The Sound

My friend Steve Peterson has just started a new blog, titled Do Cats Eat Bats?. With the addition of his blog to my links section it has taken on the appearance (if you look carefully and keep an open mind) of a little man. Un is the neck.

Steve has the thrilling news that one of his "horror thriller" screenplays, The Sound, is definitely going ahead and is already in pre-production. The movie will be a co-production of Fast Carrier Pictures and Velvet Steamroller Productions. If you go to the news section of Fast Carrier's website you can read about the film. I strongly recommend you go there and check out the fantastic plot summary. Congratulations Steve!

I met Steve when we were randomly assigned to the same apartment in the horrendous Starkey Apartments complex on the horrendous Cook Campus of the horrendous Rutgers University in the horrendous state of New Jersey. I first arrived in the US in late August 1998 before the semester started. It was the kind of day where New Jersey feels like the inside of a smoker's lung, nothing but humidity and smog. As I traveled down the New Jersey turnpike from Newark to New Brunswick I began to despair as I realized this was my new home. I hoped that New Brunswick, a college town, might be better than what I was seeing so far. How wrong I was.

When I arrived at Starkey, I knocked on my new apartment's door but no one was home. In a perfect example of Rutgers' efficiency, I looked at my campus map and realized that the office with my key was on a completely different campus on the other side of town. So began a 3 hour journey, on 4 different buses, to Busch campus and back before I could get into my apartment.

When I got into the apartment no one was there but I could tell someone else had already moved in. Steve soon returned and we did the introduction thing, 'So what are you at Rutgers for?' Turned out we were both there for the PhD program in philosophy. Steve turned out to be a great housemate (which is more than I can say for the ultra-conservative religious nut Texan we also had to share the apartment with) and, not least among his virtues, he had a car, which meant I could go grocery shopping (always a good thing). Later we moved out to an off campus apartment where we had oversized grad-student parties that would get busted up by the cops.

Steve can write a philosophy paper in an afternoon, a novel in six weeks and a screenplay every couple of months. Hopefully, we'll be seeing many more "horror thrillers" from him soon.