Month: December 2009

If you are what you read…

…then I’m a guy who jogs and likes to write.

Which would be pretty accurate.

I buy two magazines regularly: Runner’s World and Writer’s Digest. Maybe I just like magazines with apostrophes in the titles. I’ll admit having an incredibly hot guy on the cover of Runner’s World helped persuade me to take a look at the first issue I picked up but I’ve been buying it regularly since (the covers alternate male and female). It’s somewhat surprising how much can be written about an activity that consists entirely of just putting one foot ahead of the other and repeating.

Writer’s Digest is a magazine I’ve been buying on and off for many years but now that I’m writing more I can actually try employing some of their techniques and suggestions. Note: do not ever subscribe to their online newsletter. They spam your inbox like crazy trying to sell you seminars, books and probably Writer’s Digest widgets and toilet paper. I routinely archive without reading so I should probably unsubscribe at some point.

I will occasionally buy other writing or health magazines and the odd issue of Asimov’s of Fantasy & Science Fiction. What I don’t buy anymore are computer magazines (pretty much replaced by the web) and gaming magazines (also pretty much replaced by the web and most have died, besides). I lament several magazines I used to buy that went defunct a long time ago, notably The Twilight Zone magazine (which published excellent short fiction) and Marvel Illustrated, best described as “Heavy Metal without the breast obsession”. Okay, I sometimes also bought Heavy Metal because where else could you read stories where people rode astride giant penises like the sandworms of Arrakis? I also miss Omni. I wish there was still a good general interest science magazine around (no, Discover doesn’t quite do it). Mad magazine is one of the few I genuinely outgrew without even being conscious of it. They probably lost their gestalt when they began putting in real ads to pay the bills, anyway. That’s my cynical take and I’m stickin’ to tingit!

A run in the park

One worrisome note before my jog (which I delayed a day because of it): a few nights ago I woke up and felt a minor twinge in my right calf. It didn’t seem to be the same area that got hurt and forced me to sit out on running for four weeks but it’s the same calf so I was mildly freaked. I waited an extra day and when I ran today there were a few times that I felt the twinge again. It didn’t exactly hurt and it feels fine now, so I’m hoping that maybe I just pulled a random muscle slightly while having one of my increasingly weird dreams.

The run itself was under a clear sky with the temperature a crisp 3ºC. I wore the tights today and feel it was the right call. Because of the colder weather the trail had firmed up and was mostly navigable again. I ran 30 minutes and improved my distance and time/km vs. the last run, so I’m slowly coming back to speed. Definitely not pushing it this, though. 😛 I felt pretty good for most of the run, mostly evidenced by my relaxed breathing. It’s pretty much the canary in the mine for me now. If my breathing is labored, I slow down.

The graffiti on the playground equipment had been mostly removed, too. Nice to see that sort of stuff get dealt with quickly.

Review: Get Smart (2008 version)

I finally got around to seeing the Get Smart remake that came out last year. I thought it was decent as remakes go and probably more deserving than, say, Starsky & Hutch or The Dukes of Hazzard but it wasn’t nearly as good as the source material.

Steve Carrell wisely chose not to do a full-on Don Adams impression. His portrait of Smart is more of a homage and works fairly well. The rest of the cast was fine but none of the other characters really felt much like the ones in the original series. Anne Hathaway’s Agent 99 comes across as snippy and not very likeable, the Chief, instead of being exasperated most of the time, is portrayed as a brawler, of all things. Weird. But the biggest disappointment had to be the villain, Sigfried. In the TV series he is played completely over the top, complete with outrageous German accent by Bernie Koppell (who gets a cameo here). In the movie he is played without a trace of humor by Terence Stamp, who apparently doesn’t do comedy even when he’s in one. Having a serious villain in a Get Smart movie is missing the point by about as much as you can possibly miss a point.

The plot also tried too hard to be a standard action film and all the derring-do detracted from the comedy (though they did include a few funny bits in some of the sequences). The dopey Bush-like president made the movie already feel dated but the biggest problem was the movie just wasn’t funny enough. I may be strange but that’s how I like my comedies — funny!

Still, now that they have the “origin” story out of the way (why do these movies do this? I don’t need to find out how Max became an agent — even the TV series doesn’t show that) I might be interested in watching a follow-up. Even if the cast isn’t as authentic, they are watchable and the potential is there. I give it 6 out of 10 shoe phones.