First ones on the block! Got some new Halloween deocrations this yeaar so as not to be too repetitive. I love the black pumpkin inflatable thing we have but this year I went with something a little different. And that life-size skeleton was too cool to pass up. Although the first one I bought turned out to be missing a foot and an arm. Luckily I discovered this when I was buckling it into my passenger seat (he has to go somewhere right?) so I took it back into the Walmart and exchanged it for a whole one. Not gonna lie- had I got it all the way home I woulda just accepted that some skeletons are incomplete and obviously this one met a violent end. Carrying it through the walmart I made all the easy jokes to passersby like, "This isn't for halloween this is my wife, thats how long we've been in here" and so forth. I am a laff riot.

Bonus pic of the girls because they're sooooo cute!

 

Yay October! This month marks the tenth anniversary of Pooing in the Woods. Been trying to think of appropriate commemorative things to do to mark the decade but so far drawing a blank. I mean, it would be easy to search the archives for favourite posts and such but that doesn't seem very interesting to me. Also been thinking about completely overhauling the blog, maybe going to Wordpress or something since my comments widget went away forever starting today. And maybe retiring the Homie Bear identity and all that, the internet has kind of outgrown usernames in recent years. Well, the actual anniversary date is the 22nd so I have a few weeks to think about it. I'd invite your comments but not allowed!

I got a phone call from Pallas today. She was excited to tell me about her adventure on the High Level Bridge Streetcar. "That streetcar was pretty brave! He was so high on the bridge. He didn't fall in the river!"

I know you want to borrow my copy of A Feast For Crows by George RR Martin, but you can't. Because it's a signed first edition. Greenwood's Bookstore brought him in waay back in 2006 or so. Michelle and I used to live quite close to Greenwood's so we spent a lot of time there on dates. Yup, for us, going to a bookstore is a great date. And an expensive one . . . though in a good way. Michelle was even known to be a little star-struck when she saw Laurie Greenwood in the store (though she hasn't actually owned it for a few years now). Anyway, it was announced or revealed that it's closing. Yet another independent bookstore casualty. Everyone thought it would be the big box stores that killed them off but I think it was the Kindle and iPad that did it in the end.
And actually, one of the last remaining used bookstores in Edmonton is also closing down, more for not having anywhere to move to in October when their lease expires forever. Belgravia Books and Treasure. This one makes me even more sad, I think. Richard always always always asks about Michelle and Pallas (though Naia, as is her wont, often gets forgotten) by name when I go in there. Not too many places like that anymore. I love used bookstores because you always find the most amazing books that you had no idea even existed.
Well, I'm not exaggerating when I say I've bought, read and loved literally hundreds of books from those two stores, so I will miss them both very much.
Cheers.

There was a local controversy here in Edmonton last spring when a teacher at Ross Shepherd High School, Lynden Dorval, was suspended for going against the Edmonton School Board's No Zero policy. He gave a zero to a student for not handing in assignments. As you can imagine, he garnered near-unanimous support in the community, where everyone was quick to point out that in the real world there isn't a no-zero policy. Last week he was fired. He landed on his feet by getting another job at a private school. But still. Public sentiment squarely in his favor.

My wife is a teacher, so we listened to the news on the radio about his termination with interest.   I made the inevitable easy comments about how silly a no-zero policy is. Her response was a little more nuanced, as someone with university training in pedagogical methods- something of which I know nothing. She said that a zero for incomplete assignments doesn't really address what's been learned or not learned but is rather an inappropriate punishment for a behavioral issue, not an academic one. I know I'm very likely misquoting both her exact words and even her intent, but that's the gist as I understood it. A mark should only be a reflection of learning, and have nothing to do with behavior. So another way to put it might be that marks are meant to measure knowledge but have no usefulness or function for judging behavior.

I didn't really have a good response at the time, though I did feel that there was an argument that could be made there somewhere. And since all I do all day is bomb up and down a haulroad in my Kress truck, I was able to come up with what I think is a reasonable pedagogical model, bearing in mind that as a Kress Truck driver in a coal mine, my expertise in this area is nil.

What if, for any course or class, we set a baseline mark of zero. We come in as fresh faced newbies innocent of any specialized knowledge, and hence we have 0%. Yeah we might know a few facts ahead of time, but let's all start on an even keel.

The teacher's job then is to impart the knowledge of the subject at hand, the curriculum, in order to bring all the students to an end mark of 100%. The ideal goal would be for everyone to learn all the necessary data and knowledge.

Assignments and tests and all that demonstrate how much of the curriculum beyond 0% a student has gained. Hey, if I'm 47% smarter (or rather, more knowledgeable) about calculus at the end of a semester than I was at the beginning, that doesn't sound so bad. If only my RRSPs grew so fast! And if I'm 80%, 90% or 100% more knowledgeable, well that's fantastic.

Not handing in work is simply a waiving of the right to demonstrate a gain of knowledge, and therefore receiving a mark of 0% is simply remaining at the baseline where one started. One could say the teacher didn't even give (or award) a zero, since they already had the zero to begin with.

