One thousand miles

As of today, I’ve ridden 1000 miles on the bike this year. That’s a little farther than the distance between Boston and Louisville! (Swami has me beat, though, with almost 1200—that’s Boston to Birmingham, Alabama.) And since it’s getting damn cold now, I probably won’t get too many more miles in for 2007. Next year, the goal is to ride a metric century (62.14 miles); this year’s longest ride was the Hub on Wheels at 41, so the goal is 50% farther. No problem, right?

Nice view

Here are two pics from a recent trip to Asheville, North Carolina, both taken from the parking lot at the top of Mt. Mitchell. It’s the highest mountain east of the Mississippi.

How high is it exactly, you might ask?

Creativity, where is thy muse

I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity recently, because I’ve been in what feels like a slump on and off for the last year or so, and also because I just read Sandman: Dream Country. One of the short stories in that collection (“Calliope”) deals with the creative muse and writer’s block.

But I should elaborate on both of those reasons. The first reason might seem surprising, because it’s not like I haven’t been writing. The prime exhibit is this blog, which does count as writing, even if it doesn’t all necessarily count as entertaining writing. But it’s not like I’ve been staring at blank screens nonstop for the last year. What kills me, though, is that I had a taste of real inspiration, where I sat down and banged out a scene-by-scene plot for a story over the course of just a few minutes, a plot which sprang so fully formed out of my head that I was able to actually produce a complete work once I filled in the structure. This is in stark contrast to the rest of my fiction writing, where I have probably finished less than 1 percent of everything I’ve started.

So now that I’ve experienced one time where it was blissfully easy, really paint-by-numbers easy, I want to feel that again. But of course it hasn’t happened, and I wonder if it will ever happen again. I’d better be satisfied even if it doesn’t, you know? It’s a damn lucky thing, damn lucky.

Then, reading Sandman, I wonder how it is even possible to live entirely based on one’s own creativity. Anyone who writes anything, from novelists to people trying to put together an email in their cubicle, knows that many times it’s just a brutal slog to get something down. But to think that the result of that slog could be the difference between the success and failure of one’s livelihood, well, that would be a crushing responsibility. I suppose that right there explains the impetus behind works like “Calliope,” where writer’s block itself becomes the driving force of the tale. At some point you figure you might as well use the block itself for material. It’s a particularly crafty bit of self-preservation.

Creativity itself deserves a little more scrutiny, too, I think. I tend to think of people as either using it, or not, but that’s far too simplistic. It’s not just writing, or composing, or singing, or playing. It’s actually realizing that if you are hammering away at a problem and it’s not getting resolved, that you should try something different. It’s going around something, rather than through it. Which is why I’m sitting here typing this, rather than wondering when the hell I’ll ever have that flash of inspiration visit me again. At least there’s a blog post for today, now, and that’s worth more than nothing.

Striking writers

So Hollywood’s writers have gone on strike for the first time since 1988. That gives me the perfect excuse to think about what I was doing in 1988 (since this blog is All About Me, of course). That was the spring I was stuck at home before I went (back) to college, when I was slogging through a year of community college. I watched Letterman religiously back then, back when he was the funniest thing on TV. (For the record, though, I hate Chris Elliot.) I had not yet decided to watch Star Trek: TNG, which was probably a good thing because it pretty much sucked until the third season.

Of course, that was an election year, and the inevitable end of Reagan’s presidency was finally on deck. I was still too young to vote, and things didn’t exactly turn out the way I wanted, but at least Bloom County’s National Radical Meadow Party was still holding raucous caucuses. And we all have fond memories of Bentsen’s “You’re no Jack Kennedy” moment.

In the realm of music, I was just getting into Crowded House with the foolish impression that I was finally getting into a band fairly early on in the game. Then I found out about Split Enz, whoops. I think that was also during the brief period when Sting was cool, which lasted up until I went to a show on his “Nothing Like the Sun” tour in August and decided he was kind of lame. That summer was also spent buying all the Genesis albums, which may cause you to wonder whether I should really consider myself an arbiter of cool.

