Saddened about the death of John Spencer of The West Wing. He came across on screen as a really good human being, I thought. Maybe it was the writing, and maybe he was that good of an actor. But it seems to me it's quite difficult for an actor to portray characters with real humanity if they don't have some of that themselves. I'm not sure if it works in the opposite direction. I don't want to assume someone like, I don't know, Jason Alexander, is a terrible person because the characters he plays tend to lack an essential goodness. But, yeah, sad about that. He was only 58. That's not old.

I had lunch with a friend yesterday and we were talking about whether you'd want to live if you lost your limbs. I don't know how this came up. I was more okay with it than my friend was, I think, which tells me maybe I should be doing more stuff with my limbs. Uh... obviously it would be terrible to suddenly lose all your limbs, but if your brain's working okay and you can communicate and think and interact, I kind of feel like that's more essential. Maybe not. But faced with losing limbs vs. losing mind, I vote for losing limbs. Losing your mind and you've lost yourself. Bizarre topic. Sorry.

This afternoon my improv comedy class has its "graduation show." So I get to spend 25 minutes or so on a stage trying to act, which is sort of fun in small doses, especially in the pressure-less atmosphere of a "graduation show" for an audience of hardly anyone.

This blog is going to change very soon. I'm in a holding pattern right now, with regard to things to talk about. I don't have that much to talk about, because I'm deep into my book revisions and besides my book I do fun stuff with friends or read stuff or watch stuff or eat stuff. So there's not much else happening in my head. But here's what's exciting to me, and hopefully will be worth writing about and worth you reading about. I don't know what happens once I finish my book. I mean, I have some sense of the process -- there's marketing stuff to do, there's things like picking a cover, there's choosing a font I guess. I don't really know. But that's the cool part. I don't really know, but I sense that there'll be all sorts of new things to think about, and I'll want to write about them, and share that process, because I don't think there's too much out there about what it's like to do this for the first time. In effect, I want to write about my experiences with my book, like I wrote about my experiences with law school. But I have no experiences yet to write about. So instead you get random stuff in this holding pattern until I have more to say.

I saw "The Producers" movie last night. I've never seen the Broadway show. It seems like the movie is really a carbon copy of the Broadway show, put on the big screen. So if you're watching for content -- that is, if you want to hear the lines and hear the songs, and watch the actors, it seems like a pretty faithful experience. That said, watching a theatrical performance on the movie screen is a little weird and not as exciting as watching live theater. I thought, as a movie, it dragged and wasn't all that thrilling. As a recording of a musical, up close and with nice sets, it's a better experience. I enjoyed having seen it, but didn't love every minute while watching it. I would have cut a third of it, including a third of the songs. There's some nice stuff, but the middle gets slow. Just my opinion.