I finished casting last night. There were four times as many people as parts, so I had to make some hard choices and turn away people I really like (or would really like) to work with. This ends a four week long string of busyness, so tonight I can finish cleaning the kitchen and tomorrow I can take time to return the countless emails that have piled up in my inbox. And maybe even start wrinting here again like I used to. Ahh… those were the good old days.

In the future, many languages spoken today will be lost. One group seeks to preserve them by creating a modend day “Rosetta stone”. They are engraving common text as well as creation myths and grammar primers onto a three inch nickel disk. It won’t be digital, either. It’ll be complete engravings, readable with a simple 10,000x magnifying lens. I found this on eatonweb.

The Big Eyed Art Bananza: “I bet you’ve probably already guessed- I am totally obsessed with big, poor, pitiful, weepy, sad eyes. " Puppies, cats, cute little girls. If you like big eyes, here’s your place. Unless you’re looking for anime big eyed art. Western art only, here.

Friday, December 1, was World Aids Day. This weblog was unavailable then.

View From the Heart, Alwin Hawkins excellent weblog, turns a year old today. Alwin does a wonderful job of mixing links with anecdotes and stories from his life, and I’m happy to see him reach this milestone. Today he tells us it’s all been worthwhile.

It’s been all about food. The last two weeks, that is. It all started with Thanksgiving, which my girlfriend and I spent at the home of some mutual friends. The very same friends that introduced the two of us and became responsible for my current euphoric state. My friends were cooking all the traditional Thanksgiving foods, and then some. I was in charge of dessert and wine. I made three cheesecakes: pumpkin, of course, along with chocolate caramel pecan and apple caramel sundae. I made them all from scratch, including the caramel, but stopped short (this time) of making the cream cheese. Wine was a few bottles of the very tasty Beaujolais Nouveau and some white port from Mount Pleasant Winery in Missouri. It was a fantabulous night.

Then I had to cook for a lot of people. The theater group I do most of my work with has an opening night reception for each play it puts on. Usually it’s finger food things, fruits and cheeses and the like. I was doing the reception this time, and the play seemed to call for more. It’s called Dearly Departed, and it’s a comedic look at a southern “white trash” family dealing with the loss of their patriarch. Finger foods were right out – I had to do a full southern style pot luck. So I cooked for about a hundred people, using every pot and pan I had (some of them three times). Fried Chicken, macaroni and cheese, okra, hush puppies, banana pudding, fruit salad, deviled eggs, punch, cookies, peanut brittle. I used my two volumes of the White Trash Cookbooks (despite the titles, they are really very good, very informative books – highly recommended) heavily in choosing just the right recipes. The reception was Friday, and it went very well. But Saturday I faced a trashed kitchen.

I cleaned as best I could, for Sunday was another day of cooking. What was envisioned as a post-Thankgiving Thanksgiving meal, it was scaled down to include just me, my girlfriend, and my excellent friend Kim. Longtime readers and people who know me might recognize the oddity in that, but it was really very nice. My kitchen was still half-trashed, but I forged ahead and baked a ham (and then glazed it), made cornbread stuffing, mixed vegetables, baked sweet potatoes, and the most wonderful Cornish game hens I’ve ever had. I followed a recipe for the Chinese delicacy Tea Smoked Duck, adapted for Cornish hens. Though a bit involved, the cooking was very easy. A rubbed marinade, steaming in the wok, and smoking in the wok. Instead of wood chips, the smoking agent is black tea (I used Lapsang Souchong), uncooked rice, peppercorns, brown sugar, cinnamon sticks, and anise. Someone once told me that this dish was best left for the restaurants, as the smoke would stench up the house for many days afterward. But I lined the wok with foil and wrapped the overhang around the lid, sealing in all the smoke. And that did the trick. And the taste was out of this world.

So now my kitchen’s a disaster again. Luckily, I can live off leftovers for a few days, because it’ll take a few days before I can really shine the place. I’ve got auditions tonight and tomorrow for the next play I’m directing, Christopher Durang’s wickedly funny Baby With the Bathwater, opening next February 2.

Well, it hasn’t been all about the food. In other news of the weekend, the events set in motion on Day Zero have led to my kindred spirit becoming my kindred housemate.

You’ll notice a couple changes at the end of each entry of this weblog. First, I’ve consolidated each post’s permanent link with the timestamp. If for any reason you wish to link to a specific entry of mine on a web page of yours, click on the timestamp at the end of the entry to get that entry’s permanent URL. Second, thanks to a neat tool called BlogVoices, you can add your voice to mine by commenting on specific entries. Your comments will be available to future readers. To add your voice, or to read the voices of those that came before, click on the word “Add” folowing the timestamp. So long as this feature doesn’t slow down the loading of the page, I’ll keep it.

Our eyes see three primary colors: red, green, and blue. All of the colors we know are blends of those three. Colorblind people are missing one or more of the receptors, severely limiting their color perception. On the other extreme, tetrachromats have four -- an extraordinary mutation found only in certain women. Current research asks if these women’s brains can take advantage of this extra “dimension” of color.

Could a parasite passed to humans from housecats cause schizophrenia and bipolar disorder? There’s some very convincing evidence that schizophrenia is caused by an infectious agent, and E. Fuller Torrey, one of the giants of schizophrenia research, thinks he may know the source.

Yesterday I spent my lunch break painting set pieces at the theater for the Town & Gown Players. The theater’s phone rang, and I had the following conversation:

Me: Town & Gown
Male Voice: Hello, Mr. Players?
Me: Excuse me?
Male Voice: Are you Mr. Players?
Me: Oh! Yes… I’m he.
Male Voice: Hello, Town, I’m Greg and I have a special offer –
Me: Town? Oh, no. That’s my lovely wife. I’m Gown Players. Thanks for calling, but the Players household isn’t in a spending mood today. G’day!

I guess telemarketers see all sorts of strange names, but really… Town & Gown Players?