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Sumiki

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Blog Entries posted by Sumiki

  1. Sumiki
    The day started at 10:26 as I drove west to Toledo. By 11:30 we had reached the stadium of the Triple-A Toledo Mud Hens. We purchased a pennant and hat, as well as a foam hat shaped like a hot dog. Expect this wonderful hat at this year's BrickFair.
     
    We ate lunch in Toledo across from the stadium at a place called Tony Packo's, which, we learned, has multiple locations in Toledo and is legendary in the city. It originally started as a Hungarian diner and rose to fame partially due to a number of mentions it received in various episodes of M*A*S*H. When we went there, our newness must have been noticed, as we were guided through the best of the menu by the lady at their gift shop. We ordered hot dogs (original Hungarian), "sweet-hot" pickles, chicken paprikash, chili, and some fried pickles served with ranch and spicy ketchup.
     
    I am neither a hot dog person nor a chili person, but I thought the chili dog was one of the best things ever, only to be outdone by the fried pickles.
     
    While most of the decor was centered around Mud Hens history, they have a peculiar tradition of getting celebrities that visit Toledo to sign hot dog buns. It started with Burt Reynolds and now includes hot dogs signed by politicians, TV personalities, celebrities, and Bob Costas.
     
    At 1:00 we were in Michigan (state #5 thus far). My dad saw a brochure at the welcome center for a 45-minute flight in a B-17. (Being a massive WWII buff, this got him very tingly inside.) After realizing that the price of doing so would be well over 1,200 dollars, my mom and I successfully talked him down from the proverbial ledge.
     
    We went through Ann Arbor and proceeded to work our way towards Lansing for the second minor league field of the day. Their single-A team is known as the Lugnuts, and their whimsically bizarre hat features a dizzy and anthropomorphized lugnut. (It's one of the top-selling minor league hats). We purchased their pennant and talked with the sales guy, who was highly knowledgeable about teams, affiliates, and even independent league teams.
     
     
    Around 3:30 we left Lansing northbound on US-127, and got pretty cheap gas a little ways up the road. The station was not only packed, but its clientele consisted of rednecks.
     
    Yes, you read that right - rednecks. Apparently, the more north you go, the farther south you get.
     
    Because of the number of kamikaze bugs that have splattered themselves against our windshield and the ineffectiveness of our previously successful tactics against them, we began wiping off the windshield with barely wet wiper-things. In anticipation of this very situation, mom took her windshield cleaning game to the next level by pouring a bottle of hotel shampoo on the car. Smart.
     
    (The rednecks didn't like it, but who cares what they think. We're immune to haters.)
     
     
    One minor league team to go: the Great Lakes Loons in Midland. Around 4:30, my dad got their phone number and called, but, even though they had a home game that night, they do not open the gift shop to sell souvenirs during games. Dumb.
     
    At 6:12, we crossed over the 45th parallel, which is the exact halfway line between the north pole and the equator. This was announced with a sign, although we all got pretty excited about this milestone. (We've been north of this line before, obviously, but this is the first time there's been a sign.)
     
    Over 900 miles traveled and the scenery isn't all that much different than North Carolina, with the only difference being the sheer desolation of the area which reminded me of Nevada. We encountered many tree species and about three hundred different specimens of roadkill. Live animals were less abundant, but we did see spot both elk and deer.
     
    Around 6:30 we crossed the picturesque Indian River and saw more interesting (and flatter!) terrain, complete with the occasional marshy area. After rounding a turn on Interstate 75 we saw the spires of the famous Mackinac Bridge. We arrived at our hotel just a few minutes past 7:00.
     
    But this arrival did not conclude the day's adventures. After driving about 500 miles, I was totally worn out and the hot dog, while filling, did not last me seven hours. We walked from the hotel to a small fish camp-style restaurant called Darrow's. The whitefish and the walleye were excellent, the onion rings flaky, the salads crisp, and the desserts delightful. All we got was, of course, indiscriminately devoured. (The chocolate peanut butter pie was like Reese's cups mixed with Girl Scout cookies.)
     
