Grandma Dragon’s Recipee

Ingredients:

• 30 oz. – Buttermilk biscuits (the storebought kind in those cans that sort of explode when opened).
• 3/4 cup – Sugar (regular)
• 1 teaspoon – Cinamon
• 1/2 cup – raisins
• 1/2 cup – Chopped nuts
• 1 cup – brown sugar
• 1/2 cup – butter
• Small amount – Shortening or oil

Instructions:

1. Grease a 10 inch tube pan (or bunt cake pan).
2. Cut each biscuit into fourths (or pieces roughly the size of a quarter).
3. Mix the regular sugar and cinamon in a plastic bag. Then add the biscuit pieces and shake to coat all the pieces. You may have to add the biscuit pieces a few at a time.
4. Put loose layers of biscuit pieces in the tube pan. In between each layer of biscuit pieces add some nuts and raisins.
5. In a seperate pot melt the butter and brown sugar together over medium heat until they boil, stirring regularly. Boil them for 1 minute.
6. Carefully pour the boiling butter and brown sugar mixture over the layers of biscuit already in the tube pan.
7. You may have wanted to pre-heat the oven to 350°F while you were doing all those previous steps, but it’s too late now. Sucka!
8. Bake the whole thing at 350°F for 35 minutes or to taste.
9. Let stand for 15 minutes before removing.

You may have to eat this stuff out of the pan. It tastes good but can be difficult to remove. Also, if you’re not eating it with your fingers it’s not traditional monkey style.

Note: the author can neither confirm nor disprove the theory that monkey bread is so named because it’s gooy and handfuls can easily be flung at folks like so much feces in the primate house.

crudely put: Even empty space has a certain amount of energy. This energy manifests in the form of “virtual particles”. These are particle/anti-particle pairs that spontaneously spring into existence and then almost instantly annilate each other.

The existence of these particles is so brief and the counter-balance of their forces and magnitudes so perfect that the net effect is almost as if they never existed, hence the term virtual particles. However, though fleeting, certain effects such as the Lamb Shift are thought to suggest the existence of particles such as virtual photons.

In the her book Many Waters author Madeleine L’Engle implies that like virtual particles other potential entities might straddle the border between existence and non-existence.

As a side note: if a particle/anti-particle pair forms near the event horizon of a black hole, one of the particles might fall into the black hole and be lost while the other escapes into the universe. Since the particles could not annilate as they normally would the net effect is that a particle springs into being out of nothing. In actuality the energy to form the particle comes from the black hole it’s self, thus decreasing the black hole’s mass.

This process, a form of quantum tunneling, when repeated over a long period of time will eventually cause even the inescapable mass of a black hole to gradually evaporate.

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There isn’t a lot of progress to speak of currently. I’ve taken a job teaching a night class on American Literature and this has really put a crunch on time and energy. Although it is material I am interested in, I’m not entirely happy about the fact that it is a time and mind drain. I am hoping that the amount of time, energy and frustration I devote to it wains in the coming weeks. Then I can devote time, energy and frustration to screenplays.

Treatments and screenplays: Last week I got quagmired in one of the treatments. I think I’ve managed to pull myself out of the quagmire now though. I’m not sure how many more treatments I will write before I jump off here at some point into an actual screenplay. We’ll see.

Ameviathan has come to a temporary standstill. I think that of the two screenplays, the *Green Machine* is the more obvious choice to shoot. Now it is just a matter of scouting locations, figuring out what props are needed, seeking out the actors and putting together some sort of hodgepodge crew.

Non-profit and profit research has also come to a standstill. It is a daunting amount reading to do by myself. I’ll get to it, somehow.

So there you have it. Frustration. Part of the process perhaps or perhaps illuminating in terms of decisions that I’ll soon have to make.

Don’t look back.

Do you guys hear something?

…sort of like hoofbeats just beyond the hill?

+++

If
you
have
an
itch
on
your
foot,
in
your
shoe,

DON'T

itch
your
foot
with
a
pen
because
you
will
write
on
your
sock.

Groin.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this exercise it’s that you can’t very thoroughly describe an archtypal pair of pants without using the word “groin” a few times. Oh, I’m sure you can describe a lot of features of pants and vaguely give the location of those features, but if you want to give a position for anything above the knees and not directly associated with the waist, then you probably have to indicate some clue relating it’s proximity to the groin.

If you look at pants as being like a country then the cuffs and waist are sort of akin to the frontiers. The legs below the thigh are like far flung provinces. But ah, the groin! The groin is the like unto Grenich England from which all longitudes are judged, ancient Rome to which all roads lead, a sort of axis mundi of pants if you will.

Continue reading The Ideal Pants (a treatise) →

So yesterday I used some Cool Mint Listerine mouth wash. I then ate a piece of Wrigley’s Winterfresh gum immediately afterwards. It was the most unsatisfying piece of gum I’ve ever eaten. All of the flavor of the gum was completely masked by the lingering after effects of the Listerine. By the time the Listerine wore off, the gum had lost all flavor and sugar. Yum.

I’d be lying if I said I was surprised…

Click here to read more.

I am currently waiting for Tim to print out some documents on starting a non-profit. Once he does, I’ll review them.

As for writing, I’ve started working on a number of treatments for a potential future feature length film. To date I’ve finished two of these. However, I’d like to write them all out (in treatment form that is) to get an idea of their potentials. The tentative titles are:

• Space Cops
• Galaxy Lords
• Punkies
• Kill the Poor
• Never Trust a Dead Guy
• Night-Mare
• I Put a Robot Down in NJ
• Cyber-Rad
• Bore to the Core

When Syd Field writes, “Writing is a personal responsibility; either you do it or you don’t. Do it” (204, Workbook), it is hard to tell who he sounds more like, Yippie activist Jerry Rubin and his “Do It” manifesto or a soapbox-Stan Lee and his Spiderman moral, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” Wherever you position Field on the spectrum ranging from manifesto to downright silver-surfing-cheese, one thing is for certain: when it comes to the how-to’s of scriptwriting, no name shines brighter and more blinding.

What launched Field to the front in how-to’s of scriptwriting was his book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, published in 1979. At the time it came out, it was one of the first notable books aimed at the everyman to deal with scriptwriting, and as a result it became somewhat of an institution. Like any institution, it is today loved as much as it is reviled. Certainly timing played into the book’s success, yet it does lay out one tried and true blueprint of screenplay writing – a blueprint that many have acknowledged, albeit grudgingly. Field’s name is so ubiquitous when it comes to screenwriting that today he is name-checked even in the most vacuous of wastelands, such as the June 2005 issue of Maxim. On page 56 snuggled between booze ads and pages of bikini girls glossing tips on golf and car-racing, screenwriter David S. Goyer, credited with the story of the 2005 summer blockbuster, Batman Begins, directed by Christopher Nolan, gives advice to budding screen scenarists. The guidance comes in six bat-bullet points and, excluding the last (some sort of frat-meta-speak about a tough scrotum undoubtedly written in by a Maxim staff writer to placate the target audience), appears to be lifted right out of the pages of Field’s book.

Continue reading Syd Field and Scriptwriting →