What's in a Name Anyway?

First off, I want to throw out there that The Engineer enjoyed Twilight and completely understood it. So, they did well enough on the movie so that you don't HAVE to have read the books to understand the movie. I will say again that it helped, though.

On another note, though, when we were out this weekend, I ran across an individual with a most unfortunate name. Naturally, I only saw their name on the obligatory retail store name tag, and I didn't talk to the person about it. Then again, I'm probably one of a handful of people who would have seen this person that would even have known this tidbit of information. I'm sure most people who see it think, "oh, that's different" and move on. But not me. Oh no. I've got to analyze it.

Sometimes, parents want to give their children common names with clever spellings to make them feel unique and give their future teachers (employers) hell when trying to spell their names correctly. This only leads to the child catching hell for the rest of their lives since they go with life with an "extended name" of sorts -- that being "name" with "weirdness." (eg. Wendy with an "i" [Wendi] or Jennifer with one "n" [Jenifer].) Normally, these respellings only cause an annoyance for the owner and don't have a completely different and sinister meaning such and the person I saw this weekend.

This weekend, I saw someone named Charon stocking a shelf. Now, I'm sure Charon's parents felt they were being terribly clever by torturing their newborn baby girl with "Sharon with a C" to help her normal name feel a bit different in a world of Sharon's. When we were walking around and I spotted this name, I told the Queen that I thought it had to do with Hell in some language's mythology, but I couldn't quite remember at the time. I looked it up this morning because it was bothering me still.

What her parents probably did not realize through their ignorance of Greek mythology is that Charon is "the ferryman of Hades who carried souls of the newly deceased across the river that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead. A coin to pay Charon for passage, usually an obolus or danake, was sometimes placed in or on the mouth of a dead person. Some authors say that those who could not pay the fee, or those whose bodies were left unburied, had to wander the shores for one hundred years. In the catabasis mytheme, heroes — such as Heracles, Orpheus, Aeneas, Dionysus and Psyche — journey to the underworld and return, still alive, conveyed by the boat of Charon." (Lifted from Wikipedia)

This means that Charon is actually a male name, not female. He's got a couple of different names depending on the mythology you're looking at, but Charon is his Greek and primary one. Charon is usually depicted as a cranky and skinny old man in a cloth that is falling off of his bits and pieces or more modernly, the Grim Reaper, but I think this one is more amusing, and is found in the lower right hand corner of Michelangelo's Last Judgment painting in the Sistine Chapel. What Charon is holding here is his oar, and he's beating the crap out of the souls getting into his boat to ferry across the river Styx. I wonder if Charon knows who she's a namesake for...

Twilight and Quantum of Solace

So the Queen and I had a deal. We put back some money to make sure we could get a couple of DVDs as soon as they hit the shelves. She was going to get Twilight, the movie based on the first novel of the successful series by Stephanie Meyer. I was going to get Quantum of Solace, the latest James Bond installment. And we were going to get them both on blu-ray, so we'd have the best version possible for the moment.

Saturday came and we got Twilight. I've actually read all of the books including the unreleased partial fifth book that Ms. Meyer has on her website. That one came out because she had allowed a few friends to read what she had so far, and one of them broke her trust and put it out on the internet. Rather than concern herself with that, she just posted it herself and allowed anyone to read what she had so far. 

Anyway, the movie is a pretty good adaptation of the books, and it's clear that the cast knew their characters from the books very well. Despite some of the negative things people have said about it, I enjoyed the film and thought that it represented the book. The only lingering question in my mind is whether someone who hasn't read the book would get everything. We'll just have The Engineer watch it, since he doesn't really read. It did very well at the box office, though, and we are expecting the next part, New Moon, this year.

Tuesday came and went, and I got Quantum of Solace. It's an interesting title to begin with, having been based on the Ian Fleming short story (the title only; the movie is an original story). The definition of the title (not explained in the movie, but is in the story) amounts to coming out of an extreme trial and being quietly satisfied with where and who you are to the point that you have an inner peace despite your circumstances. 

Again, despite the naysayers of this film (more than one person seemed to dislike both of our movies), I think this wasn't a bad film. It had some points that seemed thrown in to fill out parts of the movie with some action, and not all of those actions were fully explained. They had the time available to do it, given that this film is the shortest Bond film to date (an irony since Casino Royale beat out On Her Majesty's Secret Service for the longest). This is also the only Bond movie to feature a storyline continued from the previous film. Sure, in days gone by we had Spectre, and we gathered Bond's revenge at the beginning of Diamond's Are Forever was all about his wife, but the previous movie didn't play into that one much at all.

So we've had some good movie nights recently in my opinion. 

This Belt Is Made For Walking

So I've been running pretty religiously on this treadmill we got last year. I started at 3mph, which is walking speed for me, and I've slowly increased my sustained speed to 6mph, working on 7. This, along with some moderate dietary control, has allowed me to lose nearly 30 pounds now over roughly the last nine months, since I really started hitting it hard. I know I've actually lost more of that in fat, because I've built a lot of muscle in that period of time (the abs are super defined yet, but they're getting there; the laughs at me for checking them out in the mirror).

Last Tuesday, however, the treadmill stopped cooperating. The belt was slipping very, very badly when you try to even walk on it, and we were very concerned since the Queen regularly walks on it as well as a friend of ours (we're very communal with our stuff). Well, it didn't take much net research to find out that the level of running I was doing on the treadmill was beyond what is intended for the price point of the treadmill and the parts used in manufacturing. One person even asked if I felt like a "jackass" for expecting to be able to run on it.

Apparently, for the level of sustained running that I do, I should expect to pay about $1500 for a treadmill, and this one cost less than $500. Now, I did look at the treadmills at that price point, and there's no doubt that the features are very, very cool. However, for that price, I'd be better off to get a gym membership, since their yearly cost is less than half of what I paid for the treadmill I currently have.

So the treadmill is more for "light jogging or walking," but when I told Rock Girl this, she immediately popped up with the question of "then why does it go up to 10mph?" A worthy question. Once I tried to do a quarter mile at 10, and I blew the treadmill's internal breaker. It is actually not capable of maintaining its top speed for any length of time. 

So on Saturday after finishing another project I'll discuss on another, the Engineer and I had a look at the internal workings of the beast to see if we could make it work right again. A suggestion I'd found online had to do with the drive belt being loose as opposed to the walking belt, and that some treadmills have adjustment screws on their motors to move them further from the walking belt and thereby tighten the drive belt. After some quick research, we figured out how to remove the top plate from the treadmill that covers the motor and sure enough, this one had bolts holding the motor in place and the ability to move said motor out away from the walking to tighten the drive belt.

So with the Engineer's foot firmly planted on the motor pushing it away from the walking belt, I tightened the bolts down. With it firmly in place again, we tried to walk and run on it. Success. He tried it at several speeds, and then had me try it since I'm more used to how it feels. I tried it at 3, 5, 6, and 7, and all of them worked great for me. 

However, this does not mean I'll be using it as much as I had before. I'm sure I'll run on it periodically, but knowing that the manufacture of it is not conducive to that level of punishment, I've taken to riding my bicycle through my neighborhood. Figuring the mileage on www.mapmyride.com, I rode over 7 miles on Friday and almost 9 miles on Sunday. It makes for a nice change from the endless run, and really, it's more interesting.

So, the problem was fixed, but apparently, even though treadmills are made for walking and running on, some of them aren't made for running. That would be like buying a car where the spedometer goes up to 120 but the car won't actually go... Oh wait.