Skiing a Year Later

For those of you who missed last year's cliff-hanger, I managed to break my left tibia skiing at Mont Tremblant just north of Montreal last year on Valentine's Day.

I've been healing for a year but that year has been filled with many surprises. First is the fact that we all know--that you just do not heal the same at 42 as you do when you're half that age or younger. It's been a solid year and I'm still not the same. Another surprise came just a couple of months ago when it was discovered that I'd broken my ankle in the accident and it went entirely undiscovered until I complained of an odd symptom that resulted in a closer look.

All during my recovery I've made it clear that I intended to try skiing again. Most family and friends were about as supportive as parents letting their kids play outside in a blizzard without a coat. Plainly stated, most of them think I'm nuts for attempting it. I keep thinking that it's a sport I love and I just am not ready to look back at skiing in my life as a historical event.

So, as this winter approached I'd started getting serious and the objections continued to mount but the unusually warm weather in the northeast trumped all of that. There just wasn't an opportunity to ski until very recently. I finally got a plan to come to fruition and my son and I headed up to the Poconos for three days of skiing. First up was Elk Mountain. Elk is a wonderful mountain. Yes, they have only slow lifts. Yes, they have a small number of trails. Yes, they don't have the snow-making capability of other mountains, but when conditions are right there, it's a wonderful spot. The issues above also help to keep it a more personal experience instead of a zoo.

Getting all the gear on filled me with both great anticipation and a bit of stress. The stress wasn't there at any point prior. Once I snapped my boots into my ski bindings it really ramped up. The entire ride up the first lift was a trial. The first exit from the lift was even jerky. Everything looked more challenging than it had a year ago, by a large factor. The first run down a trail was slow, tentative and worry-filled. Thankfully this experience lessoned with each run.

By the time the day was over I'd gone a long way towards banishing the demons, but not fully. I'd skied terrain of every type there including a couple diamond runs, all without a fall or incident. Weather then got in the way as a storm descended on the mountain leaving us wet and with visibility measured in single-digit feet. It was time to head out.

The next day we headed over to Camelback where I've skied countless times. This time it was 19 degrees and included wind gusts well over 60mph. It was a challenge just to be outside let alone ski out there. All the same we did so and managed to get in a good solid seven hours of skiing. Conditions improved dramatically for the last day and a friend also joined us.

My skiing over the three days improved but my own guestimate tells me I'm skiing at about 75% of the level I was at last year. Every bump or moment of concern resulted in the memories of the pain of the break flooding immediately back to me. That caused me to continually slow down. I suspect that also kept me more in control but I wonder if the tentative nature comes with its own risks.

On the plus side, my son was happy with the situation. This is the first time he's been able to beat me down the mountain reliably and it filled him with a major dose of confidence. If that's all that comes from this break then it's almost worth it. It was wonderful to see him step up that way and enjoy the experience.

In the end I survived the experience so my family can relax a bit. I did have some issues. I was more tired than before. It's clear my muscles are well off from where they were last year but that should improve over time. My ankle is now the main concern. It tended to lock up inside the boot causing some very uncomfortable moments here and there.

The funniest part of the trip was when Camelback informed us that their lift tickets are heat-sensitive so we shouldn't put our coats in the dryer. Talk about an idiotic design decision. You're supposed to permanently attach these tickets to your clothing which is very likely to get wet and they design it so that it's heat-sensitive (turning black and becoming unreadable)? Nice move there.

Anyway, I'm probably done for this season. I've proven to myself that I can still ski and don't need to push it. Next year I'll be more fully healed and likely in better overall health and that should all help.

Letters From Iwo Jima a Nice Surprise

A while back when it first came out, my best friend and I saw Clint Eastwood's, "Flags of our Fathers". To be frank, we found it to be entirely a snoozer. It was overly long and we just couldn't get into the characters much at all. When it was over people walked out of the theater entirely quiet and glad to be done with the experience. It's not that it was a terrible film but with Eastwood's more recent movies, I expect more--a lot more.

I remember when Flags first came out seeing the previews for "Letters From Iwo Jima" and wondered what the deal was with him doing two movies so seemingly similar. In fact, after seeing Flags, I was really concerned about how this new movie would turn out.

