At lunchtime today, I went out to tweak the transmitter settings on the MacGuffin, since people were having trouble understanding the instructions for the secret bonus.
While I was out there, I took a picture of the Ancient and Most Secret Guardians of the MacGuffin, relaxing after a hard day of foiling gentleman archaeologists (and cooking burgers on the outdoor grill, and driving red schoolbuses up and down the Brandywine, packed with schoolkids, and shoveling, and generally working hard):
"What should we tell people who ask us: ‘Um… we’re looking for the MacGovern?’"
"Tell them anything you like! Tell them that you’ve never heard of it. Or that it’s floating in the middle of the river. Tell them it was here, but it’s been gone for years."
"Can we make this face [makes grim face] and do this?" [pantomimes pumping a shotgun]
"Yes, absolutely. Think of yourselves as, you know, the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade."
"Okay, we can totally do that."
Joann Loviglio and Joseph Kaczmarek, a reporter and photographer for the AP, were at last week’s showing of Ghostbusters at Fort Mifflin. This morning, Joann’s story just went live, along with a photo of me doing a kind-of-a, sort-of-a hadouken with the first reel of the movie (click to see it on Newsvine, which I think is a sort of an AP clearinghouse:)
I will be perfectly honest here. (Isn’t your blog the place for True Confessions about unimportant things?) The reason I like that picture so much is that it makes me look skinny. I find myself not really caring if I look like a ghastly showboat. I mean, I am a ghastly showboat, but at least here I look like a skinny ghastly showboat.
Tonight, I must attend a meeting of West Chester Borough Council to ask permission to use a municipally-owned structure for an upcoming showing. Since the story has been picked up by both the Inquirer and the Daily Local News (I checked; of course I checked!) I’m hoping that at least one of the folks on Council will have seen it, emboldening me to ask if we can go ahead with the flaming tire tracks and the careening VW bus.
It’s been four years since I flew — the Boarding Pylons where you line up to load onto the plane are new to me, and the way the snacks come (heaped in clear plastic Santa sacks, passed out by a flight attendant in shorts) is a change. But mostly the same. And it’s still awesome to look out the window!
Here’s a long-exposure photo that Stephen Whittam took at the Guerilla Drive-In Friday night, where we showed Ghostbusters at Fort Mifflin:
Fort Mifflin is right next to the end of the runways at Philadelphia International Airport — you actually drive through a tunnel under the end of the runway to get to the fort. THe long streaks of light are the floodlights from a landing plane; the dots are its strobes.
The combination of proton packs up on the screen, with gusty WHOOSH-es as the planes land right overhead, with the light sweeping in an arc around the crowd as the plane goes by, was actually pretty damn awesome.
There was a very friendly reporter-and-photographer team from the Associated Press at the show. I spent some time getting my photo taken in various poses: “Now look like a cinema REBEL!” We finally got me doing a sort of a “Ha-DOUUUU-ken!” thing with one of the 16MM reels from the movie. Check a regional “entertainment” section near you for a portrait of me looking EXTREMELY BADICAL.
The crowd seemed happy, I was not hit by lightning while riding out, the projector, didn’t explode, and I don’t think the Cub Scout troop who was staying the night there learned any new words from the movie (except for “dickless”, which I bet they knew already.) The next movie is Saturday night, June 27th — if you’d like to know where it’s going to be, get out there and find the MacGuffin!
In the late fall of 1777, hundreds of Continental Army soldiers huddled deep in the sepulchral casemates of Fort Mifflin during a brutal five-week siege and naval bombardment, delivered by every ship His Royal Majesty King George could throw at them.
Stymied by Ben Franklin’s clever system of underwater spikes, the ships had no choice but to crack the fort if they were to proceed up the river to Philadelphia. And so they concentrated on capturing it- or smashing it. That’s bad enough, if you’re inside that casemate, with a few blocks of stone and a scant foot of earth between you and King George’s cannon. But it gets worse.
The bombardment, the attacks, even the design of the siege engines used against the Fort — all of these were masterminded by Captain John Montresor, the VERY SAME MAN WHO HAD DESIGNED THE FORT ITSELF, before he quit in disgust when the Continental Congress granted him less than half the funds he needed to do the job right.
Now this man, with all the mighty resources of the Empire behind him, was in charge of cracking the fort so the English navy could sail up the river to Philadelphia and crush the fledgling nation. Can you imagine the terror of knowing that every sledgehammer stroke delivered against the walls was guided by the man who best knew all the Fort’s weaknesses? Can you imagine wondering whether, at any moment, a new flaw will be exploited, a secret sally port revealed?
During that attack, one of every five soldiers holding the fort was killed or wounded. Can you imagine being killed in that assault, and forced to haunt the smoking, underfunded ruin on a Delaware River mudflat for hundreds of years?
