This week’s lunch goes to Brodie Foster Hubbard, AKA @brodiehubbard. Of the many contributing factors to Brodie’s win, possibly the most statistically significant is the fact that he entered the contest even though I forgot all about it and had fallen asleep watching House Hunters.
You can win a free lunch with me by tweeting #SethBuyMeLunch any Monday. Details are here.
Less than a week remains in the 20-day sprint to fund my radio series Special Relativity. You can on the chart over there on the right that we’re way behind the $2500 goal for the 20 days.
A lot of people ask why I need so much money for a project that only uses one of the five senses (and not even one of the top three). While studio time, data storage, and a parade of specially trained hippos wired to Marshall stacks all cost money, by far the biggest expense for Special Relativity is the one that sets it apart from most other indie media projects: paying the artists who work on it.
In honor of The Simpsons 500th episode, here’s an excerpt of a bio I wrote for a fellowship application last year. (I didn’t get it.)
“In 1993, as a freshman at NYU film school, Seth was taking a break from being the next Martin Scorsese, when The Simpsons came on his dorm room’s 13-inch TV. Man, Seth hated that show. But he only got three channels, and the other two were even worse, so he gave it a chance. He watched Mr. Burns try to convince the power plant workers’ union to drop their dental plan in exchange for a keg of beer at their meetings. Homer likes beer, but Lisa needs braces. Homer strains to birth a thought, hearing over and over in his mind, “Dental plan. Lisa needs braces. Dental plan. Lisa needs braces.” Homer almost grasps it… then Lenny drops a pencil down his butt crack. Seth laughed. He kept watching. A wide receiver trips over the shallow grave of the last union president. Seth laughed even harder. In that moment, Seth realized that he loved laughing. Seth loved the way TV invited itself into your house and then made you happy. He figured out what he wanted to do.”
Thanks to everybody’s who worked on The Simpsons over the last 19 years for helping me get my life in order.
A while back I said I’d keep you updated as I work my way through In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes, a collection of little-known detective fiction contemporary with Arthur Conan Doyle’s work. I haven’t, because so far the stories have been largely bland and unimaginative. That all changed last night when I slogged through an 1895 landmark of ineptitude called “The Stone of the Edmundsbury Monks” by M.P. Shiel. It should be impossible for a 13-page mystery to be a slog, but Shiel somehow blundered into writing kind of an anti-mystery that manages to be both severely underwritten and so maniacally overwritten that one wonders why it isn’t on display alongside the paintings by the criminally insane in the Collection de l’Art Brut.
I received an unusually large number of #SethBuyMeLunch entries this week, so I decided I needed to set up a selection process that would be unquestionably random and fair. I started, of course, by resurrecting the ghost of Hitler:
The first #SethBuyMeLunch lunch in many weeks burst forth through a hail of prawns and mashed potatoes in Culver City yesterday, when Liezl Estipona and I had a much delayed meal after I canceled on her due to illness a couple of weeks ago. I expected to never hear from her again, but she got back in touch because, as she said, “[I simply couldn't wait any longer to meet you, and] I was hungry.”
We met in front of Honey’s Kettle Fried Chicken but eventually opted instead for the slightly less-kettle-fried selection at nearby Tender Greens, an interesting gourmet lunch counter. Tender Greens structures their entire menu around a few proteins of which they grill massive piles and slice fresh in front of you: lovely steaks, chicken, and hulking chunks of ahi tuna. They use the meats as building blocks for well prepared plates,1 sandwiches, and salads. Pretty much everything costs $11, which seemed like a good deal deal for Liezl’s steak plate, slightly less so for my enjoyable grilled prawns salad. Maybe if they called them “shrimp” they could knock a few bucks off the price.
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If you’ve looked at the IndieGoGo page for Special Relativity’s fundraising campaign (which you probably haven’t) you might have noticed that for a $50 donation you receive the mysterious perk of something called Nerdcasts. Whazzat?
Each full episode of Special Relativity will have an accompanying Nerdcast — a mini-episode, maybe three minutes long, expounding on the nerdiest part of that week’s show.For example, I the first Nerdcast will feature Nox expanding on the science behind her technique for destroying the Universe. I won’t give it away right now so that you wiseguys don’t get any smart ideas, but I can tell you that it relies on an authentic outlying theory in inflationary physics which suggests that the Universe might not in fact be a true vacuum.
Nerdcasts will be within the continuity of Special Relativity but will capture moments not vital enough to make it into the main storyline. Someday they will be considered totally canon. I’m sure you’ll have hours of fun at home trying to guess at which points in the main episodes the Nerdcasts take place. Of course, you’ll only be able to have that fun if you donate $50 or more to the fundraising campaign. Nerdcasts will be delivered directly to that select group of funders and won’t be made otherwise available. I’ve thoroughly thought it through and decided there is no possibility that they could make it out to the rest of the world in some sort of unauthorized fashion.
Let me now do away with any subtext and tell you that the point of this whole Nerdcast thing is to make it clear that this is THE show for sci fi nerds. If every time you use your iPhone you realize you’re holding in your hand an actual Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, if your PC ever ran the distributed-computing SETI@Home screensaver, if you’re one of the thousands of exceptional people who gave serious consideration to my theory about how lightsabers work, Special Relativity is the show for you.
As today’s incentive to get you to donate to Special Relativity’s sprint to raise $125 a day for the next 20 18 days, I’m giving you a gift of my favorite radio show ever, which also happens to be one of the most important works of art of the 20th century. (I know that the way these pledge drives usually work is that I give you the gift after you donate, but we’re all family here, and if I had any business acumen I wouldn’t have driven six miles yesterday to save $1 on a box of Fruity Pebbles.)
The show isn’t comedy, but it is science fiction. It’s the Mercury Theatre’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, first broadcast on CBS Radio October 30, 1938, produced/directed by and starring Orson Welles. You can stream or download the entire hour-long broadcast after the jump, though you’re obligated to read through my explanation of why you should think it’s great.1
----While I’m figuring out while the next Special Relativity donation inducement will be, you can keep track of how we’re doing in our 20-day sprint using this little widget I created. It’s right over there:
The fundraising campaign for my sci-fi/comedy radio series Special Relativity is down to its last 20 days. I have just under three weeks to raise the minimum amount I need to produce the first three episodes, or I’ll have to do the right thing and return all the donations I’ve received so far and then cry until I puke. I’m pegging that minimum amount at $4000, half of my original target. So the sprint is on to reach that goal:
Special Relativity’s supporters need to donate $125 every day for the next 20 days.
To make that happen, I’m going into full pledge-drive mode. I don’t know what that means, though I have kidnapped Susan Stamberg. And over the next 20 days I’ll parade out all the special enticements and incentives I can think of to convince you to contribute. That starts right now. I’m about to let you do something that I normally would never, ever allow. You can read part of the script before the show is finished.
Click here to read a couple of early minutes from the first episode in which our hero Nox and her pet UCA (the Universe’s Cutest Animal) pay a visit to the prince of the planet of the pigeon people:
| $776 RAISED | 4 DAYS LEFT |
Day 1: $350
Day 2: $0
Day 3: $26
Day 4: $0
Day 5: $150
Day 6: $0
Day 7: $100
Day 8: $0
Day 9: $0
Day 10: $0
Day 11: $0
Day 12: $25
Day 13: $0
Day 14: $0
Day 15: $25
Day 16: $0
Day 17: $100
Day 18:
Day 19:
Day 20:
