Adventures in Onionism

Spring Break: I went to Napa Valley for the first time with a couple of high school buddies, got free tastings with somebody else's fancy-pants membership card, and hiked around Bothe-Napa Valley state park. Thursday night I rode the train to Portland. I woke up at 7:00 Friday morning with Mt. Shasta and Black Butte right out the window. Ideally I would've woken up a few minutes earlier and seen Castle Crags in the first light of day, but oh well. I had a great weekend at the PCTA's TrailFest. I enjoyed it a lot more than last year's in Sacto because a whole bunch of hikers live in or close to Portland, so I did Portland-y things like dumpster diving and riding with the North Freak bicycle gang (I was impressed with a triple-decker tall-bike with a barbecue grill welded to it.) I had a great time hanging out with Lint, Chigger, Werewolf, Remy, Anish, L-Rod, Squatch, and a talking yak. Who's the awesomest person ever? Ramsey says you are. Iris near the top o...

Awesome. The Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009 (HR 146) has finally passed the House. I wrote about this when it was S22, but couldn't find much about it when it stalled in the House. Read about it from the Environmental News Service. [thanks, Postholer ] Read about it on Congress Matters. Read the full text on Thomas. Also, on a completely unrelated note, Idris Elba is British, and normally has an obvious accent. Did you know that? His role as Stringer Bell is probably the best accented acting work since Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice . Amazing. Clearly I'm in a good mood thanks to the bill passing. It's almost enough to make me forget that I spent the day reading about LA taking the Owens Valley's water.

Yahoo! made a list of 100 films to see before you die. I've seen 76 of them.

I set a new 50K PR at Pirate's Cove/Rodeo Beach on Saturday, taking 11 minutes off December's time on the same course, finishing in 5:21 this time. I biked the 9.5 miles from my house to BART and BART to Rodeo Beach, ran the course, and was going to ride home in the cold rain across the cold bridge, but after a mile or so I realized I forgot my water bottle and when I went back for it I gladly accepted a ride from somebody with a truck heading through the East Bay. I've been trying to think of what it is I'm doing differently that's making me faster lately. I think it's some combination of (a)living three-tenths of a mile from an awesome trailhead and steep hill, (b)racing more than I ever have before (8 events last year, basically one a month lately) and (c)having hiker-trash friends that are getting into ultras and thinking that I better not get beat by them since I'm the supposed expert. It can't be all (a) because I only moved in January, so it...

I hate my baseball idea. I mean, have you watched a baseball game before? Football is much better. Regardless, instead of sitting around and hating myself all spring break, I'm going to read this stack of 9 papers that I just printed out, along with Cadillac Desert , and when I am done, no one will have thought of this before me, and I will have a f---ing brilliant idea of how to test Demsetz's law with water rights in the American West. Don't ask me to explain what the hell that means--too busy. Woo! Yeh! I can do this! I am totally going to kick research's ass! (In case it's not obvious, this is me psyching myself up.)

To kick off the spring break vacation that I totally don't deserve, I went and saw the movie Examined Life last night. It's 88 minutes of walking around outside with philosophers, listening to them ramble on one at a time (Cornel West, Peter Singer, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Avital Ronell, Michael Hardt, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martha Nussbaum). I was only familiar with the first two, but Zizek is apparently pretty popular these days. His bit is filmed inside a garbage dump, where he claims that ecology is the new ideology, i.e., the new false idea everybody clings to without any proof, and we need to start getting used to a dirty environment and alienating technology, because that's what the future holds. When we love a person we accept their flaws and don't try and change them, so if we say we love nature or love the world, we should accept it, solid waste, pollution, and all. I disagree, but he expresses the idea pretty well. I really liked a few themes than...

Watch my friend's video and vote it funny on funnyordie.com. Also, loosely related, the new fb layout sucks.

Awesome .

Dear Graham Greene, Dude, you're Catholic. I get it already. Sincerely, Garret Just finished Graham Greene's The Quiet American . I read The Heart of the Matter a while ago and really liked it. A friend was surprised that I didn't find the element of Catholic guilt overbearing, and he insisted I'd feel that way if I read more of Greene's stuff. I guess that friend was right. No offense intended (this is a critique of Greene's writing, not Catholicism itself) but if Heart of the Matter was the "Catholics can't commit suicide" book, The Quiet American is the "Catholics can't get divorced" book. It's about an American and an Englishman both in love with the same Vietnamese woman, set during the French colonial collapse. There was one great part where the characters think they're going to die and have a conversation about everything important: love, sex, death, God, and imperialism. Other than that, I wasn't enthralled...

