Booker is Back

Richard Grieco, Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum at the premiere of 22 Jump Street
(c) Frazer Harrison/ Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

I'll be honest. I haven't seen 22 Jump Street yet.

I'm on my way to do that now. But, I've been waiting quite a while to write this post.

Back in November, I received confirmation from a very reliable source that Richard Grieco would be making an appearance in the sequel to Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill's 21 Jump Street movie--but, that it wasn't going to be publicly confirmed before the movie released.

So, I've been biting my tongue (and eagerly awaiting the movie), even when some skeezy set jockey sold the tip and several publications ran the story.

But, the day is here. If life (obligations with children and all that) hadn't intervened, I'd have seen the movie already.  Many of you have. So, we're free to talk about it.

Unfortunately, I don't have anything to say, since I'm just on my way out to see the movie now. Stay tuned, though. I'll be updating late tonight.

Update: I've seen the movie now and...well...it turns out that I'm not going to be updating this post after all. There's nothing I can tell you except that if you have any sense of humor at all, you should go see this movie.

Richard Grieco on Pinterest

I'm not a big Pinterest fan, but Susanne seems to be a woman after our own hearts. She's collected quite a few photos of Richard spanning quite a few years.  I've seen most of them before and you probably have, too, but there are a few new shots.

And honestly...are you really tired of looking at the old ones?  I didn't think so.  Check out her Richard Grieco Pins here.

After Midnight Update and Trailer

The trailer for After Midnight, the new Richard Grieco movie I mentioned a couple of weeks back, has arrived.  It does appear to include a supernatural element, which shouldn't come as a surprise--I should have known better than to buy into early hints that made it seem more like a straight mystery.

 

I'm looking forward to this one.  And I appreciate that Horror-Movies.ca opened its introduction to this trailer with "One thing you can take away from this trailer is that Richard Grieco has a fantastic voice."

I know, right? Have you heard those commercials where...

Oh, wait. We're talking about After Midnight, right?  No word on a release date yet, but it's slated for this year.

AE: Apocalypse Earth Trailer

It's only a little over a month until AE: Apocalypse Earth is available on DVD, but in case you need something to hold you over (or to help you decide whether or not you want to pre-order the movie), here's the first official trailer.

Fresh off of viewing Almighty Thor, I'm happy to report that Richard Grieco plays one of the humans in this film...

 

The Asylum's Almighty Thor

Honestly, Almighty Thor wasn't high on my list of Richard Grieco movies to watch. I'm not a big fan of sci fi, mythology or knock-off movies and Grieco has been in so many films that there are several I haven't seen that interest me more.  Fish Don't Blink, for example.  And I assumed (correctly) that Richard wouldn't be at his most attractive as a deteriorating demon god.

But my options on Amazon streaming video were limited the trailer was kind of interesting, so I decided to go ahead and give it a shot. 




Honestly, the movie wasn't great: I had a hard time taking Cody Deal seriously as Thor, even before he pulled out the semi-automatic weapon.  I'm not sure whether it's a positive or negative to say that I had far less trouble taking Richard Grieco seriously as a demon god with giant, lizard-like beasts for pets.

All in all, I found the movie relatively entertaining, though I was sometimes unsure whether the things that were making me laugh had been intended to do so.  If you're a Grieco fan and haven't seen it, it's worth watching.  (If you do and you come away with an understanding of why he starts the movie looking pretty much like himself and is as white as The Joker by the end, please come back and share.)

While determining whether or not to watch this movie, I also learned some very interesting things about The Asylum, which is also behind Richard's upcoming AE: Apocalypse Earth.  The fact that both of these movies appeared to be created specifically to capture an audience created by a closely-related box office film initially put me off, but the more I learned the more interesting their business model became.

Apparently these knock-offs, often referred to as "mockbusters," are all The Asylum does.  And, that was apparently a conscious decision and one that's paid off. Sure, they get sued from time to time.  Yes, they may have had to change a name here and there or been restrained from releasing a movie for a while.  But from what I've read, it appears that the company has never lost money on one of these relatively low-budget movies. 

The more I learned, the more I shifted from thinking of The Asylum as a company that makes crappy rip-off movies to thinking of it as a company that knows exactly what it's doing, has accepted that it's not a blockbuster sort of operation and is having fun and making money doing its own thing.  Which, from where I'm sitting, looks like a pretty good fit for the guy who put on 40 pounds to mock himself in A Night at the Roxbury.

