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Friday, July 10th, 2009
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1:46 pm
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How did the world go eight months without telling me that Vanilla Ice recorded a cover of Baby Got Back?
This has been the best $.99 I've spent all summer.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, July 5th, 2009
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9:42 am - 3 weeks of marathon training, condensed. 91 days to race day.
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Week 1: Runs of 3, 4, 3, and 5 miles. Humid. Hot. Shin splints. Did the Lederhosenlauf 5k as my last pre-marathon run. That was so enjoyable that it makes me want to run 5k and 10k races as often as I can in the summer, except they don't mesh with the long runs I have on the weekends. So be it.
Week 2: Runs of 3, 4, 3, and 6 miles. Also humid. Also hot. Also tough to run after feasting on Father's Day. Remarkably, the shin splints were not the limiting factor, but rather the heat index.
Week 3: Runs of 3, 4, 3, and 7 miles. The first run should have been on Tuesday night, but due to Upstage rehearsal it was pushed to Wednesday morning. Thursday's 4 mile run took place as scheduled. The third run should have been on Friday, but due to Fogo de Chao feasting it was pushed back to Saturday morning... which was then followed with 2+ hours of Insane Chore Posse manual work. (Just for the record, that is not the ideal way to spend the rest day before the long run of the week.)
The 7 mile run was this morning, but it came out as 7.25 miles because I'm apparently just that hardcore (or that bad at judging distances in my neighborhood). My pace was 11:13 which is still just fine with me, as that was the longest run I'd had in almost a year.
The shin splints are nonexistent, and what had become familiar pains the last two years in my left knee and left hip haven't shown up yet, although I can feel some tension in my hip if I stretch it in an unnatural fashion. I am tentatively putting this into the "hell yeah" column.
Next week calls for runs of 3, 5, 3, and 8 miles, with increases coming in the 2nd and 4th runs, and then 3, 5, 3, 10 and so long to running fewer than 20 miles in a week for the next couple months.
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
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1:04 pm
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| Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
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1:32 pm
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| Monday, June 29th, 2009
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7:43 am
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Good food, good friends, good weather; this was an enjoyable weekend.
...although only a traitor would say that!
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
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1:56 pm - Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina, step forward to claim your prize
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...as the next most nutfuckingly-stupid politician since Blagojevich.
1) He disappears from South Carolina without telling anyone where he's going. The lieutenant governor is unsure who's running the state.
"The whispers about the missing governor started as early as Friday, when one lawmaker and outspoken rival of Mr. Sanford was quietly outraged that the governor had left the state without a plan for a transfer of power in the event of an emergency.
State Senator John M. Knotts, Jr., a Republican, said in a telephone interview that he got a tip from a caller — whom he would not identify — on Friday that a State Law Enforcement Division vehicle was missing and that the governor had “taken off in one.”
On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Knotts said that he called the S.L.E.D. chief, Reggie Lloyd, to inquire about the missing governor and the department’s vehicle. Mr. Lloyd, according to Senator Knotts, confirmed that both the vehicle and the governor were missing, and that the governor had told his security detail to leave.
“I don’t care how big a problem you had with the person,” Senator Knotts said. “I had concerns for his safety and the fact that there was nobody leading South Carolina. There was nobody in a position to make a decision on Homeland security or if there were a prison riot or something of that nature.”"
2) His staff claims that he's hiking the Appalachian trail.
"Then, around 10 p.m. on Monday, Mr. Sawyer sent a “high priority” e-mail alert to reporters that Mr. Sanford was hiking the Appalachian Trail, a 2,100-mile path that does not pass through South Carolina. In a follow-up statement on Tuesday morning, Mr. Sawyer said, “It would be fair to say the governor was somewhat taken aback by all of the interest this trip has gotten” and would return early from his hike on Wednesday."
3) His car is found at the Atlanta airport.
"The governor was interviewed by The State upon his return from Argentina in Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta. Earlier, CNN had identified a black Suburban in the parking lot as belonging to the governor."
4) He shows up and says that he went to Argentina to drive along the coast and unwind.
"After a barrage of news media requests, Mr. Sawyer released a statement saying, “Gov. Sanford is taking some time away from the office this week to recharge after the stimulus battle and the legislative session, and to work on a couple of projects that have fallen by the wayside. We are not going to discuss the specifics of his travel arrangements or his security arrangements.”"
5) He admits that he has been having an affair for a year, but told his wife about it five months ago.
"Governor Sanford admitted he had been in Buenos Aires, Argentina, since Thursday, not hiking on the Appalachian Trail as he told his staff. In revealing an affair that had gone on for about a year — and which he had disclosed to his wife, Jenny, five months ago, he said: “This was selfishness on my part.”"
6) He then continued the affair, over Father's Day, with his wife fully aware. Does this guy have balls, or what?
"His wife, Jenny, told the Associated Press that he had gone somewhere over the Father’s Day weekend, but she did not know where and she was not concerned.
“He was writing something and wanted some space to get away from the kids,” she told the A.P. on Monday while vacationing with their four sons. Three of his sons are teenagers, and his youngest is 10 years old."
I cannot wait to see what happens next, and I cannot understand why some people call politics boring. :D
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, June 22nd, 2009
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9:15 am - Last reminder on the marrow registration drive
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Today is the last day for the free registration to National Marrow Donor Program's registry. Normally it costs $52 (tax-deductible) but funding is available for free registration.
http://www.marrow.org/JOIN/Join_Now_Special/Marrowthon09/join_now_mt09.html
Coincidentally, today I got the news from my donor coordinator that my recipient sadly passed away in the last week or two, although from causes unrelated to the transplant. The only updates she receives from the patient coordinator are vague ones (in order to protect his privacy) so she had learned that the engraftment went well, the transplant was a success, and the patient had moved out of the ICU some months ago... and then on Thursday she learned the unfortunate news.
Apparently, it's remarkably rare for a patient to die from unrelated causes -- this was only the second time it had happened to one of her donor's recipients in her 10+ years at the NMDP, and the first time was due to a car accident.
But the silver lining... I can resume donating blood and platelets now, at least.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, June 18th, 2009
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3:48 pm
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This week I've started my now-traditional 16 weeks of official marathon training for the Twin Cities Marathon in October. Due to a change in USATF rules, sanctioned races are no longer required to ban portable music devices, and despite some foot-dragging, the TC marathon followed suit. I can legitimately listen to my ipod while I run, woohoo!
Lately, my music of choice has been the Star Wars radio drama, which is nicely broken up into <30 minute segments, just enough time for a 3 mile run. Last night I listened to episode #11, "The Jedi Nexus", which featured the gallant heroes fleeing from the Death Star, Obi-Wan being cut down by Darth Vader, and battling the TIE fighters as they escaped.
As god is my witness, I started laughing and had to stop running at the start of that space battle with the 4 sentry fighters, simply because this came to mind:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH5oRJKTWuc
More than once I hummed along to the dramatic score while pretending to shoot down TIE fighters, and having seen Family Guy's Blue Harvest, I can no longer hear that music without cracking up.
(Tonight's run? Episode #12, "The Case For Rebellion"!)
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
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8:54 am
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Last night I re-watched the remake of House on Haunted Hill. I loved that movie when it came out, although I had never heard of the original at the time. It wasn't a huge success and still only has a 5.2/10.0 on IMDB, but part of the appeal to me was that it was the first movie I had seen that seemed like an adaptation of The 7th Guest, which was one of my favorite games in the mid-90s.
Since then, that type of movie has strongly appealed to me: a haunted house (perhaps alive and malevolent? perhaps hosting a malevolent force?), a group of people (trapped inside? staying inside to win $1,000,000 apiece?) dying off one at a time, intra-party dynamics of suspicion, disbelief, and betrayal? This, to me, is what a horror movie's supposed to be.
