Adventures in Onionism

My race schedule for the coming year is taking shape. Not exactly as I wanted, but it's taking shape. I put in for the lotteries at Hardrock, Massanutten, and Barkley, but didn't get in. So I'm left with: February 23: Febapple Frozen 50 Miler (NJ) May 31: Bryce 100 Miler (UT) June 29: Western States 100 Miler (CA) I'd like to (1) break 24 at States, and (2) do something fun in July. San Juan Solstice is too soon before States. Leadville and the new Telluride Mountain Run seem kind of late (I do have to write a new labor economics course and have a new job market paper for next fall, after all.) This thing in Alaska is seeming very tempting. But what it really means is that I'm an idiot for dilly-dallying and not registering for the Vermont 100 when I had the chance.

What all the cool hipsters are doing.

Recovering after an enjoyable 5 miles in the dark while it was sleeting.

May you all be as happy as this guy during the holidays and the new year. h/t Radiolab

I have no desire to run the Spartathlon , because it is on pavement. Make it that long and on trail and I'll be there.

There weren't horses in the Americas before 1492. I like this painting, but when did the rhinocerouses get brought over?

This is the furthest George has ever gone into water on his own. A meal of fresh Canada Goose was at stake, but he gave up.

Nice 13 or 14 mile runs today along the Anacostia and the National Mall.

Just finished reading Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness by Scott Jurek (with Steve Friedman). While I'm happy that the book has motivated me to run a little (lot) more consistently, I mostly didn't like it, for two reasons. One, the writing was tired and cliched. Two, there were too many pseudo-scientific and psuedo-spiritual claims about the source of his running prowess (e.g. homeopathy, cleansing toxins, etc.). For good measure they mentioned one of the many horrible statistical studies showing that sitting makes people die early (tangent you've heard before: just because you control for smoking and other aspects of lifestyle doesn't mean you get at causality. If there is anything in the world that you did not include in your analysis that is correlated with both sitting and life expectancy, then your estimate of the effect of sitting on life expectancy is incorrect. And if there are plenty of things that you can measure that are correlated ...

A while ago I read, and loved, Peter Heller's book The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet's Largest Mammals ( my review ), so when I heard on Fresh Air that Heller had written post-apocalyptic fiction, I was looking forward to it. I stayed up till 3AM last night finishing it, and I wasn't disappointed. It's perhaps not great literature, and I found Heller's style of incomplete sentences to be mildly annoying, but I guess I'm a sucker for outdoorsy survival stories that are even halfway good. You got in your plane and flew past your point of no return. In a world maybe without any more good fuel. You left a safe haven, a partnership that worked. For a country that is not at all safe, where anyone you meet is most likely going to try to kill you. If not from outright predation then from disease. What the fuck were you thinking? Hig. My dog died, I said. Exactly.

I just read Mark Sundeen's The Man Who Quit Money , about a guy (nicknamed Suelo, see his website or blog ) who quit using money in 2000 and has lived mostly in a cave outside Moab, Utah since then. Suelo doesn't use money, and doesn't really barter either, he mostly just dumpster dives and accepts what is freely given. The book is maybe half about Suelo's spiritual quest that led him to the decision, and half about how he does it in practice and the adventures he's had along the way. Suelo was born in a fundamentalist family, and although now atheist, he is still very spiritual and talks about religion a lot. The pseudo-spiritual stuff wasn't my favorite, but the environmental and anti-corporate reasons behind Suelo's extreme freeganism I found quite interesting, and the author (a liberal environmentalist travel-writer with his own history of dirt-bagging) does a pretty great job of investigating the compromises he makes in his own modern life. He washes ou...

People are pretty stupid in general, and it's impossible to aggregate preferences well, so instead of conservation, or a cap and trade system for carbon emissions, we should just cause lots of problems and then try lots of geoengineering to fix those problems. Pipelines are a good place to start. Specifically, let's build one to move water from the Missouri River to Denver . Zero unintended consequences, guaranteed! If you want a nice economics lesson from this, it's that you people should index more of their contracts. More financial stuff should be tied to inflation rates, and when you sign your state up to divide water with six others for the rest of civilization, you should probably talk in terms of percentage of million acre feet available over some moving average window, not absolute acre feet.

My buddy Krud is making a video about his epic Reno to the Bering Strait trip last summer. Here's his trailer. In other awesomeness, the other day I was reminded of this couple who hiked the length of the Andes. Across The Andes from Gregg Treinish on Vimeo .

I spent the day stretching a bunch of the painting I acquired in Kenya. I just ordered the stretcher bars off frenchcanvas.com, bought a staple gun at the TrueValue down the street, and occasionally used the landlord's right angle square, though a tape measure to test both diagonals would do the trick. I suppose I had to live in East Africa to acquire the art as well. My friend EK is trying to build a library in Busia, Kenya, where she and I once lived at the same time. To raise the funds for the library, she's teamed with some artists she met in Kisumu. I finally met these artists earlier this year when I lived in Kakamega, and I really like the work of one of them. Seth Amollo. So I bought a few of his paintings.  Look for him at the Coca Cola stand by the Impala Park in Kisumu if you happen to be in the neighborhood. Seth Amollo         Fish Ladies (AL bought this one she visited) Women Drawing Water. Man, I should really just wait u...

you should try Gashcat , the most Neutral Milk Hotely thing since Neutral Milk Hotel This one came up randomly in the youtubes, but the video's kind of fun.

Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me , by Harvey Pekar C- I love Harvey Pekar, and I'm pro-Palestine, but this book was disappointing. Mostly a dry history of the land changing hands over the last couple thousand years. The more modern, the more relevant, in my opinion. Coming into the Country , by John McPhee C- Very disappointing. Took me forever to finish. I felt like most of this book was minutia about Alaskan state government, or even worse, local government gossip. I do think the claim that too little of Alaska is privately owned, and that BLM shouldn't be kicking individual homesteaders out of their handmade log cabins, is interesting, but I couldn't care less about Alaska's attempt to relocate the capital, or at least the way McPhee wrote it. I'd recommend that outdoorsy types read book I (traveling the rivers), skip book II entirely (relocating the capital), and start book III (homesteaders mining, trapping, hunting, and surviving hard winters) but q...

"We do not believe that God ever raised up a Prophet to christianize a world by political schemes and intrigue. It is not the way God captivates the heart of the unbeliever; but on the contrary, by preaching truth in its own native simplicity." Nauvoo Expositor , June 7, 1844 (The words of the opposition newspaper whose printing press Joseph Smith had destroyed, leading directly to his arrest and murder by a mob three weeks later.) My having read Fawn Brodie's No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet (and the glowing review to follow) may upset Mormon friends or family, but I sincerely hope not. Although I think that the large majority of the book is likely very near to the truth, I think the really fascinating part is just being exposed to the nuances of a completely different take on events. Having grown up Mormon, I was quite familiar with most of the characters and basic events surrounding the origins of the Mormon church (mostly from...