Adventures in Onionism

There's an OK article about ultra-runner Matt Carpenter in the NYT . It claims he is the "grand paladin of high-altitude distance running," which I take issue with, mostly because a "paladin" is a character class in Dungeons & Dragons, not a word you're actually supposed to use in real life, and more importantly not a word I should go around admitting that I know is a word from Dungeons & Dragons. Anyway, here's a link to his running bio , which is probably more informative than the article.

I finished reading Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty . For those who don't know, Everett Ruess was the Christopher McCandless of the Depression era. I'm guessing that definition doesn't help many people; if you know one you know the other. Ruess was a young aspiring artist that became somewhat of a legend after disappearing mysteriously in the canyons of Southern Utah outside the town of Escalante in late 1934, leaving behind his donkeys, a pair of "NEMO 1934" inscriptions, and no sign of his belongings. Krakauer mentions him in Into the Wild and Stegner mentions him in Mormon Country . Vagabond is a collection of Everett's letters home to his family and friends from the years preceding his disappearance. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that this book will only be enjoyed by a subset of those already infected with the wanderlust virus. Everett's letters are left to stand on their own for the most part, without much explanation or analysis. ...

1. Today I mentioned the possibility of doing orals to a professor and was not immediately laughed out of the room. Progress! 2. Norm MacDonald was on Conan again. Hilarity ensued. Watch it. Nothing much else is going on. I'm almost done reading a book on Everett Ruess; the review will follow shortly.

Sometime in the last 24 hours my blog lost its status as the #1 google result for the "garret christensen" search. No, I don't routinely self-google every single day to check, I just happen to have been horribly bored at least twice in the last 24 hours. I was worried I'd eventually lose out to the set decoration assistant for the movie Twilight with my name on imdb, but I'm still ahead of him, and instead I've lost out to one of those dumb take-up-every-single-domain-name-in-the-universe-and-put-up-a-blank-site-with-just-ads-so-we-can-extort-the-person/company-with-this-name-if-they-ever-want-it services. I was hoping to end this post with "oh well, at least my hike naked day photo is still the number one on that search" but I just checked and that's not true either. Woe is me.

After reading a bunch of Wallace Stegner and watching John McCain lose Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado after he said during the campaign that the Colorado River Compact might need to be renegotiated, I decided to read up on the matter. I just finished Norris Hundley's Water and the West: The Colorado River Compact and the Politics of Water in the American West . Normally when I try and think of research ideas I just read the newspaper looking for examples of bad journalism (if there's two of something it's a trend), or I just try and think of arbitrary situations or quirks that lead to natural experiments, from which I could get some sort of easily econometrically identifiable causal estimate or program evaluation. (Title IX causing arbitrary variation in girls' sports participation, catastrophic injury causing arbitrary variation in time a rookie QB rides the bench before starting, etc.) This time I thought I'd pick some large general topic I'm interested i...

Articles in the Chron about running, swimming, and biking endurance athletes from the Bay Area.

Chron columnist Mark Morford wrote an OK column on the Boy Scouts today. I guess I harp on this because it makes me really sad. I'm proud of being an Eagle Scout, and if there were any sort of volunteer organization I would love to get involved with it'd be the Boy Scouts, except I never will because they discriminate against gays and atheists, and I can't try and change them from the inside because I fall into the latter of those two categories. I assume there's a substitute ( Campfire USA? ) but it's not the same. Oh, and BSA has a trademark on the word "scouts," so that complicates matters if you want to form some sort of substitute. If only they had the male analog of one of the Girl Scout slogans: "Every girl, everywhere." On a more positive note, I met my Little Brother for the first time last week, and I started helping people file their taxes this week. I'm excited about both of those things, but that's probably the last you...

This is mostly just a test-post to see if the new feed-burning works. I didn't get into Hardrock . I'm 189th on the waiting list, which means every single current runner would have to drop and then some, so I'm taking that as a big negatory/negatron. On the plus side, the fact that I'm even on the waiting list is proof that my alternative entry (CDT yo-yo as opposed to having finished a major mountainous 100-miler in the past two years) was accepted. I'm still waiting on Wasatch . The drawing is in four days, and based on the number of spots, guaranteeds, and lottery entrants, I think I've got less than a 50% chance of getting it. If I don't get in there, I might have to look into a new race, the DRTE 100 , outside Santa Barbara in October. It'd be easier to get to, I have an ultra-running friend in the area, and I wouldn't have to acclimatize. So what am I going to be doing in July instead of running Hardrock? Let me ignore that question and go...

Apparently it's not cool enough to just let blogger (aka blogspot) do your blog's feed-burning for you; it's much cooler to sign up with feedburner (confusingly, also owned by google). I am not quite sure why, but I think it has something to do with feedburner letting users subscribe via e-mail (the built-in option only allows the owner to add e-mail subscribers) and giving the owner good stats on the number of subscribers. So after this post I'm going to re-direct my feed to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/adventuresinonionism . If you don't use a feed-reader (bloglines.com, reader.google.com, etc.) you should start, but until you do you can mostly ignore this post. If you happen to already subscribe to the old built-in Atom feed (I believe there are a whopping 16 of you), you might need to resubscribe to the new feed using the above link. If you happen to be my tech-savvy friend MRB, I'll happily read any elucidation of the matter you want to post in the comme...