really need to visit Sean’s site ToysYouHad.com for a great trip into yesteryear)

…

Last month, for the first time in over 5 years, I was officially back in the movie business, if only for few days. My friend Joeprops was in Atlanta, having taken over as propmaster of The Vampire Diaries. After completing a few small graphics jobs Joe pitched me on cool new project: illustrating a prop journal that one of the characters was slated to find in an upcoming episode (now known as “The Turning Point“, which aired on November 19, 2009). After thinking about the job for a day I agreed to have a whack at the drawings and spent the following weekend studying old woodcuts, peering through antiquated investigations of human anatomy, prying into the secret code of the Philosopher’s Stone, learning the vagaries of pentagrams, and generally trying to inhabit the mind of the book’s fictional author.

Next, I dug up my collection of Speedball inking nibs and a jar of good old-fashioned black ink and started in to drawing. Each drawing was done without penciled-in sketches – it’s just straight from the pen to the paper, just like in my real sketchbooks. I’m not a commercial artist, but neither was “Jonathan Gilbert” the character who supposedly created the drawings, and I thought the book’s drawings should feel genuine, not overly art directed (which is actually art direction in itself).

The prop department did some light aging to the pages but the grownups wanted them to look much older, so we employed my personal favorite method of aging paper which involves a strong brownian solution, a simple newtonian time machine and good timing. Out of all the pages we treated there was only one mishap – one of my ancient vampire curses lingered too long in our secret aging device and began smoldering with the hate of a thousand slain vampires until we doused it in the sink…. for the next 30 minutes every person who walked through the break room remarked on the lingering scent of charred vampire poop.

That’ll sure make your eyes water.

Let’s face it, Facebook, you have managed to make me look like a fool twice this week and while that’s not terribly difficult to do, I’m getting tired of it. This time around I find out that you fulfilled my wish for a way to view status updates only. No application updates, no notes, no videos, no links to helpful articles like this one, just plain old status updates. So where did you put this fantastic new Feed View? Why, down at the bottom of my list of Feed Views. While this is probably not a big deal for most of your users, it’s a really big deal for me because I subdivide all of my users into different categories to help me wade through them a bit better. So, let’s see what we have to in order to see the Status Updates view as our default page view. (Thanks to Amber Ward and her list of friends for this tip)

Step One
Look at the bottom of list of Feed Views for the word “more” and click it.

Step Two
Locate the Feed View titled “Status Updates”.

Step Three
Move your mouse to the right hand side of the “Status Updates” Feed View item, then click and drag it ALL the way up to the top of the list, letting go of it at the very top.

Step Four
Now that the item is at the top of your Feeds List, CLICK IT!!

Step Five
Celebrate! Now you can see all of your friends’ status updates without seeing all the additional blather that they or their apps may be posting.

Mind you, by following these instructions and never looking back you many never run across good information like THIS ARTICLE again in your lifetime, so be sure to use the News Feed and Live Feed views from time to time to get a taste of what your friends are yapping about this week…. you never know what those crazy friends might be up to!!

Happy Facebooking!

Jeepers, people. Has Facebook gone wanky (again) or what? Don’t worry though, it’s okay, I have a fix so that your Live Feed works nearly like it did before the weekend of the Great Facebook Flop of Late 2009…… but before I get to the fix let me first mention that I found these instructions on Facebook… and of all people, it was sitting up on the wall of our friend Hollis Gillespie, a well known potty mouthed Atlanta author with movie deals and book deals coming out her ears. While I admire and respect Hollis’ creative skills it galled me that I, a graduate of Georgia Tech with a double-secret minor in computer technology, had to rely on a woman whose cellphone is held together by rubberbands (no offense Hollis).

So the fix.

If you’re not already there, go to your Live Feed. If you’re on your News Feed you’ll see the link above the box where you can type your status update.

Once there, scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen until you see a bar which states “Older Posts” on the left and “Edit Options” on the right. (This is just above the site’s footer)

Click on “Edit Options” until a dialog box pops up featuring the “fine controls” for how you view your friends’ feeds. Note the lower area entitled “Number of Friends”. There is a text entry field located here which allows you to tweak the number of users that will be screened for appearance on your Live Feed.

