One of my PAs who’s going to be in town for the holidays agreed to come by and feed Chaplin for a couple days (for a nominal fee, obviously) while I’m gone. In order to make sure he knows where I live and where everything is, I had him come by this morning.

So as I’m showing him around, Chaplin walks up, says hello, then immediately proceeds to the corner to go puke up a GIANT hairball along with a bunch of food. It was one of the more disgusting piles of puke I’ve encountered from him.

Of course this guy has never had cats, so he was like, “Uh, is that normal?”

Yeah. Yeah it is. Thanks, kitty!

Many people assume that because I have a relative facility with technology, it does not randomly decide to hate on me the way it seems to with everyone else. To that, I counter with the events of this evening:

I fought with a writer’s crapware laden-computer for half an hour at the end of the night, ultimately forcing it to abandon its efforts to spit out all kinds of random pop-ups but not without going through several attempts at removal.

Massive problems with my phone (which randomly refuses to switch off roam, draning the battery pretty much immediately when it gets into that mode, thanks, Sprint!) have given way to coming home to no internets tonight.

Drove me crazy trying to figure out what it was, particularly after getting disconnected THRICE from Time Warner Cable’s lovely automated system which decided there were either “technical difficulties” or that my “call could not be completed at this time” at every turn.

However, I seem to have narrowed it down to a DNS issue - For the nerds in the house, I was pulling an IP address just fine but I couldn’t connect to squat, so I put in the OpenDNS.org DNS servers and it’s been smooth sailing from there.

Anyway, I have managed to fix (I think) two out of the three issues, but just because I usually have a half-wit idea on how to fix it doesn’t mean this shit doesn’t break on me.

I don’t know if it’s been reading about the potential SAG strike or the fact that we’re going to have a double-unit Monday to welcome us back from Thanksgiving, but apparently my problem of grinding my teeth has gotten a bit worse.

And by “a bit worse” I mean, goddamn, the tendons in my jaw are killing me. It started early this afternoon (I thought it was a cavity until I realized I could push on the teeth I thought were affected and felt nothing, but opening my mouth absolutely killed) and has been getting worse throughout the day.

I mean, perhaps it’s a good thing for my continued weight loss attempts that at the rate I’m going I’m not going to be able to open my mouth on Thanksgiving, but goddamn it, I want to be able to eat at least one of the three Thanksgiving dinners I’m stopping by.

Bah.

You know, if you’re a federal mediator and you give up on trying to get SAG and the studios to agree to something after TWO DAYS, you’re not very good at your job.

I seriously can’t believe we’re about to go into another round of this craziness.

I am (surprise!) really exhausted and overworked, but I wanted to say something more about Prop. 8 and the ongoing legal and PR battle over gay marriage in California.

The thing that offends me the most, absolutely the most, about the reaction to legal challenges to the validity of Proposition 8, is the reaction I heard from one member of the “Protect Marriage” group.

She argued on the news that the voters have spoken, and that the gays should respect “the will of the people.”

I just wanted to reach through the screen and give this woman a long lecture about the Tyranny of the Majority. And the Federalist papers. And the desire so clearly expressed by the founders of this country to bequeath to the generations a system that prevented a simple majority from abusing its power against a minority.

I wish I were rational enough about this to give an eloquent argument like that.

But all I truly want to say to her, reaching through the screen, is fuck you. FUCK. YOU. if you think just because a majority of people wish to strip me of my rights, I’m going to stop fighting for them. Fuck you if you think that’s what this country is about.

I’ll admit, I’ve never been sure that marriage is the most pressing right on the ever-vilified “Gay Agenda” for my people to hang their hat on at this very moment, particularly given that in many states you can still be fired or kicked out of housing for being gay, with absolutely no legal repercussions.

But to see a right, any right, stripped away is a nauseating, deeply angering feeling. To shake me out of my deeply ingrained aversion to and ambivalence towards politics that grew from 18 years of watching the same old shit get shoveled around in D.C., you really, truly have to piss me off.

And lady, you and your complete ignorance of the spirit of the American system have REALLY fucking pissed me off.

Update, Tuesday Noon: The LA Times has an article up on exactly the sort of folks like woman who made me so angry, although it does contain one truly awesome quote from somone who supports the No-On-8 protesters:

“To be honest, I don’t really understand the issue. If you’re a man and don’t believe in gay marriage, you shouldn’t marry a man.”

Right on.

Last night was like the end of a marathon. The elation and ecstatic reaction after Obama finally won the Presidency was surreal, like crossing the finish line first when you barely thought you had a chance.

And then, watching Prop 8 pass was like having someone walk up to that same theoretical marathoner and punching them in the face.

