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Sumiki

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  1. Sumiki

    Prelude to Beartooth

    By Sumiki,

    After a good night's sleep, we prepared for a short driving day to Billings. The road towards Sheridan was slowly dominated by the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies in the distance. After the town of Buffalo, however, we turned northwards, paralleling the range.
     
    We got to Sheridan not too long after, where we stopped to eat at a Jimmy John's where the employees far outnumbered the customers. (Many on the Jimmy John's payroll just sort of stood around in the back, likely feeling as awkward as their expressions denoted.)
     
    After Sheridan, there was nothing else to do but get up to Billings. The drive was broken up by occasional bits of road work (well, "road work" in the sense that they blocked off a perfectly good lane yet were not working on it whatsoever). We had traveled this route in the opposite direction on our first trip in going from Billings to Devils Tower, and thus passed by the Little Bighorn battlefield, although we did not stop a second time.
     
    Billings, like many western cities, is spread out. My dad noted that its three skyscrapers were "about six stories each." We got to our hotel before 3:00 and proceeded to unpack everything from the car.
     
    The unpacking ordeal, which we had endured for every day of the trip, consisted of the awkward carrying-in of multiple bags in the evenings and attempting to figure out how in the world we'd packed it again in the mornings. There's more than enough room in the hatchback for everything we have, but keeping it so we can see out means packing it a particular way.
     
    So, before a set of much longer days, we decided to pull everything out of the car and haul it into our room. This took two trips for everyone, although we were much more weighed down on the first trip. The room has subsequently been strewn with bags and articles of clothing in an effort to properly re-pack the mess it had devolved into.
     
    Before the epic day tomorrow, we wanted to eat a big dinner. We searched a few local places and asked the front desk about them. The front desk knew nothing about any of these places, so we just decided to go out and see what we could find along one of the main streets around town.
     
    We went towards downtown only to run into a residential district, and then were unable to turn around easily. Eventually we went back the other direction on the same road. We knew that the road led to food, but we didn't run into any of them. We ran into grocery stores, gas stations, casinos, dog parks, and industrial parks ... but there was no food to be found.
     
    Exasperation reached an all-time high. We found ourselves, eventually, in a Popeye's. I'd never been in a Popeye's and in fact had only ever seen them on commercials. We ordered an assortment of chicken and sides, and it was filling.
     
    Of most notability there was their drink machine: a high-tech touch-screen monstrosity that would burp out any drink you wanted so long as you could get it to cooperate. I had two big drinks of raspberry lemonade from this thing.
     
    Tomorrow: the longest day of any trip we've taken thus far, starting at dawn towards Yellowstone National Park via the extraordinarily beautiful Beartooth Highway.
  2. Sumiki

    Caving In

    By Sumiki,

    We set our alarms for an alarming 7:00 AM. My mom had already woken up and was busy packing things. We left just a little after 8:00 and went south to Wind Cave National Park.
     
    Upon our arrival at Wind Cave, we encountered a herd of buffalo making their way across the road. The great beasts were shedding their winter coats, and two of them did so partially by rubbing their bellies along the stones which hold up information signs along the pullouts. One, to which we were able to get fairly close, enjoyed scratching himself so much that his eyes rolled back in his head and he started drooling.
     
    After getting through the buffalo herd, we went through a town of prairie dogs. The cutest animals on Planet Earth did not disappoint in their adorable quotient. My dad told me to pull over on a number of occasions where he mistook a leaf for a prairie dog, despite the fact that the leaves are green and the prairie dogs are tan. (He was simply that determined to see as many of them as possible—and who can blame him?)
     
    But Wind Cave, while a wildlife refuge on the surface, was not created for that purpose. We got to the visitor center in time for the 10:00 tour and only had a few minutes of strolling through the center before we headed downstairs and out the back for the tour.
     
    Here's the thing about going to lots of caves: you see a lot of the same kinds of people. Families who go into caves come in one of four categories: the RVing retirees, three-plus-kid families whose kids are too young and/or are improperly dressed for the 54ºF cave temperature, incredibly annoying foreign tourists, and people like us.
     
    There were no foreign tourists on this descent, although one other family was gently reminded by the Wilford Brimley-lookalike ranger that they would want to have sweaters. Their scattered mother ran to retrieved their sweaters from their car while the ranger started the tour without her.
     
    Wind Cave was named for the small entrance, probably no more than a foot and a half diameter at its widest point, that "breathes" in accordance with the barometric pressure of the surface vis-à-vis the cave. Native Americans knew about the entrance for years (it figures in their origin story for the buffalo), but never went in. It was discovered by settlers years later when, according to legend, a local boy pushed some bushes away to have his hat fly off by the force of the "exhaling" cave.
     
    The land that became Wind Cave had been claimed by different families, only to have a court decide that both of those claims were invalid; the mining claim of one was null because they ran a hotel, and the other family didn't fulfill the requirements of being a homesteader. The land turned over to the local government, where it was made into a National Park some time later. Trails through the cave were paved with concrete by the CCC.
     
    Wind Cave, aside from the wind from which it derives its name, has a number of fascinating rock formations rarely found elsewhere but in abundance in the cave. Specifically, there's a kind of formation known as "boxwork," which consists of calcite blades which remain once the other rock erodes away. These fill many parts of the cave. Other interesting formations include "frostwork," which are complexes of white needle-like minerals.
     
    The tour descended step by step through these formations and ended at an elevator which took a third of the group up at a time. Throughout the cave we had lingered to the very back of the line to facilitate picture-taking. (The back of the line is ideal for us, as we like to get pictures and have already heard the general spiels of the tour guides. In fact, 90% of what the ranger said at Wind Cave is stuff we heard later at Jewel Cave.)
     
    We squinted our way back to the visitor center and met two scientists who were working on washed sediment extracted from Persistence Cave, a relatively new cave found on the Wind Cave grounds. The enthusiastic woman gave us a full tour of what she was doing and the kind of groundbreaking finds they were making. She described the overall process and how they were finding skulls dating back to before they originally thought those animals had arrived in the area. Her assistant was a timid local student who was doing a thesis on snakes.
     
    After picking up an ornament in the gift shop from a by-the-book cashier, we headed out to Jewel Cave. After getting a quick lunch at a Subway in the town of Custer, we continued on at a good clip until getting to Jewel Cave, when the road conditions deteriorated slightly and the road got extremely curvy.
     
    Jewel Cave was discovered after Wind Cave, and its natural entrance is a small tunnel. Getting in requires you to shimmy through this tunnel for three or four hours. Nonetheless, a few well-placed sticks of dynamite and the later addition of an elevator shaft made much of the cave accessible.
     
    Jewel Cave may soon be a contender for the world's longest cave: due to the air flow, scientists predict thousands of miles of uncharted cave. However, progress is impeded because, while new caves are being discovered, getting to and from the newly charted territory is a day and a half one way, accessible only through sliding through a hole of a foot or less for eight excruciating hours. After that, it's another seven or eight to the new passageways. With a limit of four days below the surface for spelunkers, progress is slow but steady. 177 miles makes Jewel Cave the third-longest known cave system in the world and may yet surpass Mammoth Cave, although both are gaining newly charted passages daily. (Mammoth has an over 200-mile lead on Jewel at the moment, so if Jewel does surpass Mammoth, that day's a long way off.)
     
    Our Jewel Cave tour featured every kind of tourist. One particularly annoying family spent most of their time doing their best to drown out the ranger's talks with loud conversations in their native tongue. Another family had enough of this after about twenty seconds and shushed them, although this did nothing. Eventually the ranger had to calm them down, but this only partially alleviated the problem. (I don't mind them visiting, but if I were in a foreign country, I'd speak English in a low voice, and even then only if I felt it necessary to do so. These folks sounded like they were trying to auction off every part of Tokyo at once.)
     
    We brought up the rear on this tour as well. I was designated the caboose and spent the time lagging behind for pictures. Jewel Cave has a number of unique structures. Like the other caves we've seen thus far, stalactites and stalagmites have been at a minimum, in favor of "flow stone" (a smooth, bulbous kind of rock, often made slick by water). "Cave popcorn," another kind of formation that looks like pretty much how you'd imagine it, covers many larger formations that themselves look like large bits of popcorn.
     
