We found out today that Dad has a staph infection, which he caught in the hospital. Also, his blood pressure is dangerously low. Because it’s so low they are taking him off the antibiotics that are fighting the pneumonia and E.coli (because they lower blood pressure) and are instead giving him a different kind of antibiotic that will fight off the staph infection. Once the staph is gone and his blood pressure is up they will start treating the E.coli and pneumonia again.

Man, it’s always something right? With the semester having just ended and all this going on, expect the blog to be quiet for a few days.

Mom just called. In addition to a severe case of pneumonia, Dad now has E.coli in his blood and something called pleurisy. Mom says pleurisy is when fluid is stuck between the lungs and the tissue lining the lungs. We also have no idea where the E.coli came from. He just had blood work done at the beginning of last week and it was clear so he either got E.coli in the hospital or right before he went last Wednesday.

Miss USA, formerly Miss Kentucky is having some trouble. It seems the pageant winner is under review and Trump may give her the boot.

The organizers of the Miss USA pageant said Thursday they are evaluating the “behavioral and personal issues” of the reigning winner and will decide her future within a week.

“I can’t really talk about it now,” Trump said. “But we have to make a decision. There is no question about that.

Now I meet her last spring when she and the other contestants were in O.C. filming a promo piece for the competition. From what I could tell she was much wilder than most of the other girls and even though she’s only 20 she defiantly had a strong relationship with alcohol. There were also rumors that she was big into coke, but I don’t know for sure if that’s true.

The cover for Flight Volume 4 was released. I just read the third volume in Barnes & Noble last week and was impressed. I had tried to read 1 and 2 but I couldn’t make it through them, but for some reason 3 really kept me interested.

I was scanning the Gazzette for easy jobs when I was surprised to see an article talking about Geppi’s Entertainment Museum. Basically it talks about how the museum is struggling and no one is going to it.

‘‘Other than a game day, we’re in a landlocked position,” said Steve Geppi, a comic book tycoon who owns Geppi’s Entertainment Museum, which features pop culture exhibits and is on the second floor of Camden Station, above Sports Legends.

Seventy-five thousand people visited the museum in its inaugural year, one-third the projected number. One reason is a decline in attendance at Orioles games, Gibbons said. The estimate was based on an average season attendance of 3 million. This year, the Orioles drew about 2.1 million fans.

Hmmm first Gemstone has problems. Now the museum is having problems. Man, wouldn’t it be awesome if Diamond was next?

Remember when I posted about Wii players throwing their controller through TV screens? Well it seems Nintendo must have read my post because they put out a recall for the safety straps on Wii controllers.

From Nintendo’s website:

Nintendo is offering to replace the original version of the wrist straps for the Wii Remote with a newer version. Because Wii consoles shipped starting in early December already utilized the newer version of the strap, you will need to determine which version of the strap you have before ordering a replacement. To view the difference between the original and the new version of the strap, please click here.

If you have an original version of the strap, please complete the form below to get a replacement (also, to ensure you continue to have a fun & safe experience, please read our Safety Information for Playing Wii by clicking here).

Once your replacement wrist strap has shipped, you will receive a confirmation email from Nintendo. We expect to begin shipping replacement straps around December 21st. It will take 5 to 9 days for delivery depending on your location. Please do not contact Nintendo regarding your replacement wrist strap until after that time period has passed.

We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your interest in our products.

Remember that O.J. Simpson book from a month ago where he wrote about how he would have killed his wife if* he had done it? Then remember everyone was pissed off about it and finally FOX canceled a TV special and the publisher canceled the book?

Well it seems Judith Regan was responsible for the book deal and Rupert Murdoch’s Nes Corp. has fired her.

“Judith Regan’s employment with HarperCollins has been terminated effective immediately,” HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman said in a statement. “The Regan publishing program and staff will continue as part of the HarperCollins General Books Group.”

