Republican Debate

I’m not going to live blog this debate. I don’t want to watch the whole thing. But this is too fantastic.

9:10 PM: Romney just hammered Gingrich. Hammered him. Obama could use those exact words against him. Wow. And Gingrich is horrid.

9:13 PM: Santorum sounding sensible here, comparatively at least.

9:15 PM: Paul whacks Gingrich again – says Congress was chaos when he was in charge.

9:18 PM: Why exactly is gold useful as a currency? It’s sort of arbitrary, isn’t it?

9:21 PM: Romney won’t pay more taxes than he owes. But he should owe more.

9:23 PM: Brian Williams doing a good job here. Jen points out that he looks good too.

9:24 PM: Bet Romney’s not bragging about Staples in 5 years. Hashtag ExpectExtinction.

9:25 PM: So, are we looking at Romney and Santorum vs Gingrich and Paul? By the way, I’m thinking that Wall Street’s failure would have been a good thing.

9:27 PM: So all this about lobbyists being bad, does that mean we’re going to get rid of it? Maybe we should make laws against lobbyists?

9:30 PM: Both Romney and Gingrich started off being very civil. Not any more.

9:32 PM: Gingrich just made sense on the insensibility of government medicare policies.

9:38 PM: I am looking forward to when Obama debates whoever comes out of this. I’d like to hear something different. Everybody sounds smart when they’re the only ones presenting an argument.

9:43 PM: Romney sounds like he knows something about money.

9:44 PM: Wait, Fidel Castro isn’t dead?

9:44 PM: OK, fine, Fidel Castro is going to hell. Glad you guys have that figured out.

9:45 PM: We didn’t generate the Arab Spring.

9:46 PM: I like Paul talking about Cuba. Wow, great answer from Ron Paul. Too bad he’s an anarchist.

9:48 PM: Santorum! Axis of Evil! Al Qaeda’s going to nuke us from Cuba! Hehehehe!

9:49 PM: Love the two hawkish young white guys sitting behind Williams.

9:50 PM: I agree, navy ships are going to be around forever. We should make sure they have bayonets too.

9:51 PM: I’m about ready to leave this.

9:53 PM: Ron Paul just pointed out we committed the first act of war against Iran. Holy cow. Ron Paul on foreign policy!

OK, that’s all for me. Going to bed.

The Weather

With my family’s subscription to Accuweather’s Pro site recently lapsing (it was never worth the money, now more than ever), I’ve compiled a set of roughly equivalent links on my site. This is geared toward Maryland, though most of the radars will work well for anywhere if you input a different location.

Meanwhile, if anyone has any other weather resources that they think are useful, pass them my way, I’ll add them.

Mad As Hell, Not Sure Why

Going into an election year, you’ll see a lot of people that are really mad. Remember how mad everyone was at George Bush? They’re that mad a Barack Obama too – not the same people, mostly, but with roughly the same fervor.

Rage should scale with knowledge. If you’re well-informed (by at least one source in addition to Fox News, the Huffington Post, or the Drudge Report) you are allowed to be enraged. If you’re not well-informed, you’re welcome to be mildly annoyed. What really irks me is the people who are ignorant, yet still enraged. If you care so much to whip yourself into a froth over something, at least make sure you have your facts straight. Or at least acknowledge that there are facts, somewhere. Many people could care less about the truth or the opposite perspective in political (or religious or cultural) matters – they believe what they believe and blindly hate whatever isn’t what they believe. I have a hard time supporting such people’s continued existence.

Your Thoughts Here

If this were the olden days, I would have posted on the two sets of thoughts that were percolating in my head over the last few days. First was how the Christmas story could work well as a Hollywood trailer, what with the oppressed mankind groaning for a savior from its cruel master and his iron grip, a child born to save the world, babies slaughtered as his family slips the net, the meteoric rise to power of a new king, his untimely and shocking death, and then the twist that shatters reality as we know it. It’s like Terminator or the Chronicles of Riddick or The Matrix or something. Second was how I’ve been listening to Bing Crosby’s old-time radio broadcasts from the 40s and 50s…and how different American seems from then. And how whenever Garrison Keillor talks, his poignant nostalgia makes me want to cry. His voice tells of his life dripping slowly, slowly away, never to return – and that’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good-looking and the children are all above-average. I can’t stand it, really. You’re born, then you start marching inexorably toward death, realizing it somewhere along the way, then fixating on it eventually as you rewrite your past in your memories.