    (As the designated "caboose," the ranger told everyone to do the "telephone game" down the line to warn those further back about dangers ranging from slippery steps to low-hanging rocks. This would have been more functional if it'd been darker—I could see everything well—but at the second major stop on the tour, the ranger asked me if the telephone worked. I promptly announced that I wasn't getting any cell reception, which led to much laughter in the group.)
     
    The jewels in Jewel Cave are crystals, embedded into the wall in geode-like patterns. A few minor examples of boxwork led us to wonder if this cave does, in fact, connect to Wind Cave. Two other interesting formations were "soda straws" (thin stalactites which connect to the floor in a uniform and unbroken manner) and "bacon" (a formation off of the wall that looks exactly like bacon, with the "fat" a general deposit and the "lean" infused with rust to give it a reddish-brown color).
     
    In total, there are a little over 700 corrugated metal steps in Jewel Cave, and that's after an elevator ride down. Truthfully, however, the standing was worse than the walking.
     
    We exited Jewel Cave and got back on the twisty road. We got out of it and within about a minute entered Wyoming. The flatter roads through northeast Wyoming mainly go along the plateau ridges. The least populous state, however, gets a significant amount of traffic on this little two-lane road, and the passing lanes were so infrequent—and of inadequate length when they appeared—that the locals felt perfectly comfortable passing us, the car in front of us, and the big trailer behind us, all with the threat of being hit head-on by some Wyomingite going 90 MPH in the other direction.
     
    The first major town we got to in the state was Newcastle. Its people may be nice, but I didn't check that. We got gas and kept going, for the place is simply strewn with trash. Every bit of rusted-out junk that you may desire can be found along the sides of the road. Car parts, trailers, corrugated metal, pipes, farm equipment ... everything was there. In my opinion, it's the one spoiler that the residents have to an otherwise fantastic view of the surrounding countryside.
     
    But every state out west seemingly has a place that looks a bit like this, and it's usually somewhere near the border. Thus, we chalked its existence up to sheer inevitability and kept rolling. Once back on the Interstate, we ramped it up to the 80 MPH speed limit and found ourselves in Gillette in what felt like a mere instant.
     
    Upon checking in, the hotel staff informed my dad that the best local place was Los Compadres, a Mexican place that serves "way too much food to possibly eat." With the six-inch subs from earlier having only held out so long, we went over there.
     
    Over our heads on the booths and on the backs of the chairs were pictures painted in a slightly cartoonish aesthetic. The place stayed near capacity for the duration of our meal, and for good reason: the food came out of the kitchen quickly and in large portions. For the wait staff, everyone they serve is their "amigo," which, I would imagine, is the equivalent to someone in a southern diner calling you "honey" or "sweetie."
     
    The appetizer of chips and salsa had to be refilled once. The salsa had a kick to it, and was filled with all sorts of small onions, cilantro, and peppers. I had steak tacos with rice and refried beans, which was all fresh and delicious. I piled all of my sides onto my tacos, but it was too late for my final taco: its corn shell had absorbed the refried beans, making it a slippery mess.
     
    My dad got the chicken fajitas with fresh guacamole with nice chunks of avocado and what appeared to be pimiento. He, too, got the fried rice and beans, as well as caramelized onions and green peppers, lettuce, and sour cream (half of which he donated to me). As is his custom, he ate these ingredients with fork and knife, eschewing the tortillas—much to my advantage, as I used one of the flour tortillas to wrap the refried bean-soaked shell for the maximum double taco experience.
     
    My mom got Arrozo con Pollo: a bed of rice on the bottom covered in so many ingredients that she didn't know it was there until halfway through. Chicken slices, mushrooms, onions, and green peppers were sautéed in mild sauce. Cheese was between every major layer. The hunks of tomato and avocado were puny in comparison to the epic mountain of food that lay before her.
     
    I finished mine. My dad finished most of his. My mom, with a little help from me, barely finished half of hers. Like I said, it was a mountain.
     
    Tomorrow: Billings, Montana. It'll be a short day, but it will act as a mere prelude to the day after, which will feature a drive on the epic Beartooth Highway and a tour of Yellowstone National Park.
  3. Sumiki

    Get Your Goat

    By Sumiki,

    Today was what we considered a driving day, and so we left Mitchell with the idea of getting to Rapid City and getting work done there before seeing the new sights further west. Clouds hovered over Mitchell and Rapid City, but the roads drained well—but I wasn't about to go the speed limit of 80 until we got to a dry spot.
     
    Most of the road across South Dakota was indeed dry. There was little to report until crossing the mighty Missouri River, and we got a sense of how the car handled at high speeds up and down mountains. It passed with flying colors.
     
    After a period of road work (where the speed limit dropped, albeit just to 65), we got into Mountain Time. This is the first time we've actually seen one of those signs on this trip.
     
    The rain around Rapid City began drizzling on us as we got closer. We saw signs for the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, which has been updated in the three years since we've been here. Their welcome center is so knew that there are still access holes in the walls, and their exhibits are printed on large sheets of paper where they will eventually be made up on plastic and find a permanent home where their placeholders currently are posted. (They're held up with painter's tape.)
     
    The lady at the front desk reminded us of my great-aunt, and she told us about the nearby Badlands. (She didn't know that we'd already been there, so we listened attentively.) While the welcome center for the Minuteman site was nice, we weren't too thrilled about spending a lot of time outside in the chilly rain, so we pressed on.
     
    But while we were there, we decided to go to Rapid City via the Badlands. They were the same strange terrain as I'd seen three years ago, but grassier overall due to the rain the area had received. I would have liked to have gotten out and done the same hikes again had it not been for the rain's continuing presence.
     
    Yet our trip through the Badlands was fruitful for two reasons: we acquired our annual park pass, and we saw dozens of mountain goat families. They were traveling in a long, loose pack roughly perpendicular to the road, which wound around in one switchback up a minor hill. The scraggly older goats trotted along while mothers nursed and tended to their young. One particular kid was following behind its mother, got distracted by something, only to look back, see its mother meandering up the road, and half-galloped, half-see-sawed its way to catch up. It repeated this pattern at least thrice.
     
    After this excitement, we kept our eyes out for more animals. It was too wet for the prairie dogs this time of year, but it wasn't too wet for the two pronghorn I noticed.
     
    We got back on the Interstate in the town of Wall. With a population of less than a thousand, I feel as if the infamous road signs for the tourist trap that is Wall Drug (free ice water ...) outnumber the poor souls who live there.
     
    We noted a continuing theme on our trek through South Dakota: the billboards. I didn't notice this the first time we were here (perhaps because we didn't go all the way across the state then), but so many of the billboards and ad campaigns have puns. From the National Music Museum's "Les Paul, More Stradivarius" to the "A-maize-ing" Corn Palace, the billboards have been dominated by wordplay.
     
    South Dakota is also the tourist trap capital of the world. I can't think of another state with so many, with an annoying number of signs. Rushmore Borglum Museum, at least three privately owned caves, the aforementioned Wall Drug, and something called 1880 Town (which Dad was sad when we passed until we learned of its tourist-trappiness from the great-aunt lookalike at the Minuteman center).
     
    Our hotel is the same one we were at when we first visited Rapid City, but this time it was much easier to get to because the opened the road that went in front of it. We checked in and were told our room was on the second floor.
     
    My dad stayed behind to park the car while my mom and I rolled our bags up. When we got there, my mom swiped the card, only to let out a startled scream and close the door. I saw just a glimpse of what was inside: nothing but swimsuits and swim trunks everywhere. Fortunately there wasn't, like, a slippery naked guy inside or anything.
     
    We absconded to the floor's lobby, where my mom kept an eye on our so-called room while we waited for my dad to come up. While he was downstairs, the front desk had realized their mistake and began scrambling. My dad, unable to resist, began his "we-might-be-hotel-inspectors" routine. He went up to tell us what was going on, then went back to the front desk. They gave us our new room, but now they may be convinced that we're inspectors.
     
    With my mom having to get work done tonight and the hotel already in a position to want to keep us extra-happy, we decided to just go downstairs and eat in the hotel, with the idea that any ensuing shenanigans would be in our favor.
     
    My mom and I got burgers. Both came on a ciabatta bread (which I had never had before). Mine had caramelized onions and sweet peppers, as well as avocado. My mom's was shaved flank steak and swiss. My dad got the smoked salmon BLT, which he went "halvsies" on with my mom. I ate all of mine and most of their fries, then got a whole cheesecake slice for myself while they split the other one.
     
