Old comment which acts as a review, kind of...

I had posted this as a comment last year on The Bit Maelstrom review of Inglourious Basterds.

Someone at work had just seen the movie and I knew I had written something about it somewhere. I thought it was on the above mentioned blog, but searches there were in vain (I probably misspelled Inglourious Basterds). I searched on Althouse, where "Blake" the author of The Bit Maelstrom sometimes comments and found a few posts about the movie in question. Naturally, being an inveterate and excellent movie reviewer, he had a comment there with a link to his review. I made the following observations in his comments section:

My wife and I saw this last weekend.

Yes, the lack of distinction between regular German soldiers and NAZIs really bothered me and I am glad someone else noticed this too. My wife thought that since most people don't make any distinction, it would have complicated the story. My view is that if there is a distinction to be made, the filmmaker should make it. They had the time to talk about nitrocellulosic film stock, but maybe they had time to do that because it is a subject that interests our filmmaker.

A couple of other things too: 1) The Zoller character was, I thought, presented in a positive light early on. But then right at the end he is kind of a jerk. Wife reminded me that he did have the girl essentially arrested in order to join him at lunch with Goebles and that was kind of jerky... 2) There were two independent plots against the theater and neither of them interfered with the other. There could have been some very nice tension if--in each case--something unexpected happened that left doubt as to the plot's success. After the denouement, all the plotters would come to the conclusion that their plot worked since they don't know about the other one. This could lead to all kinds of post-event intrigue. There was a better movie in there somewhere.

Yea! I helped the team again.

Men's 40+

9.  GREATER LOWELL ROAD RUNNERS 
40:39   43:09   44:06   45:06   45:47 (47:40) (49:52) = 3:38:47
John Dowling, Fil Faria, Ken Goodin, Glenn Stewart, David Pecchia, Tom Amiro, Michael Brodeur

Scenes from the race

The girl handing out water probably ran in the 3K which was just before our 10K race.

The Race start: We began on this bridge, ran a couple of miles through neighborhoods, back over the bridge, another 4-mile loop and then finished by crossing the bridge one more time.

These nice ladies got us fired-up before the big, steep, mile-long climb; which was just ahead.

The elite ladies start: #334 won the race and the smiling runner # 73 is 45 years old and won for her age division.

Added: Some pictures of the race posted by Locallyrun.com...

The hill

Done!

A couple of hundred feet till the finish.

Bridge of Flowers 10K

233 28/67 M4549 45:47 7:22 David Pecchia 47 M 554 Chelmsford MA GLRR

This is a long ways from my best 10K time, but this was a very difficult course (all hills) so maybe I should not feel so bad.

This was a New England 10K championship race and so I have to compare it with other grand prix races. The only other 10K in this series that I ran was back in 2007:

326 659 DAVID PECCHIA 44 M 84/197 M4049 CHELMSFORD MA 44:41 7:12

This was a hilly course too, but not nearly so bad. The key metric would be how well I did against men in my age group: 28/67=.4179 84/197=.4264 So, I did do slightly better in this race than in the one from 2007.

Where are they getting these ideas?

Back in the days of the second Gulf War, it was a constant trope of my liberal debate opponents that, "Iraq was a distraction from Afghanistan". That is to say, we could have wrapped things up nicely in the first war, but diverted too many resources away from the "good" war. Anyway, ancient history right? I was just reminded of this when a couple of days ago a smart liberal from work claimed that we pulled troops out of Afghanistan to fight in Iraq.

The press and liberals may have thought that nothing was going on in Afghanistan, but the steadily increasing numbers of troops fighting there would not agree. It is an odd and probably solipsistic view that if we are not thinking about something, it must not be taking place.

The following statistics are from the (I believe) mildly anti-war, National Priorities Project U.S. Troop Levels in Afghanistan

Fiscal Year Troops

2001 N/A

2002 5,200

2003 10,400

2004 15,200

2005 19,100

2006 20,400

2007 23,700

2008 30,100

2009 62,000*

My Wife and I were watching some concert video of The White Stripes and at some point they did their cover of I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself. I noted that it was a cover but didn't remember who made it famous. I thought it was a show tune but in retrospect, I must have been thinking of a great scene from My Best Friend's Wedding.