    It was only a short walk from the restaurant to Mackinac Bridge, which we walked towards and then underneath. We couldn't get into the reconstructed Fort Michilimackinac (easier to say three times fast than it looks), but our main interest was accessing Lake Huron down at the beach.
     
    But we had a battle to wage to get there, and, though beaten, we persevered to touch Huron's frigid waters.
     
    I'm talking, of course, about being ambushed by a swarm of ten thousand midges, annoying fly-like creatures which literally flew everywhere. I had to pull my hood well over my face and shuffle down the rocky beach to the lake. After reaching the lake we trudged back through the midges, which, disheartened by the fact we reached the lake, redoubled their efforts and tried to eat us. One impaled itself under my left eye and I believe I inadvertently swallowed another, though they are not poisonous. (I got a good look at one that landed on my finger, and I don't even think they bite.)
     
    We've decided against going to Mackinac Island due to monetary and time constraints, plus the realization that it mainly consists of hotels, restaurants, and gift shops, and the ferry times are staggered so as to encourage you to spend lots of money getting food and trinkets. If we'd had another day to spend here, we'd probably go over there, but as it is I don't feel too bad about skipping it.
     
    Tomorrow: Michigan's upper peninsula and Lake Superior, the only Great Lake we haven't seen on any of trip. We're going to try and make it down as far as Green Bay.
  2. Sumiki
    We rolled out of the driveway at precisely 11:30 and made comparatively good time on a section of US 52 that is under a state of continuous road construction. After having such good luck avoiding road construction last trip, I was amazed at how much we ran into today.
     
    Virginia, for the hour or so that we were in it, was also bogged down by road construction. The right lane was blocked ahead, but we could have made much faster time if other cars had not continuously raced ahead to try to cut ahead in the line. The vehicles that let them in slowed down the entire line, so the truck in front of us slid over halfway into the other lane so as to prevent them from doing so. In his honor, we played C.W. McCall's "Convoy" on the iPod.
     
    West Virginia, though. Oh boy. Every time we go through there, the roads are so insane it's not even fun to try to figure them out. Entire lanes would be blocked off on the Interstate for no apparent reason and they wouldn't give you any warning but half a mile out after a blind curve - and even that wouldn't be that bad, but we were careening down steep grades in a very heavy car trying to not go 80, overheat the brakes, or get turned into pâté from the trucks that were barely staying in their lanes.
     
    So, all in all, pretty much standard West Virginia driving.
     
    In any event, this is the same route we took coming back on the last Great American Road Trip, where we just barely beat out the closing of the Bluefield Blue Jays stadium on the state line. Last year, however, we skipped Princeton, WV, in the interest of time. Princeton is the home of the rookie-league Princeton Rays, so, as is our grand road trip tradition, we hopped off the road into the town to see if we could find the stadium.
     
    Short answer: No.
     
    Long answer: No, and they don't make it obvious or even tell you where it might be. At least in Charleston they have signs telling you where the baseball field is. In Princeton, we just sort of drove around town for twenty minutes in the vain hope of finding something. (The baseball travel map we acquired last year in Sacramento does not have exact stadium addresses.)
     
    After that derivative and wholly pointless excursion into the lives of average West Virginians, we realized that we hadn't, at that point, had breakfast. It was 2:20 and our stomachs were making noises that, in other places, would have sent tornado sirens squealing. Thus, between Princeton and Beckley, we found a small rest stop and ordered three thoroughly mediocre sandwiches at Blimpie.
     
    By around 3:00 we were back on the road, making good time despite the unexplained patches of road construction and the occasional toll. At 5:36 we crossed the river into Ohio as we listened to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and felt suitably epic.
     
    Ohio! First day into a new road trip and we're already to state #4 and a state I've never been to outside the womb. I honestly don't know what I expected, as it's quite like the rest of the scenery. Less mountains than West Virginia, and a bit more farmland, but overall more of the same sort of scenery.
     
    At 6:10 we pulled off the road to a rest stop. We stretched out and got hotel reservations in Milan, which is roughly an hour or so from Toledo. Ohio is not only a larger state than people give it credit for, but there is no Interstate link between where we were and the Milan area. Careful map consultation left us with a route that took us on secondary roads through scenic Ohio. At this point, I was driving, and my dad was discussing how badly we needed to see some Amish people before the sun went down.
     
