You, you with the banjo, can you help me? I seem to have lost my sense of direction!

I hope y'all had a great holiday.

I had an absolutely wonderful 4th of July with my family. We had a little picnic out at my grandparent's place where my mom lives now, just like when we were kids. The day consisted of mass quantities of burgers, homemade blackberry wine and catching up with family.

At one point my mom's boyfriend got out his tractor and hooked up a flatbed trailer and gave tours of the makeshit golfcourse he'd cut in the lawn. Watching the uncles, aunts and cousins hang on for dear life while laughing their drunken asses off tickled me to no end.

But the absolute high point of the day was a musical surprise my 15-year old daughter sprung on the family.

To back up a bit- when we were kids my grandfather would break out either his ukelele or banjo and play old tunes while the whole family would sing along. Grandpa was in the navy in WW 2 and while he was in Hawaii he'd even formed a little band and recorded a couple of tunes on phonograph.

Just recently grandpa's banjo turned up and my daughter, who is very muscially inclined, decided to teach herself how to play it.

So she gets out this beautiful instrument with pearl inlay that was made almost 100 years ago and asks us what we want to hear. "Whatever you know how to play," we told her.

She starts strumming, the tune sounds familiar but tough to place until she begins singing:

It's close to midnight and something evil's lurking in the dark
Under the moonlight, you see a sight that almost stops your heart
You try to scream but terror takes the sound before you make it
You start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes
You're paralyzed

'Cause this is thriller, thriller night
And no one's gonna save you from the beast about strike
You know it's thriller, thriller night
You're fighting for your life inside a killer, thriller tonight

Believe it or not this song works surprisingly well on the banjo. We almost bust a gut we were laughing so hard.

Dammit Spock I'm a doctor not a physicist!

I'm going to write up a short, spoiler-free review of "Star Trek" which my oldest and I were lucky enough to see yesterday at a local critic's screening.

Let's tackle the two big questions right out of the gate. Was the movie any good and was the movie true to the Trek universe that's built up over the last forty years?

The answer to the first question from myself and my daughter is an empathetic "hell yeah, this movie rocks!" This is everything a summer movie should be (action, humor) and more. That "more" is actually character development and personal stakes for each of the principles, which is a rarity is big studio pictures these days.

It was almost shocking to see these real dramatic stakes in a film like this, where Paramount studios has so much riding on the revival of this golden franchise. The safer road would have been to ignore the characters and hope you can fake out the audience by drowning the film in action. To his credit that's not the road JJ Abrams takes here. I've read chatter on movie boards that compare this movie to last summer's "Iron Man" to that extent. It does sort of have that Iron Man vibe where it's a lot "meatier" of a film than you expect.

As to whether the movie is true to the Trek universe, well, you're just going to have to decide for yourself. This is not the Battlestar Galactica-style re-imagining/ reboot of Star Trek that people have been talking about. It's difficult to describe what this is, but it's more along the lines of some sort of surreal dream featuring characters those of us who loved the original Trek are probably a little more than a little familiar with than we should be.

A friend who I love recently shared his dread that this movie would be bad to the feeling he got from "Phantom Menace." After seeing this film I'd say this was a light years better film but I do think there is something that can be gleaned from comparing the two franchises. One of the worst sins of many that Lucas committed with the prequel triology in my estimation was that he took a universe that was as expansive as your imagination, full of limitless possibility and shrunk it down to only a few planets and a few characters who implausibly crossed paths again and again. Lucas made his fictional universe smaller.

The thing I love about this movie is it takes the Star Trek universe, a universe which had become calcified over the last couple of decades, and expands it once again. The stories that can take place after this film are as limitless as the imagination. I love Trek, but Trek canon is choking the universe to death. JJ Abrams and his writers have revived Gene Roddenberry's Trek so that it can breathe again.

And make no mistake about it - Gene Roddenberry's spirit is intertwined through this movie. His optimism, his characters, his humanism and his vision of a future where we can solve problems through sheer force of will are all here. The body may look different but the heart is the same.



Foremost among these are the relationship between Chris Pine's Captain Kirk and Zachary Quinto's Spock. Getting this relationship right was probably the most difficult challenge Abrams and company faced. Besides the original show there have been thousands of books, short stories and even slash fiction written about this friendship.



I'm happy to say that they don't only get this relationship right but every other character from the classic series. I expected to like Simon Pegg's Scotty going into the film but was surprised at how much I also enjoyed Anton Yelchin's Chekov and Karl Urban's McCoy (the latter seemed to be channelling DeForest Kelley.) Leanord Nimoy is wonderful, of course.

My biggest criticism of the movie: I hate the new interiors of the new Enterprise. The bridge is ridiculous, especially the touch screen wall computers behind the Captain's chair. It's not a good thing that the bridge reminds me of "Galaxy Quest," even though that movie in itself is wonderful.

Most of all I despise the new engine room with all it's pipes, cooling tanks and gauges. Tell me if you don't feel like they shot these scenes in a brewery. There's a horrible low-budget film called "Space Mutiny" which Mystery Science Theater tore apart a few years back that utilized an abandoned factory doubling as the engine room of a big ship in space. I couldn't get that movie out of my head every time they showed the engine room.

