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What’s wrong with this picture?

That last posting below reminded me of another shrill, white-haired old lady who used to shout at me all the time. I am referring, of course, to Marie Rudisill, better known as The Fruitcake Lady from the Tonight Show segments of the same name.

For about four years we shot and aired nearly thirty segments of The Fruitcake Lady. Though we started off with so-so ratings, after a few airings it picked up and she became one of the most popular “correspondents” on Leno. I still get a lot of questions about Marie, so I’ll repeat the most common ones and give you the (sometime surprising) answers.

Q: How did you find her?

A: Marie is Truman Capote’s aunt, and helped raise him when he was a little boy and his mother was institutionalized. He lived with her in Manhattan, when she was married to her first husband, a Japanese architect whom Truman disliked (possibly the inspiration for Mickey Rooney’s buck-toothed Mr. Yunioshi stereotype in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”). Marie claimed she inspired “Aunt Teeny” from Truman’s famous Christmas Story, and she was given the publishing rights to that work after his death. That character, you recall, made a fruitcake.

Marie wrote a book containing Fruitcake recipes, reminiscences of Truman, and that very story. Jay’s wife Mavis is a big Capote fan, and after she read the book she recommended Marie for a cooking segment on the show.

The cooking segment was a hit. In it, she ordered Jay and Mel Gibson around (he did not call her “sugar tits”) and we approached her to do advice segments. After shooting with Kevin Smith in Orlando and Tampa, we dropped him at the airport and drove to her house, somewhere in a drained swamp on the Gulf Coast, showed her some questions I shot with audience members, and basically grilled her under hot lights for 3 hours. She was 89.

Q: What was she like?

A: There is something about old women from the deep south that seems elegant. The black suit, pearls and measured way of speaking belied a redneck to the core.

Outside her double-wide, a confederate flag flew 24/7. Whenever it rained, her yard would flood and snakes would come into her house. Sometimes the rain was heavy enough to sink many of the broken cars deep into the backyard. There was something living in the old washing machine back there, too.

On our second visit, her pit bull crashed through a closed window and attacked our sound guy. After that, we moved the whole shooting match to the Airport Hyatt in Tampa, and requested the same room each time thereafter to make the lamp and the crock pot in the background match.

But of course, she was very funny. Impatient, mean, and (I hate to speak ill of the dead, but) not the classiest lady to ever swear on TV, but funny.

Q: Were those questions real?

A: Yes and no. We would give the audience members (waiting outside for the show to start) cards and pencils and told them to ask for advice. Then, we would type them up and send them to Marie, and she would have a chance to look them over. A producer would run down the questions over the phone, and since she was too frail to fly, we would go to see her before we flew down to see her

After she shook us down for a new VCR or air conditioner or something, she would get into a limo and meet us in Tampa for the taping. Her limo driver, also 4 feet tall but nearly 300 pounds of crew-cut ambiguity, would carry her to the car like a baby.

We would start with those questions, then go off-topic to try to get a rise out of her. That’s where most of the good stuff came from. As she looked off-camera on TV, she was looking straight at me, so when she called a participant and idiot or an asshole, it was me she was really going after.

I would edit the clips and pick the best ones, then reverse engineer the questions. The day before show time, I would shoot the questions with new audience members in front of the studio on Alameda.

Q: What was it like working with a 93-year-old lady?

A: Not easy. She used to refer to me as the “Cut Man,” because I would cut out all of her favorite answers. However, I’m pretty sure I was doing her a favor, since nobody really wants to hear stories about her pit bull killing baby gators, and if they did, it would destroy the illusion of elegance I was going for.

You see, it doesn’t really matter what it’s like working with her. The whole trick here is THAT she was so old. A 35-year-old man yelling at you, calling you an asshole and an idiot, well that’s just angry. But a 94-year-old woman? She’s spunky! Outspoken!

Children and old people can get away with murder on TV. It’s just a basic rule of entertainment. Kids say the darndest things, and Marie said the goddamnededest things, and it was just funny. I mean, who else could tell a girl to “wash miss puss inside and out” to have a good wedding night? What middle-aged adult could tell a young man to shove a bunch of cookies “straight up your ass?”