Hey? Am I right? I never took any courses in logic or rhetoric back in university, so I'm still at the baseline 0% in those disciplines, but sounds alright to this coal miner!

One of these days I'll post something. Or not. I dunno. But in the meantime have a cookie- it's my birthday! (tomorrow)

Finally got some photos of that incident from July. Kind of more of the aftermath after a backhoe pulled the truck out of the sump. Actually, it pulled it out and accidentally tipped it over on its side. Pics aren't the greatest but beggars can't be choosers I guess.

Pallas got a Batman playset today at Costco and came busting through the door so we could play it together. It was pretty fun. Pallas asked if Catwoman is a good guy or a bad guy.
Well, she's sort of morally ambiguous.
I want to call her a good guy.
Well, that's the nice thing about moral ambiguity.
So the bad guys had a bad guy party and the good guys had a good guy party.
Then Joker and Robin and Scarecrow went to the library (You can joke me later, Joker, we have to go to the library now) and Hal Jordan tucked all his kids in safe and sound, even some Strawberry Shortcakes. Oh and the villains broke out of jail but got sent to the naughty mat.

Pallas: Do you know why I sent you to the naughty mat? Because you came out of jail!

Villains: Oh ok, sorry.

Pallas: I forgive you.

Animethon 19 was this weekend. I wish I knew what a great convention this was before now- one year, maybe in 1998 or so I blundered into it and it was tiny. There were maybe a dozen people in a classroom watching an anime movie, my friend and I popped in to watch for a bit and then we left, and that seemed to be the extent of it. Turns out it's grown since then. I think I heard there were something like 7000 people there over the course of the weekend- not bad at all. I went on Friday thinking I would zip into the artist alley since I knew Drake Tsui would be there, and wound up making a weekend of it. Even brought the family out on Sunday.
One of the things that I think is really cool about it is it's been held at Grant Macewan College (University now) which is one of my favorite buildings ever. Crazy towers and spiral staircases and walkways and a big clock and stuff.  Great quad-type greenspace outside which provides great backdrops for cosplay photography.
Downside- they announced at the closing ceremony that there would be no Animethon 20 unless a whole lot of people stepped up to volunteer and share some of the load. More details here.



 

 

 

There's this old railway that runs kind of parallel to sections of our haulroad. It's part of the Coal Branch. It was used mainly in the 1920s to service the coal-mining towns . Lots of interesting history there, but of course the way my brain works I just like looking down at the twisted remnants and pretend I'm in some future Mad Maxy apocalypse where we all pilot giant robots to extract the last dead black guts from the earth. . . and hey look the future is now!  But anyways.
China Miéville's new book is called Railsea and about a whole planet where there aren't oceans but rather one vast sea of railroads. The sealife is giant moles (moldywarpes) and other burrowing creatures monsterized for the purposes of awesomeness. Trains ply the rails trading amongst nations and uncovering salvage of varying vintages. The cover says it's kind of a Miévillian take on Moby Dick (Miéville covers Melville!) but really the only other books it's actually like are other Miévilles. Which is fine by me. 
This is now the second book China has written about trains, so I imagine he's a bit of a trainspotter or train nerd or whatever but it's not like you have to be one too. Trains never really impressed me much growing up but I do love giant monsters and mysterious derelicts from another age. 
Derelicts like these, you might say:

  

The House
 (for Steve)

