Morning Light and Fog on the Coast

Sometimes the light in the mornings looks like its playing tricks on your eyes:

But then the picture turns out okay, and you tell yourself that here's another day where we can trust our eyes.

Alyssa Liu, Hell Yeah! Olympic Notes 3

1

I was trying to explain to my kids about Alyssa Liu.  I normally loathe the tiny featurettes that showcase the backgrounds of the (only) American athletes at Olympic games (summer or winter), but I happen to put eyes on the complete four minute feature for the figure skater out of Oakland.

She was the youngest national champion? At 13? I've since seen that 2019 routine in Detroit...a little girl kicks ass at some highly difficult and highly technical things. It's...cool. The tension gets to her as she comes off the ice, and then again once her score is announced (first place! national champion!) and the tears flow both times. But she was a kid.

In 2022 she was at the games in Beijing, and she came in 6th or 8th, but, at 16, at her first Olympics, she showed up and did well, but didn't medal.

And then she quit. Retired...whatever. She wanted her life back. She traveled to Everest base camp. She pierced her own frenulum. It was on a skiing trip where she felt a kind of exhilaration, the kind of exhilaration that she used to get from skating, and so she decided to go back to skating.

I only summarize the video and common knowledge to give the context for trying to explain to my kids how this girls is so free, how she cares so little for placement and medals and tension, who only wants to show off what she is capable of. Unafraid of the results is when you'll be truly relaxed, when your brain is finally convinced it's not life or death, you can be free. Peak performance has such a better chance to follow when this level of zen is achieved.

Just look at how relaxed and chillin' she is:

This is from an interview with Mike Tirico after the event, and I get that it's easier to be relaxed after winning. She's wearing the gold medal, because of course. Watching her skate---both the short program and the free-skate---was such an experience when you see them in the context of everyone else. Stress...life or death...tears...tears of relief versus tears of gut-wrench...a weary stoicism...the gamut of post-skate emotions runs the relief-to-heartbreak racetrack.

Except for Alyssa. And that was what I wanted my kids to get, to feel. The lightness and the smiles and the relaxation. It may not be the only way to reach peak performance, but it's surely the emotionally healthiest.

All that, and I tend to support and follow my Nor-Cal people...your Marshawn Lynches, Dame Lilliards...even Aaron Rodgers up to a certain point. Add Alyssa Liu to the list!

2

A few years back I felt like NBC's coverage was about shoving snowboarding events down our gullets. I think it was early in the X-Games-ification of the Winter Olympics. Now with being able to stream the events I want to watch (Alpine skiing, short-track, women's figure skating), it seems like having curling shoved down our gullets this year is easier to mitigate. 

I mean, curling's cool and all, but yeesh...

3

Random things to finish up thoughts on Winter Olympics: 

1. Did you know that when you cross-country ski your heart rate is up to about 90% capacity? About 90% of what it can do as a human? WTF?
2. If I can stream the events that have passed, how come I can't stream ice dancing? Not that I want to, but I know it's impossible to find anyone other than the one American team...

One last thought that get's it's own bullet point:

• I heard the Winter Olympics described as: the overlapping of two supremely weird groups: the mountain people and the rich people.

Can you imagine? To be a giant slalom skier takes...money for outfits and skis and passes for the mountain. To be a sprinter you need...feet? Space to run? Jamaica is the top per-capita sprint running nation in the world. Would it be surprising that "poorest" slalom olympian in Cortina this year would probably eclipse the most well-to-do Jamaican sprinter is terms of financial security?

Skates of the Season: Olympic Notes 2

I love the differences in the same basic things. It's a nerdy proclivity I have. Anyway, I think I have a new favorite spectator Winter Olympic sport. All in due time...

I've been ice skating before! I even got Corrie ice skates for Decemberween! In both instances---the skates I got for Corrie and the skates I rented when I went skating---were of the figure skating variety.

