I’ve made a few tweaks to make it easier for people to comment on my ramblings. First, you no longer need to have me approve your first post but you do need to verify your account through an e-mail check. I’ve also included the option to upload a custom avatar although at the moment they seem to be defaulting to a bit tinier than I’d like. Finally, the Site Admin link has been renamed to Site login to better reflect that it’s where you any reader/user can login to adjust their profile settings or add an avatar.
In which I explain the various links for those who are averse to clicking.
Bloggy Friends
Paladin’s Playroom Paladin has been part of my gaming group the Martian Cartel for many years. He blogs occasionally, one of those “when the whim strikes” kind of guys.
Sam-K.net The blog of Samuel Kimpton, man of the Internet! Sam is also part of the Martian Cartel and writes occasionally, focused on things of geek interest and the travails of home ownership. Sam is also a gadget kinda guy. I suspect one day he will build a really smart robot that will lead us to SkyNET.
scatterdad Tim Everett’s blog, since superseded by his addiction to Facebook. Tim owns the house I live in and has many cogent, witty and at times caustic observations. His blog is rarely updated as of late.
Other stuff
Broken Toys Scott Jennings has written about MMORPGs for many years (originally as “Lum the Mad”) and has worked in the industry at Mythic, NCsoft and other companies. His insights are often thought-provoking and amusing if you enjoy the meta discussion about gaming.
Martian Cartel forums The forums for the gaming group I became erstwhile leader of back in its founding year of 1999. We chat about more than just games now but the group has been on the decline for a few years and activity has waned.
Every post has at least one category attached to it. The content of each category is as follows:
1. Dating There are no entries for this because I am writing about my dating experiences elsewhere, therefore this category should have been removed but I forgot. Oops.
2. Gaming In which I share my gaming experiences or write about games like roughly one billion other people on the web do. As I don’t game as much as before, these posts are becoming less frequent. If you are not a gamer there is probably only a 50% chance you will find my insights worth reading. I arrived at 50% by just making a number up, kind of like a review score!
3. General The inevitable catch-all category. Random nonsense about life, media and anything else that doesn’t fit into the other categories.
4. Health and Fitness Currently I lift dumbbells three times a week and jog three times a week and it is here where I chronicle my hi-jinks, ranging from pulled muscles to getting rocks thrown at me by ill-mannered children. I also chat a bit from time to time about diet and food choices. If these things don’t set your heart a-flutter, safely ignore!
5. Photos When I add images to my gallery I post about them under this heading. However, I am currently debating over how to add photos to the site and my current hodgepodge method means I’m not adding nearly as many as I could. On the one hand, entertainingly bad pictures from my youth are going unshared. On the other hand…well, the exact same thing.
6. Writing Here I talk occasionally about the process of writing and books I have read. Mainly I discuss my ongoing writing projects, whether they are exercises, short stories or one of my novels.
Now that you know more about each category you can better choose how to read through this rich tapestry I call my blog. Or just skip all this and skim for saucy words like “hooters” and “malfeasance”.
This past Wednesday I was in the middle of Week 6 of my jogging plan, a pair of 10-minute runs with a three minute walk between. The 10-minute runs are a little over three complete laps. On the second run I’m motoring along and notice about four girls at the little playground near the northern baseball diamond. Three are younger, perhaps 6 or 7. The fourth is bigger and older, probably around 10 or 11. A cursory glance makes it clear she is the leader.
As I jog by the first time, enjoying the music on my Sansa Clip, I observe the big girl leading the others in some kind of cheer that is directed at me as I go by. I can’t hear the exact words but the tone from her is unmistakably sarcastic because if there’s one thing I know, it’s the sound of sarcasm. I do a mental eyeroll, note how precocious they are and jog past them. They resume their previous activities.
The next lap the same thing happens and again I run past without acknowledging their presence. The third time and when I am on the cusp of completing my jog I go by and sure enough the cheers erupt as I move past. They are, if nothing else, devoted to their shtick. But then I feel something plinking against my back. Many little somethings. They are throwing gravel at me. I come to an immediate stop and pause for just a moment. This is where I wished I had a picture of their faces, for it is at that moment — when I had stopped and altered the course of events but had not yet made clear what was going to happen next — that I wanted to see their expressions abruptly shift from evil glee to uncertainty. I walked a few paces toward them, still being serenaded by whatever song was playing. I looked at the leader, holding her imaginary conch shell and simply said, “Don’t throw rocks at me.” I turned, finished my jog and left the park without looking back.
