O kay. For the last few days, while dancing between deadlines and duties, I've also been getting more of the whole ThereGoesTheDay pages sorted. If you're reading this on the blog page itself (and that's the best way!) then you'll note the links at the top are mostly sorted and the pages more aligned. It's all coming together nicely... now to get to the Photography pages!)


However here we are with over fifty pages on a DVD disc - pages viewable on screen or ideal for printing out at 300dpi - looking at the last six months of genre entertainment. There's conversations with George A Romero about his feelings on modern horror outings, the cast and crew discuss the creation of the controversial  WATCHMEN movie (plus, there's an extensive interview with Alan Moore on his distate for Hollywood and why HE wouldnt be seeing it); Jamie Bamber and Mark Sheppard discuss the success of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and their latest projects; there's a look behind the sceens of TNT's hit show Leverage (and talks with Dean Devlin and Gina Bellman); Jon Favreau talks about the success of IRON MAN and Peter Wingfield discusses his roles in 24, SANCTUARY and the upcoming WAR OF THE WORLDS and 10,000 DAYS.

All that can be yours for a measley £10.00 which includes postage and packing.  Equally, a lot of the older issues are now on CD-disc too. Issues 3-4,5-6 and 7-8 are all available on two-disc sets and are also £10.00 per each set! Tons of good stuff in there and twice as good value...  Simply follow the Verbatim link at the top of the page, or go here and click on the respective 'Cart' buttons' for the PayPal option (contact me for anything else). Thank you, kindly!  :)

I should also note that the latest issue of the UK's top-selling  Empire Magazine has an extensive overview of the HIGHLANDER franchise - seven pages, written in a very well-researched and fair manner by Owen Williams. As well as the stars etc, Owen got some quotes from me and I'm referenced as HLWW's 'PR Guru'.  Which makes me very, very good, or merely Max Clifford with less pocket-money. You decide.

I now return to you to your commercial-free blogging...  :)

O kay, I'm not particularly squeamish, but the only word I can think of is 'Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew!' Was just heading to bed on Tuesday night when I noticed something tucked right in under my left knee. Turned out it wasn't a bit of fluff but a bloody tick sucking at my royal blue blood - most likely the same kind as the long-grass variety that Jill and I found we'd brought back into the house the day before I left Iowa. In a 'what's worse?' thought, it was either gorging itself there in the nook of my knee for well over a week, or it wasn't and it rode home with my clothes etc and then found me later. Now, I've showered etc regularly, so the first would seem unlikely, but these are pesky little suckers (literally) who find hard-to-reach areas and numb their host, so it's not impossible. Tick now removed and thrown to the fishes. Doctor says probably no ill-effects (unless I can attribute some really vivid, lucid dreaming about Iowa to it?). But, again, Ewwwwwwwww.  TMI?

On other notes I'm once again ebaying a fair amount of my genre merchandise - from CDs, t-shirts and comics through to press packs and the like.  See my link on the top right of my blog page for a full list of Highlander, Primeval, Matrix and Doctor Who bits and bobs. Or clicky here >>> EBAY  All this will greatly help make space and in funding future trips abroad (or, at this rate, bus-fare into Leeds City Centre...)

And just found out that the ever-reliable Cinema Days I've attended for twenty years has now been down-sized to a two-day event in June, in a couple of weeks' time. This a few days after I booked accommodation already to cover a four-day event to get a really good deal. Peh.  I'm ticked off!

W hen I commented to my parents the other day that - barring blood relatives - I have more close ties in the States, than I do over here, my mum sagely noted that very few of the groups of friends I'd had over the years seemed to overlap with into each other much. It was a telling observation and though I'm not sure how I feel about that in hindsight, there's no denying that on close examination, it's quite true. I'm like a human Venn Diagram!


I tried to maintain contact with those I could or wanted to, but within a few years my social life was quite different. A few girlfriends came and went as did the people I worked with. Jobs changed and though I was still in Leeds, I'd end up frequenting different parts and events than I had before. I'd bump into people from time to time, but mostly the world was just too big for that to happen too often - though when it happened it was in the most unlikely ways. My closest friends over the next ten years or more were a fellow journo (Tony) and a comic-book artist (Mike) but , if memory serves me right, they probably never met each other more than a once or twice in a whole decade - totallly different people with completely social groups and different outlooks whom I usually divided my time between.

The Highlander franchise changed my life in completely profound, positive, personal and professional ways in the late 90s. What initially started out as coverage of just another bog-standard genre show brought me into contact with some fascinating people I'd never have met otherwise. In itself it was a great leveller - I remember sitting at a table in Anaheim, Los Angeles in 1998 and talking with someone who worked for NASA, a school-teacher, a Vicksburg history-buff, a government officer, a quite stunning redhead from the Mid-West... and thinking that one common thread had brought these different people together to that one table and how interested I was. What were the odds that brought us together? It was a strong enough thread that it's kept me attached to some of them in a variety of ways ever since.

