Finding Its Direction

Lost returned tonight. And from the first episode, it appears that the show's writers are back on the path that they strayed from midway through season two.

There were several strong twists in this episode, and the focus returned to the core characters rather than the second-stringers. Some questions were answered, many more were introduced, and the series actually seemed to have the energy and momentum that made it a favorite in its first season.

It's too early to say if it's going to maintain this energy for the remaining seven episodes, but I certainly hope so; it would be nice to be able to look forward to each episode again, rather than lamenting the show's stumbles...

Persistence of Motion

In discussing my exercise program, I mentioned to a friend that I have for the past seven and a half years exercised twice daily--walk a couple of miles, then spend about twenty or thirty minutes doing light weights, situps, pushups, and the like.

"But how frequently do you exercise?" he asked.

"Twice daily," I repeated.

"Yeah, I know... but how frequently?" he asked again.

"Every day."

"How many days a week?"

"Every day."

"Every day?"

"Every day."

"But what if it's..."

"Every day," I reiterated.

"Even it it's cold or raining or..."

"Every day."

That's the persistence of motion. I exercise twice a day, every day, 365 days a year, 366 days on leap years. The only exception to this have been two days after oral surgery, when I was bleeding heavily (thin blood and all that) and unable to walk without exacerbating the problem, and one day when I was ill with some sort of virus and unable to walk across the room. In those cases, I exercised an extra session each day for a few days after to make up for lost motion.

On Christmas, I exercise twice a day. When Mom died, I exercised twice a day. When Dad died, I exercised twice a day. When it snowed, I exercised twice a day. I think you get the picture.

The only way I can feel certain that I'm doing what it takes to stop myself from getting as out-of-shape as I was before April of 2000 is to make a commitment to myself that I will exercise every day.

Dr. Mike tells me I'm the only patient he has who has made such a promise after heart surgery and then kept it for years afterwards. I'm willing to be the exception in that regard.

Quick Ending

Fans of formulaic slasher films--and those who like to mock them--should get a smile or two from this ad:

Slasher film?

Be sure to watch the whole thing. The teaser line at the end is great--and this is a real company, by the way!

A Key Accomplishment

As much as I disliked Cell... that's how much I liked Duma Key.

There are times when Stephen King seems like more than one author. Cell, the last work published under his name (since then he did another novel, Blaze, under his Richard Bachman pesudonym), was a meandering, pointless, dissolute novel that went absolutely nowhere. I was wondering if King had lost the drive to tell a story.

But Duma Key proves that he still has what it takes.

King said that, where Lisey's Story was his novel about love, Duma Key is his novel about divorce. That's an oversimplification, though: Duma Key is also a novel about love, and it's a novel about art and the drive to create and the hidden place from which many artists derive inspiration... and it's a novel about change and the interrelationship of person and place and the dichotomy of change.

When King focuses on characters, he shines--and he shines a lot in this novel. I came to care for these characters and their triumphs and travails, and that drew me into the hefty tale. It's a novel that demands time, and it deserves it.

This is the Stephen King I first became enthused about more than thirty years ago. Welcome back!

The Agony of da Feet

A posting at Charles' blog reminded me of something...

Jeff Jones hates feet.

I have been a big fan of Jeff Jones' work for decades, since he first became the go-to guy for paperback companies who couldn't afford to hire Frank Frazetta to paint a cover. While Jones' work lacked the fine detail that was a hallmark of Frazetta's paintings, it had the moodiness and the sense of light and dark that made Frazetta's work so striking. And, similar to Frazetta, Jones also had an ability to present the lithe, sinuous (and often sensuous) human form.

But he apparently had no idea what to do with feet.

The cover for Kothar and the Conjurer's Curse is a great example; notice how the main figure's feet simply vanish into an obscuring mist. What is this mist? Why is it there? If the smoke from the nearby censer is rising, why isn't the mist rising? I have no idea, and neither does Jeff Jones, I'll bet; the mist is an artistic tool that allows him to avoid painting feet.

Here's another painting, from the superlative and underrated Peter Saxon Guardians series; again, the figure dissolves at about ankle-level, with no feet anywhere to be seen.

Jones isn't alone in this; a lot of artists, both paperback illustrators and comic book artists, go out of their way to avoid drawing feet. (Rob Liefeld will actually depict the curvature of the Earth in order to obscure the feet of his running characters.) Apparently, there is something about the tarsals that is either unattractive or incomprehensible to many artists.

But it always struck me as odd that Jones, who seemed to have such artistic mastery of the human form, was flummoxed by feet.

