Where’s The Oprah Action Figure?
Posted on | September 30, 2008 at 1:03 pm | 4 Comments
I’m still in vacation mode so this is going to be short. I haven’t totally processed my vacation pix yet, but I wanted to share this one. One of the tourist-centric rock-and-ore stores in Estes Park has a toy section in the back that I always enjoy visiting for its collection of eccentric action figures (click to go to the Flickr page and see larger versions of the pic):
Someday I may actually buy one of these! I know someone who would especially like the Librarian figure. I found out these are from a company called Accoutrements and are available many places on the web, including the company’s web site.
I guess I’m still waiting for the Indie Rock Record Collector figure though.
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: Great Depressions.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “never look the devil in the eye”.
Follow The Yellow Leaf Road
Posted on | September 29, 2008 at 10:11 pm | Comments Off
Another iPhone post, even though we’re back home. Still trying to get used to this damned keyboard. Anyway, after vacating the B&B this morning, N and I headed into Estes Park proper to do some shopping and lunch, though we ended up doing little of either. All those touristy shops are kind of fun, but they tend to all blur together after awhile.
At the suggestion of the B&B employees, we decided to take the scenic route home in order to view the Turning of the Leaves, which is at its peak right now. We took Highway 7 down to 72. The area on 72 north of Nederland had some of the most spectacular golden aspens I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to convey the grandeur of those yellow and green mottled hillsides. I’ve included an iPhone photo at the bottom, but you’re going to have to wait until I can get the pix from the digital camera into the computer and processed before you can get the full effect.
We then went through the world’s smallest traffic calming roundabout in Nederland to 119, and took that to Blackhawk. I had actually never been to Blackhawk since it became a casino town and was amazed at how… modern and casino-y it looked. Like one big mall. We didn’t stop to gamble and instead went down US 6 to home. By then, I was pretty drived-out. I’m glad we did the scenic route though – those views were dynamite.
Even with all the driving we did, including taking the long way home and the drive up Trail Ridge Road in RMNP, the entire Estes Park vacation consumed barely a half tank of gas in the Prius. Now that’s some cheap travelling!
Latre.
Parked
Posted on | September 28, 2008 at 7:28 pm | 2 Comments
I’m blogging from my iPhone today, since N and I are on vacation in Estes Park. I’m currently in our B&B, about to hit the jacuzzi. Today we visited Rocky Mountain National Park. We didn’t even know it was a Park Free Day, which saved us $20. We hiked Bear Lake and Alberta Falls, and then drove Trail Ridge Road to the Alpine Visitor Center and back. On the way down, we saw many elk, including some bugling bulls and their harems of cows. Weather was good in the morning, perfect hiking weather, but turned rainy and a bit cold in the afternoon. We even encountered slush showers on the drive up Trail Ridge Road and some snowfall at the top. Here’s an iPhoto of the mountains from near the top. I hope it comes out.
Latre.
P.S. N helped with writing this post, including correcting my wildlife terms.
Traffic Calming Drives Me Bananas
Posted on | September 27, 2008 at 10:31 am | 1 Comment
It seems to me like the roads are getting worse. Ever since summer ended, traffic has gotten weird. Not only is my morning commute more congested, but it seems like there are more accidents than ever. These days, more often than not I encounter the aftermath of an accident on my morning commute. I used to take pleasure from driving, but now I’m beginning to experience fear and inevitability (no doubt due in part to my crash last year).
I’ve mentioned before Tom Vanderbilt’s book and blog about Traffic. I still don’t have the book, but I’ve been keeping up with the blog, which is fascinating. One of the points that Vanderbilt keeps hammering home is that the roads would be a lot safer if people drove slower and paid more attention. He appears to be an advocate of “traffic calming” – doing anything you can to get people to slow down and focus on their surroundings. In this area, that includes putting stoplights where there aren’t cross streets, turning one-way streets back into two-way streets, lowering speed limits, and things like that. Roundabouts have started appearing too. Roundabouts are supposedly good for traffic calming, because since there are no stoplights or anything, you really have to pay attention to the other cars and to what you are doing. A lot of cities (especially in Europe) are trying radical measures along these lines, including implementing the “shared space” concept, where you take away all traffic signs, lights, crosswalks, road lines, etc. See this blog entry for an example of a German village where they did that to the central town square.
