General

If I won the lottery

I would buy all the fireworks on the planet and shoot them into the sun.

This has nothing to do with fireworks constantly going off through the neighbourhood as I type these words.

10 more posts to go

I fell way behind on my unofficial goal of 2 posts per day on the blog, and still have 10 more to go. Can I do it? Maybe. Should I? Maybe!

Here’s a haiku on perseverance I just made up:

Perseverance

You think and then do
You ponder what you have made
Do more anyway

October was a little weird, as always

I always find the transition from summer to fall mildly traumatic and this October it was very much that, because in what felt like the space of a week I went from wearing shorts and t-shirts to wearing hoodies and long pants. Long pants!

I’ve already been running in single-digit weather.

And in four days we switch back to stupid time, which is to say: Pacific Standard Time. So it will be dark for like 20 hours every day.

On the plus side, it’s only 232 days until summer!

Random facts about U.S. presidents #1

Did you know Jimmy Carter has won three Grammy Awards? It’s true. All for his gangsta rap trilogy.

Kidding, it’s for spoken word recordings.

I discovered this factoid while falling down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. I can’t say there will necessarily be a Random facts about U.S. presidents #2.

Dream: Movie intermissions

I had several vivid dreams last night, and made a token effort to remember at least one of them. And did!

It was about movie intermissions, but not the old-timey kind where the movie literally stopped playing because they only had one projector and had to physically change reels. No, in my dream–and if I remember correctly, the movie being featured was Aliens (1986)–the movie would literally keep playing, but it would be the intermission, the idea being that people still needed a break during a long movie (and let’s face it, all of James Cameron’s movies are long1mostly), but rather than force people to try to pick the best time to run off and pee (though there is, in fact, now an app for that), the movie would deliberately add in a lull midway through.

What I recall from the dream is that the intermission scenes were a combination of backstory or minor character development, stuff that wasn’t critical to the plot, so if you missed it, it was more like missing the bonus material on a DVD rather than some vital part of the story. In the dream, people seemed to like it. In reality, it would just make movies in theatres even longer than they are now, so maybe not such a good idea.

Etc.: The last movie I saw in a theatre was Onward, in early March 2020. I can’t say I miss the experience, with or without intermissions. I do remember my bladder almost exploding during the interminable credits for Avengers: Endgame (runtime 181 minutes) as I waited for the “secret” scene at the end. My bladder won, and I missed it. I think I looked it up later, but can’t even remember what it was now.

Run 820: Beaten by the rain

View from Cariboo Dam, pre-run

It was warmer today, so there was that!

It was also wet. My plan to escape the rain worked perfectly on Tuesday. Today, it worked in reverse, which is to say it not only rained the entire run, it rained more than any run I can remember in the past few years. It went like this:

Light rain > Steady rain > Torrential downpour > Steady rain

The torrential downpour part happened around the fourth km. I passed another runner, who was dressed kind of like how a ninja might, if a ninja was into jogging: black shorts, black cap, black running jacket. He looked very wet. He nodded as we passed each other, probably thinking the same thing as me: What was I thinking running in this weather?

On the other hand, once you get that wet, you just kind of go with it. There were many puddles, so much puddle dodging was to be had, but sometimes I just went through when it was easier than dipsy-doodling around. By the end I was so soaked my shorts were clinging to my legs, and I was wringing water out of the sleeves of my shirt.c I looked like I had stepped out of a swimming pool.

As for the run, it went fine. My knees felt a little stiff on the walk back from the lake, but only a little, and during the run, while I noticed ye olde left hip chime in at the 3K mark again, it was pretty quiet overall. I was a little slower, but not much, and my BPM was down, so it balances out. I may run again on Saturday, which so far looks dry. Dry will be nice.

Still Creek, post-run. An accurate depiction of conditions.

Stats:

Run 820
Average pace: 5:48/km
Training status: Maintaining
Location: Burnaby Lake (CW)
Start: 9:48 a.m.
Distance: 5:03 km
Time: 29:09
Weather: Rain, heavy at times
Temp: 14ºC
Humidity: 93%
Wind: light
BPM: 154
Weight: 169.2
Total distance to date: 5980 km
Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation)
Shoes: HOKA Speedgoat 5 (115/222/337 km)

Telephones are bad

Except I’m yelling at telephones

Remember back in the old days when the worst part about a telephone was the rotary dial? I do, because I’m old as dirt. But to compensate, you only had to dial the last five digits of a number, instead of all seven.

Today, you have to punch in 10 digits to call the person next door, but you actually don’t do this at all, because they’re in your contacts list and you just tap a few buttons. If you had to actually enter their phone number, you would have no idea what it was. You might not even understand numbers themselves.