    Tomorrow: Wind Cave National Park and Jewel Cave National Monument en route to Gillette, Wyoming.
  4. Sumiki

    So Sioux Me

    By Sumiki,

    First, two additions to yesterday's report:
     
    While at the Lincoln library, one of the volunteers told us that he would take a picture of us around wax statues of the Lincoln family. My mom, in her inimitable fashion, decided to lean up to Lincoln's face and act like she was giving it a kiss. After snapping the photo, the man got a horrified look on his face, handing the camera back to us and exclaiming "The man's dead! Show a little respect!"
     
    Also, my mom called the closet at the hotel room a "garage." She didn't realize what she had said until my dad and I looked at her for a few seconds.
     
    We began today by heading west on Route 20, which took us to Dyersville in about thirty minutes. We wound our way off the road and into picturesque corn fields. Soon we found ourselves at the Field of Dreams movie site.
     
    The field is perhaps not as big as it seems in the movie, and the famous outfield corn hasn't yet grown to full height, but the field itself is otherwise in pristine shape and the house exactly like it's seen in the film. The addition of a few signs (containing the most horrible typographical errors) and a gift shop disguised to look like a concession stand were the only two major additions since the film's release.
     
    This was where we tried to get my mom to "float." "Floating" has been a theme of our trips since the second one, when I tried to take a picture of the Grand Tetons only to get a picture of her mid-run and thus appearing to float. This happy accident is hard to replicate when you're trying, although she has since successfully floated at Acadia National Park and on Prince Edward Island.
     
    I must have taken sixty rapid-fire pictures of her running around trying to keep her feet off the ground as much as possible. The other fans on the field seemed to find this behavior abnormal to say the least, and their worries were only compounded when my dad and I did the same.
     
    We got an ornament and pennant there, and were rung up by perhaps the least enthusiastic (and thus slowest) cashier in America, then got out of the heat back towards the road.
     
    After a brief stop to marvel at the exterior and interior architecture of the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier, we wormed our way back through the Dyersville downtown and back onto Route 20, where we only had to stop for gas at the rather unsavory home town of one of my dad's old roommates.
     
    The road went to two lanes from the freeway it had been, then had spurts of freeway from then on out as construction crews dotted the area in the effort to widen it. The temperature kept going up, eventually topping out at a sweltering 100 degrees. Overall, the landscape is what my dad referred to as "pizza-shaped," because "there's all these hills on the edges and it's flat in the middle."
     
    The terrain was somewhat terraced like pictures of Asian rice farms that I've seen. The hills on the western side have been turned into farmable area by this method. I was extremely surprised by this terrain.
     
    There was nothing to do but get to Sioux Falls. Now, Sioux Falls is in Iowa, but its suburbs are split by the Missouri and Sioux Rivers. Thus, South Sioux Falls is in northeast Nebraska while North Sioux Falls is in southeast South Dakota.
     
    Our first Sioux Falls stop was the stadium of the Sioux Falls Explorers, and independent minor-league team. They were not in town but one of the exiting employees saw us and took us inside the stadium. When we told him that we'd like to buy a pennant, he went into the back and gave us one free of charge.
     
    North Sioux Falls allows gambling, which accounts for its growth vis-à-vis the other two slices of the Sioux Falls pie. With every restaurant in North Sioux Falls a mucky-looking affair attached to or within a casino, we went back over to Sioux Falls. Out of respect for the fact that Takuma Nuva will not make it to BrickFair this year, we thought it our duty to eat at the first Culver's we could find. This Culver's was better by far than the one we had eaten at in Dubuque. The only real difference between our orders then and now was that I got a larger batch of deep-fried cheese curds and no bacon at this one.
     
    En route back to the hotel, we checked out an obelisk that we'd seen going into the city. This turned out to be the monument that marked the grave of Sergeant Charles Floyd, the only member of the Lewis and Clark expedition to die on the journey. His demise was most likely from appendicitis.
     
    Tomorrow: the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota, then onwards across the state as far as time and other factors will allow.
  5. Sumiki

    Pony Up

    By Sumiki,

    We started the day much too early for my liking and ate breakfast at Charlie Parker's Diner, a local institution located in an old Quonset hut. The hut had been significantly refurbished with only about half of it devoted to eating space. We had seen it on TV a few years ago, and those inside seemed to only be locals considering its semi-hidden location. They stayed busy.
     
    The curved interior of the hut was adorned with all sorts of old road signs, famous pictures, and records. We took the booth in the far corner and saw the rest of the place pack in. Our waitress was seemingly a refugee from the hard-partying sections of Louisville, but she was more gregarious than her many now-faded tattoos let on.
     
    Springfield's restaurants have informal rivalries over which one of them invented the "horseshoe," which is, in its original form, slices of Texas toast, hamburger patties, French fries, and cheese sauce. It's basically Springfield's answer to the Québec poutine, except somehow more disgusting in a picture. Nevertheless, it's one of those local foods, so my mom got a "breakfast pony," which is a variation of the original horseshoe (the "pony" being a smaller horseshoe of any variation). An over-easy egg, bacon, sausage gravy, and hash browns all slathered over a slice of Texas toast looked promising but somehow tasted terrible to me. To quote my mom: "It was no different than eating the egg and bacon and hash browns like a normal breakfast. It just forced you to eat it all at once."
     
    I went for the lunch menu and got a reuben with about as much sauerkraut and Thousand Island as meat, which is to say that I had my ideal sandwich. My dad went for the French toast with some hash browns on the side.
     
    With a hearty breakfast behind us, we headed back to the hotel, packed the car, and then headed out to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Ever since stopping by the FDR library last year, we were interested in going to others throughout the country. The Lincoln library was perhaps more school-group-geared than the FDR library but still contained enough tidbits to interest the more historically seasoned crowd. The artifacts they have on display include Lincoln's deathbed—the actual thing—an original carriage, and a host of handwritten letters and telegrams.
     
    There is little one can say about Lincoln's life that's not already well-known, and in fact most of the new information centered around his early life. He almost drowned when he was seven and was kicked in the head by a horse at nine, but that had no ill effects on him, as he taught himself to read and devoured Shakespeare and the Bible—and probably more, if he could have gotten his hands on them way out in the frontier of Kentucky.
     
    The most fascinating technology in the museum was the introductory movie. While it was geared towards school kids, the presentation seemed like an actor lip-syncing to a script while moving around on the set. But as more and more holographic things showed up, something seemed a little off to us. Eventually, the guy faded away—turns out that he was a hologram himself.
     
    After finishing the tour, we got an ornament at the gift shop and looked to find a top hat for hatpiling purposes. We didn't find anything that came close to fitting over my enormous skull, however, and so settled for only the ornament.
     
    We left Springfield around 2:00 and headed north to Peoria, which was ridiculously crowded for when we got there a little before 3:30. As it turned out, the short stoplights were backing traffic onto the Interstate and there were also fewer roads going in on that side of town. Navigating this was a mess, but we got to the home field of the Peoria Chiefs only to find a complete lack of parking.
     
    We eventually came to a stop in a tow-away zone and left my mom in the car so we wouldn't get towed. My dad and I went across the street and quickly informed one of the employees of our pennant collection. He promised to open the gift shop for us but told us to move our car, as "the lady over there will tow you." He told us to park on the street in front of the stadium, which turned out to be handicapped zone parking with a $350 fine for misuse.
     
    My dad stayed behind to keep the car running. My mom grabbed the camera as my dad gave me the credit card to pay. I got the pennant, ran into my mom on the way out, took a few pictures while walking briskly backwards, then—after a picture of a framed uniform of the Peoria Women's League team—we hurried into the car and took off again as a storm cloud came rumbling in.
     
    But the storm never struck and my dad got his first real stretch behind the wheel—it only took him a thousand miles to get his chance—and we made it out of Peoria with little hassle. We zoomed up the Interstate but knew that we would be too late to the Quad-City area for a pennant from the River Bandits in Davenport. This did, however, keep us away from the notorious traffic mess of that area.
     
    We pressed on to Dubuque, crossing the Mississippi River and entering Iowa around 5:00. We slowly went up and down almost undetectable hills—undetectable, that is, until you reached the crest, where there'd be something like a six percent grade back down.
     