I hope that, in shooting and airing these pieces, we have not taken our society down another notch. After all, one thinks of one’s golden years as having a little more class than that. On the other hand, it’s pretty damned funny watching a little old lady bark obscenities, so I guess the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

And as for that picture above? Marie was nearly blind, so we had to wear bright clothing so she could make us out behind the camera. After her banana and an sip of Ensure, she she would often answer the questions with her eyes closed. So I would take the video into After Effects and paste open eyes on her face.

The results were hilarious.

Click here to see a sample Fruitcake Lady segment.

Phony product shot from a recent sketch

Here’s a brief look at how I put together a commercial parody last week on the show.

The idea was for the “Mom Mom,” a GPS Navigator that’s just like the Tom Tom, but instead of just saying the directions, it says them like your mom used to. That is, the device nags you as you drive.

I thought it would be more fun if Jay was the driver being nagged, and on the day we went out to shoot it (it was about 15 minutes of Jay driving in the neighborhood around the studio), he wanted to make the device more than just a voice, but also to show a little white-haired old lady on the screen.

We shot Jay’s lines, then set up a shoot later in the afternoon of an old lady against a green screen background, so I could put her image over some electronic maps and at least make it seem like she belonged in the device.

I built some 3D models on the computer in a low-cost software called Hash Animation Master, and animated them to make the bit look more like a commercial. First, a computer-generated Tom Tom, and then the modified product with different touches that make it seem more homey.

Computer-generated GPS units in various stages of completion

Next, I made a 3-second animation in Hi Def of each of the models making one full revolution. That way, I could loop the video, spinning them as many times as I want and flying them around the screen in the compositing software, After Effects. That’s where I added the background and titles, mimicking the same type style and look of the Tom Tom Commercial.

Since we had no budget for the shoot, everything was handheld. I stabilized the footage in After Effects, then built a scrolling map background and dropped it onto the footage. I edited the whole thing together in Avid and showed it to the head writer.

We agreed that the old lady didn’t add much to the bit, but still wanted to comply with Jay’s wishes of having an old lady portray the Mom Mom. So I brought in a voiceover artist, the excellent Vanessa Marshall, to create a new Mom Mom voice, and started building a completely computer-generated old lady bust to become the computer personality of the parody.

I had my work cut out for me. I only had 24 hours to design, build, animate, output and color correct that character, and also have it look halfway decent. The model I built is a mix between Tweety Pie’s grandma and Norman Bates’ mom. I flattened out the skin on her face and used Photoshop to paint on makeup (blue eye shadow, red lipstick and rouge, and a little shadowing under the chin). Then I used the same hearts motif on her dress as on the outside of the GPS device, and started configuring the model for lip sync.

Tweety Pie’s Granny meets Max Headroom

The splines that define her mouth and chin each got a virtual “bone,” with rules defining how much different parts of her face moved with the movement of each bone. Using the new voiceover, I created the mouth movements first, then moved on to animate her head movement. I blinked her eyes and moved her eyebrows around to help with the acting, and got a pretty good effect in the time allotted. If I’d had another day, I would have been able to make the acting better, but I didn’t have time for that level of subtlety, and anyway, since she was on a screen-within-a-screen, I wanted her to stand out with her movements being a bit more exaggerated.

A test render of the lady with lighting

I changed the scrolling map background to something that looked computer-y, but was not so busy, then composited it all together again in After Effects and output to the Avid.

The art department’s practical version vs. the computer-generated model, all composited together

Here is a link to the final ad. Not the most hilarious parody in history, but it was fun to do a bit of a departure from the usual and the ABC joke at the end, though lost on the audience, was a fun way to end it.

Damn you Disney Hall. Damn you to Hell!

I attended the Toyota Series for youth concert with my 9-year-old daughter and her friend yesterday morning. I lucked into the tickets, and was grateful for the chance to do something cultural for a change. The program was to feature Debussy and Ravel under the title of “The Impressionists,” and it was the L.A. Philharmonic sawing on the fiddles, so I figured it had to be good.

