The Recap

"Hello? Mr. and Mrs. Ashley? Yeah it's Dr. Shivengo. Your son just awoke from his 4 month coma."

I wouldn't necessarily consider this summer to be outright good or outright bad. It felt more or less like a preparation for after college than preparation for the upcoming year. Here's a recap:

Video Equipment

With the booming success of Chess Club in March there was no other choice but to make future movies on par with that one in terms of quality. With a recent scholarship I went out of my way to purchase it and result in one whole month of frustration trying to call a JVC center in New Jersey and get it fixed. It works fine now. I also purchased a TV box for the computer not only to transfer the tape to a digital format, but also record from DVDs, TV, VHS, and Playstation. Nice, eh? The last major purchase was a DVD burner since I plan to make a video compliation of all the stuff I've done up to this point as a portfolio for when May rolls around. And waking up to the real world from the college coma.

Achivements

I have a cell phone. No, it is not one of those fancy-ass ones that takes your picture and flosses your teeth at the same time, it's your free basic Verizon phone in full color. In an effort to retain public dignity I won't be buying any popular songs-for-ringtones to keep things nice and basic. Besides, your cell phone ringtone tells a lot about who you are. It may have taken 5 years and two tries at the DMV but I finally have a driver's license, but no car on campus. The reason for that being I'll need the license definately for the job, but as for the car at the time I got it (late July) the parking permit deadline already expired. There was no sense either in buying a new car when I was gonna be around for a month.

Golf

Stemming from my last post I did a fair amount of golf this year, shooting a personal best and worst and breaking a club in the process. Also successfully defending the Twin Lakes Showdown title. Tenatively there are ideas for 1 of 3 taped golf outings for next year: Twin Lakes Memorial Showdown (standard stroke play, 4 iron trophy), Twin Lakes Skinsdown (Skins game format), or Twin Lakes Flood Light Showdown (starting tee time 8 pm). Of course these ideas are tenative, since May will be very much a long ways away.

Revenue

Outside of factory work for one day, I did a bunch of eBay sales this summer making some figures in the black ink. Also won another art show with Road Storm and sold the photo to a woman moving to Florida. 2/2 and a sale with that one. Sadly employment didn't happen, since that would've probably made the summer gone by a little faster.

The Site

Oddly enough as this sounds I didn't make a whole lot more than I did last year. Then again Twin Lakes did take up about a good 3 weeks of editing, so it was more quality than quantity. You can vote for your favorite of the summer right here. There were some problems in July with the site exceeding bandwidth, but hopefully that won't be happening very much with the school year starting. Yet then again I could be absolutely wrong about that.

So now the recap done it's time to look ahead at the big final year. My main goal for this year, much like last year, is to plainly not fuck up. So far not a bad track record, but this year could be the way to finalize it. Secondly, stop getting pissed off over petty things. And here's a few more:

1) Ring announce for Fight Night.
2) Perform in Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat to possibly cap off the Colonial Theatre.
3) Shoot the top secret comedy-action film and put it on the site and on RMU-TV for all 20 people to watch.
4) Compile a TM2 Productions DVD before November
5) same as above, only an audio CD.

Of course these are all just ideas at this point. Well onto some packing and I'm out kids. finally.

It was the best of rounds, it was the worst of rounds.

Let's put things into perspective.

About a month ago in a golf outing with Reedy I shot a personal best at Twin Lakes, a +7. I ended up routing Reedy that day by 12 shots.

Now let's fast forward to today's round, this time add 14 extra shots to my score, lost 4 balls, break a 4 iron over a tree, and rip your golf glove. Amazingly I wasn't kicked out for my Macenroe-like antics.

Today after coming off of the best round of golf ever was the worst round of golf ever, shooting a personal worst +21. Reedy won by 6 shots, the first time I've lost to Reedy ever and the first time I've lost period since 2001, when dad beat me during a late game.

As to what exactly happened, I can attribute it to the fact that pretty much my mind was focused on sleeping rather than trying to put the ball in the hole. Or in play, for that matter. Man cannot golf on 7 hours of sleep while sweating like a hostage and dehydrating.

The bad round originally started on the 2nd hole, a hole I have never lost a ball on to begin with. I hit it with the heel of the club and veered into the high grass. OB. The next hole was much worse, finishing with a record high 9 after hitting one in the woods, hitting the 3rd shot into an unplayable location, and then three putting. A par the next hole, an 8 and 3rd lost ball after a bad bounce. 7th hole I hit it way left of the hole, still in play, but to release some anger I swung for the fences on the 4th ball I had and sliced it way right and into the woods, then proceeding to chuck the club in there also which wrapped around the tree. When Reedy saw the club split in two he had that classic "Oh shit, the guy's gone psycho on me (again)." look. From there on I was just concerned about putting the ball in the hole as quickly as possible timewise, not scorewise.

As for the golf glove apperently it got ripped somewhere along the way but didn't notice until after the round was over. My guess was that it got ripped with all that club chucking I did.

As for the broken 4 iron, I still have it and plan to make into a trophy for next year's taped golf outing. Put some duc tape on that to a piece of plywood, spray paint until golden, and then go nuts with an engraver, and you my friends have a trophy.

