Crossing paths

For Thanksgiving, The Girl and I went back to The Hometown and got a chance to visit with family and friends. In the process, I found out that a couple of people from my HS graduating class are doing some interesting things. Thought I'd point 'em out just so you know I've had a couple of very minor brushes with fame...

First up is Charlie Wen. I got to know Charlie during junior high even though he was in the opposite middle school in our district from me and got to know him better once we joined up in high school in some of the same classes. Admittedly, he and I parted ways in the maths as I was kinda better than he, but he was light years ahead of me in the artistic way. By the time we were in high school, he had already had one of his works hanging in the White House because he won a Congressional art contest.

We all kind of knew that Chuck was headed for an artsy life, as he headed to art school from NAHS. I remember hearing rumblings that he was working for Disney or Pixar a while back, but then this past weekend somebody mentioned that he was the art director for God of War II. Turns out that's not quite the truth as he's only one of the art directors for that game.

He's apparently a big enough deal that he's giving lectures and being picked as the art director for the new Thundercats movie.

Amazing, man...this was the kind of flaky guy who sat behind me in US History our junior year, whose parents owned the House of Wen (the Chinese restaurant in town which turned out to be Taiwanese), who I injured on the tennis court with a sharp volley to the nether regions.

Congrats, Charlie, for doing amazingly well for yourself.

Check out more about Charlie Wen:

• Charlie's blog
• One of Charlie's workshops with photos - dig the scruff
• Thundercats story
• Charlie mistakenly attributed to the class of '02 - get it right
• An interview in Game Informer
• Another lecture story

The second path that crossed mine is that of Craig Pumphrey, he of the new G4 show Human Wrecking Balls. In this show, Craig and his brother - both Bulldogs like me - take things apart with their bare hands. In the episode that I saw, they took a car apart using flying shoulder drops, spinning kicks, and total brute force. Sure, there's some sort of science guy to come out and explain how things break, but it's all about two big dudes beating the crap out of something - a car, a hotel room, a whatever.

And I was in the same graduating class as the older brother. Gamer, CoachSullivan, and I were hanging this past weekend, and we totally saw him in the old yearbooks. None of us knew him as anything more than a guy who threw shotput on the track team and maybe was around school with us, so it's not like we were in the same circles, but I can say with absolute certainty that his path didn't match mine after high school either.

Check 'im and his brother...





The blond one, Craig, is now a cop in The Hometown.

Only the best and the brightest, man.