All of this fuss...

...over a movie with no cast, no script, no budget, no production date.
Peter Jackson posted a letter on a website saying that NewLine had passed on him as director of The Hobbit, siting reasons of timing. To complicate matters, Jackson is suing New Line over profits from The Fellowship of the Rings. Apparently, Mr. Jackson wants to make sure that there were enough zeros at the end of his big paycheck for that movie. Given that the LOTR trilogy grossed in the three billions of dollars, I assume he's not hurting. Not scratching to try and get the kids to the dentist, or pay the past-due hospital bills.
Do you sense a lack of sympathy?
Certainly, Jackson is due whatever his contract calls for, but his demand for NewLine to submit to an audit is just Never. Going. To. Happen. Accounting in the film industry is an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a conundrum, and they don't want to reveal the charlatan behind that curtain.
Having said all of that, I doubt I would see a Hobbit remake that wasn't directed by Jackson, and didn't include at least Andy Serkis as Gollum and Ian Mckellen as Gandalf. The LOTR movies were more than mere cinema, they were events of the first caliber. My top five movies of all time would include all three. I am to this day astounded at the technological leaps that were taken in those movies, the breathtaking battle scenes. The moment when the Rohirrim swarmed into Sauron's army at Minis Tirith is perhaps my top movie moment, ever. I nearly came up out of my seat with excitement.
The Hobbit is not nearly the story that LOTR is. It's mainly a series of adventures on the way to retrieve some treasure and kill a dragon. Individually, the scenes make good bedtime reading for the kids. When Bilbo first meets Gollum, or first encounters Smaug, or gets caught by the trolls... my kids love to hear them. The book as a whole, however, is lacking in depth.
I've been looking forward to a new attempt at The Hobbit. There has been at least one animated attempt that fell flat. I'll be thrilled again if the time comes to visit Middle Earth with Peter Jackson as our guide.

Living the Dream

One of my dreams is to bike ride a significant distance across the country. I've got my route planned to several destinations, including the next big commute for work. Sometime when the weather gets warm I'd like to ride to Madison, but first I have to find two weeks to spare.
Anyway, here's a link to a blog from a husband and wife that rode a tandem from Bar Harbor, Maine to Key West, Florida. That's about 2300 miles or so, a long way to pull a trailer. A lot of continuous time to spend with your wife, as well. I don't think my marriage would survive it.
I would have liked more pictures, but the blog takes us on a wonderful historical tour along the nation's coastline, without getting bogged down in the mundane. I've often wondered if our narrator is a history teacher by trade.
If you have some time to kill (and you must, otherwise why would you be reading this?), head on over to Olga and Bob's Most Excellent Adventure and read your way from the bottom to the top. You won't be dissapointed, especially if you envy them every crank of the pedals like I did.

Just a little blast from the past

I'm a movie geek. Some seminal periods in my life are marked by movies that I saw at the time: 2001, Stand by Me, It's Alive, Star Wars, Star Trek II, and on.
And for various reasons, this song and the movie it's from (which is FULL of great songs) will always hold a special place for me.

Rocky Mountain Redux

I've said this before, but... once again I'm back in Denver. Definantly NOT where I want to be at the moment. But we do what we have to most of the time, and what we want to only some of the time.
So here I am.
I finally had a sunny day and a window seat for the flight, so I got to look down upon the land that I well know, and was able to track our progress across the state.
I first spotted the Wabash, winding it's way south through Indiana. With that as a benchmark I quickly found Terre Haute, and then Paris a few minutes later. I spent five years working in Paris, and it's been the best five years of employment I've spent to date. I learned more at that local computer / internet / wireless/ microwave provider than all the jobs I've held before or since. In many ways, little shops like that are further towards the cutting edge than I'll be again in a long time. Small shops and the small businesses that they serve can turn on a technological dime, but a big organization turns like an aircraft carrier. Deploying an Office patch can take change requests and multiple chains of permission, and testing, and deployment.... days and days.
I could follow Route 16 down through Kansas and Ashmore, and down into Charleston. I was surprised to see Quality Lime from the air, a place where I have blown many inches of rock dust out of many computers and printers. You have to know what you're looking for, but it's there. As is the Charleston Speeday, scene of many great dirt-track races and crashes.
Through Charleston and into Mattoon, I could see the airport and a nice view of Charleston lake.
What I was really looking for the entire time was a little two lane nothing that runs from north of Mattoon to Assumption. From nowhere to nowhere, really. I loved that road every time I drove it. It's always in good repair, and straight as an arrow. It goes over Lake Shelbyville, through Findlay, and then down the big hill to Assumption.
I'm unsure why I'm so enamored of that road. Perhaps it's because I always wanted to ride a bike down it, and never got to. Perhaps because the people in Assumption were always exceedingly nice, and exceedingly appreciative of my work. Whatever, I got a strange gratification in seeing it from the air, since I haven't even driven it in nearly eight years.
I gave up watching after that, having acheived my goal. I glanced up later and saw the Missippi, and right on the other side was Hannibal, MO. I grew up on Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. I distinctly remember reading Tom Sawyer again and again as I grew up, and longing to see the caves, and the river, and the picket fence. Years later I got to go to Hannibal with #1 son as a chaperone on a school trip, and had a fabulous time exploring the area. I think I got more out of it than the kids did. When the cave guide pointed out the "Number Four, Under the Cross" to the gasps of the kids, I got goosebumps. I can't wait to go back there.
So now here I sit in Denver, and I won't have time to see anything but the hotel, the rental, the office. I'd love to come back here when I have more time, but with tickets at $600 a pop I'm thinking it's not likely.

