Nice try, Katy Perry’s publicist …

Discovered while trying to locate the source of this gif:

Have you heard of Movember? It’s an annual event, organized by the Movember Foundation, during which men from around the world grow mustaches over the course of the month to raise awareness of men’s health issues.

Honestly I only recently learned of Movember myself, several days after its kickoff this year. And I kind of thought that disqualified me. But then, a week in, I remembered that I had shaved on October 31 as part of my Sexy Technical Writer costume, and had not done so again since. Still in the game! “Neglect to engage in basic grooming … for charity!” doesn’t have the same ring as “Movember”, granted, but stubble is stubble yo.

Anyway, here we are at the mid-way point, and I thought you’d like a status report. My progress so far:

Uhhhhhhhhmm …

Yeah, there’s been some setbacks. Specifically the one yesterday where I kind of spaced out and shaved. Crap! Not being a self-absorbed bastard for a month is hard.

Well, truth be told, my having shaving is more extraordinary than my having facial hair. So if you see me fresh-faced this month and have any awareness of men’s health issues laying around, be sure to raise it. Because I’m participating in “No-Mustache Movember” or, as I like to call it, November™.

Unfortunately I didn’t get around to setting up a corresponding non-profit or registering november.com or implementing a series of webscripts that would allow me to build a profile page and solicit donations. Seriously I was going to do that, but it was like 9:45. 9:45 PM, even. And after coming up with “November” I was pretty much exhausted.

So if you want to toss some funds into the pot, please do so for my buddy John (West Coast!) or arch-nemesis Sean (East Coast!), both of whom have the steel will and lack of ADD necessary to mo the whole vember long.

Update: Whoa, “november.com” is already registered. I can’t believe someone else had this same idea.

Just for kicks I wrote a script for The Office. You can read the whole thing at http://www.defectiveyeti.com/theoffice/TheOffice-Personas.pdf.

I was inspired by two events, both of which took place in March. The first was an eight-hour Project Management seminar that I attended for work. At the end of the day I was reviewing my notes and realized I’d been handed an Office storyline.

The second was the series finale of Battlestar Galactica. As followers of The Office know, Dwight is a huge Battlestar fan, mentioning the program often.

I half-expected a subsequent episode of The Office to note the end of Battlestar, but it hasn’t happened yet. Thus, I decided to write my own.

“Personas” is set around the time in season five of The Office when BSG ended. Specifically, it falls between “Golden Ticket” (S05E17) and “New Boss” (S05E18). In other words:

• Andy is on staff.
• Toby is back.
• Ryan is missing (supposedly in Thailand).
• No one in the office is in a relationship, except Jim / Pam (engaged) and Andy / Dwight (mortal enemies).
• The Charles Miner / “Michael Scott Paper Company” storyline has not yet begun.

One last thing. Forty pages struck me as pretty long for a 30 minute show, but “E-Mail Surveillance” and “The Carpet”–the two scripts of The Office I could find online (at http://www.dailyscript.com/tv.html)–clock in at 44 and 43 pages respectively, so I used those as a guide. Having never before written a script for an existing show, I figured I’d stick to precedent.

Anyway, here’s the teaser. I don’t really plan to do anything with this (it was more of an exercise than anything else), but if you have any feedback I’d love to hear it. You can email me at matthewbaldwin@gmail.com.

Update: Someone asked if this contains BSG finale spoilers. Actually, it contains no BSG spoilers whatsoever, so go nuts.

                      END COLD OPEN

You can read the whole thing as either a PDF (best) or as HTML (with some lost of formatting). An .fdr files is also available upon request. Enjoy.

In the early hours of January 1st, 2002, my friend Jamie Babcock took his own life.

I’d known Jamie for at least 15 years, though I’m not sure exactly when we met. I do recall that, at some point, he was the “new kid” at my elementary school, where he was soon celebrated for his ability to draw a near perfect Garfield–quite the marketable skill in an early-eighties fifth-grade classroom. His other claim to fame was that he had come in second at a big Pac-Man competition in whatever town he had moved from. According to his telling of the story at the time, he lost by only 10 points. As I got older I eventually recognized the whole thing as a tall tale told by a transplanted kid trying to impress his new classmates, but let’s be honest: in those days we all lied about our video game prowess.

