I hope everyone’s having a great Christmas this year! I know I am so far, and since it was just my birthday two days ago as well, I’ll soon write up the usual post of my haul. And we saw the Tintin movie on my birthday, which was awesome, so I’ll have more to say about that as well.
Merry Christmas!
Much of November was uneventful—it mostly consisted of the usual routine for the first few weeks minus a kid’s birthday—but for the week of Thanksgiving we visited Burbank to spend the holiday with my brother and his family.
That trip started out slightly awry, as we tried to leave town on Friday the 18th, right after work, and only managed to travel all of 50 miles or so to Crescent before being stopped for several hours only to learn that the road (Highway 97) was closed entirely. See, that was the night of the big statewide winter storm that dumped snow and ice everywhere. So instead of getting to Redding that Friday night we ended up turning around and coming back home (after about 5 hours on the road) and left again the next morning. That was more successful; there was still snow on the roads but it was daylight and the road was open, and once we crossed over into California the roads were pretty much cleared up.
So we drove all the way through to Burbank (north of Los Angeles) in the one day. Which isn’t as bad as all the way to San Diego in one day (we’ve done that one too) but still makes for a long drive all in one sitting.
The rest of the holiday week was good; we drank a lot of good beer, toured the Warner Brothers Studios lot, checked out Burbank and the area a bit, and had a nice Thanksgiving.
Coming back was easy in some respects—as far as the drive went as we split it out over two days—and hard in others (whaddya mean I gotta go back to work?). We got back Sunday relatively early which left time for unpacking and cleaning and such but not a lot of decompression time before going right back into the routine.
Let’s see, what else went on in November… read a good book that I’d recommend, Ready Player One, which has its flaws but is a fun, clever, engaging read. It’s essentially a caper novel masquerading as a near-future/video game/pop-culture/MMO sci-fi adventure, set some 30 years in the future and mostly taking place in an online game/virtual world. And it heavily mines the pop culture of the 80s (and 70s to a lesser extent), particularly that of music, movies, and videogames, which makes it catnip to the contemporary Gen X geek who spent a lot of time playing with computers and videogames during the 80s.
Hmm… is it bad when that’s all I have for the highlights for the month? The rest has been filled with work, and the family stuff—a school concert and other school functions, birthday parties, the usual kind of things.
But! We’re going into the Christmas season, which is one of my favorite times of the year. That always livens things up!
Just in time for Halloween!
Just ran across this Smithsonian.com article: The Top 10 Books Lost to Time. Neat read, rife with possibilities; every link I’ve seen pulls a quote from the #4 selection, Inventio Fortunata, which does have a bit of a Piri Reis-sounding mystery to it; but the “lost” Shakespeare work of Cardenio interests me more:
Cardenio has been called the Holy Grail of Shakespeare enthusiasts. There is evidence that Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, performed the play for King James I in May 1613—and that Shakespeare and John Fletcher, his collaborator for Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen, wrote it. But the play itself is nowhere to be found.
And what a shame! From the title, scholars infer that the plot had something to do with a scene in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote involving a character named Cardenio. (A translation of Don Quixote was published in 1612 and would have been available to Shakespeare.)
Kind of sounds like the ultimate Elizabethan-era crossover.
We attended Ignite Bend 7 the other night (merely watching this time, rather than as a presenter) and it continues to amaze me how good and fun an event this is; I’d venture to say this was the best one yet.
(Though I might need to watch the previous ones again to be sure.)
Since presenting at Ignite is such a fast-paced, nerve-wracking, and often first-time experience for people, there’s usually at least one presenter who’s visibly nervous, or stumbles a bit over their slides or their timing, and this faltering can take some of the steam out of their presentation; at IB7, though, everyone was engaging and maintained a really good energy level (even Becky Zagursky who had trouble keeping up with her Aqueous Humor slides rolled with it and kept the crowd laughing).
All in all a great event, as always. If you’ve never been to an Ignite, you should make the time for one. (The next Ignite Bend is going to be February 23.)
