. Bothe-Napa Valley Sate Park

Come with us now on an early Autumn stroll through Bothe-Napa Valley Sate Park. Don't forget to pee before we set off. The park restrooms are surprisingly clean. And there's a swimming pool if you need one.




Do you have your hat?




Better wear it or your skin will peel off.




Someone's getting too far ahead.




You should slow down and look at the small things.




And the tall pointy things.




It's not a long trail. We're already half way there.




800 feet up.




And it's even faster on the way down.




This plant smells like maple syrup.




Or pancakes.




What's that low growling noise?




Is that what a bear sounds like? Or a mountain lion?



Run away!



Is it gone?



Careful you don't fall in here.




Although it would be funny.




We're still alive!



Let's go home and eat some Indian food.

. Alas

Summer is officially over...

. Favourite Beers of the Week

On Friday after work, Fuzzy Nugz and myself were on our way to a bar when we suddenly could not be bothered to go to a bar. So we went to my fridge instead.



We started with a bottle of Mikkeller's Beer Geek Breakfast stout. It poured like ink and smelled like a double espresso with two sugars.

Nugz said of it: Each sip is a plethora of flavor that fills the tongue with adventure and leaves you wanting more, but only a small bit more, because if you have too much you won't make it through the entire hike.

This is the closest Nugz has ever come to a metaphor, and I commend him for it.



Next was a saison-style French beer called L'Amalthee, which means The Malted. My lovely wife bought this bottle at Rainbow. She was attracted by the picture of the goat on the label. Nugz thought this beer smelled "Floral, with a bit of spice to it." Not at all like goats, which smell absolutely awful.



Ranger is my favourite every day IPA. I don't drink it every day. But I could if you really wanted me to. Nugz voiced no opinion on this one as he was busy playing the accordion.



We were then joined by Mrs Nugz-to-be, who shared with us an Allagash Odyssey, which is a strong dark wheat beer. She thought it smelled and tasted like molasses, which was a good thing.

The Allagash brewing company recommend pairing this beer with almond crusted chicken and filet minon. We made some guacamole, but we were out of tomatoes, so I added too much lime juice instead. The Nugzs seemed to like it. But they were clearly drunk.

. The Poisonous Kind

. Favourite Beer of Last Week

Do you like jazz?



I'm not a big fan.

I like Clutchy Hopkins and Saint-Germain and Bohren & der club of Gore. But those are some kind of bastard cousins to jazz that real jazz would snigger at behind its clever little jazz hands.

Do you like the word snigger?

In American they say snicker. Like the chocolate bar we used to call Marathon.

They also eat snickerdoodles, which I always presumed were made out of Snickers, in the same way that a Rice Krispies Treat is made out of Rice Krispies.



But that is not the case. Snickerdoodles are a kind of sugar-cookie. They are named after the German word Schneckennudeln, which translates as "snail noodles."



They don't contain snails. But Vietnamese snail noodle soup does.



Poor snails.

One place you won't find snails on the menu is "Monk's Foods," a Japanese vegetarian restaurant named after Thelonious Monk.




Thelonious Monk was not a vegetarian. He was a famous American Jazz musician who liked to wear hats.



And now he's a beer.



He is a dark Belgian dubbel style beer that I think I really enjoyed, although to be honest it's been quite a while since I drank it and I can't exactly remember.

I'll have to have another.

Brother Thelonious was recommended to me by my good friend and colleague, Brian Newlin - a man who clearly knows his snickers from his doodles.




Other famous jazz musicians who have become beers include Charlie Parker -




And Miles Davis -



Miles Davis was vegetarian, apparently for health reasons. Although he sure loved heroin.

. Nonfat Euro Tart

. Book of the Month

When Star Wars came out (33 years ago) I was 8 years old. It wasn't the life-changing event for me that it was for a lot of my geek peers. When we first tried to see it at the cinema we got the dates wrong and ended up seeing Disney's "The Rescuers" instead.




I don't think I was disappointed. Who doesn't like cartoons?

We watched The Rescuers again recently. It barely has a story, but the mice are cute, and Madame Medusa is fantastic.