And I’m not sure when we actually became friends either, but here is a clue: I gave Jamie the first “Weird Al” Yankovic album as a birthday present. This was shortly after the record’s release in 1984; thus, we were familiar enough to exchange gifts by ’85 at the latest. In fact, this interaction is my first vivid memory of him. He ripped the wrapping paper off the a cassette tape I had given him and his face immediately fell. “Oh,” he said. “I thought it would be something cool like Van Halen, but thanks.”

We were buddies by the end of our Freshman year of high school though, and had become close friends by graduation. In some way this was inevitable: Hazen High school teachers preferred to seat kids alphabetically, so he and I were adjacent in every class we shared. But even beyond proximity we had a lot in common. In fact, although he (unlike myself) was muscular and good-looking, Jamie was, in many respects, even more geeky than I. He was a huge Star Trek fan, for instance. And he was fanatically devoted to those comic books he followed, Sandman foremost amongst them. Every Wednesday we we would bike to Warlord’s (our local comic book store) to pick up our favorite titles from the newest shipment.

But (again unlike me), Jamie also had many non-nerdly pursuits. He was on our school’s wrestling team for instance, where he competed in a weight class that was seemingly five pounds under what his body thought was ideal. Consequentially, he was forever depriving himself of food, trying to keep his poundage just under the limit. I think his perpetual diet made him genuinely unhappy at times, but he also joked around about it. Once, during a class, he made a production of tearing a piece of notebook paper into tiny scraps; he then drew a piece of food on each (a slice of pizza, a cheeseburger), and spent the remainder of the hour eating them, one by one, to the restrained laughter of myself and the others around him.

That was Jamie in a nutshell. Whatever happened he just kind of took it in stride. Once, when we were driving around in his VW Rabbit, I set a half-unwrapped Peach-flavored Jolly Rancher Stix on his dashboard while I put on my seatbelt; when Jamie tapped the brakes a moment later, it slid into a ventilation slot, never to be seen again. He shrugged and never gave me shit for it, even though his car smelled of peaches from that day forward.

After high school Jamie and I went our separate ways, he to Washington State University in Spokane, I to Evergreen in Olympia. We still got together during holidays and breaks, but less and less frequently. Even so, I would still refer to him as “one of my best friends”, and mean it.

Jamie joined the police academy after college. Physically and athletically he was perfect for the job–his experience as a wrestler would surely come in handy when “taking down a perp” or whatever–but I’d never heard him express any interest in law enforcement, so the news came as a surprise to me. Of course I hardly ever saw Jamie by this point, so what did I know? Shortly thereafter I joined the Peace Corps and lost all contact with him for a couple of years.

He was an officer by the time I returned to the States in 1997, so one evening I joined him on a “ride-along”. Jamie patrolled North Seattle, and we spent much of the night cruising around the U-District, with occasional jaunts down 50th or 65th to get to the scene of some fracas or another. He pointed out all the drug dealers and petty criminals we passed (which, at 1:30 AM on University Way, was nearly everyone), reciting their dates of birth from memory as he did so. He stopped a robbery at a convenience store, subduing the thief with the threat of pepper spray. He pulled over someone for speeding, but let them off with a warning because they had a “Pedro the Lion” sticker in their back window.

At one point we were called to the apartment of two college girls, who claimed that someone had broken into their house and rifled through their stuff. They were drunk or high or both, and their story was profoundly confused. They couldn’t point to any one thing that proved that their stuff has been messed with, but they were certain that it had; and they knew that someone had broken into their house because, well, their stuff had been messed with, and how else would someone have gotten to it?

I assumed we’d turn around and leave, but Jamie patiently listened to their rambling and often contradictory tale, jotting notes as he did so. He asked a few probing questions but never showed the slightest sign of disrespect. By the end of their account they were clearly embarrassed that they had summoned the police, but Jamie waved away their apologies. “You were right to call,” he assured them, and they looked relieved, and everything was cool.

