House Republicans should just put Nancy Pelosi back in charge. Then they could go back to what they really want to do: complain with impunity.

Actual complaints from vacationers, as communicated to a major travel agency.

Where do you sign up for the vacation from stupidity?

My friends at Warner Brothers invited me and a couple hundred other folks to a screening last night on the lot of the new Alfonzo Cuaron film Gravity. I don’t make it my habit here to review movies, but I have to say, it’s a spectacular movie. The special effects are spectacular, and the action is 100% filled with grabbity and doesn’t let go. I would say the most astounding special effect is 50-year-old Sandra Bullock’s perfect figure, except that’s for real. There are some scientific slips — not to spoil anything, but in the one scene the one astronaut wouldn’t be pulling the other into danger because at the moment there’s no force and no gravity — but if you notice these, please ignore them. It’s a fantastic film, and the sort of one that encourages seeing in the movie theatre.

The United States is the world’s largest energy consumer.

Which nation is the world’s largest energy producer?

If you said the U.S. — and who would have? — you’d be right.

Oh, how I wish that my father, who lost his business 40 years ago to the Arab oil embargo, had lived to see this day.

Here’s one Congressman who doesn’t think he should get paid during a government shutdown, and what he’s doing about it.

I’ve been living in California for 25 years now. For many of those years, budgets were passed way past our constitutionally mandated drop-dead date for budget passage. So a few years ago, voters approved a measure that docks the pay of legislators until a budget is passed. Here’s what has happened every year since: we’ve had budgets passed, on time.

I have little doubt what would happen if we enacted that for Congress.

My company’s building is in a semi-industrial area and across a side street from a liquor store. There are obvious benefits to being next to a liquor store — access to liquor (and other comestibles), pretty much whenever we need it — and there is one pretty big minus: a veritable stream of litter that washes across our frontage with regularity. Every day that I’m in, I’m out there picking up brown paper bags, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, lottery tickets, empty sample-sized bottles of booze and everything else imaginable. There’s a trash can front and center in front of that liquor store, but people would just rather drop their trash while they walk away. The problem is further compounded by a Jack in the Box on the other side of the liquor store.

The other thing we get too frequently is auto accidents. There’s a major intersection by that Jack in the Box, and there’s that side street, and there’s a significant artery that splits in two just past us. Especially if you don’t know where you’re going, it can get complicated. We’ve been here two-and-a-half years and I think I’ve seen five accidents.

Today there was another one. It sounded a little different — certainly a car hitting something, but the impact sounded lighter, more plastic-like. I ran out to check and saw the remnants of a blue motorcycle splayed across that side street, its two riders sitting curbside, the driver holding his head while blood poured from his nose, and nearby the driver of the Jeep that had hit them. Somebody else at my company, plus a neighbor with another business, both called 911.

I went back inside and got a cold bottle of water for the motorcycle driver and gave it to him. He accepted it gratefully then asked if I had any paper towels. It was then that I saw the blood was gushing all over his hands and legs. I said sure and ran in and got him some paper towels and brought them out. I hung around to see if there was anything else I could do, but there didn’t seem to be anything, so when the ambulance and the police cars showed up I went back inside.

I’m here late tonight and there’s nothing left to eat in our refrigerator or freezer, and I don’t want to be here that late anyway, so I headed over to that liquor store to buy a beef stick and some Bugles. Just something to tide me over. I could see that everything from the accident had been cleaned up. The motorcycle pieces were gone, and the police had put sand over the areas where the motorcycle’s gas and oil had leaked into large pools. Yes, everything was cleaned up… except the bottle of water I’d given the driver. There it was, uncapped, half of it drunk, left right there with a bloody thumbprint on it, for me to clean up.

Many, many years ago, my friend Rich Roesberg told me that his job as the manager of a bookstore was to reorder and sell books — and to scrape the gum out of the carpet. I think of that every day.

Effective today, I’m no longer artistic director of Moving Arts, the theatre I founded in 1992. And it’s a good thing.

I love my theatre company, and all of our history, and I enjoyed being artistic director from 1992 to 2002, and then again for about the past five years. But here’s what I really want to do now with Moving Arts: be the best supporter of our new artistic director and our company as possible — and be a playwright. I loved running a theatre, but it’s time (again) for new people, and I have another company I’m leading right now (this one, with my business partner, which provides another place to work with smart, talented people every day).

Here’s the announcement re our new artistic director, Darin Anthony. We picked Darin over a surprising number of other well-qualified people who applied. We did that because in addition to being awfully talented, and smart, and dedicated to new-play development, he’s the right fit for us. As he said on Sunday night when he addressed the theatre company on the eve of the announcement, he didn’t just want to be an artistic director, he wanted to be artistic director of Moving Arts (and had been quietly campaigning for the post for two years). Moreover, he has an attractive
vision for where we can go.

This is an exciting moment, for Moving Arts and for me. I’m looking forward to lots of productions and workshops and readings and developmental labs of new plays, including, I hope, my own.

Nice to see that the problem with glorified news readers isn’t limited just to the U.S. Here’s a BBC anchor holding a ream of paper he had mistaken for an iPad. Yes, he made a mistake in grabbing the wrong thing — but what was the point of the iPad anyway, if it wasn’t necessary for this bit. The ream of paper seems to work equally well. The missing iPad, then, is revealed for what it was going to be all along: a prop that says “we’re au currant.”

Starbucks says guns are unwelcome.

People can still order a double shot, though.

Another shooting rampage today, this time in our nation’s Capitol. Ho hum. Oh well — guess there’s nothing to be done about any of this.

As for my Congressman, he’s providing “thoughts and prayers.” Because that has been working so well.