An octopus managed to flood some of the small aquarium at the Santa Monica Pier today by opening up a valve inside the tank. Joel pointed out when I sent him the story that perhaps inside an octopus tank is not a great place for a valve that can be turned by, say, an octopus.

Anyway, the comments on the story are highly amusing, particularly the guy who suspects the octopus was trying to “move into an adjacent, rent-controlled tank.”

Today, February 25th, 2009, I got glasses for the first time in my life.

I outlasted my dad (who got glasses when he was somewhere around 5 or so) by about 22 years. I was outlasted by my mother (who got glasses when she was 35) by 7 years.

Also: I am now officially a nerd.

I haven’t posted an update on the whole SAG-not-having-a-contract thing in a while since SAG was mired in infighting and nothing was really happening.

Then the board removed the executive director and chief negotiator about a month ago and replaced them with people who were more willing to make a deal and avoid a strike. The parties agreed to go back to the table this past tuesday.

So what happend? The whole thing fell apart over the term of the deal. The studios want the contract to last three years from the date of ratification, expiring in March or so of 2012, whereas the actors want the contract to last until three years from the date the last contract expired – June 11, 2011.

Nine months. The studios have literally gotten SAG to agree to everything except the term they wanted. And these ass clowns want to put half the town out of work over NINE MONTHS.

The studios aren’t stupid. They see if they let SAG get what they want, the DGA, SAG, and WGA will all have deals expiring within 2-3 months of each other, and it’s possible that they’ll get hit with a mega-strike in 2011.

They’re also not stupid because they see that the continuing labor strife gives them all the excuses they need to keep cutting costs like crazy, which they all need/want to do to try to make their stocks attractive in this horiffying shitshow of an economy.

SAG, of course, doesn’t really have a plan on how to respond to this, and since this weekend is the Oscars and everyone’s distracted by that, they’re not going to come up with one for at least another couple of weeks.

So the ridiculousness continues, and all of us in IATSE, the below-the-line union that has about 80% of the workers and gets about 20% of the money, continue to get screwed as projects get held off or canceled because of all this nonsense.

The good news for me personally (since I’ve worked almost exclusively in television) is that most TV pilots have signed on with AFTRA, a rival union for television actors, so most pilots and most new shows for next year would not be affected by a SAG strike.

But still, the SAG stuff contributes to the general sense of economic panic in Hollywood, and anything that does that screws us all in the end.

Two years after I set out to lose eighty pounds, I have swam and swam and ellipticaled and biked and I have now lost…seventy seven pounds.

So the pace I set for myself last year was a little ridiculous – I wanted to lose 38 pounds in eight months, and I didn’t really take into account how much harder it is to take the weight off when a) I’m actually working all the time and b) once I’ve gotten the easy pounds off.

I’ve still got three really fucking stubborn pounds that won’t come off, and the evil that is the Craft Service Table is fighting back at me, calling out to me with its delicious croissants and mini-cupcakes and banana cream pudding and on and on and on.

But when I start to get discouraged after some fluctuation, I have to look at what’s changed:

I used to wear double XL men’s American Apparel shirts. Now I wear a large.

I used to wear 44 inch Levi’s loose fit jeans, which weren’t all that loose. Now I wear 34 inch loose fit jeans, and they actually are loose-fitting.

I used to be 5’4″ tall on a good day. I thought the doctor made a mistake at my physical this year when she listed me at 5’5″. They measured three times. I was so overweight it was compressing my spine by an INCH.

I’m now within three pounds of weighing what I weighed my junior year of high school, when I was in the best shape I’ve ever been since I stopped growing (or at least thought I had).

I used to have a BMI of 42.9, which was almost 3 points over Morbidly Obese. I now have a BMI of 28.8., which is now finally out of Obese and simply at Overweight.

I have come a long damn way. And I’m close to my original goal. Original, because the goal has changed. I have come this far, I can go farther. I can get my BMI to 25, the top of the normal range. Ain’t no way in hell I can get to the middle of that range, I’m just built too stockily. But I can get to the top of the normal range.

To do this, I have to lose 23 more pounds, for an even 100 total. This is going to be…well, very difficult. I’m aiming to have it done by this time next year, but I know it’s not going to come off terribly fast anymore.

These are the pounds that have been on for 10+ years, and these are going to be the ones that are the hardest to convince to go. These are the ones that demand I start eating salad and vegetables on a regular basis, that I work out hard five days a week period end of discussion no matter what.

Of course, I’m on the verge of being unemployed again early next month, so I’ll be back on the broke-ass diet, the single most effective diet and exercise program I’ve ever been on. Not having the money for alcohol or eating out and having time to work out for over an hour every day tends to help with weight loss.

But as slow and painful as it will be, I still have confidence that because I have come so goddamn far that I can go just a bit further. It can be done. It’s only a matter of time.