It’s probably unwise of me to speculate on what kind of police officer Jamie was based on this one night, but I’m going to anyway. I think he was exactly the kind of cop you’d want to show up when you were in a jam, someone with a good sense of humor who nonetheless took you seriously, someone who made it clear that he was on your side.

There was one incident in Jamie’s childhood that hinted at an impulse-control problem, a time when he had put his fist through a window in anger and nearly bled to death before they could get him to a hospital. I think this happened before he moved to our neighborhood and, for all I know, it may have happened just after he lost that “Pac-Man competition”, if you know what I mean. He definitely had scars on his hand, though. Truth be told, those scars were the only evidence of impetuousness I ever saw in him.

By all accounts Jamie’s decision to take his own life was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. He didn’t think about doing it, he just did it. Also bear in mind that this took place in the early hours of New Year’s Day, so I assume that alcohol was involved. He could drink, that guy.

I was told the news about 10:00 that morning, called by a mutual friend of ours from high school. There was some bitter irony in the timing, as we had been singing Auld Lang Syne just hours before. We were, like, what’s the point of a brand new year if people Jamie aren’t going to be in?

I hardly saw Jamie at in the years between the ride-along and the funeral and, in retrospect, I obviously wish otherwise. But when I think of him on New Year’s Day–and I always think of him on New Year’s Day–it reminds me to appreciate my current friends to the fullest.

That’s a gift you left behind for me, Jamie. I would have preferred something cool like Van Halen, but thanks.

Two things of interest I discovered while searching the Internet to craft the Darwinian language in the previous post:

1. The Coolidge effect is the tendency of males of every tested mammalian species to perform at their sexual peak when introduced to a new receptive female. The term comes from this old joke:

President Calvin Coolidge and his wife visited a poultry farm one day, and, during the tour, asked the farmer how he managed to produce so many fertile eggs with such a small number of roosters

The farmer explained that his roosters performed their duty dozens of times each day.

"Perhaps you could point that out to Mr. Coolidge," replied the First Lady in a pointedly loud voice.

The President, overhearing the remark, asked the farmer, "Does each rooster service the same hen each time?"

"No," replied the farmer, "there are many hens for each rooster."

"Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge," replied the President.

2. This photograph:

You can go here to see what the actual caption is. I prefer to think it reads “A mated elephant seal pair, having consulted the Kama Sealta, decides to give the missionary position a whirl.”

Somewhere in the annals
of European history
Is a man by the name
Of Al Dente.

Who served to his guests
Plates of undercooked pasta
And then stubbornly insisted
He had done so by choice.

… if you have time to kill, you could read this short story I am working on for Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and give with the constructive criticism. You could totally do that. It would be swell.

At 6,500 words its of a print-out-and-read-on-the-bus length, but y’all provided such great feedback last time that I thought I’d return to the well.

Update: Ha! Yeah, okay: the New York Times Sunday paper doesn’t have a comics section. You got me there. See, this is why I run things past you guys first.

A big thanks to everyone who provided feedback. Those who missed it–well, with any luck it will be in print someday …

I’m busy working on a thing for a guy, so I’m going to fall behind the reading schedule for a few days. Will get caught up over the Thanksgiving break.

In the meantime, here’s a fascinating article about why Heller’s original title for the novel, Catch-18, was changed. A warning for those participating in NaNoReMo–it looks like there might be some spoilers in there. I don’t know for certain, because, at the first hint of them, I skipped ahead to the origins of The Postman Always Rings Twice and My Man Jeeves. Thanks to Zan and David for passing the article along.

Also, you may recall that I recently urged Democrats to please oh please not vote for Clinton. Now Eric Berlin explains why Republicans should steer clear of Gulliani. Seriously, Dems and Repubs should just make an agreement in advance: we won’t nominate our New Yorker if you won’t nominate yours. I don’t know how, in a time when the United States desperately needs unity, we wound up with the nation’s two most polarizing figures as front runners in a Presidential election.

He’s so garrulous
To get a word in edgewise
Requires cloture

Still, to my mind, the most astonishing September 11th tribute of all time.