Being in Portland several times over the past several weeks for beer happenings got me thinking about the (mostly inconsequential) debate about “Cascadian Dark Ales” (versus the other names of “Black IPA”, “American Black Ale” and so on) and about the “Cascadia” part of that name. See, here in the Pacific Northwest “Cascadia” can refer to the Cascadia independence movement, which according to Wikipedia:
Cascadia is the proposed name for an independent nation located within the Cascadian bioregion of the Pacific Northwest region of North America. Proposed boundaries differ, with some drawn along existing political state and provincial lines, and others drawn along larger ecological, cultural and economic boundaries.
The nation would be created by secession of British Columbia from Canada, along with Oregon, Washington and portions of other states from the United States. At its maximum extent Cascadia would extend from the coastal Alaskan Panhandle to the north, extending into Northern California in the south, and inland to include parts of Alberta, the Yukon, Idaho and Western Montana.
This also made me think about the State of Jefferson—another proposed secessionist movement that would combine part of southern Oregon with Northern California:
The State of Jefferson was a proposed U.S. state that would span the contiguous, mostly rural area of southern Oregon and northern California, where several attempts to secede from Oregon and California, respectively, have taken place in order to gain own statehood.
I find these sorts of movements (ideas? memes?) fascinating on all sorts of levels, partially because they seem so wildly improbable and partially because it’s sort of a glimpse into an alternate reality (which piques my science fiction interest). And yet both Cascadia and Jefferson State are fairly recent phenomenons, which give them an air of plausibility for something that could be accomplished in my lifetime. Wildly improbable plausibility, as I noted, but still.
For these and other historical U.S. alternate realities, Wikipedia’s list of secession proposals is a fun read.
This year, for the first time since 2007, I was able to make it up to Portland for the Oregon Brewers Festival—the biggest beer festival in Oregon, if not the Pacific Northwest. (They bill it at “North America’s largest gathering of independent brewers” which I’m not so sure about considering the Great American Beer Festival, but anyway.)
You can read all the various related blogging bits about the OBF over on The Brew Site, my beer blog; beer reviews, vignettes, pictures (soon), that sort of thing. It was a really good trip, and a good festival; the amount it has grown even in the past four years since I was last there is amazing—used to be, you could hit the Fest on the first or second day early, right after they opened, and you’d have the run of the park and the beers, sure there were people there but there were no real crowds and no real lines anywhere.
That seems to have changed; even Thursday (the opening day) within the first couple of hours the crowd was bigger than I remember and there were lines to beers—in fact, the Maui Brewing CoCoNuT Porter apparently ran completely out by 12:30 (gates open at noon) on the first day—which if you ask me is just insane.
Because of my beer blog, I was able to get into the special blogger preview early on Thursday, tasting 15 beers to write about (which had to be done by the next day), plus I got a “media” badge and a mug as part of the package. I always feel a little conspicuous and slightly sneaky wandering around wearing the media badge, like I need something more to show for it than just carrying a notebook and a small camera along with me. (Okay, to be fair I had a backpack with those items in it plus the netbook computer, extra water, tokens, and Brew Site business-type cards.)
I also got the opportunity to meet and hang out with some bloggers and industry folks, which was a nice bonus to the weekend (of course). And hit up a couple of breweries: the Tugboat Brewery which I absolutely love but hadn’t been too in many years, and the new Burnside Brewery which I’ve been reading great things about (and who have some of the more unusual beers that I’ve seen).
Altogether, a really good weekend.
My wife and I just spent an anniversary weekend over on the Oregon Coast, in the southern town of Bandon. I think I’ve written before about how I really like this town; we’ve been three times previous but the last time was some nine years ago, which is too long.
Bandon is small (about 3300 people) and relatively touristy; it has a mix of the cutesy tourist shops (used books, candy stores, ocean art, antiques and gifts), a small but decent selection of restaurants, and mostly-nice lodging combined with the working-class presence of an Oregon coast fishing town. Add in several good state parks and fantastic beaches, and very decent weather (by Oregon Coast standards), and I do think it’s one of the coast’s gems.
