Our big digger is down for a month getting some renovations done. New hairdo. Air up the tires, that sorta thing. I don't know if I ever mentioned here, but our more littler digger is no more. Retired unexpectedly. I was the second last guy to operate it. They asked me if I noticed a strange vibration, and I was like, you mean, stranger than all the other vibrations?

Our even more smaller digger is also slated to get two new engines (it's a diesel/hydraulic shovel, unlike the electric shovel pictured here which has no engines) right away.

Now might be a good time to invest in a company that makes handheld shovels, because pretty soon they're just gonna hand each one of us one and tell us to start digging.

If this doesn't make your selfsoul happy, I dunno what will. I just read the first two TPBs of the new New Mutants comic, and that makes selfsoul happy too. The first volume is a Legion story, it was alright though I've never been a fan of Legion and his dumb hair. If he's so omipotent maybe he can get a better haircut. But the second volume is where writer Zeb Wells' lifeglow really starts to shine.

Digression. The New Mutants book of the 80s was one of the best for sure. Younger, more inexperienced, not-quite-ready-for-the-majors students of Xavier's, it was consistently well written by X-Men legend Chris Claremont and had a sizeable run by surreal artist Bill Sienkiewicz. Warlock was one of my favorites, though they all were, except maybe for Doug Ramsey, whose mutant power was understanding languages. Anyways, he met a violent end in a comic book that I missed, so I dunno how he died but he did. Warlock might have, too. They were best friends.

Okay. So Zeb Wells, in volume 2, decided to bring both Warlock and Doug back to the fold. Fair enough, happens all the time, with mixed results. But Zeb does it right. Not only does Doug come back in a convincing and kinda unique way, but his language power is revealed to be way more kick ass than Claremont or anyone in the world ever imagined.

Like I said, it made my selfsoul happy. Definitely going to read Volume 3: Fall of the New Mutants

These are not the droids you're looking for.

About 15 years ago now I took a science fiction class at University. It was a 3rd year English course, not Science Fiction 101 or anything like that. It was a great class, but now I don't recall much of it. Two books stuck with me though- Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, of which i have blogged about plenty since it's pretty much my favourite book ever, and the other one made less of an impact but I never forgot it, either. Iain M. Banks' Player of Games, a Culture novel.

I just finished reading Matter, also set in the Culture universe. Now I have a mission- to read all the Culture novels. If you like high concept sic-fi, and who doesn't, you should do the same. Did you ever read Ringworld? Or play Halo? In both of those the central environment is a huge artificial ring encircling a star. Pretty cool concept- never having played Halo I dunno if they do much with it, but Larry Niven does with his Ringworld novels (which I loved the first two when I was a kid, read the third a few years back and found it kind of terrible). Anyways, Matter is set on a similarly creative planet- a Shellworld, an artificially constructed hollow planet with layers in it. Cool.

Gotta acknowledge 11/11/11 right? And it seems wrong to not at least give a nod to Remembrance Day.

Other than that, though, not too much to say. Well, a photo is always worth a thousand pixels. Here's two:

Some random silliness and/or awesomeness. See if you can tell which is which:

YodaHulk!

Ahsoka Tano Halloween Costume!

I got my DVDs of Clone Wars Season 3 finally so it's time for a Clone Wars motif. Even just a spacey motif in general since I have been enjoying Peter Schilling's Error in the System, which was my second ever tape I ever got. William Shatner recently did a cover of Major Tom (Coming Home) and though it is, uh, Shatnerrific, uh, I love the original. Interestingly, on the same album (entitled Seeking Major Tom) Shat includes Mrs. Major Tom, sung by Sheryl Crow and without any accompaniment from the man. It's quite lovely.

Took a couple days off after that marathon blogging sprint in October- I blogged every day in October, a feat only accomplished two times before in the previous nine years right here. Yup. Some days it was pretty weak, and in all honesty I count it a bit of a failure since I never did get around to writing any sort of Halloween poem or story or anything. Two kids is a Harrison Bergeron effect if there ever was one.

You know what's awesome? The Wire. Finally got around to watching Season 1.
You know what's less awesome? Metallica and Lou Reed's collaboration, Lulu. Master of Puppets and Lou Reed's New York are easily the two albums I could have on a dessert island stuck with some sort of infinitely rechargeable iPod that also somehow only had room for two albums. So put them together and it should be instant head asplode awesomeness right? Well, not at first. But you know what, I'ma go against the flow here and give it more chances. Lou and Jaymz together at last? A pairing not even Cthulhu could have conceived of? How can I say nay? I can't. It's awesome just for trying! Yup, I'm declaring it awesome!

Therefore what must bear the brunt of my anti-awesome venom is OSX Lion. Sorry Apple, I love you and have one of everything you sell (except an Apple TV which isn't even a TV at all! ) but Lion really sucks. Srsly. Safari never crashed on me once with Snow Leopard, but with Lion, about a hundred billion times so far. Since yesterday.

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.