Grimm tidings

So, some time ago I spent a day in Estacada at an old lumber mill musing over a crime scene. Seems a federal agent had been murdered, so I was called in to take over the case from the local law enforcement. The hitch was they only needed two FBI agents and there were three of us on hand. I was odd man out.

But I just got a second chance. Once again there is a murder, an abandoned car our only clue, and I would be on hand to help.

This is how I returned to the set of Grimm.

We had a very early call time, forcing me to leave home long before I normally wake. I had to head out to the remote reaches of north Portland's industrial district. Actually, the Grimm studio is right down the street from where the Tomato Fight had occurred.

I was really excited because this time I would get to be a uniformed police officer. Last time I wore my own suit, trading in the suit jacket for the blue FBI field windbreaker. Both times I got a gun, but police have a utility belt which comes with "mace" (a live can of training mace), handcuffs (let the fun begin!), a radio with shoulder mic, and a telescoping beat stick. I played with all of my toys while waiting for filming to begin.

For the second time in my extras career, my "character" actually had a name. From the random grab bag of name tags I was given "Oster". That's Officer Oster to you.

Our group was composed of several cops, a couple detectives, and a few perps. We were filming on the main PDX police station set. I've never watched the show (although I nearly did once, which is almost a story of it's own), so I can't say what kind of action has taken place there, but I can tell you where this fictional police station sits within downtown Portland. Since the building is just an artificial set in a warehouse, the view outside the windows is a huge photo panorama. Pictured is what you'd see if you were standing outside Whole Foods Market looking south (on Burnside and NW 13th).

I wasn't working with Nick (David Giuntoli) and Hank (Russell Hornsby) this time around (but I did when I was an FBI agent, though they were rather stand-offish). However, I did have Sgt. Wu (Reggie Lee), and he's a really nice guy. We were just goofing off, trying to stay out of the way while the crew set up the lighting for the scene. We were joined by Captain Renard (Sasha Roiz), all of us checking the doughnut box for treats (unfortunately, there were none).

When this episode airs, I'll probably just be this blur way in the background, as the scene takes place inside the Captain's office while the rest of us are out in the main area. When it came time for filming, my job was to get some coffee. I got a surprise here. Unlike the doughnut box, the coffee machine was not empty. It was full of nightmare. A horrific black sludge, probably made by Cthulhu the last time the stars aligned, poured into my prop cup. The rest of that coffee table was just as scary. There was a half empty cup of joe behind the machine that was hosting its own little evolution experiment.

We did the scene many times and then headed back to base camp. Most of us changed into street clothes for the next scene. We were taken down to Union Station to act as passengers coming off the train. Obviously, our ride was interrupted by a freight train blocking the back road we were on to get between the studio and the station. When the train came to a complete stop several minutes later, still holding us up, we decided to take another route. Once on location, I was paired with a woman and we were to be a couple arriving from St. Louis. We were asked to improvise our story, so I soon became her whipped boyfriend.

It's a difficult thing to maintain control of a public space, especially one where there is constant in and out traffic. We closed off part of the street and part of the sidewalk, but people continually tried to walk through, or become gawkers while on camera. The cool bit was when an Amish family came out of the station in time to be in the background of our final take. I just image trying to explain what we were doing to them.

After we finished, we piled into the van to return to home base, catching a ride with Reggie who thanked us for our help.

That was the end though, a short day overall. The biggest disappointment being that they didn't feed us!

NGR goes back to school

I love to read. It really is just one of my favorite things. I switch back an forth between fiction and non-fiction when choosing my next book from my library. Going to a book store is full of so many possibilities. An actual book, with paper pages, not a computer screen, is magical.

There is a grander magic in reading to someone. I read to William every night for over a year. The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, the complete Sherlock Holmes canon by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and more. It's an amazing bonding experience, full of adventures, cliffhangers, and epiphanies. And it's fun to give voice to so many characters.

Do you know what another of my favorite things is?

Guess....

It's naked women.

No surprise there, right?

And there is an organization that caters to both: Naked Girls Reading.

That's right, women, without clothes, reading to you, the audience. Each girl comes out, sits in a comfy chair (or stands) and reads from a book for fifteen minutes.

This was my second visit to their Portland show. And they read absolutely amazing works.

The first show was geek themed, reading selections from Sci-fi and fantasy classics. We had excerpts from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince. It is at times enlightening, funny, and heart touching. So much so that you almost forget these women are naked.

...Almost...

These are fantastic women. Members of the local burlesque circuit mostly. They know how to be naked without being slutty. They are perfectly classy and entirely beautiful (without having that "perfect" Barbie doll look).

This time around, the theme was "Back to School". The idea being these are the books we read as kids, the type of stuff you were likely to buy at the Book Fair. I was reading Hardy Boys and Time Machine (a spin-off of the Choose Your Own Adventure) at the age seemingly favored by the selections. What we go was a rendition of The Giving Tree, a bit from a Goosebumps book, as well as a fantastic chapter from The Phantom Tollbooth.

The only bad part of the show was the venue. A place called the Blue Monk in SE on Belmont. We were in a basement that may be nicely intimate, but the horrid lighting proved an issue for our lovely readers, who often had to find a new location on the stage and angle to the lights in order to see their books.

All in all, a truly amazing experience and good time. I can't wait for their next return to PDX.

Stiff competition

My wife recently introduced me to interval running. You walk a certain distance, jog a bit, and then sprint.

Repeat.

What I learned this weekend is that everyone will need to do this kind of training if they want to be ready for the zombie apocalypse.

