Adventures in Onionism

I finally typed up my comments on the Western Express Adventure Cycling Maps for the AC cartographer who encouraged me to do so. I thought I'd post them here for the benefit of anyone who might google across them, as they're too long to just post in the comments of my original bike trip entry . Here they are. Map 2: Is Pinto Summit 7,376 or 7,351 feet? Is Pancake 6,521 or 6,517 feet? Is Robinson 7,588 or 7,607 feet? [I don't think these minor differences matter in terms of physical effort to get you to the top, but it's just nice to be consistent between sides of the map.] Map 1: The directions for map 6 in Placerville are wrong (and illegal for cyclists). On the detailed map, the red line stops, but the black line appears to direct cyclists onto Route 50 briefly starting at Canal St. (Westbound). The written directions just say "Placerville. See Detail... Merge onto US 50. Matchline." However, at the intersection of Canal St. and Hwy 50, although there is a ...

I just watched The Call of the Wild , a documentary about Chris McCandless, AKA Alexander Supertramp. I also re-watched Into the Wild for comparison. The latter I assume you've all seen and don't need to hear anything about; I liked it just as much the third time as the first. Pretty much the only thing I don't like is the font of the opening titles. Thanks for not blowing it, Spicoli. The Call of the Wild on the other hand is a low-budget independent documentary by film-maker Ron Lamothe who re-traced McCandless' steps. Lamothe was born in 1968, the same year as McCandless, and was obsessed with the story even before Krakauer made it huge. For the movie he went to Emory during graduation, Lake Mead, Slab City, hitch-hiked to Carthage, South Dakota, drove up to Alaska, and hiked to the Magic Bus, getting swept downstream by the Teklanika River and temporarily ruining his camera. There's a fair amount of thoughtful introspection--he interviewed random Emory grads, ...

Fine, the Internet is useful. It's also a huge waste of time and is making you stupid, so I dare you to read this whole post. In other words, I just read Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains . Carr is sometimes credited with starting this discussion with his article "Is Google Making You Stupid?" in The Atlantic a few years ago. The book goes into detail about how the brain is plastic (adaptable) into adulthood, and how using the Internet re-wires your neurons so that you're better at skimming than concentrating or thinking deeply. (When was the last time you made it through an entire NYT Sunday Magazine article online?) Carr cites numerous scientific studies showing that the distracting nature of hypertext and multimedia lead to lower retention and comprehension. These parts of the book are very interesting, just like any Malcom Gladwell-esque collection of interesting scientific findings. The book is also part intellectual his...

I just watched 180° South . Basically, some dudes take a trip to Patagonia, surf, climb mountains, and talk about conservation, and the meaning of life with Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins (the founders of Patagonia and North Face, respectively). It's sort of a re-creation of a trip Chouinard and Tompkins took in 1968 in which they drove south from California to climb Fitz Roy, then made a movie about it called Mountain of Storms (which now I guess I'll have to track down and see). 180° South was good, but I wouldn't say amazing. The surfing and climbing shots are of course beautiful. The soundtrack is very good, but a little too heavy on the Jack Johnson for my tastes. The discussion of dropping out/the meaning of life is fairly simplistic when it's from the point of view of the main narrator, but I think that Chouinard and Tompkins, given their impressive experience as both businessmen, dirtbags, and philanthropic conservationists, had more interesting and nuanced ...

You know what I'm tired of hearing about? I won't even mention it because it's the only thing in the news for the last forever and I am so pissed that there's even a question about whether they should (be allowed to) build it. Of course they should. Other than that: Good runs. A little barefooting (by that I mean VFF), 10 miles in Briones Regional Park (to a part I've never been to), two trips to the EBMUD land near Upper San Leandro Reservoir (again to parts I've never visited before), new bushwhacking and super-secret-singletrack on campus property (following the Lab fence from the High-C, and a track that crosses the creek at the Firetrail parking lot then goes up the hill close to the Connector where you can bomb down to the pool parking lot), a run with Nano down the ridge-trail to Sibley, and 10 miles along the Charles River in Boston from Mass Gen to Harvard and back. So by that I mean I went to Boston and Nano visited (twice). A+A got married and had a v...

