It was an astronomical week at work this time around. Not because of anything work-related, though. Just lots of Northern Lights. Little spears of green light thrown by Pallas Athena from her perch up on Olympus. And one night there was the craziest meteor, a lot of us thought it was leftover debris from that satellite that fell to Earth- it was super-bright and gave off sparks, and about halfway through its arc, it turned green. I know Alberta doesn't have much credibility after that Okotoks Twitter Hoax but that's what I saw.
Otherwise work was nice and quiet, I just drove my truck and listened to many podcasts. If you have time, definitely check out this episode of DNTO, at least for the stories told by Jack Tueller, a WWII pilot and trumpet player. They also post to a YouTubeo of him, very very cool.
Thanks to my new friends at NPR's Monkeysee (and the related podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour), I checked out The Tobolowsky Files. Everyone knows Stephen Tobolowsky but you just didn't know his name. He's that guy from that show you like. Seriously. Turns out he's also a fantastic story-teller. Sorry about the obnoxious ads on that website, I just get all my podcasts from iTunes but I dunno how to hyperlink there. One last amazing podcast- the most recent episode of This American Life. If you get them the week they're posted they're free (and you can listen online for free too) so just go listen right now- it's this crazy (true) story about a P.I. agency staffed by soccer moms headed by a guy who starts to dabble in some extracurricular activities...
My drive home from Hinton this morning featured not strange astronomical phenomenon, but strange roadkill- a fox and a cougar, though not together. I've only ever seen one live cougar in the wild and it's sad that now I've seen an equal amount of dead ones.

My friend JimSmash sent me some Hulk comics! Sweet! Me like Hulk. One of them was this classic from 1977. Spoiler alert- the unexpected super-villain is none other than Bi-Beast! Yup, the clone robot thing with the dual nature (plus he has two faces on his head) that was made by some bird-people on a floating island somewhere. I was a little hesitant to google him but it turns out he isn't as obscure as I might have thought, and even cameoed on a relatively recent episode of Avengers:Earth's Mightiest Heroes. It says so  on his Wikipedia page.

My dad and I went for another ride yesterday, possibly the last of the season but hopefully not. We decided to go to the Brazeau Dam, just to see. Why not? When I was a kid we went to see the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington. That one was a little more impressive.

It's the late Jim Henson's 75th birthday! Lots of love for him all over the net, from the Googlelogo to announcemnts of Henson-related graphic novels (Dark Crystal!  Yeah!) and this video of the Muppet song by OK Go (to be fair it wasn't strictly for his 75th but whatever). Pallas liked it as much as I did.

 Happy Hobbit Day! Hobbit Day, of course, being the birthdays of both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, who were born on September 22, 2890 and 2968 (Third Age) respectively.
Did you know Alberta's own Evangeline Lilly is appearing in The Hobbit as the Elf Tauriel, a role created for the film. She was my favorite thing about Lost, well her, and that hobbit.

I owe Pallas five bucks. We were upstairs playing while Michelle was making supper. Then there was a vacuum sound and Pallas asked what it was. "Mommy's vacuuming." "No. That's not!" "Yes, sweety, that's the vacuum cleaner." "Mommy's not vacuuming! She's not!" And we then had a protracted argument, which I thought I would end by saying, "Yes it is, I'll bet you five bucks." She answered by saying something about 6:35 which is her favourite number for some reason and then we went downstairs for supper. And Michelle was not vacuuming anything, it was our neighbour doing something outside. So I guess I owe her $6.35.

Anyways. Always with the tinkering. Facebook. George Lucas. Even Blogger. Why? To make something better? Not if you ask all 8 billion Facebook users, or the remaining 8 Star Wars fans. George Lucas has never held the Star Wars universe in the same esteem as his fans- for him it's always been about developing new technology to do cool things and making money while doing it. That's not even a cynical criticism by me- I love Star Wars and always will because he can't go back and tinker with my childhood- it's just a widely-accepted reading of the ample history available on how Star Wars came to be. It's also pretty commonly held that Lucas's strengths aren't in the "people skills" category. He makes neat stuff but doesn't always understand or seem to care why others like it or dislike it.
Mark Zuckerberg has never held Facebook in the same esteem as its users- for him it's always been about developing new technology to do cool things and making money while doing it. A common reaction to the howls of rage that accompanied the new(est) Facebook was along the lines of "no one's forcing you to use this free service that you enjoy". True enough, though I would argue that Facebook isn't free- just the costs are hidden and indirect. It's a $50 billion company for a reason, and that reason is not to give you more enjoyment. Does Zuckerberg and co care that you dislike the new Facebook? I doubt it, they never cared before all the times they changed it. Zuckerberg's strengths aren't in the "people skills" category. He makes neat stuff but doesn't always understand or seem to care why others like it or dislike it- and there still isn't a "dislike" button on Facebook.
Though you can always, like Vader, scream "Nooooooooo!"