Julia Roberts plays the friend of a guy who is getting married and since she wants the guy, she spends much of the movie trying to make his fiancee look bad. In this scene, knowing that the girl, played by Cameron Diaz is shy and cannot sing, puts her on the spot at a karaoke bar. The girl tries so hard and is so earnest that she wins over the whole bar and the guy loves her even more. Major backfire!

A little research showed that it goes much further back than this movie.

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD-I JUST DON'T KNOW (WHAT TO DO WITH MYSELF)
Uploaded by pierrot77. - Watch more music videos, in HD!

Oh yeah, here is most famous (now) version...

A Short Imaginary Conversation Between Two Private Citizens

Former Gov: Hiya! I see you've gotcher self a sign...

"Teacher": Yeah, I was hoping you'd come by and explain why you quit.

Former Gov: Why? Did you vote for me?

"Teacher": No.

Former Gov: Well then, once I was in office you decided I was doing a great job and are disappointed that I quit?

"Teacher": No. I'm glad you quit.

Former Gov: Maybe it is just me, but normally when I get my way about something I don't also demand an explanation. Furthermore, I gave an explanation--to my supporters--as to why I felt it necessary to resign. They deserved an explanation and they seem to have accepted what I put forth.

"Teacher": I suppose it does seem churlish to ask a question when there is no conceivable answer that would be satisfying...

Okay, now I've really gone off into fantasy-land...

Depressing Blood Pressure and Mood

I did a longish run for the first time in a while and thought ahead, or was possibly procrastinating and took a before-run blood pressure and pulse.

127/78 pulse 63 before. Ran 13.1 miles in modest heat.

112/68 pulse 63 after. I drank about 20 oz of fluid after running and took a shower before taking the after run reading, so this was maybe 30-40 minutes post-run. There are different theories as to the cause of decreased BP after an endurance event. Dehydration: After all, some of the more common BP meds are diuretics, so this makes sense. Though I had replaced most of the lost fluid before taking the post run reading. I think distension of the veins and arteries makes a lot of sense too; they get stretched-out from being under pressure for a while and it takes some time for them to recover their former state.

The time on the run was a big disappointment though; I was on track (roughly) for the first 8 miles and then just felt like there was no energy left and my time reflects this.

Later, I got the idea of giving one of the girl's a math problem related to my recorded pulse rate. 63/minute translates into how many seconds per heart-beat? Naturally it took the girl about five minutes to solve what should have taken ten seconds; and I did require it be solved in the head (no paper, no calculator.)

Answer: 19/20 sec per beat or 0.95 seconds per beat in decimal form. The way I did it is to reason that 60 BPM reflects one beat per second and there are three more beats/minute to account for. This is one beat per 20 seconds extra, which is to say that if we take-off 1/20th second from each beat, then we can fit the remaining three in to one minute. It doesn't come out exactly to this amount though since we have freed-up three whole seconds for the three remaining beats, but assuming they are the same length as the other 60, they are slightly shorter than one second each. This estimated answer is therefore off by one 420th of a second.

Summer cooking

A guy could get a pretty good meal without even grilling meat.

Though we did indeed grill meat too.

Not meat in the Catholic sense, but meat in a taxinomic sense. Sorry for only having an image of the raw steel-head and scallops--I got too busy while cooking to take any further pictures.

It was a nice day, so we had the AC off and the windows open. A good time to roast coffee and after the oven was free of coffee (it gives off a lot of smoke) some JoJo's to go with dinner.

Mexican Turquesa

Yemen, Mocha Matari

Idaho, JoJo's Vaishali-style.

At least I helped the team.

