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Originally posted in my blog Terminal Berkely Denizen. Posting here for the first time even though this is almost a month old...

The Cadillac Tramps documentary Life on the Edge is premiering next week in Los Angeles!

My girlfriend Shannon asked me if I had ever seen the Cadillac Tramps.

And I had to admit, my answer was rather embarrassing.

"...I might have."

The thing is, back in my bacchanalian days I saw tons of shows. I also had an unfortunate habit of not remembering certain shows, either in whole or just in parts due to an imbibing habit I had cultivated in my years of club hopping.

And even though I only vaguely remembered maybe having seen the Cadillac Tramps play once or twice, I still felt right at home when she took me to see a sneak preview of their documentary Life on the Edge. I didn't know anyone in the audience, but I still felt right at home. They were all the kind of people whose wardrobe consisted mainly of band shirts and jeans, and they were also people who collected lots of tattoos and couldn't remember what their natural hair color looked like. These were my people. They were my tribe.

( Read the rest... )

X-posted at my jounral Terminal Berkeley Denizen

The Shakespearean Plays are, without a doubt, one of the most widely read collection of works in the history of literature. Being a fan of the plays as well as geeking out on the ever-present authorship question, I have read many books about Shakespeare, the Shakespearean plays, and the culture of Shakespeare, and in this list I give you the top ten books that are, not just about the Shakespearean plays themselves, but about Shakespearean culture, history, and interpretation.

FYI before you read: Stratfordian = Shakespeare enthusiast, supporter, or Shakespeareaen scholar. (For the muggles!)


( Check out the list! )

I pitched this idea to Cracked.com, in this form. They rejected it for being "too specific". They suggested I write an article about "crackpot" theories. (Thinking they didn't really read it.)

Anywho, here it is...

Why some Loonies believe Shakespeare didn’t write the plays. (And why they’re not so looney!)

William Shakespeare has been hailed as the greatest writer in the history of the English language. But believe it or not, there are some who believe that Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon did not actually write the plays he is so famous for. Ridiculous, right? Well, maybe not. Turns out once you look into things, that idea is not as crazy as it sounds.

– Where are his pages???

One of the more curious things about the Shakespearean plays is that not one original manuscript has been found for any of the Shakespearean plays. Not one!

But that’s easy to qualify, right? It was centuries ago. They’ve been lost, destroyed, decayed… The ravages of time destroyed or lost them.

This is the thing however: Many of his contemporaries, other popular playwrights of his time, have surviving original manuscirpts. Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe… And most people don’t even know who these playwrights are! If you asked even the dullest stoner on the street who Shakespeare was, he’d say “That play guy from England!” But if you ask the average yahoo who was Christopher Marlowe they’d probably answer “Y”mean that Dashiel Hammet guy?” If you asked someone who Ben Johnson was, they might answer “Didn’t he play third base for the Orioles?”

References: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/to-be-or-not-to-be-shakespeare-127247606/

http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/introductions/JonsonBen.html

http://spitalfieldslife.com/2015/02/18/christopher-marlowe-in-norton-folgate/

( Keep reading, especially if you're not convinced yet! )

Attention: This contains SPOILERS!!! So if you haven't seen the finale' to the latest TWD season DON'T READ IT!!! You have been warned!!!

X-posted from my other blog...


From: The Executives at AMC
To: The writers and producers of The Walking Dead
Re: Latest season of The Walking Dead and its Finale'

Congratulations on another job and Walking Dead season well done! This season ended with a healthy Negan and Saviors gearing up for another round of perpetual heartless brutality!

As you should be well aware, a great roiling mass of Walking Dead fans wouldn't mind at all if Negan took a bullet between the eyes in the opening scene of next season, and the Saviors organization was put down within the first five minutes of the opening credits so we can finally move on to a new storyline. (Did we say the first five minutes? We meant the first three minutes.)

But it was our fervent wish that you stretch out and extend the Negan/Saviors story despite the unecessarily long time it has already gone on. The fact of the matter is we've rubbed our clitorises and penises raw over the seemeingly never-ending Saviors saga. We just can't get enough of it! That the Negan and the Saviors plot is a quantum singularity of derivation of previous Walking Dead narratives has not dimmed the fact that watching the sadistic aspects of Negan and his S&M bunch has developed, for us, into an unhealthy fetish.

