The Jack Noodle Journal

Do you remember the mix CD competitive battles that we had last year? Well I am throwing down the gauntlet again! The object of our affection and receiver of our mix discs last year was the lovely Allison. This time around our love will be going to the handsome young man Seth.

So hop to it kids! Get to work on making your mix discs for Seth. What? You don’t know Seth? See, that’s where the fun comes in. Be creative and use your imagination to pick a list of songs that you think a man named Seth would like.

The name of my CD mix is: “The I am in Love With Seth, and I Don’t Care Who Knows it Mix”.
Here’s the track list song / artist so you can make the same disc at home and enjoy the tunes that we are listening to in the Noodle Compound.

1. Every Time I Try / Spain
2. Dream About Flying / Alexi Murdoch
3. Sailor Song / Ricky Lee Jones
4. I See A Darkness / Bonnie Prince Billy
5. The Mess We’re In / PJ Harvey
6. This / Brian Eno
7. Alone, Jealous and Stoned / Secret Machines
8. Wishing Well / Porno For Pyros
9. Broken Promise / Placebo
10. The Zephyr Song / Red Hot Chili Peppers
12. Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles) / The Arcade Fire
13. Room at the Top / Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
14. Original of the Species / U2
15. All My Friends / LCD Soundsystem
16. Where the Streets Have no Name (Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You) / Pet Shop Boys

I think it’s a pretty good collection of songs arranged in a pleasing order. I’ve been working on it a bit. I have the Seth mix as a playlist on my iPod and have been listening to it quite a bit.
It’s not really a good party mix. It’s mellow. More of a homework listen or dinner album.

I mailed it off to Seth last week and he seems to have appreciated my advances. He said he has already constructed the mix disc response. I’m excited to hear that.

I’ll tell you what people, my favorite song of the year so far to date, is easily “All My Friends” by LCD Soundsystem. Man oh man, I love that song! It’s awesome.
If you’re not going to get the whole LCD Soundsystem album, do yourself a favor and at least by the song “All My Friends” from iTunes.

I’m going to listen to it right now.

Hey there! Back at it.
It is a nice sunny morning out there right now! The sun felt wonderful on my face as I waited for my MAX train to come. I believe that the weather powers that be on the TV are predicting a warm snap for us here in the city of roses. It’s supposed to get hot.

How was your weekend?

We had a really great weekend.
I’m feeling well rested.
A tad sore. I have a nice bruise on my left arm and I’m scratched up a bit.
I did a chunk of yard work. I got the bruises and scratches from cutting back the giant shrub thing that has exploded out of our front yard threatening to choke off the sidewalk.
I got the lawn mowed down nicely and got the Grass Hog out and ate some weeds.
Cutting crap down and mowing is very enjoyable for me. My favorite part of yard work. I like the pruning and weeding because there is a definite beginning, middle and end to it.

We went and saw Kathleen’s mother’s remodeled house on Sunday. Lynarra did an amazing amount of work. She is quite the handy-woman.
Another reason I might be sore is because we had a whole series of feats of strength while at the house. We had a rock throwing contest. A game of red light green light, kick the can, mother goose and some sort of running, tag, hide and seek game. Everyone was running full board. I was trying to be careful not to snap my weak ankles while running away from Phil across the dirt clod filled rough terrain.

I am in a good spot. I am currently quite happy and satisfied. Life is good.
This shall be my Declaration of Happiness. I was sitting out in the back yard soaking up the sun’s rays yesterday with my lovely family thinking, “This is the life”.

I am very excited for the coming summer fun. It is going to be a great summer. We are just getting started kids!

Yo!

It’s Friday kids. Can you believe it? This weird, funky week is almost over.
All hail the weekend! Here! Here!

Memorial Day weekend is knocking on your door. What sort of plans do you have going?
Are you going to get the heck out of town?

We are staying around the compound this weekend. I am looking forward to hanging around the house. I have been out of town the last two weekends in a row, so this will be a nice change of pace.
K and I are planning on major yard work and house cleaning this weekend.

Oh yes, K’s back is starting to feel a tad better. She has been visiting the chiropractor every day. Thanks for your words and inquiries on her condition.
She won’t be doing any lifting this weekend. The lifting and back strain will be my duty.

I would love to work on some video and creative endeavors this weekend. We’ll see. I’m not sure if our chore schedule will permit it.
I need to get my camera, computer, DVD player process totally dialed in, figured out and streamlined. There are a few clunky lumps to my home production that requires some hours of hammering.

