Missy keeps giving me grief about why I keep the gnasty old white towels for my gym bag. Finally, I’ve got a good answer:
To look cool, wrap a towel around your waist when you change. Changing skirts are practical, but not very cool. To look Euro-cool, make sure it’s a white, thread bare towel taken from the cheap motel room that you and five teammates crammed into at your last stage race.
(Courtesy of PezCyclingNews)
(Also, it looks like I missed TowelDay this year.)
I got this meme from RandomDuck, who got it from Sprite. Rules are simple – Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you’d like to read. My value add? Snide comments.
So, there’s that. Books that I would add (All books that I’ve read):
So that’s it. Heh – maybe this should count as my 100 things about me list. Mostly, though, I’m interested to see what other books folks would include.
Interesting bit on Amazon’s new e-Book, the Kindle.
I’m intrigued, despite the $400 price tag without content. I’ve started riding a van to the office, and it’d be cool to be able to carry along the PDFs I’m reading (converted to .mobi files via a free utility), or to be able to cheaply and quickly buy content via “whispernet” (EVDO) if the whim struck me.
But I’m concerned at the same time about the underlying thread that runs through ALL of this technological love-affair: That we, as a species, are going to be able to generate ‘lectricity from now until the heat death of the universe, give or take a couple billion years.
The killer appeal of paper is that it doesn’t need batteries. Kindle boasts some pretty impressive power stats, but eventually, on time-scales much shorter than years, it becomes a brick.
Maybe that’s OK. Maybe, if things deteriorate to the point at which we cannot make electricity any longer, it won’t be worth reading anything from the 2012 best sellers list, and having all that information spread into entropy is fine.
But I’ve got this vision, of a ragged and buffed 20-something, after the end of modern civilization, finding the Nebraska University library there in Lincoln*, climbing the stairs, and beginning to reconstitute civilization, learning from our mistakes this time.
In some ways, I suppose it’s a luddite point of view. I don’t think so – I’m looking forward to the power that will come with instant and cheap access to all the world’s knowledge. My hope, however, is that we don’t opt to clean off our shelves to save space or costs.
Unsolved mysteries like Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and the Bimini Road fascinate me. Maybe there’s something to the tin-foil-hat crowd that claims that stone-age technology couldn’t be accurate enough masons to stack the pyramids, or that there are lost civilizations under the Atlantic. Why haven’t we heard about them?
Maybe they were all digital. Maybe when they all fell apart, the only folks who were left were the beauticians and the telephone sanitizers, who had no clue how to work or build their advanced technologies. Maybe given a half-million years to work, nature swallowed up most of the traces of their civilizations, while we descendants of the dregs rebuilt the world in our own image.
Maybe history is cyclic, the Maya are right, and the world will end in 2012. Maybe we’ll burn books for fuel as daises grow in the center of IH-95. Maybe it’s inevitable.
Hug a book today.
*Picked a place in flyover country on the theory that they’ll avoid being completely looted and burned. Us coastal dwellers are doomed.
Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moon’s sphere;
Man, I think I need to hit the trails when I get back east.
I almost, almost punted this morning. The flight last night got in about 90 minutes late, so I left the airport well after midnight, got to the hotel after 1, and collapsed into bed about 1:45, taking into account the need to despin.
Then, the fire alarm goes off at 3. Yep, I kid you not – after not sleeping well the night before, I had taken about 15 seconds to drop straight into deep sleep once my head hit the pillow.
So, we’re standing outside waiting for the fire truck to arrive. Bunches of disoriented folks in various states of PJs or crumpled clothes pulled off of the floor. After a half hour or so, the night manager goes and calls them again, and, no lie, the fire truck got into a wreck on the way over. So, they’re having to sortie one from a neighboring fire district, which arrives after we’ve all been standing around for a half-hour or so.
So, I hit the rack at 3:45, needing to wake up about 0700 to actually start working. No way was I going to get up at 6 to get in a run.
Today at work – absolutely great. F’n phenomenal – good results and loads of new opportunities. Got back to the hotel, and instead of collapsing, went to do today’s three in the office park. Was doing pretty well until I rolled my ankle at about mile two.
Probably the greatest lesson I’ve learned in Augustathon is when to say “Enough”. I walked the last mile, and will be able to run again tomorrow morning.
Had a chat with someone. You may have seen part of it earlier. Anyway, he asked what my race plans were for the rest of the year. Here goes:
So that’s it in a nutshell. Five more days and this is a habit. Then I start working on getting up consistiently at 0500, on purpose.
So, it looks like Eric Zabel, the German sprinter, admitted to doping back in 1996. As a result, he’s being prevented from racing in the World Road Race championships this year.
While I’m a fierce believer that the current regime of testing is bearing fruit, and that the zero tolerance on folks popping positive now is the way to go, I think that for the sake of getting pro cycling back on solid ground there should be an amnesty program offered for folks who confess to having doped in the past.
While Zabel’s admission brings into question his past accomplishments, it also makes his third in this year’s Tour de France green jersey (Sprinters) competition that much more impressive, as he accomplished it without dope. Folks like Zabel and David Millar, who have raced both dirty and clean, should be used as ambassadors for clean sport.
There is a small issue of fairness – Millar served a two year suspension, whereas Zabel will likely not have to pay for his cheating (he’s in his 30’s, has good palmares, and if suspended has incentive to retire) – but that’s water under the bridge. As much as we’d like, it’s impossible to ever correctly repay past wrong. So, yes, Zabel did cheat, but did so under a different set of ethics than are in place today. As long as he’s clean today, and committed to remaining clean, and helping others to remain clean, he should be allowed to ride.
Inspired by Ali’s Julyathon, I’m embarking on an Augustathon. The goal is not so much the mileage, but running every day for a month. The rules:
1. A “run” is minimum of 3 miles. Ali required nonstop; I’m waiving that to let me do track workouts.
That’s pretty much it.
You can sign up at Nike+ if you’re so inclined.
Now, to fix the calibration on my Nike+ sensor…
F$ck. Where’s that $600…
Actually, funny little story after the break.
Completely ripped off from this guy via Merlin Mann.
The one change I’d make is that good shared assumptions are critical to timely execution, which is likely semantics over “Assuming is stifling”, which I assume refers only to non-shared assumptions.
I suppose I should RTFA instead of just digging on the picture.
This article’s absolutely fascinating. Not only are we evolved to run, but we’re evolved to run in crappy conditions. What great inspiration for summer
All together, Lieberman said, these adaptations allowed us to relentlessly pursue game in the hottest part of the day when most animals rest. Lieberman said humans likely practiced persistence hunting, chasing a game animal during the heat of the day, making it run faster than it could maintain, tracking and flushing it if it tried to rest, and repeating the process until the animal literally overheated and collapsed.
Humans hot, sweaty, natural-born runners
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