My friend and I went to see it on Thursday night. It was a 6:35 show time and we got there at 6:40 and still had to grab some drinks and popcorn at the concession stand. As we were in such a rush after work I actually stopped off at McDonalds and raided their Dollar Menu. So we sat down to watch the movie each armed with a large drink, small popcorn, a double cheeseburger, a McChicken sandwich and a small fry. I can't exactly recommend that menu to anyone but it served the purpose.

Anyway, the movie was quite a departure from Flags of our Fathers. The characters were intriguing and their backstories were always interesting. The battle sequences were much more memorable and impacting than those in Flags. It was just a much better film overall. Is it best picture material? While I would recommend this movie to most, I can't quite bring myself to say it should be thought of in that caliber.

The acting is excellent throughout. The look of the film is exceptional. You actually get a real sense of being there. The effects are also fairly well done.

There were a couple of concerns. There's a lot of dialogue in Japanese that is translated via subtitles. For some that's enough of a problem to avoid the film. They don't bother me. However, here Eastwood chose to use all white text for the subtitles and much of the film they overlay, especially during outside shots put the white text on nearly white backgrounds. We found ourselves having to work at catching every word. Yellow subtitles might have been a bit distracting but they also would have been more easily legible.

I also found the ending both very emotional while also a bit unsatisfying. You're not given quite enough information at the end and immediately you wonder just how much here was fictionalized as a result.

I also saw several reviewers refer to this movie as not being pro-Japanese or anti-American but just being pro-Human experience. I can't quite agree with that. As I walked out of the theater we walked behind several older couples whose husbands were from the World War II (or Korea) era and their comments made it clear that to them this was a very pro-Japanese film. That's not exactly a problem overall but I did sense a few times where I thought the film seemed to try to play up this aspect and play Americans as unsympathetic. Upon reflection, I can't really defend that position very well but it was still a concern while experiencing the movie.

Finally, especially during the latter stages of the movie, both my friend and I had a hard time keeping up with who was who. Character names are often similar and I wasn't entirely clear, in the heat of the battle, on who was where and what their main task was. It's pretty easy to get a bit lost for a moment or two but you catch up again quickly at the next turn.

I would definitely suggest that if you liked "Saving Private Ryan", "Band of Brothers" or any of the other historically significant movies of that caliber, that you check out this movie. It is a quality film that deserves an audience.

RIAA and Labels Still Not Getting It

There's been a number of recent articles about music lately. Much of it has been around the issue of how to grow the digital download business. Apple's Steve Jobs even weighed in suggesting that the labels need to seriously consider dropping the prohibitive DRM technology from the music.

Of course he was speaking to a group that has turned a deaf ear to everyone but their own bean counters. In fact, things are so bizarre over at the RIAA that their response to the Jobs letter was to completely misread it, intentially or otherwise. Today the RIAA lauded Apple for their willingness to license Apple's DRM technology to others as a major breakthrough. The problem with this is that the letter said, essentially, the exact opposite! Jobs stated that Apple has decided that opening up FairPlay (the name of their DRM technology) would solve nothing and that DRM should be dropped entirely. In another article an RIAA rep pointed out that it's estimated that over 1 billion songs are traded each month even with all the so-called success in suing individuals over the practice. To counter that the rep pointed out that iTunes has "only" managed to sell over 2 billion songs since its inception.

Left out of all of these articles is common sense, as always. Every major technology pundit I know of has reminded the RIAA that suing individuals would come at a price in terms of stubbornness to continue on. The articles also continue to count every download as lost revenue. As I've pointed out many times, our parents taught us long ago that you don't count money as yours unless it's in your pocket. There's no way to know how many of the downloads would turn into legitimate sales if no other avenue were available. The RIAA counts it as 100% which is completely ridiculous. I went through a period where I download a bunch of music back in the Napster days. I used it to audition music to decide if I wanted to own the CD (I'm not a fan of MP3's as a final media form and believe in the concept of paying for the music). I downloaded quite a number of songs I never purchased. They just weren't good enough past the initial interest. I'd download them, listen to them over a few days and then delete them.

