A few statistics to put the past year into perspective:

• posts to this blog: 237 (so far)
• web site hits this year so far: 6482
• miles ridden on a bicycle: approx. 1134
• records reviewed: 100 and counting
• miles driven in car: 10k, give or take
• nights spent in a hotel: 125
• nights spent sleeping in the great outdoors: 2 (way less than my wife)
• fan conventions attended: 6
• professional sporting contests attended: 4
• live theatrical productions attended: 3
• live musical performances attended: 13
• books read: 67
• books written: 1
• books purchased with intent: more than that
• gaming sessions: lots
• rpg characters killed out from under me: 1
• natural disasters weathered: 2
• days without power due to those disasters: 7
• movie screenings attended in theater: forgot to count, but lots
• cats mourned: 2
• new friends made: many, and I’m glad for it

Subjectively in terms of the personal, I’d say the year was better than average. Not perfect by any stretch, given the loss and stress and what have you, but pretty good when you consider all the great people that I got to spend it with.

Not sure if I’ll get more specific that that, but in general terms, a solid 6.5-7 out of ten.

Also, not sure how much more posting there’ll be this year; I’m on vacation, and am kind of enjoying the real world (and a fair bit of other virtual worlds besides the net), but I’ll probably do a “these are the posts I liked” collection before the 31st, so you have that to look forward to.

Yesterday was a low-key affair, we all actually kind of slept in – presents weren’t getting well and truly cracked until after 8am. We went more for quality than quantity this year, which is perfectly fine with me.

I got, among other things, a very fine, home made Jayne Cobb hat, some new pants, a nice selection of classic TSR Dungeons and Dragons books(!) and a copy of Skyrim*, which ate up most of the day that didn’t involve picking Beyblade bits an d Legos out of my foot or cooking a ten pound ham.

This wasn’t much of a problem, since the spouse spent most of the day playing around with her new Kindle.

The new bass amp I’m time-sharing with the eldest hasn’t gotten turned on yet, but I imagine it will soon enough, once she gets around to digging into the Hal Leonard bass method book and giving the old Ibanez (freshly tweaked and set up by the good luthiers at Guitar Works of Carytown) a whirl. If she stays focused and makes progress in the next couple of months, I’ll take her shopping for her very own axe. That, my friends, is what you call a motivational tool (I hope).

Anyway…that’s about it from here. Probably going to make some bean soup today, given all that ham I have left over. Maybe we’ll crack open a couple of those table-top/card games we added to the “family” pile.

______________________

* – Day one in Skyrim? Level 8 with one dragon slain. I am Thane of two different cities, and have only been curb stomped by those damned giants once.

My favorite Christmas song, for what I hope will be a quiet Christmas eve. Joni Mitchell wrote it, I discovered it via the Indigo Girls, though I think I’m currently in love with this version from Tori Amos:

Hope you enjoy your Merry Christmas with a little bit of melancholy; I know I do.

Happy December <cough>23rd</cough> everyone*! This is indeed a day that needs a song of it’s own, especially one that’s a dead-on pastiche of They Might Be Giants. Who better to bring us that song that the inimitable Paul and Storm?

_____________________

*- please ignore the backdating, after a while, no one will notice.

So, I’ve been on “vacation” more or less for a couple of days. There’s been, to be sure, some chores, some parenting, and some last minute holiday shopping (mostly extraneous bits – the actual “shopping” has been done for more than a week). But, in there too, were a couple of nice “dates” out with my loving spouse, making full use of our built-in babysitter.

Last Saturday evening, we spent a few hours at the Virginia Mystery Dinner Playhouse, Richmond branch, enjoying a pretty good meal and an interactive murder mystery comedy show. It was a surprisingly fun experience, given that in my head, I generally associate “dinner theater” with unpleasantness like “outlet malls” and “destination shopping”. We went, largely, because our friend James, aka @thepopeoffrance, is a member of the cast (and only abused us a little bit during the performance: silly hats and “bathroom monitor” responsibilities were involved). If you’ve got a free evening somewhere in Virginia (or at least Richmond, Arlington, Williamsburg or VA Beach), it’s worth the price of admission.