I got home half an hour ago. I have a 9:15 am doctor’s appointment.

For me to get 6 hours of sleep, which is generally my minimum, I would need to go to sleep…five minutes ago.

I’m going to be very happy when this week is over.

It’s one thing to say, “Boy, I really had a shit year financially last year.”

It’s quite another have your tax guy explain to you that your adjusted gross income fell by over $14,000, particularly when you weren’t making THAT much money to begin with.

And the icing on the cake is that I get to wait for about 1/3 of my total refund, since California is printing IOU’s instead of checks until the legislature gets off their collective asses and passes a budget.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Fuck 2008.

A clearance of links I’ve been meaning to post, but haven’t had time to expand into full commentaries due to work/houseguest/laziness:

• Laz posted to his work blog a transcript of the most awesomely insane phone call I’ve heard of in some time.
• Courtesy of Weigel, a sampling of some really, really awesome audio excerpts from our 44th President’s first book.
• Someone on Google Code had fun with geek humor. The commenters had a field day. Many gems, but this one was my personal favorite.
• Bill Gates clearly has too much time on his hands, and a rather warped sense of humor. And not the good kind of warped.

Also, I got bit on the chin by a mosquito or some other flying nasty thing yesterday, and I’m officially blaming Bill Gates.

Spoilers for the last couple episodes of Grey’s Anatomy and The L Word, in the unlikely event that anyone who gives half a shit about either show hasn’t either seen the episodes or heard about them.

There are many shows that, for whatever reason, have their characters do things that are either entirely out of character, wholly implausible, or both. Usually this reason is that the writers have run out of ideas, but sometimes they’re just weird.

The question becomes: How do you address this within the show? Two shows I watch have pulled really odd and implausible plot twists out of their asses, and have gone with entirely different tacks in terms of how the other characters react to the weirdness.

Grey’s Anatomy has had Katherine Heigl’s character, Izzie, fucking the ghost of her dead ex-boyfriend. Like, having actual sex with a ghost. No other characters find out about it for a couple episodes, and when Izzie’s actual living, breathing, boyfriend, Alex, finds out about it, his reaction is roughly, “Whatever.”

The whole fucking-a-ghost thing is weird and implausible enough on its own, but for Alex to not really have a reaction to it made it that much stupider. As a doctor, he should at least be concerned about someone having massive hallucinations. As her boyfriend, he should really be concerned that she’s cheating on him with said hallucinations.

The whole thing’s just been handled atrociously, and what’s worse is that it’s STILL dragging out. There was some resolution in the last episode (apparently, Dead Boyfriend came back to tell Izzie that she’s sick, but he wasn’t an omniscient enough ghost to actually tell her what she has), but there’s still a lot of unraveling that arc has to do.

Meanwhile, The L Word, usually a show I still watch because it’s grown so cartoonishly bad it’s actually funny, actually handled an out-of-character moment for two of its characters really, really well.

Jenny is the resident flake/screenwriter, Shane is the resident seductress/slut. The characters have been good friends for several seasons, but apparently Jenny decided she was in love with Shane, and at the end of the episode two Sundays ago, declared said love.

Shane reacted to this by sleeping with her, eliciting a collective, “What the FUCK?!” from the lesbians and friends of lesbians who still watch this show, because such a pairing really makes no sense for either character. Even in a show infamous for lack of continuity and character inconsistency, this stood out as really bizarre.

But the payoff to the hookup that happens in the first few minutes of the next episode made me completely ignore its irrationality. Alice, a friend of both Jenny and Shane, comes over the morning after the ridiculous hookup, and has an awesome moment of revelation where she realizes Jenny and Shane had sex.

The camera pushes in on her face like in a Hitchcock movie where someone’s just realized they know who the killer is. Due credit to Leisha Hailey, who plays Alice: The way her facial expression morphs into a truly horrified grimace as the camera pushes in is absolutely hysterical.

Alice immediately excuses herself to use the restroom, and sends out a freaked-out mass text to all their mutual friends. The montage of reactions (one person falls off a treadmill, one person busts out laughing in the middle of a meeting, one person even gives an out loud, “What the fuck?”) is truly the best sequence they’ve done in years.

And why was this so funny? Because they took the bomb they just dropped on the audience and showed that even within the show, people were completely flummoxed and thrown by the development, just as much as the audience was. They effectively told the audience, “We know what we’re doing is insane. Stick with us on this one,” by making every other character in the show a proxy for the audience’s reaction.

Now I will grant the Grey’s folks one thing: They have to fill 22 episodes, where as the L Word writers only had to fill 8 episodes for their truncated final season. Part of the reason the L Word writers may have moved to address the issue so quickly was that they really didn’t have time not to.

Whatever the reason, it’s a fascinating contrast in how writers approach plotlines that take both the characters and the audience out of their comfort zones.