Last year I had a disappointing time at the Yankee Homecoming 10-miler. It is in the middle of the Summer, but in the evening--as if these things somehow cancel each other out. It is held in Newburyport MA, which is on the Atlantic Ocean, so one might even expect some cool sea breezes. The weather last year was above 90 with high humidity and not a breath of wind.

I wanted to run it this year because I figured that it couldn't possibly be as bad as last year.

It did not start auspiciously; I gave myself two hours to get there, park, pick-up my number & so forth. Google maps gave the route an estimate of one hour, so I figured that I was fine. Traffic said otherwise. As I looked at the temperature gauge, which hovered between 95 and 97 degrees, I half-way hoped I would arrive too late to race. Route 495 was a mixture of stop-and-go and wide-open lanes and I had spent an hour and a half by the time I got off the highway. I now had to find the race, park, pick-up my race number, run back to the car to drop-off my t-shirt and sun glasses and then run to the start. I got to the starting line right before the gun went off.

Some large races have a starting sensor which keeps track of when you cross the starting line and deducts this from the final time. This can be significant. In Boston from a couple of years ago, I started in the middle of the pack and still took over 6 minutes to reach the starting line. This race didn't have a starting sensor and since I came late I was further back in the pack than I would have liked. Between crowds preventing full speed running for the first mile and the time it took to reach the start, I estimate that I lost around two minutes. This translates into 12 seconds per mile for the whole 10-mile race. It was in the low 90's at the start, but there was a little wind and the humidity was much less than last year.

I think I was running in the mid sevens for most of the way. I didn't really go all-out except at the end though. I was up there on my own and didn't want to be in a position where I incapacitated myself. In the last two miles though, a group caught-up with me and I increased my pace to match them. We all, to one degree or another, sped-up in these last couple of miles since we could taste the finish and the temperature had fallen at least 10 degrees. By the last quarter-mile we were all moving pretty fast and there was even some jostling for position in the curves. For some reason this made me loose patience and I went into full sprint mode for the final 200 yards. I left the group I was in behind and passed another half-dozen runners in addition. It is nice to add a little drama at the end for spectators. It was a little irritating though--if I had all this speed at the end, I probably could have run a faster pace for a substantial part of the second half.

I did help the team though:

9. GREATER LOWELL ROAD RUNNERS

1:02:51 1:03:57 1:11:33 1:16:42 1:30:56 = 6:05:59

724 Jason Bui 30, 2997 Cody Freihofer 22, 1881 Ken Goodin 55,

2134 David Pecchia 47, 2299 John Ducharme 41

Had I not been there, then the 6th and only other team member's time would have been used. He ran it 19 minutes slower than I did and so this would have knocked us into 12th place. Not to disparage him, he is 71 years old and finished first in his age group.

Last year I was 310th and this year 312th, so I guess the better conditions this year helped everybody, not just me.

Update: Looks as if there were a couple more GLRR's there and we moved up to 7th:

7. GREATER LOWELL ROAD RUNNERS

1:02:51 1:03:57 1:08:10 1:11:33 1:16:42 = 5:43:13

724 Jason Bui 30, 2997 Cody Freihofer 22, 762 Fil Faria 45, 1881

Ken Goodin 55, 2134 David Pecchia 47

I swear I am nothing like this. Really!

From Jonah Goldberg of The Corner

Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick

Heard this on the radio this morning. It came out in the late 70's but to me sounds emblematic of much of what would come out through much of the 1980's.

4-mile bookends or not much to report on this day off

My wife likes it when I go with her on the mornings when she runs, but she doesn't want to make me come, so she slinks away quietly. This morning I was drowsy but didn't think I could fall back asleep so I threw on some shorts and a t-shirt and went downstairs. I initially thought she had already left since it was so still on the ground floor, but she was there and happy to have me along.

The main bulk of the day was spent at the CS&T club minding the kids as they did swim team, tennis lessons and then swim lessons. We have a girl who does this the other four days per week but since I have Wednesdays off, she has Wednesdays off too. While there I got another few chapters of Stalin's Ghost read: Our hero has survived being shot in the head and few other scrapes in his suicidal attempt to bring the bad-guys to justice. Also, ran into the mom of one of Dahlia's friends, just back from three weeks in France. Naturally we had a lot to talk about.

