To make use of the new movie catalog, I’m now displaying a brief “now playing” line during the IS Playhouse hours to help identify the movies and what not that you’re capping. I know this goes against the whole anti-clutter plan I have going with the upcoming layout changes, but everything should come together a little nicer next week.

Now that I’ve unleashed all this knowledge about the available movies, feel free to help me identify actors and artistes that I’ve got a good chunk of material from who might deserve “birthday parties” of their material at IS. It doesn’t have to be a huge chunk of material, a couple of feature films or so, and since it’s about the capping, these don’t have to be great artists. Here are some of the candidates I already have:

Cary Grant 1/18/1904
Lorne Greene 2/12/1915
Jack Webb 4/2/1920
Roger Corman 4/5/1926
Vincent Price 5/27/1911
Moe Howard 6/19/1897
Art Clokey 7/7/1921 (unconfirmed)
Joe Shuster 7/10/1914
Alfred Hitchcock 8/13/1899
Dick York 9/4/1928
Bert I. Gordon 9/24/1922
Jerry Siegel 10/17/1914
Bela Lugosi 10/20/1882
Boris Karloff 11/23/1887

There are a few problems here with dates bunching up.

I’ve just released a beta version of stage one of my latest crazy project: a catalog of the “Inventing Situations Playhouse” movies. Links to the films at the imdb and archive.org (where you can watch them!) It also includes the non-ephemeral Turkey day movies, even though most of them aren’t in the rotation yet.

Stage two of this project is going to let you pick a movie, and then through the magic of PayPal, send me money to let you cap it at the time and date of your choice. It might include some other good reasons to click into the movies and better searching and sorting.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

Here it is, we’ve finally got both the candidates for the new menu design ready for you to vote on. The polling box is on the right hand side of the page. One entry is courtesy of myself, the other is from ReptilianSamurai. I’ll pretend that those of you who haven’t been following the design don’t know which one is mine.

The images below show how they should look on your machine, the HTML samples below show how they will look. Let me know if there are any differences. Note – the html pages link to the current menu-less versions – all of the code to decide what menu options to display on each page isn’t live yet.

[Edit: Removed HTML samples now that we the poll is over 10/05/06 ]

	Menu 1	Menu 2
IS main page (click to enlarge)
WPT story list (click to enlarge)

Polling closes 11 PM eastern, Wednesday October 4, 2006.

To those of you who missed tonight’s AV Geeks show in NYC, which is most of you, you missed a good time. There are two more area shows (with different films) on Monday and Tuesday which probably won’t see capper gatherings either, but are probably worth going to if you can make it. If you don’t live in the area, keep your eyes peeled at their website for shows in your area.

If you do live in the area, don’t forget about the proposed capperfest on the 28th mentioned in my last post.

Most of the shorts in tonight’s show aren’t amongst the ones AV-Geeks guru Skip Elsheimer has made available at archive.org, so they haven’t shown up on IS (yet). That’s a pity, since most of these were right in the average capper’s wheelhouse. Despite a fairly interactive show – starting off with audience members taking turns reading frames in a slideshow and occasional sing-a-longs with the film (the theme of the show was musical shorts), I’m pretty sure if there were more than one capper there, we’d have been thrown out for talking back.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must excorcise my soul of the horror that was the evening’s last film, Telezonia:

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We’ve got some events of interest in the New York City in the coming weeks that may see more than one capper in attendance.

Author of novels, comics, and other things Neil Gaiman will be will be interviewed live by author, Daily Show cast member and PC-portrayer John Hodgman, followed by a book signing of Gaiman book, Fragile Things on Thursday, September 28, 2006 at 7:00pm at The Fashion Institute of Technology’s Great Hall, 227 West 27th Street New York, New York.

It’s free, you’ve got two weeks notice and at least one capper should be in attendance. Contact UnReality (trust me, the form on that link will go to him) for more info.

For those of you with more flexible schedules, this Sunday through Monday brings us three area screenings from the AV Geeks archive, source of some of Inventing Situations’ primest material, hosted by the head geek Skip Elsheimer.

I for one will be attending Sunday the 17th’s 7 PM screening, “AV Geeks Greatest Hits” at Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue (at Second Street) which will include that classic claymation dental horrror morality tale, Munchers.

If there’s enough interest in one of the two other screenings, we might get a gathering going with or without me. We already have one vote for the screening in Huntington, NY at 7:30 on Tuesday the 19th and none yet for the showing on Monday night near the South Street Seaport at 10 PM.

If you’re interested in going to any of these screenings, contact me and maybe a gathering will occur.