So you're driving around in rural Alberta and it's not the Alberta you know with mountains and foothills it's just flat prairie far as the eye can see, maybe the odd hoodoo here and there and they definitely are odd. And then there's a town, no leadup, no sign, just town. Not much of a town, for sure, but still a town. The bank is in an atco trailer sharing space with the local realtor. There's a gas station. They have a surprisingly nice playground though, and you're not really sure if that's a nice thing to say about it or kind of mean since it's the only nice thing you can think of to say about it.
But of course you're not just driving around randomly- you have somewhere to be. The house is in a nice enough neighbourhood, big old trees and well-manicured lawns, the picture of smalltown Alberta, could be 1960 for all you know. Hell, there's even some sort of 1960s rocketshiplooking extendovan on the street. Is that a barbecue you can see in its window? There's always some weird thing in the driveway when you come here Steve says.
There's old cars, too, hot rods in various states of repair, and toolboxes and a stack of cartons of protein shakes in the driveway. In fact, the last time you were here a year or so ago, there was a stack of protein shakes, right there . . . that's not the same stack is it? Steve deftly avoids the elderly mother of the owner who is outside gardening but you stop and talk and she tells you the same story she told you last year about how great it is that this house was built using lumber from old government buildings that were demolished to make newer government buildings. From the outside the house is maybe a little more ornate than you would expect in Alberta, a little more fortressy-looking, but otherwise doesn't really seem like it was cobbled together from spare parts. It's only when you go inside that you see it. That you're not really in a normal house.
Your eye isn't really drawn to any particular thing at first, since there's so much to absorb. Over there is a pair of outboard engines, and here's an old red wagon, and some antique bicycles and guitars and a display case with oldtimey telephones and gaslamps and whatnot inside, but then you see to your left that this floor is actually only there to provide a catwalk so that you can look down on the basement where two whole cars are being worked on or built or something in what amounts to a Victorian style library with bookshelves two storeys high, complete with a grizzly skull next to a hippie love sign and some reader's digest books and a knight's helmet and a faux Egyptian bust. Of course, most Victorian libraries didn't have an entire wall devoted to a mural of Camelot or somesuch at sunset, looking out over the ocean. And there's the cars. Two of them.
But whatever, you're not here for that. Instead you climb the spiral staircase which has what one can only hope are structural support beams painted up to look like spruce trees. How do you like my spiral staircase the owner asks you. Yeah, it's . . . fancy you say. Yup, they're way safer than normal staircases he says. Because you know, if you fall, you won't go all the way down. You nod thoughtfully, but refrain from saying what you are thinking, which is that most normal staircases have railings and not just open spaces between the steps. And is that landing for the attic just free-floating plywood? Upstairs is why you're there, and you do what you came to do.
There's dust and there's bugs and there's the debris and detritus that you knew would be there. It doesn't matter. The owner, having displayed a certain tendency towards packratishness, is easily persuaded to keep much of the stuff. Most of the rest goes in the garbage, including piles of old expired medication. I can give you the number of the agency that disposes of expired meds the owner says. Sure you say, and when he turns around you toss it in the garbage. It's going to the dump where it won't be a danger to junkies looking to get high so who cares.
When you're done you try to make a clean getaway but the owner comes and says there's more stuff in the attic, and he leads us further up the spiral staircase. Someone lives up there, you discover. A mouldering mattress with sheets that haven't been changed in way way too long, and a plasma tv and a dr phil book on the nightstand about reclaiming your relationships. It's stifling hot and you instantly want nothing more than to leave. This guy's lived here two years now with no heat, can't talk him into moving downstairs the owner says. And he pushes aside the tarp wall and leads us past piles and piles of lumber under a roof made of that greenhouse stuff they used to use, kind of translucent plastic or whatever. How has this place not burned down you wonder. Anyways there's a bit more to do so you do it and get out of there.
And if you're still with me after all that, you might be wondering what the hell I'm talking about, what is this house. This house. It defies description. All I can say is it's the saddest place in the world.

Michelle's dad passed away on Friday and we were down in Calgary for the funeral. It was a hard time but there were some things I will definitely always remember. Pallas especially was amazing, she and Naia stayed with me in Edmonton the first night while Michelle went down to take care of some details, then we drove down on Sunday.
Naia was sick and mostly just sucked her thumb and stared forlornly. Pallas asked quite a few questions, like "What's a funeral?" "It's where we go to say good-bye to Papa Zunic forever." "But I don't wanna say good-bye forever, I want Papa Zunic to get better." "I'm sorry, sweety, that's not how it works." "But but, who's gonna be Uncle Steve and mommy's daddy now?" "No one, sweetheart."
Later she decided to sing a song, called the Going to Calgary song. It went like this: "Don't be sad, we're going to Calgary tomorrow. Don't be sad, we're going to see mommy." and repeat. I told her it was a great song, the only thing was, we were actually going to Calgary that very day, not tomorrow. "I know Dad, that's just how the song goes."
At the funeral she actually appointed herself an usher, more or less, hadning out one of those memorial cards to all the guests as they came in. She even told me to go back to what I was doing because she was busy working. Anyways, the funeral was good.

There's this brilliant guy named jouste on deviantArt who always draws the most unique and original character designs with these crazily hilarious bios. Finally a game company took notice and hired him to do some work on their new game Shellrazer, which comes out today. Giant turtles vs orcs and stuff!  Very cool.  I bought my copy so now Pallas and I will have something other than zombie-bastruction strategies to discuss at suppertime. Right now I'm working nightshifts so I haven't actually had a chance to try it out.
Here's the link. Only 99 cents!

Michelle saw some Halloween costumes at Costco yesterday and called me to see if she should buy one for Pallas, even though it's not even close to Halloween yet and who knows if she would still care about superheros by then. "Who cares?" I said, "Get her one for today!" Every day is a good day to dress up as Spider-man! Pallas agrees, because she was super excited! "I'll be the best Spider-man ever, I promise!" she told Michelle. So we spent the better part of yesterday fighting bad guys together- I may even have donned my Green Lantern costume from last years's Halloween. Cosplay day at casa homie bear!
Speaking of cosplay and the like, I just watched Comic-con Episode IV- A Fan's Hope. It's a documentary that they filmed in 2010, they year we went. So it was pretty cool, trying to find me or Michelle in the crowd shots (because then we could update our IMDB page) but I didn't see us. I did see lots of the cosplayers I met and photographed though.

