Well, my birthday week celebrations kicked off last night with dinner at La Buca compliments of one Robert C. Cooper and his lovely wife Hillary. Since it was really a celebratory meal, I won’t offer a critique. Instead, I will just say it was great company and we enjoyed pumpkin ravioli with safe and toasted…

Allow me to kick off this blog installment by wishing two of my buddies Happy Belated Birthdays! To Chris Judge, who celebrated his special day on Saturday, and to Robert Cooper who celebrated his special day Sunday (watching his Cowboys lose to the hated Patriots). According to an online horoscope I referenced for the occasion:…

Well, as promised yesterday, today’s blog entry will be dedicated to those scenes and excerpts that didn’t make the final cut of Reunion. Tomorrow, back to the food and fun.TEASETeyla and Ronon walk and talk as they enter the village: I completely forgot about this little exchange as it never made it past the first…

Well, judging from the feedback here and elsewhere, it looks like most of you enjoyed Reunion - which is most pleasing and comes as a relief to me as, history has shown, you never know how the fans are going to react. As promised, I’m going to dedicate this blog entry to my thoughts on…

Among the handful of story ideas I brought to the table when we first started spinning season four, was one involving Ronon and his bittersweet Reunion with friends long-thought dead. It was a story about life’s choices, going back or moving forward, as Ronon is faced with a gut-wrenching decision between the established loyalties of…

Do you know what’s even more surprising than a surprise birthday party? Yep. A surprise dentist appointment! We were in Yaletown this afternoon, lunching at Phat for the second time in as many days, when I bit down on a peppercorn in just the right spot, sending a shiver of pain along my right jaw.…

For some reason, of late, I’ve suffered fitfully sleepless nights plagued by colorfully bizarre dreams. Last night, I dreamt that the salmon stock (?) I had invested in through Stargate Producer John N. Smith had gone belly up due to improper freezing procedures. There I sat in a lawyer’s office as an independent arbitrator hired…

When your wife’s cellphone rings at six in the a.m., your mind and body are kick-started with an adrenaline rush that has you up and out of bed in seconds, scrambling to consider all of the possibilities - someone you know has been in an accident, someone you know is dead, someone you know is…

So where do people who work in the food industry like to go when they eat out? That’s the question I asked the kitchen crew at one of my favorite Vancouver haunts last month. Their surprising consensus pick: Rekados Grill, a Filipino restaurant on Main Street. And if that wasn’t enough to convince me to…

To all those of you wondering whether I’ll be continuing this blog after production on the show ends, the short answer is “Yes.” The long answer is “Yes, I will.” After all, I wouldn’t want to disappoint the many readers that check in here on a regular basis who may not necessarily be Stargate fans.…

Yesterday was a day of events. Production wrapped. We said goodbye (for now?) to friends and colleagues. And Martin Gero’s Young People F**king debuted here as part of The Vancouver International Film Festival. I was among 50 or so Stargate veterans who showed up to support golden boy Marty G., making up only part of…

Today is our last production day on Stargate Atlantis’s fourth season and, looking back, I have to say it’s been an exciting/challenging/frustrating/satisfying/whirlwind year. It feels like only weeks ago we were all reconvening, first draft scripts in hand, poised to produce what we hoped would be the best season of the show yet. And looking…

With only two days to go in the shooting schedule, we’re in wind-down mode. Last night, we regulars got together for Carl’s send-off schnitzel dinner as Mr. Binder heads back to L.A. tomorrow, hopefully not for the last time. In attendance: Robert Cooper, Lawren Bancroft-Wilson, Carl Binder, Alex Levine, Alan McCullough, Martin Gero, and myself.…

“1.2? 1.2?! REALLY?” No, not really. That 1.2 is the raw HouseHold number that doesn’t include our DVR performance. We used to receive this raw number early Monday and then wait around for the same-day DVR data to come in and bump that number up a couple of points. I thought it would be irresponsible…

To all of you asking me to post the actual rating we received for our premiere - I can’t reveal that information because we don’t have a real number yet. What we have is the raw number before 3-day DVR is factored in and this is key because:SciFi Channel is the most DVR-’d channel out…