Rarely do I enjoy a book on tape so much that I sit around the house listening to it for hours, but I loved Philip Roth's The Plot Against America , so I did just that. Yes, I do know how to read the old-fashioned way, but it's Sunday so it's a little hard to make a print copy materialize and I wanted to finish it. Anyway, amazing book on many levels. Interesting to me as a former sci-fi geek (why has that been the theme of half my latest entries?) to see alternate history done by an actually good writer. As opposed to the "In the year 2020 the robots took over, this is what the robots looked like" of sci-fi, this was more along the lines of "In the year 2020 the robots took over, this is how it affected my relationship with my brothers." (Of course the book is not about robots but about fascist anti-Semite isolationist Charles Lindbergh beating FDR in the 1940 election.) Interesting as a liberal Bush-hater opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning...

A couple hiking friends have shared this great clip with me. Brings back awesome childhood monster truck TV commercial memories.

I saw Watchmen at 12:01 Thursday night, which I guess was technically Friday. Why? Because that's when you see people dressed up like this. It's getting pretty bad reviews, except for this Salon.com one. I really liked it, but I first read the graphic novel 15-20 years ago and a couple more times since then. I thought the movie was way too gory, which is especially disappointing since Zack Snyder can direct very good straight-up kung-fu fight scenes when he wants. It's probably a little long and slow for the average action-movie fan that doesn't know the story, but it's great if you're already a geek, already know the story, and think that deconstructing the superhero myth (Why do we normally assume people who put on a mask and fight crime would be wonderful people? Wouldn't they be just as messed up as the rest of us, if not worse? And if a Superman did exist, why would he care about the rest of us?) is a worthwhile endeavor. A good statistics com...

Maybe someday I'll be doing oral arguments in front of four unimpressed professors on my committee, but for now I went to the city to watch the Prop 8 oral arguments in front of the California Supreme Court. I went with my roommates, and P. was interviewed by two Spanish-language media outlets, so that was pretty cool. It was interesting in that the judges were all sorts of interrupt-y with the lawyers, and it was pretty darn clear from the get-go what opinions the judges held. Especially Associate Justice Joyce Kennard . I'm not a fan. There were some very interesting points brought up--one justice asking whether the problem isn't just that it's far too easy to amend the constitution (agreed) and another asking whether the state ought to get out of the marriage business altogether, let anybody that wants become legal partners, and let churches decide to discriminate or not without any legal effect (sounds like a plan to me). Unfortunately, great ideas though thes...

I hate the fact that my laptop is the source of both my productivity and my wasted time. If I could just lock the Internet in the cupboard and run regressions with pencil and paper I might actually get a PhD some day. Wondering how far you can get by public transit from any location in a given amount of time? Figure it out with this Transit Shed . [ SF Streetsblog ]

In addition to just plain wanting to see it, I wanted to see Frost/Nixon because it was nominated for best picture Oscar. Using this list of best picture Oscar-nominated films, I've seen every one since 2000 except for The Pianist and generally about half of them since the 60's and one a year before that. My movie list watching began in 1998 when the AFI released their original top 100 films list. I've seen all those and am now working on their updated 10-year anniversary list (which unfortunately means I might have to finally watch Titanic .) I still need to see 8 of the 23 additions to the original list. I'm also working on this list of the top 50 cult films from Entertainment Weekly . I've seen 15 so far, some are among my favorites ( Harold and Maude ), some are bizarre documentaries about Karen Carpenter shot only with Barbie dolls , others are about Jackie O's crazy cat-lady relatives that screech show-tunes and feed raccoons whole loaves of wond...

I saw Frost/Nixon last night. As a film it was highly entertaining and surprisingly very funny, but I walked away from it thinking wistfully about the real-life issues of (1) "That could've been Mike Wallace doing the interview and nailing the guy to the wall!?" (the movie says Wallace was attempting to land an interview at the same time Frost was, but Frost offered to pay more) and (2) remembering that in interviews I've heard about the movie/actual interviews, people not associated with the making of film or the interviews seem to think Frost never really quite "got" Nixon. For example, here's the real video of Nixon with his "There was no cover-up" bulls---. Clearly, he looks flustered and, well, not very believable, but was he called on this? Here's the Fresh Air about the interviews, and here's David Frost on The Daily Show . The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M - Th 11p / 10c Sir David Frost Daily Show Full Episodes Important Th...

I ran the Sequoia 50K yesterday in 6:20, which ranks 3 of 8 in terms of my 50K times. I'm pretty pleased with that, especially since it was after the 10-mile warm-up run from my house to the park and followed by my 10-mile cool-down run home from the park. I lucked out and the weather was nice--I'm glad my IM football game this afternoon will be in the rain instead of the other way around. My knees hurt a tiny bit, enough that I iced them afterward. That hasn't happened in a while; I blame last week's using a pair of old shoes for too long. I listened to some of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America on the iPod, so far it's amazing. I'm running another 50K in three weeks, and Diablo a month after that. That's as far as I've got planned right now, and Diablo's definitely what I'm focusing on. I've done fairly well in 50K's lately, plus every single training run now involves a ridiculously steep climb thanks to my new apartment, ...