Adventures in Onionism

1. Brawndo . Watch the ads. ( MR ) 2. Nietzsche Family Circus . Good times. ( HP ) 3. Blattman summarizes studies of the awesomeness or possible non-awesomeness of locavorism. 4. My favorite local bookstore closed . ( AL ) I finally finished my first textbook's worth of studying--Robert Cooter's The Strategic Constitution . I also took a two-day course on SAS . It's more powerful than STATA . Sorta like how LaTeX or UNIX are more powerful. Or something.

Hike Naked Day! Unfortunately for me, but fortunately for the rest of you, I won't get to participate this year. How sad.

Sweet. I am going to Burning Man . My low-income ticket application was accepted, so I'll be enjoying commerce-free living and installation art with my Mormon friend and possibly her mom while likely being quite weirded out by a million raving hippies in the desert for a week after my exam and before school starts. Speaking of cavorting with hippies, I spent most of Wednesday watching the football stadium tree-sit sh-t hit the fan. Arborists started cutting down the ropes and structures that the tree-sitters built. The fence was lined with 20 or so police officers, but one dude managed to climb up a telephone pole, and one of his friends on the inside threw him a rope and he managed to make his way inside. One guy got arrested for grabbing the tools of the arborist who was trying to interfere with the guy who was trying to make his way into the trees. Some people shoved the cops arresting him, and the cops responded by cross-checking the shovers with their billy clubs. The c...

We always joke about how a typical Christmas day in my family was one hour in the morning with everybody opening their presents and then everyone spending the rest of the day in their own individual room by themselves reading a book they'd gotten--Dad in the living room, Mom in the basement, and the kids all upstairs in their own rooms. I just got back from a family reunion in Chicago, and apparently we've advanced a little since back in the day. Now we just stick to our own hotel rooms and use our laptops to check e-mail and occasionally instant message each other. Seriously, the reunion was pretty fun. We stayed right downtown, we all tried to be really chill about how much touristy stuff to do, and we only discussed politics or religion when we were in self-selected groups, so everybody got along. Good times. I am horrible with children. I am horrible with children. My conservationist brother-in-law scored us a behind-the-scenes tour at the aquarium . This catfish is hu...

Saturday was National Trails Day , so I went to a trail maintenance project at Redwood Regional Park . Some people recognized me from the Backpacker article. That was weird. Also, I am awesome with a pulaski . Sunday, instead of doing the Mt. Diablo 50K like I'd planned (since I ran there on Tuesday), I went to the city and watched the Escape from Alcatraz triathlon . Most importantly, my coworker juggles fire.

In the past 6 months I've noticed that soundtracks are one of my best sources for discovering music that I like. Not all of it is new or anything, but I guess I haven't been diligent in listening to NPR's All Songs Considered anymore, so movies fill the void. The top 5 most played songs in my iTunes library are Society --Eddie Vedder ( Into the Wild ), All I Want Is You --Barry Louis Polisar ( Juno ), Whole Wide World --Wreckless Eric ( Stranger than Fiction ), A New England --Billy Bragg ( Half Nelson ), and Mad World --Gary Jules ( Donnie Darko ). And when I bought Weezer's Red Album this morning, I also picked up Substance , a Joy Division best-of, since I loved Love Will Tear Us Apart when I re-watched Donnie Darko last week. (As a side note, the Red Album sucks big dong. Just watch the Pork & Beans video twice and call it a day. Or to rub it in that I wasted a bunch of money, read this Pitchfork review . Then, since Pitchfork is annoying, read these fak...

On Tuesday I biked to campus and then ran from there to Mt. Diablo and back. Here's the route. In brief, it's Cal, Tilden, Sibley, Huckleberry, Redwood, EBMUD, Las Trampas, Las Trampas to Diablo Trail, Diablo, Diablo Foothills, Briones to Diablo Trail, Briones Regional Park, Briones Reservoir, EBMUD, Tilden, Cal. It took me one or two minutes over 25 hours. The route I g-mapped says 59 miles, so I'd say it might be around 75. I started at 4 AM with my buddy Zack. He just PhinisheD and is moving next week for a faculty position at UCSB (congrats, and thank you for imparting so much Tilden-knowledge over the last few years), so we decided to get a final crazy run in together. We got to the summit in a decent 11 hours, bought ice cream at the summit gift shop, and turned back. Zack bailed at Walnut Creek BART, and I kept going, but the next several miles of asphalt bike-path through downtown Walnut Creek were killer on the feet. I didn't get much sleep Sunday or...

Just finished reading Ed Abbey's Desert Solitaire . Basically, it's a collection of essays and narratives from a few years in which Abbey worked as a ranger in Arches. He asks the question, "What is the peculiar quality or character of the desert that distinguishes it, in spiritual appeal, from other forms of landscape?" But I find his answer unconvincing. There are some pretty cool travel narratives (being one of the last people to raft the Colorado before Glen Canyon was filled, hiking to the floor of the Maze, etc.), interesting historical tales about hardscrabble locals (miners, ranchers, Mormons) and polemics against industrial tourism (it is Ed Abbey, after all), but I had trouble plowing through the long stretches that were either philosophical mumbo-jumbo or lengthy descriptions of desert scenery. Maybe this is just my innate preference for mountains over desert canyons coming out, but I feel the same way when I read John Muir talking about the Sierras--w...