Happy Birthday to the always lovely Lianne! Her special day was yesterday. Hopefully we will do something this weekend to celebrate? We also have to hear of your adventures in China.

Today is my work chum G’s birthday. Happy Birthday to you fine lady!

Oh yes, and let’s not forget the birthday boy Alex, who shares a birthday with the lovely Lianne. I already wished you a happy birthday at the beach though.

Gosh, I feel like Ramblin’ Rod with all these birthday kids. Next I should have a smile contest.
What? You don’t know Ramblin’ Rod? Well I bet there’s some info on the nets about him.
Hmmm. Oop! Oh yes, here you go.
Yes, I was a member of the audience once in the 80s.

Wow. Wikipedia says there was rumored to be a Krusty the Klown, Ramblin’ Rod connection. Cool. Rusty the Clown?
I sometimes wonder about that Wikipedia.

Last night we watched the reality TV show, “On the Lot” . It’s some sort of Spielberg, Mark Burnett project.
I try, oh I try to be part of that shrinking population of sane Americans who hate reality TV but I get sucked in every once and a while. I try to be above it, but I’m not.

The Lot was frustrating.
As a wanna be filmmaker myself I was really into the whole concept of the show. 50 wanna be filmmakers picked from 12,000 short film submissions, getting a chance to play ball in the big leagues.
The first task they open the show with is pitching a story idea to the judges who are playing the role of producers being pitched to. The second task was to get into teams of 3 and create a short film in 24 hours.
These are both really good real life hurdles for aspiring filmmakers. Having to pitch your idea to the suits and being forced to work on a team under ridiculous time constraints.

I think the frustrating parts of On the Lot all came from them trying to stay in the lame “reality TV” format. Come on! Enough with that tired genre already. It’s like they went through an American Idol checklist while they were editing the show together. My biggest complaint is that they stuck with the losers too much. Yeah, we get it, these guys are wacky and they are going to get voted off of the island.
Seeing the bad singers croaking isn’t funny anymore!

They would totally have an awesome show if they steered away from the screw ups and stuck with the bad-ass, young, up and coming filmmakers. I mean these 50 contestant’s work made it through being weeded out of 12,000! Show us why they are talented not how they can pull each others hair!
I was totally enthralled watching one of the winners give his pitch, and then there was a quick montage of other winners without showing the pitches. After that they showed 3 of the screw up pitches. Come on! Seeing how the winners do well under pressure and stay confident gives much more to the wanna be filmmaker at home watching your show than someone choking and acting like a moron.

I’ll probably watch more of it because that whole filmmaking biz sucks me in. I just wish it wasn’t so American Idol, Apprentice-ish!
I think I’ll check out the website more closely when I have a few spare moments. It looks like it may have more of the serious bits that I’m looking for. It would be good to see some of the submissions as well since they didn’t show any of them in there entirety on the first episode of the show.

It’s a gray one out there this morning.
I think they are saying that it’s going to get sunny today. We’ll see. I don’t think there’s going to be much rain for the rest of the week.

K’s down! K’s down!
K hurt her back while we were at the beach last weekend.
She had to leave work and go to the chiropractor yesterday. They are thinking it’s her sciatica. Wait, I guess it wouldn’t be “her” sciatica. They are thinking it’s sciatica. Sucks.
It’s crazy because I was watching her when the pain popped and she wasn’t exerting herself, bending or lunging in any weird way. She was putting her keys into the lock of the car trunk and it hit.

She’s going back to the chiropractor this morning and will probably stay home again today.
Poor little bunny! I hope she can feel better soon.

Many thanks to our friend Kim who knitted the little man Phillip a sweater. He really digs it!
Here’s a photo of the model sporting his sweater.
Phillip thanks you Kim and told me to tell you that you do wonderful work. Sorry it took so long to photograph him.

Happy Monday to you my friends!

How was your weekend? Ours was pretty cool. We were over at the coast all weekend. Stayed at the beach house. There was actually sun shining on the beach Saturday. It was a gorgeous day. Mist on Friday night and rain on Sunday.

The Marcy family joined K, the pups and I on Friday and Saturday.