For reasons unexplained this number is set at 250. If you have over 250 friends this is a problem… so change that number to something higher. Once finished, click the “save” button in the lower right hand side of that pop-up box and it will disappear, hopefully taking your new higher limit back to headquarters and restoring some normalcy to your friend stalking addiction.

Happy Facebooking!

(note: be sure to read my newest post about Facebook’s undocumented transition)
I got tired of not understanding the NEW version of Facebook’s News Feed and went all the way over to their help section (tiring, this) looking for answers. Why they didn’t send the explanation out to its users baffles me (I’ve re-posted their answer below for you lazy people).

To quote Facebook’s Help Page:

What is the difference between News Feed and Live Feed?
News Feed aggregates the most interesting content that your friends are posting, while Live Feed shows you all the actions your friends are making in real-time.

How does News Feed determine which content is most interesting?
The News Feed algorithm bases this on a few factors: how many friends are commenting on a certain piece of content, who posted the content, and what type of content it is (e.g. photo, video, or status update).

So THERE!!
Annoying? Yes.
Weird? Yes.
But I still call this a win. The app spam is gone and now I can simply follow the most interesting of my friends without even needing to pick and choose.

Let’s see how well this actually works.

Katrina Rice didn’t get a screen credit.

Now, those of you outside the film industry need to realize that this is something that happens all the time. Those credits at the end of the movie that seem to go on for days and days? They could last even longer!! Quite often the carpenters and scenics who lovingly craft those ancient temples and gleaming space stations and barnacle-encrusted pirate ships are left entirely out of the credit roll at the end of a movie, which means that their names won’t live on into “eternity”… and despite the fact that many producers use the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) as their guide to work experience, there’s no substitute to seeing your name crawl up the silver screen and knowing that thousands of people around the world will see it (trust me, this is a surprisingly emotional experience).

Yes, the carpenters and scenics think that it stinks that they get left out on a regular basis, but they’ve become accustomed to it and no one in Hollywood seems particularly interested in changing the practice.

Of course it isn’t fair, and yes, it does in fact represent a caste system that exists in Hollywood, but I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know. I mean, you have seen Bowfinger haven’t you?

So when the credits rolled all the way through and the lights came up, we all started asking each other if anyone had seen Katrina’s credit. The answer was a unanimous “NO”.

Now it isn’t as if Katrina had been hammering together flats in a woodshop, far from the silent whir of Panavision cameras. In fact, Katrina was part of the shooting crew for the entire movie as Third Props and also worked as 2nd Unit Propmaster during certain sequences of the film.

From the Best Boy to Key Grip to Art Director, everyone on the crew knew Katrina Rice.

The film’s star, Woody Harrelson, knew Katrina Rice especially well because she’s the woman who perfected an entirely vegan replica of a Twinkie to suit his dietary requirements. I mean, the man talked to late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel about those very same faux Twinkies!!

In her spare time at home, not even on the clock, Katrina worked through batch after batch of animal-free, organic confectionery treats trying to find a recipe that would suit Woody and match the look of an actual Twinkie onscreen. On the day the actor finally had to bite into her handiwork on camera he congratulated her on her success.

Toward the end of the film Katrina approached me and asked me to help her design a shirt for the ladies on the crew so I adapted a diagrammatic zombie head from one of the Art Director’s zombie warning posters and made the artwork you see at the lead of this post: the Zombiegirl Power shirts – shirts which a lot of the women on the crew ordered (I’m wondering if the show’s Producer bought one for the ladies in his life).

And then, the weekend of the film’s release, Katrina organized a huge Zombie Princess Party and had a metric tonne of pretty girls get dolled up in princess gowns and zombie makeup just to go see the movie. It was a spectacle for everyone in the theater, an absolute hit.

So… like… what up guys? Seriously. Explain to me how you leave off somebody like that. I know that everything is more expensive these days, right down to the length of a credit roll…. but come on. A few extra names is terribly stingy.

So this is where I need some help from you internet goons and goonettes.

When compared against all the hurt and suffering in the world it’s absolutely silly and petulant to worry about getting screen credit on a film, but do me a favor:

When you go to see the movie Zombieland I want you to remember to shout out “Katrina Rice” whenever you see Twinkies. Don’t do it just for Katrina. Do it for all the people who work on movies and never get credit (including Katrina’s boyfriend, whose nickname is coincidentally “Woody”).

And tell your goony friends to spread the word…. What do I care? I’m not worried about getting hired by these maroons. The only way I’m going back into the film business is above the line – that way I can make sure that my screen credit rotates in 3D and has dancing skeletons on top.

Go kids!
It’s time to nut up, or shut up.

I understand that my pals The Cardboard Troopers had a wild time this past weekend. They arrived in Atlanta for the 2009 edition of Dragon*Con, but they couldn’t actually seem to find a trace of the convention and the hotel people kept looking at them funny. I sure hope that they come back for the 10:00am parade on Saturday, they always seem to enjoy that.

Which reminds me that last month the Fall issue of the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine hit the stands and I was simultaneously delighted (97%) and mortified (3%) to read the article about me that staff writer Van Jensen composed after we met prior to my surgery this summer. Entitled “How Did That NERD on the Left Become That PIRATE on the Right?“, the article does a really nice job of catching people up with the kid who won the Batman contest back in the 80s… and the second page features a certain cardboard trooper standing in front of a line of “real” troopers at Dragon*Con.

Last week our friend Bob announced that he was going to sell a few old Star Wars toys he had laying around his house. This of course piqued my interest, as I’m one of those millions of children who were imprinted with the plans for the Death Star back in the summer of 1977. Like many of those kids, my formative years were spent poring over pre-production illustrations by Ralph McQuarrie and building my own models of the ships out of balsa wood and styrene. Looking back, I thought that I had a pretty great collection of lovingly-used, carefully-protected toys and memorabilia packed away into boxes and sent off for storage.

I was so wrong.

What I’m leaving out is that “our friend Bob” is better known in Star Wars fan circles as “VaderPainter“; one of the premiere Darth Vader costumers in the nation. His Darth Vader costume has its own custom-made road case… something you’d expect to see during a load-in for a KISS concert. It has custom-cut foam receivers for Vader’s helmet. It has casters. It has reinforced sides and custom silkscreened artwork on the outside. It’s totally Rock-n-Roll, and it’s totally ready for tour… which is exactly what Bob uses if for because he has appeared all over the place as Vader and has more Imperial Stormtrooper friends than you can shake a gaffi stick at.

Knowing how seriously he takes his costuming it should have come as no surprise that his Star Wars collection might be “above average”.

What it turned out to be though is “beyond imagination“.

Bob’s house is a realization of every Star Wars toy collector’s dream: shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves filled with figures and spaceships and books and models and replica costumes and helmets and…….. there were so many toys and figures on hand that I honestly had a difficult time focusing on any one item because there were five more things right beside it that I wanted to see. I kept finding myself staring with my mouth open at things I’d only ever seen in magazines, like an art student walking through the Louvre admiring the care given to each piece of art on display. Just incredible.

The video I’ve posted here is of Captain Matt of ThePirateShip.com being given a personal tour of the collection by VaderPainter himself. Enjoy!

After yesterday’s visit to Bob’s sale I have to tell you: my collection is a joke. And I’m okay with that. In fact, I’m more than a bit relieved because now I won’t have to build a Star Wars museum of my own. As we were driving away my 78 year old Dad said “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen a toy store in a house.”

Right on.

…

In the fall of 2008 I went to my new primary care doctor for a physical. My PSA levels were high so we ran a round of antibiotics to see if it was an infection of some sort. After two weeks we re-tested and the levels were just as high so I went to see a urologist, who suggested that everything pointed toward the need for a biopsy. I opted to wait until after the holidays.

On January 27th of 2009 I went into the hospital for a surgical biopsy. Three days later the doctor was on the phone telling me that I had prostate cancer. Somehow I knew that I was going to get that call, but it still shocked me to my core. On the way home that night I called an old friend to tell him the news, still trying to make sense of it myself. Later, I wrote a letter to a friend living out of state as I didn’t want to talk on the phone about it. Telling my parents broke my heart and I don’t like to remember that day. That night I told friends on a messageboard, most of them spread across the country and the world. That felt “safe” because they’re the “little people who live in my computer”… and they were so great, rallying to bolster me up. Later still, I met with my bosses to let them know what was happening, as best I could. But mostly I stayed quiet to the world.

