For those of you looking for the Musings of Mr. Troy Benjamin, writer, producer, publisher, DVD producer, and dashing used car salesman - this LiveJournal is not the droid that you are looking for... all blog postings are a goings on over at the Still Playing with Toys website:

www.stillplayingwithtoys.com/mblog

A'thank you.

The last time I wrote was when we had an earthquake...

Basically it takes the earth physically jarring itself violently to get me to write apparently. So what shook today that's getting me to write? No idea. It's been an interesting one to say the least, among all the work both day and night job wise, quite a bit has been going on too so here's some of the highlights.

I've taken to selling all (well, a lot) of my earthly possessions on Craigslist... what started as an attempt to get some cash quickly for my Dad's birthday turned into an all-out spring cleaning in August as I've been selling things that have just been lying around. No idea why the impulse came, maybe it just felt good to have some of the clutter out of the apartment. But electronics and the like that have just been clogging up the closet - all out. Old PS2? Gone. Old surround sound receiver? Gone. And given to (hopefully) good homes.

Last Friday night, the guys came over for beers and foosball and hanging. It was the first guys night that I've had in a long while and it was great. I actually ended up socializing with my neighbors in the process (gasp, I know, right?). In the process, one of my bestest buds R.C. ended up passing out on my couch - the next morning complaining of stomach pains. Monday morning, I found out that he had been in the hospital the night before. While totally un-cool waxing best friend's medical history on a public forum, he was in some serious pain and the poor dude is still hurting.

Went to a Dodgers game on Wednesday night, which was also excellent - nothing tides over your restlessness with life like a couple Dodger Dogs, a Bud Light or two, and having several inebriated Los Angeles denizens threatening to beat the piss out of you as you walk to your car.

Speaking of getting the crap kicked out of us, we had our first loss in the hockey season Monday night. Losing is no big woop, but the team we lost to had a couple of severe d-bags with big mouths that made the experience jarring. Plus one of their brothers/friends/lovers was out in the stands threatening to beat us all up when we got off the ice, you know, because we're that intimidating.

Have you heard Ben Folds' new "fake" album that he leaked to tide pirates over until his real album comes out next month? If not, you should.

What else? Issue three of Still Playing with Toys will be done this weekend, come hell or high water, so keep an eye open on the website come Monday for some free comic goodness.

Oh and Jeff's gotten me addicted to World of Warcraft. As if I wasn't losing enough sleep as it is, maybe it's time I started drinking coffee again...

Indeed we had an earthquake in Southern California on Tuesday, but nothing to write home about. It's been the strongest one that I've been in since helping my grandma move out of her Granada Hills house after the Northridge quake (and even those were aftershocks), but it's the first experience I've had with being in a multi-story building during an earthquake.

No damage at the Casa de Troy with the exception of a few Star Wars figures jarred loose from their perch high above my DVD shelves and sent plummeting to their Death Star reactor core-like demise to the carpet below (you know, assuming that my DVD shelves are to scale with the Death Star).

I think the funniest part of the entire earthquake experience was heading over to Mel's Diner after evacuating the building for a bite to eat and seeing the local news channels trying their hardest to make the quake the event of the century. From shampoo bottles downed in the aisles of grocery stores, to a small crack in a water main in the midst of a suburban intersection, it was the "Quake of the Century (To This Point)".

Facebook and Twitter were jammed with status updates about the earthquake and it suddenly became the thing to talk about. I'm somewhat surprised that Myspace didn't find a way to create a banner ad using the earthquake to sell some type of product (which they've gotten increasingly great at).

Anyway, back to setting back up my Star Wars figures. They need to prepare for the landing of the BMF Falcon anyway...

I have to be brief as this is a late-night musing when I should really be sleeping and dreaming of fighting the Joker in the streets of Gotham -- this dilemma seems to arise on a regular basis and I thought that I would share with my blog friends to get their thoughts...

As many of you may (or may not know), I'm just a little bit obsessed with Mary Elizabeth Winstead. I mean, we're talking like how a thirteen-year old girl pines for Johnny Depp obsession. It started with Sky High and careened out of control from that point forward. The only problem with this obsession is that poor Mary has some of the worst representation and has wound up in some of the worst god-awful movies known to man.

Because of this bordering need of help obsession, I've endured such fantastic cinematic fare such as Final Destination 3 (which wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be) and the appropriately named holiday theme horror Black X-Mas (The X means it's extreme apparently), which was so nonsensical that I basically Tivo hopped through the movie and watched an hour and a half in just under fifteen minutes.