Now, I have a Plan Z, so I'd like to think I'm more than a little prepared for the this particular end of the world scenario. But having the idea of what you will do and having the physical capability of performing are two different things.

So, this past Saturday I took part in my latest World War Z training exercise. A little mud run called the Run for Your Lives. Your standard 5k obstacle course, only with packs of zombies strewn about.

Yes.

I said "zombies". In a race. Somewhere, Samuel L. Jackson said something epic.

In most mud runs, I try to hold a steady pace throughout (although after the halfway point I tend to power walk the uphill bits). But that won't work when you turn a corner and the undead jump out screaming for your brains.

The way it works is this, along with your number bib you get a flag belt. Just like the gentler version of football, your opponents (i.e. Zed) try to steal your flags rather then chew through your skull (there is a reason I didn't play sports in high school). You get three life points, three successful zombie grabs and you're dead.

At the start line I talked with a gentleman who is a veteran of these runs. His advice: stay in a dense group and power through. Chance of survival: Nil.

How very reassuring.

We start the race in a dark meat cage, a soldier letting us know the rules before opening the gate. There will be health packs on the course, he says. To heal our zombie wounds, he says. A count down, and we're off.

Now, I like to get an early start on mud runs. They have heats all day long, usually every half hour or so. Early in the day means cooler temperatures, smaller groups, and the track is less torn up. What I would learn is this was to be the least muddy, but (not surprisingly) most bloody run I've participated in. My strategy doesn't pay off though, this is one raw race course. It's full of ruts, rocks, branches, and to my later horror, blackberries. More on that later.

The first obstacle was a new one for me. A black house, with little black windows that you have to crawl through. Already there are people screaming. It's pitch black and filled with smoke inside. And there are naked wires hanging from the ceiling sending electricity into the unwary. Well, I'm wary and I don't get shocked. Getting to the other end you can hear the growls, here comes the first clash with the undead.

You burst from the smoke into a large open field filled with zombies. Time for the first sprint. Downhill, over uneven ground. I dodge a few of the walkers and shamblers, but here comes a runner. And he is out for blood. And wham! I've already lost my first flag. I make it the rest of the way unscathed.

We're in the clear. We cross a stream and... enter another open field with zombies. Time for another sprint. I'm successful in my dodging techniques this time and keep my remaining health, despite a bottleneck in the course, leading into the woods, defended by one more brain muncher.

A short jog through the woods leads to a muddy, but easy, crawl. Then back into the trees and: you guessed it, more ghouls. These aren't as aggressive, but the trail is small and maneuvering is difficult. We clear this crowd, and find a fork in the road. We can stay in the woods, or head out into the clear. But there are more of the unfortunate wretches out in the sunshine. We decide to stick with the "obviously safer path" (tm).

Yes, I did say we. We're maintaining a group of about five (we have, however, lost our veteran, haven't seen him since the smoke house), we pickup and lose folks from time to time. Still in the woods, we complete the first mile. By this time, I've received my first wound. A small blackberry vine was across the road, attempting to trip me. Only one end was in the ground, so instead of falling, it ripped across my exposed ankle, thorns leaving a jagged line. I've had, and I'll have, worse.

One of our number takes a spill while running past a wraith. This zombie offers to help her up. My advice to you: Never Accept Help From the Undead. Sure, she gets a hand up, but off goes one of her flags as well.

A note on the zombies themselves. It seems that the apocalypse has occurred during Halloween night. There are every stripe of undead: rednecks, scuba divers, doctors, Disney Princesses. Eventually I'll even be accosted by Batgirl.

More sprinting past the cursed. More walking to recover our breath. More jogging to keep our spirits and courage up.

Then it happens. We're running for our lives through some zeros. One makes a grab at me. I leap to the side, off the trail and into a massive blackberry plant. I'm up to my knees, but I can't stop now, my "health" is at stake. I jump clear of the bush, but a vine is wrapped around my left leg. It tries to hold me back. I pull free and pay the price. I now have what looks like claw marks running down and around by leg. From the inside of my knee, across my calf, to my outer ankle. It isn't too terrible. The blood only wells, it never runs. After a bit more jogging, though, I get the sting of poison and my calf muscle starts to burn in that special way. I'm able to walk it off, still alive (even by game terms).

More obstacles, over and under walls. A maze.

I don't even remember where I lost my second flag, but now we are two-thirds of the way through the course and I'm down to my last flag. Ahead is a nearly ninety degree ramp (this course runs partly over a motocross track). The wall is probably twelve feet tall and there are more of the reanimated at the top. At this point, we've gathered more survivors into our group, including a couple dead-men-walking/running. These are folks that have already lost all of their flags. With nothing left to lose, they offer themselves as decoys and meat shields. How very noble, but I can't climb the hill fast enough to get past the guard. I've lost my last flag and now I'm dead.

I keep running, no longer dodging the dead. I'm a decoy. I'm a meat shield. I'm not sure if I'm saving any lives though. And it turns out that this was the last group of the dead.

At the end is a water slide into a pool of "blood" and a crawl under an electrified fence. I've finished the race, dead on my feet. I think only one of our posse actually made it through alive.

When I get my results, despite multiple rest stops as we gathered our strength before plowing through our antagonists, I've finished this race at my fastest pace yet. At 36:00.3, just over eleven and a half minutes per mile, or an average speed of 5.5 mph. I'm really getting the hang of this, and I think I've drastically improved my chances of surviving the end of the world.