If I had any doubts about the tone that Pirates of the Caribbean would take, they would be settled less than five minutes into the movie, when who should appear but Steve from my favorite guilty-pleasure TV Britcom, Coupling! (I started watching the show for Sarah Alexander, but now I watch for Richard Coyle and Gina Bellman.) This is not a movie that takes itself seriously. The score is Bruckheimer bombast and too loud, and the bits that allude to the theme park ride are sometimes tacked on, but you could do worse with your nine bucks.

posted: 6:21:01 PM  

I covered 9+ miles in Shenandoah National Park on Monday. The Stony Man was snoozing under a blanket of fog. Cool and damp, breezy on the ridgetop gave way to muggy in about an hour; I stripped off my birding jacket and dragged it around for the rest of the circuit.

Down Cedar Run and back up White Oak Canyon, the latter much more popular because of its slightly more gentle slope and its head near the Skyland Lodge and the Limberlost Trail. Both creeks at this time of year are slender streams squeezed out of the rocks, from time to time slipping over boulders into shallow pools. One pool in Cedar Run is just deep enough that a couple of unbreakable kids had turned the 45-degree slope down into the pool into an impromptu water slide.

Not much in the way of birds; I heard a couple of Common Ravens (Corvus corax). Leafbirds, still in their green plumage, have begun their downward migration. A fellow hiker pointed out, less than three feet off the trail, a dark-morph Timber Rattler (Crotalus horridus) trying to look inconspicuous.

My pocket altimeter registered an elevation change of 2300 feet, give or take. The hike was more of a puff than I planned on!

posted: 6:09:52 PM