I made a single-serving Guinness milkshake.

The recipe is pretty lazy:

• 1 pint of ice cream – I used Starbucks Caramel Macchiato ice cream
• 1/2 can Guinness – I used the can with the nitrogen widget
• let the ice cream sit for 5 minutes until the outside melts – it will be easier to scoop and will blend better
• dump the entire pint of ice cream into a blender
• open the can of Guinness and pour half of it into the blender
• blend until roughly uniform
• pour shake into a glass
• drink the shake
• drink the rest of the Guinness

I’m really into this XCOM trailer. I know this rebooted game is nothing like the original X-COM, but since I never played it this isn’t such a big deal for me.

It’s the 1950s, and the entire world is going insane – there’s a housewife who has been possessed by the staticky tar aliens, there’s a dude getting his insides eaten out as he screams through the bubbling tar, and best of all, there’s this flying obelisk gong thing, apparently an extradimensional alien tank equivalent, which looks like Leviathan from Hellraiser.

Jeffrey has pointed out to me that the meeting I scheduled for Monday the 9th was actually scheduled after that, on Friday the 13th. I guess that is why no one showed up, in the past before I did the scheduling.

So, I’ve rescheduled the meeting for this afternoon, at 1pm in the Santorini conference room. Note I did the rescheduling for this in the past, on Friday in response to Jeffrey’s comment today. So there’s still some chronological bugs to work out in the system.

However the meeting is scheduled for a time in the future, both in the future at the time of scheduling as well as the future for me writing this email. Therefore I feel the important parts of the process are working.

I WORK FOR NEMESIS is by far the most ambitious film I’ve ever produced. Literally my every waking moment is filled with calling people and sending emails… it seems like every five minutes I think of something we haven’t covered yet. I carry a clipboard everywhere covered in categorized notes, even to bed.

All the mayhem is largely because of the script and our schedule – the weekend of the 17th/18th we have to have nearly every featured actor in costume somewhere in the scene for this final mission, OPERATION MAGIC JAR.

But it is ultimately positive. Things are ka-rayzay, but we have an awesome team. Our new Assistant Casting Director is helping us cast extras and one of our featured parts to replace an actress that couldn’t make it on the shoot day at the last minute. And the madness of OPERATION MAGIC JAR means that everyone will already be cast, costumed etc for future shoots.

I had a company name. I checked the trademark database and California Secretary of State to make sure the name was unique. Then I queried GoDaddy to see if it was available. I added to my cart, but didn’t buy it. That was a big mistake.

Over the next week, I designed a logo, wrote up trademark registry information, engaged a lawyer, prepared LLC documents, registered for internet sites the company will be using.

Then I notice someone has registered both domains. These are obscure names. Two different squatters (not GoDaddy) had watched the queries and bought them. Now I have to get a new name, hopefully one that matches the logo, and change all the forms and contacts I was writing.

After years of idly wondering what I was remembering, I stumbled onto a detail from a trip I made once in Japan.

I was backpacking in the early 1990s around Aizuwakamatsu, to visit the castle there. Since my trip was planned by the very helpful people at the Tokyo office of the JTB, they had scheduled all kinds of crazy stops whose purpose I had very little idea.

One of the stops was a country home of some national hero, a famous scientist or other. All the signs were in Japanese and I hadn’t heard of him before, but the guides assured me he was very famous!

Now, years later, this turns out to be the childhood home of scientist Noguchi Hideyo, who discovered the cause of syphilis in 1913, and now has his face on the 1000 yen note.

Mystery solved, almost 20 years later!

I dreamt I saw the lost pornographic episode of Captain and Tennille. Most of the episode was them on stage, singing, like they always did, but naked. It was even worse than the show usually was.

Daryl’s penis was very long and he swung it around during the songs while Tennille showed her ass to the camera while on all fours.

Another weird detail in my dream: Tennille was 5′ 11″, and Daryl was 5′ 6″ or something. While I cannot remember Daryl’s exact height, I remember people mentioning Tennille’s… looking up her bio on IMDB, that turns out to be her actual height. Did I just get lucky? Or did somehow I remember that? I don’t remember remembering Tennille’s exact height!

Later in the dream it may have turned out to be a porn spoof of Captain and Tennille, because Tennille was played by Dana DeArmond, who wikipedia says is 5′ 8″.

On Sunday I was walking to meet some people at Indian burrito place “Kasa,” from the Women’s Building where we just had a Scary Cow pitch meeting. It’s about a half mile walk. It was a sunny Sunday, and tons of people were out drinking and having a good time.

About a block away from Kasa I realized I had left my sunglasses at the meeting! I ran back, passing Sara and Susanne on the way. Once I got to the Women’s Building I found my sunglasses… in my pack I had been carrying the whole time.

I ran back. This time about a block from Kasa I saw Sara and Susanne stopped… There was an SUV embedded in Samovar Tea Lounge.

So I had walked by this accident just before and just after it happened! People were milling around in shock at witnessing the accident. All the windows in Samovar were broken, and the police were closing down the street. Susanne said she and Sara had seen a man dive out of the way of the car, and then after the event had ended, they saw a woman who HADN’T jumped clear.

5 people injured, including the girl we saw under the car has a broken pelvis and fractured ribs.

The thing I keep wondering about is: did people finish their tea?

I was just thinking about this yesterday!

From 13 Stripes and 51 Stars: A mathematician figures out the best way to jam an extra star onto the American flag.