Lucas made such a hash of the Star Wars prequels that it's easy to forget how good he once was. He began writing "The Star Wars" in 1973 after completing American Graffiti.



He had been trying for years to make Apocalypse Now, but the studios didn't want it because the Vietnam war was too controversial.



The first chapters of "The Making of Star Wars" cover story development. The plot changed incredibly from '73 to '77, but certain elements were there from the beginning - spaceship dogfights, lazer swords, a cantina full of weird aliens, a cantankerous old farmer, and a rebel princess on the run accompanied by two bickering aids. R2D2 and C3PO were originally human bureaucrats, an idea Lucas had robbed from Kurasawa's "Hidden Fortress". The first treatment had no Han, no Ben, no Chewbacca, no stormtroopers, no Darth Vader, and no Death Star.




The book tracks the story's development through successive drafts of the script. Many core ideas were altered or abandoned entirely. Some were used in the later movies, and some were changed during filming - The decision to kill off Obi Wan was made while filming in Tunisia when Lucas realized that he had no dramatic climax to the second act. Around the same time he changed Luke's name from Starkiller to Skywalker. Apparently "Starkiller" was making people think of Charles Manson.

Later chapters cover concept art -



casting -




costume design -



set building -



filming in the Sahara Desert -




filming in England -



sound recording -



and the creation of ILM -




The book is based on interviews with the cast and crew from around the time of production. You get a great sense of what an amazing uphill battle the whole thing was, and of Lucas' ability to stay calm, shoot fast, and think on his feet.




There are lots of amusing anecdotes, like the one about Harrison Ford getting the part of Han Solo because he was working as a carpenter installing a door at the American Zoetrope offices where Lucas was casting.




And the one about a remote controlled R2D2 exiting a scene in the Sahara Desert, drifting out of radio contact, and wandering onto the set of Jesus of Nazareth.




Lucas seems to have been depressed through most of production. He was never happy with the script. The robots were constantly breaking down. Budget limitations meant that none of the special effects came out looking the way he wanted them to. Fox were unsupportive. Lucas spent $470,000 (about 1.7 million in today's dollars) of his own money on pre-production before Fox paid for any of it. When the movie came out he missed the opening night because he was busy remixing the sound.



This evening we are going to watch Star Wars for the first time in over 10 years. It is available on DVD in two different formats. One is with all the unnecessary and intrusive computer animated tinkering Lucas added in 1997, and one is a crappily transferred version of the original theatrical release that doesn't play in proper widescreen.

Oh, George.



Thank you to Oliver and Victoria for buying me this book for my birthday. I enjoyed reading it very much.

Next month we will be reading "Fabulous Small Jews" by Joseph Epstein

. Book of the Month

The thing I like about minimalist writers (Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff) is that they leave stuff out. They leave things to your imagination. They let you do some of the work. And that's fun.

The only thing left to your imagination in "To The Lighthouse" is whether or not anyone will ever go to the bloody lighthouse.

It's about a bunch of toffs hanging around their fancy house at the beginning of the 20th century, doing very little, and thinking a lot about it. Every thought they have, or half-thought, or thought about a thought, is detailed and dissected in the interior monologuing stream-of-consciousness style that Woolf is famous for.

The dramatic highpoint of the "plot" involves one of the characters nearly snapping at another one when he orders a second bowl of soup.



The other thing I like about minimalist writers is that they use short sentences. Woolf's sentences are so long that by the time you get to the end of one you've forgotten how it started. This kind of thing is no good for people like me with our small brains and smaller attention spans.

"To the Lighthouse" is considered by many literary types to be one of the best novels ever written. I can see why they would think that. It's clearly very good indeed. I just didn't enjoy a single page of it.

Next moth we will be reading "The Making of Star Wars - The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film" by J.W. Rinzler.

. Comic Store Fail

Quite how Mission Comics and Art manages to stay in business is beyond me. It fails as a comic store on so many levels.



It doesn't trade exclusively in superhero books and Freddy Krueger action figures.




It doesn't assault you with death-metal or the the original motion picture soundtrack to Hellraiser.



It isn't cramped and dimly lit with a grease stained carpet and the smell of last week's farts.



And it isn't run by a cabal of socially retarded goths.



Surely it cannot survive much longer.