All in all, the spring and summer of 1988 were characterized mostly by lots of sitting around waiting for my life to get its shit together. Er, is there any way I can tie that in with the writers’ strike? Too bad nobody from the Guild is around to help me out.

A bit of rantiness

Awright, a few things large and small that are torquing me today.

1. Dude on the bus who rides all the way to the last stop, but stands right at the front for the whole trip. Every poor soul who wants to get on or off before the last stop has to squeeze by this guy even though there are acres of space further back where he could stand. Hey prick, think of someone besides yourself for twenty whole minutes, ok?


2. I can only read Glenn Greenwald every couple of weeks, to keep my teeth-grinding to a minimum. Bombing Iran? A politicized military? Crazy Rudy Giuliani and his defense of torture? It keeps me up at night.


3. Caitlin Flanagan. Why, why, why does the Atlantic keep printing her silliness? I cannot stand her self-centered, frail flower of womanhood crap. A blog would serve her so much better, where she could blab about herself without having to maintain the pretense that she’s writing about topics of broad relevance.


4. The phishing email I got today that included my email address, my eBay ID, and my full name. What the hell is that? Time to change a few passwords and hope for the best. And let’s see if I get any kind of response from eBay now that I’ve reported it to them.

Funniest minute of television

Ah, I never get tired of Artie. (Psst: Turn the volume down if you’re at work.)

The global village

We hung out with Sashe yesterday! Since he now lives in Malaysia, I haven’t actually laid eyes on him since 2004. It was great to catch up, especially since he might not make it to kaskasero’s wedding.

It’s interesting to think that I know people from all across the world. And some good friends I’ve never met in person, even, thanks to the wonders of the Intarwebs. Even a cranky misanthrope such as myself can benefit from human contact once in a while, hm!

No speaky da language

After studying foreign languages for more than fifteen years, I just bought plane tickets for my very first trip overseas ever. (Those two facts together demonstrate most of all, perhaps, the extent to which I’ve faked it so far in my life.) I was supposed to go to Ukraine in June, but that fell through in spectacular fashion. But this time, no screwups allowed: I gotta ticket for Manila in December and I intend to use it. Why Manila? It is a pertinent question. The simple answer is, kaskasero managed to get himself engaged to be married, and there’s no way I’d miss that wedding. Even though it means 25 hours of traveling—one way—and lord knows how many vaccinations. Oh, and I know one whole word of Tagalog: tinga, or something stuck in your teeth. At least I’m ready to eat out, right?

Ten quotes

1. (Magneto) You’re a god among insects—never let anyone tell you different.


2. (Benjamin Katz) Fire in the hole!!


3. (The Tick) Eating kittens is just plain wrong! And no one should do it, ever!


4. (Hudson) Hey, maybe you haven’t been keeping up on current events, but we just got our asses kicked, pal!


5. (Sarge) Why don’t you put that in a memo titled “Shit I already know”!


6. (Ricky Roma) What are you gonna do about it? What are you gonna do about it, asshole?


7. (Kirk) Khan, you bloodsucker!


8. (Nathan Arizona) I don’t know, they were jammies! With Yodas and shit on ’em!


9. (Meadow Soprano) Self-involved much?


10. (David St. Hubbins) There’s a fine line between clever and stupid.

Bang a gong

Whoa, it’s October. How did that happen?
I’ve been quiet, but not idle. A week ago yesterday we rode our second Hub on Wheels, and this time we made it the full 41 miles—our longest ride ever. Only one minor mishap, despite many, many unskilled cyclists out there on the road with us. It was fun, but three hours of pretty much unwavering, teeth-gritting concentration. Yes, cyclists are masochists.

I’m also happy to report that Sashe has reemerged, yay! And I finally got a book to press; the first one since I took over the manager job two freaking years ago. The next one better not take so long.

