Happy Halloween!
I was really looking forward to carving pumpkins with Pallas, I even got her her own little set of carving knives, but Michelle convinced me it might be better if she just painted her pumpkin. I made her a Tinkerbell pumpkin, and a Green Lantern one too, which on the back I drew a Red Lantern symbol but never got around to carving it. Too much tricking and treating to do!

  

I think one of life's greatest pleasures is trick or treating with a toddler. Trick or treat! She said it so clear at every house, and thanked everyone, even wishing one lady "Happy Halloween, okay!" Maleficent answered the door at one house and was shocked that I knew her name. But Pallas really impressed her by telling her she was the bad guy from Sleeping Beauty. Her middle name IS Aurora, dont'cha know. Naia didn't come out with us this year. But she was a pretty cute Elmo, even if the costume was several sizes too large.

 

 

I'm supposed to be at work right now but I took an extra day off for Halloween. But Homie Bear, it's not Halloween yet. I know, but right now I've been awake for 28 hours or so, which I didn't want to be the case tomorrow for trick or treating with the girls. How do you do that tense, anyways? The future implausible? I didn't want to have been yet that froop. Yeah that's another thing, the day after nightshift makes you a little loopy. Like, I went to buy Naia a Halloween costume today and for some reason it seemed eminently logical that she should have a Toddler 2T size despite the fact she's only ten months old and in the 25th percentile for size.
We got three pumpkins to carve tomorrow!  Hopefully they will be as awesome as last year's:

Hey look I accidentally started a meme. After years of trying to get the "Everyone give Homie Bear ten dollars" campaign to go viral, what finally sticks is the "What 5 action figfures would  you keep if the devil threatened to destroy the world unless you threw all your toys away but he still let you keep five because he's really a nice guy." And I have to credit my Flickr friend 8, who really got the ball rolling.
It started here, and continues here and then here and here, here, here, here , here, here, . . .

The Edmonton Examiner is one of those small, free community newspapers that mainly focus on neighbourhood feelgood stories. My buddy emailed me and said Pallas was on the cover of the newest one, undoubtedly that same photo from the Sun, unless she did a photoshoot she didn't tell us about, but ours didn't have it. It boggles the mind but apparently there are completely different versions printed up for different regions of the city. Anyways, if yours has my daughter on the cover could you save it for us? Cheers.
In other news, Glen Weldon asks Who's the Spookiest Super Villain? He makes a good point about lab coats.
I'll say this about my little qwerty Samsung phone- you can drop it down a flight of stairs, watch it bounce, hit the floor, skid several feet and it will still work. Pretty sure my wife's new iPhone 4S that I got her for early Christmas wouldn't survive the experience. Though to be sure, Pallas once dunked my Mom's iPhone in coffee and it was able to be saved with some professional CPU CPR. My reason for brining this up, though, other than to brag about the fact I got my wife a 4S for Christmas, is to express surprise that Samsung is currently outselling Apple in the Smartphone war.