Now, the gravel at the playground is small so getting showered with it did not hurt at all and I’d previously witnessed a couple of kids playing the “Let’s throw rocks at each other or actually just stand there and I’ll throw rocks at you” game so the whole thing didn’t surprise me as much as it should have but I do still ponder what the goal of the leader was. Did she want to provoke a confrontation and if so, to what end? To prove her authority over the others as their superior? To establish at as early an age as possible that men suck and throwing rocks at them is about as good as it gets? The simplest explanation is that she is a budding sociopath or in the old school language, a mean kid.
Friday’s jog was to be an epic 25-minute journey but with the thermometer reaching 30C and the sun blazing mightily in that way it does, I only managed about 16 minutes or so before my head started to hurt. I had a good pace going and without the weather being so fiendishly warm I’m confident I would have made it otherwise. The small bonus was it was too hot for any kids to be present, psychotic or not. The only others around were a few couples (the guy is always as white as physically possible, glaring like a slab of ice under the steady eye of a relentless Arctic sun) and a few other nutty joggers. Onto Week 7 Monday.
Walter Cronkie died yesterday at 92 after a long illness. A poll conducted in 1972 hailed him as “the most trusted man in America”. When you consider how villified the mainstream media is today, it is all the more remarkable that people found him not only trustworthy but extremely so. The time of the Big Three networks and their evening anchor-focused newscasts has long since faded and Cronkite retired from his position way back when it was still relevant in 1981, but he remained a vital, active voice until the end of his long life. We are probably better off with today’s diverse, more accessible news delivered mainly through the Internet and organizations that are not beholden to large corporations but Cronkite’s passing still feels a bit like the loss of innocence, the unwelcome silencing of a reassuring and patronly voice.
This ad is currently running on gay.com (yes, this neatly cuts off the cries of “Gay!” right from the outset):
Normally a makeover is meant to be an improvement, if I’m remembering my definitions correctly. In the Before shot the guy could probably stand to get acquainted with a comb but other than that he looks like a pretty casual type, someone you’d go with to a Pearl Jam show then relax afterward at the pub with a couple of beers. The post-makeover guy looks like a total sissy nancyboy — and he still needs the comb. The only thing I can think to do with this schmuck is snap his bow tie to see if he starts crying. Blech. I think the marketing gurus need to spend a little more time on this campaign.
As mentioned previously, I jog at China Creek Park, which is near the Broadway campus of Vancouver Community College and the proverbial stone’s throw from the Millennium Line SkyTrain station. Here, via the magic of pictures, is a glimpse of the park from a non-satellite perspective.
First up, a wide shot of the park (click for a larger version):
Here you can see both baseball diamonds and the Expo and Millennium SkyTrain lines on the left. You can also make out the mulch-covered trail that runs the perimeter of the park and is where I jog. The trees provide meager cover on a hot, sunny day but the park overlords have thoughtfully provided a fountain:
Unfortunately, cretinous youths sometimes stuff reeds into the fountainhead (which can’t be removed with your fingertips), causing the fountain to spray water in a whimisical but not practical-for-drinking manner. And I know it’s kids that do it because all kids are evil.
Also evil, however, are crows.
At first I was ready to blame the appearance of soggy bread in the fountain on some spoiled child with a fussy palette (“I don’t like crusts!”) but then I espied a crow a short distance away with a great hunk of bread stuffed in its beak. It watched and waited as I took my picture, then flew over to dip his bread, au jus-style. I have to confess, it’s not really evil for the crow to do that. If nothing else, it suggests he is more civilized than many of the people who use the park. For example…
Here we see the small playground area and how the gravel has spilled onto the path. The fence is there to prevent tots from being brained by errant baseballs, a good plan if ever there was one. The jog before I took these pictures, there were a pair of kids here, each standing on one side of the fence. The one on the playground side was playing the game “Let’s throw gravel through the fence at the other kid!” The other kid did not seem to like this game so much.
The small brown sign warns about coyotes in the area and offers advice on what to do in the event of a coyote experience. I forgot to get a picture of it but will try to do so on a future visit.