She looked to be taking a turn with Grindhouse, Bobby and Live Free or Die Hard and I thought maybe, just maybe Ms. Winstead was turning things around...

But then...

...comes the trailer for "Make It Happen.

Well, the long-lost never been love of my life debuts her latest movie "Make It Happen" and once again, it looks to be more Tivo hopping fodder. On one hand, she's going to be a burlesque dancer (that's good), on the other hand it looks like yet another rehash of Save the Last Dance, Flashdance, So You Think You Can Dance, All She Wants to Do is Dance, Dancing Queen, Fame, and Juno - okay, maybe not the last one because that's every other movie that's been sneaking previews lately but I digress...

I'm faced with a few choices:

1) Wait it out until this thing airs on Starz at 1 in the morning as Black X-Mas did.

2) Hope that someone such as good friend Debra Rico might endure this schlock with me while accompanying me as a female so as to not forgo any masculinity which this fanboy geek struggles to maintain to begin with.

3) Write a flick worthy of this gorgeous starlet's beauty and talent and then hold producer, director, and casting associate at gunpoint until they both make the movie and cast her in it (that's how Hollywood works, I'm not sure if anyone's told you guys... you need to own weaponry in order to get something greenlit. Why do you think that Brett Ratner is both a member of the NRA and still the first call from studios to make big features? I rest my case.)

While the first two options seem plausible (and the third one about as psychotic as the obsession in the first place), things would just be a whole lot better if she could land a few better roles. Mark my words (and these are the words that insisted to everyone that this chica named Scarlett Johansson was smoking hot after seeing an advance screening of Ghost World -- you guys owe me) -- Mary Elizabeth Winstead can and will be hotter than Jessica Alba... the Boulevard of Broken Dreams just needs to give her a chance.

Good day. Well, tons to catch you up on so I'm going to give the so-called Reader's Digest version of things. Vacation in Kauai was awesome, just exactly what I needed for a week. There's this great beach town that was by our hotel that I really dug, we hiked, we swam, we slept, we helicopter toured, we slept, we ate, it was perfect. As much as I tried to keep off the grid, it's so hard to completely cut off all ties now thanks to Facebook and cell phones and everything. Of course, I didn't really try THAT hard since there were people that I wanted to keep in touch with while I was gone but that's beside the point.

Back at work and back to the almost the pace that things were at before I left. No all nighters yet but with all the projects coming up, it seems inevitable again at some point soon. Things with the comic are still trucking along despite the bumps that just continue to plague the third issue. Really anxious to get it done and move onto issue four especially after working through a rewrite that I'm sending to Chris in installments that I'm awfully proud of.

This insanely cool year of movies continues as Saturday I went with Amy to see Hellboy and really dug it despite my worries that it was going to be one of the movies that fell on the wayside this summer. But the real meat and potatoes is coming up in the next few days... Dark Knight... yow... can't wait.

Speaking of not being able to wait, Comic-Con is coming up and already the Ghostbusters goodness has started. Man, despite feeling like such an old sad bastard punching my timecard every morning and punching out every night and going home exhausted - I still feel like a kid this year with all the nostalgic big tentpole movies. What are you going to do 2009? You're pretty screwed having to live up to this year... I'm just saying.

From the home office in North Hollywood, California here is tonight's Troy's blog... you know, that doesn't quite have the same ring to it. I'll have to work on it.

Apparently I've been prone this week to having cheesy TV showtunes stuck in my head. Earlier in the week it was Hawaii 5-0, the last couple of days it's been the Airwolf theme. And for all of the above, I have no idea where they're coming from. I haven't seen an episode of Airwolf since the third grade and I don't think I've ever seen an episode of Hawaii 5-0. But alas, there be the theme songs in my head.

Usually my go-to, the theme from Doug, works - which I continue to argue to everyone is the perfect remedy for ridding yourself of any song that happens to be stuck in your head. But lately, it's been failing me. I should have conducted further testing before preaching the benefits of the Doug Theme - not to mention all of the side-effects, which rival restless leg syndrome's laundry list.

I've also watched a couple episodes of VH1's "I Love the New Millennium" and, just as I thought, it's pretty bad. "Hey, remember Spider-Man? That was a great movie!" or "Hey, razor scooters were such a fad!" (I'm listening to as the ten year old kid in my apartment complex tears through the walkways currently on his razor scooter. Dear VH1, usually nostalgia ties in pretty well with that whole "past" thing. And I don't think you've really though this through... what are you going to do once you get to 2008? Or 2009? Are you going to be predicting the future in a nostalgia show? That's a paradox that Doc Brown can't even map out on a chalkboard.

Anyway, some daily goodness for those of you cyberstalking me...

