One evening I stopped by Allan's place as I headed off-campus. He and his neighbors had just had some sort of altercation, and he was livid as a consequence. Before we left he cued up the following track on his CD player and hit play. Then he turned the speakers around so they faced the shared wall, turned the volume up to 8, and set the stereo on "repeat track". "Okay," he said, "let's go."

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.

• I was quoted in a Washington Post article entitled Forget Germs. The Real Contagion Is Our Paranoia. I have a brief bit in the final few paragraphs. Man, I gave that reporter lots of good material--I wonder why she didn't use it. Possibly because I confused her paper with the Wall Street Journal and asked if I should send a headshot for the stipple portraitist. (True story.)
• I am providing color commentary for Friday's Layer Tennis match. This will be my third time in the lime-green sportjacket--the previous two installments are here and yonder.
• Tomorrow, in this very space, I'll be posting something I recently wrote of which I am kinda proud. Stay Tuned!

The WHO also recommended that citizens avoid websites that cough! Cough cough cough cough cough cough! That show signs cough! Cough cough cough! I'm so sorry about--cough! Cough cough cough! cough cough! Is it like hot in here or is it just me?

Paul Blark: Mall Cop: "Looks like something stubbed out in an ashtray." - Wesley Morris, BOSTON GLOBE

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li: "Proving that there's no statute of limitations on lousy ideas, director Andrzej Bartkowiakï's attempted franchise expansion returns to the Capcom motherlode that produced the worst movie in the entire Jean-Claude Van Damme filmography." -- Jim Ridley, VILLAGE VOICE

Miss March: "A sex comedy that appears to have been made by people who've never actually had sex." -- Ty Burr, BOSTON GLOBE

Push: "Never stops finding new ways to make no sense." -- Cliff Doerksen, CHICAGO READER

Pink Panther 2: Honestly, I don't think any review, no matter how negative, could deter you from seeing this film more than this image:

It wasn't until the afternoon that I remembered that I had agreed to meet my friend L. after work for a drink. I thought about going home first to change, but then decided not to bother. I've known L. forever, and it was going to be dark in the bar anyhow, so it's not as if anyone would notice or care.

As predicted L. didn't say a word when I removed my jacket at the tavern, and we chatted for a few minutes before our waitress arrived to take our food order. I settled on the Italian sausage and red pepper sandwich.

"What do you want as the side?" she asked. "You can have salad, or the soups today are minestrone, cream of potato, and clam chowder."

"I'll go for the chowder," I said, adding, after a moment's reflection, "I am probably the first person in the history of the world to order an Italian Sausage sandwich with clam chowder. Could you guys name that combination after me?"

"Sure," the waitress said. "We'll call it 'The Sweaterboy'."

At some point, I and two chums (one of whom was the aforementioned Jamie Babcock) decided to pull an April Fools Day prank. We cooked up our own version, using the header from a purloined copy of an actual Student Bulletin and my ancient manual typewriter . The typeface of my typewriter was almost identical to that which the school used, and to an uncritical eye our counterfeit looked almost indistinguishable to the real thing. At least until you read it.

I would love to say that we used some convoluted and ingenious method of insinuating the fake document into the school bulletin pipeline (and I guess I could, as this blog ain't exactly fact-checked). Alas, it was not necessary for us to break into the building in the dead of night, or disguise ourselves as the members of Poison.

You see, the distribution system for the Student Bulletin was pretty rudimentary. The school secretary would produce enough photocopies for all the classrooms, and then just leave them in a pile on the office's main desk during the break following second period. One "student leader" from each class would stop by, grab the top bulletin from the pile, and take it with them to period three.

So on March 31 of 1989 (April Fools Day fell on a Saturday that year) I strode into my school's office with a stack of fake bulletins under a binder. I set the binder on the stack on real authetic student bulletins, looked around for a moment as if confused, picked up the binder (leaving the payload behind), and high-tailed it out of there. Success!

A few notes of context that will make the bulletin--well, not any funnier, but at least less mystifying:

• The year prior the school had largely abandoned premade meals in the lunchroom in favor of a huge bank of vending machines, which sold everything from sandwiches to juice to ice cream cones. This new system was called "Cafe USA".
• Two student groups at the school were PAB (Positive Attitude Builders, who held pep rallies and whatnot) and the Wizards of Science.
• The marching band would routinely sell carnations in the before Valentine's Days, with the various colors of the flowers signifying different things.

Anyway, if you were in Mr. Bristol's third period world history class that day, this is what you would have heard read aloud.

Click To Ginormosize

Coupla notes. First of all, how do you think a student-written document that has kids getting shot and a bomb under a teacher's desk as its first two items would go over today? Still a laff riot?

Second, I think this definitively proves that my abysmal spelling is not a degenerative condition, but has been a travesty from birth (or at least 12th grade). If anything, my spelling has actually improved a bit over the last two decades. At least now I select the correct there / their / they're slightly more than the 30% of the time that pure chance would dictate.

But socks tell me that my blood alcohol concentration last night wasn't too high ... no more that 0.05, probably. In fact, on any given morning I can usually determine what my BAC was the night prior based solely on what I'm wearing when I wake.

Update: I posted the above to Twitter, with each BAC its own Tweet. I'd done this before with the Typical Reaction to the Revelation That I Do Not Own a Cell Phone, By Year list, which was fairly well-received. But the lesson learned today, I think, is that 10 items on your Twitter list is pretty much the absolute maximum before your followers start to hate you. (When I put out a call for suggestions, chris_knight replied "how about stop?")

Still, some folks chimed in with some great additional entries. Here are a few:

* Not really something worn, but the judges will allow it.

If you have a suggestion, reply to this Tweet.

Layer Tennis: A new season of Layer Tennis kicked off a few weeks ago, if I can mix my sports metaphors, and history suggests that I can. Last year, you may recall, I provided color commentary for the Halloween match. I'll be donning the smoking jacket and doling out the bon mot again tomorrow at 2:00 EST. If you want to keep abreast of All Things Layer Tennis, you can sign up for season tickets here and follow them on Twitter over yonder.

The Academy Awards: The Oscars will be held this Sunday, February 22, and it's not to late to whip up a quick Oscar Poll with the Make-Yer-Own Oscar Pool Page. Well, honestly, it probably is too late. But you have only yourself to blame for that, slacker.

Customer Service: Hey, remember that short story I wrote a while back, the one called "Customer Service"? No? Don't remember it? Then you are the target audience for Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll, an anthology of crime fiction will contains the tale. Be sure to pick up a copy, snuggle up with it on the couch, read the first three sentence of my story, and exclaim "aww shit--I did read this before, goddamn it."

The Queen: And?

Me: And it's our wedding anniversary.

The Queen: Oops.You know, I'm just going to assume that the "Oops" was in reference to her forgetting the date and not to her original decision to get hitched.

In fact, I strongly suspect that such assumptions are how we're remained together for eight years.

The Washington State Department of Transportation should gather these and put them all in a single location. Not only would this help to keep our highways clean, but then skydivers with faulty parachutes would have someplace to aim for.