Just kidding! This blog post is entirely self-contained. Once you get to the end of it you will have complete closure and no need to read a follow-up post to find out how it all ends.
Sometimes I think I am the only person out there who prefers to read novels that begin and end in the same volume instead of being laid out over the course of 10 books and 10,000 pages, half of which are probably unnecessary. Maybe this is why I read so little fantasy. Or maybe I just hate elves. Or I’m simply jealous because Steven Erikson can write hundreds of pounds of books per year and I can only manage maybe half a pound at best.
My left knee has checked out A-OK and the doctor says I am good to resume jogging, which I plan on doing this Monday. When he seemed a bit evasive on the cause of the soreness in my knee I asked, “Is it one of those ‘getting older’ things?” He immediately started in with, “Well, I wouldn’t want to put a name on it…” which seemed like a polite way of saying, “Yes”. But he was polite, so no dirty look for him!
Here’s hoping my Nike+ sensor still has some juice in it. Here’s also hoping I don’t collapse face-first into the mud after 200 meters.
Today is 1/11/11. It’s either the highest-scoring day ever or the lowest, depending on the scale you use.
Only 11 years, 1 month and 1 day until until 2/22/22 rolls around! (Did I do the math right? I hate math. Barbie was spot-on there. The old dumb Barbie, I mean, not the new computer scientist version that fools no one.)
After a few instances of being the proverbial boy who cried wolf, Environment Canada correctly forecast the first real dump of snow for Vancouver this month, as it began piling up a few hours ago. It’s expected to get warmer and turn to rain by morning but it looks pretty enough right now. Best of all, no shoveling!
I wonder if this will be the last blast of traditional winter weather. My famous* weather intuition is not getting a clear picture on this. I’m going to guess we’ll see at least one more notable snowfall. In March.
Technically it will still be winter when it happens.
* famous in the sense of “I just made this up now”
How can something so stunningly elegant and pretty be such a pain to shovel?
New Scientist magazine has about a dozen images of snowflakes captured using a unique snowflake photomicroscope. The images can be viewed here. The symmetry and grace of these tiny things helps remind me that sometimes the earth is a pretty cool place (no pun intended).
Today Jeff and I hiked up Burnaby Mountain for an hour, completing our trek in about an hour instead of the expected two. It was the first time I’d be on a mixed use trail, in this case one for both cyclists (specifically of the genus mountain bike extremus) and hikers. Within moments of ascending we had our first cyclist wheeling down toward us. Since they have momentum and it’s difficult, if not dangerous, for them to try to stop, we obligingly hopped out of the way each time. I was a bit uncomfortable with this at first but everyone was so dang polite it didn’t bother me after awhile.
Then we didn’t seem any more riders.
The climb was milder than the one we did last week at Buntzen Lake but we gained a few hundred meters of elevation, at least, and some of the parts we climbed are apparently considered advanced, according to maps (see below).
No pictures since there was only one small lookout along the way, but I may take some if we return.
The route we took is seen below. We began on the road, walked east and headed up Nicoles Trail, over to Gear Jammer, down to Function Junction and finally down the aptly-named Lower Snake Trail (switchbacks ahoy!) before coming back to our starting point on Pipeline Trail. Not a bad little workout and the weather was very cooperative — clear and a few degrees above freezing.
I don’t know which is creepier, all of these mass death events (“500+ blackbirds”, “thousands of fish”) or the fact that Google maps allows you to conveniently peruse all of them.
As it happened, back in September my left leg was ailing again and so I opted to give it time to recover before resuming my runs, as I had previously. This particular time it seemed the left ankle was feeling especially tender. I am more convinced now that the way I was running — on an oval course, always counter-clockwise — may have contributed to my left leg bearing more than its fair share and thus making it more susceptible to injury. My plan was to resume running and to either find a new course to run or to simply alternate between running clockwise and counter-clockwise on the path around China Creek Park.
By the time I felt I’d rested enough to resume jogging I began a new job and suddenly my schedule was a lot tougher to work runs around. Couple that with waning daylight hours and I let it slide longer than I would have liked.
Then something weird happened. My left knee started to hurt. More precisely, I would sometimes notice it feeling sore, though it never hurt to actually walk on it. It was most obvious when I would kneel to tie my shoelaces. What makes this weird is that I never experienced any problems with my knees when running. At first I thought I did something to hurt it and just couldn’t remember exactly what I’d done but the soreness is ever-present. I feel it every time I kneel down, though it never gets worse (or better). I plan on having the knee checked out at the clinic soon but mildly fear this may be a chronic injury that will require therapy — or worse!
If the doctor tells me it’s one of those ‘men of your age’ things, I promise to give him a dirty look.
I will update on the potential kneetastrophe soon.
One of my resolutions for 2011 is to write more and to that end I have declared January official Write At Least One Blog Entry Per Day month. This sometimes leads to what one might call filler posts.
Such as this one.
Oh, here’s something kind of weird. As of tonight the Vancouver Canucks are the top team in the NHL, with 55 points and a record of 28-8-5. They have the fewest losses of any team and are tied for the most wins with Pittsburgh and Detroit but have two games in hand on both teams. I’m not sure when the Canucks were last on top of the league in January but I’m thinking it was approximately never, so it’s nice to see now. Go Canucks and all that.
Maybe they just needed 40 years to warm up and become Stanley Cup champions!
Over the weekend I had a rare chance to watch several back to back Star Trek: Next Gen movies as part of some Space network marathon and it has made me revise my opinions of several.
I saw the last segment of Insurrection and all of Generations, First Contact and Nemesis. Here are my new and improved opinions:
First Contact: This is still easily the best of the Next Gen movies. Yes, the concept of a Borg Queen is inconsistent, Crusher gets pushed into the background in favor of Alfre Woodard’s character and it combines two of the most tired tropes in Star Trek — saving Earth and time travel. But thanks to a lithe script, some excellent set pieces and tight performances by the cast, it all holds together and becomes more than the sum of its proverbial parts.