Also, yesterday, we finally got around to having lunch at The Black Sheep in the Carver district of Richmond, just off the campus of VCU. We’d been trying to visit this tiny little place for months, because it’s supposed to be good, and the “Battleship” sandwiches looked really good on that episode of Man vs. Food. We opted for the half-size sandwiches, because the fully-loaded two-footers were just too intimidating (the guys at the table next to us tried to take pictures of theirs, and had to step back into the dining room to get the whole thing in frame on their iphones. It’s a tiny little place, with seating for maybe 35 people, but again, if you want to take a shot at getting a seat (try for off-hours for best results), it’s worth it. The food is AMAZING.

Anyway, I won’t talk about how we combined yesterday’s lunch out with a trip to Costco, because frankly, that’s not terribly romantic, unless you *really* get off on 50# bags of rice and taquito samples.

Enjoy the shortest day (and longest night, if that’s your thing!) of the year.

The ideas put forth in the lastest article at Pandagon, “Believers Believe, Yes, But Because They Want To“, and especially the comments this piece is going to draw, are going to be interesting.

Many people will be put off by the overt atheism of the source, but beyond that, there’s some really interesting questions about the nature of belief and how and why people come around to believing (or not) the things they do (or don’t), why evangelism, from whatever direction, doesn’t work on people already invested in something, and, seemingly paradoxically (but not really), why those most invested in something are often the most likely to reject it, whereas people who just don’t think about things very deeply end up being an idea’s most vehement defenders.

Watch the space – there’s likely to be a lot of big ideas and heavy thought flying around before long.

It’s the kind of thing that seems to be begging for a completely tl;dr essay from me, and someday I might even get around to writing it. But, right now, I’m busy wrapping up my work year, and once I do that, I’m probably going to be taking a break from heavy internet lifting beyond the occasional funny link and maybe a couple of half-hearted “year-end” list posts. You all will just have to live with that.

Let’s hope so, anyway. In any case, a whole lot of people who could really use them are getting some happy holidays, as last US troops prepare to leave Iraq.

Welcome home, folks.

People who know me understand that historically, I’ve been a fan of the modern GI:JOE franchise; I own almost the entire run of the 80s Marvel comics series, including a copy of issue #1 signed by both writer Larry Hama and penciler Herb Trimpe. I spent my tween years watching the cartoons and collecting the toys. I’ve got the original “Cobra-lalala” movie on DVD.

That said, the live action Joe movie from a couple of years ago was mostly just okay. It captured a lot of the over-the-top-ness of the cartoon series and such pretty well, and drew nicely from Hama’s comic series for the Snake-Eyes/Storm Shadow dynamic and the Destro backstory. But, it suffered a bit from poor casting and some serious liberties with the characters’ history.

However, it was popular enough to warrant a sequel, with a few casting upgrades and what looks like a lot of the fat cut. They released a trailer today for GI:JOE: Retailiation, and despite the abuse of colons, it looks pretty bad-ass:

It looks like it’s stripping things down a bit, and, in a not-entirely-unwelcome turn, looks like they’ve killed off the wooden Channing Tatum as “Duke” in the trailer. This is probably a good move.

Of course, the genius move would be to close the movie with a hastily-added voice over stating that they “Just talked to Doc, and Duke’s going to be A-OK!”, because that, you know, would be a brilliant inside baseball reference to one of the most infamous moments in Joe history.

It appears, however, that The Rock’s “Roadblock” isn’t going to be delivering all his lines in rhyming couplets, so such a move is, admittedly, unlikely.

More’s the pity.

The year is coming to an end.

I know this because all the fun “Year End” lists are starting to pop up all over the place, including the list I look forward to the most every year, the AV Club’s “Year In Band Names”!

The AV Club is The Onion‘s pop culture section, both in the local print editions and online. As such, they get lots and lots of press releases, emailed mp3s, and promo CDs from bands looking for exposure. Some of these bands have interesting or funny names. The AV Club staff picks their favorites and presents a list with funny commentary around the end of the year.

some of this year’s highlights:

• Unicorn Hard-on
• …Or The Dog Gets It
• Treefight for Sunlight
• Full Roaming Vapor
• You Bred Raptors?
• Bring Your Ray Gun
• Say “No!” To Architecture
• Salem Bitch Trials
• Genital Hospital
• Poetry N’ Lotion
• Rad Bromance – (an all-male Lady GaGa tribute act)

Thankfully, my future bluegrass jazz-funk fusion combo name, Johnny Freon and Reef Ridge Aerators, is safe for another year.