In possibly surprising news, Halo 3 came out last week and I haven’t bought a copy yet. True, we technically have an Xbox 360 since we have kaskasero’s on long-term loan, but it’s not actually hooked up yet! And yes, I confess I’m still playing the same game of Morrowind that I started in May of 2006. (!) Don’t worry, Halo 3 will get its day at some point. Of course, it’s hard to imagine anything will recapture those heady early days of Halo. Man, the first time you go through “Guilty Spark,” you wonder if your heart can take it.

The final update is that I’ve had two dreams about seeing U2 in concert in the last week. As usual, my subconscious is failing miserably to convey to me whatever incredibly important message it has to deliver. And last night, I dreamed I was trying to explain permanent hearing loss to some chick on the bus who was blasting T. Rex out of her headphones super, super loud. Can anybody explain what the heck this all means??

Movie review: Superman Returns

It seems prudent to reveal all my biases first, before I dive into the actual review of this movie. It also might be helpful to explain why it’s taken me over a year to see it, which is very much a related topic. Thanks to X-Men and X2, I am now pretty firmly committed to that particular universe as serving my comic needs. Heck, I didn’t even know I had comic needs until those two movies kicked my ass. (See more of my ramblings on this topic here.) I’m also a little too young to have been impressed by the 1978 Superman movie that jumpstarted the current culture’s interest in the dude; in fact, I’m young enough to find Superman and his world pretty painfully dorky. More on that last point later.

So that takes care of the “I’m not a fan of Superman” portion of this review. But given that Bryan Singer brought me X-Men nirvana, you’d think that would have spurred me into the theater. Aha, not quite. Recall that X3 was originally going to be under Singer’s direction; recall that Singer jumped from the project, voiding his deal with the studio, to direct SR; recall that X3 under hack director Brett Ratner was a major disappointment to me. (Did I ever give you all my lengthy rant about X3? Searching through my blog I think I haven’t. I might have to rectify that sometime.) So I was feeling pretty ill disposed to Singer’s decision, and feeling apathy to the whole Superman idea, ergo there I am not going to see the movie.

That brings us to last Saturday night, when the disc was finally shoved into the player. I was nearly a tabula rasa, although I found myself recognizing Supermanalia in the dark reaches of my memory as I watched: oh yeah, I remember Jimmy Olsen, yep, Daily Planet, right, the Fortress of Solitude. In fact, it turns out that I had a pretty good grasp on what I needed to know in order to enjoy the movie, although not quite enough, perhaps. It turns out that this is a sequel, not a reinvention, and so there is some assumption that the story line continues from the last Superman movie back in the 1980s. (Upon checking the IMDB, by the way, I find that Superman IV is the very definition of Suck, and I wonder if it would be better for humanity to pretend it never existed, rather than tack the current movie onto the end of the chain.)

Enough of this screwing around, you cry, is it a good movie?? Yes and no. Let me take care of the “no” part first. Superman himself is the largest hindrance to movie goodness, in terms of generating what I need from plot and characterization. As my pal kaskasero always says, he’s too goddamn perfect. Strong plots and characters require conflict, and the truth is that Superman doesn’t have a lot of room for it. He has only one flaw, the weakness to kryptonite, and that gets pretty tired when you have to bring it into every confrontation with the bad guys. One of the strengths of the X-Men, and Spider-Man, for that matter, is that they’re inherently flawed or vulnerable (even Xavier, who has to get knocked out of commission almost immediately in every conflict or else nothing gets going), often psychologically, which means there’s a lot you can do if you want to make things difficult—and interesting—for them. With Superman, you kind of feel sorry for Lex Luthor, because that guy is nowhere near an irresistable force trying to push on that immovable object.

This movie does some work to show us a weakened Superman and therefore an actual conflict, but the solution boils down to pulling the kryptonite thorn out of his paw and then he’s back to being, as the Tick is fond of saying, nigh invulnerable. He also doesn’t seem particularly deep psychologically, never really confronting the new developments with Lois and her tyke. Speaking of the Lois Lane family unit, by the way, I was glad to see that James Marsden got a decent amount of screentime, considering that Cyclops’ woeful underuse in X3 is one of the reasons why that movie was so frustrating.

