Bruner Blog

My dear friend Yvette turned 20-something (let’s pretend) the other night. Another good excuse to play more with my favorite new toy. I was using a 50mm f/2.8 prime lens, and her friends (mostly actors, hence happy to oblige in front of a camera) were kind enough to post for these low-light portraits. I took them using a small table-top tripod, remote trigger and shutter speeds ranging from one to five seconds.

In an effort to battle the bulge, I avoid beer most of the time these days. I normally drink red wine anymore (on the optimistic premise that it’s good for me), or scotch, when I permit myself. I’ve never been much of a cocktail drinker, and I certainly never thought I’d be the type of person to have a complicated drink order. But then a few months ago, a colleague turned me on to the Manhattan. There’s been no looking back. Now, for better or worse, I’m a “bourbon Manhattan, neat, no cherry” man. Mmmm.

Fox’s Arrested Development is simply the best show on broadcast TV these days, and most of you morons people aren’t watching it (or perhaps you’re just too stupid to realize how hilarious it is), so it may well get cut off the air! Tonight’s brilliant, gratuitously star-studded episode put out a blatant appeal to loyal viewers to spread the distress call (cleverly wrapped into the plot, of course):

Michael, speaking about the family’s legal problems and responding to his father’s suggestion that they hold a fundraising dinner: “Our backs are against the wall, and it’s hard to accept that it’s really come to begging.”

George Sr.: “Sometimes it’s the only way to stay in the game.”

Narrator (Ron Howard, the producer): “PLEASE, tell your friends about this show.”

So, what the hell are you waiting for? An engraved invitation?! Watch the goddamn show, already! TiVo it, and watch it twice, while you’re at it (and if you actually have a Nielsen People Meter hooked up to your TV, watch it over and over and over again!).

Oddly, they flashed the URL www.SaveOurBluths.org (the family at the center of the show are the Bluths) as a throw-away gag, and although someone at Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation did register the domain two weeks ago, they didn’t bother to put up any kind of web site there. Lame. (But the show is great!)

A friend in Budapest, who is a correspondent for a major international newspaper, so I trust his sources on this, but who is also a paranoid freak about blogs, so I’ll not mention his identity, forwards this excerpt in translation from the New Year’s message from the Conference of Hungarian Catholic Bishops:

“We continue to bear the mental scars of the life of our people, and the series of tragedies and failures of the past centuries and decades are weighing down on us. Mistrust and the dramatic lack of unity within the nation is a wound which has not healed to the present day.”

But, besides all that, Happy New Year!