I went to see Steve Coogan’s movie ‘The Trip’ this week.  For those of you unfamiliar with Coogan, he’s a British comedian most famous for portraying a nerdy DJ along the lines of Garry Shandling or Larry David from ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’.  ‘The Trip’ is a semi-real story about two guys – Coogan and his friend and fellow comedian Rob Brydon, both playing themselves – on a trip through the north of England on a restaurant tour for a magazine...

I just watched Space Shuttle Atlantis make its last journey into space.  Other than a small delay to verify that the vent cap on the launch tower had retracted properly, it was a beautiful, perfect launch… a fitting way to finish off a storied history. Thirty years. I remember being so excited when the first orbiter was called Enterprise… my father and I watched Star Trek religiously every Saturday and Sunday at 5pm on KTLA.  I...

Writing is (at least for me) quite a bit like a fire hose – when it’s on, it’s ON.  And then sometimes, it’s not.  Thing is, very often that hose is pointed in a direction I’m not expecting, and that’s what I wanted to talk about today. That spontaneous burst of creativity, the rush of words in a mad whirlwind in your head, the flood of images and dialogue that’s just dying to get out of your fingers...

A blog page.  Wow.  Don’t know why this took me so long to start – actually, the page has been here for a couple of months without anything past the first ‘Hello World’ post.  That’s sort of sad, really, for a couple of reasons. The first, of course, is that I’m a loud son of a bitch with lots to say about a lot of subjects.  You’d think someone as full of hot air as me would have long since started...