    As previously noted, this was my dad's first time behind the wheel this trip and the first time he's ever driven the car at true highway speeds. As I taught him the cruise control settings, a spam call came into my mom's cell phone, which made a half-buzzing, half-ringing sound as the control panel lit up. My dad's first worry was that something terrible had happened to the car, and asked us if something was wrong so often that we couldn't get a word in edgewise for several increasingly frantic seconds.
     
    Nonetheless, it was a fantastic day to acclimate him to driving the vehicle, which was a necessary part of this journey. While I would have liked to have been able to say that I had driven all of whatever mileage the journey ends up being, such a long distance is unreasonable for any one person.
     
    We got to Dubuque and then to our hotel. My dad began his quest for a Culver's again, as apparently the Freddy's of yesterday had not suited his taste buds nearly as much as he had hoped.
     
    I suppose that the people of Dubuque are flatter than their landscape. The Culver's employees did not seem to enjoy working there, the other people getting food didn't seem to enjoy going there, and all in all everyone seemed to be having a downright dreadful time of it. The girl who took our order up at the front leaned over the computer close enough to either sniff or take a bite out of it, and became exasperated over what was not a particularly complicated order.
     
    The burgers I remember from our second trip did not materialize at this and for the first time since 2011 I was reminded of what Wendy's tasted like since it tasted exactly like Wendy's. In order to cut that flavor I put my side order of fried cheese curds onto the burger and put a little bit of ketchup on it to keep things from being too dry. It was better with these additions but still not up to the standards set by Takuma Nuva and his cousin Tom two years ago—although, to be fair, I had the "S-Mizzle" then.
     
    But Culver's biggest claim to fame is in their frozen custards. My dad and I both got peanut butter milkshakes, which we downed. We got two more for the drive back and then in the room, which were filled to the top to the point where inserting the straw pushed the thick frozen custard out the sides. We sipped on these as my mom went into a nearby grocery store for a screw-top drink.
     
    We got back to our hotel through a side door and past an Alabaman ranting about the current state of hospital stairways to some unfortunate recipient on the other side of his cell phone.
     
    Tomorrow: we see the place where they filmed Field of Dreams and cut all the way across Iowa to Sioux City.
  6. Sumiki
    Prior to leaving home, we had obtained reservations for a 1:45 PM tour of Mammoth Cave. Due to the logistics of getting people in and out of the park, it operates differently than other parks; they do not sell year-old park passes and tours are the only way to get in and out of the caves.
     
    We got on I-65 and within an hour were within the boundaries of the park. The deer population rivaled the number of people we saw on the way in. In fact, there were so few people on the way in that I began to wonder where everyone was for a June Saturday.
     
    Mammoth Cave had been used by Native Americans for centuries. Legend has it that the first white settler to come across the natural entrance did so by chasing a bear through the woods. It was used as a saltpeter mine during the War of 1812, when the ingenuity of the slave laborers helped the United States produce gunpowder. (The British blockade made it impossible to import the gunpowder.) Soon after, the caves became the second-oldest continuous tourist attraction in the country (after Niagara Falls), and continued operation throughout the Civil War years, despite Kentucky's contested status as a border state. They were even used for a few years as a tuberculosis treatment, which ended when the physician who ran the program died of the same disease.
     
    The most important figure from the early years of Mammoth Cave was Stephen Bishop, a slave and prominent cave explorer. The stories of Bishop's explorations are numerous and included he and another man dragging a cedar tree through the wider parts of the cave in order to shimmy their way across a drop known as the Bottomless Pit, all by the light of small lanterns. He died in 1857, one year after being freed.
     
    The farms were bought out by the Kentucky government during the Great Depression and given to the federal government as a CCC project. (The underground trails pioneered by the CCC workers are the same ones used today, as are the hand-planted deciduous trees on the surface.) During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy had Mammoth Cave turned into a fallout shelter, until they remembered that the temperature differential in summer and winter meant that the cave "breathed," rendering the cave useless as a fallout shelter.
     
    The caves themselves have been hewn by water. The hard sandstone on the surface resists erosion while the soft limestone underneath is carried away by the underground river system. These formations, along with a number of sinkholes, are the defining features of a karst landscape.
     
    At the end of the road, a park ranger motioned us into the overflow parking, where we got one of the last spots and endured a sweltering walk to the visitor's center. We got there incredibly early, and spent the time between getting there and the tour time touring their indoor exhibits and getting something to eat across a little bridge. (The food was standard but the clientele—which included Geraldo Rivera and Taylor Swift lookalikes, a baby with a mohawk, and an entire group of unrelated people who had pretty much the exact same face—was horrifyingly entertaining.)
     
    Soon enough it was 1:40 and we were huddled under an outdoor shelter along with about 150 other people. Our tour guide was a retired geology teacher who was able to corral—and at least somewhat entertain—a large group of people. We were one of the first in line behind him for the entirety of the tour.
     
    Our tour took us through the historic natural entrance and around the most explored two miles of the 400 that have so far been mapped. The 54-degree air blasted at us during our descent down the long staircase.
     
    The first thing you see upon entering is the Rotunda, which is a truly epic room. I've been impressed by standing underneath man-made domes half its size. We then went deeper and deeper into the cave. As we evaded divots in the trail, the walls became narrower and the ceiling inched closer, until we turned a corner and had to duck down to avoid rocks above our heads, all while trying to navigate uneven steps by going down sideways and gripping the slick handrails.
     
    From then through most of the remaining tour, we were in a constant state of concern for each other's heads and keeping them intact. The cave continued to narrow until a portion known as "Fat Man's Misery," when the rocks became so tight on every side we had to go sideways and bend over from the waist. This peculiar kind of crouch was the only way to navigate these bends.
     
    At the bottom of the tour is a small amphitheater-like arrangement known as the Methodist Church. Everyone in the group sat down on these aluminum benches as the guide talked about the park's history and pointed out the high-water marks of famous area floods. He mentioned a spry 94-year-old former CCC worker who had visited the park a few years ago, a story that ended up in a geology-related pun, to which I—sitting in the front row—said "you really had to dig deep for that one!"
     
    Yes, I nearly ended up in a pun war with a park ranger. (You know he would have lost.)
     
    We went up a three-million-dollar staircase and out through wider passages, shimmying over a soapy mixture with our feet to wipe off possible fungi. (The one they are concerned about affects bats but not humans, and they want to keep this particular species confined to one cave.)
     
    After two miles of these tight spaces and hard surfaces, we headed on up the road to Louisville and got to our hotel, where I witnessed the driver behind us exhibit what may very well be the first case of road rage in a parking deck.
     
    Now, I have to say this: Kentucky is pretty backwards in their road sign philosophy. Thirty miles without a speed limit sign and then there would be two identical ones no less than thirty yards from each other—and, just so you know it wasn't a mistake, they repeated the formula with the signs even closer!
     
    All of which brings us to Louisville, a city with a profoundly eclectic population. "Keep Austin Weird" and its more famous relative "Keep Portland Weird" have apparently inspired "Keep Louisville Weird." I've not ever been to Austin, but I can understand the similarities with Portland.
     
    However, we're not going to lose sight of why we're here, and that is to get an original Hot Brown. Acquiring this open-faced sandwich is something we failed to do on our first trip and has steadily risen on my dad's bucket list until now. The Brown Hotel, home of the original Hot Brown, is an institution and remains pretty steadily booked.
     
    Once at our hotel, we decided that we needed to eat a Hot Brown, but—much like the hotel itself—the restaurant was completely booked. We booked a brunch there at 10:00 tomorrow morning, but this only made us (well, my dad) hungrier for a proper meal beyond the dry and flimsy sandwiches at Mammoth Cave.
     
    We ended up eating at a restaurant attached to the hotel. The complimentary appetizer were deep-fried balls of pimiento cheese, garnished with a spicy green sauce. My dad and I each had the hanger steak, widely regarded by steak enthusiasts but little-known outside the butcher's circle. While not at tender as a filet or even a slow-cooked roast, it had a great flavor and was slathered in an unidentifiable but delicious sauce, surrounded by small potatoes and tiny whole sweet onions. My mom managed to eat most of half an Amish chicken. (I don't know what makes it Amish, unless it was cooked without electricity or its name was Yoder.) They split an apple tartlet for dessert while I chowed down on more pimiento cheese balls—and judging from the reaction of our waiter, that was probably not a common dessert order.
     
