Make mine muddy!

It was almost spring-like today with the temperature a positively warm 10ºC.

The gusting winds and torrential rain reminded one that it is still indeed winter.

Since it had been raining all day prior to my run the trail was good and flooded by the time I got there. It was so bad even the mini-trail running inside the main one was starting to get muddy and river-like in spots. Several times I nearly lost a shoe as my foot landed in especially thick and clingy muck. Here is a Neil Armstrong-esque print I left that rapidly filled with water:

The rain was relentless and did not ease up at all during the run. I was wet right down to my skivvies. Not really ideal conditions but I endeavored to improve my time and indeed did so, clocking my first sub-56 minute 10k. Not fast, really, but it’s more steady improvement.

I thought I would have the trail to myself given the weather but one girl appeared around the 6k mark and jogged ahead of me. She came to an abrupt halt at the first puddle and gave it a wide berth before proceeding. I jumped over it, passed her and she vanished shortly after. It is no surprise that people don’t like miserable conditions to run in. What is more surprising is how hesitant people are to get their shoes even a little muddy. It’s raining, you’re on a trail made of dirt and mulch, your shoes are going to get muddy. If you don’t like it, find a treadmill in a nice climate-controlled community center.

Results:

Total distance: 10.03 km (previous: 10.17 km) — quite enough, given the weather and conditions 😛
Average time/km: 5:36/km (previous: 5.41/km)
Best time/km: 5.08/km (previous: 5.11/km)

Smelly Run

5ºC and intermittent light rain for today’s run through the first 8km, a steady light rain for the final 2km and a rather hard rain after I got home. Dodged that liquid bullet!

There was little wind which normally is good, however there was the smell of diesel hanging in the air and the lack of any breeze meant it was pretty much there for the whole run. Later it was joined at one corner of the path with the smell of hot glue and general construction-related odors. Blech.

I started out at a deliberately faster pace but was careful to not stretch much to increase my stride and I feel fine now, so mission accomplished there. My pace was fairly consistent and apart from the various smells and a bit of gas (probably from lunch) I felt pretty good. Finished with my best 10k performance to date.

I only saw one other jogger and she must have been passing through because I only saw her for a lap. One other guy was doing some balance exercises on the park equipment and on a nearby fence. I was tempted to take a picture. I’ve seen him before so I’ll likely see him again.

There were a few dogs being walked but one appeared to be there entirely on its own. It was a large black terrier of some sort and it had a white face which gave it a creepy sort of ghost look. It seemed happy enough just randomly trotting around the field. Perhaps I just never caught sight of the owner.

Results:

Total distance: 10.17 km (previous: 10.02 km)
Average time/km: 5:41/km (previous: 5.46/km)
Best time/km: 5.11/km (previous: 5.28/km)

On being manly

I got my hair cut today and the girl who cut it was fast, friendly and just the right amount of chatty. She did a really nice job, too. My only complaint is she told me to put my purse on the other chair so hair wouldn’t get on it. It’s not a purse. 🙁

It’s a shoulder bag. And it’s very manly. I use it to carry my iPod and, uh, the bowie knife I use to hunt moose with, though I usually just kill them with my bare hands. Yeah.

Not a purse.

Me vs. Mavis Beacon, part 2

Yes, it’s been nearly a year since the last time I went one on one with the formidable Mavis Beacon. I think it’s a testament to how much that composite character intimidates me that it took this long to return.

A new year means a new beginning, though, so I re-installed Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and after 50 minutes of carefully following Mavis’s lessons, here is my current status:

Yes, I can now touch-type at a rate of 10 words per minute. This means that adding seven fingers to my typing has reduced my overall speed by about 75% (I can hunt and peck around 40 WPM). However, Mavis has not only been forthcoming with encouragement, she has practically gushed about my phenomenal typing skills, to the point where I’m fairly certain I could type a bunch of nonsense and she would still lavish me with unearned praise. It seems this new version has defanged Ms. Beacon in favor of a kinder, gentler persona.

I’m still leery, though. She started out nice the last time, too, before switching over to her “You seem kind of dumb. Go play a video game instead” mode. Time will tell, I suppose.

Good Job! Good Job? 12 WPM sucks. That’s one of those thousand monkeys banging away randomly at the keyboard with the hope that he might be the one to spontaneously type out Hamlet. But I guess it’s more encouraging than “Wow, that’s so slow I had time to finish my tax return”. And I did actually discover something new about my typing: I have been sitting a little too far to the right of the keyboard. I noticed this when I was consistently hitting the wrong key and saw that my hand was turned in a way that the ghost hand onscreen wasn’t. Thanks, Mavis! (for now)

Touching another man’s Wii

I promise the title of this post will be my first and only Wii penis joke. Really.

