Author Archives: Jeffrey A. Carver

One of the reasons I haven’t been around much lately is that I had a homeowner’s emergency to deal with—not my own home, but my in-laws’ apartment not too far from us. Frigid temperatures, frozen pipes, and a croaked boiler all contributed to the fun. Nobody was there at the time—they live in Puerto Rico, but are using this as the first step to living closer as the trials of the senior years creep in. It’s a lovely, quaint old apartment. And by quaint, I mean drafty and poorly insulated, as a part of its charm. Dealing with this took a surprising amount of time and energy, starting with a couple of hours with the shop-vac, sucking water up out of the basement. That was just for starters.

One good thing about the cold temperatures, though. It’s eased my fears that global warming is coming at us like a runaway freight train. Maybe it’s only coming at us like a lumbering freight train.

I wrote earlier how I had been tapped to play a small role in a very small indie film. My role? Pops, the homeless man with his ear to the street. Well, they had the premier screening for cast and families the other night, and—yep—there I was. For about, oh, twenty seconds or so. Maybe thirty. I thought I was pretty convincing as a scruffy homeless man, and we’ll just leave it at that and not think about how little it took to make me appear that way. (Wearing entirely clothes from my own wardrobe!)

The film is called Children of the Street. It’s an earnest work that actually tells an important story about runaways and homelessness. (Very rough around the edges, and clearly shot on a budget of approximately zero—but still, it was rewarding to be in.) I got an email from someone at our church today, saying he’d gone to see the public showing (not knowing I was in it), and was quite surprised by the homeless guy!

Maybe it will show up online someday. If so, you’ll hear it first here.

This won’t be news to any of you who have kids in college, or who are in college yourself, but it sure came as a jolt to me: When you’re applying for financial aid for colleges and universities, you basically have to do your income tax return, BANG, at the start of the year, instead of waiting to go into a panic the first and second weeks in April. That’s what I’ve been busy doing, and am still doing. No doubt it’s good discipline. It better be; it looks like I’m going to be doing this every year for at least the next seven years.

I finally heard from the fellow whose small film I acted in about a year and a half ago (as Pops the Bum). He’s having a premier showing for the cast in a couple of weeks, and will be showing it in his theater (the Regent, in Arlington MA) a few times. And then he’s sending it off to some film festivals, to see if it generates any interest. Good luck to him!

Speaking of movies, my wife sent me a link to this interesting story in the NY Times about James Cameron’s new film, Avatar, currently in production. One more step in the gradual merging of live actors and CG animation. One interesting thing is that they’ve developed the technology to let them see some of the virtual world while they’re filming the actors. That has to help the director and others realize the vision they’re after.

And speaking of technology, our friend Youngmee referred us to this story about a pretty emotive and lifelike robot developed by the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology. Her name is EveR-2 Muse.