Weekend Leftovers

The big problem with not updating for a while is that I forget to write about stuff. Sometimes it's because it happened enough days in the past that it's actually slipped from my mind. Other times, though, I just get wrapped up enough in what I do write about that I just never get to something before I run out of gas for writing.

For instance, I forgot to mention that on Saturday Debbi and I woke up at 6 am (!!) to go to the Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival. Half Moon Bay is on the coast, on the other side of the Santa Cruz Mountains, and it's served by only two roads: Route 1 along the coast, and Half Moon Bay Drive over the hills. So both roads get pretty backed up for the festival.

Other than seeing the 1100-pound pumpkin, it's not a lot different from other festivals we've been to over the last couple of years. Many of the same art vendors, a little more food, and larger crowds. Debbi says when she last went - about ten years ago - she thinks it had more of a farmer's market feel, which this one definitely didn't. There were a number of shops and farms in the area selling food and providing rides, but they weren't part of the fair along the main strip.

So it was worth going to once, but not an essential trip. I think Debbi was more disappointed than I was.

On the other hand, we did run into Monique and her friend Bruce there, which was fun. We ran into each other around the time we were finishing up our trip, and they were just starting, so they wandered off to see things after a bit. Hopefully they had a good time - the crowds were getting really thick around then.

Oh, and one stand at the fair which I hadn't seen elsewhere was selling prints of old photos from around the Bay Area and the country. Many photos of the Golden Gate Bridge while it was being constructed. Some of the old Sutro Baths (which must have been something to see at the time; today only the concrete foundation survives). Photos of the downtowns of Redwood City, Palo Alto, and Los Gatos around the turn of the 19th-20th century. If they'd had one of Mountain View from that era I might have picked it up. Very high-quality prints, too.

We tottered home and decided to hang out upstairs for a while. Turns out we were both so tired we fell asleep for close to three hours! I rarely take naps, pretty much only when I'm completely exhausted, and obviously I was! Fortunately my contact lenses didn't bother the heck out of me when we finally woke up, and I felt much refreshed. Nonetheless we took it easy for the rest of the day, winding up reading and watching the World Series in the evening.

Woke up this morning to extremely foggy weather; winter is coming! The San Jose airport wasn't letting planes land, and Oakland was only letting some flights land. San Francisco wasn't fogged in, amazingly. By 9:15 the sun was just starting the break through.

It's getting dark early, though I'm sure you all have figured that out for yourself (except for those of you in the southern hemisphere, where it's getting dark later). Daylight savings time ends next weekend, unless I miss my guess.

On the drive home tonight I hit the full-on backlog of traffic heading to the nearby concert venue, which turned my 15-minute commute home into a 45-minute mess, 25 minutes of that spent sitting in a 1-1/2 mile stretch of road. I must remember to check for concerts there in advance and take an alternate route in the future. It's not like I don't have half a dozen viable routes home.

Tonight I watched the series premiere of Birds of Prey, which was on the WB a couple of weeks back. It was - annoyingly - a 70-minute premiere (though I think most of that extra time went to commercials; and I can't wait to see how they butcher it for re-runs), so John made a dup of his Replay copy onto a tape so I could watch it.

It was... okay. As Steven Grant noted, it's a mish-mash of a bunch of comic book background: The Huntress, when introduced in the 1970s, really was the daughter of Batman and Catwoman. Batgirl was was shot by the Joker (whose voiceover by Mark Hamill is barely evident in this episode) and became Barbara Gordon, computer hacker, a.k.a. Oracle. Dinah Lance really does work for Barbara, but as the kick-ass crime fighter Black Canary, not as a teenaged psychic. But in the comics the Birds of Prey operate more as secret agents than as straight-ahead crime fighters, and their connection to Batman - at least early on - was tenuous, which as far as I'm concerned is a good thing, as I find the Batman franchise intolerable these days.

The plot of the opening episode is hard to follow; isn't there a simpler way for the villains to accomplish their goals? Didn't the heroes survive just because they got lucky? The dialogue often borders on the downright silly, and the acting is nothing to write home about. And worst of all the atmosphere is mostly drawn from the Tim Burton Batman films with their dreadful Danny Elfman music, all of whose shelf dates expired years ago.

So what is there to like, other than the "babe factor" of the show? Mostly the mystery of what happened to Batman, and what the head villain is up to. The main characters have not been well-developed so far, though I'm much more interested in Dinah and Barbara than in Helena. So at this point I admit there's only a germ of hope; the show doesn't seem to have much more potential then Enterprise. Its advantage is that it's just getting started, whereas Enterprise has had a full season in which to become moribund.

Birds of Prey will need some work to approach the level of Smallville, though.