Sure, the barbarism of Negan and his henchmen and henchwomen has gone beyond the definition of predictable, to the point where we've contacted the staff of the OED to come up with a new word for it. (Maybe David J Peterson can help. Will contact HBO! Maybe not. Those guys burn through plotlines faster than a dynamite fuse. That's not what we want.) But that does not dim for us in the slightest our fervent wish that you can keep this up. Please think about arranging some sort of truce/diversion/whatever kind of plot points you can come up with to keep the Negan/Saviors thing going on for at least two or three more seasons. Heck, maybe we'll just change the name of the show to Negan and the Saviors Torture and Terrorize Your Favorite Characters Into Perpetuity! (Maybe we can have Daryl captured and tortured again. Maybe more than a few more times! Or the characters can trade off.)

Again, thanks for the good work. Please pay no mind to the increasingly bored and frustrated fans, even if they are starting to glare and moan and groan like a gigantic horde of zombies.

Reagrds,

The Owners and Executives of AMC

Last week I did a series of consecutive races in a Disney Run event called the Dopey Challenge. It's a 5K, a 10K, a half marathon, and then a full marathon, run one after the other in four consecutive days.

My race report is in three parts. Yes, it's that long. Reading it is like runnning the Dopey Challenge!


- The Beginning - The Walt Disney World 5K and the 10K

- Drama Unleashes in the Harrowing tale of the Walt Disney World Half Marathon!

- The Walt Disney World Full Marathon Race Report

From Agony to Ecstasy: Uncancelling the cancelled Half Marathon

There had been some weather advisories about the Walt Disney World Half Marathon which was to take place on Saturday. Weather advisories aren't at all uncommon for races. I've run marathons through torrential downpours with forty mile an hour winds, through cold so biting that water froze instantly when it hit the ground. (Skate through the water station!) And I've run in 100+ heat.

But I've never signed up for a race that was ever cancelled because of the weather. Until this one.

I was out wandering around Epcot on Friday evening when a friend texted me. "They actually cancelled the race???" I quickly checked my email. Yep. Because of an incoming storm Run Disney decided to cancel the Half Marathon. It was not the storm so much that prompted their decision to cancel the race, so much as it was the lightning that came with it.

I was crushed. All of the preparation, all of the time and expense to go across the country and run four straight days of races, just to have one pulled out from under me.

( Read the rest of this harrowing tale! )

Last Sunday I ran the California International Marathon. It was my 7th ever CIM and my 20th Marathon overall.

The main reason I chose to run this December Marathon is because I'm working on my legacy status. It was my sixth CIM in a row, and I want to keep the streak going. Also it's a fairly easy course. I've PR'd twice on this course!

This year myself and ten thousand of my closest running friends totally lucked out because the weather was so good. Not very cold and a nice, cool temperature the entire way. I was one of the waterlogged runners who experienced the monsoon-like conditions of 2012, and nearly froze to death during the cold, cold snap of 2013.

I had not trained too strenuously for this marathon since I had run the Chicago Marathon a mere two months prior. I was curious as to how I would handle this marathon since I had held back on training very hard.

( And I'm off! )

Last Sunday I ran the Chicago Marathon. It was my first time ever in Chicago, my 3rd marathon outside of California, and my 19th Marathon overall.

They call Chicago the Windy City, but personally I never found it especially windy. (But then again, I was there in the mild month of October.) And Marathon day was no exception. The day was clear and cool with a few clouds. I made it, along with the rest of the mob, early enough to particiapte on my corral's eight AM start. The thing is, around eight o'clock my corral wasn't anywhere near the start line. It would be a little more than an extra half hour before I finally crossed the line with my herd.

The day before at the Marathon Expo I attended a Runner's World forum, and one of the running coaches recommended running the first ten miles as one would a training run, so you could spare yourself for the latter part. I decided to follow that advice. It was also ideal since my PT Jessica Greaux, (Of Innersport in Berkeley,) had been coaching my running, and I paid a lot of attention to my gait and cadence as I tried to pedal my feet and move the ground underneath me, rather than slapping my feet on top of it.

( Read the rest! )

These days, many women walk around playing with a Star Destroyer or coordinates to a wormhole and are often commanding a massive intergalactic space station that is capable of destroying a planet at the same time.

Yet, that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to them.