To sum up the negatives, then, Superman is inherently a somewhat flat character that doesn’t end up very compelling, and the movie’s plot was too thin to sustain itself around him. Kevin Spacey did a great job as Luthor, but he didn’t have a lot of room to work with. He was kind of a bad dude, but as far as villains go his world domination plan was thin, and I think the Joker does a better job of projecting true sociopathic malevolence. This all dovetails with my frustration that Superman’s world is too simplistic, too unreal, as if it’s never grown up. Part of that is the annoying PG-13 rating these comic-book movies always try for, but part of it is the fault of the Superman concept.

And here’s where I should remark on the dorkiness I referred to earlier. I’m sorry, but the cartoonish red and blue tights just don’t work on the modern screen, although I recognize that the alternatives are nearly impossible to imagine. (Batman benefits immensely from the forethought of his dark outfit, doesn’t he?) And is it just me, or is it darn difficult to imagine Superman and Lois feeling actual, passionate love for each other? Even though they’re ostensibly adults, they’re still trapped in a world that’s imagined for children. The X-Men have managed to transcend their immature, adolescent beginnings and turned into adults, wrestling with moral ambiguity and imperfection just like us poor slobs in the real world. Maybe it would help if these damn movies would go for the R rating. Of all people, Wolverine deserves to say “fuck” more than a few times. On the other hand, I can almost imagine a plotline in Superman where Luthor tries in vain to force him at kryptonite point to say “fuck.” Supes would certainly find a way around it; he’s so clean he practically squeaks.

But as I said earlier, there are some positives. Even though the movie was very long and often extremely slow moving, I found myself entirely caught up in it. This is where I reaffirm my unconditional love for Bryan Singer and his team’s visual artistry. They do such an amazing job of showing the viewer everything you might want to see, with camera angles and movement that naturally draw you into scenes. This is very much unlike some directors, who cut around so fast that you can’t figure out what the hell you’re looking at, which is disorienting and alienating, and leads you to wonder whether they’re trying to hide something by being deliberately sloppy. (Here I must cast an accusatory eye at Gladiator.) And everything looks so damn good, colors and lighting are rich, and Metropolis has a Deco splendor that makes me want to move there tomorrow.

Singer probably could have done a better job in terms of economy, though; one of the strengths of his X-Men movies was that he was able to give us insight into such a large cast of characters with a minimum of lines and screen time. (Although I will comment that Cyclops got shafted, even in X-Men and X2, but what can he do when Wolverine’s the center of attention?) Here, we didn’t have that many characters, but they’re still fairly flat. Time was spent on things that probably didn’t need it, like Superman’s convalescence at the hospital, and the plot hardly had time to ramp up before it was actually over.

Anyway, I think Singer did an amazing job with a very, very small amount of actual movie. For his next trick, it looks like he’ll be trying to convince me to go see a movie with Tom Cruise in it sometime in 2008. Good luck with that, Bryan.

Memory prime

Things feel a little off balance right now. Here it is, the second week of September, the sky is that ridiculous shade of blue again, but I’m not in Maine. We’ve gone there around this time of year for four of the last five years, and it feels so strange not to be there now. It’s funny how quickly the human brain gets accustomed to a repeating pattern, to the point where you even start waking up a minute before the alarm goes off. Back in grad school, when we used to drive from Ohio to Virginia every break, it got to the point where I would look out the window at exactly the moment we were passing by a particular landmark, my eyes falling on it at just the same moment the impulse popped into my brain to wonder when we would see it. (My personal favorite was off the side of I-70 in eastern Ohio: a rusty sign for the “Sports Paradise” standing in the middle of an overgrown field, with smaller, crooked lettering at the bottom that said, gratuitously I think, “Closed.” Ah, the stuff of poignant, overemotive poetry.)

