HEADACHE!

At today's Acting Meetup, I did a commercial for a financial planning group, pretending to be a rich heir confiding in his psychiatrist.  I also did a scene from The Replacements where coach Gene Hackman recruited has-been quarterback Keanu Reeves for his team. (It was the kind of cliched writing where Hackman waits on Reeves' boat then makes him jump when the latter returns there exhausted.) I played the Reeves role, but in hindsight I really should have been doing Hackman.

This evening I was going to try to see Funny Girl again at the Event Screen, planning on an early dinner since the movie started at 6:45.  It turned out, however that John and Kathrine were coming for dinner and they'd be a while arriving.  Do I stay for dinner with them and miss the movie, or go to the movie and miss dinner with them?  In the end I did neither, because I had such a big headache I ended up in bed.

Lately I've been doing o'ekaki puzzles by this Japanese expert.  The way it works is that you have a grid of tiny squares where some are filled and others are empty.  With each row and column, they tell you the length of the segments of filled squares, but you have to figure out the length of the empty segments yourself, and when you're finished you get a picture! (Left-brain process, right-brain result.) 

I really love that kind of puzzle.  Figuring out which squares are filled requires a special kind of logical thinking.  For example, if a segment is more than half of its row/column's length, you can determine that some squares in the middle have to be filled.  Or when you have a long segment on the top of the grid while the adjacent row only has some very short segments, you can figure out its location by seeing which columns begin with a single-square segment.  Or if a row/column equals the combined length of its segments plus the number of segments minus one, that means its unfilled segments are all just one square in length and you can determine the whole row! (Or if it's that number plus n, you can determine part of the segments that are n+1 in length.)