The Voices in Frank's Head

First off, thank you to everyone who posted or emailed me to express your support after the accident I was in last week. I still have the bruises, some soreness and a persistent ringing in my ears. However, I am getting better. I'm heading out to enjoy the New Year with some friends soon. However, I would be remiss if I didn't take a moment to wish everyone a Happy New Year! Here's to hoping that 2007 brings the world peace, love, prosperity and laughter!

I was at the Old Shillelagh in downtown Detroit recently for a friend's birthday party. I don't actually remember a whole lot about the party except that there were a lot of people there and some great Irish music. I don't even remember leaving the party. The next thing that I do remember is feeling very sore as a man in surgical scrubs told me that I had been in an automobile accident and that I was at Oakwood Hospital . I later learned from my brothers that on my way home from that party, my car was rear-ended by a drunk driver. According to the police accident report, this woman was traveling at a speed in excess of 100 miles per hour when she collided into me. The aftermath of this is: My car is totaled, which leaves me without transportation for the time being; I have a lot of muscle soreness in my neck and shoulders, which the doctors tell me will clear up in a couple of days; I have a persistent ringing in my right ear, which should also clear up on on its own e...

I'm glad that Tara Conner won't lose her title as Miss USA because of her drunken antics in New York last December. It's not that I'm a huge Tara Conner fan or even a fan of the Miss USA pagent in general. I just think that if women were ever penalized for dancing on a table while drunk or kissing another woman, well - my life would get very boring, very quickly.

One of the great things about living in the 21st Century is the simple fact that cool things keep happening that one would never have expected 20 years ago. Sometimes those are very big things (like the International Space Station ) and other times it's very simple things just blow me away, like an on-line music video that is customized according to your location as well as your local time and weather conditions. The Unseen Video is a music video for You Make Me Feel by Mike Milosh that does just that. The web site automatically determines where you are visiting from, retreives current time and weather information about your hometown from the internet and then adjusts the music video from there. Welcome to the 21st Century!

Peter Boyle , the grouchy father on Everybody Loves Raymound and the tap-dancing monster in Young Frankenstein , has passed away after a battle with multiple myeloma and heart disease. He was 71 years old. I loved his character on Everybody Loves Raymound . I don't think there's another actor who could have played it better and very few could have even matched his performance. I was also impressed by the pure depth of his experience as an actor. His filmography on IMDb.com lists 93 different roles that he had played over the course of his career. In fact, even at age 71, he was still working on different projects. At the time of his death, he was in pre-production for a romantic comedy called Chatham and in post-production for drama called Shadows of Atticus . It is truly impressive how he always kept going. Peter Boyle will be deeply missed.

The folks at Wanderlust Designs came up with a really interesting idea: a Cereal Bowl Light . Touch the spoon and your bowl of Fruit Loops lights up like what you see at the left. It seemed really odd at first, but the more I think about it - the more I want one. Oh, and those are real Fruit Loops in that cereal bowl. The whole thing is just kind of cool.

Merriam-Webster selected "truthiness" as the Word of the Year for 2006 , having beat out other entries such as: google (as a verb; not as a company); decider; war; insurgent; terrorism; vendetta; sectarian; quagmire; and corruption. I can't help but feel that the selection of nominees for Word of the Year underlies a certain amount of cynicism within this country. The most positive selection on that list is "google" and that's simply because its connotation is a neutral one. It's kind of scary when you think about it. Anyway, kudos go out to Stephen Colbert for the way that he promoted "truthiness" as the way he used its selection in his show. (Check out the clip on Comedy Central's Mother Load .)

I was surfing on-line and found NASA's press kit for the current space shuttle mission (officially known as STS-116 , which is the 117th mission for the space shuttle program). Included in this 135 page press kit is the to-do list (or as they prefer to call it "mission priorities") for the current flight. I have my own to-do list for the day (pay a few bills, a half dozen or so phone calls to make). Their mission priorities, however, kick butt. It's interesting that I have three college level physics courses under my belt as well as a semester of Air Force ROTC behind me and I only understand about half of what they are doing on this twelve day mission. For the curious amoung us, here is their list. It consists almost entirely of things that are happening on-board the International Space Station. Perform inspection of space shuttle heat shields and downlink sensor data for evaluation on the ground; Document space shuttle tile during rendezvous with station using i...

NASA lauched the Shuttle Discovery into space tonight at 8:47 p.m. from the Kennedy Space Center. The whole launch just looked so darn cool! It was America's first nighttime launch in four years; the lastest step in NASA's rather ambitious schedule to finish the International Space Station. Best of luck, guys!

Go west, young gal (Metro Times Detroit) Sarah Klein , the venerable culture editor of the Metro Times , announced in her column yesterday that she is leaving Detroit for the sunny climate of California - joining the ever increasing tide of Detroit expats. I dealt with Sarah a couple of times on a professional basis, most recently when I was promoting my documentary on the Book-Cadillac Hotel . I have always been impressed by the quality of her work. If you asked me three or four years ago, I wouldn't have even hesitated in joining the mass exodus of young folks out of Michigan. After all of the folks that I've met through the FoBC and Detroit Synergy , however, I would be hard presed to do the same thing today. There's just too much cool stuff going on. Regardless, I wish her the best of everything in the Golden State.

Goofs for Star Wars (1977) I was surfing the web today and came across a list of goofs for Star Wars . I couldn't help but wonder just how many times someone had to watch that movie in order to notice all of those errors.