and then it was july

It's been a very strange and turbulent summer. There's the weather: afternoon monsoons coupled with morning rains and chilly nights. It doesn't quite feel like Santa Fe.
And there's the added workload, some of which is not exactly voluntary but some is and, at any rate, it is what it is.
Right now, the sky is purple and black and lone fireworks are still being set off in the neighborhood. The yard, which the boy has been throwing himself into (he says it's good therapy after a night in the ER on shift, although he certainly doesn't use the word therapy) is very green and has an almost secret garden feeling. At least it does if you stand in one particular spot.
The last week has felt very charged. I returned home from the AAN convention filled with various thoughts on all the things one is supposed to be thinking about these days in journalism: twitter and aggregation and whatnot. I'm interested enough in all of it to have been pretty engaged, but en route learned of the car crash that killed four Santa Fe teens and left one of our employees' daughters in the hospital (slowly, slowly recovering) and was suddenly plunged into the most basic of journalistic tasks: obituary writing, albeit with heart, I hope.
I have this sense of Santa Fe imploding around me. It makes it hard to sleep or stop thinking. Although not in an entirely bad way, since I like to feel engaged whenever possible. Beats being bored, which I am not.
Am almost ready to revamp this blog and give it some real attention. Almost. As soon as I finish thinking.

If you can't stand the heat

then don't go outside. That's pretty much my current mindset. I'm in Tucson, Arizona for the annual AAN conference and I'm pretty sure it's at least 100 degrees outside. I don't really care how hot it is digit wise, all I know is it's so hot that when I step outside I literally don't know what I'm supposed to do. Walk? Breathe? How?
The conference is being held in a big hotel with many pools. Normally, lying by a pool with a book is my idea of heaven, but I feel like once it reaches 110 degrees, what's the point of even getting in the water? Why isn't the water evaporating?
I'm very determined not to spend five days complaining incessantly about the weather, but so far I'm not off to a very good start, particularly if you factor in facebook and twitter, where I've been complaining relentlessly.
On the bright side, if I close my blinds in my room and turn down the temperature to about 60, it's quite comfortable.

happy anniversary

The Reporter's 35th birthday is coming up, and I'm hoping to include lots of feedback on Santa Fe's past and future in the upcoming issue. To wit, I've created an extremely easy five-question survey. Fill it out, and your opinions, thoughts and creative ideas may be published on June 17. Here's the link:

My Sister's Marathon in San Diego

Terminator 4 Needs Salvation

In 1984, a world rendered apocalyptic as the result of machines fighting back against the people who created them had enough metaphoric foresight to do what good science fiction can do—capture your imagination and make you think.

In 2009, it's really not enough to just throw a bunch of killing machines into the ether and rely on the inherently profound notion that machines can think, but they can't feel like we do (not that there's actual evidence of believable human emotion in the movie), to provoke much of anything—other than boredom and irritation.

Even though the bulk of Terminator Salvation's action takes place in 2018, there is no acknowledgment by the filmmakers that this futuristic hellhole is just nine years away. Even an army of homicidal ipod shuffles would have at least given a nod to how much technology actually has taken over our lives since the Terminator franchise began. Lacking that, Salvation needed to bring what the Matrix brought when it explored a similar (I mean identical) trope: better gadgets. Matrix technology, like that of these movies' optimistic cousin Star Trek, is at least fun to think about. Keanu Reeves puts on some ridiculous head piece and is suddenly able to master kung-fu! Capt. Picard says "Earl Gray" toward a console and the tea appears! Wolf Blitzer is talking to a hologram of wil.i.am!

In Salvation, technology, despite being the supposed thematic bedrock of the franchise, doesn't even try. How will Skynet (maybe that name sounded scary 20 years ago; right now it sounds like the name of an airline) be undone? Um, a weird sound undoes it, you know, pitched at some weird frequency. The early version of the Terminator? Half man, half machine... It doesn't know it's a machine. Or follow orders. Whatever. Um, yeah, we gave it a human heart...because that makes sense. Because then when John Connor needs a new heart, we can just pop that half machine/half human's heart out, right there in the middle of the desert and do a little switcheroo. Man, medicine has come a long way in less than 10 years. You don't even need equipment anymore to do open heart surgery. And the Resistance? It resists in a submarine. The only interesting technological accomplishment was the shininess of Moon Bloodgood's hair in the middle of an apocolypse in the desert—the movie was shot in New Mexico—no one here has hair that shiny. (As a side note, when a real person named Moon Bloodgood plays a futuristic character named Blair Williams, it might be time to reset the entire series in the Renaissance era).

The other main facet of the Terminator series has been its reliance on Rule # 78 of the Space/Time Continuum. * It's sort of a "you break it/you buy it" philosophy when it comes to how time works. The series began with The Terminator (the movie misses Arnold Schwarzenegger so bad it uses real technology to cameo Schwarzenegger kind of naked and really young...please don't let anyone ever do that with our governor) going back in time to kill Sarah Connor so that she can't give birth to John Connor, who will one day defeat the machines). In Salvation, the machines are after Kyle Reese, (Anton Yelchin) Connor's father, who is just a teenager in 2018, to try to keep him from going back in time and knocking up John Connor's mother. ("I think I'm getting confused," my boyfriend said as we left the theater; my advice: "don't try to make it make sense.")

This new twist on the machines' determination to keep John Connor (Christian Bale, who grows ever less charming) from being born by going after his teenage father before he becomes his father, opens up the door, of course, for endless variations for future Terminators. Here's just a couple I've come up with:

1. Terminator: Supreme Justice

A Terminator goes back in time and becomes a US Supreme Court judge who gets to rule on Roe v. Wade. But instead of allowing women to have abortions, Terminator Supreme Court Judge requires all women, including Sarah Connor, to have them, thus eliminating the machines' future nemesis.

2. Terminator: Oral Fixation

When John Connor is just a child, he gets an absessed tooth and is saved from dying from infection by a kind Resistance Fighter Dentist. The machines take the dentist out, thus ensuring Connor's death.

3. Terminator: Helena Bonham Carter

Carter is given a role in yet another Terminator movie. The humans decide that perhaps people really should be extinguished off the face of the earth.

*I have no idea what rule of the Space/Time continuum this is. My geekdom has its limitations.

crossposted at sfreeper.com

Send money, now

No, that's not an order. Don't you love it when people ignore their blogs and then the minute they post again, it's all, "send me money, send me money."
I don't really want you to send me money. But it would be cool if you'd send my sister some.
My sister, Abby, is running her first marathon in a week in San Diego, California. It's a marathon to raise money for leukemia. I'm still not entirely clear how or why fundraising for diseases and marathons have become inextricably linked, but, at any rate, obviously this is a good cause. And all the more remarkable if you knew my family, whose family crest (if we had one) would read: We Only Run When Chased.
I'm flying to San Diego next weekend to cheer on my sister at the finish line. And, if leukemia/blood diseases are an issue you care about, or you just want to support a good cause and a very sincere and good person (different gene pool), please consider sponsoring her.
Click here for the link.

Don't Quit Your Day Job

Although I think I captured the boy well.