Folks, I’ve traveled more than 100,000 miles on Amtrak and I’ve seen some strange stuff. To celebrate those journeys, and in the spirit of Steve Bull’s seminal “Winter Games From the Dark Side” article in the Country Journal, I’ve developed twelve “events” that Amtrak passengers could participate in. Every one of these events is grounded in personal experience. Note that for any of these events forcible removal from the train by Amtrak staff is grounds for immediate disqualification.

1. Havre Challenge

The Empire Builder makes a daily stop in Havre, Montana. It’s a longish stop; besides a separate refueling, there’s a crew change and restocking from the commissary. The station is located on Main Street, just one block from US-2 and within Havre’s central business district. Enterprising passengers may attempt to patronize those businesses without getting left behind. Points will be awarded for money won in any of the casinos, for drinks consumed at Shamrock’s, or takeout meals presented to the on-board train staff. Any passenger who returns to the train with an ATV purchased at Hi-Line Polaris wins an automatic victory and the ATV will be stored in the baggage car. No points are awarded if the passenger is left behind in Havre. We recommend the Quality Inn, it’s about half a mile down the road.

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In the lower drawer of a file cabinet in my office is a manila folder labeled “Humor.” In it are printed out emails, clippings from magazines and newspapers, photocopies, and the occasional bumper sticker. This is mostly the work of my late father, whose approach to archiving never transitioned from paper to digital.

Even after I moved away Dad still put clippings in the mail to me. Later, when he was downsizing his archives, I retained a few pieces that I remembered fondly. One of these is “Winter Games From the Dark Side”, a one-page article by Steve Bull that appeared in the January/February 1994 issue of Country Journal, coinciding with the 1994 Winter Olympics at Lillehammer.

Bull, a native of Temple, Maine, devised a series of Olympic events that you could attempt in your everyday life. Examples included “Frozen Pipe Thaw”, in which contestants used household items in an attempt to restoring running water without burning down the house, “Bird Feeder Races”, in which you attempt to fill a bird feeder and return to the house before a squirrel gets it, or “Frost-Heave High Jumps”, in which you hit a frost heave on a county road at 50 miles per high and your airborne distance is measured. I suspect the bird feeder challenge resonated with my father, who once chased a squirrel with a shovel (the squirrel escaped).

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According to Letterboxd I’ve seen 1,529 movies, which is almost certainly an undercount. If you sort by popularity you’ll see the usual suspects: Pulp Fiction, Knives Out, 2001, Dune, The Godfather, Star Wars…what’s more interesting is what’s at the bottom of the list. Things like Rockets Galore, the indifferent 1958 sequel to Whiskey Galore, which I saw on VHS on loan from Central Michigan University’s library some time in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Or Happy Birthday, Türke!, which I watched in German class back in undergraduate. Probably a German VHS tape, who even knows? Or Screaming Dead, a bad vaguely softcore horror film with Erin Brown that was a staple of the on-demand service in the house I shared with a bunch of folks out of college in 2005.

Some movies you wonder how you ever watched them. Take The Dark Side of the Moon, a 1990 film which plays like a weird mashup of Alien, Ghost Ship, and every bad Bermuda Triangle movie. I caught it on Netflix streaming in 2012, somehow. It didn’t get a non-VHS release, that I know of, until 2019. I won’t call anything with 1.2K watches on Letterboxd obscure, but it’s still pretty hard to come by. I don’t know that I’ve ever met someone in person who’s heard of it, let alone seen it.

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The most important thing about Halloween III is that it’s not a “Halloween” movie: Michael Myers does not walk the earth; Jamie Lee Curtis is nowhere to be seen. The producers had in mind an anthology approach centered around Halloween the holiday, similar in some ways to what J. J. Abrams did decades later with the Cloverfield movies. There’s a thin line between doing that and cashing in on the name of an existing property, and audiences in the 1980s didn’t go for it.

That said, there is some commonality with the first Halloween. John Carpenter produced the movie and composed its theme. In tone and concept, it fits well with Carpenter’s subsequent Prince of Darkness and They Live. Halloween masks feature prominently in the main plot. Nancy Kyes, who played Annie Brackett in the first two Halloween movies, has a small role as the ex-wife of the protagonist.

I avoided this movie for a long time because I didn’t care all that much for Halloween and hadn’t seen Halloween II. That’s too bad because it’s fun, reasonably well-made, and stands alone. Plot spoilers follow…

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Troll 2 is, by acclamation, one of the worst movies ever made. It was shot in Utah in 1989 for around $100,000. Most of the actors were first-time performers. The director, Claudio Fragasso, spoke little English and the actors did not speak Italian. The film famously features not trolls but goblins; it was distributed as Troll 2 to capitalize on the success of the 1986 film Troll. The acting is poor; the script is ludicrous; the effects are medicore. Naturally it became a cult classic.

I’m not writing about Troll 2 but rather about Best Worst Movie, a documentary about that transformation to cult classic, and about which I have mixed feelings. It was written and directed by Michael Stephenson, who starred in Troll 2 as a child actor. Much of the main cast participates, most notably George Hardy, the lead actor in Troll 2 and then and now a dentist. Fragasso also participates, as does screenwriter Rossella Drudi.

