This is the CheeseburgerBrown News in Brief, brought to you by Emmy Award winning local anchor, CheeseburgerBrown. Cheeseburger?

Thanks, Donna. Today's lead story: the California Stereoscopic Mystery Tour Itinerary.


California Stereoscopic Mystery Tour

Yes -- and I'm about to leave for three fabulous days in Burbank. I now know every savoury detail, except where I'm staying. So, unless the hotel has Internet access in my room and there's anyone willing to come out with little or no notice to the hotel bar once I identify it, I don't really expect to be meeting up with any friends or friend-like entities from yon Scooposphere. Oh well.

I signed up to a bunch of e-mail discussion lists about stereoscopic cinematography and animation, begging for a grounding in the fundamentals so that I don't look like a total twit in front of the Californian experts. One of the lists immediately erupted into a self-immolating internal flame-war, which I found fairly amusing. Yet another one became prickly with pompous experts who found the idea of me taking a crash course in the field offensive in and of itself. Most of the rest just started arguing about terminology.

Also: to date I have received over a dozen resumes. One of which was a seventy-nine page PDF file, detailing one man's rise through the 3-D "B Cinema" of the 1950s to the theme park 3-D show-rides of today. Everybody wants a consulting fee paid before they'll answer my questions. Everybody smells budget, and wants a slice. They mail me privately, sharing nothing with the list. They telephone my office, to talk in secret. Everyone has a trick that "no one else" knows, and they will sell it to me for a fee.

I smell dinosaurs. I smell a jealous guild. Fuck them.

When I'm finished this project I will write up my findings and experiences and post them for unfettered consumption on the world wide web. Sterescopy wants to be free.


The Secret of Hot Latin Sex

Okay, so I've discovered the secret of hot Latin sex. It's not about having dance in your soul after all. No, it's all about the spices.

LittleStar was making home-made salsa. It was a clean, simple kind of salsa based on onion, tomato, and jalapenos. It's called pico de gallo. We've been eating it on crackers ever since we came home from Mexico, and LittleStar's been honing the recipe with each iteration.

She was standing in the slanted orange sunlight of the afternoon kitchen, taste-testing the salsa while wearing her short red skirt...which was really a mistake, because it meant I kept interrupting her by grabbing her bum and so on. "Hey, I'm trying to do something here!" she complained, wriggling out of my lecherous grasp.

"It's not my fault you're sexy," I told her.

"Why don't we play after I'm finished here?" she suggested, taking another taste from the bowl she was mixing.

I made a counter-proposal.

So we went to my laboratorium, whose shades are the most solid for blocking out outside eyes, and LittleStar fellated me. As this event progressed I became slowly aware that the jalapeno and hot chile residue inside her mouth was being picked up by the sensitive skin of my member. Things were, in fact, beginning to feel quite hot down there.

"Christ that's hot and spicy!" I mentioned.

"Hon un sbasa?" echoed LittleStar.

"Jalapenos!" I cried. The situation in my nethers was moving quickly from tingling to burning. "Jesus Murphy Brown!"

"What should I do?" she asked, sitting up.

"Don't stop!" I suggested frantically.

And so things finished out the way they ought, only I was gripped throughout by an unscratchable itch that made me want to mambo my pelvis into oblivion. I knew I had broken the secret that had guarded the intensity of passion of Latin lovemaking for centuries. Those mincing little slicksters don't have the tango in their hearts -- they have spice on their wangs.

"Sorry," said LittleStar, afterward.

"You never have to apologise for oral sex," I said.

"Even if it hurts you?"

"Even then." I adjusted my pants painfully, and winced. "Even then, my love."


The Secret of Hot Laser Showers

The electric company gave us a nasty shock recently. According to their Cold War-era computers, during the month of April we consumed more than double our usual dose of power. Our usage returned to normal in May and June. We'd been scratching our heads, trying to figure out what happened, until Old Oak talked to his brother-in-law the master electrician about our water heater. It's a piece of trash rented to us by the electric company that is several sizes too big for our house, installed sometime around D-Day, and connected to the higher washroom by means of a labrynthine complex of pipes that would make MC Escher blush.

This Rube Goldberg paragon of inefficiency is sucking the life out of my wallet whenever I work in the city -- because I start each day with a long, hot shower upstairs instead of my usual bath every few days in the main floor tub.

The master electrician has a plan, however. He has installed in his own house a system which doesn't keep hot water on wait, but rather heats water on demand. The water is heated to any desired temperature in a fraction of a second by laser pulses. So, while it is still heating the water with electricity, it is doing so with Borg-like perfection and so reducing waste heat and power to an infinitessimal minimum.

So I want one, too.

Not only because I want to save money and reduce my reliance on sucking the grid, but also just because I think the idea of a century-old schoolhouse running on laserbeams is fucking cool.


Re: Poll

As per the results of the poll posted along with my last diary, I will not be submitting my next adventure to the queue. If you're the curious type, my newest story involves me travelling to an island off the Atlantic coast with a crew of odd-ball characters hand-picked by a quirky mountain filmmaker with a penchant for immersive suspension of disbelief and psychotropic drugs. It's called The Island of Ticking Stones and I'll likely (hopefully) post it before the month is out.

Also in writing news: I've been contacted by blogger and meta-blogger Biz Stone about having an excerpt from Traffic Zoology included in his new book, Who Let the Blogs Out?. I said, "Okay."


Closing Thoughts

There are no closing thoughts. I'm feeling a bit numb. I hope LA doesn't suck too badly. (I'm so neurotic -- I hope I don't suck too badly.) I leave in a matter of hours. I love you all like Hawkeye loves martinis.