Let’s start our wish list now! We know we’ll get all three acts of the show, commentary, and a separate, musical commentary. Most likely we’ll get a Making-Of feature, something on the music, and bloopers. What else would you like to see, to make this the most incredible Horrible DVD ever? Here’s my suggestions:

- An extra Dr. Horrible story, filmed for the DVD

- Promos from the characters; Captain Hammer talking to schools, Penny talking about the homeless shelter, Dr. Horrible doing something court-appointed (”Kids! Don’t do evil!”)

- A karaoke version

- A fan commentary, with notable fans giving their reactions (your assistant has my e-mail, Mr. Whedon)

- Features on the people involved, fan reaction, media reaction

- Video of the Comic-Con panel

- A RiffTrax commentary, already bundled in

- A feature showing the making of the Making Of feature

- A small comic book (a la the Serenity comic that came bundled with the Best Buy version of the Serenity Special Edition DVD) of “Captain Hammer: Be Like Me”

- The original storyboards, possibly in napkin form

- A feature on the already-existing mad science apartment that was used

- The entire run of “Apartment 4B” by Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen, including the 1st episode

- A feature on the special effects, done with all the gravitas and detail as anything about Gollum on the LoTR DVDs. “Here we had to sync up Nathan leaping off a chair into frame just as the van careened by, so it really looked like he was jumping off the van. Timing was critical for it to really feel right, so we were there, oh god, almost 7 minutes before we were finally happy with it, but that’s the kind of dedication we put into it. Then we had a Snickers.”

And most importantly:

- Previews of the sequel

What do you want to see?

According to TV Week, anyway.

“I’m deeply psyched to be able to offer ‘Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog’ on iTunes,” Mr. Whedon said. “It’s a way to reach way more potential viewers than I can personally call and harass into watching it. The idea that people can carry our little opus around on their iPods and iPhones is thrilling.”

From Thinkprogress.org: “The Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco has just recently submitted enough signatures to city election officials ‘ hoping to place on the ballot an initiative that would rechristen the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant as the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.’ But on CBC radio last Friday, one of the commission’s founders, Brian McConnell, said the group ran in to some unexpected opposition to changing the name: “What we didn’t expect was that most of the opposition was coming from people who didn’t want to name anything. They just wanted to forget about the past eight years and move on or they felt that this is a facility that does something really quite useful and it would be inappropriate to put his name on it. . . . If you get to the point where people are defending the sewage plant, that’s a sign that things have not gone so well.”

I was fortunate enough to do a phone interview with Joss Whedon last Friday on his new Internet musical miniseries “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.” UPDATED: my article is up at www.news-journalonline.com/entertainment.htm, along with the audio of the interview. Here’s what was said.

This is Chris Bridges with the Daytona Beach News-Journal, and I’m talking with Joss Whedon, creator of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Angel,” the show “Firefly,” the movie “Serenity,” the upcoming FOX show “Dollhouse,” and now an original online musical mini-series, “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.” Thank you for talking to me.

Thanks for having me.

Go ahead and give me the elevator pitch for “Dr. Horrible.”

There’s an elevator pitch?

I hope so.

I’ve never heard that phrase. Basically it’s your typical Internet musical about a super villain who’s trying to make his bones in the super villain community and get some respect, and maybe even work up the nerve to talk to the girl at the Laundromat.

So, like every other Internet serial musical.

Yeah, you know, I mean it’s a tired genre but I thought I could wring a few bucks out of it before it dies.

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Come on, people! Friend me! How else can I judge my worth?

In return I promise not to send you endless messages about my great real estate opportunities, my seminars on how to feel really good about yourself, or offers of pictures of me that “MySpace won’t let me post.” I won’t post animated graphics in your comments. I don’t have MySpace’s IM service installed, so you’re safe from me there, too. Any bulletins I send will be rare and relevant. My own page will neither blink excessively, play any music at all, or contain color combinations that cause cancer in rats.

Which rather begs the question, what do I use MySpace for, anyway. But the answer is clear.

To collect friends. So get going.

Updated: I hit the 1,000 mark. And you can really tell the difference, I actually feel more loved. I’m all shivery now.

Friday was an interesting day. And I use the word “interesting” with loaded meaning (couldn’t find the right smilie to indicate that, so here we are).