So not only did I get piss-tested for that incident with the pickup truck a couple weeks ago (though described just a few posts down) but last night I got written up for it as well. But why? I wish I got to keep a copy of the form they make you read and sign. It said something like this:

On June 26th you had a pickup truck go into reverse and land in a sump, resulting in loss of a light vehicle. Any repeat occurrence will result in discipline.

 Hmm, I wonder how I can remember not to let any more trucks self-slam into reverse and drive into a sump so that I don't get disciplined? Because that seems like something I would forget.... and isn't being written up being disciplined? Anyways, there was a space for me to respond, and I did, thusly:

So, an inanimate object has a mechanical failure and I'm to blame?          That's how you spell                    B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.

Also, no berm- bullshit. And, not even my job. Bullshit!

And in the space where I was supposed to sign, I wrote in "I'm not signing this."

Anyways, later I regretted my choice of words a bit. Technically, the Ford was not inanimate. The very fact of it being far too animate was the cause of the whole problem- it was a failure of inanimation. Well, these guys are hardly literary critics- I think they'll get the message.

I asked my union vice-president about filing a grievance, and he said he would be too happy to do so though by the time it got through, the ninety days of my disciplinary term would be up anyways. And there's really no consequences to being on the disciplinary term, so other than my disgruntled sense of injustice, not to mention my 11-year perfect record prior to this, it doesn't really mean anything. But goddamn it they just pissed me off!  Plus I want a new iPhone!

Pallas went downstairs this morning and informed Michelle, "Mommy, I've been thinking, I think I need to go to the library to buy my own Hulk books."
So of course I took her, thinking we would just grab a few of those learn-to-read books, but they didn't have any. So we grabbed Ultimate Spider-Man Volume 1, a Clone Wars Visual Encyclopedia or something, Winnie the Pooh and an animated movie called Hulk vs Thor. All her picks!
On the way home, she asked me about Hulk.
"Hulk's a good guy?"
"Yup!"
"He's not a bad guy?"
"No."
"But sometimes he gets very very angry?"
"Well, yeah."
"But he's a good guy."
"Exactly."
"He's friendly."
"Yup."
"But only when someone tries to bastroy him he fights them."
"Yeah."
"Green Hulk means go, Red Hulk means stop!"

Naia Peanut is in the 3rd percentile for weight. She is quite wee, it's true. But not unhealthily so. We are just a small people, us Homie Bears. Well, my dad's pretty big but he's the anomaly of our family, I think. A couple of years ago, I was edging up to the 200lb mark, and trying mightily to surpass it. Being 140lbs all through high school and university, hitting 200lbs was a big deal to me. Since I was a casual runner and worked out some, I figured the extra weight was all muscle, baby. Michelle tactfully informed me otherwise. So then I started running a little farther, and hitting the weights a little harder, and pretty much overnight I dropped down to my current weight which is in the 173-178 lb range, which includes, if I may be so immodest, some respectably cut muscles. Not bad for 37 years old.

I think I can mostly thank my genetic legacy and body type more than any iron discipline on my part- you should see what I eat at work. And at home...

Anyways I bring it up because I just  read The Cure for Everything! which was written by a local U of A guy, Timothy Caulfield. Pretty good book, just trying to debunk all the myths and misinformation out there about fitness and healthy living. That, and AJ Jacobs' Drop Dead Healthy have been my literary nutrition of the last few days. The messages are pretty similar and pretty simple- the only truly surefire way to lose weight and live healthily is to eat right and get lots of exercise. Easy, but hard.
I do have one question, though. Here's the thing- a guy like me, probably only supposed to eat around 2200-2400 calories a day, give or take, that may even be a little generous. For a completely sedentary person, less. I don't know if I've ever eaten that little. Doing the math a bit, I wonder how it is that I'm not way fatter? I don't run that much, and indeed, Caulfield asserts that, for all the many many benefits of exercise, weight loss just isn't one of them.
One possible answer, appropriate enough given the title of this blog: poo.
I'm not being funny or trying toilet humour, I'm serious. No one ever talks about the calories lost to poo. I guarantee you our bodies are not 100% efficient at sucking every single calorie out of the food we eat. So how much of the devastatingly bad food choices we make every single day wind up getting flushed out of us unabsorbed? Probably varies, and I'm not trying to provide another excuse for terrible eating, but it's gotta be some right? I know- I'll ask google.
Hmm, Google doesn't really know, or at least, I don't really feel like wading through all the internetz garbage such a search turned up.
Best guess: some.