Our new place has been an interesting exercise for my physical memory. Since it’s laid out almost identically to our old place, I think I settled in here a lot more quickly than usual. (Our apartment in Columbus had corners that I never got used too, due to the weird layout and cobwebby, Victorian vibe. I think I vacuumed behind the staircase only one time in the six years we lived there.) But I do find myself sometimes heading to the location of the old fridge, or looking around and wondering what I’m doing in someone else’s house. Some of that is that I’d never paint my bedroom peach, but some of it is the back reaches of my lizard brain still getting used to the new surroundings. Still, I’m getting to where I don’t need to look for the lightswitch, and I almost don’t get irrationally pissed when I think about those clomping moose we used to live below. Actually, I take that back—I’ll probably always be irrationally pissed at them.

So why am I not in Maine? Well, the trip to Vermont we took instead was a total blast, so I’m glad about that. And it’s probably a good thing to break out of the routine, to make sure Acadia always stays special. But man I could go for a blueberry smoothie right now from Gaucho’s, or how about that mojito at Havana...Eden has the best vegetarian food ever...next year we’ll definitely have to cycle the Park Loop Road again...I miss Maine.

A little catch-up

It’s been way, way too long since I posted, sorry about that. I’ve been waiting for a theme to surface that covers the last couple of weeks, but it turns out I got nothing. So here’s a summary.

New nephew! Welcome to Earth, Corey Michael.

Work kind of sucks. Counting on other people doesn’t work when they’re slacking fuckups. And getting a lengthy lecture from the Usual Suspect is enough to sour my cornflakes for days. At least I have an office door I can close when it all weighs on me a little too heavily. And, of course, there are good points such that I shouldn’t stalk out the door with no plan for the future. But still, right now it’s generally bleah.

Tennis is better. Despite my automatic feeling of disappointment for getting demoted down a skill level, the last three matches have been a lot more enjoyable than the first three. And not just because we won two of them. (Although: hooray!) When I play people who are a little more laid-back, it’s a lot easier to temper my naturally psychotic competitiveness. Having said that, I do have a bit of advice for people who play in social leagues: please, please, keep the score carefully. Giving yourself a boost by announcing it’s 15-15 when it should be 0-30 makes you look like a tool. (I’m glad we ended up beating them anyway, despite losing more than one game due to the crappy scorekeeping.)

Cycling is an obsession. But you dear readers already knew that. Last Saturday we rode 35 miles, the second longest ride ever. And it felt great. Just signed up for this year’s Hub on Wheels, too. This year the goal is 45 miles!

Hooray for Crowded House. Not only did they kick ass both nights I saw them in August, they had Kufala sell discs of the complete live shows. I’ll happily pay $20 to get a soundboard-quality recording, over a free one taped by the audience that sounds like shit on toast.

Live Nation/Clear Channel sucks. Thanks to their dickishness, CH shows performed at their venues have been pulled off Kufala and can’t be sold. Monopolistic jackasses. At least their bogus patent got busted. Still, there is work to be done to bring these bastards down.

Happy Birthday to MWL. Somehow I missed the first anniversary of this blog. I bet nobody else noticed, either. But how about that! Blogito, ergo sum.

Dissed

The latest development in tennis is, we got beat again last weekend, 6-0 6-2. I thought we were fairly competitive, and I had some solid plays, but the score says we were completely outmatched. As a result, on Monday the league admin bumped us down into the lower division. It’s a bitter outcome, but then again I certainly wouldn’t mind playing some matches that are a little more even. Still, it’s not easy to be shown that I’m not as good at this as I thought I was. Moreover it’s proving difficult to schedule with people in the lower tier. Bah. That’s all I got right now: Bah.

Fitness is a harsh mistress

It’s been a bad week for sports, at least in the most local sense. Sunday afternoon I fell off my bike only three miles into a planned 30-mile ride in Gloucester, which gave me a nasty road rash on my knee and forced us to turn around and limp back to the car. It was a dumb fall and luckily pretty minor as crashes go—nothing like the one from the 2006 Tour de France I’ve embedded here.