    The restaurant was constantly loud and made it impossible to have a conversation across the table without commandeering a megaphone. Adding to this mayhem were the chefs, who cooked on one side of the room—and we were sitting closest to them. Regardless, it was a show and a half, since the head chef was yelling bits of orders in technical lingo. At one of the rare lulls before our food arrived, my dad asked him what the funny-looking garnishes were. He said that they were watermelon radishes and gave us some to eat. (Both of my parents said that the things didn't have any flavor, but I found my bite positively repulsive. When will I learn to stop trying to eat garnishes?)
     
    Tomorrow: tentatively, Springfield, Illinois.
  7. Sumiki
    It is with no slight degree of sadness that we bid adieu to the road-trip days of "Lulu," the black Buick that has taken us on more journeys than I can remember, from years before these Great American Road Trips began. She took us to Florida at least twice, to BrickFair for three years, and Toronto in 2011, not to mention the 20,000 miles from the first three mega-trips and countless hour-long jaunts to my grandmother's house. Lulu has been a great car for us, but with her mileage nearing 140,000, we can't even begin to contemplate taking her on anything but bite-sized journeys from here on out. We needed a newer car—roomy, easy to drive in cities and in the wilderness, and not prone to the various breakdowns that readers of previous Great American Road Trip entries will remember.
     
    My dad doesn't just buy a car a normal way; his method, mad as it might be, is nonetheless utterly ingenious. In 2005, he took one of his off days and spent it at a dealership from the time they opened until well after they closed, using a tactic of aloofness and subtle psychology that made the salespeople sink more and more time and energy into the potential of a sale until he wrested away their inherent advantage. Since they didn't want to have lost an entire day, they let him have the car at a drastically reduced price. No less than a year later, we waltzed back into the dealership and, having previously broken the will of everyone in the place, got another excellent deal—this time, on the car we would come to know as Lulu.
     
    Beginning last November, the both of us went around to various dealerships and test-drove more cars than I can remember. I had never before seen this tactic of his—I'd only heard about it from him and from the frightened look on one salesman's face back in 2006—so it was interesting to see him work his magic on everyone, from a lady who had been selling cars since people unironically liked disco to an NBA-sized man who had sold the most cars at his dealership for nineteen consecutive months. The test-drives gave us a sense of handling the cars, as very little on that subject could be ascertained by reading up on them online. I even suggested, not entirely un-seriously, that we should hand off part of the research to my great-uncle, who meticulously researches every minute detail regarding home renovations and new purchases and often sets up full-blown experiments in an absurdly tiny kitchen.
     
    All of this is to say, of course, that we have entered into a new era for these trips. We traded in our second car, one with significantly less wear and tear than Lulu, for a metallic burnt orange Ford Explorer, approved by the three of us as the ideal vehicle for this and future trips—although the process was not without significant sweat on the parts of the salespeople.
     
    Those who have followed my comments, in this blog and in others, have heard me mention an upcoming trip to Alaska, and I'm sorry to say that this is not that trip. Between the high school baseball season, family commitments, and our collective lack of experience in our as-of-yet unnamed new vehicle, taking it this year turned out to be next-to-impossible … however, next year is shaping up to be the year that I finally get to check off "drive to the Arctic Circle" from my bucket list in the most epic of all road trips.
     
    This year, then, perhaps embodies the spirit of the first trip more than any other; with no impetus to hit states we've not seen, we're even freer in our route around the continent. So where else to go but out west once again, where there are more natural wonders to see and more local food to sample?
     
    As always, I invite you to follow along and PM me if we're going to be heading through your area; I've gone 3-for-3 in meeting BZP members on previous trips and I'd love to keep that trend going.
     
    So buckle up, BZPower. Round four begins tomorrow.
     
    P.S. Like last year, the Great American Road Trip has a Tumblr. Photo sets from the road will go here on a nightly basis.
  8. Sumiki

    The Ends of Eras

    By Sumiki,

    [NOTE: My apologies in advance for typos, but it's 2:12 in the morning so I think I have an excuse.]
     
    I'm afraid that I'm known more here now for being away for long periods of time, only to drop in every now and then with a long blog entry either detailing my life or sharing some offbeat observation. This is one of the former, although it has more to do with the events leading up to the things that have concluded in this month.
     
    The Honor Society
     
    For years, I've been an honor society member. I joined at age fifteen as one of two inductees—the other one, obsessed with soccer, moved to Florida soon after his induction. That ceremony doubled as the graduation of most of the group, leaving myself along with the other underclassmen to keep it going.
     
    Between overbearing mothers who thought they had to run the meetings and an increasingly flighty groups of members who saw the society as the least important thing on their social calendar, the organization slipped and slipped. I was the vice president and stayed there until late 2013, when the then-president got sick, then left for a mission trip out of the country as soon as she got better. I became the acting president, and soon thereafter, the former president's overbearing mother quit her official role as the chapter sponsor.
     
    Somehow I managed to have high hopes for the group, but existing membership dried up and there were not enough new members to replenish it. All of this culminated in our graduation ceremony earlier this month, where one member showed up, did her part in the proceedings, and left within about 120 seconds.
     
    The group was so small that it wouldn't be bad, except for the fact that I had to do everyone's jobs for them. I tried delegating at the beginning of my presidency but no one did anything on time or responded to e-mails. They were an enjoyable group to hang out and joke around with, but one wouldn't necessarily think them honor society members judging strictly by their online conduct.
     
    Baseball
     
    This year was my last opportunity to play organized baseball, something I've played and loved since I was about ten. Of the 42 games scheduled, we only played 27 games, winning 21 of them with an average score of 10-4. Everyone broke offensive records but, due to constant inclement weather, we never were able to achieve a truly consistent defense. Of our six losses, four were one-run games and two were two-run games, two went to extra innings, and all of them were against top-notch opponents who go year-round and have their own fields. (There were some other questions of integrity when one notoriously competitive coach had his cousin as the home plate umpire for a doubleheader against us.)
     
    The season finished with our awards night dinner, something that's a bit of an annual tradition: players, coaches, and fans are all roasted. This was my second year with an official hand in the festivities and I created some videos for the occasion. Despite the fact that rendering the files took a long time (leaving my computer incapable of handling a second CPU-heavy operation alongside the render), the splendid reaction to the finished films made the effort well worth it.
     
    The season wasn't without its ups and downs. We beat our archrivals—only so because they claim to be the "elite" and "only" team in the area when we've had a better record than they have for four consecutive years—in a tournament on short-notice without most of our all-Southeast-award-winning infield. The coach who backed out of the tournament had previously been with us, but he quit after three games, joined the best team in the state only to have his entire team quit to try out for us, then formed his own team which hasn't won a game in three years.
     
    Family
     
    My grandmother, who had a series of back surgeries late last year, continues to recover well. She's lost a lot of weight and is moving around better than she has since I can remember. She's still got some nerve pain, but it's come-and-go and will be for another year, and it's not even close to what she was dealing with before all of this happened.
     
    My dad began suffering from debilitating eye pain in early March, to the point where he'd spend all of his free time on the couch, moaning softly in the dark. Eye-pressure-relieving drops didn't do anything and we were worried about the potential of glaucoma or other serious eye conditions. As it turned out, he had something called a cluster headache, the most uncommon and most severe kind of headache.
     
    The headache lasted for about a month and a half, with my dad reporting varying levels of pain on different days and at different times ... then, just like that, it went away. He still got it checked out by a specialist, who confirmed the previous diagnoses and did an MRI, which showed everything normal ... or as normal as anything can be when one is peering into the mind of Sumiki's Dad.
     
    I've also been seeing my mom's side of the family more this year, from my baby cousins following me around at the Easter get-together to a trip to see my uncle's band perform at a park just a few weeks ago.
     
    Music
     
    This is the last year that I'll be working in earnest on pieces by other composers. I've been studying with the same piano teacher, a retired professor who now spends his eighth decade busying himself by gardening, cooking, and traveling the world. He's seen me every week of every semester since I was six years old, when one of his graduate students brought me into his office and I was identified as a prodigy for my transpositional and improvisatory abilities.
     
