Hesperia Star office manager Maria Bamba and I will be manning the Hesperia Star booth at the 3rd annual Hesperia Community Business Expo on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (Editor Peter Day will be putting the paper to bed so it can be printed up late Saturday night, so it’s hard to say if he’ll be able to make it.)
The Expo isn’t at Sultana High School this year, and I’m not sure where it is yet. (I’m told somewhere on Hercules Street, which is still a little vague for my tastes.)
This year is the first that we won’t be sharing a booth with the Daily Press, so I don’t know if we’ll have free copies of Saturday’s paper to give out as we have in previous years, but we will have the last of the Hesperia Star magnets (which are really nice, honestly — whoever bought them a long time ago spared no expense), copies of the paper and information about subscribing or advertising in the paper.
Hope to see you there!
Here’s a funny outgrowth of this site — and proof that Mom was right about always behaving myself in public, even when no one appears to be watching — I had a reader call up today and ask about the URL of this site. Apparently, it gets discussed among certain circles of readers. I can only hope she wasn’t too disappointed to see me nattering on about my cell phone and what I thought of the DVD I saw over the weekend.
(At least one city councilman and my publisher have let me know they also have read the site at one point or another, which I think mostly suggests the High Desert needs more bloggers, because this blog surely isn’t the most interesting one around.)
To throw everyone a bone, I’ll put up some photos of the cats soon, as well as the video I shot of Peter to test out the new camera. Look for those exciting updates later this week.
And make sure to read Tuesday’s edition of the Star, as things are starting to heat up in the city election. After tonight’s school board meeting, it looks like the school board race is beginning to shape up as well. There’s some other curve balls coming that I don’t know about “on the record” yet, but I expect to break soon. It’s going to be an interesting political season here in Hesperia, almost to a fault. Given that the school board and city council can be totally transformed this year — three open seats on each mean the potential for a new controlling majority — it’ll be worth the headaches keeping up with things.
Be forewarned: The first few minutes of The Producers
are a little surprising if you’re expecting the (relative) subtlety of a normal Mel Brooks movie. The film of the musical based on his original film is done bigger than life throughout, with the acting never dropping down from the this-is-for-the-folks-in-the-back-row level. Once one is acclimated to that, however, this is a great, great time, although one that always feels very much like the filmed version of a stage play and not necessarily like a movie musical.
The basic story and story-within-a-story are as hilariously profane as ever, meaning this movie is not for children or for the easily offended. Mel Brooks takes a machine gun approach to every sacred cow on Broadway and his willingness to push the boundaries in the 1960s still feels quite edgy today.
The television and film actors he casts in the movie — some in blink-and-miss them roles, like Andrea Martin and Michael McKean — all acquit themselves well and bring an extra layer of polish to things, although I imagine fans of the Broadway show will complain, possibly with merit, that the original stage actors should have been given a chance to perform before a wider audience.
Still, this is a dazzling film and side-splittingly funny.
Strongly recommended for fans of Mel Brooks (stick around after the credits to see him appear in the film of the musical of his old film), the strong cast (Will Ferrell does an especially good job in his role as a maniacal Nazi-turned-playright) or folks who are just curious about what all the fuss was about on Broadway.
I know this weakens my case with Jenn that my new cell phone is a work device, and not a toy, but I just want to rave about two shareware games I picked up, since I now have a phone robust enough to play them:
- Strange Adventures in Infinite Space is a quickie game, lasting to a maximum of about 15 minutes. You pilot your ship around the sector, trade, fight hostile aliens, avoid intestellar hazards and collect technology and biological specimens for big bucks at the end, all with a somewhat retro look and feel.
Other than wishing there was some better way of knowing what the value of the various items was (the final score feels a little like a crapshoot), it’s a lot of fun, and extremely well-done.
- Village Sim is a very different sort of animal than SAIS. In it, you help primitive castaways survive life on a new island with a mysterious past. You have to help them gather food, build shelter, learn medicine and handle the mysterious things on the island that predate them.
The interesting part is that the game continues even when you’re not playing (well, it notices how long since you’ve been playing and plays a bunch of turns instantly when you log back on). Fortunately, it goes slowly enough that I haven’t managed to, you know, do work or have a life and come back to find my five little castaways dead, but I have had a few surprises, like finding an old drum with something inside or my castaways picking the local berry bushes clean. An interesting little sim.
Well, this is worrisome, given that sarcoidosis can lead to serious vision problems: I’ve been symptomatic the past few days, feverish, finding it hard to focus, low energy, my typing sucks (OK, that’s not an official symptom, but when the 110 wpm kid starts stumbling over basic stuff, I begin to notice the pattern), wrist, knee, ankle and knuckle pain and all the rest. In addition, I’ve got the rarely occuring dry skin on my eyelid and, hooray, hooray, my vision has been blurry all night.
If it doesn’t clear up in a day or three (I seem to go in peaks and valleys with this thing), I’m going to ask if there’s a specialist I can be referred to. I just got really cool new glasses; having this thing screw my vision all up to hell isn’t an option.
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