Marc, one of our New York people (and star of the first year of this blog), had hockey skates and while I checked them out, I never wore them. I did, though, mentally spaz out at the differences and similarities between their designs:

Hockey

Figure Skating

But there's another style of skating I remember usually most often every four years: speed skating. And their skates are wild:

Speed Skating

I even found this cool graphic, and it's the kind of thing I would have enjoyed putting together myself if I was 1) more knowledgable about ice skating, and 2) artistically inclined for infographics:

But then I saw the different comparison chart/infographic. And it has the different styles for the different kinds of speed skating: so-called "speed" and "short track":

And that brings me to short track speed skating.

This could be the best thing to watch. There is a stressful pace, a ramping up of speed, true danger, cramped spaces, and a muted physicality that belies the awesome punitive and draconian rules: if you make a mistake and knock someone out, you get penalized and they move on. The finals of one 13.5 lap races (the 1500m) had 9(!) racers, because 3 had been 'advanced' because of other people's mistakes in earlier races. I rewatched it with Cass, and it had both of us wobbling on the couch like we were watching that chase scene from OBAA.

Also, shout-out to the Korean 17 year old half-pipe snowboard gold medalist, Ga on Choi. She beat her mentor and the heavily favored American Chloe Kim (from Torrance! (local shout-out)) after taking a terrible spill in a practice run, nearly doing a header on the way down from a big move.

She came back and nailed some huge moves and took home the gold. Chloe, to her credit, was very excited and ran over to embrace the newly gold-crowned and sobbing teenager.

Downhill alpine skiing and short-track speed skating are two of my new favorite things...

Random Comic Notes

I came across something when I was looking at something else with Cass, and that led to this and then that, and at some point I was putting in a tiny bid on Ebay for the first 8 issues of a comic from 1990, DC's Shade, the Changing Man.

I'd heard about this comic over the years, and the time came for me to make a purchase.

The comics are, to say the least...strange. There was a comic that came out recently that made me think the same kind of thing: 'Well, this is weird.'

Look at these covers, about 35 years apart:

That Shade cover, from 1990, is one of the classic mainstream-WTF covers from any era:

I only bring it up now, and am comparing these two, completely unconnected comic storylines, because they shared a spot in my head. I tried explaining Shade to Cass, to Corrie, to my dad and brother...and I struggled.

If, in 1990, you picked up a Superman comic, or a Batman comic, or the X-Men or Spiderman...if you picked up a comic from one of those main companies, you'd have a pretty good idea of what to expect, and even what you're looking at.

My mother would occasionally buy me little lots of comics from Ebay or Amazon once she found out that I was giving my old, 90s-era comics out as prizes. These were full of era-specific dreck, surely, but the idea remained true: you could tell pretty much what was happening or what was going to happen.

And that's where this Shade title comes along and messes all that up. Just look at this collage of the first 8 issues. Does this look like anything from 1990, besides the digital backgrounds of television commercials?

It's not like you can randomly pick up issue 4 and have any idea what happened before and what will be happening later...or even just WTF you're looking at right then.

Even the description defies sanity: Rac Shade is from another planet, and has been sent to Earth, but needs his madness vest to help him cross the Madness Zone, and while his body seems to be stuck in the Madness Zone, he has been implanted into the body of someone about to die, but not just anyone: he's been put into the body of newly executed serial killer and needs the daughter of the killer's most recent victims to believe him and help him regain his memory and powers.

Anyway...JFK's assassination plays a prominent role in the first story arc...so, there's that...

Now, Bleeding Hearts exists not because of comics like Shade, but rather they are created in a world where comics like Shade effected the readers-who-become-creators...well, maybe those things are the same.

This comic shows the kinds of stories that comics can do. Action movies can do some of these same things, surely, and novels too, I guess but...sequential art is like the sandbox for these whacky stories.

The main character, Poke, seen there on the cover, is a zombie in a horde that has a name that I can't recall at the moment. 'Poke' is short for something like 'mouse-pokes-hole-in-head' and his buddy Mush is a zombie with mushrooms growing all over his neck and shoulder. The central conflict, as their portion of the horde corners a group of survivors and, er, makes a meal out of them, is that poke's heart has started beating again. And he's not sure what to do, besides certainly not telling his buddies.

That kind of story isn't about using madness as the magic with which to exact or extract results---like Rac Shade's adventures. But in what world could it exist? One that had madness used as a plot point?