Of course, not all women are open to being approached because not all women are single and looking.

However, if a woman commanding a space station capable of destroying a planet is single and hoping to meet a boyfriend (or even a new lover), she will usually be happy to take her eyes off of the station's command center screen or leave stellar cartography to give you an opportunity to create a spark with her.

What to Do to Get Her Attention

1. Position your spaceship in front of her space station. (With 1,000 to 15,000 kilometers between you).

2. Have a confident, easy-going smile.

3. If she hasn’t already trained her station's sensors on you, simply get her attention with a static warp shell. Fluctuate your static warp shell in her direct line of station sensors or patrol ships so she can see it and say, “Hey, how’s it going?” She most likely won’t hear you say that, (In space no one can hear you say “Hey, how’s it going?”,) but it’s just a way of showing her that you’re trying to talk to her.

4. When she opens hailing frequencies and gives you her attention, smile, point to her exhaust ports and confidently ask, “Can you lower your shields for a minute?” as you lower your shields, so she fully understands what you mean.

If she doesn’t understand that you want her to briefly lower her shields, simply gesture that you want to talk to her by pointing back and forth at the numerous interstellar fighters that have undoubtedly been launched by now from the station. Say, “I want to talk to you for a minute.”

In most cases, you won’t have to go to that extreme because most women are polite, but some women are shy and will be hesitant about lowering their shields and deactivating station perimeter defenses initially.

Of course, if you notice that she doesn’t want to call off her fleet of Star Destroyers and doesn’t seem interested in talking to you at all, just respect that and try to calculate the coordinates for hyper speed without trying to talk to her any further.

5. When she opens a channel to talk to you, you might want to then do what we call “Acknowledging the Awkwardness” by quickly mentioning something about the potential awkwardness of the moment (see the conversation example below), to demonstrate you understand that a man and a woman talking to each other in this way isn’t the most common of experiences for either party.


For example, in an intergalactic corridor or near a highly localized distortion of the space-time conitinuum:

You: [Smile in a friendly, confident manner] :) Hey – I know it’s not normal for people to talk to someone commanding a space station the size of a small moon, but I was walking along and saw you and thought – wow, she’s hot, I have to come over and say hi. I’m Dan, what’s your name?

Woman: Sith Lord Jessica, Destroyer of Worlds.

You: [Add in some humor to get her smiling and create a spark between you] Cool…nice to meet you Jessica, Destroyer of Worlds. I don’t normally talk to girls with massive space stations with hundreds of thousands of storm troopers, but your big black helmet and skull emblem were just calling out to me.

Woman: [Possibly smiling or laughing or waving her hands to black clad security guards with blasters].

You: [If you’re in orbit of a class M planet or near Deep Space Nine, let her know that you have something else to do besides talk to her, so she understands that you’re not going to stand there scanning her station's defensive capabilities for 30 minutes] Anyway, I’m just out doing a bit of pergium mining at the moment. How about you?

If it’s clear that she’s interested in talking to you and has not locked onto your craft with a tractor beam, keep the conversation going and, if she’s not training the Concave Dish Composite Beam Superlaser at a hapless planet at that moment, transport over to her station and have a chat for a while before getting her sector coordinates and parting ways.

Last weekend I ran on my friend Kiki's long-distance relay team Running C2C at the So Cal Ragnar Relay. It was my 6th ever So Cal Ragnar and my 15th Ragnar Relay.

For those of you not familiar with a Ragnar Relay: The Ragnar Relay is a long-distance relay race a la' Hood to Coast. The average team has 12 runners, and the course is around 200 miles long. Each runner runs three legs of 3 to 9 miles, and the race takes an average of 30 hours to complete. The runners get from exchange to exchange via two passeneger vans. While one van's runners are running, the other van is resting and trying to get some sleep. For more info, check out this link.

I was in van two with my intrepid Captain Kiki, (third time I've been on one of her teams,) and her friends John, (A veterinarian who happens to be the vet for Kiki's pibble Casper,) thee epic Wendi, a stalwart runner who did more than her fair share of running, (And is also a fancy semaphor flag waver,) and Angela, a soon-to-be sailor for thee US Navy! We were missing one runner who had to drop out at the last minute, so we had extra legs to cover. Such is life on the Ragnar trail!

( Read the harrowing Ragnar Tale under the LJ cut! )