Pre-Order AE: Apocalypse Earth Now

Just a few days ago, AE: Apocalypse Earth's official Facebook page informed us that the film was "essentially complete"--and the movie is now available for pre-order on DVD and Blu-Ray. 

I'm pre-ordering through the store on Richard's official website simply because I like to see as much of the revenue as possible actually go to the people who make movies what they are.

And, of course, you can wander afield and order any of a number of movies and television shows Richard has appeared in while you're there. Not that anything like that happened to me.

Addicted to Booker

Over the past month or so I've shifted away from my personal saga and into more news and information.  After being off work for more than three months with no income, I'm working like crazy during pretty much every waking hour and have barely had time to unearth Richard Grieco movies from the 90s under the pretense of reviewing them and that sort of thing.

But I'm apparently not entirely cured.  No, I don't mean of the illness that kept me off work all that time.

The other day I was working in the living room and my daughter turned toward me from the television and said, "Mom!" as if she'd just found out that I'd stolen her babysitting money or discovered porn under my mattress.

I said, "What?" quite innocently, but I knew what had scandalized her:  she'd found a Booker disc in the DVD player. 

Worse, I responded like she'd actually caught me at something.  I had an excuse for watching Booker!  It was more or less true, but still...why was I explaining myself? I'm 46 years old!  I can watch a DVD of an old television show if I want to!  Hell, I can watch Sexual Predator again if I want to.  If, you know, she's not home.

Sorry, got distracted for a minute there.

My 100% legitimate reason for rewatching Booker (besides that whole "Richard Grieco was really hot in the 80s" thing) is that I was looking for the episode in which he  tries to disabuse his colleagues of the tough-guy rumors and wraps up with "and I like cats."

So help me out.  If you know which episode that was and can fill me in, I won't have to rewatch the whole series...which means that my daughter won't feel like she needs to find me a 12 step program

Psychotronic Film Society Screening Final Payback

If you happen to be in the Savannah area, the Psychotronic Film Society will be screening Final Payback on March 20, in honor of Richard's birthday on the 23rd.  Their presentation is a little tongue-in-cheek and I did see the phrase, "so bad it's good," but hey...they remembered the movie (which was released in 2001) and knew it was his birthday, so they're not fooling us, right?

Not sure whether you want to check it out?  Here's a screen cap from the movie to help you decide.

 

 

Oddly, IMDB tells me that this movie gets the best ratings (by far) from males aged 18-29.  Probably all that fighting and shooting and such.

 

If you wanted to decide based on something crazy like the story line, it's basically this: Grieco plays an ex-cop who gets framed for murder and caught up in something much bigger than he bargained for.  Everyone wants to kill him or arrest him, no one can be trusted, innocent people die and in the end...well, spoilers aren't necessary.  You know how this ends, right?

Not the BEST Picture of Richard Grieco I've Ever Seen...

but it's apparently for a good cause, and I think it's kind of cool that Adrian Paul (of Highlander fame, if you haven't been paying attention to all of the AE: Apocalypse Earth posts and/or you missed the 90s) snapped the picture.

A small donation to the PEACE fund will allow you to download this "exclusive" photo.  The PEACE fund works with a variety of small charities that "make a positive difference in the lives of children." You can see the picture by following the donation link, though it's heavily watermarked. 

If Richard Grieco isn't your cup of tea (and really, why would you be here if that were the case?) there are many other celebs in the gallery.

People Magazine on Richard Grieco, 1989

It's always interesting to see what the press was saying in the moment, as opposed to the rewritten history that surfaces in bios and summaries across the web.  This 1989 People article not only sheds some in-the-moment light on the 21 Jump Street relationships, but includes a snippet of one of Richard's poems.  (Makes me glad I'm not a celebrity--I definitely wouldn't want poems from my early 20s surfacing online today!)

Picked from among 500 casting-call hopefuls to play Jump's cool-rebel newcomer, Dennis Booker, Grieco, 24, has been greeted this season by surging ratings and fan mail that avalanches in at the reported rate of 10,000 letters a month. "Girls see him and scream at the top of their lungs," says co-star Peter DeLuise. "Sometimes they achieve a pitch that's quite painful." In fact. Grieco is already such a draw that he will be spun off into a Fox series of his own next fall. Aware that his overnight stardom has caused hard feelings on the set, Grieco is unapologetic. "There are people in Jump Street who are jealous from the attention I get," he says. "The actors don't say anything, but I can tell."

