Adventures in Onionism

I am looking for a good " Series of tubes " joke about Senator Stevens' indictment. I will be forever grateful to anyone who posts a good one in the comments section.

1. The judge ruled in favor of Cal and its new athletic facility in the tree-sitting case. 2. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against Fish and Wildlife's de-listing of wolves. Good. 3. I listened to James Donovan's A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn . First of all, I must admit that when I got this from the library I only saw the "Bighorn" in the title and thought "Oh cool, the story of Chief Joseph [and the Nez Perce]" but alas, I am retarded. ANYWAY, the book, as the title clearly implies, is a reappraisal of George Armstrong Custer's life and career, the battle with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse of the Sioux at the Battle of the Little Bighorn where ~270 men from the 7th Cavalry, including Custer himself, were killed, and the aftermath. The author's take is that Custer, although sometimes a flamboyant and cocky SOB, was actually not all that bad (he led the first Union cavalry to hold the field against Confederat...

In February when Pacific Coast Trail Runs held their Sequoia 50K trail run in nearby Redwood Regional Park, I decided to run to the start line. This time I ran to and from the race. Total elapsed time was 16 hours: 1/2 hour of biking to get to the hills, 3 hours to get to the start line, 8 hours to run the course, 4 hours to run back to my bike, and 1/2 hour to bike home. My guess is 53 or 54 miles of running and 7 on the bike. Here's the g-map of my route to the start from the last time I did this. Last time, I wasn't quite sure how to get to the start line since the start is in Joaquin Miller city park, and I only had maps for the neighboring Redwood Regional. This time I was prepared, but I didn't give myself quite enough time. I got to the start about 8 minutes late, which wasn't a big deal. But PCTR holds races in these parks three times a year, and I assumed this course was the exact same as last time. But after 3/4 of a mile I realized that the beginnin...

1. Sewage treatment plant to be renamed after President Bush. 2. SF is "most walkable" city in America. ( Chronicle article . Website that does the ranking, where you can enter any US address and get a score, walkscore.com .) Northern Virginia house I grew up in: 20 (out of 100) SoCal place my folks live now: 42 Average place as undergrad: 71 Average of bay-area places: 85 3. I like Al Gore . 4. There was a judge that economists really like in the early to mid 1900's named Learned Hand . Is there any more literally meaningful name than that? The only other one I can think of is Ethiopian marathoner Dire Tune , but that doesn't necessarily have a straightforward connection to distance running. Anybody got any better ones?

My trip to take kids from Oakland backpacking with Big City Mountaineers just got canceled because the partnering youth organization was restructuring and couldn't find kids that wanted to go. This is a huge bummer. The only possible upside is that perhaps I can parlay this newfound study time into enough time to run the Headlands Hundred , which I'd pretty much consigned myself to not doing thanks to it being 8 days before my test. Probably still not the wisest idea in the world, but we'll see how I feel this Saturday when I do a big run. This also solidifies depressing thoughts I've been having lately about how non-profits sometimes aren't run that well. I used to have this instantaneous built-in network of friends wherever I lived thanks to church, but since I don't do that anymore, I've been trying to find some sort of replacement sense of community by volunteering and through outdoorsy groups, and it's been a bit disappointing. I mean, I appli...

1. The new sport of chess-boxing . 2. Transparent toaster . (from MoLT )

Just finished reading Eric Blehm's The Last Season . It's about the disappearance of Randy Morgenson, a 28-year veteran seasonal backcountry Kings Canyon National Park ranger who died on the job in 1996. He was in the process of a divorce and wasn't in a good state of mind when he disappeared, so people weren't certain whether he'd left the mountains on his own, committed suicide, or died an accidental death in the mountains (which ended up being what happened, confirmed when his remains were found five years later). I highly recommend the book to anybody that loves the Sierras or just suffers from wanderlust. Not that it will cure wanderlust--it won't it, it will instead make you think seriously about ways to get the EMT/WFR/law-enforcement credentials you need to become a ranger, but it's a good book. One thing I found interesting was the many original nature writings of Morgenson himself. Morgenson was friends with Ansel Adams and Wallace Stegner, ...

1. I listened to Sean Wilsey's memoir Oh the Glory of it All . You remember how Bill Clinton's autobiography was really bad because he was convinced we all wanted to know the name of everyone he had ever met in his entire life, down to the son of the owner of the Ford dealership in the town he grew up in (Mack McLarty)? And how no one had the balls to tell him that it's ridiculous for even a two-term president to write a 957-page book about themselves? Well, Sean Wilsey had the same problem. The book's only about half that long, but the details are still way too numerous. Sean is the son of two ridiculously wealthy San Franciscans, Pat Montandon and Al Wilsey. His dad left his mom for Dede when Sean was nine (he was also sleeping with Danielle Steele at the time). Dede becomes a horrible witch of a step-mother, Al becomes distant, and Pat becomes manic-depressive and alternates between seriously contemplating suicide and getting short-listed for the Nobel Peace Pr...

The feature article about me and Francis Tapon from the June issue of Backpacker magazine is now available online .