Insurrection: I only caught the last few scenes and it reminded me of what a dull and plodding movie it is. They somehow managed to make the action sequences limp and lifeless despite having the cool new Enterprise tooling around. Going from First Contact to this was a huge letdown. Even as a TV episode, Insurrection wouldn’t rank among the better ones, with its ‘simple folk on Amish planet’ plotline and not giving a damn if they blew the whole thing up.
Generations still comes off as a disjointed narrative, with too many different threads, many of them feeling only loosely connected to each other. The whole ‘Picard’s family dies in a fire’ (a fire? Really? In a time where they brag about no disease or poverty they somehow still manage to have fires that still burn down houses and kill people? Okay!) was utterly unnecessary and forced Patrick Stewart to spend a large amount of the film moping around. But the writers apparently couldn’t come up with anything better for Picard in the Nexus than ‘a family of mawkish, Stepford-style children dressed as if they were from the late 19th century so the tragedy of his real family was deemed necessary. When Picard looks out a window of his imaginary Nexus home and says, “This can’t be real” it’s a bit of a “Well, duh” moment. Which also demonstrates how hanging the whole movie on the Nexus was dumb to begin with. The plotholes in this movie are at least Galaxy class in size. Here’s just one, though: If Picard was able to leave the Nexus at any point in time, why did he not leave when Soren could be safely apprehended aboard a ship instead of mere minutes before he blows up an entire star? Because that wouldn’t have given us a scene of Kirk falling down and dying. Yes, Kirk’s death comes at the, er, hands of a rogue walkway that collapses. How noble!
Nemesis: I have always thought of this as being the worst of the Next Gen movies because of the poor matte effects, the overall cheap look of the film, the silly dune buggy sequence and the unnecessary and unconvincing sacrifice of Data as an attempt to wring a few tears from long-time fans (not to mention the cop-out of having B4 suddenly become more Data-like at the end). However, while all of these flaws are still present, none of them bothered me the same way they did back when I saw this in the theater when it came out in 2002. The story stays focused on the silly main plot (a lot of nonsense about a less-than-believable evil clone of Picard wanting to, uh, destroy the Earth or something for reasons that are never entirely clear, but which I can best surmise as “So I will be famous!”) and the pace keeps moving forward. In the end I have to say I found Nemesis more interesting than Insurrection, if not actually better, so I think I’ll now put it slightly above Insurrection in my list of Next Gen movies. My new ranking is thus:
The gap between #1 and #2 is pretty big. The gap between #2 and #3 is smaller, while the space (ho ho) between #3 and #4 is rather small.
It’s too bad that the Next Gen cast didn’t get a decent batch of movies for their theatrical run. When most of your efforts rank about as highly as Star Trek V, it ain’t good.
***
I also managed to catch most of Forbidden Planet on AMC, which I’ve somehow never see before. It’s a bit of a jolt to see a young Leslie Nielson playing it straight as the commander of a military force that travels on a spaceship that looks strangely like a UFO. Overall I enjoyed it and it reminded me of how the pacing and plot sensibilities of movies have changed so much in the last 50 years. Forbidden Planet has its action but most of the film is simply talking or even one character demonstrating things to another. The enemy for the most part is literally unseen and the ending is not based on action but a psychological twist. There is allegedly a remake in the works (IMDB lists it as a 2013 project) and I can imagine the bigger, louder lasers already, the relatively simple ending being drawn out into a huge firefight and several unnecessary subplots tacked on. We need more science fiction movies that are about ideas and not just action. I expect the worst.
Finally, I caught the first 20 minutes or so of Fantastic Voyage. They emphasized several times that the shrinking process could only last 60 minutes maximum and then went through multiple phases post-shrinking of the sub and crew before finally injecting them into the guy’s body. I was expecting the project lead to send them a wireless message (yes, despite having all of this very fancy tech, they could only communicate through Morse code) telling them that they only had five minutes to complete the actual operation. Still, I love the tone of the movie, which can be described as serious-but-fun.
Today Jeff and I went for a hike in the Buntzen Lake area. I am a hiking newbie still but Jeff kindly furnished me with a walking stick for additional stability, balance and to fend off marauding bears.
Rather than hike around the lake itself, which has an elevation gain of a little over 100m, Jeff plotted a course up the Halvor Lunden trail which would take us up to the top of Eagle Ridge and a total elevation climb of about 1020m. We made pretty good time heading up but somewhere past 600m up the trail became snow-covered. Normally this would not be an issue but the cover was fairly thin and had frozen, making it pretty much ice. Just past Polytrichum Lookout at 680m or so, the trail becomes very steep and narrow and the ice was a little unforgiving without having claws of steel attached to your boots. After continuing up a ways we elected to turn around and head back down.
Although it didn’t seem like we had climbed very far up Treacherous Icy Slope, making our way back down took longer than expected, with each step falling into the ‘be very careful so you do not go head-first the rest of the way down’ category.
We arrived safely back in the park and ate lunch in the sun at Buntzen Lake proper. For five minutes. Not that we finished lunch in five minutes, that’s how long the sun shone on our table before it moved on. Pesky winter sun. Everyone in the area seemed to have a camera. I did, too, and took some pics, which can be found in the Buntzen Lake gallery.
Here is one of them, a close-up shot of The Pulpit, the rocky outcropping at the top that we did not quite reach.
[singlepic id=125 w=640 h=480 float=none]
It was an enjoyable outing despite not ultimately reaching our goal. There were no falls, bears and the weather was about perfect for this time of year — sunny and a touch above freezing with no wind.