I also found it interesting that People's scene-setting description included, "with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other..."  Nothing shocking there, except that the 1990 book about Grieco, Richard Grieco: Hot 'n' Cool, was quite explicit in its claim that Richard was serious about his anti-drug message and didn't even drink alcohol.  Told you those books couldn't be trusted ;)

Richard Grieco Death Hoax Hoax

No, that's not a typo. 

This morning, when I read that last week's reports of Richard Grieco's death had been a hoax, I was immediately suspicious. See, like most people involved in marketing and PR, I live by Google alerts. And Google hadn't mentioned anything about Richard Grieco dying, or about there being a hoax claiming that Richard Grieco had died.  The first news I heard about the widespread hoax was this article about how it had all been a hoax.

And then there was this photo, which seemed a little odd since there is actually a Star Magazine, commonly referred to as Star Mag, which doesn't look like this.  And the fact that when I saved the photo, I got a template--on the site, Richard's face appears in the white space.

I did a quick search for the supposed memorial Facebook page and it didn't exist, but I didn't want to jump to conclusions.  Perhaps the page had been taken down when it emerged that the whole thing was a hoax.

But no.

A little more digging (okay, clicking a link in the middle of the article) revealed that the hoax hoax was meant to be parody (or satire, or something).  The whole site on which it appears, apparently, is a mock-news site dedicated to humor, much like The Onion or Andy Borowitz except...not funny or clever.

As near as I can tell (based on the site's own description, not just the stories that appear there), the "People" section is dedicated to posting fake celebrity news stories that look just like real celebrity news stories. The satire, apparently, is in the volume and repetitiveness.  So, if you're a regular reader, you can go, "Ha ha, yeah, that's the third celeb whose dog has had paw-replacement surgery this week!"  If, however, you just land on a random article, it's likely to be entirely indistinguishable from a real news article.  They've entirely left out the elements of absurdity or exaggeration that distinguish satire from what passes today for straight news.

At least, that's how it seemed to me.  I'm apparently wrong, though, as the site information assures me that "all stories are obviously not true."  Opinions may vary, but many of the comments seemed to agree with me, including some that expressed honest confusion as to whether particular stories were true or not.

Anyway...don't worry. Richard Grieco is not dead, and also, no one ever thought he was.

AE Apocalypse Earth Release Date May 28

Finally, some information--and they've kept us waiting until nearly the last minute.  Two days ago, Thunder Levin announced on the AE Facebook page that AE had a new name--AE Apocalypse Earth--and that they'd received a release date of May 28.  That's 81 days, just in case you want to start a count-down.

With a release imminent, Levin has started generating some press.  Dread Central has a brief synopsis of the movie (apparently, our heroes are fighting for survival on a hostile planet, and what I believed to be camouflage body paint on model Bali Rodriguez may actually be her native form) and a few new photos, including one of Richard toting a very big gun.  Seems Thunder doesn't read my blog, because he called the Dread Central item "our first press."

Levin describes the film as "more pure science fiction" than anything he's done in the past, and though no one is quite saying so it seems likely that the quick release date is intended to edge in before the theater debut of M. Night Shyamalin's After Earth. Asylum took some flak for a similar move in 2011, when SyFy premiered The Almighty Thor (also featuring Grieco in a prominent role) and then released the DVD the same week Thor hit theaters.

Whatever the motivation, the turnaround time on this one has been impressive.  The movie wrapped filming in January, meaning that all editing, sound and post are on track to be completed in approximately four months.

B Movie Nation also talked with Levin about a number of current projects, including AE Apocalypse Earth.

PRE-ORDER AE: Apocalypse Earth

Cats Dancing on Jupiter

I may possibly have devoted a bit of time over the past couple of days to searching for Cats Dancing on Jupiter.  It looks a little bloody for my tastes and I'm not sure how big a role Richard Grieco plays in it--he appears only briefly in the teaser and trailer.  With some pretty bizarre-looking blond streaks in his hair.  And there's some odd plot overlap with Sexual Predator here.



