Throughout my childhood, my birthday saw the arrival of a “theme cake”, that is, a b-day cake which had ties to whatever I was into at the time. Very cool idea for all you parents out there, BTW. One year it was a baseball glove, another a SF 49ers helmet, next my 1st car, you get the picture.

Well, this year she may have outdone herself. As my own interest in my birthdays has reached an all-time low, she refused to let my bah-humbug B-day attitude prevail. Somehow, defying laws of edible chemistry, she made a cake which was the spitting image of our beloved new “Laughing Planet” logo. Producing it at the family breakfast after my cousin Erin’s wedding assembled the most members that side of my family’s seen for 15 years, she unveiled her masterpiece to uproarious applause.

Is she not the most inspiring and loving mom and is this not the most amazing cake you have ever seen? Judge for yourself: (the cake, not the mom; I already know she is the coolest)

What does a guy gotta do to get a fair shake these days? First, I give the guys from the paper my business card with my name on it yet they still misspell it TWICE. My name is a TOTAL of SEVEN LETTERS long. How hard can that be?

Then, they don’t mention the huge 60-foot putt I nailed on the final hole to tie for the win. (Nor did they print the photos they took of that critical moment.)

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Not sure how often bloggers are expected to blog. Since I’m new to this blog thing, bear with me. (I’m done using the word “blog” now). Maybe I need to declare this a “weekly”.

The crushing weight of the footage gathered from March to June this year is slowly lightening. Several weeks of chipping away at the iceberg has reduced the amount of active clips by around 80%. Thanks largely to the macho muscle of our new machine, scenes are taking shape, which means more teasers are imminent.
We saved the most chaotic footage, and most voluminous, for last – that from the Lao New Year water festival. Sometimes the task of editing can be called tedious at best, maddening at worst. (more…)

Good things do come to the patient! This week will see the arrival & installation of a brand-spankin’ new Mac Pro desktop with bucketloads of RAM, memory & doodads and, most importantly, 2 Quad-core processors! This unit will do everything we need (and more) to bring this movie to completion in a timely fashion. Big, big news.

Props to our producer, Marc Johnson, who has gone above and beyond the call on numerous fronts, including when he served as cameraman in Laos for 3 weeks. Where would we be without you, Marc? You da man.

Any of you reading here who’ve yet to watch “The Laughing Planet”  trail…er…”Teaser“, take this moment to give a it a look or watch it for a 2nd time. Some people who’ve re-watched have found they “missed” some of the jokes the 1st time thru. We hadn’t tried to be overly complex with our humor, but the mark of a good movie may be that it’s worthy of watching more than once. Hopefully people were just cracking up so hard that lines were lost under the laughter.

We have plenty of hurdles yet to overcome before the completion of this project. Today witnessed the dreaded computer issue. A crash or near crash. Maybe like those water landings they prepare you for on airplanes. All you know is it’s painful, but you’re not dead.

Things do continue to progress slowly but surely, however. For those who check back here regularly we might even keep you teased with more “sneak peaks” of some of our early rough edits if we find the time and gumption to spill those beans.

I’m trying to wear as many hats as possible to keep the ball rolling for now. Fortunately I have a very big head so that’s working out fine.