I'm a winner

Unlike LeBron James, I won something last weekend: a USTA tennis tournament! Okay, it wasn’t exactly the French Open, but it was pretty tough. I prevailed in fairly straightforward fashion on Saturday (6-3, 6-2), then managed to win a real battle on Sunday against a very tough opponent (7-6, 2-6, 6-3). It took about 2.5 hours and man, did I suck in the second set, as you can see by the score. The prize was this exceedingly cheesy trophy, you’ve got to love it. Boo yah!

Hello Cleveland

This post is dedicated to cheering up LeBron James now that his Cavaliers have been eliminated in the Eastern Conference Finals by Orlando. I figure these two videos will do the trick. Better luck next year! And p.s., LeBron, stop being such a crappy loser.

Car pr0n

As promised, some lovely photos of the new ride and one of the old one. Note that it took less than 24 hours for the new car to get covered in tree schmutz. I think I need to fire the chauffeur, he is a slacker!

Next, here’s a closeup of the cute little decklid spoiler and one of those rad alloy wheels.


And the interior, where you can see the heads-up display above the very sportay steering wheel and the gearshift (MANUAL TRANSMISSION BAYBEE):


Finally, the beloved old Civic, still cranking at 184K miles!

Review: Star Trek

Battle stations, everybody! Since I saw Star Trek on Sunday I’ve been thinking about how I might go about reviewing it. It’s not easy to sift through everything I think about it, and moreover there’s already a huge amount of discussion about the movie on the net, so it’s hard to be original. Hence I’m going to approach this as a meta-review.

First, as a longtime and fairly dedicated ST fan, it’s expected that I wouldn’t like the movie. And indeed I didn’t like it. Although while I was actually sitting in the theater, dazzled by all its prettiness and enjoying the often humorous dialogue and all the biiig explosions and the rest of the usual summer movie jazz, I did have a good time.

Then the lights came up, and the thinking started. Bad move. This is definitely not a movie to think about, under any circumstances. Don’t try to sift through any of the completely incoherent plot. Don’t try to figure out how the characters are motivated to do what they do. Don’t expect consistency from recurring plot devices. None of it will do anything for you but turn you into what is apparently the worst possible thing: the Cranky Fan.

One thing that keeps cropping up in online discussions of this movie is a neverending scorn for people who are Trek fans. Yeah, a few loonies out there actually dress as Klingons or commit other Trek-related weirdness. But never mind them, they’re a tiny cohort and outliers on the chart. Meanwhile, us sane people who have enjoyed a lot of Trekness over the last few decades, are we really to be ridiculed for thinking this movie sucked? If you’ve got a counterargument that it didn’t suck, then please lay it out. Forget the ad hominem crap and come up with some substantive reasons why it’s good. (Please try to move beyond the following: miniskirts, explosions, lensflare.)

Another thing I’m hearing is the idea that Trek fans can’t complain about the nonsensical supernova behavior or the other head-scratching plot elements in the movie because we’re willing to buy into impossibilities like faster-than-light travel or antimatter explosions or whatever. Hey folks, I don’t have a problem with science fiction. I do have a problem when a movie plot can’t scrape together the tiniest bit of internal consistency, or make any damn sense. Who cares if the concept of warp travel is crappy science? If a person or thing acts one way in one situation, and a different way when the plot requires it, that’s crappy storytelling. All stories deserve to be told well, whether it’s Trek or L.A. Confidential or Shakespeare. This one is told incredibly poorly.

Eh. I sound defensive through this whole post, but I don’t think I should have to defend myself. I’m bummed that this newest Trek incarnation is so lousy, and I don’t have to apologize for that. (Be glad I never even tried to watch Enterprise, heh! That looked like all kinds of suck.) In the meantime, maybe I’ll see the Wolverine movie again, that turned out to be better than this one. And maybe with the scads of money this movie will make, they’ll be able to make a better film next time.