Michelle took Pallas to see Brave today. We'd been wanting to go as a family, but it turns out it's a perfect mother/daughter movie anyways so it all worked out. (My amazing parents generously took both girls for the weekend so Michelle and I could have a beautiful, peaceful 7th anniversary. We saw Prometheus, which was beautiful, though not that peaceful. So yeah. Babysitter exhaustion fair enough!) The best story Michelle told me, though, is that when Pallas saw the giant poster for The Amazing Spider-Man she said, "Spider-Man! Hi! What are YOU doing here?"
Speaking of Spidey, I just read Avenging Spider-Man: My Friends Can Beat Up Your Friends which I thought would be a visual feast, what with Joe Madureira's artwork, but it turned out to be all about the excellent writing of Zeb Wells. Essentially a Marvel Team-Up for the new era, I liked the two stories where he teams up with Hawkeye and Captain America the best. Nice, character-driven stories (with lots of action, sure) that are the types of comic stories that stick with you.

This story would be so much better with pictures. Then I could just say, "So, this happened:" and show you a photo and leave it at that. But I was unable to get photos of the incident in question because my camera was in my backpack, which was in a pickup truck, which was in a sump. Also in the backpack:
 -Cellphone. Normally I don't carry my phone with me at work since there's no coverage out there anyways. Not sure why I had it that night.
-iPhone. This is my Mom's old iPhone which she gave me to replace the iPod which died on me a few months ago. I just use it as an iPod, for music and podcasts, though only in my Kress truck, and the night in question I was fuelling pumps in a pickup truck and had no need for it.
-National Geographic, June issue. Fun fact, I've read every page of every issue of National Geographic since at least 2006, when my mother-in-law started buying me a membership each year for xmas. Streak ended!
-The Mastermind of Mars, half-read. Apparently it's still floating away down there.
-A Fighting Man of Mars, unread. In case I finished Mastermind.
-aforementioned Olympus digital camera. Waterproof and unharmed!
-foodstuffs of varying composition but uniform deliciousness, ruined. Though I ate the $3 protein bar after it was recovered, dagnabbit, them things are expensive!
-sundry other items of lesser value
 Anyways, the iPhone may not come back to life, though it was previously thought killed when Pallas dunked it a mug of coffee, so you never know. My cellphone is probably ruined, but good news- the SIM card was alright so I transferred it to Michelle's old phone of the same model which she no longer needs ever since I got her an iPhone 4S.
All that happened is I backed the truck down parallel to a pump to throw some fuel in it, and I stepped out to open the fuelcap on the pump when it kind of went thunk and slipped from park into reverse, whereupon it accelerated surprisingly quickly into the sump. There was no berm around the sump so it flew right in. Earlier I had noticed the transmission not going into park so I took it down to the washbay to wash out the linkage, after which it was working fine. Or seemed to be, anyways.
 So now I'm looking at my pickup truck which is sort of propped up on an angle, lights shining, over half-submerged and not accessible at all. My first thought was for my backpack. Then I realized the radio was in there and no one else knew I was down there, in the bottom of this very deep pit, with walls that are so bad they actually brought in a radar dish to monitor it, and so I would have to walk out. At midnight with no light because, though I had just asked for batteries for my headlamp not a half hour previous, I was told there are no batteries for peons such as myself. Did I mention all the grizzly bears that have been hanging around? Not that I was too worried about them, grizzlies are waaay too smart to be down in that pit by themselves at night.
What really pissed me off about the whole thing is they piss-tested me for that! On my incident report I'd written a fairly straightforward narrative of the events, highlighting facts I felt were relevant, such as that fuelling pumps is not my job. Then when I found out they wanted to drug test me, I wrote an addendum as follows, word for word inasmuch as my memory serves:
On the advice of my shop steward I am assenting to a drug test but I would like to register my extreme displeasure at the unjustness of this decision. NOT my job. NOT my fault. NOT my problem.

I wish I'd thought to write, "Furthermore, you owe me a new iPhone!" Anyways, I didn't get to be there for the funnest part, which is recovering the truck, since I was busy peeing into a cup. But I was told it was a lot of fun, and as an interesting aside, apparently my backpack floats.
There are some photos so it's possible someone will smuggle me a file or two, it's kind of funny.

Over at the John Janzen Nature Centre they had a Fairy Forest Midsummer Eve thing, and the whole place was completely overrun by fairy princesses. It was a fun daddy/daughter date to do, Pallas loved it. There was singing (she wanted to suggest bimoceros as her favourite animal for one song but nothing really rhymes with bimoceros). And then when one of the group leaders asked what fairies do, well the answer is obviously that they go to Pixie Hollow. And then Disney's trademark lawyers came and ceased and desisted the place down.

 

It was definitely Bear Week at work. Every day I saw at least 1, usually 4, and I think I saw 8 different grizzlies, possibly 9 though of course it's hard to tell which are the same ones twice. A friend was  driving to work when his truck was charged by a very angry boar, whom we saw a few minutes later but by then he was running into the bush with a sow. Hopefully to relax a bit. If we're going to see bears, it's always this time of year and then after Canada Day or so we don't see them anymore, so I think they are after the relatively easy protein to be found in all the baby elk, sheep and moose hanging around.
This picture here was of a mama I saw on the way to work one morning- which is why I was able to use the Nikon. Of course, early morning so the light wasn't amazing. Her cub was with her too and I got some photos of them both- nothing magazine quality, but better than nothing.
But the best was yesterday, just as I was driving my haultruck, crossing a bridge I saw that blonde sow that had been hanging out all week, running down a road full tilt, then going up on her hind legs and generally acting fairly aggressive. Then I saw the mama moose and her baby. Mama moose actually chased the grizzly into the bush. From my vantage point it was so obvious that the grizz just had to scooch around mama moose and she woulda had a tasty little mooseburger to share with her cub, but it was not to be. This time.