    It's actually only been in recent years that I'd gotten the nerves to perform in recitals, partially because of a kind of stage fright I only get when playing the works of others, but also because I'd not picked out my repertoire. I began selecting my own pieces and bringing them in around the same time that I began composing—which, incidentally, is how I discovered that I was totally at ease playing my own pieces.
     
    My piano teacher was skeptical at first but was totally sold on the idea of me as a composer when I brought to him a CD containing a selection of my own pieces. I dedicated a piece for piano and orchestra to him, which he and his wife apparently began to show to their other students, and finally I presented to him a 100-page bound booklet containing all of my solo piano pieces from late 2013 to early 2015, with the bulk of the pieces (all but four) from eight months in 2014.
     
    I played in the final recital last Sunday, and I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't bittersweet. After it was over (I was the final performer), my teacher announced my intention to study composition beginning in the fall and told the younger students that if they wanted a model to follow in music, just to look to me. The moment was a little awkward, but it was mostly just cool.
     
    The next Great American Road Trip
     
    This doesn't fit with the overall theme of the entry, per se, but there have been a number of occurrences surrounding the to-do list for the next Great American Road Trip. While a fourth month-long installment is on the table for this year, the potential departure date hovers around June 5th.
  9. Sumiki

    Franchise Futures

    By Sumiki,

    Let's face it: franchises rule the box office. Let's take a look at some of the big franchises, both current and anticipated, and get a good sense of where this is all headed. There's more peril than promise, I fear.
     
    First, let's look at Harry Potter, the quintessential film franchise. One movie per book, with seven b—no, wait, they split Deathly Hallows to keep the die-hards happy, so eight movies.
     
    Still, that's pretty good, right? They didn't split Goblet of Fire like they were going to; we could have had nine or ten movies.
     
    Yes, and now executives are kicking themselves silly not to cash in when they had even more opportunity. We're gonna start having to call this thing The Franchise That Lived, because they're turning the companion volume Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them into a trilogy. If they keep at this record for all of Rowling's remaining Potterverse material, increasing the number of installments like an unhinged Fibonacci series, we won't be done with these films for a while yet.
     
    Moving on to a similar, yet more hotly anticipated series: Star Wars. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone more excited about The Force Awakens than I am, but I'm beginning to have unsettling feelings about where the franchise is headed. We all know that the sequels will make tons of money regardless of their quality (although at this rate I would find it unlikely that J.J. & Co. would find a way to make them worse than the prequels).
     
    The Force Awakens and the two subsequent installments in the sequel trilogy will happen and I'm not concerned about them, Rogue One looks promising, and heck, I even have a feeling that the two other spin-off films will be at least halfway decent. But Disney put big money into Lucasfilm and I have a feeling that they're going to want to make more than just six films. The best way to handle the franchise is to have the stars of the sequel trilogy do what the original trilogy actors are doing in the sequels, but I have a feeling that Disney's not going to want to wait that long, which means a sequel trilogy to the sequel trilogy and/or further populating the universe with more spin-offs, and keeping up quality there is going to be extremely difficult.
     
    A similar case is that of the Lord of the Rings movies. Peter Jackson's acclaimed interpretations of the Tolkien classics, nominated for basically every award possible and winning most of them, remain widely acclaimed. When they announced the Hobbit films, I thought of it as a logical move ... until they went from two movies to three. It took three movies to tell three books, and all of the sudden you've got to fill up two hours with a third of the material? Of course you're going to have pacing issues—ones that even the greatest filmmakers would be hard-pressed to solve. I give it five years before a tetralogy based on The Silmarillion is announced.
     
    Okay, I think I get it. But these series are either finishing up or are yet to start and what you're suggesting hasn't actually happened yet.
     
    Well, yeah, none of these are currently disasters, and I have reason to believe that studios will continue to make incredible amounts of money by doing nothing but simply funding these franchises. The success or failure of these series will be less at the box office and more in the minds of those who see them. I mean, no one likes Michael Bay's Transformers series, but they have lots of explosions and continue to make money even if the franchise is a train wreck—or, given that it's Michael Bay, a triple train wreck where each train was carrying a third of the US nuclear arsenal.
     
    I have but two more examples of current large franchises, so bear with me.
     
    The Fast and Furious franchise has seven installments, with the seventh intended to launch a trilogy. After the death of Paul Walker, the filmmakers decided to make #7 a real fitting end to the series and a touching send-off to Walker, which would have been a nice thing to do ... except for the fact that they're still making #8 and #9 and they more or less messed themselves up by changing #7. This is actually real problem for the Fast and Furious team, and I have a feeling that they'll end up starting a trilogy on #8 and having it run through to #10. Just getting #8 to seem plausible and not a tacky money grab is going to be an uphill battle.
     
    Finally, the big daddy of current franchises: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It grows bigger by the day, and Marvel's original plan outlined three phases of epic proportions, not to mention Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent Carter, Daredevil, and future shows. This is the biggest universe in terms of sheer scale and it has a ton of moving parts without much in common between films—well, except for the ever-present Stan Lee cameo. (Even the actors change; Edward Norton was the Hulk in a film people seem not to remember.)
     
    Marvel has the best chance of pulling off something like this, but it wouldn't take much for the MCU to become a self-contradictory jumble. Acclaimed writer and disruptive pseudo-feminist Joss Whedon's comments about what he did and did not consider to be a part of the MCU may be as much of an indictment against the MCU's current size and scope as it is against Whedon himself.
     
    So you're saying that there's a critical mass for a franchise?
     
    Yes, with the caveat that they all exist in the same universe. James Bond is a very long series, but only recently have the films been definitively set in the same universe (although I committed quite a long entry to this blog awhile back postulating that James Bond is a Time Lord). Even then, it's doubtful that the Casino Royale/Quantum of Solace universe is the same as the Skyfall/Spectre universe. Bond's got a while to go before he runs out, and the nature of the role means that the series will reboot again when Daniel Craig makes his exit.
     
    But TV shows don't have this issue—look at Doctor Who.
     
    ... a show that has decidedly gone downhill under Moffat.
     
    Still, TV shows are different from movies in many fashions. Shows usually translate well into films (see Mission: Impossible), but I can't think of any adaptations that successfully went in the opposite direction.
     
    Shows have a slower pace, more hours to tell a story, and deeper characterization. We have the opportunity to get to know Andy Dwyer that we couldn't possibly get for Star-Lord, and that's just an example from one actor. There's a smaller group of people who make a show from season to season, and they can plan what they want, who they want, and when they want things to happen.
     
    Movies also must feel complete, and continuing to find compelling ways to tell stories with characters, both familiar and unfamiliar, while simultaneously keeping in mind that each installment must come to its own conclusion (to ensure that the films within a franchise are enjoyable by themselves), will eventually cause problems.
     
    In short, I don't think that all of these franchises I mentioned are necessarily doomed to failure, and certainly I doubt that any of their respective installments will flop at the box office. With each successive film, however, you run the risk of painting yourself into a corner by being forced to tell new and compelling stories while maintaining self-consistency in everything from aesthetic to characterization. It's an elaborate dance, and one misstep means fandom chaos.
  10. Sumiki
    Late last night, I was up thinking (uh oh), and the most random question popped into my head: what Hogwarts house would Ron Swanson be in?
     
    The answer became very complex very quickly, because Ron Swanson—like all of the Parks and Recreation characters—is more interesting than a some actual people, which makes a simple classification tricky.
     
    But Hogwarts houses shouldn't just be a simple classification, which is what they've boiled down to. They're flanderized and there's not much that Rowling does to stop this from happening.
     
    In truth, the four aspects that define each house are not mutually exclusive. While the sorting process is intended to group students based on which of the four aspects is the biggest, that would result in less homogenous houses than are portrayed.
     
    For an example, let's look at Slytherin. Its members are depicted as varying levels of evil, when in truth, Slytherin is about cunning and self-preservation. As such, while it makes sense for the bad guys of the series to have Slytherin affiliation, it should, by its very definition, be a complex house. Were good Slytherins subjugated by the Malfoy types of the house? Were there secret friendships between Slytherins and members of other houses? These things are never elaborated, and Slytherin remains the Evil House—not unfairly by any means, but as it stands no argument can be made for it being good.
     