(By the way, listen to that News From Lake Wobegon podcast above. It’s at the right-ish time, it starts about 30 seconds in.)

I could talk about buying a new camera soon and probably a macro lens with it. I could tell of how Jen worked on Christmas, how we saw Mission Impossible 4 on Christmas Eve, and how Tom Cruise always runs with his hands straight like fan blades. I could talk about Michael’s manic Christmas light drive, where we lurched between parked cars and swung around cul de sacs at roughly highways speeds, all with mutant snowmen chasing us. There’s also physical therapy, where I’ll be in a half hour, or the kid from church who was admirably careful when crossing the street in front of my car, only to dart back without looking when he forgot something. (I missed him).

I could write a lot of those things. I’m not sure that I have time. I’m trying to do a lot of things, almost always, and when I’m not doing those things, I’m staring blankly into a future of doing more things. Even in comparative leisure, I wonder how I ever had time to think coherently. I guess that’s what I did when I ran, then I’d come back and write about it. Huh. Anyway, I’m still working out how I’ll have time for all this. Maybe we’ll hire a maid service. Publish.

Hanna Family Christmas

Some new Hanna Family pictures. They are just the cutest people in the whole damn world. If I ever learn how to sell stock photos, one day you’ll see them in your picture frame at Target.

Death Penalty

The following countries allow the death penalty:
Afghanistan
Antigua and Barbuda
Bahamas
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belarus
Belize
Botswana
Chad
China (People’s Republic)
Comoros
Congo (Democratic Republic)
Cuba
Dominica
Egypt
Equatorial Guinea
Ethiopia
Guinea
Guyana
India
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Jamaica
Japan
Jordan
Kuwait
Lebanon
Lesotho
Libya
Malaysia
Mongolia
Nigeria
North Korea
Oman
Pakistan
Palestinian Authority
Qatar
St. Kitts and Nevis
St. Lucia
St. Vincent and the Grenadines
Saudi Arabia
Sierra Leone
Singapore
Somalia
Sudan
Syria
Taiwan
Thailand
Trinidad and Tobago
Uganda
United Arab Emirates
United States
Vietnam
Yemen
Zimbabwe

Either the civilized world has lost its mind…
source

Step 1

I have a tentative outline in my head for the next year, as it relates to running. It’s hard to visualize running at the moment. My tendon and the nearby vicinity do not feel right. While the knot in the tendon (which led to the surgery) is mostly gone, the entire tendon seems thicker now. It is probably swelling – the wound and area posterior to it are bruised and somewhat irritated. In addition, the scar feels abnormal. Perhaps it’s not abnormal as far as scars such as this go, but it’s abnormal to my standard definitions of what soft tissue is supposed to feel like. I’m ice massaging it (even though it makes me vaguely nauseous to touch it) and keeping it moisturized, in an effort to keep the scar from thickening too much.

All that said, I already hardly need the crutches, a mere 4 days after getting out of the cast. Dr said 1-2 weeks of crutch assisted boot-walking. I’m going to be a good boy here – crutches till Friday, day 8. I’m walking around the house without them, but I’ll continue to use them for the long hauls at work.

Strictly speaking, step 1 is the physical therapy that starts tomorrow. I’ll be doing flexibility stuff for the next four weeks, at which point I’ll start the strengthening process (alongside ditching the boot altogether). We’ll be doing stim on the calf to keep it from atrophying further.

Also part of step 1 is the loss of weight. It’s not as though I’ve ballooned or anything. Racing weight 6 years ago was about 158-159 lbs. I’m 165 now. The plan is to lower my equilibrium weight to 158 by, say, March. If I’m going to do this for real, I’d try to push it to 154-155 by September. I love eating. I’m not going to ask my body to do 90 mpw again, so I’m going to have to cut calories if I’m going to cut lbs in a meaningful way. Still, I feel like each pound under 160 is worth about 5 seconds in the 5K for me. Even if I’m wrong, it doesn’t matter – that’s what I think, and knowing is half the battle.

So, Step 1: PT and weight loss.

A preview: Step 2 is non-running boot camp in late December/early January. Step 3 is exercise bike endurance in January. Step 4 is the slow running ramp (with bike for my real fitness) in February through May. Step 5 is the start of training, basework and aerobic threshold in June-July. Step 6 is speed work and aggression in August-September. September/October, I race, leveraging the natural surge in training from the improvement in the weather.

