Diary of a Wolfeman

9:30am. Breakfast with the lovely Illyana at Holman’s. (A great little dive, by the way; you should check it out on a day when I’m not going to be there – I like it quiet.)

11:30am. Left the restaurant and called my insurance company – and got the “please call back during business hours” message. I called back again, and this time impersonated a clinic and got into the automated system, which then confirmed I am eligible for lenses and frames; no idea on the value thereof. Went to the mall.

Noon. Saleslady confirmed that I indeed have a hardware credit available and priced things out for me – both sets of frames I chose fell under the coverage limit, but the lens options I wanted would bring the total up to $169. Money well-spent, I figure. It’ll take 10 days to get them though.

Crap.

This is where I give some mad points to Binyon’s: they offered to give me a pair of “loaner” lenses to use until my ordered lenses come in. This is extremely cool, because it involved them throwing away a set of basic lenses – it’s not like anyone else will have my exact ‘scrip, so they won’t be able to re-use the lenses.

So, either they are very cool about this, or the lenses and two hours’ worth of technician time to grind and fit them is really a lot cheaper than they want us to think it is. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt this time and say they’re cool.

Noon to 2:00pm. Wandered ’round the mall killing time while Binyon’s built my glasses.

2:00pm. Picked up my new glasses. I be stylin’ now. Once my eyes get used to the change in ‘scrip, I’ll be able to see a little better. Now time to vacate the mall because I have spent far too long there for one day.

5:00-8:00pm. Office Holiday Party at Uptown Billiards. Food was good, table arrangement in the party room is still poor – one of the pool tables is pushed too far to one side to allow for a dartboard, and wouldn’t you know it, half our group ended up hanging out on the narrow side of the room and were constantly being asked to step aside for a pool shot. I expect a little better out of a pool hall. The Boss stole all of my blackjack mojo, and I ended up just breaking even this year.

Saturday needed help, but the weekend turned out ok.

Tolerant and I are very fond of the Chinese Village at 82nd & Stark, but it can be a bit too far to drive after work, so we’ve been on the lookout for something closer.

Chino Sai-Gon fits the bill rather nicely. They handle most of the Asian favorites with large portions at a reasonable price.

Now if only they delivered…

Da Roomie and I have been sadly watching the downward spiral of local radio in Portland, and it has gotten to the point where I just can’t take it anymore. Radio sucks, and I get tired of swapping CD’s around on the road – especially when I’m flying solo out to one of the wineries on the back twistys and don’t want to stop just to change discs.

So, I’ve been saving up for a new toy, and today I treated myself (and my passengers) to some new audio capabilities: a Kenwood KDC-HD942U. So far I’m diggin’ it. MP3-on-CD-R support, USB support and built-in HD radio.

I don’t really care about the HD radio – it sucks just as bad as regular radio – but that USB support is crucial. The reason for this particular model, however, is that the USB port is a cable that they routed from behind the unit to one of the center console pockets. On all the other models in my price range, the USB ‘support’ is a port on the faceplate so you can break off you thumb drive and kill the port with an accidental grab at your drink.

A quick trip to the electronics store netted me a 4GB USB drive, which is plenty of room for my roadable selections. Of course, it will take a bit longer to dig my way through the manual to figure out how to use all the functions on the thing.

Just a quickie here, since everyone else has reviewed it already.

Technical cinematography: Damn, this is a gorgeous movie. Props to the prop men, lighters-in-the-air to ILM, and something else to the other guys. I’m a bastard for pointing out bad edits, and I couldn’t find any. Technically, this movie is amazingly well put together.

Downey as Stark: hammer, nail, head. Pow. Hmmm… an actor known for his boozing and womanizing playing.. a billionaire inventor known for his boozing and womanizing. Gee, tough stretch. He does, however, nail the flipside of that role pretty solidly as well.

Paltrow as Potts: Again, a solid bit of casting. She’s never the damsel in distress, and never the token eye-candy. Solidly played.

Howard as Jim Rhodes: The downer cast member. Honestly, I thought he came off a bit gay, which just doesn’t seem to fit for a character that is A:) a ranking military officer chosen to be the liason to Stark Industries, and B:) the guy who will eventually be War Machine.

Bridges as Obadiah Stane: he dies in the end. Thank you. My sense of hearing is a bit weird – I hear pretty well, around the top end of the human ability. The problem is in the filtering: out in the woods, I can hear you coming long before you’ll see me. In a loud room however, I have trouble filtering out the rest of the room and paying attention to the person I’m talking with. To combat this, I have become a half-assed lipreader over the years and use it to fill in the gaps when my ears get overloaded. This means that while you may be watching their whole face for expression, I’m just watching the mouth, and I can’t stand Jeff Bridges’ mouth. He talks like an old man who forgot to put his teeth in. Plus he looks terrible as an old bald guy.

The Verdict: Two paws up. Go see the movie, and don’t worry about paying full ticket to do so. I may go back and watch it on the DLP screen.

Tolerant and I decided to get some culture into our mundane lives, so we went out last Friday to see the Portland Center Stage’s rendition of Cabaret, starring Storm Large as Sally Bowles and Wade McCollum as the EMcee.

Cabaret is set in Berlin during the rise of the Third Reich, a time when Berlin had become home to the strange and eccentric. Life outright sucked in the late 20′s for your average Berliner, and entertainment had to be suitably exotic to take your mind off your woes. As the program they handed us mentions, “if we actually put on stage tonight what was happening in those clubs in Berlin – we’d be shut down.” Thus we enter the Kit Kat Klub, one of the more notorious nightspots Berlin had to offer.