    He got his wish. We pulled off for gas off of Ohio Route 39 and, lo and behold, a buggy came a-rollin' over the hill, and I witnessed firsthand an Amish man getting a gallon of gas.
     
    (My dad said: "Amish people are like dustpans. You don't see them every day, but when you do, you don't see anything really exciting about them.")
     
    We saw a few more Amish folks in the towns we went through, and some had some interesting and cute downtown areas. We saw a number of Amish buildings which sold things under the name of "Yoder." "Yoder's" seemed to be the common beginning of practically anything Amish. What it means, no one knows. Maybe that's why it's used everywhere - to confuse non-Amish who aren't in on the gigantic practical joke.
     
    By 8:20 we got to Wooster and ten minutes later located a Bob Evans, where my dad decided to give the waitress a hard time about frozen foods. We were in and out in half an hour and began sucking down Mountain Dews to stay awake for the rest of the journey. We took US 250 all the way through Ashland (there's a town by that name everywhere, it seems) and Norwalk, encountering four fault lines in the road that were reminiscent of Amarillo. Everything was okay with the tires and steering as we rolled into Milan at 10:20. By 10:30 we had checked in.
     
    Nine hours. 514 miles. Four states. One day.
     
    Tomorrow, we're aiming to get to Mackinaw City at the very tip of the southern peninsula of Michigan. Two long days in a row will cut out an extra day, leaving another day to (possibly) take the ferry over to famous and carless Mackinac Island.
  3. Sumiki
    Last summer, as you may or may not recall, I spent 28 days on the road in 25 states, and blogged about my various experiences. These experiences included, but were not limited to, impromptu hail storms, toothbrush-gets, confusing waitresses with pre-cooked bacon, creating poems about eggplant, ridiculously large potholes fault lines in the road, our GPS channeling its inner HAL 9000, grown men sharing their beers with their dogs, getting attacked by a gigantic crow, squirrels that thought they were dogs, my dad rubbing his beard on various items, and, of course, going a few thousand miles with what turned out to be a busted ball bearing nestled somewhere in the driveshaft.
     
    After that epic journey concluded, I felt a longing to get back on the road - a reverse homesickness, of sorts. There's still a lot of this continent to explore, and my bucket list mostly consists of exploring it. North Carolina just seems so ridiculously small now.
     
    So then and there, preliminary planning for the route of the second Great American Road Trip was underway. According to our philosophy of aiming our car in a general direction, going, and hoping for the best, we did not want to plan too much of the adventure, but the various states and provinces we want to see on this trip necessitate a bit more precision. We're still not planning ahead too much, as we might be on the road for our maximum 37 days available. (If we don't run out of money, we should be okay.)
     
    This is The Great American Road Trip: Part II. Tomorrow - May 15th, 2013 - we shall depart from North Carolina, bound for Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, western Canada, and possibly points beyond. (My dad keeps threatening to get "frisky" in Canada, drive to Alaska, off-road it to Nome, raft across the Bering Strait, buy an old Soviet tank in Russia, drive the Trans-Siberian Highway with Vladimir Putin. I'm not sure we have enough time to do that this year.)
     
    This is where you come in. If you see that I might be rollin' through your area, comment on an entry or PM me, and we'll see if we can work something out.
     
    So without further ado, let the insanity begin.
  7. Sumiki
    so today we'll be looking at "The Alcotts," which is the third movement to Charles Ives' "Concord" Sonata and likely one of the least dissonant things he ever wrote
     

    we begin in b-flat major, not too shabby
     

    wait a minute
     

    POLYTONALITY OUT OF NOWHERE
     

    WHAT NOW, MORTAL
     

    AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    on a serious note I'm actually trying to learn this
  8. Sumiki

    Shakespeare

    By Sumiki,

    who says Shakespeare ain't fun
     
    I mean really
     
    dude put a yo momma joke in a freakin' tragedy
     

     
    you gotta be one hardcore punk to do that
  9. Sumiki
    My blog is becoming less active again ... I blame it on the end of the semester.
     