Olympic Notes, 2026

1

I had a conspiracy moment the other night, late night, watching the ladies dual moguls. This is the first year of the ladies dual moguls as an Olympic event. Moguls is a downhill ski race that has two jumps and all the bump-bump-bumps between the jumps. It's exhausting to watch.

The other night, and it was late remember, the first thing that seemed peculiar to me was that there were three skiers that had byes, and had no competition to get to round 2. Cool, that's the gravy of being one of the highest rated athletes. They were all American. Cool.

As the competition progressed, there were inevitably crashes...and it seemed crazier and crazier that the crash outs were against the American ladies. Every time it seemed like an American was going against a competitor, the competitor would go cockeyed at the first bump. One time I even called it: "Watch: that girl in the dark kit is gonna washout---oh no, jeeze, bummer!" One time the competition went around a flag, which is an automatic loss, and the announcer were like, "She just...just didn't cut back, I can't understand---" and at that moment, the American lady crashed hard. She got back up, moseyed on down the mountain slowly, came in far after the other lady and still advanced.

An American got to the gold medal match by having her competition washout, and the Aussie that made it beat a different American. Then the Aussie won the gold. The bronze was awarded to the American girl who scored better than the French girl, because winning the race isn't the whole game, and she did not win the race. It was peculiar and triggered by BS meter. But...it was late...

2

Curling is cool and all, but dang! So much curling on television! Why is it curling and not figure skating? It seemed like curling has been the default programming. It's slow but not devoid of entertainment, but it can really make your eyelids heavy,

3

I had to look it up: Super G is a souped up version of Giant Slalom, which itself is a souped up version of Slalom. This is the downhill skiing of my imagination: the sweeping turns and absurd speeds (SEVENTY MILES AN HOUR ON STICKS ATTACHED TO YOU FEET?) and 'just-survive-once-again' vibes. Slalom is that, but Giant Slalom is faster with more turns. Super G is even faster with even more turns. Holy hell, it's crazy.

So between it---Super G---and skeleton, I've been showing the kids the most terrifying winter sports imaginable.

4

Cass: "Wait...is that a gun? And why are they skiing like that?"

5

We watched the Finnish 18 year old on Big Air (the "Hot Dog" from our Commodore 64 "Winter Olympic" video game) land on his head and then slide down the hill face first, fully knocked out. Here's hoping to him being all good. 

That was unnerving to watch.

6

I had the Quad God final spoiled by an NPR report as I drove the kids home from swim on Friday, so when we watched it that night, it was interesting to watch the Kazakh kid get his big score, and then held it for twenty minutes and five skaters.

Birthday Girls and Weather Weirdness

My February girls had their birthdays last week on consecutive days---as in the nature of the, eh, days---but some weird weather had us confused.

I know we live in Southern California, and the two days in question tend to be the coldest days of the year (in the past while we lived back east), but this year they topped 80. One may have even reached 85 or 87, depending on the gauge.

A few days later I took the kids to the aquarium, and we wore shorts and rode bikes...what is going on? I know the weather shenanigans we experience are unreal, but this is bizarre by even our standards.

I think these jaws are the same ones from the holiday card, just in a different place on the grounds:

I'm not complaining...it's just different, even for here...

Seeing Myself in a Babette Cole Book

When I was a young boy, books were an important part of learning and entertainment. One book I was given, the inscription from my Auntie Peg remains on the inside cover, was Babette Cole's "The Trouble with Mom." It's a classic, colorful tale, full of gross stuff and a weirdo/witch mom eventually saving the day and becoming an important part of the once-anxious neighborhood.

A different Babette Cole book I still have is called "The Hairy Book." I've been reading with my own kids often enough. One part we all got re-accustomed to was the "hairy dad" drawing. Whenever we get to it during a read through, I usually joke and say: Hey! Look, it's me!

The kids will laugh and say, Jeeze, dad, it is you! Camille even introduces me to her friends, and teachers, and even her friend's parents, as her "hairy daddy." I usually shrug, and smile, and gently nod.