February was a blur of appointments and scans and tests and conversations and absolute mind-numbing dread. A radical prostatectomy was the best option, with radiation seed therapy running a distant second. The recurrence of prostate cancer isn’t unusual, and since I’m so “young” to have this disease the best option was to remove the prostate entirely, which would dial the danger down to zero for the rest of my life.

Now, this urologist happened to be someone who performs traditional “open surgery”, and has done so for years. He suggested that I should look toward Northside if I decided to have “robotic” surgery. However, my understanding of “robotic” surgery was based on some old DARPA concept sketches published in tech magazines sometime in the 1990s and I had no desire to be a guinea pig for what I felt was immature technology.

Soon after, one of my oldest friends suggested that I go with him down to Florida to watch the Braves in spring training. After a bit of indecision I leapt off of the fear wagon and straight into Denial Town for a bit of a vacation and it was great. The perfect break; one that I was tempted to stay on permanently, if only I could get a job as an Imagineer at Disney.

But the trip to the land of pre-season baseball is always over all too soon and I was forced to find other ways to not deal with my Next Step. Hiding behind a string of must-see episodic television series was an excellent technique. Burying myself in work was another.

I maintained my silence about my situation with everyone I knew, only occasionally letting friends know, and even then it was only under certain situations. One of the dumbest things about considering yourself to be a fun-loving person is that YOU think your friends are going to expect you to be entertaining and funny… that they won’t want to see your thunderclouds. I couldn’t have been more wrong, but I wasn’t ready to tell people yet, partly because I didn’t have my Next Step in place.

I felt bottled up and it was killing me, but I couldn’t manage to make myself go to get a 2nd opinion… I think that the fright had caught up with me. But I still told a few people here and there.

Seriously, I dare you to try tossing the line “oh, by the way, I have cancer” into the middle of a dinner table full of people chattering away happily. That’s a social hand-grenade and I wasn’t able to throw it because I didn’t have a follow-up response to that announcement, and how dumb would I look not having a medical plan in place?

While I was at the Atlanta Film Festival I was talking to a filmmaker I used to date and she advised me that it would be best if I just kept quiet about the cancer, saying that she would never tell anyone… and as smart as she is, I knew that we were wired very differently. I wanted to talk about it with everyone, but I wasn’t quite ready yet… was I going to do the open surgery after all? Why was I dragging my feet then?

One afternoon I was scheduled to have lunch with a couple of friends from the movie business and another couple of former classmates from Georgia Tech. I was on the phone with my friend Channing, giving him directions to the restaurant when I was suddenly seized by “that feeling”, so I tossed the cancer grenade.

After the initial shock, and expressing his sympathies and best wishes, Channing said “Well, you’re going to get the DaVinci surgery, right?”.

Now, that’s probably very nearly exactly what Channing said to me. But the tone of his voice said “Please tell me that you’re not an idiot” and that surprised me almost as much as the fact that he knew what the DaVinci surgery was… I mean, I barely knew myself, and I was the one with the prostate cancer. It was a metaphysical slap across my metaphysical face and my metaphysical cheek was smarting something metaphysically fierce.

“How… how do YOU know about the DaVinci surgery??” I stammered.

“Remember, I’m a hospital architect, I DESIGN the stupid operating rooms!!” came his amused reply.

Driving to meet everyone for lunch that day, all I could think about was what Channing said. Then at lunch he and my friend Magnus explained that they had a friend who’d recently had the surgery with one of the two “big gun” surgeons in Atlanta and that this friend had become a disciple of the DaVinci surgery.

I never told him, but Channing gave me the push I needed.

I started thinking about the da Vinci surgery all the time. I started reading about the mechanized da Vinci “surgical system” and comparing it to open surgery, specifically when performing the “da Vinci prostatectomy”. In-surgery blood loss, nerve-sparing techniques, recuperation time, it all suddenly made so much sense. The tools were oh so TINY (see my illustration again to get an idea of how big the “snipping” tool is when compared to a dime).