Finally saw my first grizzlies of the year!  I took some photos but they didn't turn out too good, but got a good long look at a blonde mama and her cute lil cub. They were up on a ridge and then came down just like they was mountain goats. Earlier this year I saw a cougar and a bobcat, so it's been a good year.

Pallas is maturing into a perfect little comic book geek like her daddy. A couple weeks ago, I was giving her a lecture about something, how important it is to listen to daddy and all that, and she pointed at my shirt which features various Marvel heroes such as Wolverine and Thor, and interrupted me with, "Is that Hook?"
"Why yes, that IS Hulk."
"Hook is my favorite!"
"Yeah me too! I love the Hulk."
And she skipped away happy as can be, lecture forgotten by both parties.
Also she is learning about secret identities, and knows that Peter Parker is Spider-man, and that Batman and Hook are both named Bruce, though they have different last names.
And then today at lunch, she asked me about the Green Lantern animated series she likes to watch.
"Daddy, why when Green Lantern is lying down and having a moment and Red Lantern fights him?"
"Uh, well, I guess Red Lanterns don't really respect moments." In our family, when we need to decompress and get away from the craziness, we say "I just need a moment."
"But Green Lantern was having a moment!"
"Yup. Well, that's how you can tell that Red Lanterns are really good bad guys. They fight you even when you need a moment."

Watch this in high def on the biggest screen you have:

The transit of Venus is today, and the next one is not for a long long time. NASA has some pretty amazing photos:

I was listening to the Radiolab podcast on Colors the other day and thought I came up with the most important scientific epiphany of all time. See, us humans have three color receptors in our eyes, red, green and blue (or yellow, I forget exactly), and those working in concert allow us to see the millions and millions of shades we see. Seems like lots, right? But other animals have more, some have 6, and mantis shrimp even have some crazy number like 18 of them. Well, listen to the podcast because obviously I am garbling some of the details. But here's what I immediately realized:

The reason why we've never seen a sasquatch is their fur is in the colors we can not perceive! Obviously!

I was composing my Nobel acceptance speech in my head when I realized the flaw in my reasoning. Okay, there's probably more than one, but right away you can see that even if their fur was colored something we can't see, the light reaching us would still be blocking out the background behind them, so they would still appear as some other color. Brown, maybe. Dogs can still see us, even though they are colorblind (though not completely, as they have two color-rods in their eyes, rather than our three). So yeah. Oh well.

Alright well I think my repaired iMac is up and running and not giving me any troubles. As a bonus, this new hard drive seems to like Lion much better than the last one did, maybe because this one is a Lion native and the other one started out a Snow Leopard or whatever.  About the only thing that is forever lost is my little spreadsheet that I made that recorded how awesome I am- by counting all the miles I ran and pushups I pushed and so forth. Though the fact that I kept such a spreadsheet perhaps cancels out any awesomeness....
Speaking of awesome, Avengers. Yeah, you already knew that. We finally got to see it. Worth the wait. That Thor Hulk fight was waaaay better than the one from the made-for-tv-movie, The Death of the Incredible Hulk:

This poor neglected blog. I was hoping its tenth anniversary year would be a little more interesting than it has been, and then maybe retire it at ten years triumphantly, or reboot or something. Instead it is sort of just going out with a whimper.
My iMac piled up on me- just over a year after I got it. Lucky for me I got the extendo care warranty and I'm bringing it in Friday to get it fixed up. I lost a few files, nothing too critical though- not only do I have a 1 terabyte backup hard drive (AirPort Extreme, though of course I haven't backed up in a while)- but my photos have double and triple backup with Flickr and my camera card itself, so I think I lost a few photos that didn't make the cut to Flickr or keeping it on the card, but that's alright. Lost some Game of Thrones episodes, which are replaceable. iTunes downloads are all free to redownload and there's the iCloud and all that. So really, this is all actually a good thing as I have had nothing but trouble with the iMac since I installed Lion and hopefully the new hard drive and all that will just run smoother.

I got some great artwork this year. Katie Cook was there, which was huge for me. I made a beeline to her table as soon as I got there on Friday night and asked her to do a comission of Pallas fighting Darth Maul with her pink lightsaber. (Today she decided that now she has a purple lightsaber, so next time I'm at comic con and get someone to draw her fighting Darth Maul to make sure I get that right....) It turned out perfect! Katie can be found here. I also made sure to stop by Drake Tsui's table and get him to another one for me- Valkyrie, currently of Secret Avengers:
 

And I stopped by David Joyce's table, since last year he drew Caiera for me, and then on his blog he made me a sketch of Hulk aka the Green Scar (from Planet Hulk) and this year he did another of the Incredible Hulks, Jenn Walters. The Sensational She-Hulk, of course.
 

