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So the last two weekends I’ve listened to Jami Noguchi’s siren song and gone to work as an extra on the pilot episode for a television series called C-47 which he’s been working as “Special Effects Supervisor”. Last Friday I had off from work and went up to the warehouse it was being filmed in outside of Baltimore and hung around for about 10 hours but was only in about 4 takes before I had to leave. They’d been having some problems getting the green screens and cameras set up and I had another engagement back in DC in the evening. Going up there at 5 in the morning only took me an hour. Coming back took closer to 2 because of the traffic. Even though my first day of extraing was less than very active, it was fun just hanging out on the set talking to people and watching all the set work being done. I’ve always thought being an actor would be fun, but my activities in school took me in other directions, so I enjoyed the chance to break my routine and try something new. I wanted to go back last Saturday as well, but I was taking the Foreign Service Officer Test again. (I think that went pretty well. Better than back in February, so here’s to hoping I have good news in 3-5 weeks.) This past weekend was the last weekend of filming, and since my kickball season ended last week, I was able to make it out this Sunday as well. I’d have gone more, but Friday I had to work, and Saturday I had already had plans. And I have to tell you, Sunday was a blast. Even if I did get there at 8:30am for a supposed 9am casting call which I didn’t know had been pushed back to noon as the cast and crew had been on set until 5am the night before. Things did get underway pretty quickly once noon rolled around. They were filming two different crews simultaneously. The A camera was working with the main actors and the B camera was working with extras and the green screen to get a lot of different figures to include in crowd scenes. Over the course of the day, I was dressed as 5 different people doing lots of various things. One of which was playing a beggar of sorts who gets tasered by some cops as he tries to steal something from a merchant’s booth in a market place. That was fun. I don’t have any pictures of myself in costume, but hopefully one of the guys working on the crew will send me some. If he does, I don’t know if I can post them or say much more. Unlike Jami, I didn’t sign an NDA, but I’m not going to muck something up like that. I believe they have a few months worth of post-production to go through before the thing is presented to a studio. I do have to say that for a pretty small, independent production, the folks working on it all seemed really professional, even though I know several of them were first timers working on something like this. I definitely really enjoyed doing the extra work, and if I can, I think I’m going to try to keep my eyes and ears open for future chances to do weekend extra work. Almost 2 years ago, I wrote a blog post called “Name of the Wind sequel announced”. Since then, that one page has probably result in more visits to my site via google searches than any other. And in the last few days I’ve had a couple of people comment on that post. All these people are trying to find out when the sequel to Patrick Rothfuss’ debut fantasy novel is coming out and unfortunately, they leave here just as empty of knowledge as when they came. Hopefully I can do a little bit to rectify that. As of May 1st, Pat has finished writing and has shipped his manuscript off to his publisher. That means it is entering the revision cycle. And given that the manuscript is absolutely monstrous, that could take a while. Pat hasn’t announced a specific date and neither has the publisher. However, I think that it is safe to say that the book will be published some time during 2010. As to why it has taken so long for the second novel to be finished? Well, I’ll just let Pat answer that for himself. And yes, Pat has his own website, which is where I’m sure some of the earliest information about the release date for The Wise Man’s Fear will be found. Though of course I’ll be posting about it as soon as I know. After reading yesterday’s post about squared circles, my dad sent me the following email:
[He was distracted by thoughts of lunch, hence 'pie' instead of pi.] Just for the record, my dad is a pretty smart guy and is one of the most common sensical people you could ever hope to meet. And as you can see, he’s scientifically minded enough (with a Masters degree in Biology to prove it) to actually look into something that catches his interest, even if it is outside of his area of expertise, something that a lot of people aren’t. After I responded, he commented that it had never occurred to him “that if you take a closed loop and reshape it that while the perimeter remains the same, the area changes. It never occurred to me back when I took geometry and if it had, I probably would have gotten into trouble by pointing it out to my teacher (it just wasn’t something you did).” Now, I don’t know when it was that I realized this little bit of information myself, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t directly taught in school. Though it really should be. Anyway, here is my initial response to his email:
So now you know something that a lot of people probably haven’t ever even thought about. I hope it will be useful to you one day! Two weeks ago, I blogged about encountering the phrase “telephone number salaries” and I’m returning this week with another entry in the collection of phrases that make you go, “Wait, what?” I just encountered “It is a difficult circle to square” in an article in The Economist, discussing Obama’s health care reform. This caught my eye, not just because it’s a new phrase to me like “telephone number salaries” was, but also because it doesn’t make any sense. “Squaring a circle” refers to an ancient geometry problem which has been proven impossible — given a circle and using only a compass and a straightedge (the traditional Euclidean geometry tools, in a finite number of steps, construct a square of equal area. So, the author of the article essentially said, “It is a difficult impossibility.” I’d love to know what an easy impossibility is. And it is true that “squaring the circle” has often been used metaphorically to describe something futile or impossible. That phrase has over 100k hits on google, though many of them are mathematical pages discussing the problem itself. However the phrase I encountered only occurs 523 times in google. And google’s timeline function only shows 37 pages, the earliest being 1997. English has a pretty long history of phrases being misused and entering into the common parlance with the new, incorrect usage. And given the lack of familiarity that most people have with basic math and science, I have no doubt that we’ll be seeing this incorrect usage quite a bit more frequently in the future. Because even if you don’t know what it actually means, “squaring a circle” just sounds difficult. About 3 months back I started my own webcomic called In the Back of My Head. Pretty simple idea: pictures of the back of my head + hopefully humorous captions. Here’s a sample from a few weeks back.
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