I embarked on the quest because, though I recently watched 11 of Grieco's movies (purely in the interest of science), the most recent was released in 2004.  Cats Dancing on Jupiter (2011) is the most recent of Grieco's movies that I thought I'd be able to get.  No such luck.

Though there's a lot of clamoring in various places online for this movie to be released on DVD, the producer's last statement (from October, 2012) indicated that he was still holding out for a theater release first.  They're trying somewhat unsuccessfully to use Eventful to generate demand for local screenings, so if you'd like to see this movie in theaters (and you would really like to see Richard on the big screen again, wouldn't you?), you can add your vote here: Bring Cats Dancing on Jupiter to My Town

Though it's an independent film, this one had a decent budget and Richard's isn't the only recognizable name: one of the lead characters is played by Amanda Righetti from The Mentalist and Annaliese Van der Pol and Rex Smith play signicant support roles.  With a little bit of publicity, those combined fan bases could push this one into theaters--or push Bliss Sinema to release it on DVD.

Booker All Grown Up

I don't always see Dennis Booker in Richard Grieco, which makes perfect sense--though they shared the same body (at least temporarily), characters and the actors who bring them to life aren't one and the same.
 

Sometimes I'll catch a glimpse, though, and never more so than in MovieFone's shots of Richard at the 21 Jump Street premiere. Again, I guess that makes sense. It was no coincidence that Grieco showed up to the premiere in black leather, with hair shorter than we've seen it since 1990.

Clearly, he was reprising his role (and I'm sure I wasn't the only one who was happy to see it. If you haven't checked them out, MovieFone has a whole gallery of shots from that night, including about 15 of Grieco arriving in a police car and on the street outside the venue. I personally recommend # 12, wherein we learn through visuals that Richard has spent most of the years since we saw him in the original 21 Jump Street at the gym.

On a side note, Grieco looks to be having fun with premieres whether or not he has an associated character. 

The picture at the left is from the premiere of The Raven.  If you saw the film, the look will probably strike you as quite appropriate (even familiar)--and it wouldn't be the only time.

AceShowBiz has shots of Grieco from several different premieres, and more often than not he looks to be in the spirit of the film.

German Richard Grieco Fans - Talk to Me!

Here, I'll bribe you with a nice video of Richard performing in Germany in 1994:



It's always been clear (and by "always," I mean "in the entire 6-8 weeks I've been aware of Richard Grieco's existence) that Grieco had a strong following in Germany, simply because he and whatever powers that be were involved in his career at the time decided to release Waiting for the Sky to Fall in Germany in 1995.

That idea was reinforced by the fact that a significant portion of the search traffic to this blog comes from Germany.  So...I know you're there.  Talk to me!

If you were a Richard Grieco fan in Germany in the mid-nineties when this CD was released, tell me how that came about. How did you learn about Richard?  What kind of press surrounded this release in Germany?

If you're a Richard Grieco fan in Germany today--and, again, I can see that there are a lot of you--are you a loyal fan from the 90s or have you discovered Grieco more recently?  And if he was a more recent discovery, how did he come to your attention?

Richard Grieco: Hot 'n' Cool

Did you miss me last night?

Don't worry--I haven't abandoned my post.  You didn't hear from me last night because when I'm usually blogging, I was doing my homework. By which I mean, I was reading this (so you don't have to):

As far as I've been able to find thus far, this is the only book ever published about Richard. It was rushed out in the summer of 1990, when Booker was on the air and If Looks Could Kill was a speculative possibility for the future.  In addition to being wildly outdated, it's pretty bad.  So bad that I kind of want to write a better one.  Don't laugh--it wouldn't be my first book.

Assuming that the information in this book is accurate (and that is a big assumption given the way these books are produced), I did learn a few interesting things, a few things that made me say, "Awww" and a few things that made me wonder what went wrong in the couple of years following Booker and publication of this book.

I'll share a few.

Interesting tidbits:

• Richard apparently started getting fan mail at 21 Jump Street after a commercial aired introducing him--before he'd ever appeared on the show.
• According to the book, Grieco's fan letters during his single season on 21 Jump Street far outnumbered those received by Johnny Depp.

