(#357 in the "geeky come-on lines that don't work" series.)

That's okay, I'll just go check my logfiles by myself. Sometimes it's pretty amusing, at least if you like that sort of thing.

I even had a reason to take a quick peek after yesterday, because the visits to the Trygve.Com site finally broke the last record set this past January. Sometimes the number of visitors would get within a few hits of it, but it wasn't until yesterday, with 16,478 visits that day, that it broke through.

this was the first time I'd noticed people doing searches on "free naked pics" of me.

Most logfile entries are pretty dull, really, but when you scan through at least some of the day's search engine hits, sometimes something will jump out at you.

In particular, this was the first time I'd noticed people doing searches on "free naked pics" of me.

Why people would do this, I have no idea, but I figure it probably means you've attained some degree of notoriety in the entertainment industry when it happens.

... either that, or they were having a "crossed mental wires" moment and just couldn't remember whether the fabulous babe they'd seen in that music video they couldn't quite recall the name of was Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears, Michelle Grove, Madonna, or Trygve Lode.

- in which case, if they actually did scare up some free naked pics of me, they'd be in for a shock. With or without clothes, it's relatively easy to tell the difference between me and Jennifer Lopez. I'm taller, for one thing.

Now, while the rest of the world was busy hitting on my servers, I was down in the server room myself, putting in the new 3Com Corebuilder 9000 series multilayer switches. It's a new experience for me, anyway; I know the layer-three look has been "in" for a while now, but this'll be my first time implementing layer-three switching out here at the treehouse. 3com, of course, in hopes of enhancing the sense of mystery and the thrill of exploring new territory, has reorganized their site again, replacing their old, tired, and boring semi-navigable menus with new, state-of-the-art pictures of happy people, generally depicted as being nowhere near any actual 3com products.

I'm just lucky that my old bookmarks still go into the pieces of their previous website which, though lacking in racially balanced depictions of smiling families playing lawn darts, do have technical documentation. I guess that's not what modern system administrators want these days, but I'm just old-fashioned and behind the times that way. I'll try to make up for it, somehow. Maybe I can invite 3com's new team of web designers over for a friendly game of lawn darts.

They can be on the "catch" side.

Some days, it's hard to get out of bed in the morning without the effort causing you to end up on at least six or seven more mailing lists. Unfortunately, one thing I've learned from filmmaking is that trying to fool whoever collects these junk mailing lists by getting up in the evening doesn't work.

When a film crew can easily include dozens--even hundreds--of people, not even counting the obligatory "cast of thousands," it's easy for a bulk mailer to get a little carried away and, based on the pile of duplicate letters that appeared in the mailbox today, they apparently don't always make the attempt to weed out all those duplicate addresses.

So, now I have personalized copies of junk mail solicitations for all manner of crewpeople, past and present, who have worked for one or more of my production companies.

Whee!

- how come they can't at least have the decency to do this sort of thing in winter when I could enjoy having a little extra fireplace fodder?

The Viking Festival went off without a hitch, which is a good thing, because the Vikings didn't have hitches, not of the "trailer hitch" type, anyway. According to the museum staff, the turnout for the festival was the largest that the museum had seen, and not only were the lines to get into the museum prodigious, the line to get into the main exhibit area within the museum stretched down the aisle, across the walkway, and into the second room of the main exhibit area on the other side.

Which added up to a long wait, so in between performances, I wandered along the length of the waiting line and told people I was with the museum's Tactical Lecture Squad, and rambled on about the armor, weaponry, and social aspects of ninth and tenth century Viking exploration. I figure I'm easier to move around to where the people are than any of the stuff behind the glass cases would have been, and even more mobile than the replica of the Viking longship that the American Museum of Natural History in New York City had constructed and lent to the Smithsonian's travelling exhibition. The longships were great for travelling waterways, but hallways, that's a different story altogether.

One of the great advantages of calling people up early in the morning and asking them if they'll do something before they're entirely awake is how much you can get away with that you might not have been able to convince a fully-conscious person to do. That approach has gotten me to agree to such things as being a prize in a morning show promotion, and on Tuesday it got Darlene Cypser to agree to go out in traffic, armed with a digital camera, while I tossed candy around.

the Story of Johnny Highwaycone, pioneer of the American Transportation System  [ http://www.trygve.com/johnnyhighwaycone.html ]

Okay, most of the time I just mimed tossing the candy, but for the close-up shots, I did have to do it for real.

