Mice

This movie takes on a more somber tone in light of recent shinanigans.

There are mice living in my house.

The place is a mess, it’s got a generally fetid odor, the kitchen is a disaster, and over the course of several parties our bathroom has seen a lifetime’s worth of horrors ranging from shower peeing to sink puking to a party guest getting an impromptu blowjob.

And now, on top of that, we’ve got a fully-fledged mouse infestation. Classic.

We’ve already killed three, although when we started setting out traps we thought there was only one.

You see, my roommate Cameron saw a mouse saunter through his room and out the door a few weeks ago. He came running out of his room to tell me, and for the next 24 hours I was living in a state of fear. I tore apart cardboard boxes and taped the shreds to the bottom of my door to prevent the mouse from crawling underneath, starting obsessively researching the diseases mice can spread*, and never ventured out of my room alone for fear that the mouse might rape me.

*Fun fact: If it’s a horrific disease that you thought had been eradicated years ago, mice can and do spread it.

But then, in the morning, the mouse dove headfirst into one of our peanut butter-baited Victor mousetraps – a move that resulted in the wire snapping down across the bridge of his nose, breaking his face into two pieces, popping out an eye, and leaving a bloodstain on our carpet.

The mouse was very prolifically dead, and we all figured that the crisis was over. Admittedly, we still hadn’t found the hole in our defenses the mouse had used to get in, theoretically leaving the door open for any other mice that wanted to join the party, but our reasoning was that our profoundly gory execution of the first mouse had given us a Keyser Soze style reputation in the mouse world, and the rest would stay away out of respect and fear.

Over the course of the week, though, we found two more dead mice in traps that we’d forgotten we had set. The message was clear: The mice were out in force, and they wanted us to know that they would suicidally Zerg rush our defenses until we ran out of both peanut butter and mousetraps. They delivered their coup de grace when, two nights ago, I walked into the bathroom in the middle of the night and watched a little furball go streaking out the door a second before it closed.

I hadn’t seen any of the other three mice – they always died and were disposed of while I was in class – so this was my first encounter with our woodland invaders. And let me just say this: It’s really easy to laugh at women in cartoons who see a mouse and instantly jump on a table with their skirt hiked up. It’s like, ‘What’s wrong with you? It’s just a little mouse! And to think we let you vote!’

But when you’re half asleep in the middle of the night and you see something with mangy grey fur and a tail scamper past your foot in your own goddamn home, I challenge you to not want to jump up on a table and start screaming. That second before you remember that it’s just a little creature that is pretty much at the absolute bottom of the food chain is a straight up nightmare, because all you’re thinking is ‘OH MY GOD HOLY SHIT THERE WAS A WILD ANIMAL IN HERE OH JESUS CHRIST IT WAS GOING TO WATCH ME PEE.’

This encounter galvanized me into action, and the next day I hit Albertson’s and picked up a pack of four Tomcat brand mousetraps. This was my first mistake. Do not buy Tomcat brand mousetraps. I’ll tell you why in the paragraph after next.

I’ve never set mousetraps before, but I’ve seen enough Saturday morning cartoons to know that it’s an activity ripe for slapstick comedy and severe pain. Naturally, I was very cautious as I primed the traps and daubed small amounts of peanut butter onto the bait trays, but I managed to make it through the entire process without having one of the traps close on my thumb, causing it to become comically large and red and make my eyes shoot out of my head. I placed the traps at key, mouse friendly areas behind couches and along the baseboards and went to bed.

In the morning, I went out to check the traps, preparing myself to see a grisly scene of mouse carnage – because it’s always surprising how much damage one spring loaded wire can do. But lo and behold, all I discovered was three still-primed and set mousetraps, albeit with completely empty bait trays.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why you shouldn’t buy Tomcat mousetraps. While they have a very cool and intimidating looking picture of a ferocious cat on them, their trigger mechanisms are so unresponsive that they serve less as traps and more as plates with which you can easily convey food to the mouse’s mouth. Unless these traps operate along the ‘turn the other cheek’ principle, I think a bunch of nefarious vegans have started swapping these duds for functioning mousetraps in an effort to safeguard the livelihoods of these freeloading, disease spreading rodents.

So that mouse is out there in my house, belly full of peanut butter that I essentially gave him, gnawing on our wires and playing host to God knows how many fleas. All I’m saying is, I’d better kill his ass before he meets some nice girl mouse and I come back from Christmas break to find everything in my house buried under a fine layer of mouse droppings.

Truman Capps has also considered leaving a toy motorcycle out for the mice to ride in an attempt to make friends.

Quick Thanksgiving

...I have to eat it all in 30 minutes and then drive to Eugene. This... Is Man vs Food!

What’s the last thing anybody wants to do after their Thanksgiving dinner? Yes, that’s right - move. That’s the real paradox of Thanksgiving – it’s a brief holiday that causes an immense traffic snarl-up across the country, all so millions of people can rush home, overindulge more than usual, and then turn right around and rush back wherever they’d come from, in spite of the fact that their digestive systems want them to spend the intervening weeks before Christmas sleeping.

My Thanksgiving this year is even more abrupt than the average Thanksgiving, because the University of Oregon has helpfully scheduled a football game for Friday, November 26th. Thanksgiving and football are both completely awesome, uniquely American traditions, but I’m not looking forward to being physically present at both of them in the space of 24 hours.

The new University of Oregon athletic director, Rob Mullens, received some criticism from fans for making gameday the day after Thanksgiving. His response was, “You can have the game be whenever you want, if you give us $600,000,” referring to whatever broadcast contract they’d worked out with ESPN.

And to that I say, fuck you, Rob Mullens! You have plenty of call to get snippy with people at other times of the year, but when you’ve scheduled a major event that requires thousands of athletic employees, security guards, janitors, cooks, policemen, and band members to cut their holiday short, some greater degree of apology is in order, whether you actually mean it or not.

Don’t get me wrong – I love Duck football. I love it just slightly less than I love Christina Hendricks, mostly in that I don’t want to see Duck football naked.*

*Yes, I am well aware that the Duck football experience includes the Oregon cheerleaders, who I would like to see naked, but if my seeing them naked required me to see everyone else involved in the Duck football experience naked (LaMichael James, Chip Kelly, toothless Crowd Management Services people from Springfield, the rest of the trumpet section), I would probably opt not to. I’m sure the Oregon cheerleaders would look spectacular naked, but if I had to also look at an entire stadium full of naked people in order to see them naked, it would ruin nudity for me altogether.**

**Incidentally, if any of the Oregon cheerleaders are reading this and are interested in working out some sort of more favorable nudity arrangement, don’t hesitate. Male cheerleaders need not apply.

Anyway.

I’m leaving home tomorrow, shortly after dinner, so that I can ride back down to Eugene with other band friends and get a good night’s sleep before the game, which, in true late November fashion, will be colder than Hoth, only with no warm Tauntauns to crawl inside.

I’ve been telling everyone who will listen that I’m praying for a freak blizzard/ice storm/zombie apocalypse to strike Oregon on Thanksgiving, anything to close down I-5 and give me a legitimate reason to throw up my hands, shrug, and say, “Oh well – guess I can’t make it to that there football game!” Some of my friends who are seniors have shaken their heads, saying, “No way, man; that’s our last home game. No way I’d miss that.”

And it occurred to me that, yes, this is going to be my last game playing with the Oregon Marching Band in Autzen Stadium. The Civil War this year is at Reser “Stadium” in Corvallis, and after that our next performance will be somewhere in the Sun Belt, preferably not in a location that ends with –adena.

But for whatever reason, I don’t feel myself experiencing an overwhelming rush of nostalgia. Not yet, anyway.

Autzen Stadium is the greatest stadium in the history of stadiums. It’s obnoxious and loud, like Gilbert Gottfried full of angry drunk people. It’s technologically advanced and powerful, like The Six Million Dollar Man full of drunk people. It’s classy and aesthetically pleasing but also won’t take your shit, like a young Edward James Olmos… Full of drunk people.

The Rose Bowl felt small and Husky Stadium felt like a clammy handshake from a boring kid who nobody likes and is consistently terrible at football. The Horseshoe isn’t bowl-y enough and The Big House looks like the Wolverines are compensating for something.

So understand this – I love Autzen and I love the Ducks. But after four years of attending every home game, I know the pattern each game takes. I know the ups and downs of the game itself, the smell of $9 kettle corn, the balls out rush of students running to get their seats, the solemn trooping of the team from the Casanova Center to the field, the look of shame on the face of the fan being ejected by the cops, the hint of weed in the air, and stadium announcer Don Essig’s creative pronunciation of virtually every word in the English language.

I enjoy all of those things – they’re the reasons I continue to put up with the ongoing weatherbeaten shitshow that is the Oregon Marching Band year after year. But my last one isn’t going to be all that different than the others, and it’s not an experience I’d be too sore about missing. The game looks just as good on TV.

Thanksgiving with my family, on the other hand, is something I want to have every second of. My Mom is a fucking amazing cook, in addition to being hilarious after more than two glasses of red wine, I’ve grown to miss my Dad’s unending onslaught of lame puns and dirty jokes, my cousin Gene is spending the holiday with us for the first time ever, the house is spotless and, unlike my place in Eugene, it doesn’t smell of beefy man BO and mouse droppings.

I love my Ducks, but I love my family more. So fuck you, Rob Mullens, and you, ESPN. I can’t help but notice that we didn’t have anything to do the weekend before this game – that would’ve been a great time for my final Autzen experience.

As it is, my final Autzen experience will coincide with the experience of running onto the field for pregame while still digesting the previous night’s turkey and mashed potatoes. And that will be a unique experience all its own.

Truman Capps loves his family, but does not want to see them naked.

Truman Analyzes Rap Music

Oh, hi there Greatest Image on the Internet. Can I make you into a poster?

I’m a white guy who grew up in a Mormon-heavy part of Oregon, and have a solid history of attending schools with roughly the same level of racial diversity as a KKK meeting.

I have also never been a huge fan of rap music – which is not to impugn its legitimacy as a form of self-expression – and the bulk of my experience with it comes from what I’ve heard at college parties or on my friends’ car radios.

After four years, these are my impressions.

(No information included herein is intended to be offensive to the artists, fans, or Black People™. Also, I have a very broad definition of what ‘rap music’ is, so don’t take issue if my selections are actually hip hop or something, Jack Brazil.)

Replay – Iyaz

Shawty’s like a melody in my head
That I can’t keep out
Got me singing like
Na na na na every day
Like my iPod’s stuck on replay.

My iPod has had plenty of problems, but getting stuck on replay isn’t one of them. Usually, when my iPod gets stuck, it freezes while cycling between songs and refuses to turn on or off – on my drive to California over the summer it locked up outside Sacramento, forcing me to listen to the only available radio station in Yolo County, which consisted entirely of mariachi bands.

Of course, ‘Shawty forces me to listen to a music genre that I’m not crazy about’ doesn’t have quite the same message. I’m just saying, I don’t know how Steve Jobs feels about a song highlighting a potential hardware malfunction in one of his main cash cows.

I guess Apple is doing pretty well right now, and the publicity probably can’t hurt them. Thank God Sean Kingston didn’t target the auto industry:

Got me singing like
Na na na na every day
Like my 1977 Ford Pinto got rear ended and exploded, killing me.

99 Problems – Jay-Z

If you’re having girl problems I feel bad for you, son
I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain’t one!

Up until now, I had heard this lyric as ‘I got 99 problems, but the bitch ain’t one.’ Use of the definite article ‘the’ suggested that while Jay-Z had a bitch, their love for one another was so strong that in spite of all the various other problems in his life, he knew that at the end of the day he could come home to his bitch to relax and enjoy her company.

As I saw it, the only thing Jay-Z could count on was his bitch, and this song was about how lucky he was to have such a bitch in his life, whereas everyone else had to deal with girl problems because their bitches weren’t of the same caliber as his bitch. It was sweet. I hoped to one day meet a bitch who made me feel the same way that Jay-Z’s did.

You know what I mean? The sort of bitch you can take home to meet Mom and Dad. The sort of bitch you could see yourself spending the rest of your life with.

So imagine my surprise when I see that it’s a bitch – indefinite article – that isn’t one of his problems. The implication now is that bitches, were they to play a bigger role in Jay-Z’s life, would be just as big of a problem as racist cops and a fundamentally broken criminal justice system, which isn’t nearly as endearing a message.

I’m like, fuck critics, you can kiss my whole asshole
If you don’t like my lyrics you can press fast forward!

…well, if you want to make me cry, Jay-Z, then mission accomplished. Dick.

Can’t Tell Me Nothing – Kanye West

The drama
People suing me
I’m on TV talking like it’s just you and me.

With all due respect, Kanye, I’ve seen you on TV before, and the way you talk isn’t how you’d be talking if it were just you and me. If you were, in fact, talking on TV like it was just you and me, there would probably be lots of awkward pauses, and you’d spend most of your time trying to steer the conversation away from Battlestar Galactica. That said, it would still be one of your least embarrassing TV appearances.

Let up the suicide doors
This is my life homie, you decide yours
I know that Jesus died for us
But I couldn’t tell you who decide wars
So I parallel double parked that motherfucker sideways
Old folks talkin’ about back in my day?
Class started two hours ago, oh am I late?
You know I already graduated
And you can live through anything if magic made it.

Wait, what?

So you start out talking about suicide doors, an outmoded feature on old cars, then move into self-determination before talking about Jesus and then something about deciding wars. Then it’s another automotive reference with the line about parking, something about old people, a Saved By The Bell gag, and then perhaps one of the most perplexing lines in music history, ‘You can live through anything if magic made it.’

You know what magic made, Kanye? The One Ring. And let me tell you, one hell of a lot of people didn’t live through that fiasco. Just ask Boromir.

Miracles – Insane Clown Posse

Water, fire, air and dirt
Fucking magnets, how do they work?

Look, I was going to do this thing where I posted the Wikipedia definition of how a magnet works, but to be honest, I’ve been skimming the article on magnets for a minute or so now and I haven’t found a concrete explanation.

So I guess what I’m saying is, good question, Insane Clown Posse. Let me know if you find out!

Truman Capps awaits the inevitable accusations of racism.

Studio Production (Or, Buttons: A Love Story)

Has there ever been anything more enticing?

Lighting and editing aside, you know what’s actually fun? Studio production. Why? So many buttons.

My Intro to Electronic Media class is a comprehensive course, designed to give us a knowledge base in just about every subject necessary for the creation of electronic media. The most recent skill they’ve been teaching us is studio production: The art of a bunch of people sitting in front of a bunch of different, outdated machines and pushing buttons and saying things in the right order, a process which, if done correctly, will make a live television broadcast happen. If done incorrectly, everyone gets angry and yells at each other. The evening news, I have learned, is a delicate and precarious thing.

It takes a lot of people to run a live TV broadcast – you need somebody to work the teleprompter, somebody to manage audio levels, a guy in the master control room to see that everything is being broadcast properly, somebody to design the little titles that pop up under the anchors, a person to operate the switcher, which determines which video feed from which camera gets broadcast, and a director to tell all of them what they should be doing at any given time.

What all of this amounts to is buttons: Thousands and thousands of buttons. The mock TV studio in the basement of the journalism school is basically one big orgiastic tribute to the button, and, more importantly, the pushing thereof. That’s actually all that electronic media is, now that I think about it – pushing buttons. Sure, there’s some menus and dials along the way, and at least one prominently placed lever, but by and large if you meet somebody with an electronic media degree, you can bet that their fingers are calloused from spending long days bent over large, expensive consoles, endlessly pushing buttons.

When I was a child, I made frequent trips with my parents and various school groups to OMSI, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, a large and endlessly wonderful children’s museum full of interactive, rotating exhibits about space travel, dinosaurs, earthquakes, and anything else likely to hold a five year old’s attention for a few minutes.

Space travel and dinosaurs were all fine by me, but what I liked most about OMSI was the fact that most of the interactive exhibits had buttons you could push.

I think buttons and the pushing thereof holds a revered status among children because we grew up surrounded by buttons we saw adults pushing that we were always expressly forbidden to push ourselves – usually because most household buttons set things on fire or activate spinning blades underneath the kitchen sink. At OMSI, we were surrounded by child friendly buttons that had no function – well, okay, maybe they would make a recording of a scientist explain about erosion or some shit like that, but anyone who actually waited around long enough to see what pushing the button had accomplished was seriously limiting his ability to seek out and push other buttons. The point is, we could pretend to be button-pressing adults all we wanted.

In a TV studio, there are just as many if not more buttons.

The teleprompter operator sets the speed at which the script moves with a big silver dial which doubles as a button which, when pressed, starts the teleprompter. The audio operator has both buttons and sliders which turn mics on and off and adjust their levels. The technical director is in charge of a series of highly advanced buttons with built in LCD readouts which explain what that button has been assigned to do (activities are assigned to buttons by pushing other buttons), and below these buttons are more buttons which light up when pressed and serve only to show that the buttons above are ready to be pressed.

These buttons, unlike the ones at OMSI, affect very specific things when pressed, and seeing as about half of the buttons in the control room are tied to equipment on-camera personnel are using live in the studio, careless pressing of the buttons can result in making someone look like a dick on live TV. Boom goes the dynamite? Somebody was probably messing with the teleprompter speed control. If you hate somebody on television, by all means, go into the control room and start pushing buttons.

As a child I would’ve rejoiced at the opportunity to push all these buttons, but now that I’ve reached something that could be considered adulthood I have to recognize the terrible power all these buttons hold. Pushing buttons – a fun and carefree activity in my childhood – is now sort of nerve wracking, because one errant push can bring down the entire delicately constructed broadcast and get everybody in the studio to yell at you over their headset radios.*

*Oh, yeah, did I mention we get headset radios? Buttons and headset radios. Suck it, public relations majors.

When the stars align, though, and the studio production goes off without a hitch – everyone focused, talking on their headset radios, and pushing the right buttons at the right times – I get this overwhelming sense that now, more than ever, I’ve grown up. I’m in a position to push buttons that have actual power, buttons that, if a small child were nearby, he would be forbidden to push.

Only eight weeks into the term and already electronic media has given me a sense of accomplishment. If only the accomplishment was something more dignified than, “Is old enough to be unsupervised around complex technological equipment.”

Truman Capps promises an end to electronic media-oriented updates for the time being.

Editing

This icon is synonymous with spending four hours squinting at a computer monitor.

Oh man, you know what’s almost as bad as lighting? Editing.

Editing is terrible because doing it reminds you that the film industry is maybe 30% glamorous movie stars acting out tightly written scripts on lavish, professionally built sets and 70% fat sweaty nerds sitting in dark rooms full of computers, eating Cheetos and stitching the whole thing together with cross dissolves and color filters.*

*In the case of movies like Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow or Avatar it’s more like anywhere between 90 and 110 percent sweaty nerds in dark rooms with Cheetos.

While shooting the 60-second project for my Intro to Electronic Media class was a daunting task because it required me to manage actors, put together equipment, and light the damn scene, it was the editing room that really frightened me. Because once you’re editing, the cameras are put away and the actors have gone home. What you’ve shot is basically all you’ve got to work with, and no amount of George Lucas wipes and audio effects can help if you’ve made something terrible.

That was my main concern – finding out once I’d reviewed all my footage that I’d screwed up in the filming process. Because there’s a lot of stuff you need to remember when you’re shooting – you’ve got to focus basically every time you move the camera, and white balance so that the camera knows what color everything should be, and make sure all the legs of your tripod are the same length so you don’t wind up shooting everything at some weird angle. This is a lot to ask of somebody like me, who frequently forgets biological necessities like eating breakfast.

Fortunately, I’d shot everything correctly, but the potential pitfalls didn’t stop there. Between the camera and the computer there are all kinds of disasters waiting to befall your hard-recorded footage.

Dropped frames are one. A relic of the days when film was physically cut with an actual razor on a reel to reel machine, a dropped frame would occur when one of the necessary frames would get inadvertently cut and then dropped onto the floor, where it would presumably get lost among all the other unwanted materials. In the era of digital recording, it happens when a piece of sophisticated and expensive equipment decides to stop doing its job for a fraction of a second and not record, which creates timecode kerfuffles galore in the editing room later.

Also, the tapes we use don’t necessarily do us any favors. Back during the Writers days, Mike and I had one of our tapes actually split into two pieces, forcing us to, in a moment of desperation and supreme desire to not spend any more time on Writers than necessary, (Scotch) tape our (MiniDV) tape back together so that we could stick it into the tape deck to upload the footage to the computer. As it turns out, tape decks only want one kind of tape in them at a time and tend to break if you don’t respect their wishes, a discovery which very nearly cost us a few hundred dollars.

It was experiences like these that worried me as I sat down in the editing bay earlier in the week to put together my 60-second piece. In my previous experiences with Final Cut, I had always had someone better qualified right there with me to make sure I didn’t screw anything up. But now, flying solo, who would guide me through the sea of options and menus that is Final Cut Pro?

That’s just it – I’m not a pro, and I didn’t feel qualified to use a professional program such as that. After all, everybody says that Final Cut is an incredibly powerful program that can do just about anything; what if I accidentally clicked the ‘Blow Up Journalism School’ button, or checked the box next to ‘Go Back In Time And Help Nazis Win World War 2’? Somehow setting fire (digital fire) to my footage was the least of my concerns.

Fortunately, most of the rest of my Intro to Electronic Media class was in the editing lab at one time or another, and together we formed a shaky support network for one another. It takes a village to raise a child, and it also takes a village to edit 60 seconds of video footage. Ideally, though, people raising a child aren’t looking for tips on how to cut him into pieces and rearrange them in a more dramatic or aesthetically pleasing way.

Once I got going, though, I was surprised by how quickly I was able to put everything together, and how little help I needed throughout the process. Final Cut was always my go-to excuse for not doing more multimedia stuff – “Oh, man, I totally would, but I don’t know how to use Final Cut!” Now the curtains have been pulled back, and I realize that it’s actually a pretty simple program when you get right down to it.

I’m going to need to find a new excuse not to go out and start making movies.

Truman Capps wishes he didn’t have to edit in a room full of people, because it makes it far harder to yell profanity at the computer when it moves too slowly.

Lighting

This little bastard will stop at nothing to make you miserable.

In every book on filmmaking or electronic media I’ve ever read, at some point the author attempts to dispel the rumor that all media creation is simply ‘Lights, Camera, Action!’, and that it is, in fact, quite difficult. There are so many other steps – scripting, storyboarding, funding, editing, catering – that make the process so much more difficult, thereby explaining why there is so little worthwhile content on the Internet.

But lights, man. They’ll get you every time. Fucking lights.

In spite of how far we’ve come as a civilization in terms of camera technology, the amount of light put out by the lamps and overhead fixtures in your house is still not enough to properly light a scene for multimedia production. Video cameras are, apparently, cooler than everyone else, because they are perpetually wearing sunglasses, which means that if you want a scene you’re shooting to look normal, you have to give all your actors long term eye damage with a variety of different heavy duty stage lights, working in tandem, set up in the correct order.

Today I shot a project for my Intro to Electronic Media class in my living room. The leadup to the project was not especially daunting for me – I knew my way around a camera, thanks to Writers, and I had a good plan for what I was going to do and how I was going to do it.

But lights, man. Fucking lights.

On one of the first days of my Intro to Electronic Media class, our professor pulled out one of our battered, aging light units and explained its inherent difficulties and dangers.

The stands are flimsy and prone to collapse. (You can damage journalism school equipment and incur serious fines without even trying.)

The lights reach temperatures of a billion degrees within fifteen seconds of being turned on, so don’t touch them or keep them near curtains or other flammable materials. (The lights will not hesitate to kill you and then destroy the evidence by burning the house down.)

Don’t touch the lightbulbs – if too many people do it, the accumulated grease from fingerprints will boil and make the lightbulb explode. (Using one of the 20-year-old lights from the journalism school is essentially playing Russian Roulette with everyone who has used that light since Desert Storm.)

They’re the most dangerous, finicky, and unpredictable part of your shoot. Fucking lights.

Lighting is about two things: The proper illumination of the subject, and the complete genocide of shadows. Ideally, you will have three lights (a spot, a fill, and a backlight) set up in a specific triangular pattern that, somehow, will make stars align and completely eliminate all traces of shadows (because shadows don’t happen in the movies, just like people going to the bathroom or minorities living through an entire horror movie).

This is all fine and dandy if you know the order in which to set up your lights. If you’re me, who can’t find his textbook or his notes on how to create this shadow destroying power-stance, the best you can do is flip on all your lights and play musical chairs until the shadows are as small as possible, at which point you turn on the camera and hope for the best.

Fucking lights..

Shadows are resilient. Today we had shadows so strong and beefy that even when we shined other lights directly on them they refused to go away. It was a lot like Independence Day - our adversaries were powerful and seemingly invincible and we had no idea how to kill them. Only in Independence Day Jeff Goldblum and Steve Jobs save the day, whereas I just said, “Fuck it. It’s my first video project – she’s bound to grade us easily,” and went with it.

For something that I consider to be a chore at best and an incentive to give up on film at worst, lighting has a surprisingly strong cadre of devotees. I’ve met plenty of amateur filmmakers who are obsessed with lighting, people who treat sets full of craggy, shadow-prone objects the same way my parents treat crossword puzzles – fun problems waiting to be solved. Up until 2005 there even existed a magazine, Lighting Dimensions for people with a severe hard on for lighting.

Thismakes me wonder if they have a magazine for people who make those toothpick and paper umbrellas that they stick in tropical drinks, because I find them and lighting to be about equally interesting. Unfortunately, you need to light your scene properly if you’re going to make a good film, whereas a Pina Colada is simply strongly encouraged.

Fucking lights.

I spent the better part of our shoot today fretting about the state of our lights, which has now made it impossible for me to enjoy scripted television anymore. Every time Don Draper stands against a wall and tries to explain why cigarettes aren’t bad for you, all I can think about is how difficult that scene must have been to illuminate, given the fact that there’s no room for a backlight or a fill.

Lighting has ruined television for me.

Thank God you’re not a journalism major.

Truman Capps would like to welcome his J472 class to his blog – why don’t you take a picture? It’ll last longer!

Man vs Food

This burrito is bigger than my roommate's girlfriend. By the transitive property, Adam Richman is a cannibal.

We’ve all met plenty of snobs who turn up their noses and say, “I don’t watch reality TV – it’s so puerile.” For example, if you’ve ever met me before, you’ve met one of those snobs. I don’t like reality TV because real people are fundamentally less interesting than fake people invented by writers, and because their petty, stupid conflicts are too similar to my own; when I watch TV, I want to see people who have to deal with zombies or genocidal robots on a daily basis, if I want to see an argument about who needs to clean the kitchen, I can just leave my room.

What I’ve found with a lot of my fellow TV snobs, though, is that we’ve all got one weak point. “I don’t watch reality TV… Except for What Not To Wear, because there’s actually a lot of good fashion tips on that show.” “I don’t watch reality TV… Except Nanny 911, because it’s really inspiring what they do to turn those kids around.” “I don’t watch reality TV… Except Jersey Shore, because I’m stupid.”

In that case, I may as well tell you now: I don’t watch reality TV… Except Man vs Food, because there is no purer form of entertainment than watching a man slowly kill himself, one bite at a time.

For those of you unfortunate enough to not be familiar with Man vs Food, the premise is simple: Host Adam Richman travels around the country, doing every restaurant food challenge he can find. You know that steakhouse by the Interstate where if you can eat a 72-ounce steak in half an hour you don’t have to pay for it and you get a free hat? That’s Adam Richman’s career.

What I love about this show is the fact that Adam is living my dream. I love food – moreover, I love food that is prepared in such a way that its deliciousness is only matched in how many years it will shave off your life, hence my deep-fried safari to Scotland earlier in the year. However, I’m also trying to live healthier, a lifestyle choice that makes it hard for me to eat anything involving red meat without imagining my innards crying and dreaming of a day when I consume nothing but Edamame beans and tepid water.

Fortunately, I have Adam Richman to show me what life is like for people who have absolutely no common sense when it comes to eating – or, rather, what happens when The Travel Channel pays a person to tie up his common sense, throw it in the trunk of a car, and have Robert Di Nero shoot it like in Goodfellas.

For example, in the most recent episode, Adam goes to a restaurant in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and orders a five pound nacho platter with three different kinds of meat, horrifying amounts of refried beans, and a lava flow of melted cheese, all of which he finished in slightly less than 45 minutes, earning him a free T-shirt.

There is something so quintessentially American about this – one man eating enough junk food to feed an entire village in Mexico, all in the pursuit of a cheap polyester T-shirt, most likely manufactured by starving peasants in the same village in Mexico.

My biggest problem with the show is Adam Richman himself. The only reason I watch the show is because I like food; I feel like that’s the reason why most people watch most food shows. Yet food shows have a solid history of obnoxious hosts – Guy Fieri and Anthony Bourdain are the archetypes, and Adam Richman is well on his way to overtaking them.

Whenever he isn’t stuffing his face with something that looks almost criminally delicious, he’s mugging for the camera, telling jokes or, more often, mimicking fear and anguish as he watches the chef prepare his gargantuan eating challenge. That always sort of pisses me off – insurance risk managers don’t act all scared when they have to determine the liability of a second rate theme park, my Mom doesn’t roll her eyes and gnash her teeth when she’s assigned to a particularly nasty malpractice case, and I usually didn’t quiver in fear whenever I had to assistant edit a three hour long ghost hunt over the summer. I know you’re just trying to be endearing, Adam, but there’s nothing endearing about a guy acting stressed out about the job in which he gets paid ludicrous amounts to travel the country and eat.

Man vs Food has been criticized for being ‘food porn’* - a shameless display of overindulgence and excess. But I say, what’s wrong with a little porn every now and then?

*Mainly by newspapers in England, where excessive eating is looked down upon. Excessive drinking, on the other hand, is widely celebrated there. So you tell me, England – where’s Man vs Alcohol?

My roommates and I watch Man vs Food pretty much whenever we’re in front of the television – between On Demand and the fact that Man vs Food is a big moneymaker for The Travel Channel, it’s basically always on. And while the show is undoubtedly a celebration of excess, to me it’s also sort of a champion of moderation.

Before the challenge, Adam narrates as the camera lovingly pans over the preparation of this unmanageably large feast – a six-pound burrito, or a four pound grilled cheese sandwich, or three pounds of cracked crab – and all of us on the coach collectively moan and talk about how much we wish we had his job.

And then the clock starts and Adam starts eating, shoving this simply gorgeous looking food into his mouth as fast as he can in pursuit of that T-shirt or bumper sticker, a crowd behind him chanting his name. He’s putting away this food so fast he can probably barely even taste it.

As the challenge goes on, Adam inevitably begins to slow down, sweating bullets and clearly fighting off the urge to vomit. And there comes a point, near the end of each challenge, where he looks like hell and he’s still got half a plate of delicious barbecue ribs left, and his entire career is entirely dependent on him eating the rest of them in under ten minutes, and you can see this defeated look in his eyes where he wishes that he had just become a CPA before he dives back in and finishes.

Then, greasy, sweating, bloated, and miserable, he manages a weary smile and mugs for the camera one last time before retreating to his trailer for Man vs Colon, an event which is not televised but must be equally exciting, at least for him.

If anything, this show is anti-gluttony; Fundamentalist Christians may well be behind this whole song and dance, trying to beat the American obesity epidemic by showing us this one man being made to hate his very existence because of too much food.

He’s a regular martyr, that Adam Richman – sacrificing himself on camera every week so that we may one day realize that there is such a thing as too many nachos.

Truman Capps wants Adam Richman to come to Taylor’s Bar and Grill in Eugene to do the ’25 Tacos in 30 Minutes’ challenge, mainly just to see him finish the tacos in 3 minutes and make all the people who’ve lost look stupid.

Previously, on Battledip Galactica...

The ping-pong ball is not a secret ingredient, just the luckiest (or unluckiest) beer pong shot of all time.

My mother had, from an early age, taught me that artificial cheese is a bad thing. In her eyes, it was perfectly acceptable to buy a package of Kraft Singles or a gallon jar of Rico’s nacho cheese at Walmart, but only if you were going to smoke three cigarettes on the ride back from the store in your rusted out 1973 Dodge Dart before returning to your obese wife and 5 kids living in a double wide trailer which doubles as a meth lab. Otherwise, any cheese that didn’t come in a $7 brick with the word ‘TILLAMOOK’ emblazoned across the front was only to be used as a punchline.

So imagine my quandary last year, on The International Day of the Nacho, when my then-roommate and current-Boris Johnson lookalike Jack Brazil came home from the store with a brown bag full of discount nacho ingredients, among them two squat glass jars of Tostitos Fiesta Cheese.

Jack uncorked the two jars and poured their contents into a big glass bowl. The cheese rolled into the bowl like viscous, yellow sludge; pooling on top of itself in folds and layers as it settled. This, I had been taught, was the wrong consistency for cheese to be. If you wanted your cheese in liquid form, you had to buy it solid and melt it yourself – to buy it pre-melted like this left a lot of unanswered questions about how the cheese had originated and who had done the melting.

“Why, uh,” I muttered, watching these seemingly small jars disgorge a veritable Crater Lake of cheese into the bowl. “Why are we putting it in a bowl?”

Jack, no doubt a veteran of many jars of artificial pre-melted cheese, looked at me like I was stupid. “So we can warm it up in the microwave! Duh..”

This cheese was nauseating enough at room temperature; the thought of it slightly warm like a lover’s embrace was not doing it or me any favors. It was so thick that it took ten minutes to microwave it to an acceptable temperature.

And then there we were – me, Jack, and a big, bubbling bowl of what I had been brought up to view as concentrated synthetic evil. I resolved not to have any of it, but somehow Jack changed my mind (to this day I can’t remember how – I imagine he probably called me a fag somewhere in the process) and I dipped a chip into the substance and then deposited the chip in my mouth.

The cheese slithered across my tongue, bland and overly salty, before sliding down my throat like mucus. I pushed the bowl back towards Jack, who was gleefully drizzling the cheese onto his plate of nachos.

“Pfft.” Jack grinned, watching me force back the urge to vomit. “More for me, I guess. Pussy.”

While Jack is accomplished at many things, he is far better knowing every obscure fact about every band in existence than he is at eating two jars of Fiesta Cheese in one sitting, and so once we were finished with dinner we had one and a half jars of Fiesta Cheese in a glass bowl sitting in our refrigerator.

Two days later it was the night before a weekend band trip to Seattle to watch the Ducks crush the Fuskies, and Jack and I were staring at that big bowl of cheese, the last thing left in our refrigerator.

“We should probably throw it out,” he said. “Y’know, in case it goes bad while we’re gone.”*

*In retrospect, the cheese probably had so many preservatives in it that it would outlast me, Jack, any children we might have, and potentially all life on Earth. Eons from now, alien survey parties would land on Earth and the only evidence they’d find of human civilization would be that bowl of Fiesta Cheese. Tasting it, they would no doubt write off our entire race as producers and consumers of sub-par dairy products and go on their merry way.

“No,” I said, my long held aversion to wasting food welling up within me. “Let’s use this cheese. Let’s make it better. Let’s cook with it.”

“What can we make? It’s just a bowl of cheap cheese!”

“We’ll make dip,” I said, turning to the spice cabinet and flinging the doors wide open. “We’ll make the best fucking dip in the history of the world.”

Jack and I proceeded to do just that, employing probably about 60% of the nonalcoholic foodstuffs in the house. Cayenne pepper, chili powder, taco seasoning, red pepper flakes, black pepper, Chipotle Tabasco, Tapatio, and half an onion combined to make what had once been a bland bowl of dairy sludge into a robust and delicious dip.

Jack and I heated the substance up and sat downstairs, playing Halo 2 and scooping as much of this stuff as we could into our mouths on chips.

“What are we going to call this?” Jack asked, gasping for air between mouthfuls.

“Easy,” I said. “Battledip Galactica.”

Like Battlestar Galactica, my dip is intense, smart, powerful, well-written, and a fitting allegory for the global War on Terrorism. Also, none of my other favorite TV shows had applicable names for a dip - Mad Dip? Dippy Howser M.D.? No thank you.*

*In the process of writing this blog, I realized that Arrested Dipvelopment was almost a better choice than the name I went with, but I have no regrets.

I’ve never thought of myself as an especially gifted cook, so it’s been ingratiating for me to see the warm reception Battledip Galactica receives at every band party where I’ve served it. When the trumpet section went to the beach a few weeks ago, I pulled the Battledip out of the microwave just as half a dozen stoners came back inside after herbing up on the back porch. The entire bowl was gone in under 15 minutes.

People have begun to demand Battledip even when I don’t have the ingredients; on Halloween, two people left the party while drunk just to go to the store to buy an onion and some Fiesta Cheese so I could make the dip. When I was done, it was gone in about 20 minutes.

I feel pretty good about Battledip’s popularity, given that it’s got four figure calories and reportedly has given more than one person a horrifying case of Battleshits Galactica the following day.

People keep asking me for my recipe, and I’ll tell you here on the Internet in front of everyone: All you do is pour two jars of artificial cheese into a bowl, and then start experimenting with all your other applicable spices and vegetables. Everything is variable, except the artificial cheese.

Sorry, Mom.

Truman Capps wants to have a Battledip Galactica sampling party where all the guests bring their own versions, but the windows would have to stay open at all times, if you catch my drift.