Having been forced into many such Philadelphia Orchestra events as a kid, I felt for my daughter’s friend, a boy of 10 who seems to spend half of his waking hours gripping an imaginary machine gun and making shooting sounds. So I tried to keep him interested by telling him what was going to happen: The warm-up, the entrance of the first-chair violinist – the last to be seated – before he struck a note and the entire orchestra would tune to it. Then the conductor would come out, shake his hand, raise the baton and the hall would be transformed, the many instruments becoming the one voice of the composer.

And so it went, up to about measure 14 when an actor, dressed as a surfer dude (his name, appallingly, was “Dude”), carrying a beach chair and wearing a Madonna-style headset mic, set the chair up on the stage. A bone-thin lady actor, posing as the stage manager and also wearing a headset, stopped everything to act out a scene with him.

What followed was unwatchable. They portrayed stereotypes, him the nit-wit Spicoli who wants the orchestra to have him “see the music” as advertised, her the bitchy schoolmarm who, against her better judgement, wants to “reach” the moron with music.

And while the orchestra was supposed to be in on it – the conductor stiffly read lines into a hand mic, with the slow-motion forced enthusiasm of a single person trying to hold a baby for the first time – the musicians looked increasingly distressed by each interruption. Though the scene was acted poorly, you could tell it was rehearsed because the first and second chair violinists would roll their eyes and slump in their seats just before anything happened. At least the audience only had to sit through it once.

The music was Debussy;s “La Mer,” and when it wasn’t parsed by instruments it was accompanied by cheesy, lo-resolution shots of the ocean that dissolved back and forth with pans and glides on famous Impressionist paintings. The overall effect was to contextualize those great works with 1970s van art.

Maybe it’s cultural, but I was taught never to talk down to kids. Although, come to think of it, the few classical musicians I’ve known tend to talk down to everybody, so maybe they were just customizing the condescension to suit the program. Add to that the obnoxious kid behind me who kicked my seat the whole time, and it felt like trying to enjoy the Mona Lisa while sitting on a Southwest Flight from Vegas to Reno.

They could have taken a page out of the Nickelodeon Manifesto, or even shown it to one child before staging this show, because, even with the thundering crescendos of the third act and the Dude and the Stage Manager yelling ever more loudly, the young crowd grew more and more restless and upset as the morning wore on. Just like the violin section.

In any event, it sucked ass.

On the way out we ran into another school family, and the grandmother in the group summed it up best when she said, “Do they think so little of Los Angelinos that they have to explain the music to an idiot for the rest of us to understand it?”

Maybe it was the influence of the Patrons on the event. After all, it is Disney Hall, and this brief foray away from more highly-produced Disney products sent the 1,000-or-so kids in attendance screaming back to the Disney Channel or, for the rich ones, to “High School Musical III” at the El Capitan. At the very least, many of the families had to pop a Disney DVD into the player in the minivan to restore calm.

Today they did the second half of the concert, featuring Ravel’s “Bolero.” Maybe it’s The Dude having a fistfight with Bo Derek, but I doubt it because that would be entertaining.

Highland and Franklin

Just a quick note and a link to my commute this morning. The camera’s mounted on the front of my Vespa, and for about 15 glorious minutes you can see what it’s like to get from Miracle Mile to Burbank on a scooter.

You can watch the video and play your favorite car trip games, although counting cows is probably out of the question.

You can see the results here.

And here is part 2 with the exciting Barham/Warner Brothers run, and a bizarre, tiny car that I follow into the NBC lot: here.

On the Russian River

On our recent car trip up north to the Russian River (that’s “Russian,” not “rushin’,” we discovered when we found the stream checked (not Czech’ed) by summer dams), we decided to rent a couple of kayaks and see what we could see. The water hardly moved through the dams, and we soon discovered that, though we were going downriver, we could hardly make any headway against the wind. Once we got into the lee of the bank, however, we started making progress and soon found ourself at a fork in the river just above the Bohemian Grove.

