Color Run Team Names

While I was coming up with a team name for my group for the recent Color Run in Tuscaloosa I noticed there weren't a lot of examples out on the Internet. So, I forged ahead and made up my own. And, while I was at the event several people told me their team names (or ideas for team names), but some of the names were just descriptive at best ("The Red Bandanas") or not even in the colorful spirit of the event at worst ("The Flying Pototoes" -- there's not even a color in that team name!).
So, to help those of you out who need team name ideas for your Color Run team, or your Color Me Rad team, or even your local paintball team, here are some colorful suggestions that I came up with that you are free to use or riff on:

• Overly Saturated 
• Colorful Language
• Running, Going Blue (RGB)
• Colors Make You Krazy (CMYK) 
• Soylent Green Is People! 
• Yellow Bellied Blue Haired Walkers
• Does That T-Shirt Come In Any Color Other Than White 
• Color Me Blue... and Pink and Green and Orange and Purple and Yellow 
• Orange You Glad You Aren’t With Us 
• Throw That Colored Powder At The Slow Walker Behind Me 
• We Can’t Run But We Can Color With The Best Of Them 
• Hue Wants To Know
• Blue By You
• Painting, Panting, Passing Out 
• Lite Brite’s Got Nothin’ On Us 
• Who Are You Calling Yellow?
• Chase The Rainbow
• Splatter Paint By Number 
• Coloring Outside The Lines 
• We Dream In Color We Run In White 

You could also go with a theme and have everyone in your group wear something similar:

• 50 Shades Of Grey (everyone in your group could wear grey-tinted sunglassess)
• Pink Ponies (everyone in your group could wear pink pony tails)
• The White Stripes (self explanatory, but you could also print Jack White on the back of your shirts)
• Back In Black (paint the back of your t-shirts black)
• Go Big Red, Crimson Tide, Red Sox, Big Blue Wrecking Crew (pick your favorite sports team [assuming they have a color associated with them] and wear your team's colors proudly)

O.K., so I know that just like the points on the t.v. show "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" the team names at the Color Run and Color Me Rad events don't matter -- you just use them for registration purposes. But, that doesn't mean you can't have fun with your team name -- come up with a logo and make signs with your team name, and/or have (white) t-shirts printed (or use iron-on letters/artwork) with your team name across your back.

Color Run… or, Orange You Glad I'm Exercising?!

I'm now a 5K Color Run veteran. Last month I was a spectator at the very wet but extremely colorful Birmingham event at the impressive Barber Motorsport Park. This past weekend I took part in the fun by running/walking in the sprawling Munny Sokol Park near Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I got some much needed exercise and was splattered with color in the process. I hope the other 4000+ participants had a blast, too.

My arm is the Jackson Pollock one on the left.

Review of Collsion Course

I just finished Collision Course by William Shatner (with Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens [who I suspect actually wrote the meat and potatoes of the novel]). Okay, so maybe I'm a trekkie/trekker wannabe, but I actually enjoyed this book. As a fan of the original t.v. series (and its various films and later television outings) I found myself easily connecting with the storyline (based on the Kodos acting troop incident in one of the original shows... I won't show off my trekkie trivia knowlege by telling you the name of the episode, but it was first season episode 13 which took place on stardate 2817.6 -- I looked that up on startrek.com, by the way). The story tells of the first meeting and first adventure together of teenagers James Tiberius Kirk and Mr. Spock culminating in their joining of Starfleet. The story is fairly tightly woven with good character development, a bit of suspense, and a few technical details thrown in for flavor. William Shatner's humor is definitely visible in the story, as well. If you are a casual Star Trek fan, as I, you will find this book a nice easy, enjoyable read. However, if you get upset that Star Trek Comic number whatever contradicts any teenage Kirk/Spock storyline presented in this novel and the Star Trek Technical Manual specifically states that the dilithium could not be handled so willy-nilly as mentioned in this story, then this book is not for you -- so, go pick on Star Trek: Enterprise some more for its blatant anachronistic errors, while I recommend this book to my not-quite-so-fanatical-about Star Trek friends.

Review of Walk The Line

Although the movie was a little long and could easily have done with a bit of trimming without hurting the storyline, this biographic look at the life of Johnny Cash was worth the watch to get a peek into the early career and love life of the legendary man in black. Joaquin Phoenix as John R. Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter are quite believable in their respective roles. That they do their own singing adds to the audio continuity of the film -- while for accuracy's sake I would have rather had Johnny's and June's own voices singing the soundtrack, I can certainly understand and appreciate the need to have Phoenix and Witherspoon sing for their own characters especially during on-stage banter, plus, they both did a bang-up good job. The focus of the film is more on the passions of Johnny rather than being a stale biopic chronologically hashing out every major event of Johnny's life. By passions, I mean in the classical sense: strong feelings and strong sufferings. The film dealt with Johnny's brother's death at an early age, Johnny's relationship with his father, Johnny's love of women (his wife, his fans, and his objet du désir, June Carter), his music with its distinct sound (although we never learn why his sound is "steady like a train, sharp like a razor"), and his drug and alcohol abuse. Many accounts in the film are fictionalized (or, rather, condensed to move the story along without getting bogged down), but the spirit of the life of Johnny and his relationship with June, I believe, are captured eloquently. I recommend watching the movie once and then going out and buying a greatest hits CD of Johnny Cash to get a better understanding of the man behind the music.
(On a personal note, I'm not a great fan of country music, but I had the wonderful privilege of seeing Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash perform live in 1996, and his music transcended genre definition and spoke to me on a number of levels. After that, I followed his career and purchased his albums and CDs. I miss the man in black, and I thank him for the enjoyment his music has given me over the years.)