Ironically, for a guy who calls himself Homie Bear, given that bears have the best sense of smell in the animal kingdom, I am anosmic. Doesn't bother me too much. I don't play it up but I don't hide it either (which is why, after 9 years, this is the first I mentioned it). What happens is, at work, after I mention to the guys that I don't have a sense of smell, I'll find myself in a truck and there will alla sudden be all this snickering, and I'll ask what? and they'll be like, we was just testing you man, we been letting 'er rip all day and you ain't said nothing, I guess you really can't smell! Just the other day my good buddy Jay was fueling me up and he mentioned how gross it was, every now and then he caught a whiff of the shitter. Hmm, I said. Oh sorry, he says, I keep forgetting you can't smell. That's okay, it's not like I was just thinking I wish I could smell that shitter.
Really, it's kind of a super power, especially when it comes to changing diapers. But it means food has always been kind of utilitarian to me, a bit. Our latest book club book was Ruth Reichl's Garlic And Sapphires all about when she was the food critic for the New York Times. On the one hand, it was fascinating that she could write about food in such a rich way- the fricassaise has an oceanic flavor but the sensual succulence of the truffles held a note of a hidden brook etc etc. For me it's kinda "It was yummy" or "It was yucky." On the other hand, there's only so much food writing I can take before I need to go read some comics. Snobbery doesn't sit well with me. Recihl is not the snob, though she falls into the trap of it a bit as she dresses up in disguise to avoid being recognized as the pre-eminent food critic in the world. I liked the book- I just didn't like the world it described. Sommeliers? Not part of my world. And Maitre d's that have no time for you? Come to my world for five minutes we'll see how you make out in a coal mine buddy. Yeah. I visited New York about nine years ago, my buddy Jon who grew up in the same small town as me moved there. So there we were in the East Village just outside a liquor store or something, we had just bought a bottle of wine (undoubtedly something cheap) and were just hanging out on the sidewalk when a rich new York lady all into fashion with her little pocket dog walks by, and she did the classic snobby thing where she sniffed and said "Excuse me" in those icy tones reserved for the editors of fashion magazines and the like and I just couldn't resist- I said, "Why, did you fart?" You can't take us provincial small town Albertans anywhere.

Apparently I had stashed a box of Groo comics at my sister's house lo these past ten years or so. Do you remember Groo?

Sergio Aragones, Mark Evanier and Stan Sakai are to blame. Just teasing. I love Groo. Did, anyways. He still has a place in the nostalgic rooms of my geeky heart. Most issues were kind of the same, with a lot of running jokes, like someone says to Groo, "I know you are slow of mind" and he eventually, with a longer gap every time, says "Hey what did he mean I was slow of mind?" And there was a hidden message in each issue ("This is the hidden message" it always said if you were clever enough to find it). I pulled a couple out today to read- issue 11 of the Marvel series, in which a handsome Adonis named Arcadio takes the credit for all of Groo's accomplishments, managing to fool everyone, even Groo. And also #2 of the original Pacific Comics series, something I didn't even know I had. The price tag on the sleeve said $4 but that was crossed out and in its place it said $200. Which would make it the most expensive comic I own! I certainly don't remember paying $200 for it but you know, you can have it for a mere hundred if you want. That is a great deal, as any fool can plainly see.

She was in the paper!  Of course this really didn't impress her much as she's on the internet every day. She has no time for old media.

Tried to work overtime today but was stymied so instead we took the girls to West Edmonton Mall for a Halloween thing at Galaxyland. It was fun. Usually we avoid WEM but it wasn't so bad. There's a small possibility Pallas will be in the Sun tomorrow as a photographer took some photos of her since she was one of the only ones dressed up.

 

 

Pooing in the Woods is 9 years old today!  Which in blog years is pretty much a century. One more year for an even ten, then it might be time to shut er down. Or not, I don't know.
Here's nine random highlights culled from the previous nine years of archives:
The Case of the Missing Purple Gasoline
Terminus
Me vs all the haul trucks
Again, the abomination
I just love warehouses
Black heart scarring darker still
E=mc2
The Frog Store
Ode to Nemicolopterus crypticus

Although I didn't attend Comic-Con this year, I feel like I almost got more out of it in some ways by following the Twitter feeds of those who did, panelists and artists and such. Last year when we went, I hadn't yet fully resubmerged into the comics world, going mainly because of my long association with deviantArtists and the Star Wars community. And after all, it was Michelle's idea to go, for which I can thank Edward James Olmos since he gave her chills at a Calgary convention by saying "So say we all!" That was pretty great. Anyways, going in 2010 was the catalyst for me to jump back into comic fandom.
Thanks to the aforementioned Twitter feeds, I heard about yesterday's rather unexpected layoff of 15 Marvel employees. You certainly didn't hear about from Marvel's Facebook feed. The newspapers wouldn't really pick up on it, except for maybe a side paragraph in the business section where it would probably just speculate on how the move would impact Disney's share value or something. Here's a fairly informative article, maybe a little speculative as well but certainly more savvy than what I know. I'm just a guy who's loved the Hulk and Spider-man et al for over 30 years now. It's be nice if the custodians of these characters, the keepers of the legacy so to speak, were treated with a little more respect.

