This coming weekend I'm going to be a pacer for a local half marathon race. I was going to write a blog post about what that entails and why I think I'll be good at it, but I already wrote that post last year. So, let it suffice to say that I'm going to pace again this year and although it'll be hard to do it as well as I did in 2006 (when I crossed the finish line EXACTLY on schedule, to the exact freakin' second!), I plan on having another successful run.

On a completely unrelated note, I saw the movie "Into the Wild" this Saturday night. Hank had heard that it was good, and that's all I really knew about the flick going into it. She showed me a newspaper ad that was filled with words like "Astonishing!". I can't recall ever actually being astonished by a film, but I understand that words like that are the currency of the reviewing business. It's the same force that drives restaurant reviewers to describe a piece of chicken as sublime.

Really? Sublime? The chicken? Huh.

Anyway, some of my favorite movie experiences have been when I sat down in a theater with zero expectations or knowledge of the movie. Sadly, that wasn't to be the case here. As the opening credits rolled, I saw that it was written by Jon Krakauer.

Jon... Krakauer....

Some synapses in my brain fired... slowly. Eventually they connected with a few other synapses, who told two friends, and soon the correct information was dug out of semi-dormant nooks in my brain. I had read this book, or at least sizable chunks of it. The ending of the book popped into my brain.

Doh! I knew how this movie ended! Stupid semi-dormant neurons should have either stayed awake or stayed asleep!

It was still a good flick though. Solid performances and satisfying characters. Sublime.