    This picture was taken on June 11th, 2012 in Louisville, Kentucky, at the Louisville Slugger museum. The lifelike statue of Ken Griffey Jr., it seems, was too much for my dad to resist pinching.
     
    And before you ask, yes, this is probably the weirdest thing he's ever done.
     

    "Talk about being a pinch hitter."


  11. Sumiki
    Is it really a "contest" if I'm not announcing winners every week?
     
    Oh well. I'll catch up on it next some time. I'm too tired now.
     
    Today's picture was taken June 3rd, 2012 in Spokane, Washington - and yes, that is a reserved parking sign.
     

    "It's called ... yump."


  12. Sumiki
    Every now and again, I post collections of quotes or various snippets of wisdom from my dad, such as "we've invested in a raisin farm," or "furthermore, I own a stapler." As I was going through the nearly five thousand pictures taken on last summer's road trip, I found a number of them that featured my dad doing something insane. (This is also known as his natural habitat.)
     
    Your mission is to suitably caption these images.
     
    This image was taken on June 2nd in Portland, Oregon as we headed out of the Bricks Cascade convention center.
     

    "This is getting to the point of udder ridiculousness."


  13. Sumiki
    Over the course of the past few weeks, I've been watching a James Bond marathon, from movies I've seen a number of times to a few I'd only seen a few bit and pieces of. The series is episodic, but there is enough carryover between films to imply a sense of overall structure. Desmond Llewelyn played Q from Sean Connery until Pierce Brosnan, for instance. Between specific films there are correlations as well. The death of Bond's bride in On Her Majesty's Secret Service is referenced on occasion, especially during Roger Moore's run as 007. However, discrepancies and anomalies in the series pile up, which is why, to make sense of it all and fit it into my own headcanon, I have adopted the assertion that James Bond is, in fact, a Time Lord.
     
    You heard me.
     
    This solves the issue of the appearance changes, which are the main problem confronting anyone who wishes to make sense of Bond. But that's not all - one has to do some shuffling and some between-movie assumptions for this to fit.
     
    Let's go chronologically, shall we?
     
    We begin with Dr. No, where we're introduced to the early form of a Bond movie, complete with many of the tropes that would come to define the series in popular culture. From Russia With Love is its sort-of sequel, where SPECTRE (SPecial Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion) and its recurring villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld are introduced, complete with white cat.
     
    Goldfinger takes a break from Bond battling SPECTRE, but it returns with Largo's nuclear hijack in Thunderball. Blofeld's face is revealed for the first time at the climax of You Only Live Twice, but he escapes to fight another day and SPECTRE is far from over.
     
    This is where it gets interesting. Sean Connery did not want to return to the role of Bond, so the producers cast George Lazenby and made On Her Majesty's Secret Service, a movie that I don't care for and don't understand why others do. (Maybe I'll eventually understand what all the fuss is about, but in my opinion Lazenby does not play Bond, but instead plays a cardboard cutout of a Sean Connery lookalike.)
     
    But the existence of this movie becomes a problem for my pet theory. If the series had gone straight to Roger Moore as Bond, it wouldn't be a problem, but Sean Connery returned for Diamonds Are Forever, the next film.
     
    Instead of saying that Lazenby was the same "incarnation" of Bond as Connery, he was a different character. Plus, the aftermath of the death of Tracy Bond in OHMSS would have certainly had an effect on Bond in the next film ... right?
     
    Well, no. She isn't even alluded to until a conversation in The Spy Who Loved Me, three films into Moore's run. We also see her grave in the pre-credits sequence of For Your Eyes Only, and is referenced in conversations in Licence to Kill and The World is Not Enough. Instead of ignoring OHMSS (and those great moments for continuity in the other films), it makes sense to instead move the events of the film after Diamonds Are Forever, between Connery's Bond and Moore's Bond. Connery regenerates into Lazenby, and the events of OHMSS occur afterwards, accounting for Lazenby's stiffness. Grief-stricken afterwards, he regenerates again into Moore's Bond.
     