And there we saw it: a giant, epic rope swing.

While I have never participated in the Iron John movement, like most men I consider myself ready to take on the elements, ford a stream, survive in the wild. More importantly, ever since I was a child and saw my first Steve McQueen movie, I have always held that I was ready to survive the Towering Inferno, and even get Fred Astaire out with his case of champagne, which is more than Paul Newman could ever do.

Don’t be confused: ready for action does not necessarily mean you have the skill set for the Inferno. You might be able to get to the bottom of the hull on the SS Poseidon, you might even be able to land a 747 with Charlton Heston calling you “honey” the whole time over the radio, but if you want to keep alive in the Tower, you’re going to need one more thing:

You’re going to have to swing from a rope.

Come on, you say, anyone can swing from a rope. But you’re forgetting that, the higher you swing, the heavier you get at the bottom of the rope’s arc.

Looking at the spry, 20-somethings climbing that bank say, 25 feet on slippery mud, launching from at 35-foot rope with about 17-foot arc, I guessed that they were pulling about 3 g’s at the bottom (over rocks) before swinging upward, over the river, and letting go at a height of about six meters. Using that rough factor of 3 times the force of gravity, I tripled my weight, and wondered whether I could hold it.

I handed my wife the camera, kissed the kids, and jumped into the water. I figured if I got killed, at least I wouldn’t have to look for a job next year. The whole trick here is not to get maimed. Once I negotiated the muddy bank, I thought I was in the clear. Then, as I tested my grip on a knot, one of the 20-somethings called up, “…and watch out for the log.”

You can see the results here. The impact was uncomfortable, driving water up an otherwise one-way street, if you catch my meaning. But I had been in enough waterskiing accidents as a child to shrug this one off. I was about to go up again, when I heard my daughter say, “We can go now, Dad,” and I swam back to the boats.

Along the way, my arms shaking as I swam, I knew that I still had it. Me and Steve McQueen. The image soon faded as I spent a couple of minutes trying to haul myself onto the kayak.

It’s a whole new nerd game

Somehow, through no fault of my own, I had to go to the San Diego ComicCon again. I had thought I had been filled with dread about going before, but this year I found out it was sold out and was able to dread it even more, thereby implying that, while I dreaded going, I was not absolutely FULL of dread.

As usual, the convention rose to meet my dread quotient, and then some.

You have to realize, it is the biggest comics convention ever. Period. Remember that Iron Man, The Dark Knight, Hellboy II, Hulk whatever, and some other superhero movies I’m forgetting have all come out – making the comic book business the biggest it has ever been.

And the world is getting to be more like a comic book as things wear on. Used to be, criminals were just criminals. They sold drugs, shot people, committed white collar crimes. Nowadays, criminals are terrorists. They poison water supplies, bring down buildings, send out video statements declaring war on goodness and wholesomeness – in other words, we have arch villains. It’s like free advertising for Marvel.

But the convention itself – man, it’s tough. Just think about it: a gathering spot for loners, an actual physical spot that allows you to celebrate your fantasy world, together with other wizards and elves and robots and time travelers. And don’t get me started on the Klingons – they wouldn’t even talk to us, because some Klingon had appeared in a sketch on the show eight years ago, and had used the wrong syntax, thus mangling “Die, Human,” and turning it into, “I’ll have the fried Denebian Slime Lizard, please.”

They are there for validation. Some people we met spent 8 months making their costumes. Others spent more than 20 grand. There was a family from Chino Hills dressed as characters from “Planet of the Apes,” where Dad was the ape and Mom and Daughter were human slaves, where were not allowed to speak even when the camera wasn’t rolling.

Hey, whatever you’re into, I say. But nobody would break character. It’s only so interesting to have someone declare they are Valdar of the Lizard Clan five or six times before you want to take his Ragnaroc spear and jam it through his neck. So it’s not the Tonight Show bit you might be expecting. Worst of all, I got the sense that these people felt they were pretending in the rest of their lives, and here, they could be their true selves.

