Cannonball

Today was the MMC’s annual Pool Party and as always at these Miata Club functions I consumed a lot of food. And even though I participated in (and won) the Biggest Splash Competition, heavyweight division, Cannonball style, I didn’t expend as many calories diving as I took in eating.

I didn’t even break out my camera, but someone else took a bunch and promised to email them around. If any of them captured me making big splashes in full glory, I’ll post them here for your enjoyment, until then, please enjoy this little animated gif file from the turn of the century.

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Ecks Philes Moo V

Of the 4 movies we have seen this summer I’d have to say that I Want To Believe notches in just ahead of Wall-E, a long way down from Iron Man, but miles ahead of Indiana Jones. The only reasons it did beat out Wall-E was because the last third of that animated flick disappointed compared to the beginning and I’m an X-Files fan from way back. When friends asked at dinner tonight how we liked it, both Donna and I said, “Go see it if you were a fan of the series.”

It was great to see the old familiar faces of Scully and Mulder together again, but it has been too long. This is the move they should have made a half a decade ago, a year after the series ended it’s TV run. It was definitely better than 1998’s Fight the Future which suffered from the same malady as the Firefly movie, Serenity, it was too movie-ish. I Want To Believe was more true to it’s television roots, it is almost quiet, there were zero explosions, nary a gunshot and the only chase sequence was on foot. But it did include lots of scary moments, a few very squeamish moments, a “paranormal” plot, some Scullyisms and Mulderisms and just enough tips of hat to the characters old familiar quirks to make it worth the matinee admission price.

There certainly wasn’t a lot of pent up demand to see this movie, like there was for Batman, because we went to the first showing ever for this theater at 11:30 in the morning and there were just 15-20 seats occupied.

The Picasa/Google map of the bike ride home wasn’t as interesting as I thought it might be, take a LOOK for yourself.

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How To Bike Ride Home In 42 Easy Steps

Even though it was Thursday, it was the last day of our work week, so we rode the tandem in. Because it was our nine hour day we needed to be into work an hour earlier, so the alarm went off at 4:45AM. FYI, even though the days are still quite long because of the season it is very dark at half past five in the morning, but we have a red strobing tail light and a nice bright battery powered headlight so we can see and be seen.

After work I mounted the camera in the Photojojo BikeCam Mount and documented our 6-1/2 mile ride home. I took 42 pictures and uploaded them to Flickr. You can watch a slideshow by clicking HERE. Once it opens up, click on the i in the circle so you can read along. If you are not from around here most of the comments won’t mean anything, but hey, reading them might distract you from the fact that they might be tilted or blurry. (Did I mention that they are totally unedited in any way?) Tomorrow I’ll work on placing them on a google map so you can see the route. (Can’t hardly wait, can you?)

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Long Range Baseball on the Radio

The FRS had an afternoon game in Seattle which started here on the east coast at 4:40 PM. Perfect timing for me as I could listen to the game while I put another coat of gloss white on the trim in the middle bedroom.

I fired up Gameday Audio, selected the Boston radio station that broadcasts the games and I was greeted by some inane sports talk show. At first I thought they might be in a rain delay, knowing the pacific northwest, but then remembered that the Mariners field had a retractable roof, so a little liquid sunshine wouldn’t halt play. I clicked on the link for the Seattle radio station’s broadcast and sure enough they were nearly through the top half of the first inning.

It was kind of neat to hear a different set of voices with a different perspective of the game. The roof was open and because the stadium is near the city’s rail yard there were quite a few times when you would hear train horns blasting in the background that, for me, added to the ambiance. Half way through the game the TV and radio broadcasts swapped play-by-play guys and I got to listen to their long time announcer, Dave Niehaus. He has been doing Mariner’s games for 32 years and you can hear why he has been doing it so long and is getting inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame this Sunday. A very nice listen even if his team loyalty is misguided.