I have been studying Georges Méliès over the last few weeks. We have been watching the “Méliès the Magician” DVD we got from Netflix. You know George right? He’s that early film maker from over a hundred years ago that made the movie “A Trip to the Moon“. He was one of the very first special effects masters. Méliès’s work is absolutely amazing if you keep in mind that this stuff was a hundred freaking years ago! The general public was barely use to seeing moving pictures at that time and I imagine that Méliès’s tricks probably seemed like sorcery.

Looking at Méliès’s works now is a fun exercise in appreciation of what they did back at the birth of cinema long before computers did all of the special effects for you. I’m interested in working out some in-camera effects that can be done before the footage gets into the computer. Having an understanding of the roots helps make the computer less of a crutch.

I am really excited about capturing striking images and good photography with the camera. Sure it’s fun dorking around with it on the computer, but getting a good image to start out with is what I’m really shooting for now.

The Marcy kids, Phil and I filmed some Méliès style experiments at the beach. We had the kids disappear and reappear out of thin air. We had objects popping out of their hands and had the kids move a wooden bear across the table using only the power of their minds. It was totally fun. Kids really dig seeing themselves popping off of the screen. We were all thinking of crazy ideas and stunts we could do.

I’ll have to put our experiments up for you to see soon.

It was a fun and relaxing weekend.

Hey there kiddos.
Long time no write eh?

I was down in California over the weekend celebrating my grandma’s 80th Birthday. I would have said something about my travels earlier in the journal but I was fearful that roving bands of marauders would read the journal and attack the compound in my absence. I was down in Cali from Thursday night until yesterday.

K stayed home with the puppies. Her workload didn’t permit the trip. I wish she would have gone though. I missed her

The trip was really fun. It was good to see all of the family. Grandma had a great time.
I documented the whole weekend with my new camera. I have been given the task of creating the 80th birthday DVD.

I think the older you get, the more observant and attentive you become to the wackiness of your gene pool. I was closely watching my dad, grandpa, uncle and aunts, looking for signs, forming a road map of where I will be heading when I am their age. The Noodle clan is a pretty good stock. I did find myself saying “oh man, that’s where that comes from” a couple of times.

Now I am back at the office. I didn’t think of the office once while I was away. That was nice.
I have to be careful today. I am much more refreshed and relaxed than the coworkers I left behind with the giant workload. I might get a fist in the face for being too cheery.

Oh my, oh my. It is absolutely gorgeous out there this morning. Almost too gorgeous.
It is nice and warm out. I was almost dressed too warm for my morning travels. I almost broke a sweat! I think one bead of sweat may have broke free from my mammoth forehead.
I’ll check the weather reports before starting my work day to see what those outside of the office will be experiencing.

This is not working weather. Luckily I will be hiding away in the darkness of my caveicle and won’t be near any windows constantly reminding me of the lovely day I am missing.

Ah yes, still working quite a bit. The work load has been cutting into my journal reflection and typing time.
It is good to have a lot of work. It keeps you busy and out of trouble. Idle hands are the devil’s playground you know.

I’ll be hitting a bit of a break after Wednesday. There will be some time away.

Hey, hey. I got a new digital video recorder on Saturday! Ah yes, another camera! I am quite excited about it. It is way awesome. I got the Canon HV20. HD filming time! I almost wept when I saw the magnificent footage captured by the new baby. I was really missing out on a whole world of clarity sticking with my 10 year old camera.

I’m in the “getting to know you” faze. I have been shooting some test footage and experimenting with the computer system introductions. There will be a bit of a learning curve. Editing in HDV is a larger undertaking than regular DV. I’m planning on putting up some experiments on YouTube for you to see before too long.

So one works the overtime time to get the camera, but now one is still doing the overtime and has little time for using the camera. That doesn’t seem fair.

Yes indeed. It be Friday. What up my peeps?

Not too much to report this morning.
Intermittent rain bursts with a patch or two of sunlight out there right now.

I wore my hooded rain jacket and pulled it up a couple of times.

I’m sleepy.
I just started up the coffee maker here at the office. I’m going to hit my first pint of the day shortly.

What is up for the weekend?
I’m going to try and take at least one of the days off.
Cinco De Mayo is tomorrow. Be careful.

I’ve been working quite a bit this week.
K did say last night (I heard her) that I should probably reward myself with a new DV camera for all the hard work I’ve put in.
We’ll see.

This week I have been listening to Sly and the Family Stone. Thanks Mike for the turn on. I don’t know why I scoffed so. That is some good stuff to do your work to. Stick some Sly and the Family Stone into your earbuds and click away.