But their true selves are also being celebrated, albeit not in the real world. Take a look at the new A-list of nerdy movie stars. I have a feeling Seth Rogen has spent at least a few of his megabucks on some action figures.

Luckily, I had young director Brian Herzlinger as my host. He has the kind of affable charm that’s tough to come by. And he’s able to enjoy the scene, while poking mild fun at it (as a matter of fact, Brian had a ticket to the convention on Saturday, and I shanghaied him for my piece). I was reminded of a young Kevin Smith from back in my early days of Tonight Show Correspondents. (We had an interview set up with Kevin, but he cancelled in a text message to one of the crew at the last minute).

If they’re here, who’s playing The Sims?

I saved the strangest bit for last. Turns out, hundreds of nerdy women, who are teachers and computer programmers and moms for the rest of the year, come here to walk around half-naked and let the shut-ins take pictures. It’s like a 4-day, nerdy brain/hot body contest, and every self-abusing guy with a digital camera in the Southland is the winner. You know the old movie moment, where the nerdy secretary takes her glasses off and the boss says, “Why, Miss Johnson, you’re BEAUTIFUL?” This is like the atomic-powered version of that.

You would think that the Tonight Show coming to an end would be a total bummer, but there’s a bright side. No more ComiCon! Now I can get on with the business of dreading everything else.

Just a sample of the more than 90 comedians I spoke with in Montreal

I have often thought of going back to the raw footage of every piece I’ve shot over the past few years, and taking a still of each and every person I’ve met and interviewed. So, after wrapping up Tuesday night’s piece from the Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal, I thought I’d try it with just one, to see how it went.

I gave up after 70.

Maybe I was tired from the long hours we pulled shooting the bit: the best place to bag a Comedian in his native habitat is in the hotel bar after the shows are over. After shooting for a few hours in the day, we would get to the bar at the Hyatt at around 11, stake our claim near the elevators, and try to catch every comedian, publicist, manager, agent (and waitress) that we could. This would go on until about 3:30am, when the lights would come on and, blinking, drunk and unable to buy more booze, the aforementioned group would slink back to their hotel rooms, shades pulled tight.

More likely, I was tired of the comedians. I’m so used to shooting civilians in bits like “Pitch to America,” that doing a total immersion with professional funny people was akin to being embedded with a manic-depressive platoon on a sixty mile hike. And they’re not even our troops: as a writer for the most mainstream, number one show on TV, I’m considered to be Establishment. And the same rule applies now as it did in the ‘60s: Establishment = Enemy.

But I’m not your enemy, oh brothers and sisters of chuckledom. I’m just the guy who wants to put you on TV. Come on over, grab this here microphone, and tell my little camera a joke. You do this for a living, right? What better place to be anti-establishment than in front of 8 million viewers?

But I have to be fair. Turns out that many comedians don’t do jokes. They don’t even do anything that could be both humorous and under 45 seconds long. It’s just impossible. Jokes are for squares, there’s no street cred in jokes, there’s no momentum in joke telling. The real thrill, the thing that elevates your status among your peers is the premise. Like a real, ballsy premise that makes everybody go, like, “WHAAAT? Did he SAY that? You gotta be SHITTING me!”

I can’t be critical. It’s a job I could never do. I’m terrified of speaking in public. When there’re more than three people at the In-N-Out drive-thru window I just keep moving. I write for comics but could never perform the jokes. Doing a bit on the Tonight Show is out of the question. I can’t knock these guys, and if they have something to say, but choose not to phrase it in the form of a standard setup/punchline with a possible flip, they still have something to say.

And some of them really delivered. Shocking, odd, nostalgic, silly – I got more than enough to divert the viewing public for five minutes, and it was damned funny. It takes guts to do something as reckless as being the only thing on NBC for thirty seconds, and the reward? Everybody repeats your material the next day. You defined yourself with a joke, then gave it away.

And with the May 29, 2009 end date announced on Monday, that closes the book on the “Pass the Mic” bit. The first of a long list of my own routines that I will be crossing off in the coming months. So goodnight, Montreal, and thanks. You’ve been a great audience.

