Bingo, Film Festival, Fletch

I've had a busy and fun weekend. Saturday, after dinner, I practiced with my band. We had a really good practice and I think we'll have a great show next week. Saturday night was James Brown Bingo. James Brown is the head chef in the galley down here and every once in a while will host a bingo game. I only arrived for the last two rounds, but I think I got the gist of it. James Brown, dressed like William Wallace from Braveheart, complete with kilt, blue face-paint, and sword would pull bingo numbers and yell them to 50 or so drunk people. He would start by yelling the letter and then people would start guessing the number and if you guessed right, he would point at you menacingly and yell "YES!". It was quite a site. Of course, for certain tiles, there are standard responses. For example, if B4 was picked, everyone would yell "and after," or B2 "bomber" or B1 "with the universe". Naturally when O69 was drawn, the crowd would yell wildly. During the last round of bingo, where you had to black out your entire card instead of just get 5 in a row, when O69 was drawn james brown picked up a 3 foot long wooden stirring spoon (more like a paddle) and smashed a giant gingerbread house to pieces. It was quite entertaining. Afterwards, a bunch of us went into the game room and played pool, foosball, and drank. Much later on, I went with the firefighters to the "bar" at summer camp. Summer camp consists of a bunch of Korean War surplus Jamesways, one of which is a lounge that is used as a bar over the weekend. There, we had some whiskey and scotch. Outside of the bar was an ice-core from the Ice Cube experiment. This ice was upwards of 10,000 years old, so I chipped some of this ice off into my drink and had scotch on the 10,000 year old rocks. Thanks again to New Zealand's extraordinarily weak beer, I felt fine the next morning.

That morning there was the Polympics. Originally, the events sounded fun, but then there were all these stupid rules so it was more like games you'd play at a picnic than actual athletic events so I didn't feel like doing them. After lunch, I played volleyball from 2-4:30 and then soccer from 4:30 to 6 so my legs were quite tired after dinner. There's a film festival this weekend called the South Pole International Film Festival, or SPIFF, where people at the south pole make movies and submit them for judging. I decided to borrow an HD camcorder from the IT department, wrote a script, practiced some editing with iMovie and started filming. I plan on trying to make 2 movies: one will just be a documentary-style movie where I interview people around the base as to why they decided to come down here to work and the other will be my best attempt at a coen brothers style movie. The movies are only 5-10 minutes long usually, so it shouldn't take to long to complete... maybe a couple of days. I've got my actors lined up and a camera man and have shot some scenes already. It's a lot of fun. After SPIFF this weekend will be the open mic where my band will be playing. It's going to be a busy weekend.

Last night, after doing some editing, a bunch of us got together in one of the lounges and watched Fletch Lives on VHS. It's funny to watch a VHS movie on an HD tv... It was a very silly movie. Oh Chevy Chase... used to be so funny.

Today, the other guy in my group finishes his work with the telescope, so I can take over and start running the schedules that I want. I'm heading out there after I finish this post.