Monday, March 29, 2010

More disgusting

Doesn't investment carry in itself some inherent risk? (does "in itself" and "inherent" make that sentence redundant?)

Apparently real estate investors in Virginia are pissed off and suing because Fort Lee is going to build its own hotel for transitioning soldiers, and they had gone to all the trouble to toss the dice on hotel investment in the area, so now their "sure thing" investment is being put into jeopardy...

God forbid we should actually try and provide soldiers and their families decent accommodations close to the base, without worrying about crime and other problems (read comment #9 on the story).

Things to never say on an airplane

We all know not to make jokes about bombs or guns or whatever.

But here's one that I knew of, but actually had the chance to encounter in person this flight: don't ever say "Fuck you, BITCH!" to a flight attendant... This statement caused us to be an hour on the tarmac waiting for said passenger to be ejected from the plane and remove his luggage.

It was pretty funny, though.

Leave

It's always unfortunate when your leave becomes more busy than your work week. So, to everyone I didn't get a chance to get in touch with, or talked to only briefly, I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to meet up.

I am back to the wonderful world which is "the sandbox" and our internet has been down for the last week straight, so I don't know how often I'll get to post. Despite recent guidance, the NIPR computers here still block access to all social networking and blog sites... so I am forced to use the pay-per-minute style ISPs to do much of my research, limiting my time to actually address simple issues like a blog.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

TV Connections

So, much like David Mamet has a pack of actors he likes to draw from, apparently so does Carlton Cuse. I picked up a box set of Brisco County, Jr. at the DVD shop a couple weeks ago, completely unaware that the show was by Carlton Cuse (now famous as one of the producers of Lost). I just remember a friend raving about it back when I was a freshman in college (yeah, that long ago). And since I'm a big Bruce Campbell fan, I figured I'd check it out.

Now, it's a fun show, and the comparisons with Lost are kind of interesting, and have already been made on a number of Lost forums. However, what's interesting to me is to see the awkwardness of Cuse's first attempt at this, compared to the smoothness with which Lost is (usually) written. (We'll ignore Season 3). The biggest funny thing to me, though, is the number of actors that have appeared on both shows:

John Hawkes
M.C. Gainey
Patrick Fischler
Francois Chau
Sam Anderson
Andrew Divoff
Although he wasn't in both shows, Mackenzie Astin was in Lost, and is also the son of John Astin, who was a regular on Brisco County (and Addams Family, of course)

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Actors who look like each other, plus!

So, I was watching the most recent episode of Lost last night, and one of the characters reminded me of someone, and I couldn't quite place it. Then I realized that he reminded me of another character on Lost. So much that I actually thought it was the same actor for a moment. Of course, it ended up being a different actor, but the similarity is a bit uncanny. I have commented on the similarities between particular actors previously on this blog, but this one has a little bonus.

The bonus to this particular discovery, is that one of the actors is Arab, and it once again demonstrates a point I make frequently, no matter what you look like, there is someone in the Arab world who looks just like you, only Arab: