Whale Wars

Anybody seen Whale Wars on Animal Planet? The show (basically) about pirates and dorks?



Does this dude, Peter Hammarstedt, not look like every nerdy techie you've ever worked with?

Columbus Circle

I'm usually no big fan of holiday displays, having worked in a window display shop until my sanity could handle it no more (about eight weeks). However, the other day, while braving the crowds to buy some veggies at Whole Foods, I was stopped in my tracks by these:



These giant star-shaped lights are hanging from the ceiling inside the "Shops at Columbus Circle". They pulsate, glitter, change color, and practically made me wet myself with Christmas wonder. This picture doesn't do them justice. Big props to whomever created these wonderful, if corporate, ornaments.

Hatred #392:

Running over my own toes with one of these:

Holy Delusions of Grandeur, Batman!

dumb phrases

A co-worker of mine absolutely loathes the term "courtesy tab". If you don't know, this is a fold you put on a piece of gaff tape so that whoever might strike it later can easily peel it up. This guy's beef is with the fact that there has to be a term for this thing at all. Why not say simply, "tab the tape", or some such?

Which got me thinking of theatre terminology that I hate, which includes the following:

Dimmer Beach (the title of one of my posts below). This is one of those phrases used mostly by really nerdy technicians who think it makes the dimmer room sound cool, when actually it's a mess of gross cables and despair.

Nope. That's pretty much it. Just "dimmer beach". Maybe because the first person I heard utter it had a gross scraggly ponytail and a penchant for message t-shirts.

things fall apart

So, the theatre I work in likes to fall apart. It particularly enjoys doing so the day of a load-in. Circuits fry, lighting instruments die inexplicably, and I myself shed a bit of dignity while unsuccessfully attempting to hold in sighs of frustration.

We had twelve 8-inch fresnels before this summer. As of today, we are down to nine. They don't break in a way that they could be salvageable, no. The fucking porcelain lamp seat fuses to other things and then breaks off. The reflectors melt into funny shapes. In short, they are old and decrepit.

When a light won't work, it can't just be a bad lamp. Of course not. You must have a bad lamp, a bad cable, AND a bad end cap all at once! And then the second unit you lug up on the ladder will ALSO have a bad end cap. But also, you were in "patch" on the board, you lameberg. Your day is SO awesome. You are really good at making things work.

So you'll toss everything in a big pile labeled NFG and hope that it will disappear before you ever need to repair it.

And why in the world are there eight versions of our rep plot (some from the early 90's) floating around amongst NYC designers? It feels like a bad joke.

I'm tired and cranky, and in about an hour, I get to hop on a train full of annoying people and not have enough room even to cross my legs. What I'm sayin' is, if you're lucky enough to glimpse me in the next coupla hours, you're gonna see some bitches* feel my wrath.

*And by bitches, I mean anyone, male or female, who: can't walk in a straight line, repeatedly jostles me while singing along to Oochie Wallie on a cellphone, talks about their awesome new tv addiction, or generally breathes in my direction.

Dimmer Beach

For the past two days at my theatre, I've been having a very slow heart attack. One of our 96 racks was intermittently deciding not to work, at all. It seemed particularly averse to working late nights (understandably). As we have a show opening tonight (which I'm designing lighting for), this was cause for concern. Half my systems weren't working, and I had no house lights. For hours, I looked at this CD-80 rack, frowning, and fucking with cables, and taking out cards, noting, nervously, that it was built in 1981. At least five people looked at this mess and shrugged.



The rack was on, and it was not communicating with the light board. Our other 96-rack was working just fine. So last night, I called my buddy Michael, who's very good with these types of things. He had me trace all the cables back, check out the opto splitter, and...the lights on the splitter were not on. Which meant that it wasn't getting power. Tracing the power cable back to its source, I found that it was hooked into the same circuit as our amps, which get shut down by our sound tech at the circuit breakers. So when the sound tech leaves, our CD-80 rack went bye-bye. The other rack still worked because it was plugged into the pass-through on the opto, which doesn't require power.

I guess the moral is: when in doubt, it's the dumbest, simplest possible solution you can think of.