High point: finding out with an hour to spare that I would get to do a phone interview with Joss Whedon. All I really remember was that I was focusing on not sounding like a doofus, my painful discovery that it’s a big, big mistake to pound down a large Sprite to calm your nerves when you’re afraid to leave the phone long enough to pee, and that when he did call and we talked I sounded like a doofus.

With luck it’ll appear online Tuesday and in the paper later in the week. Only really new thing in it that I haven’t seen anywhere else: the Dr. Horrible episodes will appear on drhorrible.com pretty close to 12:01 am on their launch dates. Didn’t get if it was PST, I’m hoping to hear back about that. My favorite quote was when I was asking about his knack for attracting obsessive fans:

“That’s what I am, that’s what I grew up as. The things I love, I love very hard.”

Low point: immediately thereafter, when my car blew a head gasket on the way home and my brother-in-law and I spent four fun-filled hours next to Beville Road trying Bars Head Gasket Fix in the desperate hope that mine had blown in just the right way for this to work and save me many hundreds or thousands of dollars that I don’t, strictly speaking, have.

Results: I have an interview which I have now transcribed and will tomorrow edit, modulate, and possibly remaster until I sound like David Attenborough, am now working on my article. Car is running well if not smoothly, the oil has been changed, and we’ll see how that goes.

All in all, best thing about the weekend? Watching the little videos Teres took of the concert with our camera, where her fangirl shrieks can plainly be heard over the din. She’s been blushing nonstop, I’m working on making one of them my Windows startup noise.

Teresa has decided to become a full-time groupie.

Not just the type who gushes about her band online, pins posters around her room and writes “Mrs. Bon Jovi” on her notebooks, although she does that too (not the Mrs. part, she said she has no interest in leaving our marriage or breaking his; I believe she has in mind more of a sophisticated arrangement, like a time-share). No, she plans to be the one who follows her band, concert to concert, city to city, country to country, becoming friends and confidant to the road crew. The fact that we’re broke has no bearing on this. You can’t deny your calling. She has already begun looking into which countries allow you to sell your children.

Yesterday, on an extended and carefully planned last minute whim, she flew to Boston to see Bon Jovi in concert. She’s even now in the air on her way back, possibly without waiting for the plane. With her are the well-wishes, advice, and (in some cases) open envy of the other ladies on the Bon Jovi forum she frequents. They have kept up on her doings from other forum members at the concert who are calling in song-by-song updates, and from me, as I’ve been hearing from Teresa and posting on her behalf with her account. (I am, apparently, “Mr. Teresa.”)

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I need a new Web service, and I don’t think it’s other there yet. Nor do I want to set it up myself, I just want to avail myself of its nonexistent services.

I want a plot search engine.

Say I think of a fantastic idea for a story (it could happen). And say I invest time, trouble, and skullsweat into developing that story. How do you think I’ll react when I realize, halfway through, that not only has someone already written that story but probably did it better. Pretty darn despondent, that’s how.

So to head off that despairfest I’m calling for a plot search. If I want to write about time-traveling monkeys I want to know how many brave writers have gone that road before me, never to be heard of again (answer: 6). I want to type in “Barnard’s Star,” “alien warfare,” “Cheeze Whiz,” and “testicle” to see if I’m original or just pulling from the collective unconsciousness.

How tough could it be? All we’d have to do is review every book ever written and enter the plot and publishing info as keywords in a database. There are people online who do that kind of thing for fun.

In the meantime, I’m off to write. Hmm. How would Cheeze Whiz react to microgravity…

Well, that was fun.

Dreamweaver was giving me problems yesterday so I rebooted. Or, rather, I turned my computer off and it came back up partway. The graphic image of your motherboard logo or graphics card that you see for a second before your system starts loading? It stopped there. That’s kinda weird.

Memory was fine, checked it in different slots and tried different memory sticks.
Blew out all the dust everywhere.
Video card was fine.
Unplugged all the drives, same thing.
Had it down to either the power supply, the motherboard, or the chip. None of which I could easily test without buying the components.

Here’s the difficult bit: Office Depot has a clearance price on an HP Pavillion computer that’s better than what I have now: $399 after rebate. Tempting. Read the rest of this entry »