Hot Wheels

Last night I awoke with a pretty excruciating pain in my back. After tossing and turning to try and make it go away, I felt around and pulled out a Hot Wheels toy car from under the sheets. It wasn't Speed Racer like the one pictured, but it was shaped the same.
My first instinct was to wake and throttle the children until one confessed, and then force the interloper to sleep with the toy car under HIS back for the rest of the night.
That feeling passed. It was 3 a.m., after all, and I'd just have to struggle getting them all back to bed and up again for school.
Then for some reason I thought that, one day, there will be no more Hot Wheels under the sheets. No more Potato Head parts to pick up from the floor. No more Barney / Wiggles / Caillou movies playing endlessly on the TV. No more wiped tears and kissed owies and heads patted. No more major everyday triumphs, like celebrating the first flush, the first step, the first word. (And, if you've never done the pee-pee in the potty dance, can you really say you're a parent?)
Granted, people think we're crazy. When they ask 'How many kids?" I just cringe. No matter how quietly I mumble "Six" the response is always "Six! Six?" like they've never heard the number before, like it's the word in Zimbabwe for the digit between five and seven.
I've always like what Stephen King says about his kids - "They came when they came, and we were glad to have them."
Amen to that.
We had two early, one in the middle, and three late. Not quite cheaper by the dozen. And yes, we know what causes that.
And by the way, I've learned that with three kids aged four and under, you have to play zone. Man - on - man is no longer effective.
Some friends of ours just had twins, which brought them up to six kids. We're going to start getting together and going to the buffet, where they charge kids under twelve so much per year. Between us, that's 9 kids under twelve. It'll be fun to watch the managers run screaming for the exits.
So I told my wife my little story, and I got appropraitely misty in the right places. She said something about grandkids, but I was too busy with my fingers in my ears yelling "La la la la la la la" to hear the rest.

Vote Predictor

Back in the 2004 election (which did not go my way, in case you haven't figured that out by now), I was addicted to the web site www.electoral-vote.com. This site took data from nearly every poll that ran for that race and put the results in spreadsheets and on maps, trying to predict the outcome of the race.
They got it wrong.
But the story of how they got it wrong is fascinating. Anyone with any political leanings at all should check it out.
The site is still going this year, trying to predict the outcome of many close House and Senate races. Veiwing all of that data over time somehow satisifies my inner geek in a way that little else can.

Rocky Mountain High

I find myself back on a plane, headed for scenic Denver. Not something I thought I would be doing, but here I am.

The best feature about my flight is the video display on the back of the seat in front of me. For free I get to watch a graphic of the plane superimposed over a mapquest map, showing altitude, air speed, and location. Way cool in a geeky sort of fashion. Now I know what city I'm looking at out the window, whether the pilot tells me or not. For $5 I could watch a Direct TV feed of various channels, but who needs it?

I also showed #3 son how to go online and track my flight, which I hope will ease some of the issues he been having lately. Between that and the excellent video conferencing capabilities of Skype, he should be OK.

The Denver airport is gargantuan. It's also about thirty miles from anywhere I need to be. With all of that room and the traffic flow, you think there would be something to DO there when you're stuck there. But unless you want to spend way too much for the usual airport touristy crap, there's not. Especially if you don't drink.

Last time here I spent an afternoon driving up Lookout Mountain, and going to the very touristy Buffalo Bill museum. I wish I'd had more time to get off the tourist track. But the view was spectacular, and I bought the usual useless trinkets for the kids.

The thing I could not get used to was seeing open land with nothing cultivated on it. Back home if there's an acre or two of open field, someone is growing corn or soybeans or wheat on it. Out here, hardly anything grows, even when the land is left to Mother Nature to plant. It really makes me wonder why folks originally settled the area to begin with.

Perhaps I'll have time to find out on this trip, but I'm not holding my breath. There's a train ride I'd like to take, if I get the time. But chances are I'll end up barely having the time to accomplish what I'm really going there to do.