After being so wordy yesterday, today I just have some photos. Here we have 35 truck, looking like it is auditioning for a part in a children's show about mining:



And just a quick shot out my window as the small snow storm we had today started to clear up and melt away.

I'm glad I decided to give Malcolm Gladwell another chance. I read Blink a few years ago and though it was a fun read I was left a little unsatisfied- the thesis was (I may be a little off now a few years on) essentially that you can really trust your snap judgments except for when you can't. But this past week or so I've been reading What the Dog Saw and loving it. I keep turning to Michelle and saying "Even if you don't read this book you should just read this one essay," but I say it about all the essays so really she should just read the whole thing. The essays vary widely by topic but they definitely have some commonality- they tend to point out a new way of thinking about something familiar, giving you new insight on a wider world. Gladwell is really really good at pointing out things you might never have noticed but once you're shown, they almost seem obvious. Once I figured out that that was what he did, I learned to adjust my expectations accordingly. So with Blink, I kept waiting to be given some tools to figure out when my first impressions are trustworthy and when not. BUt he never promised to do that, I just assumed he would. Same with many of these essays, and here's an example I spent some time pondering today at work: In the essay The Art of Failure he discussed the subtle but fundamental differences between choking and panicking. I don't want to just repeat what he said but I was completely engaged because it seems to me that having understanding of what's going on in your head when you either choke or panic can be useful for the next time it happens. Again, Gladwell is content to point out that this is what happens without really going into how to prevent it from happening to you. Which is fine because I have 12 hours at work to mull things over. It kind of has a personal stake for me because of my recent motorcycle crash- by Gladwell's definitions I panicked rather than choked in that situation.



Now- I have always prided myself on my coolness under pressure and I honestly can say I don't panic, at least in the sense of getting all excited and doing the chicken-just-met-an-axe thing. But when I realized, going into that corner on my bike, that I was going too fast, I grabbed my brake, and that was my undoing. As my dad pointed out, braking while cornering causes a bike to stand up which is the opposite of what you want. With more experience, that situation woulda been took in stride. But as a newbie, in that moment without tons of experience to draw on, I just did the only thing I could think of- grab the brake. textbook panic, according to Gladwell, because in the stress of panic you lose short term memory. So even though I was totally calm as I flew through the air, I have to say I panicked. At least I didn't choke! But choking is reserved for those who really know what they are doing. So some day I hope to be good enough to choke.

Edward James Olmos follows me on Twitter. He's not hanging on my every word though - he follows pretty much everyone who follows him.  Not that I tweet much anyways, I have a hard enough time blogging every day which so far in October I have been able to do. But in honour of Eddie Adama, we watched one of his classic movies last night- Stand and Deliver. It was kind of fascinating from an anthropological/historical point of view- set in the mid 80s much like part of my own life was. So thinking about this gentleman who was hired to teach computers at a school that had no computers (so he teaches them calculus instead) who in real life goes on to be active on Twitter . . . the world has changed a lot in the past 25 or so years, which is not a brilliant thing to say but it's an easy thing to forget. Of course, you could reach the same conclusion by watching original Battlestar and then the new one.

