Pimp My Nutcracker (from La Maitresse).

(The full report on Xmas festivities is coming soon. I just have to download the pix. Also, I have to go do a workout before I do anything else. I can feel my arteries clogging from yesterday. Oy.)

“‘Why did the twenty-five-foot tall gorilla climb the building?’ ‘You had me at twenty-five-foot tall gorilla.’” — Darin, in the car last night coming home from the movie.

Oh, what a disappointment King Kong was. I don’t know what cut of the movie all these raving reviewers have seen, but could it possibly have been this three-hour-and-fifteen minute extravaganza?

Let me sum up this movie in two words: slow motion.

There are lots and lots (and lots) of scenes in this movie where the film literally goes to slow motion, and does so to no apparent end that I could figure out. Slow motion film always reminds me of shows like “A Current Affair,” where they put the footage of the alleged perp in slow motion not only to make him seem more sinister, but because they just don’t have that much footage of him to begin with and need to stretch it out.

But the movie itself also unfolds at a slow motion pace. Director Peter Jackson is going to do everything in depth here: when you have a $200m. budget, fleshing out not one, not two, but possibly seven or eight different vignettes on How Bad The Depression Is seems like a good idea. Or, as I said to Darin, “Did you catch that Naomi Watts was in vaudeville? Don’t worry, because you’ll have six more opportunities to get up to speed on that.”

It’s an hour before we get to Skull Island, and it’s another hour before Kong gets to New York. (I’m not exactly sure of those numbers, actually, because Act 3 in this pic — Kong in NYC — moves at an ungodly, and illogical, speed. Suddenly Kong is on stage in New York — and Jack-the-playwright’s new play is opening the same night! With uh, what: the world’s shortest rehearsal time ever?) When the movie is on Skull Island — one gigantic action scene — the problems just keep piling up: we have brutal savages, giant gorillas, T-Rexes, and a humongous collection of the world’s most ravenous man-sized insects. (I couldn’t even play the insect part of World of Warcraft. I had my eyes closed for the insect bits of this movie.) When Adrien Brody and Naomi Watts fell into a river during their escape, I actually expected another detour with sharks or something.

My general reaction to the frenetic, well-produced goings-on is: Who cares? Yes, there’s lots happening, but I wasn’t particularly invested in any of it. Possibly the problem is how damn long the movie goes on for: maybe if it had been “People go to island, people find Kong, people bring him to NYC to a coldwater five-story walkup, then shoot him off tall building when he looks for a Rm W Vu” it might have meant more. But the movie never sells me on the grand tragedy of this giant gorilla who connects with a blonde chick and then falls off the Empire State Building. I mean, what: were they going to get married or something? Nope, sorry, not feeling it. Mostly wanted the movie over.

Jack Black, as the movie producer who finds and exploits Kong, has one mode, one facial expression in this movie. Naomi Watts has pretty much just one of each too: one more closeup of her looking searchingly at (insert one: Kong, love interest Adrien Brody, mates from vaudeville act) and I was going to scream. The special effects are amazing — my comment was, “It’s great how you’re actively watching a scene that has no element that ever existed in real life” — and if you’re interested in seeing this movie, see it in the theater.

But see it soon. I can’t imagine King Kong is going to be around for long. The theater we went to last night was mostly empty.

Via Firedoglake, Media Matters has a wonderful bit up about our wonderfully unbiased press:

In a November 13 column, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell addressed reader requests for the Post to conduct its own polls to measure public support for impeachment:

First, there was a swarm to me and to Post Polling Editor Richard Morin asking that The Post do a poll on whether President Bush should be impeached. Whoa. Since we get mail all the time saying that we are biased against Bush or are in his back pocket, why would The Post want to do that? The question many demanded that The Post ask is biased and would produce a misleading result, Morin said; he added that the campaign was started by Democrats.com.

But Howell’s defense doesn’t ring true. Her reference to complaints that the Post is “biased against Bush or are in his back pocket” is simply an irrelevant dodge; it has nothing to do with the question. It’s simply the same tired and lazy strategy that news organizations often fall back on in the face of criticism: saying, essentially: hey, both sides complain, so we must be doing everything right.

Further, Howell didn’t explain how “the question many demanded the Post ask is biased,” she just asserted it (attributing the assertion to Morin). But how would it be biased? Surely it must be possible to design a poll question to measure the public’s support for impeachment that isn’t “biased.” After all, the Post did it repeatedly when there was a Democratic president.

For example, A January 1998 Post poll conducted just days after the first revelations of Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky asked the following questions:

“If this affair did happen and if Clinton did not resign, is this something for which Clinton should be impeached, or not?”

“There are also allegations that Clinton himself lied by testifying under oath that he did not have an affair with the woman. If Clinton lied in this way, would you want him to remain in office as president, or would you want him to resign the presidency?”

“If Clinton lied by testifying under oath that he did not have an affair with the woman, and he did not resign, is this something for which Clinton should be impeached, or not?”

Morin was the Post’s polling director at the time, and he wrote the January 26, 1998, article reporting the poll results.

By the way, if you’re not reaading the incredibly valuable Firedoglake (the only blog I check more often than my RSS feed allows), you are missing out. It is the sine qua non for explaining all things Fitzmas — seriously, the ins and outs of what Judy and Scooter and Karl and Woody have been up to have been parsed and translated for the lay reader in a way that’s utterly beautiful… and it takes the mainstream media a couple of days or even weeks to crib from them and put sort-of explanations in the papers.