So thankfully that'll be the last bit of golfing I'll be doing for the year.

Thankfully.

Whip Out Your Longman Series: Say Something Funny (That Guy Model)

As a person with quick wit and the ability to make people laugh, there's always the rare occurance upon a party that instantly freezes all kinds of creativity and readyness.

I believe it goes like this:

"Hey Gary! Say something funny!"

No matter how humorous, witty, or communicative a funny person is, that statement freezes anyone in their tracks. It elicits a "deer-in-highlights" feeling of unprepared, caught off guard speeches of filler words and nervous eye contact. Basically put, the say something funny phrase is a guaranteed killer for anyone that's a comedian.

How does one combat this phrase? The good people at Total Mayhem University, headed by Dr. Yurah Dushbaag and Russian communications specialist Drapinyay Numbrtu, as well as a myriad of faculty members in addition to former Carmen Sandiego henchmen and women, recently published a 410 page journal on the skills and art of humor, comedy, and communication in social events. With the permission of lead writer, Professor James A. Monkeypants we have published the entire journal here for you to see. Actually 409 pages of the journal were collections of Chucky Cheese tickets, bibs from local wing nights, and oodles of doodles of poodles eating noodles.

Dr. Seuss co-wrote that section. So now, onto the article.

(insert boring historical significance, blah blah blah, yada friggin yada) "Ok, now let's analyze the Hey, Say Something Funny phrase. (editor's note: to spice up some scholastical jargon, the Say Something Funny line will be referred to as the That Guy Model, TGM for short.) The keyword in this icer is 'funny', the desired outcome of the request. The fallacy of this statement is that funny is not a description, rather it is an evaluation. Do you laugh before a joke? If you did, then late night TV would be really strange ass. The communication of sender-receiver for a joke is much like a communications process. The statement is delivered, feedback, and all that sequential crap college students sleep through while hungover. The Cliffnotes of this are that the message is successful if it achieves the desired feedback, through the delivery and actions of the sender and the past experiences, cultural surroundings, and connections of the message to the receiver. If the statement or action is not funny, then one of those keypoints are missing. In the TGM model, the sender has already issued the feedback demanded to be desired, creating an increased amount of pressure on the receiver to deliver the targeted feedback. Often time this leads to unsatisfactory results, due to the on-the-spot creativity poised at the receiver of the TGM.

Furthermore, jokes are dereived from a narrative, sometimes anecdotal sense of fiction or non-fiction. When you think of late show monologues a lot of the material is based from actual news articles or events; for stand up comedians, often times it's interesting notes on daily life or personal experience. In the TGM, there is no base of material to start from, thus the receiver quickly has to find a base to start from. In this shortened case of time, however, the wrong base can easily be picked and delivered.

Cliffnotes to this point: the TGM asks for funny as a description, not an evaluation like it is supposed to be. No base material to form a joke is present in the TGM.

So how does one go about combating the TGM? One can simply avoid the sender as much as possible, however given the characteristics of the sender it could possibly cause more badgering. Delivering 'something funny' is generally not recommended, because it submits to the more dominant sender and often times does not result in 'something funny.' Comedian Gary Ashley gave this idea in an instant message conference:

'I think it's rude when someone uses the TGM in a social event. Say you have some coolguy at a party that's wearing a loud hawaiian shirt, which everyone at the party has already tried to avoid, pulls the TGM on you. Let me just say that you should never use the TGM under any circumstances. Not even to your enemies. By delivering the TGM to someone it completely throws out of order the communications process, putting the evalutation right at the front. It would be like saying you love a piece of steak when you have not viewed, smelled, or tasted it. I feel that the TGM is insulting to the receiver; Thus, you should throw the insult right back at him/her. An example of this defensive measure would start with the obvious TGM. However, instead of the nervous filler words and shifting eye contact, it is best to just dryly and bluntly insult the sender with whatever you feel is insulting about them. As an example, I would tell the loud hawaiian shirted TGM sender that he 'Smelled like baby vomit and should return that shirt to the top of the volcano so the island god doesn't get mad.' (crowd laughs) Now obviously you can use more creative, spur-the-moment insults like that depending on the sender, but the main idea is to go with the blunt insult. That way the hapless requester has no way to combat what you just said, and any party goers overhearing the conversation get a laugh at the TGM sender's expense. Thus, you save face, make a joke, and win at the same time.'

Of course Mr. Ashley's methods should only be used for people that really, REALLY deserve it. Otherwise, we prefer a lesser insulting approach, or in fact a brief conversation on the That Guy Model to prevent anymore occurances of 'Hey, Say Something Funny'."

Dr. James A. Monkeypants, B.S.
Yura Dushbaag, Ph.D
Drapinyay Numbrtu, B.S. #2
Dr. Soose (to prevent infringment)
TM University

source:

Ashley, Gary. 2005. "The That Guy Model and How to Avoid It". Online chat conducted August 4th, 2005, using Yahoo Messenger. Retrieved August 5th, 2005, from a scrap a paper and doodles of poodles eating strudles on a Burger King takeout bag. Partial source credit from Dr. Seuss (Soose).