Spoiler alert! If you still want to see Green Lantern, don't read this.
Even after I downgraded my expectations for the Green Lantern movie (based on all the negative reviews, though I still held out some hope as a comic book geek that maybe it was too comic booky for everyone else) I still found myself disappointed. Often when a comic book movie disappoints, it's because the director seems to be completely ignorant of its source material. Elektra, for example. But that's not the problem here- save some minor tweaks for streamlining and simplicity's sake, the comic books, and specifically Geoff Johns' excellent version, are more or less faithfully transferred to the big screen. Maybe that's the problem- Hector Hammond with his oversized brain looks silly in "real life" and as a villain he fails because the poor guy was an innocent victim of circumstances he never asked to be involved in. He's quite a sympathetic character, actually (in the comics he has no redeeming features). Hal Jordan isn't even as sympathetic as poor old Hector. Hal's kind of an ass, actually. Not a charming ass like Tony Stark, just a kid who never grew up and doesn't know how to clean up the messes he makes. Maybe ass is too harsh, since I did like him, and I liked Ryan Reynolds fine.
 Parallax? Well, kind of lame. Better than Fantastic Four 2's Galactus in that he was more than a giant cloud- but not much more. And of course it stretches credulity that the entire Green Lantern Corps would be "He's too tough let's let him win" and then when Hal is like, "I'll fight him all by myself even though I am the greenest of Green Lanterns. Everything will be okay, you guys just chill on Oa!" I did like that he basically punched Parallax in the face, though. Nice.
Sinestro was the best part of the movie, I thought. The actor classed up the joint with his performance. Unfortunately, the final scene where he puts on the yellow ring doesn't really work because there is absolutely no reason for him to do so. In the comics he has a very complicated and nuanced reason for creating the Sinestro Corps and going to war with the Green Lanterns. Here it looks like he did it for the hell of it. I stilll hope they make a sequel, though. A war between the Corps would be pretty cool on the big screen. Maybe.

Last week I put up the Halloween decorations, and realized they were kind of sad. Styrofoam chunks missing, ancient curses nullified, that kind of thing. So I went and got some more. It looked like a billion things in the shopping cart but then when set up, less so. Oh well. I can always get more.

 

 

Back from another round of night shifts. Not much to say about that week- just a nice easy week, three parts Kress truck one part loader. Podcasts!
What's that band that has some American expats in it that are based out of Montreal and they're really good? Ar something? No, not Ar. . . hmmm . . . Barr. .  yeah-  Barr Brothers! They were on Q and played a couple of live songs. Wow. I was using the finger-swipey scrub motion to find the spots in the podcast to replay those songs. I can't find a link to it but all these are from iTunes anyways. CBC Q.
Speaking of music via podcast, Tegan and Sara have an entire folk festival concert available from NPR music which was nice and Tegan and Sara-y.
As It Happens had a pair of interviews with a Welsh gentleman whose giant vegetables caught the attention of Snoop Dogg who then posted a video to YouTube inviting him to a concert and backstage to discuss horticultural techniques.
Stephen Tobolowsky entertained, as always. And Freakonomics had an episode on hitch-hiking which I found interesting because of all my hitch-hiking adventures.

This pretty much says it all.

UPDATE: Pallas announced to us out of the blue that Cinderella was on her Facebook. Neither of us remembers ever mentioning Facebook in conversation but who knows, she had to have picked it up from somewhere!

I'm sure I've mentioned this sometime in the past 9 years, but Halloween is my favourite time of year. But horror movies and books are probably my least favorite of the genres of movies and books that I like- which is to say, horror is on the list of stuff I like, but it's at the bottom. Below sci-fi, fantasy, superherody, drama, comedy  and western. Science fiction and fantasy head the list because the emotions those evince, at least when done well, is a sense of wonder. Like, you want to go there and do that. Middle-Earth, an asteroid field, Hogwart's. Being a superhero would be pretty great, right?
Horror just tries to scare you. It's right there in the name. Some people really enjoy that feeling, but for me, not as much. And most movies don't really achieve that goal anyways. Then there's the sub-genres like slasher and all that stuff which I've never been into.
Nightmare Befote Christmas and Corpse Bride? Yes please.Sweeney Todd? No thank you. Well, that was alright but the Saw movies and me need never intersect ever again.
But after saying all that, I still love Halloween because the horror trappings, the ghosts and goblins and pumpkins and everything, is fun in a way that horror movies are not.

