Shots from the Lip

 I have a long day today.  I started out with a walk to CVS for Katherine's daily pills.  Then to Trader Joe's for a can of organic kidney beans.   I really do not have much to add to my blog today but I did commit myself to writing daily, so here it is..... After the blog I will go on Schwab for a possible purchase of Berkshire Hathaway B .  Then it is off to the dry cleaners.....such is a boring life today that will end with my prematurely going around 6pm to my last workshop class - that's it for today - not much - such is life

 I started early today and while I anticipated a light day, it was 'more involved' than I anticipated.  John Achorn acted his way through chapters 19-22 of Huck Finn.  We discussed the LA Times sponsored Festival of Books at which Percival Everett, author of James, spoke.  For Summer session (8 weeks), we are going to read Raymond Carver short stories.  We were also asked for our input regarding choice of authors for the Fall semester. I got home just as Freddie's class began.  The legions of women watercolor painters who simply adore Freddie Manseau makes his Zoom class quite entertaining.  Freddie is a true character - the extent to which he plays up on this to keep his classes large is open to conjecture but regardless, I am enjoying painting! I was just about to pay for lunch at the St John's Cafeteria when Katherine called - I met her at Sawtelle after lunch.  I also discovered along the way that the # 17 bus travels both ways along Sawtelle,...

 The weather outside is still crummy but the wind, at least, has subsided.  After class today I will go to Santa Monica's Din Tai Fung for take away fried rice with pork chops and hot and sour soup (no spice or oil).  We rarely go out anymore because of tipping - tips make eating out far too expensive.  It never was like this in the past and the future does not look good for the hospitality industry. Wednesday is the last comedy workshop session.  I have been scripting and changing/modifying the script daily since 20 April.  Today there is nothing I want to change - this is the script I must indeed change from me acting to me doing this being me.......I am confident that this will be done - I like my script and know that I will get some laughs even if I screw up....If my timing is right I believe I will get a lot of laughs. I ordered a collapsible display tripod from Amazon......will await a Janich picture and then will order both a large picture for displa...

 I was undecided until I got up.  And when I got up I realized that unless I bike ride today, there is a good chance I will not be able to ride again for a couple of weeks.  So I got up, put on three bike shirts (which was not enough - it was really cold out this morning!), and rode the Venice beach bike path to Washington Blvd.  It felt good! I came home, ate breakfast, walked to Trader Joe's for non-fat milk and then came home to see if the new keyboard for the Fire works.  It did not work so I went to Best Buy on the E Line.  The instruction manual neglected to do one thing:  inform the user that there is indeed an on-off switch for the keyboard that must also be charged....So now I am typing on the Fire keyboard. If the Fire were capable of getting the Kobo Reader app, it would be perfect.  As it is, I simply will not get Kobo books unless something special becomes available....such is life.  The fact of the matter is that this tablet is ...

........and along those very same lines, suppose I did a comic gig and no one laughed.  That is not a remote possibility because there are some things that are funny enough that even I cannot fuck it up, no matter how experienced I am in fucking things up beyond all recognition.  But this is a way - at least - of saying that I now have my script and know what I want to do in the time I have allocated to my gig on the 17th of May.  I am reading it through - with emotion - three times a day.....I expect that I will have memorized it by the time of performance and memorized it well enough that it is 'me' and not an actor doing the script........ Suppose I wrote a great book and no one read it.  That, sadly, is closer to reality.  With Joanna's reading everything I wrote from inception, I found the target audience to write to this time and it was the best stuff I'd ever written.   True, the editing (or substantial lack thereof) for the ebook was horrendous...

 I liked switching from Windows to a Mac. A long time ago I used Bootcamp, an Apple method of dividing the computer disk to allow it to separately operate both as a Mac and as a Windows computer.  This was necessary in those days way back when I liked and used the Mac for everything else but tax. Tax was so all-consuming as part of my life that I basically had to become a Windows person again. Ah, but now I want to cartoon again and the software company that I used for my first book is still in business - but only available on a Mac.  No problem! I have that old, rarely used 2019 Macbook with the user name and password for the Mac partition available and Best Buy assisted me in getting 'quite' up-to-date and usable for cartooning.   It is the 'treasure trove' of 16,200 pictures dating back to 2007 that I  just found.  I will, sooner or later (now that I know how to access this) transfer it all to a thumb drive and send to Joanna - hey - if she wants an...

