The New Millenium Race

It was the classic moment when you begin to feel like you live in a new city instead of being the constant visitor. Last night I ran a race in Chicago. Not a another distance run - this one was a winner takes all sprint against a few other guys.

Last night I went to a gallery opening for a friend with K. Takla is uber-talented and easily had the best, most-polished piece at the show. Afterward, the eight of us went to dinner. Elliot challenged all comers to a foot race. Graham's girlfriend talked Graham up as being the fastest at the table. I somehow became involved, and a half hour later we were standing in Millenium Park. The giant Chicago faces to our left, the bean up ahead.

As we are stretching out, realizing our folly, three smoking skateboarders come up and ask the perfunctory questions about the race. All of sudden we have four runners. Elliot, Graham, myself, and a skateboarder that still has a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The bad thing about running a race in a tourist destination is that it is never not busy. We approach the starting line and look up to see a large group of men walking toward us. They realize what's about to happen and decide to line the 150m course to cheer us on.

Suddenly, this small challenge has turned into a neighborhood race with the four runners plus a newcomer - a shirtless frat pledge and one of the smoker's friends has decided to skateboard along. We take our marks. Takla begins the race. Mark...Set...Go! I get a great start but Elliot is much faster than anticipated and takes an early lead. However, right at the end he runs out of gas and I tag Corderro's hand mere tenths of a second ahead. The frat boys have their friend up on their shoulders for finishing last. Graham finished a respectable third and the smoker fourth. The skateboarder kept up but wasn't really competitive.

We decide to make it "who wins two first" race and Elliot ends up winning the next two and becomes the night's champion. The second race was uneventful, and the third race the same except for a few parents and their kids as onlookers.

I can't wait to move to Chicago.

Books and the lying liars who write them

Is anyone else baffled by the press that Frey is getting for his "Million Little Pieces"Flap? Now I've never read the book because I never thought that another drug rehab memoir would be particularly interesting, but the outrage that people are feeling is amazing.

This just in:
* Thoreau spent two years at Walden Pond, but in the book he says he was only there for one!
* Dave Eggers has long emotional, insightful conversations with his 12 year old brother in "HBWoSG" using quotation marks! But we all know that conversations don't go that smoothly, especially with a pre-teen, no matter how precocious.
* Washington Irving created a pseudonym for many of his short stories. Why couldn't he take responsibility for his writing?

Obviously, this Frey nonsense is just that. I've always thought that the only thing good about that book was the cover. Frey should be congratulated for writing something that touched people emotionally, no matter how fictitious. Hemingway once said “All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished with one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer." By this definition, Frey achieved what most cold, modern novels can only dream of.

Where is the outrage at movies that are based on true stories but fudge the facts to make for better stories? Munich, anyone?

Ed Gein!

If I could have a second skin/
I'd probably dress up as you.

How is possible that Belle and Sebastian can sing the aforementioned lyric and sound absolutely romantic and not even a little bit like a serial killer?

Steve gave me the new B & S cd yesterday because I'm headed to the concert in March. Can I be prosecuted for having this CD (which doesn't actually come out until early February)? Would the crime be receiving stolen intellectual property rights?

But I type better when I'm drunk!

Today in the paper I read a story about some unscrupulous people that have been selling cadavers for medical purposes. However, they have been fibbing the numbers, so to speak, because instead of selling otherwise "healthy" bodies for tissue transplants they have been selling old, diseased ones and changing the death certificates on the cause-of-the-death line from "liver cancer" to "heart attack". Now people that are wanting tissue transplants(?) wanting to get better are getting sicker because of the implant of diseased tissues.

Here's the kicker: a lady is suing the company because she claims that she got a STD from the tissue transplant. I'm not saying that she's lying but it seems like a little blame shifting is in order in this case. What a great excuse. I don't sleep around; I just used some bad tissues.

Is it possible to sue someone for giving you STDs if you knowingly engage in behavior with them, in the bedroom, in surgery, or otherwise? This could be an important precedent in these decedent times.

A Question of Economics

Something that I've been pestering K about lately:

Has the proliferation of credit cards as the main form of payment decreased the amount of money that homeless panhandlers take in because people don't carry pocket change or have people begun to view all change as we used to view the penny, as a useless pocket weight, and started giving more just to get rid of it?