During the breaks between innings there was sometimes silence and sometimes commercials. I remember when I first started to listen to the Red Sox games on the internet all I ever got was silence, but sometime in the last couple years I started hearing all of them. I wonder if it was because MLB.com blocked certain ads. That seems unlikely, because as much as baseball frowns on gambling (right Pete?) one of the sponsors I did hear from several times was the Swinomish Casino. A big sponsor of the Red Sox baseball games is Foxwoods Resort & Casino as well. The only thing I can come up with is the radio station has a two tiered sponsorship plan for advertisers, one cheaper one for local coverage and a more expensive one for the national coverage.

I stopped listening to eat dinner with the game tied at three runs apiece. When I came back I tried the Boston broadcast again and they were doing the game, so I stayed with the old familiar voices. The game was still tied, but the FRS finally won the game in the 12th inning earning a three game sweep of the Mariners (which took a little of the sting out of being swept by the Angels in the three games before.) Tomorrow is an off day before the dreaded MFY come to Fenway Friday for a weekend series which means I’ll probably get to see some of the games on TV.

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Bike Cam II

Tried out Version 1.1 my Photojojo BikeCam tonight. The lock washer helped because the clamp around the handlebar didn’t come loose at all during our nearly 12 mile neighborhood jaunt. But, you just knew a but was coming didn’t ya, the camera still had a tendency to rotate from facing straight forward. My guess is because this doesn’t work like a real tripod, i.e. the screw doesn’t bottom out in the camera’s tripod socket, no matter how much you tighten it, it is still going to rotate.

Because the camera is off center on the handlebars, the tripod mount is off center, the camera is sticking up at the end of a 2″ long screw, the tires have 90p.s.i. in them and the roads are not real smooth, 90% of the images I’ve taken so far have been blurry. Even the un-blurry ones aren’t what you’d call photographs (snapshots maybe), so what is going to let the world know you are taking these pictures on a moving bicycle and are not just snapped by someone from another planet who has never even heard of photography?

You include the bicycle. If you look at the very bottom of the first picture you can see a shadow of my helmeted head. Not real obvious. When life hands you lemons, you should make some Mike’s Hard Lemonade. When the camera kept rotating bit by bit, an idea popped into my head, why not rotate it nearly 90° and include some of my hand/arm. I think ideally I should figure out how mount the camera in a vertical manner and using the widest angle available include just a bit of the front tire. Maybe I can work that out with my Gorilla Pod.

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Is It Just Me

Or has mr-miata.net been really slow lately? I can’t even load cpanel to back up my database in case of some sort of imminent failure.

Current plan for Friday is to go see the X-Files movie. I hope that Scully and Mulder don’t kiss, contrary some of the images I have seen on the net, because it will ruin something for me. Someone I talked to today wishes that they would just go ahead and do it, as the sexual tension is killing him (Hi Mark.) I know in real life that eventually they we would end up together because as the great philosopher Harry Burns once said:

…no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.

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Used Books

I get nearly all my reading material from a local used book store. An eight dollar paperback costs four bucks and then because I have store credit from returning books there, they take another half off, so for a couple dollars I get several hours of escapism. I mostly read mysteries, from the hard boiled private eye kind to the comic female bounty hunter kind.

Because I read a lot of the same type books and my memory is addled due to age and the hundreds of acid trips in my younger days, all the back cover blurbs about the book are starting to sound the same, so that has become an unreliable way to choose a book. I have more than once brought home a book and about half way through it realized I have read it before. To increase my odds of bringing home a book I haven’t read is to open to a random page and read a bit, but for the reasons mentioned above this is not much more effective. My latest solution to this dilemma is to take a black Sharpie and fill in the zero on page 101 in every book I bring home. This works for me. But.

The mark is not that noticeable, I don’t think, but does it bother the next person who picks up the book? It is surely not as bad as some markings I’ve come across. In the latest book I’m reading some kindly Christian has tried to prevent readers from inadvertent blasphemy by crossing out the word goddamn. It happened once early on in the book and then twice later. I’m curious as to why a person of those moral standards was reading a book featuring murder, adultery, gambling, drugs and prostitution in the first place. And I wonder why they just didn’t stop reading after the first mention of goddamn, but plowed ahead to find more.

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