Last weekend we watched The Mist, which fit those criteria remarkably well. No haunted house, but people trapped inside a supermarket. Supernatural monsters attacking and killing, but the focus isn't on them, it's on the interactions between the people and exploring how interpersonal relations develop or collapse under desperate circumstances.
Come to think of it, Cloverfield fit that somewhat well as well. Ostensibly a monster movie, it was more focused on the small group of people trying to figure out what's going on and how to get to safety than the traditional monster movie. Oh no, Godzilla's awakening. Now he's swimming to the harbor. Now he's smashing building after building. Clovie was not the subject of the film, but drove the action.
So, while I'm rambling here... any suggestions for films that fit those above criteria? Preferably the stuck-in-a-evil-house aspect, since The 7th Guest is still clever, and no matter what, it's always Wu-Tang Forever.
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(15 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
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10:50 am - Insane Chore Posse
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The ICP is in the hizzy.
Over the last few weeks I've been postponing certain projects around the house because of their size. The garage needs to be cleaned out and organized, some junk needs to be hauled away, some boxes need to be taken downstairs. The brush pile needs to be cut up into fireplace-sized pieces. I want to put in another 10x10 raised bed garden, although it's a little late for that this year. I thought how simple all of those would be if I only had three or four other strong backs to do grunt work, and then sit down with a cold refreshing American-style lager afterwards and congratulate ourselves on a job well done.
Thus was born the Insane Chore Posse.
Lem and I did a little brainstorming on this and came up with some simple guidelines. You show up, help someone with some home improvement or other unskilled labor (no one's expecting professional electricians, or the Spanish Inquisition), and the ICP will return the favor.
Maybe you want to pull some weeds, maybe you want to move those boxes out of the basement, maybe you want to move a pile of lumber and stack it behind the garage; the ICP is there for you. The more you show up to help, the more often you can enlist the ICP to make your life easier.
Right now we're leaning towards something like 3 hours on Saturday mornings, 8-11 or 9-12, capped off with a sammich and a beer and self-satisfaction for reversing entropy in one small section of the universe.
Speak up now, and don't worry, everyone is a documented worker so this won't bite you in the ass when you run for office in twenty years.
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(9 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, June 13th, 2009
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10:52 am
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2nd Annual leather pants run complete. It sounds so much more sexy to say that instead of lederhosenlauf. Now for a fulfilling day of laundry, gardening, yardwork, babby-minding, and watching MST3k.
I need a Miller High Life, because this is, indeed, the high life.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Friday, June 12th, 2009
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4:05 pm
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| Thursday, June 11th, 2009
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9:14 am
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This Saturday at 8 am I will be hauling my fat ass 3.1 miles up and down Selby Avenue in St Paul for the 2nd Annual Lederhosenlauf 5k. Elly and Eleanor will cheer me on. Afterward, beer and brats at the German-American Institute. I can't think of anything better to eat after a run than that at 8:30 in the morning.
And then on next Tuesday, I start the first scheduled run of the first week of marathon training again. Hello, summer. This year's motto: Shallow graves are for thin people, fatty!
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(7 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
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9:00 pm
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liquidgeneration.com recently put together a clip of the Top 100 Movie Lines in 200 Seconds:
I knew 85 of 100 - there are a number of other ones where I recognize the quote but didn't know the film title. It's also entirely likely that I fubared one or two of these below.
Fill in some gaps for me?
Edit: Now I'm only missing #12 and #83 in that list. Help?
( 100 movies )
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(10 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, June 8th, 2009
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12:21 pm - Marrow donation registry
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Longtime readers (well, nine months is a long time, right?) will remember that I was a bone marrow donor last fall. Normally, to join the registry you need to pay a tax-deductible $52 registration fee to cover materials and administration expenses involved in tissue typing. I had signed up for free during a sponsored registration drive in Boston some 10+ years ago, and had been called twice since then, with the second call leading to an actual donation.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ethel posted today that the National Marrow Donor Program is sponsoring the Be The Match Marrowthon from today to June 22nd, or as long as funding remains. That's right, you can be typed for free. The steps are easy.
