BFTSOB

Hey again.
I've finished Spin. It can be argued, I suppose, that it was somewhat a cop-out ending, but I found it ridiculously awesome. Seriously, what a book. Now I've begun on Childhood's End, which I'm ashamed to say I've never gotten around to reading even though it is a treasured piece of SciFi literature and the work of my all-time favorite author. It's pretty darn good, but I doubt it'll live up to Clarke's 2001, which I worship. My only dissapointment with CE is that Clarke found it necessary to republish the book a few years back to make it seem that the aliens came from Mars instead of the Moon, since the original version was written pre-1969 and seems a tad ridiculous now. Still, a classic is a classic- don't mess with it.
Anyway, I won't bore you with the details of my reading materials. Or another sugar-induced sermon about genetic engineering (That can wait a few days.) Instead of thinking of such deep things, I'm forced to wonder why internet access has suddenly become such an expensive thing to obtain. It used to be that while passing through my local Airport, waiting for a flight, I could jump onto Gateworld and see what was going on in the distant, West Coast Canadian land of Vancouver, but no more. Right now I'm paying another $4.99 for one hour of connection at Starbucks. Seriously, I thought that internet connectivity was a courtesy thing for customers. I mean, I am a customer- I just bought a water of fair size to get rid of the headache of last night's once again misdirected run.
Oh yeah, that. See, I've fallen into this annoying pattern of wanting to run somewhere I never have before and ending up lost out of my mind. Now I want to make it clear that I do not have a classic case of being too prideful to ask directions (as I did ask directions on the 45 minute run turned 3 hours Monday morning), but I don't ask directions because of the fun of it. I'll admit I'm hopelessly lost, sure, but now the real fun comes- I get to find my way back. And usually I do. Usually.
But you see, sometimes getting back doesn't solve all of your problems. Like the time I had a singing commitment in two and a half hours and I figure'd I'd go for an hour run, but ended up getting lost in what appeared to be a sea of farmland, arriving fifteen minutes late to the commitment exhausted and completely parched. Believe me, singing is painful when you have 0% moisture in your throat and mouth.
But I don't mean to complain or seek sympathy.
Something that's really been bugging me recently is not Hollywood itself, as I am arguably its slave as far as science fiction goes, but rather how Hollywood effects our lives. You see, I've become quite irked with how many people have ceased to acknowledge the difference between the movies and real life. Take Chicago- you can't go to Chicago without the teens in your group basing their schedules at least partially on seeing something because it was in some romantic comedy they love obsessively, the scifi geek (in my case, me) relating all of the locations to what episode of Early edition it was seen in, and people of all ages scouting out 'that art museum from Ferris Bueller', more respectively known as the Art Institute, a fascinating place. Don't even get me started on New York.
But my point is that instead of experiencing things for ourselves, we are trying to relate them to fictional things we're already familiar with. If I were a Chicagon (Chicagan?Chicagun?Chicago-un?) I know I'd get sick of people referring to the home of my favorite baseball team as 'That place Ferris caught the ball'. Just a rant, and I know it's quite hypocritical, as whenever the word moonshine is heard my friend makes an allusion to Lt. Ford, and I correct him by saying the moonshine joke was actually employed first by Daniel in the pilot and that the Ford bit was an example of scriptual redundancy. Well, whatever. I've recognized a flaws not only in others but in myself as well.

With something that could pass as love on a rainy day,
Your Klingon