This is one of the da Vinci machine’s instrument arms fully extended. The tiny operating tools are located at the end of the extensible black rod/tube.

It turned out that my belief that this was “experimental” surgery was out-dated. The technique had been around long enough, not long enough for hard clinical comparison to open surgery, but long enough that it had established numbers and they were good. The technique was gaining traction every year. Men I knew who’d had traditional open surgery in the last 15 years ALL said that they would pursue the robotic surgery if they could have it all over to do now.

With all of this information in my head I finally realized that I had bought into this surgical technique. I made the call to Scott Miller, one of the city’s very best da Vinci prostatectomy surgeons, and was met by the most incredible response by his staff. They sent me emails, they called me back to check with me. They held my hand a lot, and I needed it.

I was suddenly on track and everything felt right.

I had momentum.

I started throwing the cancer grenade more often, and every time it went off I found more support. LOTS of people had relatives who’d had this surgery, or something similar. Information began flowing. I could suddenly talk to people with other medical problems with new understanding. A week or two before the surgery I posted information to my friends on Facebook and sent out an email to other friends and was stunned to find out that an old colleague from the film business had been diagnosed a year before me and had the same surgery with the same surgeon. At his urging I called on him many times before and after the surgery, which was a real blessing.

What if I’d never told anyone?

Opening up was the best thing I ever did, I know three guys who have told me that they went to get checked after hearing about my cancer – and I’ve no doubt that they wouldn’t have given it a thought otherwise because that’s how we guys are. But we do talk about this stuff amongst ourselves, especially if somebody we know gets it. We’re not afraid to ask questions of each other and if I can help one person catch this particular problem by being a poster child it’s something I’ll gladly do.

Now, crawling into a quiet hole and not telling anyone does in fact work for some people, but it would have been the worst medicine for me. It’s up to you to figure out what suits your personality, your age, your culture, and your relation to your friends. But don’t be afraid to tell people. They’re certainly not going to laugh at you, and if they treat you like you’re made of porcelain for awhile, let them. Everyone needs a way to cope with this situation, and who are you to deny them their coping mechanism? Just don’t be afraid to tell them when they’re being a little too coddling.

Between my Facebook announcement and that big email I still managed to miss a lot of people and have been getting a lot of calls in the weeks following my surgery. It’s simply impossible to get the word to all of the people who know you, so don’t worry if you miss a few. They will understand that you have more important things brewing.

And… if some of your friends disappear from your radar entirely because they can’t deal with your situation, let them go without anger or hurt. It’s their problem. Maybe they lost someone important in the past and simply can’t deal with the chance of further loss, which is sad. Maybe they’re cold and insensitive robots and were never worth having as friends in the first place, which is tragic because that must be the way they live their entire life. Or maybe they never actually liked you!! LOL – just don’t hold it against them. Or do. Whatever works.

Going in for surgery can be scary. Teeth-chatteringly scary. Defy the fright by being the calmest person in the room.

Having your family with you is great, unless you don’t like them and then it’s probably a terrible idea. Fortunately, I like my own family quite a bit and knew that they were in far worse shape than me because I was about to get some really great drugs and go very, very far away for two or three hours, while they had to sit in uncomfortable chairs in a big waiting room with a lot of people they didn’t know, worrying about me for hours on end.

I remember getting into the gown, and then into the leggings they use to prevent clots. I remember being dressed with some sort of silver sheets and shower cap and leg coverings they said they were testing for keeping patients warm during the surgery. I was convinced that they just wanted to dress me up as a baked potato. I remember being wheeled into the surgery. I remember telling one nurse she was really pretty. I remember seeing the robot over in the corner. Then I don’t remember so much.

The patient lies on a platform beneath the da Vinci machine, where technicians do a million things I can only guess at, like switching out the various tools at the tips of the robotic surgical arms, as well as more traditional actions like monitoring vital signs.

Later on I remember being wheeled down the hallway and talking to people we passed, saying hello to anyone I could. The attendants were cracking up at me. That’s what I do when I come out of anesthesia… I like to wave and smile at people. They should put me in a parade right after surgery.