Understand that I'm now 42 years old. My days of buying a lot of music in bulk are behind me. I just don't care about music like I did when I was 20. I own literally a few thousand CD's but my CD buying has dropped significantly. My friends say the same thing and they're not downloading music to keep either. However, the CD's I have bought recently were mostly as a result of auditioning MP3's first. Without that outlet I probably would have passed on buying those discs entirely. I also suspect that this is yet another parameter that the RIAA doesn't consider or doesn't mention--that as the baby boomers age, they're buying less music. This is bound to have an impact on the bottom line. CD sales are down 23% since 2000. I'd be willing to bet that a graph showing the aging of the main buyer in 2000 isn't far off from that same line.

The final thing that isn't mentioned is profit. iTunes has sold 2 billion songs and the labels make far more on those singles than they ever did selling CD's (percentage-wise per song). However, this isn't shared with us. Instead they want you to have the other numbers in your head even though it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

I'm still waiting to join the (new) digital revolution. I've bought a couple of songs but then stopped. When I can download DRM-free full CD-quality songs I'm very likely to start spending more money again. I don't see that happening anytime soon though. There are many CD's that come out that I think about buying and without the ability to audition the songs properly (10 second segments don't cut it people) there's no way I'm going to make that investment on a reliable basis. However, when I can pay $1 for a song the way I described above, then it becomes an impulse buy and I'm interested again. Paying $1 for a crippled piece of junk has no allure for me. Sorry.

What's Wrong With People?

Tonight on Bill O'Reilly's radio program he decided it would be fun to let people call in to tell them why they hated Hillary Clinton. Of course Bill would take issue with that stating that he let people say whatever they want, but that's like asking a stadium for of Philadelphia Eagles fans to tell us how they feel about the Dallas Cowboys. You know exactly what kind of response you're going to get going in.

Anyway, caller after caller used every negative word and phrase possible to describe her. One man that Bill clearly didn't disagree with actually called her evil and went on to explain that she's evil because she wants to provide "cradle-to-grave entitlement programs". He explained that he's a millionaire and he had to work extremely hard to get there and that he resents the idea of people being able to simply be handed things.

What the hell is wrong with this type of person? Talk about idiotic, close-minded, short-sighted, asinine thinking. It doesn't get much worse than this. First, anyone born in this country is benefiting from entitlement. These people could have been born in a country where their only hope is to get a hand-out from that rich country they someday hope to visit. Second, in what world does someone like this live when they think that a person living on the hand-outs of an entitlement system is getting away with something worse resenting them over? This guy actually was suggesting that if Hillary Clinton were elected, all his hard work would be for nothing because everyone will just work a minimum wage job and live like kings.

No one is talking about taking people off the street and handing them ten million dollars, buying them a yacht and running them for political office. We're talking, at best, about providing basic health care for people. We're talking about providing enough income in your senior years to keep you from having to live on the streets (and just imagine how happy these same people if everyone on social security had nothing and did live on the streets.) People like this make me sick. They resent people for being alive? That's what it comes down to. To these people anyone who hasn't walked in their shoes should be dead. You ran a successful business but then it failed and you spent your future trying to keep salaries going for your workers? Screw you pal. Drop dead. Survival of the fittest and you just don't qualify.

To actually go through life being resentful of someone who might get free basic health care (when you would be able to get it too but will most likely choose NOT to rely only on it) or live in low-incoming housing while you're living stress-free because you worked hard? Give me a break. You want resentment? I'd accept it from someone born in one of those countries I touched on previously. Someone there might have some reason for wondering why they didn't draw the lucky straw--to be lucky enough to be born in a country where people care for their fellow man enough to give them the basic things in life so that they have a chance of lifting themselves up without having to worry about dropping dead from malaria or scurvy.

It's amazing how much someone who has succeeded in our country can look down upon everyone else who hasn't made it and actually resent their very existence. It's just wrong. The entire concept that someone is pulling one over on the rest of us by getting free health care (which we don't have), free income (which isn't exactly a fair view of welfare), a free home (low-income housing isn't free) or a free retirement (you pay into social security and it's not making anyone rich) is just ludicrous.