Tonight, three years after its debut, I finally got a chance to play around with a Wii, thanks to an invite from Nic to try his out. He got it for the best price possible — as a prize in a raffle. Nice!

We played some Lego Batman after I got the lowdown on how to use the wand and nunchuk controllers and I think I did fairly well for a newbie. I had to play as Robin but hey, it’s Nic’s Wii so if he wants to play Batman, he plays Batman, dammit (and after watching how many times he plunged to his death while using the bat glide suit, I wasn’t too concerned about playing the sidekick). In one particular room we managed to kill ourselves repeatedly. I would push the joystick on the nunchuk and press the A button on the wand and Robin, the boy wonder, would happily walk off into a vat of lava or some toxic goo. Repeatedly. Being made of Lego grants you a kind of immortality, however, so the sting of death is not severe. We made a pretty good team, I’d say.

After putting away Mr. Freeze and Clayface, we moved on to the pack-in game, Wii Sports, testing out Tennis and Bowling. In Tennis we played two games. Nic beat me fairly handily in the first round as my fatheaded guys ran around the court looking more like rejects from Lord of the Dance than tennis players. The second game, however, found Nic without his mojo as he bobbled nearly every volley, handing me an easy win.

After drawing in Tennis we played a round of Bowling and I’m a bit concerned about Nic dislocating his shoulder when he plays the real thing because he puts some serious English into his swing. And it works. He got 5 strikes in all and ended with three in a row after finding the “magic spin”. I did not find any magic whatsoever and managed no strikes, though I got a few spares to stave off a humiliating defeat. Neither of us got a gutter ball.

Overall, the Wii left me unimpressed with its graphics (though being on a standard def TV probably doesn’t help much) but the controls were easy enough to grasp. The precision left something to be desired, though (see the countless deaths in Lego Batman as an example). While the party games are fun, I can’t say I’ve got a huge urge to trade-in my Xbox 360 for a Wii just yet.

Still, I must win at Bowling, so my Wii play is not over.

Review: Sherlock Holmes

I saw Sherlock Holmes today and liked it. I knew there would be more action in it than what one might expect in a typical Holmes story but it wasn’t an action movie. Robert Downey Jr. stamps the character with his own style while still engaging in some of the classic Holmes behavior we expect — the logical deductions, the violin playing. Jude Law was terrific as Dr. Watson and I was pleased to see the character presented not as a well-meaning buffoon or comedy relief but as a worthy match for Holmes in many ways.

The story sets up a cult engaged in magic that will “change the world” and is neatly deconstructed (and thwarted, of course) by Holmes in the end. The perfect sort of tale for the confirmed skeptic. The remainder of the cast is fine, though no one especially stands out. Everyone does what they’re supposed to and Downey and Law remain the focus throughout.

There is the suggestion of a sequel by the end and that wouldn’t be an altogether bad thing, I’d say. Thumbs up.

Come undone Run

7ºC today under cloudy skies for the run. I was pressed for time so I quit as soon as I reached 10k. My pace was almost identical to the previous run. Wore two layers and was pretty warm by the end.

At the 4k mark my left shoelace came untied. I tied it back up too tight and for the next 2k my foot hurt like heck until the action of running finally loosened the lace a bit.

The run was otherwise unremarkable.

Results:

Total distance: 10.02 km (previous: 10.14 km)
Average time/km: 5:46/km (previous: 5.45/km)
Best time/km: 5.28/km (previous: 5.15/km) (not sure why the first km was slower. Maybe I was distracted.)

Web forms is hard

These days it seems every site on the web requires a login. There are various programs out there to remember, secure and sort the multitude of usernames and passwords one might need (indeed, Firefox and other browsers have this ability built-in) but what if both you and your system forget? You simply click on “Forget Your Password?” Or is it “Generate New Password”? Eh, just click whatever link is given and hope that the system works better than the person in charge of the page. Web forms is hard.

Book review: Dark Delicacies II

I just finished Dark Delicacies II: Fear, the second collection of 20 horror short stories and it holds up nearly as well as the first volume. Most of the stories are fairly good, a few are standouts and, unfortunately, a few also fell flat. The variety is decent, ranging in subject matter from vampires (on the Titanic) to the undead, ghost and the more subtle horrors of the mind. Tone and mood ranged widely, from very light to grim, with most stories falling somewhere between the extremes.