Yet back in the UK those different friendships I had remained quite separate. Perhaps it's a factor that the way I gelled in with each group was often different and the different roles weren't compatible outside those groups. Oh, who knows?  Some friendships grew or blew out depending on a range of factors - some for reasons I don't even understand to this day but rarely did they cross path in the interims. Sometimes my US friends/girlfriends would meet my UK friends, but usually only briefly during rare visits. Kerry probably bridged the gap more than most but probably only met Tony and his girlfriend two or three times in total. Several friendships grew out of the journalists I attended press events with, but scattered across the country or further afield, it was often a case of downing as much alcohol as we could when we all got together (how's that for a cliche!)  :).

Meeting the likes of HLDU's Carmel Macpherson and the organisation that would become Highlander WorldWide created a whole new professional avenue and another strong friendship as well, something that has allowed more travel and experiences than I could have dreamed of.

Ironically, while being particular about the friendships and relationships I have, I'm more and more in contact with that original group from my teenage years. Karen, after travelling the world, still lives in Leeds with two strapping kids, Simon is back in Yorkshire from the States. I haven't physically met up with them in some time, but at the risk of sounding 'woolly', the original threads - somewhat unwound though they might have been over time - never unravelled completely.


And ten years on from chatting with that wise-beyond-her-years redheaded girl in Anaheim, I'm hoping she'll want me to spend increasingly more time with her in Iowa... and her own group of local friends - some of which I'd like to think are now mine too or will be soon.
 
So, yes, it's true that I seem to have closer ties in the US and that some of my friends will probably never meet other friends, but in a modern electronic world geography is becoming less and less of an obstacle - there's less and less reason to be 'here' when you can be 'there' or 'anywhere'. Though not ideal, I CAN edit Impact purely by sitting at a connected laptop on ANY continent in any time-zone. I can travel around the world only limited by money and not by time (I could be in mid-America in 12hrs, Australia in less than 24).  The Net is no substitute - for the reality of 'being there', especially - but it has opened up that world of 'there' no end.
 
I used to think the world was big. It so IS. But for better or worse - usually in the end for the better...the Net makes it seem almost welcomingly manageable and full of possibilities.
 
*Note: if replying to this blog entry - can you do so via the actual blog site and not via e-mail as otherwise it may not show up.  :)

I woke up this morning... okay, fine, technically I got up at 12:00, midday on the dot... to find it a gloriously sunny Sunday. However I don't feel remotely guilty as it is a long weekend (bank holiday tomorrow in the UK and I think it's Memorial Day in the US?), there were no inhumanely pressing deadlines and it seems to have ultimately kicked away the last of the annoying jet-lag cobwebs. In fact, the only downside is to have half the day gone before I can thoroughly enjoy it.

Just had a nice long shower, heard the tootlin' of an ice-cream van (can't remember HOW long it's been since one of those has been in the neighbourhood - must be a decade or so...) and cooked some soya-soaked chicken. In short, 'tis a good day, if a short one.

However, there are things that I'm aware I needed I make progress on. In the last few days I've managed to get some tech stuff sorted on this site, a couple of Impact articles done, paid money towards urgent bills that needed to be paid/placated and started setting up some general things for next week. (Tomorrow there'll be some ebay stuff going up again as part of my efforts to continue the financial momentum towards the next trip). Equally I'm trying to keep my desk and work area fairly tidy, if only because there's lots of things I need to keep sorted, within arm's reach and not have fall down on my head. Hey, these things have happened...

Tonight, maybe a bit more writing, a call to Jilly and then some playing of the Wolverine X-Box game my brother bought me for my birthday.  Nothing too demanding stressful.

Tomorrow, probably back to the grind

I guess I can understand how Jill and others feel (starting work so early in the morning and having another job to go to later) because even though I've shaken off most of the jet-lag, I'm still at the point of getting very tired in the late afternoon and wishing I could collapse for an hour or so to feel right. The get up and go is got up and gone. It's caught me out a bit in both directions this time which means I'm either getitng old or time is an illusion (lunchtime doubly so). I'm betting on the latter.

And deciding that I'm spending £90 a quarter on a service I don't really use at the moment, I went the full hog and I'm dumping BT Broadband for the forseeable. One way or another I've been with BT since I strated on the 'Net over a decade ago. But I already have access to a wi-fi account and so BT's Broadband service has largely been an unused box on the side of the desk since late last year. In this current climate and wanting to save a few pennies, this should work out well. I've upgraded the Network Solutions domain package (which had already sorted me the www.theregoestheday.com name) to a full hosting package, which means I should be able to have files to download from this site in the near future. This should help with Verbatim - the new info on that is in the process of being put up and should be fully orderable after the weekend. It will also possibly mean a change of e-mail address (though the existing btinternet.com one should be okay for at least couple of weeks... or so they tell me!)