Really, California? One of the most liberal states in America can have idiot right-wingers get you so pants-pissingly scared that Teh Gayz r after ur Childrens! that we fucking passed a CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT to ban gay marriage?

I am still very, very happy about Obama. What I told people at work last night when 8 was looking iffy still stands: We had one chance, and one chance only, to elect Obama, and in terms of the good of the overall nation, that was more important.

It keeps the Supreme Court from going completely to the batshit crazies, it makes the world hate us less, and it gives people some fucking hope that for once, they have voted for a candidate who’s not simply the lesser of two evils.

That 8 passed sucks, there’s no dobut. But we, and by we I mean the Gays and everyone who thinks people deserve equal rights, are going re-fight this discriminatory horseshit at every fucking turn until it is OUT of the CA constitution.

Until then, I’m going to the gym to go take out my anger on an elliptical machine instead of the drywall in my apartment which I sorely, sorely want to put my fist through.

Oh, Blogger. You make me crazy with your refusals to publish and your half-assed FTP impementation.

But oh, WordPress, trying to switch to you is making me EVEN FUCKING CRAZIER.

Why didn’t I learn something useful in school, like PHP programming? Then I could figure out what the fucking problem is.

More to come, possibly over here when I’m done tearing my hair out. In the meantime, feel free to tell me how fugly that design is.

Trying to explain why, even though it does not appear the Screen Actors’ Guild is actually going to strike anytime soon, I am frustrated with the lack of progress in the talks, is a little hard to explain.

The stalemate has brought all feature production to a grinding halt, and because of the weird timing of the pilot I’m on (even if it gets picked up, it won’t go for a few months, and almost all other TV in town has already started up), I had been looking to hop on a feature when it finishes in a couple weeks.

So, why is a stalemate a bad thing for feature films? Well, I’ll try to explain.

Were the Screen Actors’ Guild to strike, everything would shut down immediately because without actors, there is nothing to shoot. That’s the easy-to-explain, apocalyptic part.

In a stalemate, which is where we are now, the actors are not striking, but they have not signed a deal and could theoretically strike at any time.

With a stalemate, TV shows keep shooting because they have all the actors under contract for basically the entire year. Were a strike to happen, they would give the crew an unpaid hiatus for the duration of the strike, and then everyone would come back to work when it’s over (assuming a short strike of about a month or so, which everyone is).

With films during a stalemate, you run into the big problem of actor scheduling: While television shows have the principal actors under contract essentially year-round, every film has a very short window in which its principals are under contract.

For example, pulling a name that’s fun to type out of the air, let’s say Jake Gyllenhaal is scheduled to do a film that starts tomorrow, and finishes in early September. Then, he’s scheduled to go on to a second film that starts in mid-September.

If the actors strike, it will eat up all the time that he was on film #1, and they still lose him to film #2 in mid-September. The fact that the strike is happening does not push everything back, it just makes the time disappear.

Why is this a problem? Well, the main issue is that because a SAG strike could completely fuck up actors’ schedules, major films can’t get what’s called a completion bond.

This is a very large insurance policy that will pay the a substantial portion of the cost of production should the film not be completed for some reason beyond the control of production (actor is hit by a bus and/or drops dead in the middle of production, earthquake destroys Los Angeles during shooting, whatever).

The insurance companies don’t want to give completion bonds right now because if Gyllenhaal starts shooting film #1 and SAG strikes for a month in August, he will still have to move on to film #2 on the same schedule. Film #1 could potentially only be half-finished and largely unusable, and the insurance company would be on the hook for the money.

If you can’t get a completion bond (and right now, you can’t unless you have a waiver from SAG, which you can only get if you’re a small independent production not part of the AMPTP), the studio will not give you the money to make your movie.

So everyone on the features side is pretty much sitting tight, waiting for SAG to make a deal. Once they make a deal, plenty of stuff will start up, and hopefully many of us will be gainfully employed once again.

We’ll see what happens. Again, I’m in a bit of an odd spot with scheduling, but hopefully by the end of July this will get sorted out, and I’ll land on something or other. I’ll probably get an involuntary break of a month or so, but hopefully not much longer.

I hope that sort of clarifies for those of you who don’t have to deal with this glorious horseshit on a daily basis what’s happening and why, and why while people in LA are worried about this, most of the national entertainment press is pretty much ignoring it.

It’s always fun to read a story in Variety and, before reaching the end of it, start mentally calculating how much plasma and/or heroin I’ll need to sell to make rent.

After blotting calamine lotion on my ridiculous number of flea bites, leaving a pattern of dark pink spots on pasty white skin: “God, I look like a gay leopard.”