So in a way, phones are better now, because dialing is more convenient than ever. BOOP BOOP and done.

BUT…spam. I also remember never getting spam calls. Now I get them all the time. This is not an improvement. But because phones now accept text messages, I can also get my spam in text form, too. And do. Constantly!

Also, remember before we had voicemail trees? Where you could talk to an actual person because an actual person would pick up the phone when you called? It seems quaint now.

I had to call a bank, not for myself, but regarding someone else. I got into a voicemail tree. I spent some time with this pseudo-person-sounding thing. It was confused and befuddled by my inquiries. I tried rephrasing. I thought of using some snooty British accent. Finally, I pushed the 0 (zero) key, hoping it would still work as a “Please for the love of all things holy, let me talk to an actual carbon-based unit” button. And it did! The “digital assistant” put me through to an actual person at some central office, probably a couple of thousand miles from the local branch I wanted to book an appointment at (she confirmed her centrality, but did not reveal where she was located, nor did I inquire). She could not book the appointment for reasons, so I ended up speaking to three different people and being subjected to terrible hold music that played on a short loop and sounded like it was recorded from the FM radio in a ’73 Gremlin. In the end, I finally had an appointment. Hopefully. They could not give me a local number in case I had to cancel or was running late or anything. Apparently they only communicate through telepathy or email with local branches.

Back in 1975, I would have called the local branch directly, spoken to someone who would have picked up after the first ring, then had the appointment booked in a few minutes. Except I was 10 years old in 1975 and didn’t even have an account back then. But I could have theoretically done this.

My current phone is pretty good at checking the weather, though, and it lets me take photos of me shaking my fist at the sky, futilely. So in some ways telephones are not bad.

I regret the long pants

I normally run on Mondays, but this Monday has been Heavy Rain Day. I don’t really like running in the rain, but if it starts raining while I’m running, I shrug and continue. If there’s a light rain or drizzle before the run, I shrug and continue.

But if there’s heavy rain falling and I know that as soon as I step outside I will get drenched, I find motivation harder to come by. But tomorrow morning looks good, so I count skipping the run today as a handy day of extra rest.

I did have to go to the store, though, so I tried to time my trip between deluges and was…partly successful. I also wore long pants for the first time since April, covering up my sexy tanned legs. Worse, it wasn’t even cold out (17C — above normal). I later regretted the pants. But I waited until I got home to take them off. I’m not some perv.

Happy Friday the 13th!

I’m not superstitious–at least about numbers or dates–and it’s pretty weird when you think about how people can be spooked by a certain date falling on a particular day.

But people are pretty weird as a rule.

More importantly, Friday the 13th gives me the perfect excuse to post an image of a scary black cat!

Well, scary-ish. Okay1I still can’t decide whether to type OK or okay. Maybe I should do a poll on the internet., not really scary at all, but actually cute.

Four Daryl Hall and John Oates albums ranked

Yes, I’m actually calling them by their preferred name, even though everyone else calls them Hall & Oates. For the title of this post, anyway.

And yes, they have released 18 albums since 1972 (gadzooks, that’s 51 years ago as I write this), so ranking four is only covering a tiny portion of their discography.

BUT.

These are the four albums that established them as the most successful pop duo ever. They’re also the only four I ever bought as a teen/pseudo adult in my early 20s1Technically I bought five, because I also got their hits collection, Rock ‘n Soul, Part 1. There was never a Part 2..

Ranked:

  1. Private Eyes (1981). This is a near-perfect album that plays like a greatest hits collection because it’s full of irresistible pop gems. The band is in great form and the hooks are huge. Favourites include “Some Men” and “Did it in a Minute” but really, all the songs are terrific. Even Oates’s goofy “Mano a Mano” is fine.
  2. Voices (1980). This is the blueprint for Private Eyes and while not as fully realized, it still has great tunes crossing a lot of styles. Highlights include the excellent single “Kiss on My List”, “United State” and more. Oates sings lead on more tracks here, so there’s some good vocal variety, too.
  3. Big Bam Boom (1984). They get a little experimental and it sometimes works (“Bank on Your Love”) and sometimes falls a bit flat. “Some Things are Better Left Unsaid” is a great ballad, though, and the good outweighs the bad across the album.
  4. H20 (1982). This is not a bad album, it’s just very slick. None of the songs are terrible or anything, but there’s little on the album that really stands out for me, though I dig the cover of “Family Man”. The lyrics of “Open All Night” are real, “Did they really write that?” stuff.