Fortunately, Darlene had her official bright yellow hard-hat on hand, which is almost as useful for being able to get away with anything as a lab coat and a clipboard, and often works better outside. Actually, you can get away with almost anything as long as you have the right attitude, but I figured that if Darlene were to go out in traffic wearing nothing but attitude, she'd probably attract too much attention and the resulting traffic snarl would have interfered with my photographic agenda.

That, and it was a bright, sunny day, and I'd left my sunblock at home. So, hardhat and camera ready, we ventured out in search of the open road.

...except that I didn't have the requisite candy either. What good was even a really bright yellow hardhat with no candy?

Not much, obviously, and so before we could shoot anything that involved real candy (not just low-calorie "mime" candy), we'd have to find some. What surprised me was just how hard it was to find candy corn; that's obviously one of those products that seems ubiquitous until you actually need it, and then it goes into hiding. Eventually, we did find a grocery store with a spikeful of little candy-corn packages, so we were set. Everybody had dozens of shapes and colors of gummi-thingies, but gummi is just not a suitable substitute for candy corn.

Believe it or not, finding the candy took longer than the photography itself, even though we did use at least six locations to get the shots I'd had in mind. Fortunately, road construction is just too big to go into hiding when you're looking for some ... unlike candy corn.

Thanks to the opacity of the bright yellow hard-hat, Darlene was able to escape the ravages of sunburn.

Well, and, now that I think about it, she did wear some other clothes too, which I'm sure helped in the sun-protection department.

Maybe this happens enough to some of you that it doesn't come as a surprise any more, but I had the interesting experience this morning of showing up at the museum only to discover that they'd used a picture of me as a sort of "logo" on the posters, flyers, newspaper ads, and even the "register here to win a B&O stereo" forms. I don't mind having that kind of surprise; in fact, I could stand to have it happen more often.

The other surprises of the day were a little less thrilling; for starters, having the weather go from "sunny and in the 80s" to "borderline blizzard" was one of those less-thrilling surprises. Bryan, trying to put a sunny spin on an unsunny day remarked that this was just perfect Viking weather.

It should be noted that Bryan had not shared in the experience of hauling the crashpad, the "big modular foam trapezoid that must have some official name I just don't happen to know" (BMFTTMHSONIJDHTK, for short), the springboard, or the other assorted props, weaponry, and film and video equipment through this putatively perfect Viking weather.

One of the most unfortunate surprises was that Bryan had managed to put our pro wrestler, Bobby Black, out of commission before our staged battles even began. Will there be an upcoming Bobby-versus-Bryan grudge match in the future? Who can say, but under the circumstances, it's probably best not to argue with Bryan "Crusher" Crump about the weather.

I guess I could have made him carry the BMFTTMHSONIJDHTK, just to make sure he had the opportunity to experience this Viking Weather to its fullest, or at least in that special way that only hauling something as large, clumsy, and awkward as a BMFTTMHSONIJDHTK through the wind and wet, sloppy snow can be.

And so we kick off the month in the traditional way . . . by kicking.

Okay, maybe that's not everybody's family tradition. I admit there have been times that even I have wondered whether my lifestyle is a little unconventional, but compared to most people I know, I'm really pretty mainstream.

I'm doing a few more shows for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science--this time for the "Viking Festival," adding that little extra bit of "living history" to the Denver Stop of the Smithsonian's "Vikings, the North Atlantic Saga" travelling exhibit--and, just to make things that much more challenging, most of the usual stunt performers were scheduled to be jumping out of an airplane at the time.

A flying airplane, as it happens, which makes it all the more difficult to be running back and forth between the two locations, especially since the crew with the airplane wasn't planning on dropping the stuntpeople anywhere near the museum. It would have made for a terrific entrance if they did, but then there'd be the whole wardrobe conflict problem to deal with, because it's very difficult to make a single costume that is historically accurate for both a ninth-century Viking warrior and a paratrooper.