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While Katie got up early Saturday morning to wait in line for the Warner Bros. panel in the cavernous Hall H (her goal was Harry Potter, but Green Lantern was an equal or greater draw), I slept in a bit before going down to the Hilton Bayfront for Leverage at the Indigo Ballroom. I really had no idea what to expect, and wasn’t even 100% sure who was going to be there since I couldn’t find a description in the program.

I certainly wasn’t expecting to have to walk straight through the hotel, out the back, and along the edge of the waterfront to get to the end of the line.

Fortunately, the Indigo Ballroom is big, and they hadn’t started letting people in yet. So even though the line looked long, I still managed to find a seat 1/3 to 1/2-way back from the front. It was a bit nerve-wracking to start with, though, especially since a large part of the line was made up of people who were more interested in the Venture Brothers panel immediately afterward (many of whom no doubt had bad memories from a year or two back when VB was put in a room much too small for its audience).

Sighted!

As I neared the front of the outdoor section of the line, a shout went up, and people started waving up at the balcony. It was hard to see in the gloom, but several of the actors were out on a balcony. Tim Hutton (Nate Ford), Aldis Hodge (Alec Hardison), and Christian Kane (Elliot Spencer) started waving back, and as we took pictures of them, they took pictures of the line. Meanwhile, the Venture Brothers fans were wondering just who the heck was up there.

Everyone received a T-shirt on the way in, with the show title on the back and one of the character’s roles on the front: Hacker (olive green), Hitter (red), Grifter (gray), Thief (blue, I think) or Mastermind (black). I started with an XL Grifter, but traded it immediately for an L Mastermind — which will actually fit. No luck swapping it for a Hacker, though, which is what I really wanted.

They also had Beth Riesgraf (Parker), producer/writer Chris Downey, and guest star Wil Wheaton…who will be returning as Chaos this year in an episode called “The Ho-Ho-Ho Job.” (He said that John Rogers called him up and asked him to come back as the Grinch who stole Christmas.) Gina Bellman was the only member of the main cast who didn’t make it.

It was mostly a Q&A panel, with a surprisingly good mix of questions. (Too often, audiences seem to focus on one or two of the guests to the exclusion of the rest.) There were a lot of funny moments, and in the middle, they ran an extended segment from “The Gone Fishin’ Job,” which was set to air the following day.

Apparently there’s a show coming up in which you find out that each of the members of the crew tried to steal the same thing years ago, and they all met without realizing it. You’ll see what each of them remembers…and then what really happened.

Quotes

The best quotes — or at least the best ones I managed to write down — came from Beth Riesgraf and Wil Wheaton.

One fan asked what Parker would think of Comic-Con. Beth Riesgraf said, “She’d have a field day picking everybody’s pockets… so many costumes! This is her crowd.”

Another fan asked about progression of character relationships, and they explained that Parker and Hardison were taking things slow. Wil Wheaton piped in, saying, “I think the Internet has you covered.” Some time later, Aldis Hodge said something to Beth Riesgraf about pretzels, which neatly separated the Leverage fans from the Venture Brothers fans in the audience.

Regarding Hardison wanting to run his own crew, Aldis Hodge said, “I’m not taking on my own crew anytime soon, but maybe 27 seasons in…” A beat or two later, Wil Wheaton added, “27 seasons in, it would be Leverage She Wrote.”

Jumping off of Christian Kane’s singing and cooking, both of which have found their way into Elliot’s background, one fan asked whether any of the other actors had brought hobbies in to their character. I hadn’t realized that Aldis Hodge actually plays the violin and paints. Then Beth Riesgraf joked, “Well, I was really good at stealing stuff when I was little…”

As for favorite memories from the show, TIm Hutton immediately answered, “Food fight.” Almost overlapping, Beth Riesgraf added, “I was going to say the cold cut fight.” Someone asked her to elaborate, and she explained: “It’s a food fight, except you only use cold cuts.” “Good times!”

Finally, one of the last questions was: When do we see Hardison steal Comic-Con? I can’t remember what anyone else said before Wil Wheaton summed it up: “If ever there was a time when Hardison and Chaos would team up…”

Now that would be a fun show to watch!

»Saturday at Comic-Con.
»Full index of Comic-Con posts and photos.

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Saturday night we went out to see a production of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia at the Sierra Madre Playhouse. If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s a comedy about love, sex, math, history and the pursuit of knowledge. The show follows two main stories: the lives of a student and her tutor during an 1809 visit by Lord Byron to her family’s estate, and the present-day efforts of two historians to figure out just what happened during that visit. (One of them gets it spectacularly wrong.) It was a good production, though I got the impression that the actor playing Bernard was trying to channel Ricky Gervais.