But on this last read through, the very next page has a line about "the drink that grandpa likes best puts curly hairs on his chest,: and has the following picture:

When we turned the page from hairy dad to this shirtless grandpa the other night, Camille squealed and said: "Wow! That's even more you!"

More crestfallen than amused, all I could say was, "That's...less flattering..." while Corrie choked on her own laughter.

I love this family!

UCLA Gymnastics

Wow, Camille won another accolade, and we were gifted another quartet of tickets to Pauley Pavilion, this time to see the home-opener for the UCLA gymnastics season. They were competing against Nebraska, both schools being odd members of the Big 10, historically at least. But here we are.

And there we were! It was general admission, so we found a front row seat up on the second level, which, despite the photo, felt right up on the action.

The way it worked was: one school would do one event while the other school did a different event, and once each school's six (or seven) competitors were done, they would switch. Once the six or seven were done again, they would move across the floor and repeat the process with two new events. First: UCLA had the vault and Nebraska has the uneven bars. After they finished and switched, UCLA had the balance beam and Nebraska had the floor routine. We watched the first set of rotations, but left about halfway through the second set, when UCLA was on the floor routine and Nebraska was on the balance beam.

One cool thing was that we got to see American gymnast star Jordan Chiles land a spectacular vault, crushing a 10 out of 10:

During Camille's gymnastics winter extravaganza, the balance beam gives me the most anxiety, but this time it wasn't as nerve-wracking...maybe because they're super professional and badass:

Whoa...in the past fifty days we've been to Pauley Pavilion twice. It's both pretty weird and pretty awesome.

Uneven bars are incredible to watch in person, by the by. All of these events are, really.

Netflix Piles of Burning Cash

Decemberween was awesome and our tiny apartment was packed full with Norm and his boys. It was glorious. Cass and Simon would wake up early and go explore the building's inner workings before we'd head out to Santa Monica.

After the festivities and before the kids had to go back to school, we got to expose our kids to a pretty nice slice of our childhood.

There was a time a while back where I joked with Corrie that in the weeks after Thanksgiving we should begin a rewatch binge (evenings only, of course) of Stranger Things with Cass, so we can be caught up when the finale arrives on New Year's Eve. She rolled her eyes---basically---and said, "That show is WAY too scary for Cass..." and I mostly agree. We're pretty locked down on what we let them watch, but we didn't want to necessarily want them to miss out on everything mono-culture adjacent. 

Also, since their bedtimes are so close together, an entire episode of something like Stranger Things wasn't going to work, even if we decided that it would be okay for Cass, since Camille at 5 is still too young. We went in a different direction: towards Charles Addams' creations. First we watched the 1991 classic "The Addams Family," and the 1993's "Addams Family Values" to set up the general ethos and visual vocabulary for Netflix's Wednesday.

This was the first of the three Netflix series I wanted to blahblahblah about here. It was scary-adjacent enough to be exciting for both kids, it gave Cass a pair of young ladies to develop crushes on, and it introduced the concepts of cliffhangers to our young media consumers.

I enjoyed the design of the show when I first watched it as well as when we watched it again with the kids, I enjoyed the callbacks to the Barry Sonnenfeld movies, I enjoyed the callbacks to the original Addams comics (Luis Guzman vs Raul Julia, even while I love Raul), and I even enjoyed Fred Armisen's Fester, as a closer study of Jackie Coogan's television show portrayal and different that Christopher Lloyd's Uncle Fester (whom I also liked).

The cliffhanger at the end of Season 2 had both of our kids demanding to know the release date range for next season (yeesh, looking like summer '27), and they got a taste of the old school havin'-to-waits.

The next show on the list of supernatural-adjacent Netflix projects was finished after only two seasons, but both were lavish and expensive, and the source material had many fans:

In a conversation with my dad and brother about the comic this show is based upon, my dad asked why it was specifically popular with college girls. The Sandman was a popular and beloved comic during the age of hilariously beefed up dudes and their super-babe counterparts with enormous proportions of their own. But saving Gotham or fighting against anti-mutant initiatives was not what this enterprise was about. 