One other minor problem I had with the film was the score. It was probably better than average for an action movie but one thing it didn't do was utilize all of that wonderful music written for the original series by Alexander Courage and other composers. How cool would it have been if that fight music from the show worked it's way into a fist fight, or the weird Vulcan tune played when they showed that planet? The theme music from the series isn't the only memorable tune.

But in the end these are minor quibbles because Abrams gets the characters so right. I can forgive a goofy looking engine room set if it's got a believable Scotty standing in it yelling "I'm giv'n it all she's got, captain!" I can't wait to see this movie again and hope that sequels will be coming. Star Trek is back. It's been away too long.

Before you came there had been no sacrifices for a year.

A belated Merry Christmas to all.

Personally, I had an absolutely wonderful, stress-free holiday owing in no small part to the fact we were pretty much snowed-in. We had a ball sledding down the driveway, building snow forts and snowmen and having snowball fights.

But my favorite part of the holiday besides living in a Rockwell painting was that my kids, no longer believers in Santa, STILL had to wake me up at 5:00 a.m. on Christmas morning because they were excited. This left us a couple of tortured hours to kill waiting for my mom to arrive so we could open presents.

My oldest suggested we read a Christmas story to pass the time. Does she whip out a copy of something by Seuss or Livingston? Hell no. She pulls out her worn copy of Lovecraft and begins reading "The Festival" aloud.

"It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind."

We passed the story around, continuing where the last person had left off but at some point we got a little silly and our attempts at making the story sound ominous devolved into cartoon voices.

You may have travelled the world or sky-dived or bungee-jumped but I'm here to tell you that you really haven't lived until you're heard Mickey Mouse read H.P. Lovecraft on Christmas morning.

I hope that y'all had a holiday like mine where I came out on the other end feeling MORE sane. That sort of thing's a rarity.

You won't make me cry. You'll never make me cry!

I was woken this morning to the dulcet tones of the Highland pipes as played as the ringtone my the new phone Mrs. Wormer got me for my birthday and snuck under my pillow.

This still beats the birthday morning revenge had by my oldest daughter who woke me with a Hendrix rendition a couple of years ago. Anybody that's been to college probably has stories of horrible ways to be awoken from cold water to felt pens.

The electric guitar played dirty beats those all in spades. It's not so much the guitar but the slow gliding into conciousness with the sound of an amp powering up right next to your ear. The first thought going through your head is "this is going to be bad."

Anyhoo- I was checking out Rachel Maddow's website for her show and got a kick out of the juxtapositon of the viagra ad in the lower corner with the picture of McCain/ Palin. I know Maddow probably didn't do that on purpose but it still cracks me up for some reason.

I never touch spirits. Have you some milk?

A strange moment of zen this weekend.

I was driving the kids downstate for a young cousin's birthday. In the back seat my oldest daughter and son were screwing around with the laptop she got for graduation and for high school. They were watching the original batman show on DVD.

We were going through a small town that was having some sort of festival. From the back of the car we heard the theme from the start of the show ("Atomic batteries to speed. Turbines to power. Nanananananananaa...")

My middle daughter who is sitting next to me in the front seat goes "there's the batmobile."

I said "what the heck do you mean batmobile?" and turned to look at what she was pointing at.

We saw this...

There was a ton of traffic and by the time I got the car turned around to get back into town to see if we'd had a shared hallucination, the batmobile was gone.

Holy now you see it, now you don't!

What we were after now was the old surprise visit.

Canvassed for Obama with my oldest daughter this weekend.

We live in a moderately rural Oregon town of about 7,000 people. Roughly 15 minutes East of us is a city of 100,000 people. However if you head West up the mountain it's pretty much the boonies; farms, horse ranches and lots of single wides with trash on the lawn.

We drew a walking list a little West of town. Although there's lots of Obama support in that direction we did pass this sign that had been defaced on our way out.

I assume it was just kids but it's disconcerting just the same.

Canvassing works a little differently in Oregon because of vote by mail. What savvy campaigns try to do is identify their supporters and then make sure they get their ballots in. We can actually collect ballots while hitting these targeted voters. This is the biggest thing I don't like about vote by mail, btw.

It went pretty well overall. We had some healthy discussions with supporters of senator Clinton and senator Obama alike. The only bad exchange was with a guy that was pissed off we were bugging him about politics at all. Nobody forced you to register to vote and your certainly weren't forced to register as a Democrat, jerk.

I was so proud of my daughter. She had been up all night at an 8th grade graduation dance/ karaoke/ party thingy run by her school and I had offered to let her stay home and sleep but she really wanted to do this. She basically collapsed when we got home.

It also gave us a bunch of time to talk about the campaign and I did a lot of of listening. One of the things that impresses me about my daughter's view of politics is how mature it is. She realizes politicians aren't perfect. She brought up the fact that Obama himself mentions that fact repeatedly. She doesn't expect Obama is going to get elected and fix everything magically.

The other thing that repeatedly impresses me about her is that even though she's grown up in this rural town which is sorely lacking in diversity, she still has her head on right when it comes to this stuff. Most of her friends support McCain.

I'm so proud of her.

That's why you no liking us meesa thinks.

My 14-year old guitar playing daughter just replaced this poster...

...with this poster...

...on her bedroom wall.

This makes me happy on so many levels I'm unable to list them all here.

We also had a nice father/ daughter bonding moment as we burned the Jar Jar poster in the yard and cracked wise ("Meesa no likea the fire. No Ani, no.....")

Muhahaha!