Adventures in Onionism

Class of '04: Me, Nacho, WC, Too Obtuse, and WS Monty, among others Class of '09. Look closely. Nitro sporting a ball-hat. I had an awesome weekend at the ADZPCTKO at Lake Morena Campground with Ducky, Firefly, Freefall, Gazelle, Hawkeye, Heinz, Jug, Leap Year, Mags, Mattress, multiple Monties, Nacho, Nano, Nitro, Pro-Deal, Scarlet, Shrek, Skittles, Sly, So Far, Splash and her blister Seymour, Squatch, Suge, Tattoo Joe, Tomato, Weather Carrot, Wildflower, Yogi, and everyone else whose name is not popping into my head immediately in alphabetical order. It was a little more chill than last year, probably because it was freezing at night so it seemed like a huge ordeal to leave the campfire where I was already hanging out with Nitro and her mantourage to go watch hiking videos or go to the cabins and party. Also, have you tried using a laptop outside in the sun? It doesn't work that well. I did do a 20-mile run from the lake to Kitchen Creek road and back on Friday, howeve...

Orals (AKA qualifying exam AKA advancing to candidacy) three weeks from today? Yikes! That seems like the last day everyone will be in town. Holy crap. And I'm heading out tomorrow for the weekend at ADZPCTKO. I guess I'll just have to be a stick in the mud running regressions while everyone else is having a grand old time.

You know what the lamest part about running ultras in extreme heat is? The shower afterward. You spend all day sweating out salt and chafing in as many as four places (anus, thighs, nipples, armpits) and then you hobble your way into in the shower, and the water washes all the salt on you into the open wounds. It's like the Macaulay Culkin aftershave scene in Home Alone , only with more expletives. I ran the Diablo 50-Miler for the fifth consecutive year yesterday, and managed to take over 50 minutes off my previous best time, finishing in 12:39, despite it being 90 degrees. The race almost immediately goes on singletrack, creating a long singe-file line of people trudging up the steep slope. After climbing straight to the top of Eagle Peak, the single track drops off steeply. Steep technical downhills are my favorite part of running and probably my relative strength, in that I love to bomb down stuff where other people might pick out individual steps. So this year, for the...

iTunes 8.1 broke syncing with 2nd generation iPod Shuffles (the ones that're postage-stamp sized.) It's been long enough that it seems like they're not fixing it on purpose to encourage people to buy the new 3rd generation Shuffle. Here's a story about it. It's not bigotry like Amazon's recent flub, but maybe this story can help the meme spread.

Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics is the worst book ever. If ever an author wrote a book just to prove to the world that she's smarter (and can try and pose for a more glamorous author photo ) than everyone else, this is it. It's everything I don't like about Scott Stapp, Ayn Rand, Susan Jacoby, and Peggy Noonan all rolled into one. The characters are arrogant, hypocritical, disingenuous caricatures of real people, and the book is verbose for verbosity's sake--nearly every paragraph has a citation to some obscure (often non-existent) reference encyclopedia or literary work that does nothing to advance the story. The book is about a smart high school girl (Blue Van Meer) who looks down on everyone else and hangs out with the rich/cool kids who similarly look down on everyone else, including Blue. Then after 400 pages, nothing has happened, so plot devices drop from the sky, main characters turn out to be domestic terrorists, and the book ends wi...

I finished reading Eric Ryback's The High Adventures of Eric Ryback . Ryback thru-hiked the PCT as an eighteen year-old in 1971. It's a crazy experience to be trudging across an endless high-altitude snowfield, getting cold and wet from postholing up to your hips every third step, cursing the day you were born and screaming angry expletives at the top of your lungs until your voice is gone, and yet, at the end of they day, loving it all and thinking there's nowhere you'd rather be and nothing you'd rather be doing, and Ryback does the best job of capturing that beautiful dichotomy of any hiking book I've read. Man on Wire is a great happiness-inducing live-life-to-the-fullest movie. Season four of The Wire is good, but I think there are too many characters at this point, so we spend all our time just keeping up with everyone 30 seconds at a time instead of seeing characters in-depth. Freaks and Geeks is amazing, and makes me wish I hadn't waited till grad...