What you’ll see on the show

In addition to my writing and shooting duties on the show, I also do the occasional graphic. Most of the time, that means an animated title for one of the bits, as you may know from past blog entries. But once in a while, I do special effects.

These effects can be planned ahead, like the blowdarts I used on children in my “Blownadril” antihistamine commercial parody. There’s just no way we’re going to dart a kid in real life, so a computer-generated dart is the only way to make the joke happen.

Sometimes, I create effects to fix mistakes, or to more clearly demonstrate where the joke is in a bit. Like today. In the above photo, the joke is that it’s been so hot, the illegal immigrants are using a Slip ‘n Slide to come through the border. However, the way it was shot, the time of day, the color of the fence – all of these factors made it hard to see that there was a fence there at all.

Here’s the original shot:

The chain link fence is too dark. While it might do, it could also be confusing to viewers. The idea of sliding under the fence needs to be more obvious.

I took a reference shot and put it on my digital camera. It’s just a Nikon Coolpix, but when the zoom is all the way out, it has nearly the same distortion characteristics as the lens we shoot with on the show’s ENG camera. Also, the color depth is good, so I can dial up the contrast and hue to really come close to our video.

Then I went across the street to the construction site, parked the Vespa on the sidewalk and stood on the seat. I took this photo of the construction fence there:

You can see it’s pretty close in angle to the reference shot, and the shadows are all going in the right direction. I took it back to my office.

In Photoshop, I did an overlay, copying the new fence shot over the reference shot. After a little scaling and positioning, I created a mask and painted out all the areas that I wanted to see through. This included the hole in the fence, but not the fence on the left and the bush on the lower left.

I had to make the pavement look like dirt, so I sampled the color of the leaves in the original, and using another overlay layer, colorized it to match. I didn’t try to make it perfect, instead choosing to make it look like a shadow.

Next, I made a fake border sign and distorted it to look like it was hanging on the fence. I painted on a few shadows, and blurred it to look like the video, which has a lot of pixels, but the resolution isn’t quite HDTV.

Here’s the new overlay, ready to composite onto the video:

I saved the file and opened it in After Effects, along with the original video shot. Since the camera was handheld (extremely well, by the way – there was very little movement) the background video needed to be tracked so the overlay would move with it. Easy enough with all those crossing wires on the fence.

I applied the motion of the camera to the overlay and made a few positioning adjustments. Since the fence is backlit, I made it just a tiny bit transparent, which also allows you to see the action before the Mexicans make it through the fence.

When you’re doing a visual payoff like this one, the idea is not to be seen. It should look real, but be obvious enough so the audience gets it. The last thing you want viewers to do is math — connecting the dots from the premise to the punchline.

We do the math, so you don’t have to.

Click here to see the video clip.

Lighted green warehouse windows attract and repel

You know how your brain brings up the same stuff, over and over? Maybe you don’t, but mine does, and there’s no way to control it.

My mother calls these little memory flashes “my old routines,” and many of them are. For example, I can’t drive down certain streets without hearing in my head the song that was on the radio the first time I drove it. It’s irritating. Or, the tiniest jokes that get repeated forever and ever when the situation arises:

(Driving past Madison Square Garden) “Hey, I lost my glasses in there once. You know how I found them? I Felt Forum.”

See, these things are little demons in my head, and I hope to exorcise them by writing about them, but I’m not hopeful. Nothing helps.

But to finally get to the point, a more significant, recurring thought dates back to 11th grade English class with Dr. Dewsnap. A slight woman, she was famous for being a tough grader, and for unconsciously fondling a small purple statue of a panther when she was lecturing us on American Literature. Most boys could forgive her grading policy, just to watch her work that panther over. Whew!

Anyhow, she was the one who taught me Fitzgerald, including “The Great Gatsby.” This was not a book to be enjoyed, God forbid, this was a book to be examined, worshipped, even envied if you had the idiotic desire to become a writer. And on the last day of Gatsby, as we slouched our ache-free teenage bodies into the classroom, she stood writing on the blackboard.