    In truth, the Slytherin case shows the underdeveloped nature of the non-Gryffindor houses, and it wouldn't really take that much to make it more nuanced. A Slytherin who joins forces with Dumbledore's Army, or perhaps rewriting one of the Harry-finds-out-important-details-by-overhearing-some-people scenes to have a Slytherin, troubled by the actions of their house, spilling some beans to Harry and the gang.
     
    Oh, and Ron Swanson's totally a Slytherin.
  11. Sumiki
    Star Wars is back with Episode VII at the end of this year, and I'm pumped because I'm secretly Star Wars trash.
     
    The first time I saw Star Wars, Episode I was already out. I accepted Jar Jar from a young age, but it didn't take me long to realize that while I enjoyed it, it really wasn't the same style of film. Nevertheless, I remember counting down the days until Attack of the Clones came out and I remember liking it too.
     
    By the time 2005 rolled around and I was counting down the days until Revenge of the Sith, and I loved it in the theater only slightly more than I do now.
     
    Only later did I discover the immense dislike—hatred, even, in some circles—directed against the prequels, and my subsequent viewings began to take these views into account. While they're certainly not as good as the originals, they're an enjoyable series. If Lucas hadn't ever made the originals and started in 1999 with The Phantom Menace, I'd bet the saga would still be big.
     
    This brings us to the crux of the debate of prequels vs. originals: when watching the prequels, we know what's going to happen. We know that Anakin turns to the dark side, we know that Palpatine is going to become Emperor, and we know that the Jedi have to be all but wiped out. The question of how to get from point A to point B makes for an inherently less interesting set of films.
     
    Could George Lucas have made the prequels better? Certainly; even from a layman's perspective, I see opportunities to improve on existing material or even outright changed it. But even if the plots were scrapped and a different prequel trilogy existed, they would never be the epics that the die-hard fans wanted. It all goes back to the fact that we know where the story is going. Plot twists are anticipated. It's harder to get emotionally invested in characters like Qui-Gon because, well, we knew that he was going to bite the dust at some point, as would Darth Maul. The only surprise is that both fatalities came during the same battle.
     
    How does all of this affect the sequels?
     
    For starters, we've got a team unencumbered by an endpoint. With the EU non-canon, the fandom expects something truly epic to make up for their fantasies of a Thrawn Trilogy movie, but let's be real, fanboy standards are impossibly high anyway. We barely know which actor is playing what part, and we have absolutely no idea where the sequels will take us.
     
    Also, there's the advantage of seeing the originals in light of what the prequels did wrong. I'm not someone who believes that a series can be "ruined" by the release of subsequent installments of diminishing quality, but I do think that this situation bodes well for the sequels. While it's possible to mess up the sequels, what we've already seen is a good sign that the people in charge have learned their lessons.
     
    All of which brings me to the title question: is there a good prequel out there? Can anyone name a prequel that doesn't suffer because it was a prequel?
  12. Sumiki

    A Well-Dressed Lamp

    By Sumiki,

    Alternatively: The Wonderful World of Going Through Old Pictures
     

     
    I would say "presented out of context" but I don't even remember the context for this in the slightest.
  13. Sumiki

    The Adventures Conclude

    By Sumiki,

    It all began with the idea for a short story, yet it spun into a full-blown comic tetralogy that took the Comedies forum by storm.
     
    Now, after four installments of eight chapters each, The Adventures of Sumiki's Dad has come to an end.
     
    The complete Adventures of Sumiki's Dad saga shall be printed and bound later this year. At least one of these copies will go to Portalfig (the Blogarithm Contest #9 winner).
     
    Where to from here? Let's just say the G&T forum should look out.
  14. Sumiki

    Three Years

    By Sumiki,

    I am the first to admit that the time I spent on the old forums was time spent as a noob in nearly every regard, but I joined when I was only ten, so my zealous enthusiasm for BIONICLE, the site, and literally any member I thought was cool has an explanation.
     
    When the forums came back, I felt like I'd grown quite a bit in many ways. I still didn't really know what I was doing or what I'd be doing in the future—aren't we all adrift in that regard?—but I felt more confident about my life.
     
    Life is determined by experience, and our culture has decided to bunch many new experiences together in the late teenage years. It makes for a confusing mess.
     
    Added to this aforementioned mess was the downtime. The better part of a year without BZPower made me really come to terms with how important the site had been to me. I'd made and met friends, attended my first BrickFair, and though I'd accepted the possibility of the forums never returning, I came to see the Internet as a whole as a way to interact with those whose interests fell along my own lines. Friends no longer fall along the lines of geographic proximity, but mutual interest and similar personality.
     
    All of which, of course, somehow added to a step up in my own maturity.
     
    Digressions aside, it was refreshing to have BZP back. I didn't do anything that I felt was particularly special from that October onwards, aside from the number of blog reports I sent in (Takuma attests to this), I made no particular attempt to ingratiate myself towards the staff, as I had in my younger and more vulnerable years. (BBC staff circa 2008 probably hated my guts because I'd literally go through every active topic and report every post that was even close to breaking a rule.)
     
    The thing is, I never really wanted to be a part of the staff nearly as much as I wanted to matter to the site, which I ended up attaining during my years as an OBZPC. It was throughout that period that I became known as The Guy Who Never Gets Promoted. It would have been natural for me to feel the same way, but I was happy simply mattering to the site in my contributions. In that sense, I was more "BZP famous" than a good chunk of the lower-level staff of the time.
     
    Three years ago, I was promoted to the now-defunct position of Forum Mentor.
     
    I was excited—who on this site wouldn't be?—but I realized the importance of the position. Yet as time went on I got used to the routine; I was surprised at how much the same everything was. The sense of sameness was, to some extent, my own interpretation. Much of the rest of the staff know each other and are personal friends outside of BZPower, and I never felt it my place to include myself in what they did. I didn't want members to see me as a part of a privileged elite—as if an "elite" can reasonably exist on a web site devoted to a toy line—and so I positioned my official activities on a more personal level.
     
    Little was I to know that other staff members were doing the same thing, and I am happy to see a personal touch as a universal approach to moderation, a change which has only relatively recently become practical with the overall decrease in activity. The "small-town" BZP is in many ways infinitely better than the "big-city" BZP.
     
    I've changed in three years in ways in which I cannot even begin to comprehend. This entry is going to be rambling enough as it is, but I can only end it by thanking everyone on here. The site and its members have unequivocally made me who I am today.
     
    Here's to the many years to come.
  16. Sumiki
    As a kid, I grew up seeing Shakespeare as a bit of a rite of passage. I knew he had a propensity for wordiness (exacerbated by the sheer time differential in the years that have passed since the Bard wrote his last), and my one and only encounter with similarly loquacious literature (the opening chapters of The Hobbit) in November of my fourth grade year averted me from any writer who chose to couch their ideas in language I considered overwrought.
     
    Now look at me; I completely unironically wrote a sentence that runs most of that paragraph. How times do change.
     
    In any event, a few years ago, while at my grandmother's house, I saw on the shelf a copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare. Her father, a newspaper editor and wonderful writer in his own right, had acquired the volume (along with a great many other classics) in the mid-1930s. Some time later in his long life, he appeared to have read a good deal of it; I found one of his classic makeshift bookmarks in the middle of Act IV of The Merchant of Venice.
     
    The book was pristine, and a going-over revealed that it was probably as good an edition as any published today, including I borrowed the book for however long it'd take my mom and I to read the complete works.
     
    It was audacious indeed, and no small task to read such prose. So we devised a plan: for each scene, one of us would play half of the characters, and then read through each play at the kitchen table. These characters transform over the course of the play into their own individual voices, often impressions; so far, I've played characters as Morgan Freeman, Mrs. Dubcek from 3rd Rock from the Sun, and an overly Scottish fellow who freely inserts references to haggis at every available opportunity.
     
    The Comedy of Errors, early, short, and full of puns and slapstick, was an obvious first choice based on its description alone. When the lines and stage directions got so funny that we both had to stop for fear of laughing ourselves into unconsciousness, we knew that we'd made a good decision.
     
    The comedies continued with The Tempest, a marked stylistic contrast, and then through plays famous and obscure, ending with The Winter's Tale, of which I remember remarkably little save for the stage direction "exit, pursued by a bear." The histories, full of as much political intrigue as any modern miniseries, lasted for quite some time.
     