The Best

  • “Dog” by Joe R. Lansdale, a simple but effective chase story
  • “The Accompanist” (John Harrison), a mesmerizing character study of a man consumed by his passion for music
  • “Where There’s a Will…” (Robert Masello), a romp in which an underachieving son in a somewhat dysfunctional family gets success in a way he could never have imagined. This was my favorite of the collection, a real delight all the way through.

The Worst

Unlike the first volume, there are a few stories here that fell flat:

  • “Amusement”, a story about unlikeable characters engaging in unlikeable (and uninteresting) acts
  • “Great Wall: A Story from the Zombie War” by Max Brooks which was strangely boring but mercifully short. Maybe it suffers from being out of context from World War Z.

“The Y Incision”, a goofy homage to the old Night Stalker TV series, invoked my internal editor when the protagonist, a private detective who specializes in the undead, complained about “losing two bills” on a case that goes bust when there was a very clear, obvious point where the detective could have (and really, should have) gotten the money back. There were a couple of other stories where I found myself rewriting bits in my head. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

Overall, though, I’d definitely recommend Dark Delicacies II to any horror fan. It’s a solid anthology.

How to sell 80 million books

Start off with a paragraph like this:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

This is the opening of The Da Vinci Code. You may have heard of it. It’s sold more copies than Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, which was released 105 years earlier and has been selling every year since. The Da Vinci Code is, in fact, the second best-selling book of English fiction ever. Why?

Is it because Dan Brown is a great writer? Is it his mastery of the simple sentence? Or is is it because he’s a Transformer of the literary world?

Does it bother me that some of the most popular things in entertainment are also some of the worst in terms of quality?

It does, actually, because it’s possible to entertain and be popular and not sacrifice your craft in the process. Die Hard is a smart, funny action movie. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is noisy, insultingly dumb, incoherent and borderline racist. And yet…$843 million grossed worldwide. The Da Vinci Code is the go-to book when one wants to point out the worst bestseller. But clearly writers like Brown and directors like Michael Bay have tapped into a formula that resonates with a lot of people, people who are unconcerned that what they are reading or viewing is the equivalent of junk food.

I’m not putting myself above the masses, either. I read Stephen King, I sat through Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I’m a fan of pop culture and fascinated by it at the same time. It just seems that we are in a downward spiral, where dumb just isn’t dumb enough anymore.

I expect the top-grossing movie in 2020 will be three hours of cars exploding. It will star Shia LaBeouf’s son. The bestselling book will be Dan Brown’s The Forgotten Clue, a collection of sentence fragments in pop-up format. The movie version, also starring Shia LaBeouf’s son, will gross $1.1 billion. Sure, ticket prices will be $50 each, but still.

What happens when you fall on a full carboy

A carboy is a large (5-15 gallon) bottle.

Tim uses these for his home brewing.

This morning as I was going about my usual routine I heard a tremendous crash upstairs. There seemed to be two aspects to it, which was odd. The first was kind of a smashing sound, the other a very large thump. The thing that came to mind was a large cabinet with glass doors being knocked over, but there is no such furniture upstairs. A few moments after this thud, water began sluicing down into my kitchen, mainly through the cupboard that houses the fusebox. This is bad but it could be a lot worse, as the water didn’t channel through the fusebox, but rather off to the side. Mostly it just makes a mess on my counter.

So now I had the smash, the thud and water pouring from up above. I call Tim. He says in a quiet voice, “Can you come upstairs and help me?”

When I get upstairs, this is the first thing I see when the door is opened (click to get a larger view):

Tim had dropped and fallen on a full carboy. He was holding a towel up to his right arm to prevent blood from pouring about the house in copious quantities. As it was he had left a pretty good trail from the accident to the bathroom:

I fished out the first aid kit from under the sink and bandaged up the bleediest parts of his arms, one of which had a wound that looked like it went right to the bone. He got 15 stitches in that one. He feared the same arm was broken but fortunately that turned out not to be the case.

While he was off to emergency (via cab, he felt an ambulance was not needed) I cleaned up the gore-filled house of horrors. apparently I cleaned up a chunk of Tim in the process, which I am happy to report I did not notice at the time. I also let Barley out so he could pee. He was just getting to the whining stage by the time I’d finished the mopping and sweeping. Whining = “I’m going to pee, it is your choice where that happens.”

All in all, not the usual start to the morning but it could have been worse.

I am now going to try convincing Tim to switch to six packs. In cans.