Since the blackboard was so far from the purple panther, the guys couldn’t care less what she was writing, and the usual harrumph of a murmur went around the room. Then, quietly and intensely, she spoke.

“The Green Light. What does it mean?”

The room murmured on. She turned on us, furious. We shouldn’t be talking about our own little lives, we should be talking about how our lives were changed sometime last night, when we read that last chapter, in which Gatsby stands on his lawn and looks across the water at the green light in the distance.

“The Green Light! THE GREEN LIGHT! IT’S EVERYTHING!” she exploded, clawing upward with pipecleaner fingers, circling the room in long strides like a Barrymore laying down some Bard.

This got our attention. Frantically, I scanned back to the night before, sometime after swim practice, “Wonder Woman” and a couple of Who album sides, but it wasn’t coming to me.

“It’s the central image! It’s the future! It’s Daisy and hope and… everything!”

We sat there, ashamed that we had missed it. All except for Joel Myers, who knew everything and therefore was a pain in the balls. He just nodded smugly, and looked like he might join her up there at the board any minute.

So now whenever I see a green light, it all comes back. Usually I can banish it by whispering a quick “green light,” as if I’m playing a private game of “red light, green light.” But last week in New York, as we returned to the hotel on our last night of eating and drinking and walking and visiting old friends, I looked up at a renovated warehouse and saw the wall of green lights, shown in the photo above.

My mental GPS froze me to the spot for a second, putting that view/memory/location permanently into the archives. And it made me think about the green light, and New York, and everything that has happened since then, and my own Daisy, and Dash, and life out west. Maybe this is the future, back in a New York that’s changed so much. Could we really go back?

And looking at those green windows, formerly a squatter’s warehouse and now the worldwide headquarters of some absurd designer or something, I found myself drawing a profound conclusion to the entire trip:

Maybe L.A. doesn’t suck so much after all! Yippee!

A welcome sign

On my last day of hiatus, I can finally say that I have finished my CNC router mill. Why the hell I would WANT to say that, well, that’s another story.

First, what it is. “CNC” stands for “Computer Numeric Control,” which at this point is an old-fashioned way of saying that it’s a machine that your computer controls.

Another word for this would be “robot.”

While it doesn’t wave its arms around and warn Will Robinson that Dr. Smith is feeling frisky, it still qualifies. There are special motors called “stepper motors,” one for each of the x, y, and z axes. Once you calibrate the table and tell the software just where everything is and how thick it is, you can convert your drawings and designs and the thing makes them for you. As far as I could tell, all the robot on “Lost in Space” ever did for the Robinson family was Jack and Shit, so I consider my robotic mill to be vastly superior.

There are other robotic similarities. When the stepper motors go to work, they move in very small, very precise increments, so it’s not a smooth motor action but a vibratory one. Thus, as the router is whirring at 3,000 RPM, the motors give out with an eerie, atonal song. As the thing cuts a circle and the speeds on both motors continue to change, they make a song not unlike the music from “Forbidden Planet.” Get it? Robby the Robot?

Okay, that was a stretch, but you have to admit this thing is pretty cool. I can download a Google Sketchup drawing of a desk, decompose it in EasyCad, turn it into g-code and the mill will make all the parts for me. It’s like an earsplitting, 10-hour-long, dusty trip to IKEA, all within the confines of my garage workshop.

There are still refinements to be made to the mill. First, I have to make a dustcatcher to which I can hook my shop vac. Next, I’m going to drill holes in the stage and attach another vacuum to that, to keep the stock lumber in place while it’s being cut. Think of it as a reverse air hockey table. That works at 140 decibels.

And finally, after I have used my precision machine to make built-in shelves for my wife’s home office, I will start learning the carving software, that will allow me to make 3-d representations of stuff I’ve designed on the computer.

But for now, I’ve basically worked my way up to cutting out complex letters. And while that puts me on a technological par with a sign making shop circa 1978, back in 1978 I used to think that sign making shops were awesome. Or maybe groovy, I don’t know, I don’t retain contextualized adjectives well.

So here it is, the debut project:

Sign Pro of Media, Pennsylvania, eat your heart out