Once home, I cleaned-up the breakfast things and lunch things which was enough to run a load in the dishwasher. Next, I put together a batch of spaghetti sauce for dinner tonight and a few other nights. We ate early due to Surenna having to go to a hip-hop workshop. After dinner there were enough pots, pans and dishes for the dishwasher to set-out again on its mission.

After all of this, there was still plenty of light for a run though it was still 80 degrees out. When we haven't had a heat-wave in a while, I sort of relish the idea of blitzing-out a 5-miler in the middle of the afternoon. It is a challenge that I enthusiastically embrace. It has been more-or-less continuously hot here for a solid month and now running in the heat just seems like drudgery. I think that this is the reason for my times being so lame in the last couple of weeks. Still, with heavy heart, I went out for a four miler.

One small reward was that I got to see how fast I was going. The police have put up a radar sign which flashes your speed. I have noticed it in the car and wondered if it would register a runner. There are two criteria that would have to be met: 1. There must be some threshold speed to be met since you wouldn't want it wasting its time flashing zero all day from the speed of the road itself. 2. There must be a reflection threshold. You want it to pick-up a car or motorcycle, but not, presumably, a breeze. this would not seem to be a tough problem since motor vehicles are made of metal, which is pretty reflective to microwaves, versus air which is not very reflective. (There are such things as storm and wind speed radars btw.) The key here is which side of the threshold is a person? I am mostly water and the only metal is a wedding ring and a couple of bits of dental work. The answer is that it did pick me up. It was on a slight down-hill and picked up my speed as 8 MPH from about 200 feet away. Naturally I sped-up and managed to hit 11 MPH (which is a 5:30 pace). I think I could have hit a higher speed but didn't want to pull something and cripple myself. Also, just for comparison; I could run a 1/4 mile in High School at an average speed of 15 MPH. Double also; I was a distance runner and the real quarter milers were much, much faster than me.

Family Fun Day

It was more-or-less just like last year's version at our local co-op pool club. I made the 2nd round in the cannon-ball contest, but didn't win it.

Being forced to sit outside on a hot day (at least we got there early enough to grab a spot under a good shade tree) has some benefit: I had enough time to get back into a book I had started back in January on the flight home from Bombay. I am reading Stalin's Ghost which is the 6th novel in a series by Martin Cruz Smith. The first book is the most famous, Gorky Park probably because there was a big Hollywood movie too. The movie is actually pretty good, it has William Hurt and Lee Marvin in it. It was only through looking into it in the process of writing this post that I realized how many stories there were in this series. I had read the first two and had a vague impression there was more than three.

Anyway, I am really glad I kept reading. The novel was interesting, but fairly involved so to keep track of the characters and plot requires either quick reading or careful attention. The action is picking-up now and so I am eager to find out what comes next. Our hero, the guy played by William Hurt in the movie, has had a girl try to garrotte him in one chapter and in the next a deadbeat dad shoots him in the head. I suspect he will live since the book centers around this character, but we shall see.

Endless lawnmower issues...

I suspected that the spark plug was an issue since last week I had got the machine to run by cannibalizing the plug from the snowblower. Well, today I went out and got a brand-spanking new plug and a gapper. The lawnmower ran for a bit and then started to sputter. I checked the air filter and it was full of dirt. Even once the bulk dirt was out it still caused the mower to quit whenever it went into place over the air intake.

I don't feel too bad though: The plug came from a little hardware store that didn't have filters anyway. I will have to go to the big Sears Home Center for the filter. Meanwhile the lawn is still growing.

Out of coffee and it is hot outside.

Our oven is excellent for roasting coffee; it has a convection mode and is gas rather than electric. These two aspects allow it to do a good dark roast in about 10 minutes. The only drawback is smoke. Roasting creates a lot of smoke. This is not a problem in the temperate times of the year since the open windows will air-out the house in short order. In the Winter it is unpleasant and drafty to have windows open and in the Summer if there is a heatwave--such as we are having now--there are big drawbacks to opening the windows and running the oven at 470 degrees F.