Beforehand we had dinner at The Novel Cafe in Pasadena. Afterward we went looking for someplace where we could grab dessert or coffee, but Sierra Madre had pretty much closed down for the night from what we could see. Solution: a bottle of water, a soda, and a bag of cookies from the grocery store.

About that orange moon.

Along the way back, I dithered over taking the 605 or the 57 until literally the last moment, and decided to take the 605. Less than a minute later, I looked out the window to the right and saw…

…a deep orange half-moon just above the horizon, sitting tilted with the curve facing downward to the right. Just below it were towers of lights, almost certainly the distant skyline of downtown Los Angeles. The lower end of the moon was just starting to flatten out as we lost the view.

If I’d gone the other way with that 50/50 decision, or if we hadn’t taken the time to look for dessert or coffee, we would have missed that view.

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This afternoon I found myself entertaining the notion that Orange County, California had somehow switched places with Orange County, Florida. The weather was certainly more typical for Florida in July than California.

It was 90 degrees and sunny when I left the office a little after 6:00 pm, though the eastern half of the sky was dark with clouds. It started raining before I pulled out of the driveway. Just a little. I was halfway home before I decided enough of the raindrops were staying on the windshield that it would be worth turning on the wipers.

It was still spattering a little when I got home, but nowhere near enough to soak the ground. The drops were evaporating quickly. A far cry from the heavy rain and thunderstorms a few miles farther inland.

The rain’s stopped here, and the half-and-half cloud cover and sunset are giving the sky a dingy yellow color.

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I used to get annoyed when someone would send a complete screen shot along with their tech support request. I thought it was a waste of bandwidth when a simple text message would do just as well, and be faster to send, receive and display.

But the thing is, screenshots have their advantages. For one thing, they’re exact. There’s no risk of an error code being mistyped.

More importantly, a screenshot can tell you other information that the user hasn’t thought to mention. This is critical, because the reason people call tech support is because they don’t know how to solve a particular problem…and that often means they don’t know which information is relevant.

Like, say, the fact that they’re running another program which happens to conflict with the one that they’re calling about.

Still, I wish Windows would create a file instead of copying the screen to the clipboard. Users need to paste it into something, so they paste it into what they’re most familiar with: Microsoft Word — something even less suited for sending images by email than a .BMP file created by Paint.

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It’s funny how some companies will go out of their way to avoid acknowledging the competition. Universal Studios has a panel at Comic-Con promoting the movies Paul and Cowboys and Aliens. Here’s how they describe Paul and its part of the panel:

Paul—  Scheduled to appear for Universal Pictures’ sci-fi comedy-adventure Paul are a who’s who of film comedy. Director Greg Mottola (Superbad) will be joined by cast members Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz), Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead), Kristen Wiig (Date Night), Bill Hader (Forgetting Sarah Marshall), Jeffrey Tambor (The Hangover), Joe Lo Truglio (Role Models), Seth Rogen (The Green Hornet), and Sigourney Weaver (Baby Mama) as they discuss the movie about two sci-fi geeks whose pilgrimage to Comic-Con ultimately takes them to America’s UFO heartland. While there, they accidentally meet an alien who takes them on an insane road trip that alters their universe forever. Q&A session to follow.

Does anyone really think that the Comic-Con audience will best remember Sigourney Weaver for a supporting role in Baby Mama? (I didn’t even know she was in it.)

Not, say, her starring role in the Alien series?

Ripley would like to have a word with someone...

Or if you want to go for something more recent, it’s only been half a year since Avatar.

Or heck, since it’s a sci-fi comedy about fans and conventions, how about Galaxy Quest?

See, they don't think it makes sense either.

Guess what? Those movies weren’t produced by Universal. Baby Mama was.

Talk about underselling the guests! That’s like promoting that you’ve got Harrison Ford from Sabrina!

I see it in comic books as well, though not quite to this extent. DC, when it realizes that someone is best-known for their work at Marvel or somewhere else, will at least mention the fact…but they always seem to want to downplay it. Standard practice is to put the DC titles in all-caps and anything else in standard title case. For example: Flash: Emergency Stop by “Grant Morrison (FINAL CRISIS) and Mark Millar (Civil War),” or Superman: Earth One by “J. Michael Straczynski (BRAVE AND THE BOLD, Thor, Babylon 5).”* It always leaves the impression that they’ve kind of hoping that, even though they’re banking on the name recognition, you won’t really notice.

*Ironically, Babylon 5 was produced by another subsidiary of Warner Bros….and the licensed comic books were published by DC.