Finally, what I had cheekily called rice paddies in the Google Maps image turned out to be a community garden growing along the hillside on the northwest corner of the park. Apparently poo has a special place there, for it gets its own sign:
The garden is a variety of flower beds, trees, bushes and vegetables, very nice and in full bloom this time of year. Although festively colored, the poo sign kept me from entering into the garden directly. It was too reminiscent of a minefield warning and I’ve played Company of Heroes. I know what mines can do.
Tonight I de-activated my Facebook account after posting this:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I find Facebook annoying and not very useful but I realized I was hasty and so I have re-activated with the intention of utilizing this wonderful Web 2.0 communication tool to its fullest. Everyone on my friends list should be afraid.
Wall-to-wall coverage of Michael Jackson’s death continues unabated while Farrah Fawcett’s demise slides off the main page. I bet the news people are kind of relieved because who wants to say “anal cancer” on the air? Wolf Blitzer probably giggles every time he says it, that jerk.
Here is an exclusive news clip that was linked to me by my pal jackrabbit, who has his pulse on celebrity news like some guy that holds onto something and won’t let go, even if you pull really hard:
Along these lines, I watched a bit of CNN’s live feed yesterday (I am sans cable, so no TV for me) and to fill in the airtime, they started reading viewer comments. “This is from Christy. Christy says ‘I am so sad!'” Later they needed to fill more airtime and they returned to the viewer comments. Curiously, they chose Christy’s again. I guess her sadness was so profound it had to be shared repeatedly. I flipped over briefly to ABC News’ live feed and their approach was a bit different. They just let the camera roll while nothing was happening. The reporter was milling about, adjusting her hair, chatting to people off-camera, all of it live and in pseudo high-def. This is bleeding edge stuff, folks. It’s like watching the future happen.
Twitter crashed as users saw multiple “fail whales” — the illustrations the site uses as error messages — user FoieGrasie posting, “Irony: The protesters in Iran using twitter as com are unable to get online because of all the posts of ‘Michael Jackson RIP.’ Well done.”
MSNBC had comments from celebrities and other notables, including Nelson Mandela and Hugo Chavez (!) who may have had the best observation of all: Yeah, it’s sad but man, you guys are just going on way too much about it. Note that the media frames Chavez as a bad guy, so it’s okay to dismiss anything he says (and he does often say the darndest things). Hang in there, Christy!
Today saw the strange spectacle of a celebrity death getting overshadowed by another celebrity death.
Farrah Fawcett, of “Charlie’s Angels” and the best-selling poster of all-time fame died today at age 62 after battling anal cancer for several years. There’s two words that should never go together: anal cancer. Her death was not unexpected, as her health had been getting much worse lately, but it is still sad to look at the insanely toothy grin on that poster and contrast it to how painful her last days must have been.
But the memorials for Farrah were just barely getting started when word came in that Michael Jackson had suffered cardiac arrest. Not long after several media outlets were stating he had died and later in the afternoon it was confirmed by members of his family. He was 50. This is probably the biggest celebrity death since Princess Diana died in 1997 and I’m expecting saturation coverage to go on for some days. Only a major disaster (natural or man-made) can bump the story right now, which is curious when you think about it. After all, he’s dead and that’s not going to change. I don’t think the coverage will be as excessive as it was with Diana’s because the media is a lot more fragmented these days and attention spans seem that much shorter. A lot of the “coverage” will effectively go unseen, too, by being posted to Facebook or Tweeter or blogs (like this one). There’s also a bit of a difference in terms of where each person was at when they died — Diana was freshly divorced, only 37 and was still riding high in the public eye. Jackson, on the other hand, was plagued by health issues, exhibited increasingly eccentric behavior, fought off charges of child molestation and had a career that stalled out nearly a decade earlier. He was, in fact, only weeks away from a big “comeback” tour that was to also be his last.
That said, there is no denying his musical legacy. Thriller was insanely popular (I didn’t buy it because I was going through that “I’m a teen, anything popular must be crap and I shall shun it!” phase) and for much of the 80s he really was the biggest pop star. But man, what a slide after that. Still, 50 is awfully young to go and who knows what he might have done musically if he had pulled off the tour.
And as usual, dying is a great way to boost your sales. This is the iTunes top 10 album list from the morning of June 26th, less than 24 hours after Jackson died. He holds 8 of the 10 spots:
