The St. George Half Marathon – Matthew Jacobson

THE SKEWED REVIEW | EVERYTHING ELSE 

This is the third time I've run The St. George Half Marathon, and the second time I've finished it. (Last year some medical issues got in the way, but hey – I did make it to mile 5 before I had to call it quits!) For those of you thinking about running it in 2016, here's what you should expect.

The Course

The course is relatively standard. It runs on the city streets for half the race, and on city trails the other half. After 2.5 mark, it starts going uphill. The Bloomington Hills area of St. George is very hilly, so there is a lot of up and down throughout that area. There's little-to-no level roads from 2.5 until the summit of the course at the halfway mark, where the course begins its downward slope. At about 7.5 miles, the course turns to city trails, which are more-or-less even. The race finishes where it starts.

The View

St. George is a very scenic city, surrounded by beautiful red rocks and desert. The forced landscape is beautiful, too. However, there's one time of the year when the city is ugly and barren, and that's in the middle of January.

This is what makes The St. George Half Marathon unappealing. It's cold and it's ugly. Everything is brown. In a way, it's disheartening. Instead of being able to enjoy the surroundings, you're just wishing the race would be over already so you can get away from this dead, disgusting place.

The Medal

The medal is an integral part to running these races. We runners like to display them proudly, so it's nice when there's a rad medal with an awesome design. I have to give props to St. George for changing up the design of the half marathon medal from years past (the St. George Marathon medal stays the same year after year...), but I don't particularly like the vomit green used for the ribbon.

I'm still hoping one of these races will feature an awesome black and white medal.

Overall Rating

The challenging first half makes this a race you feel good about completing. But the scenery leaves much to be desired.

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'Anything After' App - Matty Jacobson

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THE SKEWED REVIEW | TECHNOLOGY | PRODUCTS | EVERYTHING ELSE

More and more filmmakers are utilizing the movie's credits to add additional scenes. These can be throwaway scenes meant just for laughs, they can be plot clarifications or, as we see in most Marvel-related superhero flicks, the scene during and/or after the credits usually sets up some sort of sequel.

I affectionately call these extra scenes "Credit Cookies." But they're also known as stingers or just plain old "that scene after the credits."

Whatever terminology you prefer, the fact is sometimes there's extra footage that you don't want to miss. But sometimes there's no footage at all.

And sometimes, what's even worse, is sometimes there's footage -- but it's just not worth sitting through two or three minutes worth of credits.

There are actually a few different apps that provide this information, so you can go into the movie knowing whether or not you want to sit through the end credits. But the one I've come to rely on most is Anything After.

Anything After does cost 99 cents, but because of that, you're not bogged down by stupid ads popping up whenever you want to quickly plug in the title of a film before the trailers start playing. The films are relatively easy to find because they're listed by what's in theaters.

If you're looking for an older title, then click the button and type it in.

The best part is you get peer responses on whether a credit cookie is worth the wait. In my case, however, even if it's been downvoted, I tend to hang around just to see what it was people didn't necessarily like about the after-credit scene.

I do that mostly because I want to be able to add my reason as to why the scene ain't that great, which is an option with the Anything After app.

This app has also saved my skin a couple of times as I've been heading out of the movie theater. I decided to double check to see if "Anchorman 2" had something to wait for, and indeed, it did. Of course the scene wasn't actually that great, so I noted it as such in the app. But at least I wouldn't be left wondering what I missed.

The Anything After app is available on iOS and Android devices.