Hot news in several flavors

It hardly seems possible, but there’s been too much going on recently and it’s been keeping me from updating the blog. So here is a summary:

New wheels: Finally, after many, many false starts (going back a ways!) we bought a new car last weekend. The hard part is over now—the price research, figuring out which dealer might be less sleazy than the others, the horror of haggling, the feeling that, despite everyone saying that this is the bestest time to get a fab deal on a car, we paid too much. Now all that’s left is to pick it up later this week (after checking to make sure the VIN is correct and all that paranoid jazz). Once the new toy gets driven home, I’ll post a pic and give more details. Woo, first car bought in twelve years, how crazy is that!

New TV: It seems silly to have a whole paragraph about this, but it’s pretty momentous in Casa Snorklewacker to upgrade the TV. After all, it was only back in 2000 that I replaced the 13-inch TV with a very modest—nay, un-American—20-inch one. Now we’ve got a 32-inch HD display with all the widescreen goodness. And, I must say, Halo 3 looks goddamn good on it. Standard-def cable, not so much. Guess I gotta upgrade that too, hmph.

There is no “I” in team: Last Tuesday, I overheard the pro who runs my tennis clinic telling someone about the local women’s USTA team. It’s something I’ve been curious about, so I wandered over and inserted myself into the conversation. Turns out that the last day of tryouts was the next day, so I figured that I was too late to get in on it. But the pro called the guy who runs the team and basically browbeat him into letting me come in and do some hitting. Mostly this consisted of the pro telling me to just show up, never mind that the coach was saying that there were no slots, etc. So on Wednesday I did just show up, and they did let me hit. The good news: they let me on the team! The bad news: despite how that sounds, it’s pretty much noncompetitive to get on the team, and it doesn’t at all mean that they send you to actual matches. There are far more people on the team than they need, so at a minimum it just means you can come to practices and get a little coaching and drilling. Well, I’m happy with that. What’s kind of schmacky is that after five minutes of hitting the ball around, the coach put me into the 3.0 level, which I doubt I am. I went to the first practice last night and out-hit a lot of the supposed 3.0s—heck, there is one girl there who can’t consistently hit the ball with her racket, which seems pretty crazy to me. Surely I am at a higher NTRP ranking than her?? But anyway. The important thing is that my foot’s in the door, something which wasn’t even on my radar a week ago. And maybe I’ll meet some people. Everybody seems nice, and I did get some good coaching advice last night. And after playing tennis last night for three-odd hours (there was the usual clinic, too!) I can proudly say that I am still able to climb stairs today. I wasn’t sure whether that would be the case!

So there’s the update for now. Hopefully more updates more often from here. I also need to see the Star Trek movie, surely that’ll inspire a post. Stay tuned.

Peep watch

My homie Beerad, living a newly itinerant life, has set up a blog to document his travels. Go check it out! It’s guaranteed to be interesting or he owes you a deep-fried chili dog or something.

In other peep news, we saw the ever-elusive Sashe this past weekend! How funny to have a friend from freaking Malaysia be the first person to see the new crib. I subjected him to some Halo 3 playing, and he subjected us to this incredibly addictive (as in, danger of losing your job addictive) online game. I am warning you, don’t click on the link. Or if you can’t resist, kiss your spouse farewell—and mute your speakers.

Whew

Well, I spent a day off of work today doing two very important things: mailing my damn tax returns, and clearing crap out of the old condo. Success on both fronts!

It is pretty sad to see the condo all empty. Funny, it looks much more worn around the edges than it did when it was full of our stuff. I wonder if this is why brokers don’t like to sell vacant properties: because every scuff mark and dull spot just sticks out. It makes me realize that the place was nice in large part because it was home. And now home is somewhere else, and that’s the nice place now. (Although complete, box-filled chaos.)

At this point there are just a few last things to get, and a final round of vacuuming, and then that tragic chapter in life will be closed. How weird, how awful. Thank heavens it’s almost entirely in the rear-view mirror. These last couple of weeks have just been a full-on sprint.