So I went down to Calgary for my 3rd Calgary Expo in 4 years. Took holidays from work for it, bought my pass months in advance, but due to extremely poor planning on their part, kind of had a mixy matchy weekend. By the time I got there on Friday there was only an hour left, since the doors closed at 8. 8! What kind of convention ends at 8?
Saturday was the big day, the entire cast of The Next Generation was reunited for the first time in over 20 years. It was announced that the fire marshal stepped in and shut the doors and so thousands upon thousands of people, those with passes or without, it didn't matter, were stuck outside. I had been inside for about an hour but stepped off the floor to have a sandwich before going to a panel (Robert J Sawyer was doing one on writing believable science fiction- and after that I was heading to the costume contest) and was then SOL for the rest of the day. Luckily I still had a great time talking to many many other convention-goers who were in a similar situation. ie I made the most of a shitty situation but it wasn't the day I paid for. I spoke to many, many people who weren't very happy at all- some had, like me, traveled from elsewhere, gotten hotel rooms, paid almost $500 for a photo with the Star Trek cast, and because the Expo organizers oversold, they were stuck outside with no apology. Even, in some instances, attitude from the volunteers. Calgary Expo, via their social media feeds, seems to have chosen to not acknowledge any error on their part, insisting that it was all the fire marshal's fault, and indeed, us convention-goers' fault for showing up all at once instead of in nice and orderly groups of two or three thousand. Today on the CTV News there was a report that the fire marshal has denied any involvement in shutting the doors, but I can't find a news article online to confirm, yet. Here's my photoset, though, got lots of great photos with all the other attendees who were stuck outside.
Sunday was a bit better, I got there early and stood in a crazy long line that went alomst the entire way around the convention grounds, and that was just for us pass holders. They cut off the door-ticket-buyers at 11 and many got sent home.

Back. Tired. Started to upload some photos but going to bed. Lots more to say tomorrow.

I'm heading to the Calgary Expo tomorrow!  I'm gonnabe ascited! Here's some of the geeky things I'm into lately.
Game of Thrones season 2, of course. Who isn't into that?
The Legend of Korra is finally here, and cheers to Nickelodeon for making the episodes available online for free, even for us Canucks. Sometimes we have a hard time watching tv shows from American websites, something to do with CRTC rules or something. (but wait, didn't you say you were watching Game of Thrones....) Korra kicks ass!  Worth the wait (it was announced at SDCC 2010, though I wasn't in the room at the time of the announcement, I think I was just down the hall...). A perfect show for Pallas, at least as far as having strong female protagonists to emulate. We like to fight bad guys, Darth Maul being a particularly persistent foe, he shows up several times a day to get his butt handed to him. By a 3yo girl!
Darth Maul shows up in the current season of Clone Wars, looking forward to seeing that on DVD. The Cartoon Network being one of those networks that don't let Canadians watch their shows. But that's ok, I have the entire original Marvel Star Wars series in Omnibus form! Finally finished reading it. I think it's really cool that the final (and my personal favorite) run was done by a female writer and penciller, Jo Duffy and Cynthia Martin. For the mid-80s that was a rarity. Hell, it's a rarity now.
And I'm rereading Perdido Street Station, this time for book club. Loving it just as much, maybe more, this time around.

Pallas has a new imaginary friend, though in true athenian from, she has her own unique twist on it- she takes on the identity of PallMall and says that Pallas is the imaginary one. Today Pallas fell out of my car but luckily PallMall (Pellmell! I dunno where she came up with that) appeared and really, she's as much fun to have around as Pallas.
Also, as I was trying to contain the chaos of two little girls, Pallas asked me if I was mad.
"No, I'm not mad, I'm just . . ." I groped around in my brain for the word that means "a little overwhelmed by how crazy it is to be responsible for two little girls who are not capable of sitting still for two seconds to get their shoes on".
And she said, "You're just fwustawated?"

This be what befalleth, Laurence!  This be what befalleth!

I am quoting, of course, from Two Gentlemen of Lebowski: A Most Excellent Comedie and Tragical Romance, that lost Shakespearean play recently unearthed by Adam Bertocci.  Sir Walter is admonishing young Laurence Sellers on what befalleth when thou firsk'st a stranger 'twixt the buttocks. And what befalleth, of course, is Sir Walter wrecks yon corvette. Never mind that the vessel in question is not captained by little Laurence.
Mashing up The Big Lebowski and Shakespeare (and doing it well) is beyond brilliant. Being able to do it without using even one f-bomb is an accomplishment worthy of the Bard. There's even helpful footnotes and woodcuts just like we all had in our Shakespeare books back in high school. The Dude becomes the Knave.  "I must protest; the Knave mindeth. This will not stand, this uncheck'd aggression..."
But in the end, the Knave abideth.
Here's a bonus minimalist poster for The Big Lebowski that captures the spirit quite nicely.