Great Explorers

I'm thinking of having my keyboarding students do a powerpoint presentation on explorers. I need thirty. Any suggestions?

1. Erik the Red
2. Marco Polo
3. John Cabot
4. Christopher Columbus
5. Juan Ponce de Leon
6. Vasco de Gama
7. Vasco Nunez de Balboa
8. Francisco Pizarro
9. Ferdinand Magellan
10. Giovanni da Verrazano
11. Hernan Cortes
12. Jazques Cartier
13. Hernando de Soto
14. Francisco Vazquez de Coronado
15. Sir Francis Drake
16. Vitus Bering
17. Robert Bartlett
18. Mars Exploration
19. Neil Armstrong
20. Ernest Shackleton
21. Amerigo Vespucci
22. Henry Morton Stanley
23. John Wesley Powell
24. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
25. George Everest
26. Henry Hudson
27. George Vancouver
28. Spirit and Opportunity
29. The Bathyscaphe Trieste
30. Thomas Cavendish

Slow Connections

My Internet at home is not working. My school connection is snailing along tonight. I will post longer comments later.

Updates:

1. Kimberly met Rebecky last weekend and vice versa. We ate at the Bongo Room. Everyone really likes Kimberly.
2. I began moving things to Chicago.
3. K and I saw Harry Potter "Goblet of Fire" on IMAX.
4. Began new teaching load. Loads of fun watching students type.
5. Finished Bering. Amazing book, though his physician, Steller, ends up becoming the protaganist.
6. IU beat Illinois tonight in a nail-biter.

Fastest Delivery Ever!

Yesterday around 5:00 I called Gateway to get a new hard drive.
Today by the time I got home from school the new hard drive was outside my door.

Can UPS win a land speed award here?

Coolest Explorer

I tried to read Confederacy of Dunces I really tried, but for being a Laugh-Out-Loud comedy, prize-winning book, I've chuckled once, maybe twice, and both of those were internal chuckles. My favorite writer Nicholson Baker said that there is nothing more impressive than to see someone laughing while reading. This book fails to make me look impressive, but I'm half way and I'm not comfortable just putting it down.

I've decided on a new plan: begin reading a nonfiction book while reading snippets of the Dunces. What I didn't bargain for was how rivetting a book about a 1700's Danish turned Russian explorer would be. Vitus Bering, who we all know from The Bering Strait, which we all know seperates Russian from Big Land (America), led a pretty awesome life. By the time he was fifteen he was going on major sailing expeditions. Later in life he went to America and back, then when he was 42 he was assigned to map the coast of Siberia and see if Russian connected to America. It took him three years to go across Russian starting at St. Petersburg. Imagine three winters in Northern Russia! He then spent 3 months sailing in pseudo-explored waters then he had to make it back to give his report. He lost 15 men, many deserters, and over 500 horses.

What does he decide to do next? Start an expedition to do it again but this time with professors, and navigators, and soldiers, and botanists, and over a thousand other people. Imagine the logistical nightmare!

I can't wait to get home tonight to read more.
Please notice the pun in the title if you haven't done so already.
Be impressive laugh out loud.

Powered Down

My computer broke yesterday.

It took an extremely long time to power down and the next time it powered up it would boot to the Windows XP screen then restart in a continuous loop. Eventually, I booted up from the CD into safe mode and moved all my files to my external hard drive. I tried to reformat my hard drive but it was unable to do so. I suspect a bad hard drive. I bought the computer 2 years ago so I think it is still under warranty. Just more hassles and what I assume will be a long phone conversation with tech support until they finally admit that it is broken.

Until then I'll only be able to post on my plan period.

Anthem

I finished Anthem today. Some of my Honors kids are entering the "Write Nice Things about Ayn Rand" essay contest so I agreed to read the book to help them with their scribbling. What a bunch of garbage. Praise the ego, forget collectivism; focus on yourself, lose altruistic motivations.

Answer this Rand junkies:
How can you make yourself better without trying to improve the world around you? Does growth come from within or is it more like in the service of and from the betterment of others? How can others grow when everyone is trying to make themselves the center of the universe?

I guess I'll try once again to try to teach a book I have absolutely no enthusiasm for.