Set Your Phasers To Fun

I’m much more of a Star Wars geek than I am a Star Trek geek. I love Star Trek but I never suspended all my disbelief the way I did for Star Wars. The new Star Trek movie is opening tonight, and it’s the first one I’ve been excited about since… well ever. Star Trek, in all its incarnations, was a television show, and it never translated to the big screen well for me. The director of the new Star Trek, J.J. Abrams, seems to feel the same way. He’s famous for big budget Hollywood summer blockbusters – Armageddon is the most famous – and having beautiful women in tight clothes beat people up on television – Alias and Lost. He’s “rebooted” the Star Trek series and upset some “purists” along the way. Instead of a morality play, this is supposed to sell popcorn, and he couldn’t find a spot for William Shatner. I’m happy about the first; I’m sad about the second, but not angry. Abrams has told the “purists” in interviews not to see the movie; it will only make them angry. I don’t know if upsetting these people is a good idea. A bunch of them have a tenuous grasp on reality as it is. The early reviews for the film are very good, so I hope some psychotic trekkie doesn’t stab Abrams with a Klingon dagger before he can finish the sequel. I’m hoping that he can do something special with the franchise the way Ron Moore did with Battlestar Galactica. The less talky more shooty approach is a better way to tell Kirk’s story anyway. I do hope they bring back some of the camp that made the original series great, but they may have had to let it go so the whole thing wouldn’t wind up cheesy. I understand that the guy playing Kirk avoided everything Shatner while filming, which couldn’t have been easy. I see more Priceline commercials than I do Geico commercials. I may have to go see this one alone, though. MJ has never been a big Star Trek fan, and she’s even less of an action movie fan.

Weird Stuff on The Net

Today didn’t go as planned. I had stuff scheduled throughout, but the first thing got screwed up and it threw everything else off. I dropped the Odyssey off at the dealer this morning at 8am, but they had to get the guy that sold us the van to sign off on giving me a loaner car. He didn’t get to work until 9am. The day was down the toilet. I went to the gym, but felt a twinge in my leg so I quit. I’m not as stupid as I seem, and I’m not as stupid as I used to be. However, with a screwed up schedule and a workout cut short, I don’t have anything to write about. Therefore I will write about stuff I saw on the internet today. Random question: does anyone still call it the World Wide Web? The first thing that caught my interest today wasn’t even on the web. It was on television. I was sitting in the Duval Ford waiting pen watching the CBS morning show, and noticed that the crew was really, really White. Whatever culture their people came from has been wiped from their DNA, and I don’t mean when they’re reading copy. It was also when they had their between segment banter. I was just thinking how exhausting it must be to force yourself to speak in non-regional, every sound stressed, diction for any length of time. “I’m going to go to Publix and get some things for dinner” is something I do everyday but I’ve never once said in my life. It’s always “Ima go to Publix n’get some stuff fer dinner”. The first interesting thing I saw on the internet was a list of the five most baffling sex scenes in the history of fan fiction. I won’t go into what I read. Suffice it to say I will be having night terrors every time I close my eyes for the rest of my life. They weren’t explicit. They were creepy, and written by people with serious psychological problems. I cleansed my pallet with “Dork in capris vs. A carnival hammer. Who ya got?” While a guy hitting himself in the face with a hammer may be a tragedy, he went out in public wearing capris, and God was watching. This prepared me for the best thing I saw on the interweb all day long, and I will not be going into this either. This deserves it’s own post. I think it should be a meme: The Seven Most Horrific Places You’ve Had to Take A Dump. I don’t know if I should write this post now or wait until tomorrow.

If You’re Not Close To Death, How Do You Know You’re Alive?