Good NYT article about getting rid of your crap and living simply. Except it seems like it's saying that instead of buying fancy stuff you should buy stuff that helps you have cool experiences (preferably social ones). I'd say that's a fuzzy line to draw, and I'd advocate instead for buying pretty much nothing. But part of me does like the claim that buying "equipment like golf clubs and fishing poles" makes you happier as this obviously helps me justify the four Rubbermaid tubs in the corner of the room as well as the 40-pound box of maps. Applied to today's situation, would buying the special tool I need to remove a bike's rear cassette (and eventually a bike stand and a wheel truing stand) and doing the work at home make me happier, or would I be happier riding down to the community workshop and fixing my three broken spokes there? My guess is the latter, since I get to interact with the shop guys, who're pretty remarkable in that they have no ...

Alright Mr. Hope-to-go-on-the-job-market-this-fall, you can make me buy a stupid suit, but you can't make me like it. And you can't make me pay more than $15 for it. And no, unfortunately I'm not running the Headlands Hundred right now. My friend couldn't get off work to pace me and it would have prevented me from accomplishing anything for the better part of four days and possibly weakened to the point where I caught a cold. So instead I got the cold before the race and am spending the better part of four days sick on the couch watching movies: Breathless : sharp, but that's all it's got going for it. Infernal Affairs : I'll take Marty's version with Marky Mark in hospital booties over the original. My Dinner with Andre : One of the better two-hour long conversations about new-agey bulls--t that I've seen. The Straight Story : Heartwarming and beautifully shot (Iowa cornfields). Sometimes the main character either had poor line delivery or acted lik...

This one's for the running nerds. My route : I went over to Marin county today and did a nice 6 hour run on the north side of Mt. Tam on Marin Municipal Water District land. I've hiked and run on Mt. Tam a few times before, but always on the southern/western/Pantoll side. I generally don't like to drive to start a run, but I knew I'd be out long enough today to make it worth it. Traffic through Richmond and over the bridge is generally not that bad, and parking was easy and free, so that's points for Tam over Diablo or anything in the South Bay or on the peninsula. I started at Natalie Greene park above Ross Commons, up Tucker and Indian Rd., down a ridge to Lake Lagunitas, up to Collier springs, on Upper North Side and Benstein to Rock Spring, down the Cataract trail to Alpine Lake, Helen Markt, Kent, Bon Tempe Shadyside, and Fish Gulch back to Phoenix Lake and back to where I started. I liked the area. Not giant trees like in Muir Woods or even the French Trail in...

I just read Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals . At times I found Foer's writing extremely pretentious (e.g., five pages of "Influence/Speechlessness" repeated over and over, consisting of 21,000 letters, which is how many entire animals the average American eats in a lifetime.) But in general I thought it was well written and enjoyable. I think Foer assumes to some degree that the reader agrees with (or at least doesn't virulently oppose) three ideas: factory meat farming is (1) inefficient (it takes from 6 to 26 plant calories to make 1 meat calorie), (2) environmentally horrible ("All told, farmed animals in the United States produce 130 times as much waste as the human population--roughly 87,000 pounds of shit per second . The polluting strength of this shit is 160 times greater than raw municipal sewage.") and (3) extremely cruel (cages are so small animals can't turn around. Watch Meet Your Meat if you need convincing). A few chapters of th...

One of my favorite memories from college was watching Seven Samurai and Magnificent Seven projected on our living room wall and remarking how similar Toshiro Mifune's samurai character was to my buddy Nielsen, just by the goofy look on his face and how he strutted around and was always scratching himself and laughing, but occasionally morphing into alpha male badass when necessary. Tonight and a week ago I watched Yojimbo and Sanjuro , which are absolutely brilliant. Mifune doesn't play the same character--less goofy, more grumpy, but still badass--but the resemblance is still there, and the movies are absolutely must-see. In case you're wondering, I've seen 10.5 Kurosawa films this summer: Rashomon --brilliant Drunken Angel --slow but good Throne of Blood --very good, and the final scene is fantastic, but I didn't quite like it as much as many people do I Live in Fear --slow The Lower Depths --unwatchable (and yet I watched it?) I'm sorry, but I require a pl...

I listened to Scott Zesch's The Captured: A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier . Meh. It's about nine different kids captured by Apaches or Comanches, and I could never keep them straight in my head. It did make me think of one interesting philosophical question, however--there's lots of mention in the book about Native American dislike for typical white European settler working life (which at the time obviously meant farming) and the children had trouble readjusting to settler life once their abduction ended and often never readjusted to the whole working/making money thing. So in what sense, if any, is that "laziness" (how it's referred to by settlers in the book), in what sense is it Native Americans being smarter and knowing that he who dies with the most toys definitely does not win, and when can I start living in a log cabin in a brutally cold place with no facilities and spend all day chopping firewood and growing my own vegetables...