My favorite phrase of the day, from ESPN The Magazine's Tim Keown: "Lucky Sperm Club," describing those baseball club owners who came about their fortunes through that old-fashioned American virtue, inheritance.

Details of Disney Hell postponed for this news bulletin: I just got into the contestant pool for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, which had tryouts in Sunnyvale today. Tryouts were at a hotel, so I got a room yesterday and got little sleep last night – probably a combination of the caffeinated Coke I had with my late dinner and the Goldilocks-like pillows they had (one pillow too skimpy, two pillows too rock hard, blech). I woke up at 6 to get moving and prepared for the first tryouts at 9. Breakfast came, which was a healthy aberration for me: granola and yogurt parfait with fresh fruit and coffee. When 7 rolled around, I took a stroll to see if anyone started queueing up yet. Not a trace of anyone, so I took a dip in the hot tub for about 15 minutes, then got dressed and walked out to the hotel conference room. By this time it was around 8, and no sign of anyone, until a passel of folks were herded into a single-file line outside the building, and I had no idea idea where the hell they came from. (No real signs anywhere on where to congregate.)

I ended up chatting up a few of the folks who stood around me in line – or to be exact, I likely bored them to tears with my knowledge of game-show arcana. One lady was a contestant on Jeopardy!, another lady came down from Sacramento, and one guy was there from Long Beach, vacationing with his family. On the line, I noticed a couple of faces I'd seen on game shows before, most notably Leszek Pawlowicz, who's won the Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions, was thisclose to winning $250,000 on History IQ, and won a $1M annuity in an online trivia game. He's been on ABC's Millionaire a couple of times, but hadn't made it into the hot seat. I found out he was just there to provide company for a friend. I found out at least one other J! TOC winner and a 5-time J! champion were in attendance as well – ringers galore.

Eventually we got into the ballroom and took a 30-question written test. Out of around 150 folks, 40 or so passed the test (they don't tell you what the passing bar is), and in short order I filled out the contestant questionnaire, got a Polaroid taken, then had a brief interview with one of the associate producers. Sounds like they've already taped about 8 weeks' worth of shows out of a 39-week initial commitment from the stations that picked the show up. By the way, if you're asking yourself, "Hey, didn't the show get cancelled?": it did get cancelled from ABC prime time, but starting Sept. 16, it goes five days a week in syndication, hosted by Meredith Vieira from The View. As they say, check your local listings. And if you have a specialized field of knowledge, will you be my Phone-a-Friend? Heh heh.

I have returned from the Disney Death March of 2002. More details to follow when I regain lucidity, but one question for now: Is it sick and wrong for me to want to punch out the lights of every kid I see?

Phone phreaks slam American Idol voting lines. I didn't know there were people out there with goals more aimless than mine. Jeez, who gives a flying sideways fuck about this show, especially to try to jam the voting process? I swear, I have not seen one episode yet. Nor Big Brother 3, either. (Though I must admit, I was compelled to track down vidcaps of Tonya, the chippie from Vegas who wore the peanut butter bikini. The best body modern science can buy, especially considering she has 5 kids.) I just obsessively videotape old game shows, that's all.

Introducing... two great tastes that taste great together. What's next, U.S. Airways becoming Austin Powers Fembot Air?

Nooooooooo! Tom Heald at TV Barn reports that Comedy Central has put the hammer down on Win Ben Stein's Money, even though there's a whole season yet to be aired. One could see the handwriting on the wall, when they moved the show back to 5 p.m. to accommodate the inferior, not half as funny Beat the Geeks. You could also say that the show lost its raucous sense of humor when Jimmy Kimmel left to begin his ascent to broadcast TV. Whatever the case, you couldn't say the show had softball trivia questions – definitely on a par with Jeopardy!, though not as tough as the last game show I was sorry to see cancelled, The History Channel's History IQ. The money prizes were paltry, too ($5000 if you're lucky enough to outsmart Ben in the final round – no mean feat), but I found the pop culture cachet of being on the show to be its own kind of gold coin. The X-factor was the comedy, between the byplay among Ben, Jimmy and the contestants, as well as the studiously sophomoric humor of the category names. There was a definite reason the show won Emmys for writing. One of the best experiences I've had was when I was a contestant on the show 3 years ago. So it goes.

Last night I had a fairly strange dream. I was rehearsing for an episode of MadTV. Why was I going to be on? Why did they want me to portray Bill Clinton in a sketch? How did I find time during the lunch break to hang out in Las Vegas with my aunt and uncle? Only my fevered unconscious knows, and it's keeping mum.

It's going to be another scorching day in the Bay Area. Normally, the really hot days don't hit until Indian Summer in September, October, and even November. Not so the past couple of days. It's supposed to be no better today. And with no air-conditioned office oasis to go to on the weekend, I'm going to carry lots of water and hope rehearsal doesn't stretch on for too long.

