To Waffle Or Not To Waffle

THE latest aquisition: Nike Zoom Waffle Racers Mark 6. I got these from Eastbay online. Nike no longer makes them. I have to call this one intuition. I am not typically mystical, but these things just sang to me, and over the last few days I have come to the conclusiuon that these are the shoes I would have designed if Nike had asked me. They are almost nothing but nylon mesh and sole, but they have a bitchin' arch support and a stable heel, almost precisely like a cross between my old Daybreak trainers and the Oregon Waffles. Nike has been messing with variations on the waffle concept over the last year or so; most of them being racing spikes or variations on the shox concept shoes, in addition to the "classic" "aged" re-issues, but this is the only model (aside from the classics) that comes anywhere close to Bowerman's original design, MHO.

Yesterday's meal was take out from the Hop Feng, which became the default after a day's labor at a Habitat for Humanity project. I put in the better part of a day, working from seven to noon, before concluding that I had worked myself out. It was only after getting home and cooling down that I realized I really had: I hadn't stopped top rest for more than a couple of minutes the whole time, and I had spent the majority of my time doing high impact tasks, building truss ladders and handing trusses from the ground to the roof, coming to the aid of those unable to master the art of toe-nailing, and, at one point, playing human pendulum, using my body weight to help bring a truss into alignment with the framing below it, which is no easy task. The Wifey went back and put in the last 3 hours, being less exhausted as she had wisely kept to smaller tasks and not worked as insanely vigorously has I had. We may go back next weekend.

At any rate, neither of us was really up to goin out, so while she showered I nipped out and got scallion chicken and fried dumplings and spicy Singaporean noodles, and thusly supplied we settled in to watch Stop Loss.

Stop Loss is a film that does not waffle. Even when it's characters appear to be unceraitn of what to do, the film is deadly earnest in its certainty. The Army is evil and duplicitous, all soldiers are to be forgiven their tresspasses because they have sacrificed for the country, and all women are better than all men. Even the most internally contradictory speech in the film, in which Our Hero argues that he shouldn't be required to go back and fight an illegal and immoral war because our President had already declared it over and therefore we are no longer at war-- thus negating the conditions of the stop-loss clause in the contract he signed, this taking place moments after he is told that the stop-loss was being enacted by executive order, at the pleasure of the Commander In Chief-- is delivered in a stream of earnest bluster, without so much as a blink, let alone a wink or a smirk. Which is not to say that this was a BAD movie. It wasn't BAD, per se. It was just . . . Well, ham-fisted doesn't quite do it. This was the Homeless Shelter Thanksgiving Dinner movie: all the component parts are there, in sufficient quantities and in proper proportion. But there is no denying that everything here came out of a can. The film wants to be anti-war in the final analysis, but comes off as having only one central message: all Texans are in favor of pointelss violence.

I was going to stick a picture of Dubbya here, but it just seemed too obvious.