What do you get when you mix a shower, a bidet, and a terrifying, bikini-clad bunny rabbit? The Viteo Outdoor Shower. The shower is upside down, meaning the water comes from below you, and it’s activated when you step on the white surface. This allows it to be set up without needing all sorts of pipes and showerheads and such, but it also means your, er, undercarriage will get cleaner than your hair. Still, it’s a pretty neat design. I’m not really sure what the girl in the bikini with the head of a bunny has to do with anything, but I guess I just don’t understand artsy marketing. Maybe it’s a European thing.

Dark Horizons says it has some spoilers for “Spider-Man 3.” Check them out after the break…

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Pay at the Pump is so yesterday. I want buying things to be so easy that I don’t even have to pull out my wallet. Apparently Cingular and MasterCard have been reading my mind (I knew that magnetic stripe had a dual purpose), because they’re launching a trial program for paying via cell phone at stores in New York City.

Say you’re out buying some xmas gifts. If the retailer you’re at is set up for MasterCard’s PayPass (which lets you just tap your card to the machine instead of sliding and signing) and your phone is equipped with Near Field Communication (NFC), all you’d have to do is tap one button on your cell and you’re done.

Making you pull out a phone instead of a credit card isn’t exactly jacking up the convenience factor, but the “Tap n’ Go” method gives you the option of leaving the card at home. Then again, it’s one more reason to panic when you leave your mobile in a cab.

“The Sopranos” sixth season part one hit dvd last week and it seems HBO is finally giving a hint to when the final part of season six are going to air.

At HBO.com its posted that “The Sopranos’ final season starts in April.”

Mind you, that’s not the most solid date ever and doesn’t even list an exact date, but when breaks between new episodes have lasted up to 21 months, fans will see it as a good sign.

HBO also says it will re-air season six of “The Sopranos” beginning in mid-January. Assuming the network will want to air all 12 episodes before the new season begins, the final season of “The Sopranos” likely would premiere in mid-April.

Will Smith is Will Smith and no matter what type of movie or what genre he’s always going to rule the box office. His new film, “The Pursuit of Happyness” managed to bring in $27 million more than half of its $55 million budget. With Christmas and no other big drams/girly/emo movies coming out, it’s safe to guess that its going to pass the $100 million mark.

The joke of the week has to be either “Eragon” or “Charlotte’s Web.” Both are based off children’s books and both cost close to a $100 million, yet together they only made $35 million.

Continue after the break to see the chart…

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For the first time in my life I have some Wisconsin Cheese. It all started when I got out of the shower yesterday and Sarah says to me, “Why did you order cheese?” I told her I hadn’t. She then said “Yes you did. You ordered cheese from Wisconsin and some guy just delivered it.”

As soon as she said “Wisconsin” I KNEW it was a gift from Lisa and Craig, owners of Neptune Comics. I get my comic books from them and they sent this as an x-mas gift because my desire to try Wisconsin cheese has been a long term joke between us.

So I got dressed and immediately ripped open the box. In side were six different types of cheese. Some are normal like “mild cheddar” where as others are weird like “brick cheese” and “onion cheese.” It’s going to be tons of fun to try each one.

The only thing I’m worried about is I don’t know what I should do with the cheese. I want to eat it duh! But like, should I eat them by themselves? Should I use them to cook something? I don’t want to ruin the cheese by doing something mundane with it like putting it on a hotdog, but at the same time they seem too special to waste with just cheese and crackers.

Anyway I’m super excited about my xmas gift!

Finished my breakdown, scheduling, and budget for “Funeral Day” (a 130 page screenplay of mine). I did this stuff for my final project in my producing class and oddly enough it was a lot of fun.

I’m sure most of you have no idea what a producer does nor do you have any idea what kind of bitch-work I’m talking about. You see to get a budget you first must have a screenplay. Then you take the screenplay and break it down. This includes going through every page and marking/keeping lists of every person, prop, location, vehical, extras needed, stunts, special make-up, and well… EVERYTHING.

