Since when has Crispin Glover been a "Mystery Man"?

Granted, "Yahoo News" is not the best source for well informed journalism but this article confirmed that these writers don't know enough about their readers (ashamedly - that being me). Since when is Crispin Glover a "mystery man" to films? Why, I've been following him over the years. He's not just the fellow from Back to the Future. Let us remember the classics, Rubin and Ed, The Beavery Trilogy, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, (the new) Alice and Wonderland, Charlie's Angels...the list goes on. Okay, so the last one was not one of his finest moments and the first couple are pretty obscure if you aren't a Brooks, but let us just clarify that Crispin Glover is one to have paid attention to throughout the ages.

Yeah, he's a crazy person but surely one to follow for those that like some quality off-beat flick watching. Here's him as "Rubin", from Rubin and Ed on Letterman.



Needless to say, there is more to Crispin Glover than Hot Tub Time Machine or even George McFly.

Great News!

Matt went and got himself a dream of a job today that will last until this August. Starting on Monday he will be working 20 hours a week as a library assistant in the Harry Ransom Center archive. What is an archive exactly, you ask? It is sort of like a museum that meets a library*. An archive focuses less on objects and more on documents, letters, books, etc. The materials in an archive, like the Harry Ransom Center, are available for both research and curated exhibitions. Most of Matt's work will comprise of moving some of the permanent collection into an annex and creating finding aids for the materials so they can be easily retrieved when needed. This is pretty exciting stuff for a fellow like Matt who collects caligraphy inks and pens, fetishizes typewriters and enjoys solitude in projects.

More on the Ransom Center. If you are not library nerds then you may not be as familiar with it. To give you an idea of how cool this is though, I once heard this place described as a "kick-ass archive". I thought that was a pretty silly thing to say until I went to one of their latest exhibits on the history of film. This exhibition was pretty incredible. It included all kinds of treasures like the actual red dress Scarlett wore in Gone with the Wind and the preliminary storyboards from Martin Scorcesi's Raging Bull. They also have, as part of their permanent collection, an original Gutenburg Bible. I think we can all agree this adds up to a pretty cool archive, maybe even kick-ass job...?

*Funny that I didn't end up in an archive but I think it is mainly because I need a little more "people time" than Matt does.

In other news...

Matt shaved. His skin was getting a bit irritated in spots so he decided to rid the facial hair until he felt it was again time for the beard. Here are a couple of different stages along the way. I was at work when he did most of it and he sent me this pic in an email. It got me laughing so hard in the Teen Center that all the kids were looking at me like I was a crazy person (actually that probably had nothing to do with me laughing on second thought since all look at me that way).

Well, without further ado, I give you stage #1 of shaving process:

The G'Day Gov'nor stage

And stage #2. I am not sure what to say about this one except that this is what I came home to last night and after taking the obligatory picture, I demanded that something happen in a timely manner to take care of this creepy stache. Sorry Matt, even you look like a fascetious chump in a moustache.

SCIENCE!

Do you remember doing stuff like this?

For the Austin Public Library's Teen Center, I worked at the Science Festival this last Saturday. It was a great time and I kept thinking of how spot on my Jack Smaz friend was about having her students spontaneously yell "Science" during biology class to foster enthusiasm. Turns out that learning about science can be quite exciting, as seen in one of my favorite tri folds below...

It reminded me of my 6th grade science project when I use the ol' scientific method to determine whether a dog's or a human's mouth was cleaner. My dad hooked me up with 3 "blood auger petri dishes" (he made me spell the whole thing out in my project rather than just using petri-dish). Then I got an "inoculator" (a wire hanger that had been sterilized on the stove) to swab around in Geezer's, my dog, mouth and then onto the petri dish. Then, after sterilizing the hanger again, I did the same with my mouth for the second dish. The third I swirled the inoculator in the air a couple of times to make the "control dish".

Two or three weeks later I got the shock value I wanted, and the justification that it wasn't in fact gross that my dog licked my face, the dog's petri-dish grew far less gross looking stuff than mine. By 6th grade science fair standards, that meant that my mouth was clearly dirtier than my dogs. Infallible logic really. The funny thing was that the control dish grew a huge blob of something terrible looking. I wasn't quite sure what the deal was with that except that maybe it had something to do with me waving it around in the air above a pot of bubbling Hormel chili (it was on the other burner - the one not being used for sterilizing a hanger). On second thought, maybe what I proved was that Hormel chili is actually much "dirtier" than both a dog and human mouth... Who knows? Science can be so elusive....