Without going into full travelogue mode, I will say both Edgewaters and The Loft (both right downtown in the Old Town Bandon area) are fantastic restaurants, and the two candy stores of Cranberry Sweets and Coastal Mist are must-visits.
One thing I do notice however, is a distinct lack of beer. Not to say there’s no beer there—there is—but ironically the best selection of craft beers that we found on this trip was at the Mill Casino up north in Coos Bay/North Bend. In fact the entire southern stretch of coast below Florence is completely devoid of breweries, probably making it the most under-served area of Oregon in that regard.
To that end I have to say I think Bandon would be a natural location for someone to open up a brewpub; I suspect it’s got the tourist traffic that would support at least a small one, plus you have a population of at least 25,000 some 20 miles to the north from “Oregon’s Bay Area” (which, no joke, we saw on a sign entering Coos Bay). So naturally, I’ve already started formulating beer ideas in my head and wondering how the numbers might pencil. (You’d ideally need to be located in Old Town Bandon, I think, where you’d get the majority of foot traffic and tourists.)
So, who’d want to go in on such a venture…?
Some of these links aren’t as shiny-new as they were when I started this post, but even so:
The CDC’s zombie apocalypse preparedness plan: Yes, the CDC is all over the possibility of a zombie apocalypse. For real.
If zombies did start roaming the streets, CDC would conduct an investigation much like any other disease outbreak. CDC would provide technical assistance to cities, states, or international partners dealing with a zombie infestation. This assistance might include consultation, lab testing and analysis, patient management and care, tracking of contacts, and infection control (including isolation and quarantine).
Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn move trailer: I knew Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson were making a Tintin movie, but I didn’t realize just how OMGAWESOME it was going to be until I saw the trailer:
The Javascript PC emulator: pure amazing geekery. This is an x86 processor being emulated in Javascript inside a browser. And it’s running Linux. To be clear: what is essentially a full computer is running independently inside the browser. Which theoretically means you could run, well, anything inside of it.
A few weeks ago I checked out Superman from the library (the first Christopher Reeve movie) so I could watch it with the kids; it had been far too long since I last saw it, and the kids (naturally) needed an introduction to the best “Superman” movie, well, ever. And I have to say, even though it was made in 1978 and some of the effects are, well, 1978, it holds up.
I loved the Superman movies when I was a kid; considering the only previous “on screen” Superman adventures around were basically the old George Reeves ’50s television series and the Super Friends cartoons, those movies were like magic when they came out. They turned what I could imagine about a live adaption of the comic and turned it on its ear, they were that good. And Christopher Reeve was a genius bit of casting for that role—completely filled it out like nobody has before or since.
I’m thinking of the first two movies, primarily, since they hold together relatively well. I was pretty excited about Superman III when it came out, but even then I could tell it wasn’t up to par for the first two; they gave short shrift to Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane (completely ignoring the circumstances of the second movie, it seemed), for instance, and adding Richard Pryor as a campy, weird sort of villain just didn’t click.
And then Superman IV was just a mess, obvious even to me as a kid at the time.
I never have watched Superman Returns, which purports to ignore III and IV and operate as a sequel instead to II. Too many bad reviews and from what I read about the movie itself, too much of pretty much the same things they already did in the first two movies, and Brandon Routh just isn’t Superman. And I’m sorry, but the costume looked horrible.
I actually rather enjoyed the “Lois & Clark: New Adventure of Superman” show that was on during the 90s. Dean Cain was no Christopher Reeve, but he held up.
And I love the Animated Series that was out around that same timeframe (and which continued into the Justice League series); I haven’t seen all of the episodes but I think it’s probably the best TV series done for the character.
I haven’t watched “Smallville” though. No real reason, just missed the boat I guess.
Now, you can probably see where this is going.
So there’s this new Superman movie coming out, slated for December 2012… Man of Steel. I’m not sure what to make of it yet, but it’s got some pros and cons (in my mind) going for it.
The good:
The bad:
Okay, deep breath… Yes, I’m excited for this movie. I hope it’s as good as the original Superman. But… well, we’ll see, won’t we?