Geek Advisory: The rest of this blog entry deals with web development-type stuff. If that bores you to tears, go forth and enjoy your day. You've been duly warned.

As if I don't have enough to occupy my time currently, I've gotten a bug up my ass to start a long-needed overhaul on my site. (If you've ever been brave enough to venture to kipilman.com proper, you'll know it just consists of a 2-year-old résumé.) Long-term plans are to add more content to the site – areas devoted to my acting and voiceover work, as well as my obsession and experiences with game shows, and perhaps an area dealing with my writing (provided I scribble anything other than the blog itself.) In the short-term, I'm going to simplify the site graphics-wise. No firm ideas on the motif, but I think I'm going to retire the PiL / Repo Man homage and go with something else – my current brainstorm is to use something like faux candy bar wrappers, to represent the variety of "flavors" on the site. In the even-more-short-term, I want to get the site up to current web standards. This Webmonkey article is the impetus for the change. I figure it's a good excuse to immerse myself in and familiarize myself with current HTML and CSS standards, to see how far we've come in making web standards a truly cross-browser reality. (Quick tangent: for all the big and fast changes in tech, where the web is concerned the changes come at a glacial pace. The latest W3C recommendations for CSS and HTML have been around for a couple of years at least, but a lot of stuff out there is still coded to old standards, my work included.)

I come from the old school of jury-rigging this, 1-pixel spacer GIFing that to get things to look the same across all browsers. This, of course, was in the times that tried the souls of the hardiest folk, the 4.0 Browser Era (cue Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back). When one horribly conceived browser held sway over the land, and it wasn't Internet Explorer. I swear, if it was up to me, I would form a browser SWAT team that would go from house to house and forcibly uninstall Netscape 4.x from every computer in the land. There's no reason to use it, and fewer reasons to code for its quixotic behaviors anymore. And still it's in the browser spec at work, and every engineer has it on their Linux boxes. I really want to see customer browser metrics for our site, to see what portion of our audience still uses 4.x browsers. Granted, our customer base is more broad-based and less tech-savvy, but nowadays it just takes a couple of clicks to upgrade to Netscape 6.2 (I still don't know what the hell happened to v.5) or IE 5.5 or 6.0. It would be a massive undertaking to make our code conform to HTML 4.01 Transitional DTD, not to mention revising it so that content and presentation/layout are truly independent of one another. Which is why I'll start with the petri dish that is kipilman.com. Pray for me.

Not too long after I read this, I read this. On Sept. 11, let's take a moment for quiet reflection – wait, did someone say free tickets to Detroit? I'll reflect at 35,000 feet at no charge, and give me a scotch and soda while you're at it.

The thing is, to bring it back to Keith Olbermann's Salon piece, this is like the gas station owner in L.A. who offered "Free Lube Jobs for All POWs" at the end of the Vietnam war. Taking a horrific time in our collective history, and turning it on its head in the name of corporate publicity and self-interest. A sick perversion. Will they be stenciling "Let's Roll™" on the planes, too?

(And on a similar tangent, I'm very glad the erudite, sharp and funny Olbermann is writing for Salon. I wish an S.F. radio station would carry his "Speaking of Sports" and "Speaking of Everything" segments.)

My brother-in-law turned me on to another insanely great album: a soundtrack from Indian action movies. My favorite tracks (snippets linked for the RealPlayer): "Bombay 405 Miles," "Inspector Jay from Dehli" and "Theme from Don." They have a second album I want to get my mitts on now.

It's been a busy yet very uneventful week. Rehearsal, work, rehearsal, work, sleep, rehearsal. Though I did get a pleasant surprise at the beginning of the week, when Hanne sent me a big box via the post. It contained 4 bags of Utz's Crab Chips, a Maryland snack food specialty – potato chips with a crab seasoning flavor (think Old Bay, not crab flavor per se). Damn tasty – I've killed half my stash this week. As ever, Hanne is the queen of the thoughtful and delicious surprise.

After rehearsal yesterday, one of the actors told me they were glad I was in the cast, that they liked the energy I brought to the rehearsals. A small compliment, but it made me feel so much better. 32 days till we go up – it will be an interesting sprint to the finish line, I think.

So I revised the one personals ad I still have online a couple of weeks ago. I've gotten a few responses, most of them a little wacked. Call it a pet peeve, label me fastidious if you will, but why does hardly anyone write a thoughtful response to an ad anymore, and actually show they've read the ad? Seems like they're just playing the numbers – responding to a huge quantity of ads, seeing what sticks. It really bugs the shit out of me. I've only initiated a response to one ad since I started this personals thing – this may clue in you in to the fact that I'm not exactly, uh, assertive in the dating scene – and I made damn sure to write something a little thoughtful. I guess I have to take some initiative if I don't want to be continually disappointed in the quality of responses I get. This proactivity thing – I have varying degrees of difficulty with it. Could ya tell?