I've done it before and am doing it again today: Roasting coffee on the charcoal grill. The first batch is a little over roasted, but I think it will still make serviceable coffee. The 2nd batch was really perfect, a nice Vienna roast--lighter than French but darker than American. The 3rd batch, doesn't seem to want to finish: I guess the coals only go for so long and these batches have been taking around 30 minutes each.

One nice little benefit from all of this is that the grill has burned-away any accumulated grease.

Look a little closer

A little bee, completely covered in pollen.

Mostly Meat

There are three things which make for a tasty marinated meat dish, I instructed my wife--as if I was some kind of expert: Though I do think the following is sensible.

1. The marinade.

2. The cut of meat--no matter how you flavor a crappy specimen of flesh, it will still be dry, tough or whatever.

3. Cooking technique: There are a million ways to ruin the most perfect cut of meat--burn it, under-cook it, cook it too slow, etc.

All of this was brought about by a visit to a new "gourmet" shop in town. The name of the place inspired thoughts that it was primarily a meat place and a good portion of the joint was meat, but less than half. The rest was a selection of mostly what we would consider upscale items rather than gourmet. The problem was that they didn't have much of a selection in any category. They had breads, but only sliced (a good brand) and a smattering of artisan loaves. They had some nice cheeses, but a selection any one of our supermarkets easily match. As for the meats, it was not a full-service shop. They had some USDA Prime steaks, various chops and sausages, but mostly they had vacuum sealed packages of marinated meat. This is what my wife primarily rejected. First, she didn't expect that their marinades would stack-up well against what any competent cook could throw together and the prices were super high. Added to that, it is impossible to judge the quality of a piece of meat when it is swimming in goop.

We got nothing from this place.

Later, I went to Costco for various items and scored. They had USDA prime beef! One package was about $8/LB and was a boneless rib eye roast. This is a good deal since the regular grocer charges almost that much for USDA choice grade. I am dry aging the whole piece and will cut 3-4 LB of it for a Christmas roast and the rest into steaks of various thicknesses.

Since it was my day-off, I also got a package of three racks of baby-back ribs. I put a dry rub on them and slow cooked them for 6 hours. Half were for dinner and the other half for an easy meal some other time.

Besides the shopping, I had run with my wife at lunch-time, worked on the cars and picked-up some plywood for a project--so I was kind of tired. Still, after the big rib meal and the earlier slow run, I wanted to really go out and get a hard workout. I went into the failing light for a 7.85 miler and even at that late hour it was hot and sticky. I felt great when I was done though, for a while. When I went to bed, the chills set-in, plus I felt dehydrated. Later, my skin turned burning hot and my perpetually cold wife couldn't stand having me close. All turned to normal within a couple hours of hitting the sack though. I suspect I had a bit of heat exhaustion.

Little experiments I do

A year or so ago, I was driving home from my in-laws with just the middle daughter. (I work near them, so I will come directly from work while my wife will drive from home with the three kids and the dog.) Anyway, the middle daughter was a champion at stream-of-consciousness dialog. Just to test her, I resolved to give her nothing to work with: I would say nothing and see how long it took for her to stop talking--maybe she would ask a question or just run out of steam. Well, she made it the whole 20 minutes; nonstop chatter.

Today, I tried the same thing except this time she was silent. Lost in her own thoughts, not a word was uttered the whole way home. Once home, I opened up the door and she disappeared upstairs while I turned to cleaning the kitchen.

Independence Day Race on the 5th this year

124 17/225 M4049 13:08 6:34 David Pecchia 47 M 1375 Chelmsford MA

I'll put up pictures if I see any posted.

This is the first race ever for both Wife and oldest daughter--they did very well and I am proud of them!

I was able to find my picture at the race site, but not of the others. Well, they are above.