I am reading “Into Thin Air” by Jon Krakauer, about his trip up Everest. Its a pretty amazing book, and it is serving the purpose for which I bought it. That purpose was to decide if I wanted to someday attempt to summit Everest or not.
I’m still up in the air, you might say. Truthfully I am reserving judgment on whether or not I want to attempt it as a goal until I try my hand at high altitude tomfoolery on Kilimanjaro later in the year. For all I know, the weasels that inhabit my brain cavity and do all my thinking may explode at that altitude, causing me to expire.
Krakauer describes Kilimanjaro as “Physically grueling but technically undemanding”. I should be able to get some idea from my trip whether I would want to go a further two miles vertically, the difference in altitudes of Everest’s peak and Kilimanjaro’s. Yeah. Everest is truly staggeringly tall. I estimate that it is nearly as tall as my opinion of myself, something that has never been successfully scaled.
Meanwhile my friend Nick reports that he was recently in a helicopter a mere ten feet over the treetops doing wild banks and turns somewhere in an unnamed wilderness. He realized that he was going to have to spew his lunch, but didn’t want his companions in the chopper to know. So he reached into his pocket for his Nalgene bottle, unscrewed the cap, barfed discreetly into it, and secreted it away in his jacket again.
Son of a bitch, Nick is having more fun than I am!
But back to the lecture at hand. Since I am something of a font nerd, I was taken with the print in the Krakauer book, which I correctly guessed to be Caslon Pro.
It’s a great looking font. If I ever get to write a real deal book, I would like to have it printed in Caslon. It just looks so serious and groovy, like a tweed sport coat with leather patches at the elbows, which is how I require all my dates to dress themselves. I also demand that they smoke a pipe. I hope you’re listening, ladies.
So, I’m enjoying “Into Thin Air” and I recommend that anyone interested in Everest or breathing without a lot of oxygen read it as soon as they have time. If you’re wondering whether you might like to climb it someday, well, you probably shouldn’t.
More to the point, I probably shouldn’t.
Hermitar!
An associate of mine, who shall remain nameless because I let slip to her some sensitive hermitage-related details, successfully talked me into leaving my lair and viewing a film on Saturday night. I figured I was going to be the recipient of some hermit-related chiding, so I decided to head that off at the pass.
I drove to her apartment building and hunkered down in the lobby to wait for her to emerge wearing a trench coat, fedora, and huge dark sunglasses. I thought the concierge might have a thing or two to say about me lurking and having every appearance of a charlatan, but he merely regarded me briefly and went back to concierge-ing.
It would have been even more appropriate to appear swaddled entirely in animal skins and smeared with the ashes of a wood fire, but I didn’t think of that until too late, and anyway it was too cold to be prancing around barefoot.
It’s tough to find a casual shoe that matches animal skins.
Finally my associate came down and discovered me lurking in my hermit-away-from-hermitage getup, and then sat on me and hugged me and we were away.
You don't know me, you never saw me, I wasn't here, medium popcorn please.
The upshot of all this is that I finally saw Avatar in 3D this weekend. I’m glad I saw it before it left the big screen. I might have had some trouble making sure that not one of the Na’vi has nipples on my home TV. But no, they are completely nipple-free, which destroys one of my criteria for a good movie. Namely, naked girls.
James Cameron has wisely forced everyone to wear nerdy black spectacles when watching the movie, so that your subconscious nerd feels glad to be seeing scantily clad alien babes rather than full nude alien babes. It’s a swindle, people!
The movie does have a lot of flying creatures swooping around, which I am willing to accept as a stand-in for a car chase, and a lot of rounds of ammunition get fired off, so those two criteria are certainly met.
However, it also has a lot of the Papyrus font in the titles and subtitles, which rubs me slightly the wrong way, like getting a warm hug from someone who burps loudly at the end.
Still, it was good to see the film, and good to get out of the house, though I forced my associate to promise not to tell anyone I said that. I also drank a huge soda and ate popcorn, though I can still only chew with one side of my teeth thanks to my recent dental nightmare.
I was glad to get to use the soda cup filling robots in the theater as well. You use a touch screen to select the flavor of your future fatness, then press a huge button and the machine pees a finger-thick torrent of the stuff directly into your cup. It is marvelous. I bet kids love it.
All things considered, I had a great time and enjoyed the movie.
I assume there will be an “Empire Strikes Back” style sequel to come in the next few years, and I look forward to it as well.
I’ll go the animal skins and wood ash route for that one.