Vacation over. My only regret is that I didn't take more. And that I didn't discover any perfectly preserved dinosaur feathers like these guys did. I hardly ever discover any dinosaur bones of any kind, and I live in a province chock full of dino bones. Every now and then we find some clam-type fossils at work, not even brachiopods which are supercool, just normal old clams. Is it too much to ask for a trilobite every now and then? Yes I understand the basics of biostratigraphy and all that. Still. Look at this crazy guy. It's like a long wormy trilobite.

There's so many calories in that cake that it may spontaneously explode. Your computer. But it's so yummy! So yeah, I had a pretty good birthday. Actually it was pretty quiet, all rainy outside so we stayed in and watched movies and read. X-Men First Class was fantastic.
The girls picked me out some gifts, and then Pallas told me, "Thanks for the birthday presents daddy!"

Here you go.

So I'm an uncle now! I have a niece. Yay!
Other than that, still on holidays. Weather's great. Alberta Beach isn't. Reading lots. Watching some shows. True Blood is goofy as ever but still a lot of fun. Rewtching BSG a bit, that first miniseries is good but the acting and filming aren't as great yet as they will be. Started watching LOTR during my workouts- the first time since I got back from New Zealand almost 7 years ago. Crazy. It's cool to recognize some of the scenery from having been there, and also I have a guidebook with coordinates so I can look up other places on Google Earth if I want to. First I would have to download Google Earth I suppose. Remember this place?


Pretty sure they reused it for The Hobbit.
Also, I have a niece!

Finally went to see the chiropractor today. He expressed a fair bit of dismay over the state of my back and neck, which I thought was pretty much all healed up. He could tell it wasn't, and then did unkind things to them, hopefully not as punishment. Now I kind of feel worser than before. But I still ran my 10 km, goldurnit.

Finished reading Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream by Jason Fagone. It was recommended by Christopher McDougall in that book I read last week. Pretty much the opposite of that book, in a way, but just as interesting. Funny, crazy, kind of alarming. It's all about the competitive eaters, whose major league webpage can be found here. I considered looking up some YouTubeos of eating contests but then I thought better of it. Besides my YouTube is about to burn out from all the Elmo videos we've been watching. At least Pallas can identify Feist by sight now, and thinks Katy Perry is a princess.

Somehow I was able to snag a vacation here in the most coveted bloc of the year. Actually, even though I have somehow accrued enough seniority to be one of the seniorer guys on my crew, I forgot to put in my requisition slips in time and was left with the dregs. But who's laughing now? The best week of the summer is upon us, and everyone else is going back to school leaving us free to wreak havoc at our leisure. And little secret- it's my birthday soonly. Haha! Evil plan complete. But thus far no actual havoc wreaked. However I was able to do a full workout today, almost completely healed up after my moto-mishap of not even two weeks ago. Even Wolverine wants to know my secret. And the secret is cale. Or possibly chia seeds. Maybe whey protein or even just the blueberries. Smoothies, anyways. Liquid healing factor. Enjoy a Game of Thrones funny sent to me by my friend Sarah. You know what's weird? New and improved Blogger somehow doesn't have the ability to make separate paragraphs. Seems like a step backwards to me.

Went for a short ride today, it was so much fun. I was a little nervous about spontaneously falling off again, like maybe I caught Wipeoutitis and was doomed to forever suck at motorcycling. So that's good. That I didn't.
Now for the home stretch of A Dance With Dragons. Spoiler alert- George RR Martin really really dug Avengers #9.
One time I was reading an old issue of ROM Spaceknight (I think) and there was a fan letter from Kurt Busiek (I think). Here's a good mission for you- see if you can dig up the old comic that has a letter from me in its letters page. Give up? I was only fooling!

NIghtshift sometimes is pretty cool. (Other times, not so much.)

