Give Me An Hour of Your Time

This has got to be my favorite day of the year— the annual Death of Daylight Savings Time. It's the glorious retreat of an hour. Fall back! Fall back! The one day of the year where I can get up to find the Time Fairies have miraculously given me another sixty minutes to rest. It helps that my son is old enough to fully appreciate this phenomena and not ruin my precious hour of repose by daring to awaken at the usual time. Of course, it's important not to squander said saved time by anticipating it the night before and staying up an hour later, but even then: to rise with more light and still be perpetually early! I go through day savoring this gift anew: "It's ten o'clock now, but I'm saying it's nine!" "Now it's lunch, but we're really eating at one!" It's like we are able to plunge the hours itself into our own personal crucible and bend them to our will. Hephaestus, eat your heart out!

Of course, it also helps if you skip your meditation at the Zen Center because it's raining and you can't find a parking space (bad Buddhist! Bad Buddhist!) so you arrive at the Farmer's Market early and miraculously it stops raining as soon as you arrive and you walk through the shiny streets where the market is uncrowded, the produce is glistening with rain, the air is crisp and clear and life is beautiful. Could this day be any better?

Hmm. It could also be that the cafe mocha which I drank before I was going to go meditate (bad Buddhist! Bad Buddhist!) is causing this euphoria. Eh, let's just roll with it. 


Good news for a good day: the long-awaited, much anticipated (at least by me) "Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness" is finally making it's official debut tomorrow on Nickelodeon. They're playing a new episode twice a day (5:30 and 8:30pm) for the whole week, and then airing it weekly after that. 

Here's a review from Variety which is pretty fair:
Variety Reviews - Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness - TV Reviews - - Review by Brian Lowry
Interestingly, as oppose to other entertainment reviews, I'm usually not anxious at all about what is going to be said about me in TV show animation. This is because (non celeb) voice actors are rarely mentioned at all, and if they are, it's usually en bloc. We're the Invisibles behind the cartoons, and that's fine by me. Now, message boards are a separate matter... we'll see. 

Speaking of which, remember that "Chicago Code" I did last summer, where I had to speak Cantonese on a day's notice? The producers didn't really care what I sounded like, but apparently a viewer did. On a message board for my entry on IMDB, one "indigojiu wrote under the banner "incredibly bad actor": 
<<Jut [sic] saw him on Chicago Code> What language was that??? Definitely NOT Chinese.>>
Can't say I disagree, indigojiu. That wasn't  Chinese. Let's call it— an homage to William Shatner-ese. Is that so wrong??

Day 2

Okay, I had insomnia all last night—can I blame that on my not playing app games?

My second day of cold turkey. No discernible difference in my day, though I seemed to move more efficiently from point A to point B. The day seemed to drag a bit, but maybe that was the zombie effect from a lost night of sleep. My friend Denis pointed out that playing games allows you to withdraw from the world for a little while, and that can be a good thing (Pusher! Pusher!). Of course, he's also the one who just challenged me to a Scrabble game (though to be fair, he hadn't read the blog before challenging me). Hmmm...

Okay, so many of you have winkled out the television show I was on, or happened to catch my episode when it aired two nights ago. Thank you for your very kind words. I, being the Richard Blais of TV acting, could not bear to watch it, but I'm sure I'll still cringe at the VERY ersatz Chinese. Maybe I'll work up the courage later. Probably not. For those who are dying to see it, you can go onto Fox.com/chicagocode and the episode is called "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow." I'm in two scenes. The show has a good look.