Morpheus is the name of the titular Sandman, also known as Dream of the Endless. Dream has six siblings, all of which are more concepts than proper people: Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, the twins Desire and Despair, and Delirium (previously Delight). The seven endless are in control over their, er, roles in the lives of entities on Earth. They also have kingdoms and nearly unlimited powers in their kingdoms, but it seems like only Dream likes to go visit the world of humans often.

The conflicts in the books are emotional and generally dealt with in mature ways---processing and discussing the issues---and resolutions come with humility and suffering, just the sort of thing Gen X college girls in the early 90s were all about.

The two seasons of the show cover a few of the major arcs of the finite 75-issue run of the series. It begins just like the comics, with Morpheus getting trapped by some powerful magic in the hands of poorly-trained zealots who were trying to summon and imprison Death, but got Dream instead. Inside a glass sphere he sat, angry and uncommunicative, for 75 years. He watched the old men die, their sons plead and bargain and lie, trying to make deals they couldn't understand, and then they too, grew old and died. Eventually he gets free, and sets about exacting revenge.

It turns out the dude is pretty impetuous, and as he rebuilds his kingdom and tries to see what no dreams for 75 years has done to humanity, we see a guy who maybe wants to change how he may have acted for the past ten-thousand years.

The episodes follow pretty closely the first few books, as he regains his tools and strength. The end of season two follows the end of the comics, but the dude playing Morpheus is playing "generic sad British boy" through most of the season.

The best stand-alone episode starts with Dream and Death arguing about mortals and heading to a pub to settle their argument. It's 1389, and a guy is bragging about deciding not to die. He's a veteran of the Hundred Years War, or the remnants of it at the time, and tells his buddies he's decided not to die. Dream thinks that mortals are stupid and that not dying would be terrible, and his sister, Death, sets the dude up to live indefinitely, until he wants to die. He agrees to meet Morpheus in 100 years time at the same pub, where Morpheus expects him to beg for death.

In 1489 they meet, in 1589, in 1689, in 1789, in 1889, but in 1989 Dream is still locked up, but he swings by a new pub, as that structure was in use for nearly 700 years. Each year it's something new, but the gentleman never decides to call it a game. He has some tough times, like watching his wives and kids grow old and die, and later makes a fortune in the slave trade (about which Morpheus scolds him), and later still renounces said-slave dealings. Perspective and history and the possibility of friendship all swirling around a once-a-century bar date.

Also, the way the demons are depicted in a television or movie program is my favorite ever. They're like tarry nebulous balls of mist and razor teeth.

And that brings me to the biggest pile of burning cash Netflix has going for it, Stranger Things, or, more accurately right now, Stranger Things 5:

I had other things I wanted to write here, but then time went by, and I'm still sick, and I really don't care enough to hold the strands much longer in my head. We started season 5 after New Years Day, binged the exposition-heavy, clunky scene behemoth over a few days, and watched the finale in a single two-hour sitting. It was exhausting, and reminded me of being in a wedding: you're just looking forward to the whole thing being over.

Anyway, I just wanna talk the ending, so consider the following area to be SPOILER zone.

I looked up online in the days since, looking up theories and shit, and none of it looked like what we just watched. And now, as time meanders on, and I stop caring, I thought I should write it down...

Isn't Vecna just the herald of the spider-critters, like Silver Surfer and Galactus? So, this is what I remember,a nd how I got to my conclusion: The boy Henry, after he beats the dude with rock in the mine and opens the briefcase, grabs the glowing rock. The rock absorbs into his hand and he starts hearing the voice of "Vecna" saying "Find me," or "Find me, Henry." Then he kills the dude for real with his new powers. That all happened.

Then he's found and used by the government to make more telekinetic kids, and that part of the unwieldy, "two or three different epic stories pasted together" gets started.

I interpreted what happened ultimately to be: the rock was from the spider-critters, enormous alien animals on the other planet that also have psychic powers, and maybe they used the humanity of young Henry to make their earthling-herald, Vecna, to come and prepare this world for the merging. Isn't Vecna attached to- and getting life force from- the spider-critter? I figured it was them who sent the talking stone and the exotic matter that created the wormhole and the Upside Down, like a shitty invitation. Maybe Vecna was the spider-critter version of Henry, and a vessel he could in turn use and morph into...