    The tragedies have been some of the most fun plays to read, as comedic bits come in at the least expected moments. Some of the earlier tragedies have a farcical or satirical tone; Titus Andronicus, with its "yo momma" jokes and Kill Bill-esque mass atrocities, can be taken as nothing a parody. Similarly, Troilus and Cressida parodies the ancient Greek myths, although the humor is lost on modern-day audiences where Hector, Ajax, and the crew are no longer hip pop culture references.
     
    And that's what's really struck me about Shakespeare: there's inevitable variety of style. Everyone reads Hamlet in high school, just as everyone reads The Great Gatsby. And while Hamlet is a wonderful play, I think it would serve students just as well to go beyond the Prince of Denmark or the feuding Montagues and Capulets. Not every work is a masterpiece—The Two Gentlemen of Verona, for one, is just terrible—but Shakespeare is worth much more exploration beyond what is stereotypically required.
     
    At the heart of it all is that the plots and characters represent things so fundamental about the human experience that they have stood the test of time. They have gained popularity while the work of his his Elizabethan contemporaries are now known primarily to academics. They provide for endless adaptation, just as Shakespeare himself adapted many well-known stories to suit his own ends.
     
    So now I've read the complete plays. What now?
     
    Well ... he wrote a bunch of poetry, too.
     
    On to the sonnets.
  17. Sumiki

    Auditions and Recitals

    By Sumiki,

    This next week will be one of the most important weeks of my life.
     
    I have back-to-back music auditions on Friday and Saturday, and it's been an interesting setup thus far. I have ties to both schools, but they have very different audition standards and admissions offices.
     
    One requires a piano audition, which I'm not excited about—not that I'm not competent at the instrument (far from it), but that I'm afraid I'll be judged in that area against full-time prospective piano students with whom I would be competitive were I not also a composer. Basically, my piano repertoire is a little more offbeat than the usual and I haven't the slightest idea how much the piano portion will weight my overall audition.
     
    The other has had a few mishaps in the admissions office. I'm not particularly concerned about that since everything has been straightened out, but the fact that it was straightened out so close to my audition means that it only takes one thing to slip through one crack for the audition to have complications.
     
    I don't know what the deciding factor will be in this matter. I don't know if there will even be a deciding factor. There's no clear-cut favorite at this point.
     
    Oh, and then the day after I'm in full-on recital mode, including a rendition of the only piece I've written that I've also memorized, because my brain somehow has a hard time remembering things that I write. I suppose that it's because I write them.
     
    Musically, I have every reason to be confident in what I've done. My orchestral pieces have been compared to Haydn in humor, and my piano pieces to Chopin in scope. Something outside of my control going horribly wrong, however, is not something I'd be able to take, mentally speaking.
     
    The little time I've had in recent weeks has been devoted to:
    putting my fourth orchestral piece into notation software
    editing my complete piano pieces as a gift for my piano teacher at the end of this semester
    composing a new choral-ensemble piece (featuring a libretto partially by Sumiki's Dad)
    sketching ideas for a piece for cello and orchestra, partially as an experiment in orchestration (cello concerti are notoriously hard to orchestrate), but mainly as a gift for a cellist friend (who is one of three people on the planet to have beaten me in a pun war).

    It's somewhat hard to focus on these various things, but it's kept me from stressing over the auditions more than I already have, so I guess that's something.
     
    In other news, my neck scar is healing quite nicely (the stitches come out for good tomorrow!), my grandmother is walking around as well as she has in about three years, and my senior year of high school baseball begins with a practice on February 9th.
  18. Sumiki

    Xaeraz

    By Sumiki,

    Xaeraz kills zombies
     
    Slayraz
     
    Xaeraz is a significant other
     
    Baeraz
     
    Xaeraz arrives before June
     
    Mayraz
     
    Xaeraz appears in a John Green novel
     
    Okayraz
     
    Xaeraz is a well-trained dog
     
    Stayraz
     
    Xaeraz takes a nap
     
    Layraz
     
    Xaeraz is diurnal
     
    Dayraz
     
    Xaeraz becomes fond of ligatures
     
    Xæraz
  19. Sumiki
    My previous appearance at a plastic surgeon to excise a cyst from the right side of my neck ended with me setting up a follow-up appointment in order to remove an adjacent mole. I'd had this mole since birth, and when the surgeon heard of this, he told me that such things have a small but significant chance of developing into melanoma.
     
    Earlier in the week, I went over there and the operation was almost entirely the same as what I'd experienced before: some sharp pain during the numbing process and then a totally painless procedure. Everything went well until that night, when it began bleeding more heavily.
     
    I will spare everyone the more gory details of things, but the following morning I had more stitches inserted and the local anesthesia didn't work in the slightest bit. That wasn't fun.
     
    Still haven't been able to move my neck much at all, which made a dental appointment a little more long-winded than usual.
  21. Sumiki

    Dear Bonkle Fandom:

    By Sumiki,

    G1 and G2 are not related.
     
    Yes, they're reusing names, and they're reusing elements, and the Vahi keeps cropping up in hidden ways. But other franchises have gone through reboots, and no other fandom has attempted to connect generations as I've seen here.
     
    Please stop trying to connect them.
     
    Sincerely,
    Sumiki
  22. Sumiki
    So about a year ago, I was sitting in a chair and my dad suddenly starts feeling along the upper right side of my neck. I had a large bump in it and went to see a dermatologist, who didn't know what it was but prescribed a low-strength antibiotic to try and get it down. It worked a little bit, but the bump never went away. It wasn't painful in the slightest, which made it pretty strange.
     
    Last fall, I went back to the dermatologist. He'd narrowed it down to "cyst" and "random inflammation," having ruled out anything malignant since the antibiotic had some effect. To try and find out, he numbed the area and cut the skin to see if there was a cyst underneath the first layer ... but it was simply too deep for him to excise in the office, and so he referred me to a plastic surgeon.
     
    Now, like most people, I thought that plastic surgery was the realm of rich facelift addicts and burn victims. Most patients—at least around here—go there for small outpatient operations because plastic surgeons have more training in that area.
     
    November rolled around and I went there to get it checked out, and it would have been removed then and there had the plastic surgeon—a gregarious fellow with a passion for fish—accepted our insurance. Having just returned to private practice, it took a little while for the insurance companies to make deals with their office.
     
    Sure enough, insurance came through in December and it was cut out today. The mysteries were resolved—it was a cyst, and it was deeper than the dermatologist's incision. The antibiotic effect was explicable.
     
    The only tough thing about this whole ordeal is that I have to make sure to keep the area covered with sunscreen for the next six months in order to prevent a visible scar from forming ... but I'm used to sunscreen anyway, because I'm naturally an incredibly pale person.
  23. Sumiki
    I've had this blog since a few months after I joined, and although I don't have eight full years of entries (I deleted many on the back end), there are still plenty of memories and hilarious moments in its many pages. To spare you the pain of trawling them, here's a list containing the best of the best.
     
    I request that no one comment in these entries.
     
    Wikipedia Has it All Wrong - 12/29/09
    The Tale of the Toxic Waste Bunny - 05/03/10
    -----the original Sumiki's Dad adventure
    Someone Had to Do It - 07/19/10
    Antichicken - 09/16/10
    NOTROBLERST - 03/13/11
    Dinchfast - 04/25/11
    Farm Animals - 11/20/11
    Obnoxious Twinkies at the Zoo - 1/22/12
    Glaciers - 02/26/12
    Ode to Eggplant - 05/20/12
    THE BRICKMIKI SAGA - 07/28/12 – 07/30/12
    ----I'm definitely Sumiki
    ----Something New
    ----Seneca Crane's Beard
    ----tyhins entry wsass typoed with my nose
    ----Sumiki May Have My Content Blocks
    Tahu - 07/31/12
    Shoutout to Windrider - 08/31/12
    Quote from My Dad - 09/18/12
    Deluxe - 10/16/12
    ATTN: XAERAZ - 01/22/13
    How to Play Piano, with Sumiki - 05/01/13
    Ode to Dental Floss - 05/27/13
    GALIDOR 2015 CONFIRMED - 08/17/14
  24. Sumiki

    I Won a Thing

    By Sumiki,

    You know, I was trying to decide the other day who my favorite Toa from G2 is going to be, and lo and behold, I find out that I've won a Kopaka poster.
     
    IT'S BEEN DECIDED
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