Ricky Fitness
"If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!"

I've recited those lines, the conclusion to Kipling's "If," to myself over and over inside my head during the last two days' runs.

"If" is sheer brilliance from stem to stern and I fall short of nearly all the criteria therein, but in this one small way I am, in the words of a writer I admire greatly, a Man. Bully for me.

Project TROIKA
After a lull over the holidays and a bit of a creative hangover, progress has resumed apace. I constantly remind myself that collections of quirks and behaviors are no substitute for nurturing and revealing a character's personality, but thanks to a strict adherence to Chekhov's Gun, each quirk is not a personality-substitute, but a lens through which that facet is magnified and expressed.

The sensation of working with a partner is still new and unfamiliar, but I quite enjoy it, and for more than the novelty. 'Tis a tad early to exclaim, "Hip hip hurrah, let's have a parade, Steeze and I are on the same page!," but I am pleased with how we seem to be playing each to the other's strengths.

Project TROIKA: Grow or die.

The Victors
Wisconsin 64-61 Michigan. Moral victories rot, but we really did put up quite a fight tonight against the pesky Badgers, a nationally ranked club. By Fielding Yost's ghost, our valiant Wolverines are slowly but steadily improving under Coach Beilein's system; things are off to a rocky start, but I do believe the future is looking brighter than at any other time since the Fab Five were sophomores. For all that, though, moral victories still rot, especially to the pesky Badgers, whom I despise. (Well, I despise their football team, which kind of pollutes the whole university. Get bent, Wisconsin!)

Go Blue!

But, hey, the Kentucky-Tennessee game was a hoot! I will never forgive the University of Tennessee for daring to have a football stadium with a higher seating capacity than Michigan Stadium, even if only for a single season. Hubristic fiends! "You want to get nuts? Let's get nuts!" There are a good twenty or thirty yards between the western edge of the Big House and Main Street into which the stadium could expand. And believe you me, if we have to the University of Michigan will compel the City of Ann Arbor to reroute Main Street! The Big House is the biggest house, now and forever! A pox upon Tennessee! A plague upon the prideful Volunteers! Kentucky 72-66 Tennessee. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, you orange-clad buffoons.

The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
John Williams & the London Symphony Orchestra, "Airplane Fight" from Raiders of the Lost Ark - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary: When I was a kid, I thought that wicked looking flying wing was an actual type of Nazi-era German warplane. Only later were my illusions shattered when my pouring over of my father's many books on the Luftwaffe produced zero evidence of such an aeroplane. Knowledge is a curse, a horrible, horrible curse.

Montag, 21 Januar
Dan Potthast, "Same Page" from Eyeballs (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary: Dan Potthast, Mu330 front man, a.k.a. Dan Posthaste, a.k.a. Steve Roelle, the long lost Roelle brother (at least within B.T.W.).