Early on in The Big Lebowski, the Narrator (none other than the immortal Sam Elliot) describes The Dude as quite possibly the laziest man in the world. Certainly he's lazy, but I would say he's more a man who just prefers not to have a job. He's definitely not lazy when it comes to getting his rug back, and everything that follows from that. No, I'd say the laziest man in the world would have to be Dishwasher Pete (now, Dishwasher, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from...) aka Pete Jordan. Though he did manage to write a book called Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States so maybe he's not all that lazy either. He first came to my attention in one of my podcasts, This American Life most likely, and then that same week I saw his book in one of the bookstores I frequent, so obviously it was fate that I read it. Glad I did, I haven't laughed so hard in a while. He just wanted to wash dishes. Even chopping carrots was too much- once when a boss asked him, he deliberately chopped them way too thick. "Like this?" "No, thinner." So he'd do it paper thin. "Like this?" "No, thicker!" and he just did that back and forth a few times till his boss just gave up and let him be. Letterman even invited him on the show but he sent someone else in his stead. An impostor! So yeah, definitely a recommended read.
 I was washing the dishes with Pallas just tonight. She always pulls a chair over from the kitchen table to stand on. Lots of times she pulls my chair over, so today I asked her to take her own chair, since hers is already all ruined and wrecked from being spilt on and suffering sundry other abuses that only a toddler can impose. I've noticed that mine is starting to show some signs of damage from her overflowing destructive forces. So I said, "Pallas can you just use your own chair?"
 "Why?"
"Because yours is already wrecked and I like to keep the damage to a minimum."
Then she said something along the lines of what's wrong with a little healthy carnage?
"Well all the stuff you wreck costs money. Spending money on stuff just so you can wreck it makes daddy sad."
"But I don't want daddy to be sad."  She started crying.
"No, sweetheart, I'm not THAT sad."
"But I don't want daddy to be sad." Fullblown sobs now.
"Wait, I didn't mean sad! I'm not sad. More just, mildly chagrined."
"Sniff sniff. Okay." And then she was happy.

So the Commodore guy passed away today. It's too bad he never became a household name- in fact, I had to just now google it to remember what it is- Jack Tramiel. According to this obituary he wasn't part of Commodore anymore when the Amiga came along, but the Amiga was my first home computer- the original one and then, a few years later, the Amiga 2000 with an astonishing 20 Mb hard drive. But my neighbour had a Commodore 64 and we spent many hours playing Aliens and Rambo on it. Games were what I mostly did back then, and on the Amiga there was this kickass paint program called DeluxePaint which I spent many, many hours on but unfortunately my mastery of that never translated to any kind of affinity for Photoshop. Anyways.

We went and saw John Carter last night, and while I was a little disappointed, I don't think it deserves the fate it was handed as one of the biggest flops (in the financial sense) in history. Going in, I wanted to feel that director Andrew Stanton would clearly be the victim of studio honchos who felt that calling a movie "John Carter" rather than "John Carter of Mars" or "A Princess of Mars" was a wise marketing decision. Someone on my Twitter feed said that'd be like renaming Raiders of the Lost Ark "Henry Jones". Anyways. The movie had three separate beginnings, never a good sign and not one that helps vindicate the director, and was that Michael Chabon I saw sharing the screenwriting credits? And having just watched 4 seasons of The Wire it was a little jarring seeing Officer McNulty being, uh, whoever Officer McNulty was trying to be. Though it was fun seeing Julius Caesar and Marc Antony reunited- not to mention Posca! I do want to say that the Tharks were pretty much Tars-tastic. And they were pleasantly faithful to the source material, as pulpy and muddled as it was, so really, I guess I should just be thankful they didn't cast Rosie O'Donnell as an adorably spunky sidekick to Tarzan. I mean, John Carter. Speaking of flops, I just read Nathan Rabin's My Year of Flops. As well as his memoir, The Big Rewind. My Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast pals are all friends with him and always borrow (ie steal) his ideas. So I thought I'd go to the source and read his actual books. Who would have guessed that the guy who came up with the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl led such a shitty life? Not shitty in the filled-with-terror-but-also-crazy-adventure way that Jeannette Walls describes in The Glass Castle. Just shitty in that he was so very angry and had no one on his side and thus wound up in mental hospitals and group homes. The sad thing to me is that not even Nathan is on Nathan's side, or it seemed to me anyways after I finished the book and couldn't really think of a single redeeming thing to say about him- not because there are none, but because Rabin himself seems to have gone out of his way to avoid pointing any out. Here's another flop, starring me! Someone took this video at work. The star was supposed to be the truck driver, who is a new trainee and also the brother of the guy taking the video. You know, take a video of the kid brother at his new job to show grandma kinda thing. I guess this would be an outtake.