Shows Canceled Before Their Time

A friend and I were talking the other day, and we got on the subject of canceled TV shows that we miss. Most were shows that had run their course, and, if we felt a longing for them, we could revisit these old friends in reruns in syndication, on DVD's, or on TV Land: M*A*S*H, Seinfeld, Gilligan's Island, I Love Lucy, Night Court, The X Files, Twilight Zone, SG-1, Alias, Star Trek (pick an incarnation), Quantum Leap, Pee-wee's Playhouse, etc.
However, I started thinking of shows that I felt got the axe just as I had gained an attachment to these series. Further, I can't help to wonder what happened to the characters (I miss you, Sidney Bloom):

• VR.5
• The Lone Gunmen -- fortunately they returned to The X Files where they met their demise -- but I guess that was also rather unfortunate :-(
• Profit
  
• John Doe
• Dead Like Me -- I've heard for a while now that another project is in the works with Henry Ian Cusick (you know, Desmond from "Lost") as the new head reaper
• Eerie, Indiana
• Firefly -- "Serenity" helped, but was it enough? O.K., let me be honest, I wasn't that terribly upset when Firefly got canceled, but I know my buddy Double D shed some obligatory tears
• Journeyman
• Pushing Daisies
• Eli Stone
• My Own Worst Enemy
  

I'll add more as I think of them.
In an opposite direction, I'm contemplating a list of series that went on a season or so too long, so I'll leave you to consider The X Files, Friends, and the original shark jumper, Happy Days.

Review of I Am Legend

Let me be honest, I wouldn't consider myself a Will Smith fan, but somehow I end up sitting in a theater watching his films. Typically, with a Will Smith film I know what I'm going to get -- a cocky, somewhat humorous guy on a mission to save the day (or the world). I wish I could say "I Am Legend" is different; I won't get my wish, but I will say that the theme and tone are a little outside of the box for Will Smith. (Note that I said "a little".)
Take Will's Smith's character from "Independence Day" and age him a bit, then throw in his character from "I, Robot" and you've got Col. Robert Neville, his character in "I Am Legend." (And, for the record, let me say that I am thankful that his characters from "Wild, Wild West" and "Men In Black" do not get mixed into this performance.) The style of "I Am Legend" is similar to "Children Of Men" but infinitely more colorful (here in America we visually like warmer, reddish and yellow tones, whereas in Britain there is a tendency toward a dreary, blue cast). Basically, though, the message is alike in the two films: it's up to one person to save the human race (as we know it) from disappearing from the face of the planet. In "Children Of Men" in the very near future no more babies are born to humans due to... well, we never really learn, but that film makes a strong point that globalization has something to do with it. In "I Am Legend" in the very near future a definitive cure for cancer has an unpleasant side-effect of turning those cured into light-poisoned, cannibalistic, zombie-like mutants with nasty, big, pointy teeth -- I guess they should have read that small print on the cancer medicine's commercial. Later the disease becomes airborne, and our hero Lt. Col. Robert Neville, who somehow has an immunity to the disease, sets up a lab in New York City which is ground zero for the outbreak (so, I guess that means they only tried to cure New Yorkers of cancer first) and tries to use his own blood to find a cure to reverse the effects of the ill-fated cancer cure. Meanwhile, as far as Neville knows, the rest of the world has been affected by the mutant virus and everyone has either been transformed into human eating creatures of the night or have been eaten by those same creatures. (Human beef, it's what's for dinner!) Still, Neville (and his dog, Sam) searches for a cure while slowly going crazy. He spends his days hunting deer and other animals (obviously escapees from the Bronz Zoo), renting movies from his neighborhood video store populated by mannequins, and hanging out at the pier (having daily broadcast a message on AM radio that he is there in the event that someone else has survived -- I guess by using AM he expected Rush Limbaugh fans or sports radio callers to have survived). He spends his nights injecting lab rats and mutants with varying chemical adaptations of his blood and apparently watching a lot of "Shrek". Throughout the whole story, Neville comments that the mutants have degraded to no longer having human-like actions and that they have devolved into pure animals. Maybe before the end of the story he came to realize that at least one (or more) of the mutants were exhibiting human feelings of deception, inventiveness, and physical attachment (of the love variety, not just the teeth buried three inches into the shoulder kind).
I'm not really sure I would or would not recommend this film. If this were a recipe, it would be made of equal parts "Children Of Men" and "28 Days Later", spiced with the flavor of "I, Robot" and slow cooked in a pot of "The Andromeda Strain." If you like the taste of "Children Of Men" you will be probably be left feeling hungry for the lack of moral lessons in "I Am Legend" -- that is, other than man is to blame for man's downfall (well, excuse us for trying to cure cancer!).
In the end, I liked the movie. Don't expect a fast-moving thriller or a slow-moving sleeper, as this movie is somewhere in between. And, don't expect great CGI effects... while some effects are impressive and others not noticeable as CGI (which is the goal, isn't it), some of the mutants and animals are obviously computer-generated. Do expect a chiseled Will Smith whose acting has become almost as well-sculpted as his body. (I know that sounded homosexual of me, but really, I'm not... not that there is anything wrong with that.) Unless you are a Will Smith fan, I think you can wait for this one to come out on video.
I give it a 7 out of 10.