I'm still working on A Dance With Dragons. After four or five weeks I am only about 750 pages in or so. It's not that I don't like it, it's that I like to savor things and also we keep getting all these great books from the library that have to be read within a certain amount of time. Such as:

Manhood For Amateurs, Michael Chabon: pretty much brilliant, just a bunch of loosely connected essays about his life, and being a dad, and being a man, and being a geek. I wonder why I related so much. There was even one essay that opened with his great love for Big Barda, a superheroine I had never heard of till I met her at the Calgary Con and then saw her all over the place.

Then I read two books by Sesame Street Muppeteers- Carrol Spinney who plays Big Bird and Kevin Clash who performs Elmo. I learned about them from two different podcasts, so that was weird, sorta like running into Big Barda everywhere 35 years after her brief moment in the sun. Great books, especially the Elmo one, actually. Kind of autobiographical but also made me realize how important Sesame Street is and so I have Pallas watching much more Youtubeos of Elmo. Him and India Arie doing the ABCs is pretty good. Me: India is pretty, eh?

Pallas: Yeah! Mommy, India is pretty!

Michelle: Who else is pretty?

Pallas: Me!

Silver Surfer: Requiem is one of the best comics stuffs I've read lately. Especially since I had no idea it was about what it was about. I really like J. Michael Straczynski's stuff.

The best book I've read lately is Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall. Michelle found it in a bookstore one time and showed it to me, but even though I'm a runner I kind of put it back on the shelf, thinking that reading about running sounds like even less fun than actually running. Luckily she read it and kept reading me all these astonishing highlights that I had to give it a try. It's awesome the way books like Into Thin Air and Klondike are awesome, full of amazing feats and real-life characters that would seem too over the top if you put them in a novel. I'm not quite done it, so every few minutes I turn to Michelle and say I'm gonna throw away my shoes and go barefoot, and she keeps telling me to finish the book before I go entering any ultramarathons. Today was actually a run day for me but due to inexplicable soreness on the side of my body I fell on when I crashed my bike, I decided not to.

Did you ever see that movie One Week? Most likely not as it was a Canadian Indie about motorcycles and cancer. Anyways, the guy has cancer so he buys a bike and rides across Canada to sort things out in his head. There's one scene where he's driving along and alla sudden he's in the ditch. Or maybe there was a very good reason he crashed, I don't recall exactly. Well, a similar thing happened to me today. Except it was a corner I came on a little too fast and didn't really handle it too well. I'm okay, mostly, and so is the bike, mostly. It's even uglier now but at least the scars on it are my own and not the previous owners' doing. If only that one burger joint had been open in that one town we were in, it wouldn't have happened. Well, nothing you can do now, at least in the sense of changing what happened. What you can do is control how you go forward, right? I've given it some thought though I might need some more time to process it, it's kind of surprising how many different and weird emotions and reactions I'm having.
The first thing you can do, obviously, is get up. For some reason it was really important that I jump up immediately, as if in doing so I would guarantee that I hadn't been hurt. My Dad didn't see it happen so I had a few minutes to pick the bike up and try to get it back on the road, though I wound up needing his help to do so.
Then you have to get back on the bike, assuming it will still run. Mine did. Did I take corners a little more slowly on the way home? Yeah, but nothing wrong with that.
The rest is mental, as so much of life is, and here's some thoughts I tried, and mostly succeeded, to believe:
-yeah I crashed but I'm so badass I got right back on it and kept riding.
-it coulda been a lot worse and it wasn't so chalk one up to luck (both good and bad I guess) and be better next time

If it had been my bobber I think I would have cried. And threw up. Poor little EX 500!

So I did a kind of cosplay yesterday, we went to a supernaturally themed costume party. We been catching up on True Blood Season 3 (we just finished it tonight in fact) so what better than dressing up as Sookie and Lafayette? Especially since, with two weeks notice, going as Daenerys and Khal Drogo wasn't really all that feasible . . .although that would have been pretty kickass. Michelle would have to really amp up her weight training though if she wanted to pass as the Dothraki horselord. And of course I don't have long silvery gold hair. Hmm.
Anyways. Sookie was easy enough, though a little expensive as we had to order the t-shirt and apron with the official Merlotte's logo from the States, and pay extra to have it expedited here in time.For Lafayette you have a little more leeway, just have to wear something suitably loud, a necklace and jangly ear-ring and a do-rag. And eyeshadow and nail polish, of course. Nothing a quick trip to wal-mart can't provide. I had to get a kindly old lady to help me with the eye shadow- I pointed at a picture of a model wearing some and said, "What's that stuff around her eyes? I need some of that!"