Yeah, that would SUCK. And I expect you’d be ready for a good laugh. Which is EXACTLY what I plan on providing to those ragged Revolutionary specters tonight. Want to know more? DM or message @guerilladrivein on Twitter!
PS. During the siege and bombardment, 85 of the 405 soldiers garrisoned at the Fort were killed or wounded. But they succeeded in their mission: the fort delayed the British navy long enough for Washington’s Continental Army to escape to Valley Forge and safety. Fort Mifflin is called “the fort that saved America”, and for good reason.
Today, we had Coworkout at Shofuso, the seventeenth-century Japanese house in Fairmount park
I arrived first, a few minutes before the house is opened to the public. I walked around the fenced garden, watching volunteers dig holes for new azalea bushes. The house looked IMPOSSIBLY, UNBELIEVABLY, INCREDIBLY awesome. This is the photo I took with my iPhone:
Once the gates opened, but before the other folks arrived, I walked all around the house, looking for power outlets. I mean, I know there were not power outlets in seventeeth-century Japan, but this house was designed and built in 1954, and assembled in MoMA’s courtyard in NYC. Even though there are no nails in its construction, I thought there might be utility plugs hidden away somewhere for use by someone.
I did not want to ask if there were outlets, because I was afraid that the answer to "excuse me, is there an outlet around?" would be "HA HA HA, YOU IDIOT! SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY JAPANESE HOUSES DIDN’T HAVE POWER OUTLETS."
“But I thought maybe you wanted to vacuum?” I pictured myself asking, followed by them guffawing in my face: “HO HO HO YOU FOOL! SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY JAPANESE HOUSES HAD NO VACUUM CLEANERS!!!“
So I didn’t ask. We sat on the veranda, smelling the sun on the cedar, the sweet-hay smell of the Tatami mats, and enjoying the shade under the deep eaves:
I worked as long as I could on my mostly-charged battery. Finally, when the last ounce of battery juice was gone, we started packing up, and struck up a conversation with Prudence, the friendly executive director of the house. I got comfortable enough to ask:
"Say, there’s no, you know… power jacks or anything hidden around here, are th…"
I was so afraid that I was about to get ridiculed, I trailed off.
"Oh, power outlets? Sure! You were sitting on one!" she said.
"Ha ha ha", I agreed shamefacedly. It was a stupid question, and I felt silly for asking. I’m not surprised she answered sarcastic —
"No, seriously, you were sitting on one!" she said. She cheerfully pointed at a teeny tiny little metal dealie in the floor, which clearly (I thought) was a part of the door hardware:
We all stared at it.
Jon Bettscher slowly reached down and twisted the little tiny middle of the dealie — a metal disk the size of a quarter.
Two familiar little slots appeared.
BECAUSE OF MY FEAR OF GETTING LAUGHED AT, I had spent two hours carefully marshalling my laptop battery. Dimming the screen to the point where I could barely read my screen. Composing only short emails, and using only antialiased fonts, to conserve electrons.
ALL WHILE I WAS LITERALLY — literally, as in "my bottom was touching it" — LITERALLY SITTING ON TOP OF THE POWER OUTLET.
I bet there’s a life lesson in here somewhere.
Too bad I’m too afraid of looking like an idiot to ask what it is.
I’m going to do some hyperventilating here.
For a while, I’ve known that there’s a Japanese house in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park called “Shofuso” (literally, “Pine Breeze Villa”), and I knew it was built in a traditional sixteenth-century style, and I wanted to hold a coworkout session there, or maybe show “Ran” for the Guerilla Drive-In, but I had never visited. Lydia and I went there yesterday, and OH MY GOD I’m suffering from Stendahl syndrome trying to process all the amazingness that we found there.
Probably the best way to do this is just to dump all my impressions, plus a late night of Wikipedia-ing and reading the house’s excellent website, in no particular order:
You can see a few more pictures that I took on Flickr, and you can read a lot more about the house on its website at shofuso.com. I’ve reached out to them about visiting for Coworkout, and I really really hope that we can spend a day pretending that it’s actually where we work.
I’m not quite sure how you manage yourself and your laptop when you can’t lean up against the wall, but I look forward to figuring it out!
Nin hau ma, y’all? *tips cowboy hat*:
What does “NYOU-lo KARR-szha” mean?
Meatcards appeared on G4TV’s “Attack of the Show” yesterday. Their verdict? “Tastier than most business cards!”
Chris had made a prototype just for them, before leaving for Florida to watch the shuttle launch. Will is waiting to hear back from the USDA to see if we have to comply with the Full Weight of Government Regulation regarding meat manufacture (a USDA inspector on-site every day we make cards!), or whether this is a “not picked up on radar” kind of a thing, since all we’re doing is marking and repackaging already-manufactured jerky. We’ll see!
tikaro.com 