Things that made me say, "Awww":

• During Booker, Richard says he had a list of about 35 fans facing serious crises like cancer whom he called once a month to check in and ask how they were doing.
• He hired his mom to answer his fan mail, but asked her to pull out letters from teenagers writing to him about their problems in case he might be able to help.

Things that made me kind of sad:

• Grieco was already in his mid-twenties when this book was written and claimed that he didn't drink and had "never done any drugs".  But in the late nineties, he admitted to entering rehab.  Clearly, something slipped seriously off track in the relatively few intervening years.
• He talked about turning down multiple scripts because he "took his acting seriously" and would never do movies like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes vs. the Green Squash because he "just didn't believe in them."  Looking at some of the movies he ultimately appeared in, I find myself wondering whether he expected more from them in the draft stages or was simply so eager to work that his standards had fallen dramatically.

I'm taking it all with a grain of salt, given what I know about the mill that creates this kind of book.  Most of it, though, I want to be true.  The whole picture painted made Grieco seem much more likeable than I'd ever anticipated.

Can Richard Grieco Act? Part 2b

Since I started the great Quest to Figure Out Whether Richard Grieco Can Act, I've watched:

Mobsters (1991)
Tomcat: Dangerous Desires (1993)
It Was Him or Us (1995)
Against the Law (1997)
Captive (1998)
A Night at the Roxbury (1998)
Blackheart (1998)
The Apostate (2000)
Final Payback (2001)
Sexual Predator (2002)
Dead Easy (2004)

That's 11 movies spanning 13 years, in addition to 21 Jump Street and Booker, so you'd think it would be enough to draw some conclusions from.  And mostly, I think that my conclusion is akin to what a reader said in a comment recently--he's not a bad actor, but he's not "masterclass", either. In a lot of Grieco's movies, I don't notice his acting one way or the other, and I think that's how most movies are.  On rare occasion, someone will be so good that it will jump out at you; more often, if you notice the acting it's because it's awful and takes you out of the story.  For the most part, I think if an actor is doing his job, his acting isn't making an impression on you--you're thinking about the story.  That's how most of Grieco's performances have been for me so far.

But here's why, after a couple of seasons of television and 11 movies, I'm not quite ready to commit.  First, some of these movies were bad.  And some of them just didn't seem like good vehicles from which to judge.  Here's a quick rundown:

In Mobsters, I thought Grieco was pretty good and he got decent reviews, but his part was relatively small. Tomcat: Dangerous Desires was (no exaggeration) one of the worst movies I've ever seen from a writing, direction, acting and production standpoint.  That Grieco was considerably better than his co-stars wasn't enough to bring the performance up to "good."

I've already talked at some length about It Was Him or Us, in which I found Grieco quite convincing.  Against the Law was a weird movie and, again,  not otherwise staffed with a lot of talent.  From there, we hit a good streak:  I thought Captive, Blackheart, The Apostate and Final Payback and Dead Easy were all decent. They're all movies I would probably have watched if I weren't studying Richard Grieco, and probably would have come away saying, "That wasn't bad."  I skipped over A Night at the Roxbury because Grieco was playing himself, and although he created a stylized version of himself for the film, it wasn't entirely acting. 

I skipped over Sexual Predator because, frankly, I don't quite know what to do with it.  I saw a lot more people having sex--many of them not especially attractive--than I wanted to.  And the story was definitely edgy.  But it had that "down the rabbit hole" feel where someone makes one bad decision after another and things slide out of control, but you can kind of understand it. And Grieco was convincingly both seductive and enigmatic--no clear good guy or bad guy here.

But the primary reason that I'm undecided isn't any of that, and it isn't that there's so much I haven't seen.  It's a couple of episodes of old television shows.

A review I read suggested that The Apostate might have been the best performance of Grieco's career, but I don't think so. Though it defies reason, I think the best performances of Grieco's career may have come during 21 Jump Street and Booker.  Each of those series features a single episode in which Dennis Booker is, for lack of a better description, mentally disintegrating.  And in each of those episodes, Grieco's transformation is jarring and dramatic.

Had I watched those television shows in the 80s, those two episodes would have left me expecting great things from Grieco; even though I haven't seen that level of performance in any of the films I've picked and chosen, they gave me a different perspective on what he might be capable of.  So even at this point, I'm reserving judgment a bit, waiting to see whether a later role comes along that rivals those performances.

