The Great Escape

Even with all the feel-good Olympics commercials kicking around lately, I didn’t think I’d seen anything quite so lovely as this ad from Tropicana, in which they bring “sunlight” on day 31 without daylight in Inuvik.

The genuinely delighted reactions from so many in the ad are contagious, and I’m all for genuinely creative ideas like this.

But half of the impact here is the song, Patrick Watson’s “The Great Escape”.  And by happy surprise it took barely any effort at all to turn up an entirely more beautiful video that goes right along with it.

Tina and I watched it together tonight, and both had the same immediate sense — it reminded us both strongly of so many Canadian National Film Board animations we’d seen through our childhood:  hand-drawn, pencil-animated, physical and dirty and tangible.

It’s such a delight to see that there’s animation out there, so perfect in tone and feeling, that still gets in under your fingernails.

Hockey Bear Will Destroy You

By now, everyone should have seen this absolutely epic video of an Alaskan college hockey team’s mascot destroying the solar system in the spirit of hockey.

If not, you must view it now:

But apparently that is not enough to fire up Alaskans, so fortunately a full wing of jet-flying polar bears are here to destroy the very earth itself in order to rile you up adequately for tonight’s game:

I’d like to see the Ferris State Bulldogs do that.

The Third & The Seventh

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Every last thing in this film is computer-generated, except the footage of the photographer.  Worth setting on full-screen, leaning back to watch, and feeling downright lucky to live in the future.

Storm

This is something I’d watch.

Because this is something I really enjoyed listening to.

“By the way, why do we think it’s okay for people to pretend they can talk to the dead?  / Isn’t that totally fucked in the head? / Lying to some crying woman whose child has died?”

Remember the ones you love

Here’s to the New Year, remembering the ones important to you, and one of the best stories out of a nasty bitch of a year.

To help you rest up for New Year’s Eve

Relax, everyone.  2009 is nearly over, that nasty son of a bitch.

Merry Christmas

Enjoy those family Christmases, everybody!

Like a storyteller’s toe

Gosh, it’s hard to defend how terrible — yet catchy — the theme to The Ewoks cartoon is.  It’s got the strange tribal sounds to it, someone who sounds suspiciously like Tone Loc singing the lyrics, and lots of allusions to family and goodness.

But The Ewoks was probably one of the strangest, darkest cartoons I remember from this time of my life.  This is the show about the cuddly bears from Return of the Jedi, yeah; however, almost every episode in some way touched on themes of death, family loss, betrayal, power or failure.

• Family member at risk of dying because of a careless mistake?  Check.
• Entire planet set on fire while the living embodiment of the forest reaches into the dreams of children and communicates its pain by setting the main characters ablaze in their own dreams?  Sure.
• A nuclear annihilation analogy?  You bet your socks.

The voice acting was way beyond what was necessary for a licensed Saturday morning cartoon — Jackie Burroughs as Morag was creepy and note-perfect, in particular.  In looking at the writing credits, the pedigree there was far above where it needed to be:  Paul Dini, for example, went on to shape Batman: The Animated Series as one of the best shows of the 90’s.

If only the theme did it any kind of justice.

It’s just this brain, designed by man, has got me in trouble again

Of the two cartoon series inspired by Star Wars, as a kid I thought Droids was by far the weaker.  Yeah, there were lots of moments where people were shooting at each other with lasers, and ships would fly around or race each other, plus I think there was even a Star Destroyer at one point.  But 3PO and R2D2 weren’t exactly the heroes of the Star Wars movies, they never shot at anyone ever, and instead just combined conversations with outrageous self-sacrifice to get things done.    The themes at work were not at all suited to 9 year-olds looking for lightsabre action.

In retrospect, it was a strange concept for anyone to write:  two characters, one driven by an ingrained sense of propriety and the other by dogged loyalty — neither suited to be the hero, and yet both at the center of a narrative.  That the writers cooked up at least three storylines where, from behind the scenes, these two funny little droids saved the day and made heroes out of their masters is pretty darned good.

That at least two of those storylines were better-crafted than Episodes 1 through 3… well, that’s less surprising.

Plodders have a place

…but the New York Times wonders, is it at a marathon?

I know I’m not that much of a runner, compared to some.  In fact, my performance has actually fallen off since I started:  my best time for a 10K race is 41 minutes, and these days I can barely manage 50.  I ran my best 1/2 marathon at 1:40 minutes, and this year I finished my first marathon at 4:07.

I was heartbroken, because barely an hour earlier than that I was running behind a middle-aged fellow whose wife was chasing him from waypoint to waypoint with a whiteboard, updating him on his pace.

“YOU’RE STILL ON PACE FOR 3:38!!!!!!!” it said, when I saw it.  She had a huge smile on her face, whooping delightedly as she waved her sign, and her enthusiasm brought one to his expression too, tired as it was.  I was right behind him.  It was my pace too, until I hit the wall and struggled every inch to the finish line.

So what infuriates me isn’t that there are people out there who think, somehow, that those who run 26 miles over the course of 5 or 6 hours are unworthy of being called “marathon runners”.  It’s no surprise to me — everyone wants to think their suffering is more acute, their effort was more noble, their work was somehow more real than the people who are walk-running or just painfully trudging as hard as they can.

What takes my breath away is the implication that somehow these people do not deserve the accomplishment, however long it takes them.

The first time I ran at all, it was to support a friend of mine who wanted to join the Army Reserves, and needed to make sure he was in shape to do it.  But he’s a social runner, and he asked me to go with him to keep him motivated.  So I did.

Four hundred meters later — which is a single lap of a track — I was breathing so hard that it felt like blood in my lungs.  He was convinced I was going to die.  He held back, and back, and back some more just to show me that I could get around the track a second time, a third, a fifth, a tenth.  I never felt more a failure than those times that I had to stop, and he encouraged me with what his track coach taught him:  “It doesn’t matter how slow you go, the important thing is just not to stop.  You can keep going, you can always keep going.”

Funny how things stick with you, because that’s what popped into my mind when I was staring at the CN Tower, with hilly Queen St. West between me and the finish line.  I can always keep going, it doesn’t matter how slow, as long as I don’t stop, then I can do it.

What would I have done, if I had listened to Adrienne Wald or Julia Given instead?  If I had been made to feel as though there is something more I had to do to simply earn the right to be a proper runner, like them?  What possible reason would I have to even keep going?

Running is beautiful because there is no such thing as proper, there is no such thing as perfect, and no such thing as acceptable. There is you, your feet, the road and time.  Whatever else happens, those things are true, and the rest is entirely up to you.  It is marvelous and liberating for that reason — if you go slow, then that’s how you do that day; if you go fast, then you celebrate that perfect combination of body, weather, energy, hormones and luck.  Whether it’s twenty-six seconds, meters, minutes, kilometers or miles — each and all of them are yours, for you.

If a race organizer is willing to take your fifty bucks to see what you can do, it’s between the two of you.  Never let an Adrienne or a Julia take that away from you, or make you think you’re unwelcome.  Just look to around you on race day, at all the people just like you who are excited to test themselves against the most difficult thing they’ve ever tried, and feel proud that you’re among them.

Because you should.