SUNDAY

Sunday morning, I met up with a friend from a Star Wars collecting message board who had blind purchased a new Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull poster prior to seeing the movie. He saw the movie and then promptly was looking to get rid of the poster. Being a fan of the one-sheet art as well as finding that the movie is growing more and more on me, I offered to take the poster off his hands.

Afterward, I picked up Debra, who was enjoying the air conditioning that she and Tony has just put into their apartment. We drove over to the Grove in the midst of the 100 degree heat that we've been having here in LA over the past week or so. I've been in dire need of new clothes, particularly pants because I have several favorite pairs that have been worn so much that they're starting to look like cheese of the Swiss variety. At the Grove, the two of us underpaid geniuses (genii) weren't able to afford much of anything and we started waxing nostalgic of growing up next to outlet malls and actually being able to afford clothes that didn't make us look like we were back in 7th grade...

...which spontaneously turned to a trip out to Camarillo to the closest factory outlet to LA. Where it was also (thankfully) a good 20 degrees cooler. Which was incredibly welcome. We got stuck in some traffic coming back so I missed out on hockey practice, which isn't necessarily a bad thing considering how hot it was.

MONDAY

Monday was a craaazy day at work, juggling about three hundred different things and rushing first thing in the morning to meet a deadline on something that I should have been able to work on over the weekend but wasn't. But the highlight of Monday was definitely a date with Amy (whom I had met in Friday's edition of The Troy-man Show, in case you treat my blog like Tivo and episodes of Lost... which would actually be cool). We had a great dinner and it was great to be able to talk enthusiastically and openly about regular geeky things -- with a cute girl. Things went really well and needless to say, I am completely smitten, I am in deep smit.

TUESDAY

Tuesday morning I had a pre-day job conference call in regards to the good news I had mentioned on Friday and, as seems to be the running trend of things that have made me incredibly nervous and sleepless this week (between the date and this conference call), it went really, really well. Still don't really want to reveal what it's all about quite yet, but it was definitely exciting news.

Work was great, I ended up having lunch with Steven Smith, who is always just such a fascinating and interesting person to converse with. Per usual, the two of us ended up talking movies and our love for absorbing as much as possible. We ended up talking quite a bit about his dealings with Jerry Goldsmith, a composer whom I wished that I would have been able to meet before he passed. And we went to Lucky Devil which, despite the fact that it's murder on the stomach at a later date, is quickly becoming another of my favorite restaurants in town.

After work, I got home and relaxed a bit catching up on the last three episodes of House, which man- talk about a smack of melodrama in the midst of a show that usually is somewhat light-hearted. And such a well-crafted couple of episodes dealing with House's "visions"... For as much crap as I gave this show in its beginnings, it really is excellent.

Oh caught up on one of few reality shows that I'll subject myself to in Hell's Kitchen (Chef Ramsey = Hero)... I'm not an angry person but secretly I think I wish I could scream at people and call them "stupid donkeys..." Which... I'll never be able to do. But still...

VACATION COUNTDOWN: 5 DAYS, 15 MINUTES

Our top story tonight. Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead. And now the news...

Well, another week gone by - for whatever reason that past several weeks, despite how busy things have been with work and how stressful things have been, time has been flying by. Well, maybe not quite the correct expression, more like things have just been blending into one giant blob of a timeline. Non-work events that actually happened over Memorial Day weekend feel like they happened last weekend-- really strange.

Despite the previous old person colloquialism, this week was actually a pretty good week. The powers that be at work moved me into an office, which has been a really strange adapting process after pretty much having three years of working in a "group" environment. Sure, when I worked with Trevor, I pretty much had my own office - especially during the Santa Monica office years, but it's taken a couple days to get used to being back inside four walls - but it's been pretty cool.

FRIDAY

The highlight of this week, which I was definitely looking forward to, was the charity screening on Friday night of Serenity. Since the beginning of the year, I've been absolutely head over heels for Firefly and Serenity after countless times of RC and several others telling me that I really had to watch it and that I'd dig it. Long story that I've detailed elsewhere short, Friday's screening was something that I had been anticipating for a while - finally getting to see the "Big Damn Movie" on a "Big Damn Screen" (well, bigger than the screen in the Troy Theater).

