Watching the closing ceremonies of the 2006 Torino games last night, I was struck by an observation on my own mental state, which must have been bubbling to the surface over the last two weeks: the periodic nature of the Olympics has fractured my personal flow of time. Every four years, more or less the same athletes come back and resume their stories; during the opening ceremony, I see some of the old faces and hear their names, and it all comes rushing back. Then for the next two weeks I experience time as running on a track parallel to the main, day-to-day chain of events—the Winter Olympic track. This train started at Calgary '88 or so, but it makes slower progress than the train of normal time, as it runs for only two weeks every four years. The Summer Olympics run on another parallel track because the characters involved are usually different.

I think this is why watching the games is so beautifully comforting; when I jump into Olympic time I'm able to reach back with ease to 8 or 12 or 14 years ago, to a time when I was a child or an adolescent. Each of those two week Olympic periods gets appended onto the end of the last one, so all the great events of Lillehammer '94 (and whatever I was doing at the time) are as though they happened only six weeks past.

Silver was the New Black, but black is the New Silver. It's true. The pendulum has swung back. Portents of it are everywhere in the consumer electronics industry.

Black lost out years ago because it looked plastic, despite the fact that plastic really looks best in black. So the mainstream started to emulate the high-end brushed aluminum thing, and it worked, for a while. Respectable mid-market home theater gear HAD to be silver. But turnabout was inevitable, really, once you could buy a shiny silver DVD player for $29.99 at Walmart. Then it was obvious that the sexy new silver was mostly the same plastic as ever, tarted up with what amounts to chrome—in some cases even actual chrome. And chrome is the sort of thing that seems like a good idea for about ten minutes. As soon as everybody and their third grade teacher owned a cell phone that looked like it fell out of the Tin Man's ass, we were bound to be back in black again.

Last Sunday my cousin Torm and I were invited to a Car & Driver / Road & Track "Editor for a Day" event at the Homestead Speedway. After a wild ride from Boca Raton to Homestead in record time, we had the chance to drive some interesting cars for comparison purposes; some of our comments might even be published in the magazines! Two courses had been laid out with cones on a large parking lot there—they wouldn't let us go out on the NASCAR oval for some hot laps no matter how much we begged.

Go see Serenity, in theaters now. Just go, don't ask me why. You'll either hate it fiercely or love it forever, and my duty to those that will love it outweighs my duty to those that will hate it (stupid statist purple-bellies, anyway!)

I went with some people associated with FAU fencing to Disney MGM Studios in Orlando for the 2005 Star Wars Weekend, a nice event for Star Wars geeks, although not everybody was quite as hardcore as we are. When one of the “crowd control” stormtroopers cracked “He hasn't been the same since he hit his head on that bulkhead” the entire audience was silent except for the five of us, laughing and cheering maniacally. Regardless, a good time was had by all; pictures follow.

A mob at the Star Tours attraction.

Meeting the characters is a cool feature of Star Wars Weekend; Vader was by far the most popular.

Emily, wearing the coolest Star Wars T-shirt EVER, tells Greedo what's what.