A friend and I went to a neighborhood organization's outdoor screening of the movie Runner's High , about a local non-profit called Students Run Oakland that helps at-risk Oakland kids train for a marathon. It was a good movie, if a little long (but maybe I just thought that because I watched it sitting on the concrete sidewalk) and it seems like a great organization.

Remember how I used to love Milton Friedman? This episode of Family Ties is pretty awesome. You'll know what I mean after about two minutes.

My friend Zack Grossman is on the cover of this month's Outside magazine. It's on newsstands west of the Mississippi only (Harry Connick Jr. gets the Easterners, neither are online yet), the relevant article's about cool cities to live in, and Oakland gets a tiny blurb (never mind that the photo was actually taken in Berkeley). It's the same Corey Rich photo that appeared in Trail Runner magazine in the article about the East Bay a couple years ago, which also doesn't seem to be online. Anyway, there's also a good article (not online yet, but will be on outsideonline.com in a month or so) about the Great Divide Bicycle Race , which I stumbled upon last year on my CDT hike. The article is about last year's race, although I'm not sure I remember any of the people it mentions. This year's race has been won, but there are still a few days before the 25-day limit comes to an end. Yes, I will definitely try and ride this someday.

I should probably just ignore this article about murder on the Appalachian Trail since I dislike it so much, but I guess I'm posting the link mostly out of anger. It's not that the story itself isn't newsworthy, (I'm aware of the fact that I've ardently defended other publications about similar subjects to some of you) it's just the manner in which the story is written, with all these phrases like "But a murderer was in these woods, too. And he brought darkness to the light," and "But sometimes, man feasts here as well. And the killer was hungry," which sound more like the guy doing the voice-overs in a horror movie trailer (and a bad one at that) rather than reporting from the newspaper that brought down a sitting US President. Arg.

I just got back from a week of volunteer trail work in the High Sierra. I took the train to Fresno and worked with the High Sierra Volunteer Trail Crew , and I ended up working on a section of trail about 3 miles south of Silver Pass on the JMT/PCT, doing mostly rock work. I originally signed up for a log-out project on a completely different but nearby section of trail, but was informed at the last minute that trip had been drastically altered in the direction of "LAME," so I just joined the simultaneous Silver Pass project. There were 2 or 3 Forest Service employees with us and 9 volunteers. We hiked in on Saturday, a pack string brought in our tools and food, and we got to work on Sunday. The trail looked like this before. We dug big holes, dropped in big anchor rocks on either side of the trail, put a rock between them as a step, then filled behind with crushed rocked and covered it up with dirt so it looked like this. All of the work was extremely labor intensive, an...

Because I like trains . Not just because I dream of becoming a freight-hopping hobo someday, but because they're more comfortable than the bus and have a smaller carbon footprint than planes. And thanks to funding from the state of California , the train, or rather, Amtrak bus & train combos, can actually get you cool places like Yosemite. (Article link from Schnapp )

This is pretty old news now, but it appears that heat and fires have claimed multiple adventure victims this year: Western States was canceled thanks to California burning to a crisp, and David Horton decided to end his CDT record attempt due to life-threatening desert conditions on the trail in New Mexico. I just got back from a week in the High Sierra (more on that next post) and there was very little snow left. But I heard from a bunch of PCT hikers that Washington is still completely covered in snow, and according to this NYT article , so is Montana. Not a good year to go southbound. A great article about trail-legend Billy Goat was in the LA Times a week or so ago. Also, here are some older articles from local papers about my friends Nitro and Wildflower .

I must admit to being slightly interested in famous people with the last name Christensen. Christiansons can go jump off a bridge for all I care, but Christensens , now those are interesting people. So I went on a miniature little quest to try and find a movie in which "actor" Hayden Christensen does not suck horribly. And by miniature quest I mean that I watched Jumper on my flight home from Chicago (why is it so much easier to watch horrible movies when they're in-flight, on a horrible 4-inch screen?) and then I got Shattered Glass from the library. Surprisingly, Glass , based on the true story of Stephen Glass, a journalist for The New Republic who turned out to be a big fat liar, was actually a pretty good movie. Not because Christensen did a good acting job, but because he did the same thing he's done in every other movie he's been in, which is act like a big baby. Only that's what he was supposed to do, so it actually turned out OK. The other ...

After reading Whale Warriors and a SF Chronicle article about this Berkeley dude with so many solar panels on his house that PG&E owes him something like $700 a year (they don't actually pay him, they just reset his balance to zero at the end of the year) I was thinking of ways I could become even more of a radical. I discovered that thanks to rennet cheese isn't vegetarian, so I thought about becoming vegan instead of just vegetarian. But I'm a really big fan of wool and down. Currently I'm working on some sort of convoluted argument about how wearing petrolium-based polyester is worse for the environment and ends up causing more suffering than wool directly so that I regain some sense of internal consistency. Plus polyester gets smelly quickly. I also discussed the possibility of doing some sort of stop-shopping deal with a few friends of mine. I didn't expect anyone to be down for it, but I think some of them may actually be more excited about it ...