I remember getting into the bed. I remember a thousand night visits from a million different nurses and unceasing barrage of temperature checks and leg compressions and terrible hospital food and being tired and sleeping. But none of it was all that bad.

By noon the next day I was released to go home. For a week I had a catheter in place and the less said about that the better. It’s not the End of the World, but it sure is close, somewhere up toward the front row… not because of any pain, just the annoyance. Be sure to have a plan in place in case your cath stops draining, which happened to me one very exciting afternoon.

The catheter has been gone nearly a month and I have some recovery issues that I’ll continue to deal with for awhile, but there’s hardly any pain whatsoever from any of the actual surgery itself.

The six abdominal scars are healing quite nicely, and in case you’re wondering, here’s the key to the scar diagram as best I understand it:

1) Camera went in here. Prostate came out here.
2) Suction and some spritzing delivered through this incision.
3) surgeon’s micro hand tools
4) surgeon’s micro hand tools
5) assistant’s tool(s), delivery route of suture needles to site
6) additional grabber

Five weeks after the surgery my energy levels are still improving, but aren’t quite up to normal yet. I’m not supposed to do any heavy lifting yet. I’m still a bit scattered, but every day I’m a bit more “with it” and have been posting silly crap online again.

If you’re reading this and you, or a loved one, have been diagnosed with prostate cancer, I’m sorry. It sucks. It’s scary. Your options depend on your age and the state of your cancer and your existing health. A friend of my friend Dale, over in Charleston, South Carolina, sent along a PDF from Johns Hopkins that showed a study which said that surgeons who work on a LOT of cases on a regular basis are a VERY good choice…. seeming to fit with the old adage “give a job to a busy man and it will get done”. So, if your surgeon has done 30 of these operations, and you have the opportunity to go to a surgeon who’s done over 1300 of them, I recommend you investigate that high-volume doctor.

If you’re up to it, talk to your friends. Talk to people who have had your surgery. Nobody can prepare you for all of it, but it does help cushion the experience.

My friend Mike, who was diagnosed with a different sort of cancer taught me to be mindful of your loved ones, as they’re silently suffering in ways that you may not realize. So don’t lash out at them when you’re scared, as you’ll only ratchet up their stress levels.

And that’s all I have for now.

I still have months and months of recovery to go through, things that go beyond the healed scars. I wish you only the best and pray that you will find a path that leads you to the next big chapter in your life.

God bless.

One night earlier this week I woke up embracing one of my big J.C. Penny brand pillows, with my hand slid up inside the pillowcase… I’m not especially proud of this, but I’m pretty sure that I got to second base. The problem is, I didn’t know “her” name. So I’ve asked my friends to help me name this new pillow girlfriend and am posting a poll with all of their suggestions in the hopes that you’ll take a few seconds to participate. The winning suggestion will earn the submitter a free PiratePalooza 2008 T-shirt, compliments of my friend Captain Drew… and best of all, I’ll be able to resume my liaisons with my pillow without worrying about getting her name wrong. The advantages of having a pillow girlfriend far outweigh the disdainful comments of your fairweather friends!!

She’s always fierce, ever so fierce – far too primal to hang anything as pedestrian as a name on. She’s simply “Kitty”, a title she pointedly ignores. I love her long black hair (I refuse to see the white hairs creeping in), the proud disdain in her eyes, and the way she seems to ignore me when she’s actually watching most closely. She bites: sharp, sharp, sharp!! She kicks: one, two, three!! All to let me know when we’re really, seriously engaged in the conversation primeval. She never backs down from a fight, unless the wind is wrong or the moon’s too high in the wild night sky. She melts into the shadows, adores the heat, and kills the little grey mouse ever so dead, dead, dead – just for me.

Or maybe not.

Regardless, you can see more pictures of Miss Kitty in her own Flickr album.

I recently treated myself to something I’d been wanting to do for nearly 2 years… I had my family’s DNA genotyped by the company 23andMe. Here are 10 things about me and my folks that we didn’t even know (and this is just scratching the surface of data about ourselves that we can explore):

10 — My Mom’s mother’s mother’s mothers sprang from the same haplogroup as THE Marie Antoinette (though that does not mean that I am necessarily a direct descendant).