Thanks, Trish!

For the first time in my life, I actually know how to use a knit scarf to keep my neck warm!

I walk outdoors a lot, in all sorts of weather, so I frequently am wandering through sub-freezing breezes. (Like tonight, for instance, when it was 25 degrees with a 20mph chill wind over snowy ground.) A warm knit scarf began to sound very appealing after the first year of my winter walks, so I got a couple of them as Christmas gifts. Problem was, I had no idea what to do with them. Oh, I knew where they went, but I ended up wrapping them around my neck multiple times so that they either bunched up, became tourniquet-like, or flopped loose in the breeze.

Then, at dinner on Wednesday night, I saw Trish preparing her scarf before she went outside in the Wednesday night snow and chill. She folded the scarf in half, put it around her neck, tucked the ends loosely through the loop, and adjusted. Bingo, she had a scarf that kept her neck warm, looked good, didn't choke her, and didn't fall off the first time she moved.

I tried it, and it worked!

For the past few nights, my neck has actually stayed warm and I was comfortable--thanks, Trish!

Repeat Performance

When I went out for a walk at 8:30 this morning, there was no snow, in spite of the weather forecasts indicating that the snow would begin between 3am and 6am. I began to wonder if this would be a repeat of the 1976 "snow-fake," when weathermen predicted such a heavy blizzard that schools began sending kids home at 10am so that no one would be snowbound in the school building... but the storm dissipated at the Alabama line and we didn't get a single flake.

Turned out that wasn't the case; the snow was just running behind schedule. About 9:30, it began to sleet lightly; by 10, that had switched over to big wet flakes of snow. That continued for about two hours, at which point the snow turned to fine, tiny flakes. So far, we've had about an inch or so of snow, but it's supposed to continue for the rest of the day.

Six years with no significant snow, and now two measurable snowfalls in three day!

The Snow Must Go On

After more than six years of virtually no snow, we had almost 2" of snow (measured at my house--your snowdrifts may vary) yesterday, and every weathercaster seems confident that we're going to have that much or more again late Friday night/early Saturday morning (it's Thursday evening as I write this).

"So exactly how long has it been since we had significant snow?" you ask the ol' weather record-keeper. The answer is "four years, two weeks, and one day." We had a heavy 6" snowfall on January 2nd, 2002; all of our snowfalls since that time have been light dustings of 1/2" or less... most of them, in fact, were so light that they didn't even cover the roads evenly. (We've had freezing rain twice since then, but that's not snow, is it?)

Last night's snow was the kind that drives students insane: it snowed heavily starting about 6pm, snowed for three or four hours, then warmed up, shifted to rain, and the snow was so diminished by sunrise the next morning that kids had to go to school. I'm sure that, had I been outsite at sunrise, I could have heard the communal groans of teachers and students echoing over hill and dale...

And to prove that nature can be twice cruel, this next snowfall is predicted to fall on a weekend, thereby impacting students' time off but not their school schedule.

Now and Then?

Is this the abortive version of John Lennon's "Now and Then" that the Beatles reportedly considered for completion after "Free As a Bird" and "Real Love?"



Probably not. There are a few "Paul is dead" references here that I don't believe the real Paul McCartney would include in a video; the sound has no elements of the Jeff Lynne production style that characterized the other songs; and the contributor at YouTube is not listed as PaulMcCartney (with an l), but as PauIMcCartney (with a capital "I").

Even so, it's cleverly done and has a certain Beatles sound; worth checking out, at least. The same contributor has also done a remix of Lennon's "I Found Out." Follow the links from the "Now and Then" video if you're interested...

Ehhh..

Okay, the announcements are made, and I'm just sort of ehhh... about the whole thing. Maybe I expect too much. Here's the rundown on my earlier-posted rumors and the veracity thereof:

•MacBook Air: it's there, but no induction charging at all, just a standard magsafe adapter
•Mac OSX 10.5.2: not specifically announced, but it sounds like they may roll it out with the new base stations
•New AppleTV: announced, but no optical drive, no announcements of more storage space, no tuner
•New iPhone with faster 3G network accessibility - no such luck, as iPhone users are still saddled with 21st century accessibility in a 21st century machine
•Updated MacBook Pro - nope
•DRM-free iTunes - not announced
•Movie rentals through iTunes - yep... ho hum...

Now, what wasn't rumored:
•New Airport Extremes with built-in hard drives--500gb for $299, 1TB for $499. That sounds very good, and it may lead me to upgrade one of my units.

No major surprises, a couple of minor letdowns. I had higher hopes...