Have you ever heard of High Dynamic Range photography? The first couple of times I saw an HDR photo I was kind of blown away without really knowing why. Then they got to be kind of all the same, a bit. Maybe a little fake. Plus I am not really a big believer in heavily editing photos with software, I like to see what I can achieve in-camera. Although I am marginally open to the idea in the future, for now it is a photography blindspot for me. Here's a Flickr group devoted to HDR to give you an idea of what it is. Gizmodo posted a pretty cool HDR motion capture video, though. I used to have a little 3 megapixel FujiFilm camera, a Finepix, and that camera took some amazing shots for whatever reason. None of these photos were altered in any way by me- they came out of the camera like that:



I suppose the foregrounds would be a little better exposed if I edited them for HDR, but I like them fine. Spooky, Halloweenish. I took them at work one day many years ago now.

Then there's what I am going to call the Unapologetic Pop Culture Hellyeahs for those things that all the hipsters and everyone else but you turn their noses up at but you love. I got tons of those. Tons! Exhibit A: Load and ReLoad by Metallica. In fact, Metallica in general. No longer the cutting edge of cool that they were a mere 20 years ago, but I will never give up on Jaymz and the boys. Hellyeah! In fact I still listen to all those 90s thrash and death metal bands almost every day...
Exhibit B: Star Wars. Even the prequels, mostly. Childhood nostalgia goes a long way.
ElfQuest, and other 80s comics. Again, nostalgia trumps goodness! I'd mention modern comics too but no one really turns their noses up at them anymore. Not like in the good old days...
So You Think You Can Dance- most reality or competition shows fly under my radar but Michelle got me into the SYTYCD- some years I watch, some I don't, but there's some amazing dancing going on. The Canadian version was recently cancelled and all I can say about that is I hope Tre Armstrong lands on her feet.

Plus: Avengers Trailer!

James Bond came up at dinner last night and once again I was forced to admit that I have never been much for James Bond. It's what the Pop Culture Happy Hour folks would call a pop culture blind spot, except when they discuss blind spots, they mean they're open to them, just that they've never really gotten around to them before. Me, no real desire to get into Bond, James Bond. Shaken, not stirred and all that. Maybe the Daniel Craig ones but they're hardly new so if it was important to me I would have done it before now. In high school I had many a geeky argument over why I just wasn't into Bond, preferring guys like Indiana Jones. Bond was sophisticated, rich and cultured- probably the type to use an Oxford comma like I just didn't. Indy wasn't any of those things and I sure as hell wasn't either! If not shaving's good enough for Indy it's good enough for me goddammit. And so forth.
Other Pop Culture Blind Spots- Twilight. No surprise there, and I'm not the target demographic so no one gets hurt over that one.
Arcade Fire- Michelle and I both are marginally open to them, supporting Canadian (mostly) music and all, but so far we don't really get it.
Dexter was one but we just started watching the first season and are suitably hooked so cross that one off the list.
If I had a reliable commenting system I would invite you to share yours but for some reason comments only show up in Safari. Or Firefox? Oh yeah Safari.

Happy Thanksgiving!  Right now I'm feeling thankful that the Oilers have a perfect record, and hopeful that we'll still be able to say that for a week or so.
This morning we ran a 5 km Turkey Trot down the road by the rec center. Pretty good run, one killer hill at the end but we did alright. I think my time was in the 28:30 range, not bad for pushing a stroller with both girls. I know I was the first stroller roller to cross the line, anyways, for which I won a DQ gift card. Truthfully the gift card was a random draw I think but I choose to see it as the First Prize for my category of Old Guys Pushing Young Kids. Me and Pallas even had a cheer we made up for us:
Run so fast!
Kick some ass!
Come in last!