Upcoming Richard Grieco Movies

I've written quite a bit about AE--at least, given the small amount of official information available about the film.  But that film just caught my attention because of the odd sprinkling of information about it and that camouflage-painted woman.  While I've been speculating about AE, I've been entirely ignoring two other upcoming films. 

One of them, A House is Not a Home, is slated for release some time this year and actually has a trailer.  You'll have to pay close attention to catch Grieco in this trailer; I don't think he's one of the good guys.  Here's the official synopsis:

A House Is Not A Home: Ben (Webb) and Linda Williams move the family into a dream home in a last ditch effort to save their troubled marriage. Despite the good intentions, they can't shake the feeling that they're being watched by something. Their unimaginable fears are realized when things inside the house take a supernatural and sinister turn. Ben and his family flee for their lives but it's too late. The house isn't finished with them trapping the family in its labyrinth. The Williams must come together as never before to fight for their family, their lives and escape.
 

One thing that interested me about this film is that Grieco is listed as a co-producer in the IMDB credits.  I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I hold out some hope that it bodes well for the relative quality of the movie compared with some past endeavors.

IMDB also shows Coachella Massacre in pre-production status with an undetermined release date.  Since this one is still classified as "in development," very little information is available.  IMDB isn't revealing anything and FestivalFocus doesn't seem to know anything.

The one source of information I've been able to find is Director Dan Frank's Twitter account.  He mentioned the film, which is apparently centered around the annual Coachella Music Festival, quite a bit back in the fall.  According to Frank's Tweets, Grieco will be playing the role of Danny Thorn who is "pretty bad ass." Frank said the role was perfect for Richard and he was excited to have him on board.

I'm sure we'd all be excited about that, too, but Frank's Tweets about the film die out in the late fall, not long after he announced Grieco's participation. The last mention is in mid-November, when he responds to a question saying that he is still working on funding and "working out the cast for the budget he has."  It's not clear what that means for the project's future:  I can't tell whether Coachella is moving forward at all, whether there's any timetable in effect or whether the cast announcements from last October will hold in view of the funding issues.

I've inquired and will update if I learn anything more concrete.

Richard Grieco is Captain Sam Crowe in AE

At least, that's what the AE Facebook page is telling us.  So far as I can tell, that page remains the only source of official information about the film. There are some updates since I last checked, including some shots of editing work in progress.  We can hope that means it won't be too long before more information (or a release date/plan) is forthcoming.

For the moment, I know nothing about the story beyond what I've mentioned before; it's shot in jungle-like terrain in Costa Rica.  A new photo on the Facebook page shows Adrian Paul and the camouflage-painted woman I previously mentioned in the water in a "climactic scene". 

Here's Captain Sam (the military-like designation doesn't seem to explain his Dharma Initiative get-up):

Method in My Madness

You know that I started this blog because I was sick, off work and bored out of my mind.  While I had nothing to do, I spent a lot of time thinking about Richard Grieco naked watching old television shows on DVD.

But a funny thing happened.  In real life, I'm kind of a marketing guru, and I have a fair amount of experience in public relations and Internet marketing, so from time to time I took a look at the stats.  I was surprised when I started getting search traffic after less than two weeks, and even more surprised when I started getting daily traffic on Grieco's name without modifiers in under a month.

This made me curious about the celebrity realm, which I would have expected to be highly competitive.  So I started a blog about Matthew Perry, and another one about Mark Hamill. (Lynda Carter coming soon.)  And an ever crazier thing happened--traffic started arriving within just a couple of posts.

So here's what I'm thinking: perhaps, during my convalescence, I'll become an accidental celebrity blogger. Perhaps it will become a little sort of side business that I'll keep up when I go back to work  Perhaps you will all FORGET that I've watched Sexual Predator twice, even though I had to wait until my kid was asleep to do it because it's millimeters from porn.  Or, maybe you'll think, "Well, that's her job--rough though I'm sure it is."

And maybe, when we've all recast me in our minds as a woman with a plan, my daughter won't roll her eyes at me when a padded envelope arrives in the mail and say, "Will this be a Richard Grieco movie?"

Sound good? Okay, let's do that.

Here's a gratuitous screen cap from Final Payback just because I think it's pretty (and if you're reading this blog, you probably will, too.).  But remember:  this is strictly business.