9 — My Dad’s mother’s mother’s mothers came from a region stretching between Spain to North Africa, all the way around to Lebanon. No wonder I like drinking Port and eating Baba Ganouj.

8 — My DNA says that I have a 24% lifetime incidence of experiencing Prostate Cancer, as compared to other people in my same genotype. This is fairly ironic, as I am currently recuperating from robotic surgery for prostate cancer.

7 — I am not a carrier of the BRCA Cancer Mutation, which now defines the life of my childhood friend Nikki who is still on chemo to this very day.

6 — I have a 21% lifetime incidence of experiencing Psoriasis, as compared to other people in my same genotype. This was another ironic discovery, since I’ve been dealing with that skin annoyance for nearly 5 years.

5 — I have substantially higher odds of having red hair. How crazy is that?

4 — My IQ will be raised by 6-7 points if I am breastfed. The things I’ll do to excel.

3 — I have moderately lowered odds of getting Mad Cow Disease (Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease). Eat mor chikin.

2 — I’m over 99% European, less than 1% Asian. That tiny percent of Asian in me REALLY likes Asian food and hot Japanese Schoolgirls and Yu-Gi-Oh!

1 — The haplogroup of my Dad’s father’s father’s fathers suggests that we may be kin to the Irish king Niall of the Nine Hostages, who established the Ui Neill dynasty that ruled the island country from the 4th or 5th century and onward for the next millennium, though our family is more recently from Scotland. There can be only one.

—
Back in 2007, when I first learned of 23andMe.com, they were charging $999 to provide this service. The price has come down to $399, which isn’t cheap, but what price can you put on learning about yourself from the inside out? Tell ‘em that Drewprops sent you and they’ll say “Great!! That’ll be $399!!”, but in all seriousness, I recommend that you follow their Twitter feed to take advantage of some $50 discounts they’ll be offering in the coming weeks.

Do you know what hyperbole is?
Do you know who Kirk Montgomery is?
Do you know what you get when you mix the two?

I just heard an advertisement for the new Star Trek movie in which Mr. Montgomery is quoted as saying that the new Star Trek is “this generation’s Star Wars”. ORLY? I thought it was supposed to be this generation’s STAR TREK!!!!

Cretin.

::sigh::

Following this new variation on logic I can only surmise that:

• “House” must be this generation’s “Gone With The Wind”.
• The new Will Ferrell remake of “Land of the Lost” must be this generation’s “French Connection”.
• “Transformers 2″ must certainly be this generation’s “Citizen Kane”
• and who could deny that “Operation Runway” represents this generation’s “From Here to Eternity”??

Alls I know is that THIS generation have their heads up their collective asses and that Mr. Montgomery is leading the charge. Just like Humphrey Bogart in “Ironman 2″.

Now THERE was a classic.

I have a little present for you… keep reading!

Anyone who’s been within a mile of a geek is aware that the Star Wars franchise continues to exert its influence on popular culture. Yet, in the 30+ years since its initial release, I think that we’ve forgotten the ferocity with which that space opera seized our collective imagination… it was a massively incredible time to be a kid… a time when words like “wookie” and “darth” and “R2-D2” were alien and exotic and felt wrong and strange and wonderful when spoken aloud.

The First Age of Star Wars stretched easily from 1977 into 1978, and yet there was very little merchandise marketing to take advantage of the movie’s staggering popularity. In time, Star Wars and its ilk would pave the way for today’s relentless merchandise marketing machines, but in that very first year there was little preparation by the studio or its licensees and intellectual property theft was rampant. It was a time when you could glue the words “Star” and “Wars” onto your product and make a million dollars.

Take, for instance, the following treasure stored safely below ground in the depths of the Drewcave, replete with children-drawn illustrations of creatures and characters from Star Wars (click here to download (note!!! this is a 14.7MB PDF). This isn’t a joke or a fabrication, but a real scan of a real book given to our class for the 1977-78 school season… a rare first glimpse into a burgeoning Star Wars phenomenon that has endured and is nearly as popular today as it was back then.

How It Was Made
I removed the original staples of this book and set them aside before scanning in each page. After scanning, the pages were straightened in Adobe Photoshop and then broken into single pages and placed into Adobe InDesign, before being exported as a PDF.