A big fire swept through the backlot at Universal Studios last night, and among the casualties was my actual favourite part of the lot: the Hill Valley town square from Back to the Future. (The clock tower evidently survives, but was damaged; no word on who or what traveled where or to which time period.) If all this is making you nostalgic, I might point out that they have the goddamned Flux Capacitor at the Silver Snail now. It certainly prompted two or three minutes' of unabashed staring from me.

I Rode for the Heart this morning; a big thanks to Erin Booth, Helen, e-Becca, my aunt Beth, Jocelyn, Matthew Fabb, Demetre, Jeff, Chris, Meredith, my parents, Steeeeve!, Christys, and Sarafina for sponsoring me. Hey, here's an idea: next time I want to do a 75K on this thing, someone remind me to actually train beforehand, yeah? And by "beforehand," I mean for several goddamned months like a real grown-up would do, not a few weeks of half-assed riding. I did the whole thing in about four and a half hours this morning and it damn near wasted me. I was not prepared.

Let's post-script two things:

Lost! While on the whole I'd say that Season Four has been fairly kickass, I gotta call the finale weak. Not as bad as that disastrous tail-ender to the first season, but still not nearly as absorbing as last year's "we're in the future now!" slam-o-rama (though to be fair, what could be?) nor even as action-adveturey-science-fiction-terrifico as the Season Two closer with Desmond. So instead of debating the fiddle-faddle of who was in the box or who got blowed up on what freighter, I'll just give two bits of human interest on the whole thing and then call it a year: 1) they pointlessly brought Harold Perinneau back just to get rid of him again, because he did indeed go "boom" with the boat; and 2) here are some hilarious alternate versions of the final shot, featuring other non-Bens in the coffin from Season Three. Anyways, I'm sort of glad the year's done, as my interest in the show was sort of lessened by the strike gap. I'm sure I'll be back on board for Season 5.

X-Men! In like kind, I'm glad Astonishing X-Men is done. Joss' lack of commitment to the publishing schedule made the final arc really difficult to enjoy, and the final one-shot was a solid B minus at best; the high-mark work in the arc took place earlier with Scott, not in the bullet with Kitty. It was at some point this week that I realized that I've been regularly reading three X-titles and pretty much don't care about any of them any more, so I think it's time for an X-break. At least until Ellis takes over AXM.