It's bizarre that a week ago I was still in Iowa - in fact I wasn't even awake yet. It seems ages. However I'm planning the next trip already and the next few weeks will be busy ones. I'm sure time will fly, broadly speaking...

Y awn! It always takes a few days to shake off the jet-lag and my sleep patterns are still buggered up. From deep sleep to wide-awake at the drop of a Zzzz. But hopefully by mid-week, I should be all realigned!


In the next few days I'll also be updating the Verbatim page here as I've repackaged the earlier print editions onto CD/DVD discs as PDF pages and they'll be for sale at a very respectable price (all monies will help towards my next US trip which I'd like to be sometime around September if everything goes well!)

I'll also be updating and bringing into the 'There Goes The Day' pages, some photography pages. I intend to spend a bit of serious time on design and photography during the later half of the year and see if I can bring in some more cash for those efforts. Journalism is fine, but in the current climate it's more competetive than ever and I need to diversify.

In the immediate future is probable Transformers press and also Cinema Days where I'll sit and watch 15 films or so over four days . I tell you, my work is never done...

Due to leaving some DVDs/CDs in LA and claiming a clothing drawer at Jill's, I had less to bring back, so there wasn't the weight problems with luggage there could have been - I'd actually managed to consolidate two cases down to one! Jill and her sister took me across to Sioux Falls airport on Friday afternoon and due to incoming weather conditions, the check-in guy took my case and then suggested he put me on an earlier flight. It worked well as due to rolling delays I didn't get into Chicago long before I would have done anyway (and my actual flight would have been way too late to make the Heathrow connection).  Sat next to a Republican on the plane and ended up politely debating the merits of Bill O'Reilly politics, but as I managed to wangle extra leg-room on an exit row and also managed to watch the week's Bones and Numb3rs it all evens out ;)

Into Heathrow by about 8:20am, King's Cross by about 9:45am and in Leeds around 12:30pm ish. Asleep by 3:00pm-ish for a couple of hours and then a decent 8hrs through the night.

I'll just take it easy through today and plan to get an early night. Then I should really start planning my next visit. Or rather financing it. On that note, details on the new issue of Verbatim following shortly...

For the moment.... Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Again, there is still much of a taking-it-easy pace, spent between finishing some bits and peices for Impact (now largely done), helping around the house (and outside, doing some mowing today! Whoohoo!), eating of the delicious cosmic brownies (not as illegal as they sound)and some more opportunistic photography when and where I can.

Jilly is once again juggling her considerable workload (two jobs and a menagerie of animals to support) and I'm mucking in with the housework and indulging my inner domestic godness (and doing surprisingly well). I've fixed her televsion, fixed my own video camera (which let me down royally at HLWW), planted some flowers, helped clean the house and hope to help her get a virus off her computer in the next few days. For the moment Jilly's done a dog-swap with friends and so Big Gay Winston has been replaced by the smaller and more manageable 'Tater'. He's just as giddy, but less of a handful and apart from a few small 'accidents', he's a lot easier to clean up after. Katie, Jilly's other dog, is a bit jealous of the little one's attention, but seems to be pal-ing up fine. Right now, Katie, Tater and Jilly are all sparked out. They've all earned it.

While I suppose I should have spent some time post-con doing the interviews I didn't have time for, it proved heard to nail people down (gotta buy a nail gun), so I decided to set more up for later and just chill out after the con.  Apart from writing some stuff for Impact and helping Kerry photograph some items she'll be ebaying (some nice geek stuff - I'll alert the masses when they're up), the rest was mainly 'me' time.

We went to Gillian's on the Monday night where GH had a lovely table of Thai food to entice. Kerry warned me not to eat too quickly otherwise she's have to use the Alzheimer's manoevre on me. I asked her to repeat what she'd said.  She looked quizzically at me and said "I said I'd have to administer the Alzheimer's manoevre".. You mean Heimlich?  Pause. Rolling of eyes. "Yes, I absolutely do..."  (This comes as sweet revenge for me searching my hotel room for half an hour for my passport, only to have her walk in and point to it!)

Walked up to the Golden Apple store on Thursday and then we had some good takeaway in the evening after Kerry had spent the whol week Leverage-ing scripts.  Thanks again to her for letting me stay.

Fri-am was an early start (up at 5:00am to get ready for shuttle to the airport) and was on my flight by 8:30am. Despite nearly leaving my Visa card in the check-in machine, all went well and I wa sin Iowa by 3:45pm local time where I was introduced to the Olympic Rummage Dash.  Now it's Saturday morning, the sun is shining and I must go hunting for chocolate...