We went for a walk in the river valley today, and I didn't bring my camera which is a shame since it was a beautiful day. Pallas loves the forest, she is forever saying she's going to the forest to find her father, which apparently she learned from Beauty and the Beast. But here's a good photo of Naia:

There was an article in a Sports Illustrated, circa 1994, in which the writer related an anecdote about a guy named Joe Schitz. Seems Mr. Schitz got so tired of his name that he legally changed it. To Frank. Now no one would ask him "Whaddyaknow Joe?"
Last night at supper with some friends we were reading an article about Steve Jobs, seven things you never knew about him or something, and I impressed them by knowing stuff like his Syrian dad and who Joan Baez was and how to say Wozniak. It's not like I explained how transistors and resistors circuitly electrify with ohms to make an iPad work or anything like that, since obviously I can't. Anyways this got me thinking. What do I know?

Here's what I know about what I know.

Some of what I know is wrong. Too bad I don't know what. My wrong knowledge can come to me from an erroneous source- ie what I was taught was wrong to begin with. Or the knowledge changes over time- we were taught Pluto was a planet but now they teach us it is a dwarf planet (though we know better don't we precious?) Or our brain can fail us and "save" the info incorrectly. I was so sure Crockett's car in Miami Vice was a Testarossa- I could even recall the cheese grating in the opening credits, but my Dad, who knows cars but his pop culture fu is spotty at best, told me it was a Ferrari Daytona 365. No way!  Way! We argued and bet and then I owed him money. Though just now as a I googled it I see he DID drive a Testarossa after the Spyder was blown up in Season 3. I want my money back!

Much of what I know I've forgotten. At one time I used to know calculus and crystallography and what all the guts of a shark were, among other things, but now I don't.

None of what I know is not already known by google. Unless it's personal experiences and stuff like that I suppose. And the internet has been known to be wrong on occasion... So what's the point in acquiring knowledge when all the known knowledge of the entire world is at our fingertips (or Siri query)? I don't know!  Google it. Nah. I just like being smrt, even if all my knowledge is thoroughly useless. Like the fact that there was a joke in a magazine 17 years ago that would make an excellent intro to this little minimeditation. That's something google can't do for you- associate and correlate and bring it on home, from the top!

Sometimes you just need to go to Cracked.com and read some of their lists- like this one- 5 Absurd Ways Comic Books Have Resurrected Dead Superheroes.

Here's a video from the cab of my loader I took at work today, I just taped the camera to the dash while I loaded. So not all that riveting, but you get an idea what my day is like. Except it's more so. Oh yreah, nothing much happens for the first 1:30, and then nothing too much happens after that but at least it's different nothing than the first minute of nothing.

New Feist today! Sweet. Does anyone buy physical CDs anymore? Do you? Why or why not? I pretty much go with iTunes now, phased out on the discs without even really noticing I was doing it. It's the convenience mostly, and the price. If the disc was 9.99 I'd get it, then you'd have a copy for the car or if your computer and Airport Extreme get stolen/melted in a fire or whatever. I still buy books even though I intend to go with iPad versions one of these days. Once I clear my pile. That I keep adding to.

That's more like it- back on my truck today with my regular crew. Easy day, had some minor issues with my truck so I helped the mechanic out a bit and took some pictures from inside the box, somewhere I'd never been. Trippy, see?



Also here is what you see when I pass you.

Oh right I hate pumps! But I like getting paid double, so I went to work today on overtime as a pumpman. I figured it wouldn't be too bad, but it was rianing/snowing all day and there was mud and flooding and all that stuff I hate. One road was so flooded the water was up over the exhaust pipe and the truck made a funny gurgling sound and then died shortly after. Then a backhoe dropped a Godwin pump three times. But it still ran. They're tough, what the hell.  Nice thing? I was the third banana on the pump crew today, plus there's a contractor outfit taking care of one pit, so it wasn't all on me like in the old days. And now that it's over, it wasn't so bad. The paycheck will take away the sting anyways.

October already? Sweet! Too bad there's a pumpkin shortage in Alberta this year, I have some pretty good ideas for jack o' lanterns this time around.