Also, I call them spider-critters because I refuse to call it the Mind Flayer. Maybe "mind flayers" is better than spider-critters, but I thought there were more of them on the landscape. I think that's a false memory. 

I do want to give props to a show that at the cumulative 42nd hour mark is like: actually it's a giant psychic alien spider critter that seems to be imperiling earth using an exotic matter-created wormhole. Hats off to ya'll, Duffer Brothers. It goes right for it, and whether or not you like it is beyond the point. It had the qualities of not-seeing-it-coming and being bombastic as hell, and topped maybe even the reveal in Dark when she realizes: Wait, I'm my own grandmother?

Anyway, three supernatural-adjacent programs, one done after two seasons; one likely done after next year's third season; and one done after (checks notes) roughly 43 hours and ten years, and probably on a scale not likely to be seen again...three mostly satisfying visual programs.

There was a time...there was a time when this streamer went nutso with money. Not everything was a masterpiece, but lotsa stuff got made, and that was pretty cool.

In Praise of Kibuishi's "Amulet"

My son, just like me, loves reading. He likes books of all kinds and all reading levels. Once at our local library (Billie Jean King in the house!) my son came to me and said, "Dad, you should read this. It's so good. I hear at least. let's get the first few of them..."

I shrugged and said, "Yes! What a wonderful way to bond with you, m'boy!" 

Um...not exactly, but after I sat with the first issue and read over the first few pages, I could tell the reading would be fast, and with the main character's dad dying in those first few pages, I thought, maybe it wouldn't be dreck.

And I can say, now after finishing all nine of the Scholastic published graphic novels, it is most certainly not dreck.

We follow Emily Hayes and her younger brother Navin as, after their dad dies in a car accident, they move with their mom to her great-great grandfather's rural house. Inside there turns out to be a ghost-like apparition that may or may not be nefarious, and the mom gets abducted by a bizarre animal and taken into a closet or wardrobe.

When the kids enter, there turns out to be an entire world sprawling out from the closet portal, and the kids get wrapped up in a series of adventures as they learn about their surroundings, and their destined place in those surroundings.

A series that touches on many genres---horror, thriller, heavy duty fantasy, philosophical introspection, and rounding out into sci fi---the creator Kazu Kibuishi mastered the art of the cliffhanger. Not necessarily in events always, but it story-aspects, major plot points often times are dropped a few pages from the end of the book, leading to a desire to grab the next book immediately to get some closure. Bravo, dude.

The publication dates are interesting when viewed as a whole, and we imagien a reader in the era of awaiting its new releases. These weren't comic books in the general Superman/Batman?Spiderman sense, these were smaller-dimensioned books of about 180+pages each, and they were released pretty rugularly for a while: Jan 2008; Sep 2009; Sep 2010; Sep 2011; Sep 2012; Aug 2014; Feb 2016; Sep 2018; and the final, 200+ page release was in February 2024, a wait of five-and-a-half years.

All said, the story is deep and iconoclastic, confident and angry at established norms that are hard to swallow, and, for the few melodramatic dialogue flourishes, the point the characters are making remains salient: you have to believe in one another and trust that people can change to actually make any changes.

I read pretty fast, I suppose, but each one of these takes, maybe, a half-hour to read. And when they're all at the library, the commitment of time time, money, and storage here at the apartment is low. Plus Cass and I got to gossip about the story? Priceless.

After that half-decade between #8 and #9, the fair question is: Did it stick the landing?

I won't spoil anything, but Kibuishi was bold enough to introduce a major new idea in that last book which kinda reshapes belief structures in their world.

Cass and I are monitoring the news that Netflix is getting into the Amulet business, as in they're working with Kazu on an upcoming project. We're excited for that, and hoping it actually comes to fruition.

Happy New Year 2026

The rain stopped long enough for us to take Cass's new bike out on a ride, The day was eventually beautiful, or what it was worth.

We rode over to the sweeping incline/decline at the lighthouse.

And while the debris was steady in the sea, as the river channel emptied out into the ocean proper, the water looked a strange kind of enticing.

Happy New Year to you and yours! Let's see of we can't improve the lot for so, so many in 2026.