Killing Batteries

Some of you may remember that I was flown rock star style from Rome to Washington DC last June with only four days notice - rock stars never get more than four days notice for anything - to audition for a travel TV show hosting job that I ultimately failed to get due to various extenuating circumstances that had nothing to do with my stratospheric talent and unmistakable on-camera sexual magnetism.

Recently, I’ve once again been auditioning for a few travel TV show hosting gigs - once invited, once in answer to a controlled cattle call. I was passed over for not being enough of a masochistic, death-defying bruiser in one case and the jury is still out on the other (deal-sweetening fruit basket going out today).

It’s taken me a while to see the pattern emerging, but it’s finally dawned on me that my destiny is to host a travel TV show (or be a judge on Iron Chef, because yummy!). This conclusion is based mostly on the fact that I’m being invited to try out for TV hosting jobs, while even a dump truck of money can’t get publishers to print my memoir project, which has been unanimously judged as being the funniest book in the history of the universe. Apparently there’s some kind of hang-up about the book not having “a clean conclusion”. Sigh. The conclusion is that you laughed your ass off for five hours, jackhole!

Back to the task at hand. It’s understandably difficult to judge a guy’s on-camera potential, even if he’s flooded the internet with fetching photos of himself and can transform a community college lecture on squash cultivation into a laugh-riot Broadway script. So, in the interest of upping my TV show hosting profile, I’ve decided to start video blogging, A.K.A. ‘vblogging’.

The first installment is an audition clip I used in December, a spoof guide to making omelets. Please do not rip my camera framing skills, lighting deficiencies and the lazy use of in-camera sound. I’m just trying to give people an idea of why I’m great for TV, not win an Academy Award for Short Film (Omelet-Making).

So, with no further ado, I present to you “the Lonely Planet Guide to Making Omelets”:

On direct orders from my agent, publicist, personal chef and the Pope, I’ve been trying to up my writer profile lately by targeting big name publications. I started by short-listing several household name publications, then eliminating the sadistic jackasses that pay 25 cents a word despite an excess of two million readers and the ones that only accept queries on spec. From there it was time to start doing my research by reading several issues of each publication to get a sense of the types of stories that they print so as to craft the perfect, laser-guided pitch. This is how I ended up with 15 Playboys strewn around my house.

No, I did not go out and buy 15 Playboys. Buying a pile of back issues for US$5 a piece for every publication you want to pitch is what suckers do right before they have to layoff their personal chefs. Instead I thought I’d be smart and just call every guy I knew asking for a couple recent issues. This tactic probably would have paid off back in 1992, but with pictures of naked girls hard-hitting articles freely available on the internet these days, I came up totally empty handed. Unwilling to call it quits, I broadened my search and finally hit pay dirt: a single mom who’s been mysteriously receiving Playboys for free in the mail for the past ten years. Of course. Why didn’t I think of that in the first place?

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Having completed my ‘ultimate fly fishing’ adventure, I was demoted back to the ultimate eco-tour group for the final few ultimate days of the ultimate cruise.

FYI – an incontrovertible tourism fact I acquired on this trip is that you can make virtually anything ‘ultimate’ if you somehow involve a helicopter. Ultimate bird watching, ultimate knitting, even ultimate house of cards building, which would admittedly be pretty ultimate if you were able pull it off with a helicopter rotor spinning at over 200 revolutions per minute nearby.

I say that my return to the eco-tours was a demotion only because the eco-guides had seemingly run out of fresh tour ideas, due to the limitations of our location and seasonal options. And one of the only original excursions they could dream up, a volcano hike, nearly resulted in a pneumonia pandemic.

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Actually, this is a dual post about how pissed off I am about the clusterf*ck happening in Iraq and how everyone should go out and rent NO END IN SIGHT before voting in the presidential elections later this year (apologies to non-American readers, though you all should still see the movie just in case you needed to renew your loathing for the current administration).

If you’re the kind of person that values zero-pulled-punches reporting, but thinks that the over-dramatization and sarcasm in Michael Moore’s films tend to overly distract from the facts, you’re gonna love (to hate) this movie. There’s no carefully selected extreme-case profiles, there’s no flotilla to Cuba to seek treatment and five cent drugs, there’s no guy in a bird costume trying to draw attention to gun control… This is simply a matter-of-fact, indisputable series of interviews with several of the original main players of the Iraq occupation who were either duped, pressured into leaving or fired for trying to avert the disastrous situation that has unfolded in Iraq.

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My day of ‘ultimate fly fishing’ had finally arrived. I initially took this term to be a mirthful oxymoron, but that was before I was rocketing past volcanoes and cruising mere tens of feet over forest canopy at a breathtaking 130 MPH in a Bell 407 helicopter to engage in said recreation.

OK, fine. It was pretty ultimate. Point taken.

After hovering next to a large waterfall and swooping past yet another sea lion colony, the helicopter deposited us on a small lake beach and minutes later we were in the boats, lines out. Though fly fishers usually go out in pairs, I was alone in a boat with my guide Ricardo, which was probably for the best as I had a lengthy casting learning curve ahead of me and the fewer people around to get hooked in the lip the better.

Being of the inaccessible by land or sea variety, our lake was deserted and perfectly still, with a stunning backdrop of impenetrable virgin temperate rainforest and snow-capped mountains further distant, shedding little puffs of clouds. During a conversation the previous evening with the lead guide, when I confessed that this would be my first attempt at fly fishing, he noted that the fish were so abundant where we were going that “you’ll catch four by accident”. In fact I caught 10, including a massive brown trout, snagged a mere seven minutes after leaving the beach while we trolled to our first site. It was that easy.
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