All week I’ve had a front-row view to the healing process as I’ve been wearing these space-age clear bandages. They’re definitely not for the faint of heart, as you can imagine.

In other news we managed to get our butts kicked bad in the doubles tennis league last night. Our opponents seemed beatable but just never made a mistake, whereas we made plenty. Now we’re 0-2 and I’m feeling kind of demoralized about the whole thing. Although I did a good job returning the guy’s ridiculous spin serves and even hit a few winners. Our third match is this Sunday, and man I hope things go better. It’s tough, though, because I thought we were better than this and it’s a nasty surprise to find out otherwise. At the very least I can only imagine that I’m giving these opponents at least a little bit of a challenge.

Well, it’s nearly the weekend again and time to try and redeem myself. Here’s hoping there’s less blood drawn and more games won.

The passing of the Rove

Thanks to the arrival of the Atlantic Monthly late last week, my disgust with the Bush administration has resurged to the point where it’s been hard to think of anything else. So my emotions are decidedly mixed with today’s top story of Karl Rove resigning from the White House staff. Of course, I immediately thought about the whole rat leaving sinking ship metaphor, and the whole door hitting him in the ass thing (I sincerely hope it does), but that all seems inadequate when confronted with the legacy of someone as despicable as Rove. This timely article does a good job providing an outline of what exactly Rove did to succeed so well at campaign politics, and how he was such a spectacular fuckup at helping run a functional government.

But what’s missing from that piece is the outrage, the deep personal sense of fury I feel at what has been done to my government and my country for the last seven years. By treating every minute of every day as part of a political campaign, Rove managed to strip all vestiges of competence out of the government. Spurred by his scorched-earth attitude and monomania of securing a permanent Republican majority, the executive branch abrogated its responsibility to govern. Instead of competent people, we got political hacks put in charge of things like FEMA and managing post-Saddam Iraq. And not surprisingly, they blindly and stupidly steered the bus into the ditch. People have fucking died because of these idiots: victims of Katrina, soldiers, American civilians, and a staggering number of Iraqi civilians in Iraq. Am I a godless liberal brainwashee to notice that? Meanwhile, Rove didn’t even want Bush to land the plane from which he surveyed the Katrina damage, and we are forever stuck with the image of President Chimpface standing under a banner that declared “Mission Accomplished.”

Along with the competence, we also lost any shred of civility in political life. Considering how tenuous Bush’s claim to the presidency has been (and I’m being charitable there, please recognize) in both elections, it didn’t seem like too much to hope for that he really would try to be a uniter rather than a divider. But instead Bush managed to alienate even his own party in Congress, not to mention those of us who never cast a vote for him but still live under his management. And the mainstream media has been cowed to the point where they publish unvarnished partisan propaganda without question or analysis lest someone scream about their “liberal bias” or they lose access to the spin-controlled crumbs the administration throws them. Believe me, it’s hard to take the prez seriously when he seems more interested in whether foreign aid might lead to someone buying a condom than whether his casus belli for Iraq was actually legitimate.

So Rove is finally resigning. Well, the cynic in me can ruefully say, he’s certainly done enough damage such that he deserves a nice break. And I get no joy out of the resignation, considering how many years it’s going to take before all the mistakes of the Bush administration are rectified—assuming that someone still remembers how to actually run the government in this country. It’s definitely not going to be easy to explain to the next generation how we let this happen.

Tour de Vermont

At last, a travelogue from our recent trip to Vermont! It was a four-day cycling tour, about 25 miles a day, through some of the most ridiculously hilly terrain I’ve ever ridden. We stayed at two different inns, one nice, the other extra-swanky, and had breakfast and dinner included.

So the day’s routine was: crawl out of bed at 7 a.m., breakfast at 8, start cycling at 9, a sandwich in a tiny Vermont town for lunch, cycle until about 2, lengthy shower and lengthier nap, dinner around 7, collapse in bed and fall asleep around 9:30. It was like being in the bike army, but in a good way—no uniforms or discipline. Also, there was the all-important support van. Driven by one of our two guides, you could flag it down at any time for food or snacks or a rescue. It also came in handy when I bought a quart of Grade B maple syrup from Plummer’s, since I wasn’t about to carry that on my back for the rest of the day. (Speaking of tiny towns, this next photo shows the actual, official U.S. Post Office in Jamaica, Vermont.)