I chose pain. I’m training in the sun this summer, and I started today. I went to the Y this morning to lift weights and when I was done I was planning to do my normal hour on the elliptical machine. But then I thought why not run outside? So I did. I headed out to my car, checked the thermometer, strapped on my iPod and took off towards the river. It was 87 degrees and I was wearing a black shirt. The only downside is that I didn’t have my Garmin 305. It took me less than five minutes to finish blasting my shoulders and to start running. The plan was to run to the Jacksonville Landing and back. I was less than ten steps in before I was out of breath. My body was still trying to deal with the fatigue from the weights when I was asking it to carry me up a bridge. I hated every moment of it, but this is how Kenyans and Ethiopians grow up, it’s their basic mode of travel, so running up hill in the heat is the way to go. On the way down the bridge over the railroad tracks, it wasn’t so much running as it was not quite falling down. Man was I happy about being in the shade, which didn’t last very long. I got to the bottom and found my stride. I cruised the half mile to the Landing, and then realized I had to run back. I started to lose it on the way back. I was wondering what the homeless people thought about runners. I was wondering if I would feel it when my heart exploded in my chest. I know heart attacks hurt, but this wouldn’t really be a heart attack. Heart attacks come from a lack of blood. My heart was just being pushed past its limits, especially going back up the bridge. I never felt as bad as I did during the River Run, so I never stopped. These were the thoughts that were running through my head. I finished with a lap around the track, and I ran flat out the last hundred yards. I drove home and sat in my car for five minutes while my heart slowed down. It wasn’t until I was sitting in front of my house that I got a little scared about not being able to catch my breath. Oh well, that which doesn’t kill us. This is gonna be a fun summer.

Heat Stroke: It's What's for Dinner

I was feeling restless yesterday so I went for a run. It was after 5pm but it was May in Florida so it was 110 degrees with 110 percent humidity. I was going to run a quick five miles, which turned into five kilometers at the top of the hill less than a quarter of a mile into the run. I’ve been running pretty regularly for more than two years but it still shocks the hell out of me how much difference the temperature makes in running performance. I hadn’t run in a couple of weeks but I’ve been doing a lot on the elliptical machine so I’m in decent cardiovascular shape. I wasn’t pushing myself because I knew my legs weren’t up for anything serious. I was refusing to let myself run the first mile in less than ten minutes. My attitude had changed three minutes in at the top of the hill to just do three miles. I was inhaling but I guess the part of the world I was running in was low on oxygen because I was getting nothing. Why doesn’t oxygen work over eighty degrees? If it’s seventy degrees or cooler I can dial in at about a ten minute mile and run forever. Training for the River Run was fun. Running yesterday was agony. It didn’t help that I had just finished a couple of helpings of spaghetti right before I ran. I was wondering if I would slow down if I started to feel sick or would I just blow chunks on the sidewalk like it was nothing because I wanted the run to be over. Fortunately, I never had to make that choice. I ran 3.2 miles in just over thirty minutes, which should have been no big deal, and I’m feeling it today. My legs are sore and they shouldn’t be. Unfortunately, I’m at a macho crossroads. On the one hand, I’m thinking about running before dawn because it’s fun and relatively pain free. On the other hand, I’m thinking about running at 2pm everyday and seeing if I can get used to it.

…to be continued.

I Even Remember That Milk Drink He Was Putting Bitters In

My sister got engaged today, and I’ve had to come to grips with the, now, undeniable wisdom of Father Nanton. He’s the priest that married MJ and me. He’s a crotchety, self-important, Episcopal priest. We chose him because when he’s not being a priest, he’s a laid back Trinidadian and we were sold a bill of goods. He was living in Miami and flew up to Jacksonville to marry us and on the ride from the airport to my parents’ house in Orange Park we were talking about the ceremony. My goal was to leave the ceremony legally wed to MJ. Anything short of that would be a massive failure. Anything beyond that would be an unqualified success. He had different ideas. He was asking me about how the seats would be set up and where people would be sitting and blah blah blah. I was flying down I-295 at this point doing about 110. This was two days before the wedding, and MJ was having serious issues with the reverend already. His wanting to change basic plans that had nothing to do with the Lord was not going to help. He started going on in his mellifluous baritone Caribbean drawl – dude has a world class speaking voice – about how all the couples that would be there, young and old, would be reliving their weddings vicariously through ours. My attitude was, whatever! I was treating this thing like a bank robbery – get in, get out, the rest is ego. Then today came and my mother told me about my sister getting engaged. I was a little bit giddy – that’s the best way I can describe it. I was really excited for her and her fiancé, JH, but I was also taken back to June 15, 2002 in Ponte Vedra, Florida. That was such a magical day for me. It was the happiest day of my life. I remember everything about that day. I remember everything about the rehearsal the day before. It was better than the day LMJ was born, even though I was consumed with an all encompassing love that I didn’t think was possible and was totally unprepared for when the nurse handed her to me. My wedding day was better than the birth of my daughter because on LMJ’s birthday I watched my wife get an episiotomy, on my wedding day I fed her cake.