There is a moment in the documentary where Stephenson and Hardy track down Margo Prey, who played Stephenson’s mother and Hardy’s wife in the original film. Prey has one other film credit, also in 1990. At the time this documentary was made she was living modestly with and caring for her elderly mother. Margo herself gives the impression of struggling with some mental health issues. Popmatters’ Dan Heaton called the scene “very awkward”; I agree and wonder if that’s not strong enough.

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The late Rogers E. M. Whitaker is a personal hero of mine. Under the name E. M. Frimbo, the “World’s Greatest Railroad Buff”, he wrote numerous columns for the New Yorker about various train trips he taken, many in various out-of-the-way places. A number of these columns were collected in All Aboard with E. M. Frimbo, World’s Greatest Railroad Buff, of which I own several copies and is a charming read. Perhaps less well known is that Whitaker also covered college football for 30 years.

Back in 2008, I was working for Kalamazoo College (my alma mater) as a desktop engineer and, as I wrote at the time, “[i]n a fit of madness I promised the Athletics Department that I would attend a road football game this year.” Thus it was that several friends joined me amidst the remnants of Hurricane Ike for a football game in Rockford, Illinois, which Kalamazoo won 17-14. The story of driving through that weather has lost nothing in the telling over the years. A minor tradition was established, and we made similar trips in 2009 and 2010:

• September 13, 2008: Sam Greeley Field in Rockford, Illinois
• September 19, 2009: Burt Field in North Manchester, Indiana
• September 25, 2010: Benedictine Sports Complex in Lisle, Illinois

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On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

I’m updating an older stack in CDK and is my custom I’m writing tests. When writing tests for an existing stack, I’ll incorporate the output from the deployed Cloudformation templates. This ensures that the test is realistic and works toward my main goal, which is to minimize disruption to the infrastructure when updating the code. A good example is security groups–changing the description is enough to require replacement. If you have a multi-stack deployment with ingress/egress relationships between security groups, that will cause problems. Testing for that upfront saves time.

When working with a CDK application, you can have code in three places:

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Within the circle of people Liz and I knew through B-Fest at Northwestern University, Gymkata was somewhat legendary despite being a comparatively recent film (1985). For my part, I always have a soft spot in my heart for that very specific sort of 1980s film that doesn’t quite exist in the real world yet isn’t magical realism either. Films in the 1980s were allowed to be weird.

Gymkata was shown at the 2010 festival, allegedly at 9:15 PM, after Heartbeeps. I’m in no position to quibble, but that’s early for me to fall asleep halfway through, and I remember Hard Ticket to Hawaii and (ugh) Sextette. During a 24-hour film festival your brain enters a liminal state and you’ll believe all kinds of things. You’ll think Beastmaster and Krull are the same movie, and wonder (during Krull) when the hell Rip Torn is coming back. Bottom line, I nodded off at points and maintained for years afterwards that I’d missed the main part of the film.

Having now watched Gymkata in a wakeful state, with the full benefit of my faculties…no, I didn’t miss all the much in 2010. It’s just that much of an incoherent mess. Robert Clouse directed, and there are similarities to his earlier (and far better) Enter the Dragon. The plot is this: it’s 1985, the United States is building SDI (“Star Wars”), and we want to install a satellite ground station in the fictional country of Parmistan, somewhere in the Hindu Kush. The Soviet Union is never mentioned. The country is closed to foreigners; all who enter Parmistan must compete in “the game”, which is a weird combination of the Barkley Marathons and a battle royale. Succeed, and your life is spared and you gain any wish within the power of Parmistan’s ruler.

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We use a git+composer strategy to manage our WordPress environments (start here for a series of posts about this) and therefore have WordPress auto-update disabled. Beyond that, Apache doesn’t have write to its own filesystem, so WordPress can’t update itself.

However, the update and upgrade buttons are still presented on the interface, and it’s possible to accidentally trigger the update process from there. When that happens, WordPress places itself in maintenance mode, tries to update itself, fails, and then takes itself back out of maintenance mode. It’s about 5-10 minutes of downtime depending on your caching strategy.

WordPress also leaves behind a memento in the form of a message displayed to every administrator (both network and site on multsite environments), informing them that “An automated WordPress update has failed to complete.” This message is easy to remove, but you may have to take multiple actions to do so.

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This weekend I migrated this blog from WordPress (with a static generator) to using Hexo directly. Overall I’m pleased and the learning curve isn’t bad, though why I can’t easily link to pages or taxonomy items is puzzling. One challenge that was relatively easy to resolve was this one: how to add movie posters to the top of movie review articles?

I haven’t written a movie review here in a while, and I haven’t decided whether to start again or go longer form on Letterboxd. I’m proud of the writing of the dozen I did back in 2013-2014. I never wrote long enough to justify a billion screencaps (à la Ken Begg), but I did like including the poster at the top, floated left:

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