Back when I was 17 and in high school, I met this gal AH at an SCA event about a 2-hour drive from home – turned out she lived about 10 miles from me in the next township, and we ended up hanging out on weekends. (Yes, we dated too, but it went nowhere – we just were better friends.)

Anyway, up until this point I had been introduced to the idea of the Transformers only peripherally – I had seen commercials, but not the cartoons due to lack of cable. One or two of my friends may have had them, but it just never really came up, you know? Come to think of it, aside from Saturday morning cartoons on the Big 3 Networks, I hadn’t been exposed to decent animation either.

For those of you who have been pining away like me for a new space shooter since we got tired of playing Tachyon: The Fringe and gave up on X3: The Reunion, there is some small bit of hope: Ascaron Entertainment’s DarkStar One.

Basically, the game is a T:TF retread. Your character is given his murdered father’s ship, the experimental DarkStar One after he graduates from flight training. He is of course then tasked to go find his father’s killer. Along the way, he flies from system to system, meets new, interesting people, and kills them.

Yeah, the plotline’s a bit hashed, and I think an almost direct copy of X3, but what the hell. It’s not like we really give a rat’s ass about the plot, we’re here to shoot down other ships.

And, boy, do they give you plenty to choose from.

The hook for the game is the ship itself, which has a new twist up its tailpipe: the ship can be upgraded by collecting Coupons…err, Artifacts that have been left behind by some ancient race.

In asteroids. That are being actively mined for ore. And people just left these things lying around without taking them to any of the hundreds of research stations planted throughout the galaxy…

Yeah, not a lot of thought here.

Keep reading… Read the rest of this entry »

The concept is quite intriguing: a book imagined by Robert Heinlein and written years after his death from the original notes by Spider Robinson, arguably RH’s spiritual successor in the halls of Sci-Fi-dom.

It is a good book, an enjoyable read – I had to ration myself for fear of finishing it too quickly. The characterization is there, the plot is solid, the dialog is well written and carries well throughout the book. All the earmarks of a bestseller.

Then why am I disappointed?

Very simply: Spider has written this book before.

Okay, I’ll cut the guy a little slack. Having written some 32 or so previous books, one can expect that certain things will carry forward from previous books. I was just bummed that so many things carried forward in this one.

The main character has many similarities with Jake Stonebender of the Calahan’s series – and Jake is an extension of Spider himself. The plot is very reminiscent of Starseed if you look at the broad picture. Zen Buddhism plays a big part, as in most of Spider’s work. When it gets right down to it, the only things that are missing from the Robinson canon of plot elements is a mention of “Running, Jumping, Standing Still” and a sexy fat chick.

It was a very good book – but I kept getting the feeling that I had read it before. C’mon Spider, let’s see something new.

Tolerant, in her infinite sweetness,took me, The Pookster and her niece out to see Happy Feet, the animated adventure of a dancing Emperor penguin.

This is a good movie, and those of you with kids should take them to see it. The family will have a good time, and it is worth the money to see it on a big screen with good sound, as there is copious singing.

There is also a thick handful of social commentary, as any good fable should have. The worst part, however, has to be Nicole Kidman’s voice. A sad case of casting there.

Spoilers follow.

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A couple weeks ago, I stopped by the library to pick up Tolerant and I was wandering through the shelves when she grabs a book at random and hands it to me. Right there on the cover is the usual plug, this time from Jim Butcher, author of the bestselling series The Dresden Files:

“A swift pace, a good mystery, a likeable protagonist, magic, danger – URBAN SHAMAN has them in spades.”

Okay, I’d never heard of Jim Butcher, but he writes a good plug. Two things kept the book in my hands: One, Tolerant had randomly grabbed a book with “shaman” in the title, and I have always given a little credence to the old idea of randomly flipping through pages in a book for answers to life’s harder questions. Kind of like an instant Tarot reading – go ahead, try it sometime. The second is that I was also in a *shrug* “Why not?” kind of mood.

The World’s Best Girl Friend proves her worth yet again, as she handed me a gem. Butcher was right, this is a really good book.

Our protagonist was born Siobhan Walkingstick, daughter of an Irish mother and Cherokee father, but she calls herself Joanne Walker. Really, who wants to go through high school with a first name no one can pronounce and a last name like Walkingstick? As a single, twenty-something Seattle Police motor-pool mechanic, life is fairly ordinary. All that changes, of course, when she spots a woman running for her life from what looks to be a pack of dogs staright into the path of a knife-weilding Bad Guy parked in a church lot.

From a landing plane.

From there, she gets tangled up in a series of murders, the Wild Hunt, and coming to grips with the idea that the world isn’t the same as it was last week. With the help of a 73-year-old intrepid cabby of unusual talents and Seattle’s only cross-dressing detective, she may just survive the week – if she can catch some sleep.

Okay, there are a couple things that really make you stretch your belief, but Murphy does it in a way that you don’t really notice it. Like any good mystery novel, it’s written from the protagonist’s POV, and Walker spends most of her time wondering “what the hell?” just as much as you do.

The most annoying cliche about the whole thing is that Walkingstick’s Totem appears to be Coyote. This has been a bit overdone in the genre, but I suppose it makes sense – who better to walk you through the process of having your world-view turned inside-out than the Trickster?

The second-most annoying part is that Murphy has Walker visualizing her early steps into shamanic power as working on a car – it makes sense to ground the young shaman into something she can understand and visualize, yes, but I get the feeling that Murphy doesn’t really understand cars very much. For instance, this gifted young mechanic drives a muscle car – a classic Mustang. Correct, I can see that. But it’s an automatic? No.

Yes, I’m picking at nits here. Deal with it.

Nevertheless, a darned good read indeed, and I’m looking forward to digging up anything else Murphy has written.