 Not quite a week ago, I 'knew' that from all my workshop classes, I'd get the most out of using my bone setter visit in China as the main theme from which I felt I would get the most laughs.  I wrote the first draft.  It was awful - didn't even last through the first reading. Draft # 2 was too short, far too short.  Drafts 3 and '3A' brought me to a solid 5 minutes.  Today I added physical comedy - I'm going to 'go to school' over the next week on Andy Kaufman You Tube videos and learn the choreography I need to 'introduce' me.......then comes the script........and it all will end with some 'commentary' about the book..........I AM HAPPY WITH THIS - AND WILL DO A FULL SCRIPTED PERFORMANCE ON WEDNESDAY EVENING, 30 APRIL TO THE OTHER MEMBERS OF MY COMEDY WORKSHOP WRITERS CIRCLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ...........while I am not writing about it yet, in the (far, far more than just) planning stage is my 19 May - 29 May trip to Japan.  ...

 What can I write in 17 minutes?  We'll soon find out....it is 2:13pm..... I had a waffle breakfast at St John's this morning, prior to my gastroenterologist visit.  Jimmy Sul just got back from Korea and we discussed travel - his just completed and mine - aspirations, just far..... The big, mother-fucking pill that I've been taking is being taken wrong - got to dissolve it first.....so much for instructions, or lack, thereof.......   Same goes for the utterly complete lack of western logic in using a Japanese website, apparently translated from Japanese to easy to read English.......it still makes no fucking sense!   Four times I tried for the ANA site - two of them after having to go to the bank because AI erased all my bank telephone numbers off of my iPhone.  Thus, I was able to pay for my ANA business class flights - all ANA - no United code sharing!!! Living in the lap of luxury is something I'm going to have to plan because I now have a 42 ...

 True, it is not likely that I will mis-read my iWatch - it is so close to my eyes and the watch font is so big.  Yet at 6:30am this morning I got up.......why?  It was so damned early.  Yet I did actually fall back to sleep before finally getting up and trekking to Whole Foods for their Tuesdays $2 off on whole rotisserie chicken.  I was there early - too early because there were a whole bunch of chickens being cooked but none were close to ready. Thus, a Tuesday morning bagel & cream cheese and coffee at NY Bagel and going to Trader Joe's for another two boxes of matzoh - only it was still too early for Trader Joes to open. So across to Whole Food to check - not ready yet - come back in a half hour And thus, I picked up three rocks to add to some of the blank spaces in front garden where we have the camellia trees......and then back to TJs to wait................and they opened........and I got the matzoh boxes..... ......and crossed the street again to Wh...

  First, before I have a senior moment and forget about mentioning it, for a second time, yesterday I confirmed the Wheelhouse shtick:  40% of what?????? !  The base per item price of exactly the same product at another weed shop where that other shop was $2 less than the 40% off base price at Wheelhouse........they're getting you there with 40% off advertising and relying upon people buying without further investigation.....shame on them.........or shame on the buyers for not asking a bit more than blindly accepting just '40%'?? Uncle Arnie is the brand of 100mg concentrate drink at the weed shop located between 14th and 15th Streets on the south side of Wilshire Blvd in Santa Monica.  On a sunny afternoon when the winds coming in off the ocean are not too strong and do not reduce the outside temperature with an uncomfortable 'feels like', walking west on Santa Monica Blvd along the sunny side of the street and casually heading north along the way to get to Wilshir...

 I forgot the day - ain't no big deal as I've been a user since sometime during the early to mid-60s.  But when the Wheelhose-Venice emails 40% off today, then it is time to take a look. Take what Wheelhouse wants to push today, remove all the taxes and show the product only price which just happens to be 38% less than what you're going to be charged.  Higher base price?  Then definitely higher taxes.   I thought I had a deal for this month's supply until the bottom line of $208 came up - far more expensive than anticipated.   The women in charge - I've seen her there over the past year - took an exceptionally cavalier attitude when I asked to use a calculator to add off of the receipt.  When told that 'the best legal and accounting minds have set this up to be 100% valid/legal - sorry you do not understand it.', I got annoyed..... So then I asked for a refund - something never done there - causing a line of impatient pot-heads, waiting for a...