As an afterthought, CEJ, if you read this my only advice is to skimp on the wedding and splurge on the honeymoon – and maybe pick a rabbi, from somewhere other than Trinidad, to marry you. It’s better to be safe than sorry.

We Got Out The Door For Blue Book. Scoreboard!

We bought a mini-van today, closed the deal. Car shopping is an adventure. We didn’t wind up buying it from Tony Soprano. We bought it from a tag team of stereotypical used car salesman. MJ wanted to go and see one more van this morning before we committed. We headed to Duval Ford to see it, and we were barely out of the car before we were met by the dad from American Chopper with the thickest listhp I’ve heard thince Thindy Brady. It was so thick I found myself watching his mouth when he spoke. I’m not a speech pathologist but I could tell the reason he had a lisp was because he stuck his tongue out three inches past his front teeth whenever an “S” came up. He referred us to his buddy down at the fair grounds. All the Duval car dealerships were having a huge used car sale this weekend. Geronimo, that’s what was on Thindy’s tangerine business card, was very professional and didn’t try to push us into anything on his lot. We drove downtown and met Bob, who looks like a character actor that always plays cowboys but I have no clue about his name. It was about 700 degrees outside and I liked that Bob was not only covered in sun tan lotion, but also had a big hat on. We drove around in the sage green minivan and it made our decision harder. It had more miles than the one we thought we wanted, but it was a year newer and came right out of Q branch – DVD, navigation system, rear outside camera. We didn’t buy it on the spot because it was more expensive than the older one we were looking at yesterday, and we were able to get the two dealerships into a bidding war. Bob actually asked us what it would take to get us into the car today. In the end Duval Ford was more desperate to move their stuff off the fairgrounds than Lucas Honda was to move their stuff off the lot. The Lucas Honda team was very efficient. It took at least forty-five minutes less to get the paperwork done than the last time we bought a car. The guy that did our paperwork was named Alfredo, and I bet if I asked to see his green card we could have knocked another $1500 off the price, but that’s being greedy, and just a little bit racist. It was weird listening to him run through the used car salesman stuff trying to up sell us on an extended warranty with a Hank Azaria in the Birdcage thick accent. We drove it home today and have to take it in Wednesday to get cleaned up. We love it already. Getting LMJ in the van is effortless, and it has storage space for days. I may never drive anything else again.

Will They Keep Spinning When I'm Stopped at a Stop Light? or Big News Week

Well this was a big week. Senator Arlen Specter left the Republican Party and joined the Democratic Party, Chrysler declared bankruptcy, Justice David Souter announced his retirement, and we’re thinking about getting a mini-van. I already wrote about the senator. Chrysler declared chapter 11 bankruptcy, which means they’re going to reorganize their management and renegotiate their debt, and by reorganize and renegotiate I mean a judge is going to decide all of this. It needed to happen and I think it’s what all of the American car companies need to do. They have to be able to get their costs under control so they can compete. Then they need to hire some people that don’t suck, so they can start putting out products that don’t suck. Justice David Souter is retiring. He said he was going to if Obama was elected. Apparently, beltway politics make his skin crawl and he can’t take it anymore. I hope the president is thinking about who’s retiring and his story. Souter screwed the Republicans after he was on the Bench. H.W. nominated him thinking he’d be the conservative he’d been throughout his legal career, but as Supreme Court justices are wont to do, Souter voted however the hell he wanted to. That’s the whole point of the founding fathers making the job permanent. Obama needs to be careful who he picks, especially if he wants to have more than a crap shoot of an idea how the new justice will vote. He needs to be aware of more than race and gender or he’ll wind up with the presidential equivalent of herpes – unless we’re talking about Bill Clinton, in which case the presidential equivalent of herpes is gonorrhea. Nothing sticks to slick Willie. We went car shopping tonight. We’re probably going to end up buying a car from Tony Soprano. The guy we’re dealing with is clearly from North Jersey, and he hasn’t been down here long enough for Middleburg to affect his speech. He’s not as big as James Ganolfini, but he is a big guy with a receding hairline, and he looks a like Tony would look if Tony got his teeth fixed. He’s a real nice guy. MJ is deciding between two Honda Odysseys. I’m deciding if 20” rims would be ridiculous on a mini-van. Really, there’s only one way to find out. Boom.