    Moore lasts for seven films, some good, some completely and utterly ridiculous. (Read: Moonraker.) Between the events of A View to A Kill and The Living Daylights, Moore regenerates into Timothy Dalton.
     
    But there's a catch here: unofficial Bond film Never Say Never Again was released the same year as the official Octopussy, which performed slightly better at the box office. If NSNA is counted, this would throw a serious wrench into the Time Lord 007 theory - unless we move the movie in time to occur between DaF and OHMSS in our new, slightly scrambled version of events. Sean Connery is still Bond, but concerns are being raised about his age in the film. It's a remake of Thunderball, but Bond doesn't reference those events, even with the same-name bad guy and same plot. The only way this fits into the canon is if Maximilian Largo of NSNA is the son of Emilio Largo from Thunderball, and no one referenced the events of Thunderball.
     
    (Or we can just ignore that one. Like I said, it wasn't even official (though some of the better elements of that film got used again in Skyfall to great effect.)
     
    Anyway, after two films, a long hiatus occurs. Presumably Bond, inspired by License to Kill, goes rogue, gets caught up in the Time War, and becomes Rassilon before being time-locked again by the Doctor. Somehow he escapes, atones for the error of his ways, regenerates into Pierce Brosnan and beats up bad guys for another four films before becoming Daniel Craig.
     
    Now, this is where the Time Lord 007 theory becomes really interesting, and fits in well with the ongoing continuity: Craig's first Bond film is also his first mission after not acquiring, but re-aquiring his license to kill. M is portrayed by Judi Dench, as she did at the start of Brosnan's tenure. Bond is reveal to be from Scotland in Skyfall, which accounts for Connery, who was born is Scotland in real life. It also accounts for the reappearance of the classic Aston Martin in the film, and the many callbacks to previous movies that wouldn't be possible if Casino Royale had been a true reboot.
     
    Let's not just continue this logic with Bond. M and Q are different characters, but there is another recurring character in the films that is supposed to be the same person: Bond's CIA counterpart Felix Leiter, who has been played by seven actors. David Hedison played the role in Live and Let Die and Licence to Kill, which were some 16 years apart. Instead of making it too timey-wimey, let's suppose that these are two distinct characters, which means there have been eight Leiters to the six Bonds.
     
    The fridge logic here is that, offscreen, Leiter gets in more inescapable, dangerous situations than Bond does - though he doesn't have the Bond magic of escaping those situations. It also accounts for Leiter's friendship with Bond, which was never explained in the films.
     
    NEXT TIME: SUMIKI IS BEATEN UP BY RABID GEORGE LAZENBY FANS.
  15. Sumiki

    It's my Dad's Birthday

    By Sumiki,

    So, in honor of this momentous occasion, here are a few more of his timeless quotes:
     
    "The KGB looked around, but they couldn't find any vowels."
     
    "The best rat repellant is old plastic combined with Arby's sauce."
     
    "I was inspired by a dried squash with silly tendencies."
     
    "Onions and my navel have a close association with tacos."
     
    "She discussed the importance of large nose hairs while spending time with her pet lampshade."
  16. Sumiki

    IPB Admin

    By Sumiki,

    Is it just me, or did IPB Admin show up as pink in the member list?
     
    I could still get to its profile, and is still in the administrator group. Perhaps just a board error?
  18. Sumiki
    LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
     
    I AM PLEASED TO INFORM YOU THAT THIS IS INDEED BRICKEENS' BIRTHDAY, OTHERWISE KNOWN AS 'BIRKDAY"
     
    LAST NIGHT I REALIZED THIS AND DREW A COMIC FOR THE OCCASION
     
    THERE ARE MANY INSIDE JOKES IN IT SO IF YOU READ IT AND DON'T GET IT, DON'T WORRY
     
    PAGE I | PAGE II | PAGE III
  25. Sumiki

    RE: The Snowmen

    By Sumiki,

    It was sort of like this ...
     

    (483 KB)
     
    ... but in a good way, because dang, that was one good episode.
     
    Confession: I squeee'd at the title sequence.
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