Woke up this morning, got the kids dressed and ready, and headed directly to the mall. Getting there at 9 was a good idea: we found a parking space easily, there was no one in Target, and I knew precisely what I was there for so we could get in and out. Although we were in the mall long enough to let the kids play in the Kids Area and get lunch at The Cheesecake Factory.

I still have a few things to get, mainly for my three-year-old nephew. You’d think I’d have a handle on what three-year-old boys need and/or want. You would be totally wrong. I’m thinking I’m going to need to hit Gap Kids early in the morning. Remember how when we were kids we hated getting the clothes presents? As a parent, I love the clothes presents. It makes life so much easier.

The main thing I’m working on now is the shopping list for this weekend’s festivities. I think I’m going to have to pick up a large ice chest to hold drinks, so I have more room in the fridge. Of course, I was at Target today; did that occur to me? It did not. Sigh.

I don’t know how the shopping season is going this year; the mall never felt particularly crowded. Not much in the way of lines, except for the cars that piled up to get our parking space.

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This year we have a tree. A gigantic noble fir, about six and a half or seven feet tall. Sophia picked it out; she was also the driving force behind getting a tree. We haven’t decorated it yet. I bought some boxes of generic ornaments and some tinsel. I’ve told the kids they can get one special ornament each; if we do that every year, after a few years we’ll have a decent selection of ornaments.

I asked around for info on how to tell if you’re buying a decent tree. Here’s what I heard: check to make sure the trunk has sticky resin on it and that the needles bend but don’t break. Plus, make sure the tree places cuts a part off of the trunk to expose it to the water in the tree stand, and refill the tree stand every day.

Why didn’t I know how to pick out a tree? My parents always got the tree on Christmas Eve. Perhaps this was some kind of tradition, but most likely it was because trees are really cheap by then. At least, that’s what we did after we moved to San Francisco. In Connecticut we had a fake tree that we put together every year, each branch color-coded with a tie my mother had attached to it.

But now I have a big-assed real tree with a sticky trunk in my living room. All I have to do now is dress it.

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Hey, Happy Holidays to me! I won an iPod Nano! From Blue-Tec Software, makers of the Ulysses text editor, as part of their Nanos for NaNo(WriMo) contest. Woo hoo! This is completely unexpected — in fact, I’d forgotten I’d entered.

Ah, poor iPod Shuffle, I hardly knew ye… although I used you for my workouts all the time.

And now I have to get 2 gigs of workout music. I have lots of music, but not so much of it the stuff you need for workouts. Amazon, here I come!

Darin: “Honey, you realize with the Nano all of your money goes toward the accessories. The armband, the case…”

In our continuing quest to keep up with the running, Rob, Nina, and I did the Pfleger Estate Trail Run two weeks ago and the Muir Beach Trail Run yesterday. The two runs couldn’t have been more different: the Pfleger Estate had gently rising hills and generally even terrain. Oh yes, and beautiful weather.

When I showed up at Rob’s house for the Muir Beach run, he said, “Is that all you’re wearing?”

What did that mean? I had on a long-sleeved running shirt and my running tights. Sure, it was nippy out, but it was 6:30 in the morning. It would warm up by game time, it always did, right?

Except we weren’t running in Cupertino. We were running near the Pacific Ocean. In winter, this area is best described by the terms “windy” and “cold.”

When we got to Muir Beach, none of us wanted to get out of the car. The wind was blowing fiercely. The lady in front of me at the porta-potties said her car reported it was 45 degrees. “I think your car lied,” I said through chattering teeth. It probably was 45 degrees, with a significant wind chill factor.

“It’ll be warmer when we start running,” Rob said.

“I hope you’re right.”

And it was, especially since the first kilometer or so out of the gate was straight up. On the second rise I had to wave Rob and Nina to go on without me, because I was having the damnedest time breathing. That’s the thing that’s killing me when I go running with them: I can keep up well enough on the flats, and I go downhill a great deal faster than they do (possibly because I have gravity working in my favor, but I think it’s just because I’m stupidly fearless), but I just die on the uphills. When I stop breathing at all well, I know my heart rate is at 165, which is the top of my range.

What can I do to increase my aerobic capacity? Do deep breathing exercises? Just get into better shape? Lots of hill drills? This is killing me.

There was an aid station just before the 7 km mark. Usually the shortest runs don’t have an aid station, but I guess all the runs went through this point. The aid station was to soften us up before the last hill, which went a mile straight up, with the rain that started and more wind, before we tore down the hill to the finish, where we enjoyed soup and gummi bears. I wasn’t particularly hungry, I just needed that soup to warm up my insides. Surprisingly, our consensus was that the rain didn’t bother us (it wasn’t a heavy downpour or anything). The wind had chilled us far more than the rain had.

After we fed our faces for a bit I said, “Coffee?” We all quickly said, Uh-huh, and went off to search for coffee. At Starbucks Nina said, “I hate their coffee! It tastes like bile! Their Americanos are good though.”

“I guess we’re getting Americanos,” Rob said.

“I don’t want anything that tastes like bile, that’s for sure,” I said.

And she was right: the Americano is much better than a standard cup of Starbucks’ drip, so I’m sold.

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The Angel Island Trail Run is in January! Anyone up for a wonderful run should sign up now!