4 for 4
Mood:  celebratory
Now Playing: SECRET AGENT
"We...are the champions, my friends..."

The Marketing department had its annual White Elephant party today. If you don't know what that is, everyone brings in one wrapped gift, either something decent or something crappy. Everyone chooses a gift one at a time and opens it. Each successive person has the option to either open a new gift or steal one that belongs to somebody else. In the second round, after everyone has an open gift, each person has the opportunity to steal from someone else or keep what he has. Each gift can be stolen a maximum of three times, so there is some skill involved.

Each of the past four years, I have walked away with a better gift than I walked in with. Of course, it helps when you like a lot of stupid shit that nobody else does. For instance, this year I made off with five cheapjack $1 DVDs of PD (?) titles like THE DEVIL BAT with Bela Lugosi, DEAD MEN WALK with George Zucco and BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA. Oh, yeah, there was a bag of puffed rice (!) in the box too.

It's also a good opportunity to clean out my VHS collection. I unloaded MARTIAL LAW II (Cynthia Rothrock), TERMINAL RUSH (Don "The Dragon" Wilson) and FORTRESS 2 (Christopher Lambert) on some poor soul today. I don't think they got a good home either, which actually makes me kinda sad for some stupid reason.

I finished the first SECRET AGENT disc tonight. Excellent series, sort of the anti-MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. and closer to I SPY than to any other TV spy show. Patrick McGoohan is a gripping lead, and the directors used MGM's British backlot to great advantage in showcasing the scripts' foreign locales. McGoohan is unfortunately semi-retired in Los Angeles these days, but you might have recognized him as Billy Zane's father in THE PHANTOM, King Edward in BRAVEHEART or the judge in A TIME TO KILL.