So the race we ran this morning was called Iron Mama, and it was pretty cool since it was a lot of Moms and their kids. And four dads! I was one of them. Also Batman was there, encouraging you to enter to win. It was fun, and in support of a good cause, famine relief for Africa. We ran it pretty fast, too, so we wondered if it was really a full 5km- but no one was complaining too much. Last night when Michelle told Pallas we were running this race, and that she and her sister would ride in the stroller while Daddy pushed them, she said "Maybe Pallas race too!" How can you say no to that? There actually was a kids' race, though we were under the impression it was a 1km run, so we didn't go in it. BUt it was just a fun there and back again sorta thing and Pallas totally coulda run it. Anyways after the race Pallas said it was her turn so we let her out and I ran with her for a bit, she was pretty happy with that.



After that I went for another motorcycle ride with my Dad, so pretty much a perfect day!

Good news! I figured out Bluetooth, so I can finally get all the pictures off my little cellphone. But the even more better news is I went out for a ride with my motorcycle gang today, which consists of myself the Homie Bear, Uncle B (the B stands for Badass) and uh, Big Papa. We showed how many rat's asses we just don't give by staying a shade under the speed limit the whole time! Another reason for doing so is technically I still don't have a motorcycle licence. Rat's asses I just don't give, I'm telling you! It's still legal for me to ride since my class 5 counts as a learner's so long as I'm in the protective care of my posse. And leave all my guns at home.
Anyways, all joking aside I just have to say how so so so fun it was. So fun. We rode about 200 kms, just going around some of the backroads a bit and then home on the highway. Big Papa found a killer deal on a Kawasaki EX 500 that was a little banged up from being dropped once or twice- it used to be a motorcycle school bike, but it runs great. Perfect for me to get some experience on.
My friend Robin, who also got the motorcycle bug from Big Papa, now has three bikes- a bobber like the one I'm building only his is done and runs, a small Honda for his wife and a new Triumph. HIs wife is totally into it,and we were discussing the possibility that Michelle might someday want to ride. I said it wasn't going to happen, srsly. Robin said, "She probably doesn't want a bike because she loves life."
"Yeah, that's basically why, in a nutshell. Living is nice."
"But I would argue that is the very reason she should get a bike."

You know what's fun? Running. Except that it's really actually not, no matter how much I try to tell myself it is. What's fun is being in shape and the knowledge that yes, I can run 10 kms without trying too terribly hard. There's also, I admit, a small degree of satisfaction in knowing that in all likelihood, you can not. Not to get too cocky though, there are tons and tons of people from children to senior citizens who run marathons and would use my laughably elephantine gait as a lesson in how not to do it.
Perhaps in an attempt to make running even more fun, I've noticed a proliferation of themed runs. A few years ago, Michelle and I ran a 5k race whose theme was, uh, cops and robbers or something. We were the only ones who dressed up! This year there's a run in support of mountain gorillas and other great apes where everyone is supposed to run in a gorilla suit! Remind me to register for that one. But the best one I've seen so far is this one in Baltimore (roughly a million miles from here) called Run For Your Lives, where you have to evade zombies while you run. Ooh! More locations coming soon. What better than one in Deadmonton?
(via Bonniegrrl)

Back to work today, but it was a really good day (for being at work) since I listened to a whole ton of podcasts and before I knew it the day was all done! Probably the most interesting one was an episode of NPR's This American Life about a bunch of prison inmates who put on a production of Hamlet. Mostly I'm a CBC podcasty kind of guy, but lately I been branching out to NPR for a little variety- I also really like Pop Culture Happy Hour, which is all about nerding out.
And I couldn't wait to get home to check out Wookiee the Chew, especially fitting because of our Winnie the Pooh outing earlier this week. That from another geeky podcast, the name of which I forget. I'll have to show this one to Pallas when I get home, since she loves Pooh Bear and she loves animated Star Wars stuff, Star Wars Gangsta Rap being her current favorite cartoon. I kind of wonder what sort of twisted version of Star Wars she's building in her head, since I haven't shown her the actual movies yet. She just really really loves Boba Fett (she always makes me Boba Fett tea, it's bountylicious!) and I think she will be devastated to learn that not only is he not the main character, when he does finally show up about an hour into the second movie, he's a bad guy. Who meets a stupidly silly end in the first hour of the third movie. She'll have to learn the truth some day. As Hamlet might say,

I must be cruel, only to be kind:
Thus bad begins and worse remains behind