Now for some details. You might be aware that Vermont is kind of hilly; in fact, one might call it downright full of mountains. And just about every day there was a hill of such staggering proportion, with a grade approaching 6 or 7%, that I did end up walking some of the way in lieu of feeling my heart explode. But then on the other side of most of them, there would be a descent for the record books: my max speed was clocked more than once at over 39 mph, which is definitely the fastest I’ve ever traveled on a bike.

The scenery was fantastic: totally bucolic, lots of chattering streams, mountain peaks and valleys, covered bridges, cows, cute little towns with nothing in them except one country store (where you could always get potato chips, the most essential cycling food there is). Not one whisker of cell phone service. And I only realized after we got back that I didn’t see a traffic light the entire time we were there. Another thing which I didn’t know beforehand is that most of the secondary roads there are still unpaved, which made for some seriously hairy moments on my road bike. There was one stretch that was so unbelievably muddy that we had to take the van for a couple of miles because it was just too dicey. Amazingly, I did remain upright the entire tour.

Before we went, I was completely unsure of whether I’d be able to take four straight days of riding, but it turned out to be just right. The third day I was pretty sore in the morning, but the itinerary centered around a three-mile hike to see this fabulous waterfall. And then on day four, I felt great. I think maybe my muscles just gave up complaining when they realized I wasn’t going to give them a break.

All told I logged over 100 miles in four days, improved my mad skillz at climbing, descending, and off-roading, and purged all thoughts of my mundane life. And in a true stroke of fortune, it never rained on us during a ride. I would definitely do it again. How soon can I take another vacation?

P.S. See more pics at my Flickr page.

Stormtrooper True

One of my fondest internet-related memories dates back to April 2000, during the whole Elian Gonzalez debacle. Soon after the raid during which Elian was seized from his family’s house in Miami, this little Shockwave movie found its way onto the Net. Sure, it’s dated, sure, it references a stupid Bud commercial, but I laughed so damn hard at that thing. And the best part was, it got pulled almost immediately because it used a copyrighted photo, so it quickly faded into obscurity. (Here’s a story describing the controversy at the time.) Now that the moment has long passed, though, I’ve found it online again and I can relive that classic moment. Good times, good times.

Sporting news

Well, I owe everybody a long account of my Vermont vacation (in one word: excellent), but then I got caught up in watching the Tour de France, and then I got caught up in the ridiculous doping scandals that have marred said Tour, and as a result you poor souls out there haven’t heard from me in a while. I’ll try to get to the Vermont recap this weekend, although I ain’t guaranteeing anything. Also, the Swami and I signed up for a doubles tennis league, and our first match is tomorrow morning. Wish me luck—I love playing doubles, but haven’t done it in ages, and I also have a tendency to lock up with anxiety in pressure situations on the court. So I don’t expect anything but a debacle; hopefully I’ll be proved wrong. (And yes, if I just stopped being so competitive it wouldn’t be a big deal, but to that I say right, as if.)

Tune in again soon. At least I can say with confidence that there will be no doping scandals in the tennis league...right?

Please leave a message after the beep

I hope all two of you loyal readers can handle it, starting tomorrow I’m away to Vermont until Friday. It’s a cycling tour, so we’ll see if I can handle four straight days in the saddle. Next time I post, it might be while sitting on a big ice pack or something.

While I’m gone, here are some study questions:

1. Exactly how awesome was Keith Olbermann’s demand for Bush and Cheney to resign?


2. Exactly how awesome was that Federer-Nadal Wimbledon final?


3. You are watching the Tour de France too, aren’t you??


4. Write a 10-page essay on the Jungian subtext of the Transformers movie.

See you next weekend!