I think this is all very interesting, but I don’t know how I’d approach something like that happening locally. I’m all for paying attention while driving. But I’m the kind of person who needs direction. Though I like to drive and feel that I’m very good at avoiding distractions and being totally aware of the traffic flow around me, and even probably drive too aggressively than is warranted, I still get stressed out when I have to make a decision. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I will purposely avoid taking routes where I have to make decisions, such as right turns on a red light where the cross traffic is heavy.
I know I should probably just be riding the bus to work, but there are too many things I need my car for. I don’t feel that guilty about the gas because I *smug alert* drive a Prius. If I were paying more for gas, it would probably be a different story. But also, I want to keep my hand in driving. Don’t want to become rusty. I love cruising down the open road with some good tunes on the stereo. I like executing a perfectly timed passing maneuver. I think I even like getting angry at other drivers, because it makes me feel superior or something. It makes me feel. I would never do anything road-ragey, but I do like to talk smack. As long as they don’t see me doing it.
So, though I see its value, I’m not really a fan of traffic calming. What happened to all those studies that showed the mandatory 55 mph speed limit didn’t really save lives after all? There’s a reason it got revoked. People like to get where they’re going in the fastest way possible. It’s just unnatural to go that slow (please, no quoting of Sammy Hagar the Horrible), and I also think that makes it more dangerous, because it’s going against the Rhythm of the Road. But if it is more dangerous to drive faster, so be it.
Latre.
(Speaking of Vanderbilt’s blog, there’s an interesting entry here talking about a new system for Audi cars where the stoplights will communicate with the car and let it know when the light will turn, so that the driver can judge whether or not he needs to speed up or slow down. It even calculates the optimum speed needed to avoid stopping. But as Vanderbilt says, it doesn’t take into account how many cars are stacked up ahead of you or any other road conditions. My question is: Where are these miraculous communicating stoplights? I bet they’re pretty rare. I’m not even sure I want traffic lights talking to my car. Next thing you know, the car will be talking back to the stoplight and telling it that the driver just ran a red light.)
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “how to get a snake out of a building”.
The Urban Jungle
Posted on | September 26, 2008 at 7:35 am | 6 Comments
So, imagine this. You get up in the morning to get ready for work. It’s still kinda dark out but you don’t turn on the light because your eyes need time to adjust. You head for the bathroom. You see an unfamiliar white line on the floor just inside the bathroom. You think it’s a spilled shampoo bottle or something. You reach down to touch it and it moves. What do you do?
That’s what happened to my girlfriend in her apartment yesterday morning. She turned on the light and there it was: a snake. And not a little garden snake or garter snake either. It was a white snake with tan markings, about 2.5-3 feet long, around an inch in diameter. Much to her credit, she did not scream or panic. She calmly gathered her thoughts and then tried to herd the snake out the front door, first using a disassembled clothes hanger, then some boxes, then a broom. She finally got it through the door, and then marched it down the hall and through the utility door into an outside stairwell. Then she called me. I told her she needed to take a picture, so she went back outside and the snake had already climbed the stairs. She took some pictures, and then that must’ve ruffled the snake, and it headed back down the stairwell and curled up in a corner. At that point, she had to get to work.
She worried about the snake all morning. Part of the worrying was that it would get back in the building, but mostly she was worried someone would find it and kill it. N is a naturalist and has a strict “live and let live” philosophy. She loves all wildlife and is very empathic toward animals. So, during our lunch breaks, we drove over to her apartment to see if the snake was still there. It was still at the bottom of the stairwell and was partly inside a white plastic bag.
N went in and got the clothes hanger and my medium-sized cooler, which she had been borrowing. We worked as a team and I used the hanger to lift the bag and the snake and put it in the cooler. It tried to crawl out before I could get the lid on, and I had to get it back in there. Then we drove to a local park and set it free. The picture to the right is an (unfortunately blurry) iPhone photo of the snake just after we let it loose (click to enlarge). It’s still kind of attached to the paper bag, but you can see its head up in the middle there. The pics from N’s camera are probably better, but she didn’t have time to show me and I didn’t grab the memory card.
Neither of us could stop thinking about how exotic the snake looked. I did some internet research and finally determined it was an albino corn snake. It looked exactly like the white snake in this picture here. Corn snakes are not native to this part of the country. The Wikipedia entry said that corn snakes are very popular as pets and make good ones. They are also great escape artists. N’s apartment building is in the middle of the city and there isn’t a lot of parkland around. It seems likely this snake was a pet that had gotten loose, though we didn’t entertain that hypothesis until after letting it go. I hope the little guy does okay in the wild. I feel somewhat sorry for the owner, assuming there was one, but he really should’ve kept a better lid on his pet and not let him escape to other people’s apartments.
