JWhiting.com

You may have spotted me getting beat up by John Cleese in a Just For Laughs gala, you may have noticed me sitting one over from the late-great Heath Ledger in I’m Not There, but I’ve just received word that I will be playing my biggest smallest role ever in the upcoming Black Flag Pictures hilariously B-movie flavoured film, Crawler. (I think I’m going to be the bull dozer deliveryman… )

The Black Flag site is here and the teaser trailer is below…

Let’s hear it for acting!

Terrible news out of B.C. yesterday as the CBC reports that yet another ‘positive’ climate change feedback loop has been activated, accelerating the Earth’s rush towards full-blown climate crisis.

Warmer weather has allowed pine beetle populations to spread far and wide across British Columbia’s Central Interior region, turning a once effective forest-based carbon sink into a carbon smokestack. The article quotes estimates that the beetle will wipe out 80% of the pine forest in the next five years. And what does that mean?…

Canadian Forest Service scientist Werner Kurz estimates the beetle’s devastation will release almost a billion megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2020. That’s equivalent to about five years of emissions from Canada’s transportation sector, said Kurz.

What’s it going to take to start moving information like this from the science page to the front page? (More info here.)

I was recently reminded that the big book draft that darkened my doorway on Friday isn’t technically my first book… That dubious honour belongs to the soporific 8000 Series Components Manual. (Click the link for a free copy!)

When I graduated with a computer engineering degree from the Royal Military University in 1996 I knew a few things: the Canadian military was stuck in a massive rut and I wanted to go somewhere to combine my green writing and technology skills.

My first step down the writing/tech path was to become the Junior Technical Writer at Tundra Semiconductor Corporation. The dot-com boom was on and considering the mundaneness of the things we got into from day-to-day, they were fairly exciting times. I was young, flush with cash, given stock options and an expense account. The experience financed my move to Montreal and the purchase of the duplex that I’m happily ensconced in at this very moment.

One of my first jobs at Tundra was to touch up the 8000 Series manual right before they decided to discontinue that product line forever. Part of that job entailed drawing up a couple of schematics. As a non-artist, non-Adobe Illustrator guy, I remember being particularly proud when I finally figured out how to make the correct curves on a tricky little 28-pin SOIC package. (And no, I no longer have any idea what an SOIC package is…)

Hopefully the success of my second book will surpass that of my first…

I haven’t really spoken about it here, but I spent much of last year and the beginning of this year writing my first novel. So far the book-writing process has been both highly satisfying and deeply maddening. Luckily the highs have outnumbered the lows. And one of those highs came on Friday via the mail.

For all of its life so far the book that I’ve been writing has only existed in my head and on the computer screen. No one else (including my best buddy life-partner) has seen or read a word of it… Until now. [Cue the dramatic music.]

Late last night after piloting our new electric scooter through the mean streets of Montreal, Jeanne and I laid eyes on the first-ever printed pages of The Virus Makers.

I finished the first draft of this Young Adult novel at the end of March and my soccer-loving, boy-fathering, cousin-in-law Peter Coles kindly offered to print it up for me. Pete’s the VP of Sales and Marketing at Arcprint (and imaging) and it seemed appropriate that the book be birthed back in Vancouver where I first started writing it in the spring of 2006.

I’ll speak more about the book in, I’m sure, way too many subsequent posts, but for now I just want to fête the newly corporeal block of text that is the first draft of The Virus Makers!

I’m going to be doing some writing today for King Features’ Betty Boop franchise and, like the good writer-boy that I am, I spent some time last night researching the brand. I loved what I found.

Betty Boop started out her cartoon life as a dog-like creation of Max Fleischer (an animation legend who helped bring Popeye, Superman and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer to life).

Boop first appeared in the early 1930s sporting a decidedly 1920s style — it was all about the saucy little flapper dress, jazz beats and wry winks to sexily intoxicated good times. Eventually she was toned down (yet another black mark on the morality police) and her popularity waned.

One thing that makes Betty Boop’s earlier cartoons so great was that, unlike other movie-makers at the time, Max Fleischer wasn’t afraid to work with black musicians.

Check out the incredible1933 Betty Boop cartoon Snow White below (not to be confused with the Disney version that came out four years later: You can read Time’s 1937 review of that movie here).

Fleischer’s inspired version of Snow White features an incredible section with Koko the Clown dancing in a skeletal underworld. Koko was voiced by none other than Cab Calloway doing an amazing version of St. James Infirmary Blues…

(This film was chosen for preservation by the U.S. Library of Congress in the National Film Registry in 1994.)

Up to this point, this site has been a sort of clearinghouse for my random fascinations. It helped me get a handle on blogging, RSS, using Wordpress etc. It allowed me to rant at Videotron. And now things are going to change a bit.

Over the next little while I’ll be modifying the look-and-feel of the site as well as its focus. The site (now simply jwhiting at jwhiting.com) will serve as my professional face-to-the world.

Although I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea, in order to advance a big-ish project that’s coming down the pipe I have to get into the business of self-promotion. Expect some more talk about my writing and what I’m up to and less about my gift wishes and what I’m laughing at. Also expect the site to look a bit wonky and going up and down before everything gets back on track.

Thanks.

Jason

Al Gore updated his talk for TED. See it below.