Gotta Have a Gimmick

As an aspiring artist I have recently come to realize that what I lack is a gimmick. I have truly neglected this aspect of my professional development and now find myself, as usual, casting around at the last minute. I saw this fella in India on the Reuters Oddly Enough news that beat me to the punch and paints entirely with one fingernail on his left hand. Now I’ll have to scratch that one off my list of potential gimmicks.

I confess that I was a little misled by the title of the story "Disabled Artist Still Painting". I was expecting perhaps a story of a gallant quadriplegic who struggles with a brush held in the teeth, or an artist with Cerebral Palsy who has to wrestle over every detail. You can understand that I was a bit let down when it turned out to be a guy with a bad right arm who, therefore, paints with his left and who’s main aspiration is to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. He’s not even that good.

But being good or not is irrelevant when you don’t even have a gimmick (in song writing they call it the "hook") to distinguish yourself from the crowd. And so many obvious gimmicks have been taken. I’ll really have to work on this, and I already have so much to do this week!

Sorry, this story is in video format only, as far as I know.

GET THE STORY.

Me. On Fox. At 2:30 A.M.

Meonfox

Okay, I’m really not that sleepy. (Or wasn’t *AT THAT TIME.*) I picked a frame where I’m blinking.

But you can see other frames with my eyes wide open (if you have an interest in that).

GET THE VIDEO. (55 meg; high-speed required.)

(Cowboy hat tip: Small But Disorganized for capturing & hosting it!)

NOTE: The video may only be available for a limited time only due to download restraints.

Scary Coincidence #2

It’s the year 2001.

A jet liner leaves on a journey, one of whose terminii is Boston’s Logan Airport.

It’s filled with passengers.

Shortly after takeoff, it’s hijacked.

The goal of the hijackers?

Slam it into the World Trade Center and spark a war.

I’m talking about 9/11, right?

Wrong!

I’m talking about the pilot episode (no pun intended!) of The Lone Gunmen.

The Lone Gunmen, as you may know, were three conspiracy buff/lovable loser types who first appeared on The X-Files as a kind of background think-tank, research group on which Mulder (and later Scully) could draw.

The three provided not only impossible insights on cases Mulder and Scully were trying to crack, they also provided priceless comic relief, and in the end they proved so popular that they got their own series!

But it only lasted 13 episodes and ended with a cliffhanger that had to be tied up back on The X-Files (not entirely satisfactorily, to my mind).

Lonegunmen In the first episode of their series, they faced a situation that was eerily prescient of 9/11, just as Futilility–or–The Wreck Of The Titan was eerily prescient of the Titanic disaster (that was scary coincidence #1, btw).

When 9/11 happened, I went "Oh, wow! This is just like the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen!"

Except, of course, that in the TV show they managed at the last second to avert the plane so that it didn’t hit the World Trade Center (except for knocking over an antenna on the roof).

Also on the show, the event was engineered by a rougue group within the government rather than Osama bin Laden. (Though Daily Kos readers may think that is real life for all I know.)

The Lone Gunmen just came out on DVD, giving me the chance to re-watch the pilot episode and the rest (including the X-Files episode tying everything up, which is also included in the set).

Too bad it didn’t last longer.

GET THE SERIES.

Incidentally, something seemed to be buzzing around the collective Hollywood intellect about 9/11 in the year before it happened. Joe Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, had been working on a series tentatively called World On Fire, which was so similar in content to 9/11 and the events that followed that he scrapped the whole thing after those events unfolded. What he planned to be a dynamic, daring television series had now become the nightly news. (Maybe that was scary coincidence #3.)

Where Were You?

The passing of our beloved John Paul II was not unexpected, yet most of us will remember, I think, where we were when we heard that he had died. I would, perhaps, have chosen to be in my studio, or at Adoration, or any other place where I might have given his passing the attention it deserved and had time for prayerful reflection. As it was, our house was a flurry of activity as we prepared for my daughter’s birthday party later that day. Decorations needed hanging. Last minute tidying had to be done. One more trip to the store for this and that forgotten item. I caught the announcement on FOX News as I was getting in the shower. Life went on at a dizzying pace.

The party (a sleepover) was a big success. The last guest has gone. We have almost finished cleaning up. Before we attend Mass tonight we will gather in prayer as a family and reflect on the passing of our Papa. I will go to Adoration tonight at midnight and offer prayers for the repose of his soul, for his successor and for the cardinals who will gather to elect him.

Tomorrow the trees will continue to throw out their buds, our dogs will go on pestering the squirrels and I will get back to painting. Over the coming months the magnitude of this loss will soak into our awareness like a slow spring rain.

John Paul II, we miss you. Pray for us.

Some Dates

What I’m about to write will very quickly be overridden by events, but based on the apostolic constitution Universi Dominici Gregis, which lays out what is to happen after the death of the pope, it’s possible to determine when certain things are likely to happen. There is some play in what dates they should occur on, though, and the fact that the pope died not long before midnight makes it a little harder to guess what they’re going to count as the benchmark day, but the Cardinals will be announcing the official plans soon.

In any event,

  • The pope’s funeral is to occur four to six days after his death. Since he died on Saturday the 2nd, that should place his funeral between Wednesday the sixth and Friday the nintheighth.
  • The conclave is tentatively set to start on the fifteenth day after his death, which would be Sunday the 17th, but since that is a Sunday they might start it Monday the 18th to avoid conflicting with liturgical celebrations of one of the Sundays of Easter. They have the flexibility to delay it up until the 20th day after his death, which would be Friday the 22nd.

Once the conclave begins, there is no way of knowing precisely how long it will last, though I suspect that it will last only 2-4 days, based on recent conclaves.