After you do your breakdowns (which take hours and hours) you make the schedule. A schedule sounds easy but it isn’t. You need to deal with unions and guilds. For example, SAG (screen actors guild) has all these stupid rules. For example, actors can’t work more than 8 hours a day without overtime pay. The must be fed every six hours and must get at least a 12 hour break from the time they wrapped the night before till the start the next day. Then you have to consider how many pages you can film a day. When locations are available. Time of day. And tons of other things.

ONCE you have a schedule, (for “Funeral Day” I scheduled a 29 day shoot using SAG rules). You then do a budget, which is stressful ‘cause your spending money that you know you’ll have to find from somewhere. For the budget you pay your SAG actors by union rules and then cover all the departments, making sure there is the proper equipment and people who can use it. You also need odd things like craft services (food tables) plus meals for the entire cast and crew.

So when all was said and done I was able to budget “Funeral Day” for a cost of $175,017 bucks. That’s shooting on HD, having SAG actors, and a full professional crew. This of course is a lot of money but in terms of movies it’s nothing for a full feature. The frustrating part for me is that I’m doing a full feature for my thesis in two years and all I an think of is “Damn, where can I get that much money???” the good news is that “Funeral Day” is a much more complicated script and long. So my thesis should be right around $100k at most! Ok, still a lot, but it’s manageable.

(reminder: I’ll be on campus all day tomorrow, but its the last time this semester)

Guess who is in the hospital… AGAIN. Yep, Dad. This time with Pneumonia in both lungs, and supposedly one is really bad. My sister is all worried that we’ll spend Christmas in the hospital, but we’ve done it before so if we have to, we have to.

Over at Beaming Beeman, Greg interviews Ruth Ammon a production designer on “Heroes” and talks about where the show is now (Pic Above is of some location scounting).

While HEROES is on a six-week hiatus we’re still working hard on making episodes that will air in January. Today, for instance, we had two units shooting. The first is in downtown LA shooting the last day of episode 14 - involving Milo Ventemillia and a new (exciting) character doing a NYC street scene. As night falls they will do a big stunt high fall into a Taxicab. The other unit is shooting day 3 of episode 15 – scenes involving new disturbing developments at Claire’s house – and later a scene set backstage involving Hiro, Ando and chorus girls. Today, I, personally, scouted locations and laid out scenes for episode 16 (which we prep now but begin shooting in the new year) – I also spent time in the editing room, first doing a visual effects spotting session on episode 12 and 13 and later with Tim Kring and Dennis Hammer reviewing and polishing the edit of episode 12 (which looks like it’s gonna be terrific by the way.)

I don’t feel like finding the link, but way back in September I posted about how Claire’s friend Zach was gay. Well it seems that is no longer the case.

Series Creator Tim Kring had this to say:

I am very sorry this has caused concern for the readers of your website. It was certainly not our intention to confuse the issue of Zach’s character being gay. We have too much respect for our audience to do that intentionally. However, it has simply become too complicated behind the scenes to push this issue further with this particular character. We apologize for misleading the audience, and wish that we could have handled things better on our end. But making a TV show is often a very imprecise business. As you stated, Heroes is a big, sprawling drama and there is no reason to believe that a gay character will not be represented on our show in the future. It is my hope than we do, we do it with honesty and dignity. That will certainly be our attempt.

Meanwhile, several other sources have confirmed that Thomas Dekker was the problem, not Kring, the show, or NBC. Dekker’s manager threatened to pull her client from the show unless the story was changed. I personally think its pretty crappy and that Zach’s character should just be killed off, but as we saw in last week’s episode, his memory was wiped, so for all intensive purposes he may be done. Also, an upcoming death is related to a situation over an agent/manager and maybe it’s Deeker.

A show by Amy Sherman-Palladino was picked up by Fox. The series is a half hour comedy entitled “The Return of Jezebel James.” There’s an article about it in Variety, Hollywood Reporter, and a few other places, but if you want something more in depth check out her interview with Ausiello.

Most of the interview was about the new show, but Amy did talk some “Gilmore Girls.”

Ausiello: If they asked you to come back for the finale, what would you say?
AS-P: Because I don’t know where they’ve gone or what they’re doing, that’s almost an impossible question for me to answer because, like I said, I have it in my head how I want it to end, but that may not at all jive with what they’re doing now. I would say I don’t really see how that would happen, because it would be so weird for me to go, “OK, these writers have set their paths, so I’ll just do that.” That ain’t Amy. Amy can’t follow someone else’s path. Then she wouldn’t be the delightful human being that she is.

Ausiello: What if your ending will still made sense in the context of these new stories?
AS-P: Well, if it still made sense, then it’s definitely something we could talk about. I love that show. That show was my child. It was my everything. Dan and I did nothing but that show for six years. We’re still staring at each other like, “What do we talk about now?” And I love the crew there. My best friend, Helen, still works over there. And I adore Lauren and Alexis. I love them. I miss them very, very much. I miss not seeing them and working with them. So I can’t say that it wouldn’t be fun as hell to go back there and hang with them for a while. I’m just not sure if that’s really going to be possible. Our storylines were very meticulous. Dan and I crafted arcs to go way, way, way back — for good bad or indifferent. Whether you liked it or not, we really put a lot of time and energy into setting up very early what we could pay off at the end, and I’m not sure that would be such an easy thing to pull off. I won’t say no, because it might happen. But I can’t see it right now.

Be-warned, you’ll see it after the break.
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And we tune in for another edition of Brevoort’s Brilliant Blog, this week he enlightens us as to why Marvel does so many stupid things…

“Some of our best and most commercial ideas have come from something somebody’s said off-handedly at lunch.”
2006-12-13 05:53:38

I was a little taken back when the headline on CNN read “Jack The Riper Returns,” which was later re-written as “Prostitutes told: Stay off streets.” I just found it as an odd editorial correction.

You can waste a whole day with this thing. Basically you type in commands and Santa does whatever you say.

This is great as long as you are a fan of “Scrubs.” Basically a PA had the cast record voiceovers for “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and then he re-edited the classic holiday special.

I’m no where near being a “Star Trek” fan but for some reason the idea of Matt Damon playing Kirk bothered me.

Straight from Dark Horizons:

Matt Damon has that he’s open to assuming the role of Captain James T. Kirk in the proposed “Star Trek” reboot film, but denied previous rumors that he is already in line for the iconic role originated by William Shatner.

“I heard that [rumor]. I think J.J. Abrams or somebody said that at press junket or something, and it got picked up… If the script was good, I’d do it,” Damon said in an interview with Sci-Fi Wire while promoting his latest film “The Good Shepherd”.

Abrams, producer of TV’s “Lost” and “Alias”, is set to co-write and produce Trek XI and may direct it as well.

If Damon were to win the role of Kirk, he would become the first actor to play the character since Shatner played him in the original 1960s Trek and its subsequent spinoff movies.

Bryan Hitch posted at Millar World that he has finished “Ultimates” #13. As fans of the series know, the book is SERIOUSLY late, but is now expected to hit shelves on the 31^st of January (2007). Hitch had this to say:

It’s been years coming but today I feel both sad and abso-frakking-lutely overjoyed.

The bane of my life for the last five years is gone from my day to day routine. Apart from a little tidying up, the penciling on the final issue of Ultimates 2 (13), all forty four pages of it, is done. Inking is going. colouring will follow and within living memory the book will come out. That may sound a little harsh but no job in my 20 pro career has been like this; so hard, so creatively rewarding, so time-consuming and so fullfilling. It will be nice not to struggle, if ony for a few weeks!

I’ve lived with little else by way of work for so long and although a little sad to be done with it, the new stuff ahead (which I’ve already started) is so exciting I haven’t time to mourn.

It’s been such a good working relationship with MM all these years that we have each other booked up forever. Our next book for Marvel, already underway is as different from Ultimates as I could hope without straying too far from what we do best. TV and movie news to come as well but next year is shaping up to be my most fun and most productive in a long time.

So, Goodbye Ultimates. It’s been swell.

Hello to the new crew. See you all Summer 2007. In print that is.