1) Follow that link.
2) Complete the online form and order your registration kit. Do it now while it's free.
3) When the kit arrives, swab your cheeks with the cotton swab and mail it back.
And that's it. You're done. You're added to the marrow registry. It's likely that you'll never be a match, you'll never be called, you'll never actually donate... but every additional person in the registry increases the chances that someone with leukemia, with lymphoma, with one of so many deadly cancers can find a match and a cure.
I was a regular donor of whole blood and platelets prior to the marrow donation, and although I know the familiar "you save 3 lives with every pint of blood" refrain, I still felt a greater connection and a greater sense of accomplishment with the marrow donation. Of everyone in the registry, the transplanting doctor picked me as the best possible chance for the patient to survive. I wasn't just another random source of B positive blood.
I'm going to steal one quote from Ethel's post about this:
"It is not an exaggeration to say that you quite literally might be the only person on the planet who has the power to save someone's life, and you might be sitting here reading this right now and not even know it."
Please do sign up, please do register, please do what you can.
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(12 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
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3:39 pm
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First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak up, because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Catholic.
Then they came for the Comcast service techs, and not only did I speak up, but I told them where the techs were hiding.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
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8:04 am
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| Monday, May 25th, 2009
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9:11 pm
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Like most boys my age, I was a huge Star Wars fan as a youngster. I fondly remember birthday parties where the decorations on the cake were action figures from the films. I fondly remember getting the AT-AT walker for my birthday, and marveling that the trigger inside the cargo bay made the front cannons move back and forth while flashing and making Real Laser Sounds. I could go on, but I most fondly remember reading the Marvel comics, to which my grandmother gave me a subscription every year on my birthday. I collected them starting from issue #72 (Fool's Bounty) to the final issue #107 (All Together Now), and when I found back issues in gas stations, garage sales, and flea markets, I scraped together the dimes and quarters I had to add them to the pile. They're all still in a box somewhere in my boyhood bedroom at my parents' house, dog-eared, torn, stained, and faded. A six-year-old boy has no qualms about reading a comic that cost fifty cents.
I loved those comics because they took the first movie (then ESB, then ROTJ) and ran wild with the potential. The first few dozen comics touch on the romance between Luke and Leia, since the first movie set that up. Jabba the Hutt was a humanoid, obviously so. The kitsch level was unsurpassed, but that just made them all the more appealing to me. The potential in the Star Wars universe was embraced and Marvel just ran with it.
All of this is just laying the groundwork for the meat of this post: part of my incentive for running this summer is to buy these old Star Wars comics, helpfully assembled into omnibus packages by Dark Horse Comics earlier this decade. I've demarcated thresholds that I need to surpass before I can reward myself with the next issue. I've got #1, Doomworld, and I have an amazing feeling of excitement and elation reading it. The introduction to it, hidden behind the lj-cut below, describes this perfectly.
Now I just need to get on the road and push myself to that next goal so I can buy #2, Dark Encounters, issues 21-40.
This warrants a "hell yeah", and without further ado, the introduction to Doomworld:
( Read more... )
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
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12:52 pm
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And the garden is planted for this year: radishes, carrots, green onions, wax beans, green beans, snap peas, winter squash, zucchini, green peppers, serrano pepper, roma tomatoes, grape tomatoes, and good ol' fashioned ordinary tomatoes.
I had intended to build another 10' x 10' raised bed garden this year, but didn't quite find the time in the last month, so we'll live with that -- but it still produced an absurd amount, so much that I ended up filling an IKEA bag with tomatoes for John and Amy at one point.
There's 7 lbs of pork in the oven at 225F, and it still has six and a half hours to go. There's a load of diapers in the washing machine. My butt and knees are covered in dirt and mud. Sometime this afternoon I need to take Pirate for a run.
So far, it's a good Memorial weekend.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Monday, May 18th, 2009
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10:18 pm
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