So that’s our snake adventure. I’m so proud of my brave sweetie for dealing with the intrusion in a level-headed manner. If I had been there and had discovered the snake, I would’ve totally freaked out. I think most of you out there can relate.
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: I’m having a lot of trouble accessing the Internet lately. I think my DSL modem is dying. Thankfully I have my iPhone so I won’t have to miss a day of blogging.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “collider phobia”.
Hiro Sandwich
Posted on | September 25, 2008 at 7:13 am | 8 Comments
Last Monday night was the third season premiere of Heroes, one of my favorite TV shows. It was a massive three hour event! The night started off with a useless let’s-pat-ourselves-on-the-back pre-premiere party being held somewhere where hundreds of screaming fans got a chance to lean over a red-carpeted pit and stare at the beautiful stars of the show speaking into microphones about what a great show they’re on. (What… NBC is now morphing into HBO?) They also showed clips from the upcoming premiere episode… y’know, the one that was premiering in less than an hour… which seemed like kind of a waste to me. Good thing the DVR has a skip button! The good part about this event was that it served to bring me up to date on what was going on with the show when we last left it, all those pre-strike months ago. I couldn’t figure out if this event was live or if it had been pre-taped, though they were trying to make it look live with a countdown timer and all. I’m not sure it mattered. There was an whiff of desperation surrounding all the self-promotion.
Then the 2-hour premiere episode itself began. The producers of the show made a big deal earlier in the year of acknowledging how crappy the shortened second season of the show was, and how the third would be a return to form. I will admit it got off to a fairly decent start, and they’ve done some things to fix some of the problems. Most notably, they’re refocusing more on the core cast and on some tighter storytelling. I liked the breakout of the supervillain prisoners from the Primatech facility, and I also like that ubervillain Sylar may be switching sides somewhat. Hiro gaining a nemesis who actually makes him think and sweat is a good thing. But that said, I still had a lot of problems with it:
1) Time travel again? Alternate futures again? Not only is it such a cliché in science fiction, and hard to do well, but this particular show has already gone to that well too often. People from the future trying to change the past, people in the past seeing possible futures, blah blah blah. If the future is so malleable and keeps changing, there’s no real stake in anything that happens. Time travel is one of those tropes that lazy writers trot out to make their show look more science fiction-y when they’ve run out of other ideas. They always end up painting themselves into a storytelling corner, which forces the plot to lose more and more coherence as they try to escape it. To my mind, the only TV show that ever did time travel right was Babylon 5, and part of the reason was because it was used so sparingly (the original Star Trek comes to mind too). It’s just not right for a soap opera about people with super powers.
2) Too jumpy. As I said, I do like that they’re focusing more on the main characters again. However, with such a huge cast and so many stories to attend to, it’s easy for things to get jumbled. Many of the stories are connected or probably will be connected, so that’s good. But when you get two or three 3-minute scenes with each character/story each episode, it’s hard to keep up interest in any one particular story arc. I think they need to feature less characters per episode – no need to cram everyone into every episode, and have a more linear, connected plot running through the episode. They did that to some extent during the first season, even having whole episodes that focused on one plotline. I guess I’m just getting too old and feeble to concentrate when things jump around so much.
3) It appears they may be moving to a plotline that involves being able to give anyone super powers via a serum injection. This plot was already done on the Promicin arc on the show The 4400. C’mon guys, some original ideas, please. Although this storyline does show some promise, since Mohinder, who injected himself with the super power serum, is now turning into The Fly. The actor even kinda looks like Jeff Goldblum already.
4) Can it with the sappy Mohinder voiceovers already!! Speaking of clichés, how often do I have to hear that Yeats poem anyway?
It’s still a bit early to tell how things will play out. Obviously they’ll be fine tuning things as they go along, in order to not duplicate the problems with season two. Hopefully they’ll at least be dumping the confusing time travel plot soon. I know I’ll keep watching no matter what.
Latre.
Jogged Today: Yes (@ 56°F)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging:
- “Annabelle” (Mighty Lemon Drops)
- “Smooth” (Steve Wynn)
- “I Am the Storm” (Blue Öyster Cult)
- “Passing Strangers” (Ultravox)
- “Qu’est-Ce Que C’Est Que Ca” (Pete Shelley)
- “Don’t Call Me” (Girls Say Yes)
- “My Favorite Kiss” (Frank Black)
Videogame(s) Played Yesterday: Heavenly Sword (PS3)