I stay away from posting You Tube videos but I saw this and I couldn’t help myself. It’s so painful to watch that I just felt the urge to share it. This is a real song called “Christmas Shoes” and its about a kid who’s mom is dying so his dad sends him to the shoe store to BEG FOR FREE SHOES so his mom can look pretty when she meets Jesus!

I don’t really do “music” or follow that industry, but even I know the premise of this song is stupid and find it hard to believe it was produced.

To help promote “30 Rock,” Alec Baldwin is calling people and telling them to watch the show. All you have to do is go here, enter the information and Baldwin will call whoever you tell him to call.

Bush is having a 3 day consultation about what to do in Iraq. Let me make it simple for him: GET THE F* OUT!

I have a breakdown, schedule, budget, pitch/proposal on a full screenplay due Thursday. So I’m pretty tied up doing work, but hopefully at night (all this week) I’ll update the blog on anything exciting in the entertainment industry.

My photography class is over and I’m sad. Out of all undgegrad and grad school classes it’s tied for the best class I’ve ever taken. Yesterday we all shared our final critiques and it was great to see how much everyone grew skill wise and to just see what everyone else did. A great example of the crazy stuff (and one of my favorites) is the picture above. It was taken by Michael Soucy and his series took fast food and looked at it in a humorous but often disgusting way.

The head of my department at AU sends out emails and in his most recent he pointed out Julian Beever is an English artist who’s famous for his art on the pavement of England, France, Germany, USA, Australia and Belgium. He does chalk drawings that at the correct angle look 3D.
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If MySpace wasn’t enough a new ComicSpace launched. I guess its supposed to be a social network site for comic book fans and professionals. Of course it seems to be lacking on most of the basic features. Anyway, you can friend me here if you want.

Blockbuster is trying to steal away Netflix customers. From now till Dec. 21, if you bring in a Netflix envelop to blockbuster you’ll gain a free rental!

Most “Smallville” fans know that the Justice League will appear on an upcoming episode of the show, but several sites are reporting now that the league will appear again in a second episode toward the end of the season, which will leave things open for a spin-off.

Talks about the eighth season of one of my all time favorite TV shows started over a year ago, and I’ve mentioned it a few times, but it seems Joss Whedon is finally doing the media push. I know he has done interviews with Rolling Stone, Newsarama, CBR, and Entertainment Weekly, but here’s a HUGE one here with TV Guide.

Joss Whedon’s “Firefly” universe is not dead, even though the movie-version bombed money wise. Browncoats should rejoice to know that Fox plans on releasing a Firefly MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) in 2008.

“FOX’s ‘Firefly’ series is set in an incredibly rich and exciting universe. It’s going to make a very compelling and unique online experience filled with adventure, humor, and mystery,” Corey Bridges, co-creator of FireFly said in a press release. “It’s our hope that ‘Firefly’s’ passionate and dedicated community of fans will enjoy the chance to become part of the story as they develop and explore the worlds of ‘Firefly.’”

Thus, in a little over a year, gamers and Browncoats will be able to visit other planets, make deliveries on time and pick up space whores, just like the characters on “Firefly.”

The press release regarding the “Firefly” game makes no mention of any involvement on Whedon’s part.

How badass was Monday’s “Heroes?” I plan on watching it again this weekend and then putting together a longer post. Until then here is what Greg Beeman, one of the show’s producers, has to say about it:

Also, how cool was the final sequence – Peter’s dream sequence in NYC – Like I say, HEROES is like a TV show, only bigger. We shut down 4 city blocks on a Sunday. We jammed the streets with empty cars to create a deserted, neutron bomb look. It was also the first time ever that the whole cast was together. We had cranes stedicams and three cameras - It was intense amount of work to do in one day… And beside the scene you saw Monday night there was a second version shot with more characters and more information which will be used in one or more future episodes

The new trailer for “300″ has also hit the net.

MTV has the new trailer for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I never buy a new game system when they first come out because there is always some sort of major problem. It seems Wii’s problem is that it tried to be too innovative with its controller and is destroying TV sets all across the nation.