All posts by Howard Tayler

Time to go!

I’m packed, I’m ready.

I brought golf discs, my portable target (complete with the inner set of chains I built for it), and this afternoon I went out and bought three more discs (including a 134g “cheater” they had on the shelf — legal minimum weight is 150g).

I’ve got a couple of books to read. I brought my marker set and my colored pencils. I’ve got a short stack of bristol and a big pile of graph paper. I’ve got my laptop (should I decide to write — typing is faster) and my pencil and pens.

I have a swimsuit, sunscreen, warm clothes, cool clothes, stylin clothes (a hot yellow dragon-print shirt I bought in Africa in 2000) and a hat for my shiny, easy-to-burn top.

I’ve got a small pharmacy packed, including allergy meds, Vitamin I, Vitamin H, and little self-contained packets of other vitamins for each day.

We’re bringing the digital camera, a connector cable for the laptop, Star Munchkin, Grave Robbers from Outer Space, Skip-Bo, a pair of cell-phones (do NOT call me) and both our vehicles.

I’ll be driving Turbo Schlock up the hill, while my wife takes the crew up in the minivan. The name “Turbo Schlock” was pronounced by Link, who read my license plate, and then read the “TURBO” label under the VW logo, and decided the two words needed to be strung together. He was right. They DO. There’s no champagne in the house (never has been), so I spritzed some Windex on a bug on the hood, wiped that off, and considered it christened.

I couldn’t be more ready.

I may enter some journal stuff from camp on their slow link, using their public web-browsing machines. Then again, I may not.

See ya!

–Howard

One over… AGAIN.

I tied my best-ever Disc Golf score for Provo’s Bicentennial Park: One over par. I’d love to be able to just get PAR for nine holes, but after a full year of playing I’m not there yet. My drives are still 100 feet short of where they need to be, and my putting game is crap outside of 20 feet.

I bought an InStep portable Disc Golf target on eBay for $58, and it showed up while I was in Africa. I got it set up and found that with the single ring of chains it has a tendency to not catch discs as well as the targets at the park. Rather than put up with a basket that teaches me gentle putting, I decided to install a second ring of chains.

I’m pretty pleased with how that turned out. It took about an hour’s worth of planning, and 30 minutes of shopping, but once I had the parts it took all of 5 minutes to install, and only cost another $23. I used mini-carribeeners from Wal-Mart, and seven two-foot lengths of chain from Home Depot.

I’m taking that basket with me to Aspen Grove in hopes of improving my game, having fun throwing in a new environment, and ruining my vacation.

–Howard

(Buffer update is here)

The Day After Tommorrow

I saw The Day After Tomorrow on Tuesday.

(Okay, if today is Thursday… [insert probably done-to-death “that’s today” joke here])

Great effects. Fun story. The cardboard cut-out characters were cut from a decently thick-enough cardboard that they had me fooled for a while.

NOT ENOUGH DEATH.

Sweet merciful crap. If you’re going to run a wall of water through Manhattan, you need to inflict us with the bloating, floating corpses. Sure, we see a few bodies here and there, but the reality of this disaster movie is that we come out of it thinking “bad weather would be fun.” Sure, a few unnamed characters disappear, and in one or two cases we see someone actually get killed, but for the most part it’s all passionless stuff.

Remember that scene in The Sum of All Fears where we see the fast montage of people at the football game? And then the nuke goes off, and we are forced to IDENTIFY with at least one now-incinerated person in the crowd? PASSION. EMOTION. POWER.

The message in The Day After Tomorrow is “don’t screw up the environment.” It’s heavy-handed, the science goes from decent cutting-edge stuff to the inane contrivances of narrativium and “plot device,” and the power figures are all straw-men. Fine — that’s typical eco-political sensationalism. But they screwed it up, because IT LOOKS COOL AND YOU CAN BELIEVE NOBODY REALLY GOT HURT.

Bleah.

Here’s a comic about it.

Pathetically, I enjoyed the movie.

–Howard “hypocrisy now, procrastination later” Tayler