Work Friday night was pretty crazy and I ended up staying late and driving straight from the office out to Pasadena. And by straight, I mean sat on the 101 South for an hour. Yay California! It had been a while since I had been to Pasadena and I'd forgotten just how cool Old Town is, just a completely different environment than the usual Los Angeles overcrowding claustrophobia. So I parked and walked around eventually wandering over to the Old Town Laemelle where there was already a line for the screening. The Browncoats (Serenity fans for those of you uninitiated) are all incredibly warm and friendly people and it wasn't long before I was joking around with people in line like I had known them for years. When the Will Call girl walked by she mentioned that if I wanted a t-shirt, they still had a couple - of course I wanted one and I was told I had to be escorted over to the swag table. Feeling strange about having an escort (and actually after a moment or two thinking it was really cool), I picked up a t-shirt and walked back to the line, only to find that I couldn't remember where my place was. The line wasn't really long so I walked to the back and started chatting with a guy after a couple Friday night socialite Paris Hilton wannabes asked us what the line was for (we both were on the same page in wanting to tell them it was a Q and A with Sarah Jessica Parker after a screening of Sex in the City - but copped out and told them what we were actually in line for).

No more than twenty seconds later, I hear the people behind me talking to Will Call Girl and one of them gives her last name and I overhear it - it turns out that directly behind me was a friend of Tim's whom I after much mustering of courage, had just introduced myself to via Facebook no more than a couple days ago named Amy. Yet another example of that whole Small World that Disneyland's been trying to sell us on since the 50s. (Those little animatronic Playmobile toys might actually be right!) Completely a scenario out of a movie - Amy is super cool, very cute, and she and her friend Katrina were kind enough to let me tag along with them inside the theater. The screening is awesome, so much fun and between auctions, raffles, and an impromptu Q and A with a bit character in the film, it was pushing 2 in the morning before everyone started to shuffle out of the theater.

Despite being so tired, I got home and suddenly got a second wind so I read a bit and hopped online completely losing track of time... so by 3:30, my eyes were telling me it was time to actually sleep.

Between the Serenity screening and meeting Amy, moving into my own office, and getting some news from my manager on the drive out to Pasadena (which I'll share at a later more appropriate date), Friday was a pretty killer day -- and for once I went to bed not completely stressed out or exhausted from said stress.

SATURDAY

So the past week, LA has been caught in the middle of a sweltering heat wave. My apartment when I got home from Pasadena was hot and humid enough that I half expected a bunch of old gnarly old people in towels to be walking around my bedroom like it was a Palm Springs Sauna.

With the AC cranked, my fan full blast, and my bedroom actually fairly cold - I both slept like a baby... and didn't hear my phone ring about four times. After getting my energizing phone call from Brendan on the drive out to Pasadena, I had called RC wanting to pick his brain about said phone call and what it entails over lunch today. But come noon and I'm still sleeping, and RC couldn't get a hold of me, the dude finally gave up on me and hit Boston Market by his lonesome (sorry man).

Still refusing to get out of bed, I flipped on the laptop and wrote a few emails - finally making it out to the living room (where I had also kept the AC on all night luckily) where I still refused to get the day going and had a bowl of cereal and watched I Love the 80s.

...and was completely in awe of the fact that VH1 has the audacity to be airing a new show this week called "I Love the New Millennium"... seriously? Are we nostalgic for 2001 already? I realize that I'm talking about the network that claims each passing week was the Best Week Ever, but still - it completely caught me off-guard. Still pondering the programming manager at VH1's thought processes, I hopped in the shower and headed to the North Hollywood YMCA to drop off some paperwork for the hockey team.

Apparently the league manager hadn't dropped off our roster, and I didn't bring a copy, so the super cool employees invited me back behind their counter to pull up my email and print out everything they needed. I had just met these folks and was sitting behind their counter as if I was an employee. Pretty funny stuff.

Afterward, I got back to the apartment and traded off work (both comic and Trailer Park) with catching up on movies, watching Factory Girl, Jumper, and Be Kind Rewind (which I'll post reviews of on Facebook soon... I'm about 20 movies behind on reviews for anyone that reads them, I apologize).

Tomorrow, I'm meeting up with a dude who bought a poster for the new Indiana Jones movie before seeing the movie and finding that he loathed the movie. So I'm taking the poster off his hands. Then, it'll sound niche niche, but my friend of friends Debra is accompanying me to the mall to help me find new much needed threads. Hockey practice (if it isn't ten million degrees outside again). And then there's talks of poker and BBQ with Mr. Ayers down in Hermosa... should be a fun Sunday.

Hello, my name is Troy and welcome to my LiveJournal. While I'm not sure how much attention this blog will get (since I'm addicted to blogging both on my publishing company site Still Playing with Toys as well as to friends on Facebook where I can get all personal and tell you mundane details), I have new friends over in the land of LiveJournal that I wanted to keep up with. So here I am!

...and now is the time in Troy's LiveJournal where we dance!