Or, none of that. But at least I’ll have tried.

On Penn State and The Media

Make believe that I repeat this after every paragraph: if the allegations against Jerry Sandusky are true, he is a criminal and should go to jail. If the allegations against the AD, Tim Curley and the whatever he was, Gary Schultz, are accurate, then they too are criminals and should probably go to jail. If Mike McQueary witnessed Sandusky sodomizing a boy and didn’t go to the police, then he too should be in jail – it doesn’t matter if he reported it to Joe Paterno. Paterno? Let’s take a second’s pause.

As far as I can come up with, there are two culturally untouchable topics in American society. Two wrongs that are so toxic in our culture that the mere implication is ruinous. One is racism. The other is child abuse, particularly child sexual abuse. In these cases, no one is allowed to stand up for the accused, without himself being called a racist or an enabler/pervert/whatever. All involved are immediately condemned, no questions asked, no explanation accepted.

The alleged (and let’s face it, likely true) crimes were committed over the past decade. The alleged incident witnessed by McQueary and reported to Paterno took place 9 years ago. The allegations were revisited this spring. The news broke three days ago…and the mob has enacted a swift justice. Once the media catches wind of something, due process be damned, NOW is the time to prosecute the judgments against all involved. Commentators were tripping over themselves trying to ascend to the pulpit in condemnation of all involved. No one stopped to look at facts, no one waited until people had a chance to explain their side of the story, and 60 years of Joe Paterno’s otherwise sterling reputation was thrown away haphazardly in 3 days. Why such a rush to judgment?

While they might claim otherwise, the media’s assault did not save any victims – the process had already taken care of that (albeit about 12 years too late) before they jumped on board. The media serves the appetites of the American people – we love to be outraged. It’s our national past time. Look at politics, looks at sports, look at abortion, gay marriage, gun rights, whatever. We love being outraged. We invent things to be outraged about if we can find nothing else. And when we’re outraged we beat up Muslims and bomb the hell out of third world countries. We circumvent our constitution and basic civil rights. And, this week, we hold a trial in the court of public opinion instead of in a court of law.

Now, I’m not saying Joe Paterno isn’t wrong (how could I, I don’t know either!). A lot of people are wrong here. The prosecutor was wrong for not pressing charges against Sandusky for an unrelated incident in the late 90s. McQueary, who witnessed the act, was wrong to go to a football coach instead of a police officer – I’m very confused as to why he’s not being publicly crucified too, makes me wonder if maybe I don’t know that whole story with him either. That’s what little we know. One thing we don’t know is what McQueary told Paterno.

Consider these completely hypothetical scenarios:
Scenario 1
McC: Coach…I think I just I saw Sandusky being physical with one of the kids from the youth program in the locker room.
JoePa: That’s disturbing Mike. I’ll go to the AD right away and they’ll investigate. I remember some chatter of this before, we should take this up the ladder, I think the school knows what happened with this last time. I’ve known Jerry for 40 years though, I just…it’s just unbelievable – but I’ll pass it along.

Scenario 2
McC: Coach, I’m freaking out. I just saw Sandusky having sex with a boy in the shower.
JoePa: Are you sure?
McC: Positive.
JoePa: Listen, this will ruin everything we’ve built here. If you ever want to work in this industry again, you better shut your mouth or I will ruin you. I’ll pass it on to Curley, let him take care of it and you keep your mouth shut.

Do you see how those scenarios are very different? Which one happened?

We don’t know.

One is an oversight, a miscommunication, an unfortunate but ALMOST understandable travesty. The other is a despicable crime committed by a selfish, power-drunk tyrant. The truth could literally be anywhere in between. That’s why we have courts, lawyers, juries, and judges – to winnow through the stories and come out with something resembling the truth. The media and the mob are not very good at this.

Remember when we played Pile on Richard Jewell? He was an oafish security guard who spotted a pipe bomb at the Atlanta Olympics and saved many lives. The media, using untruths and assumptions, decided that he was really the bomber and dragged his name through the dirt for days. But…he wasn’t.

These situations are why the court of public opinion should not have the sort of power over people that it does. How many times does the media have to be right about something to make up for the time that it’s wrong? This is why I cannot support the death penalty – if Texas executes 100 guilty men and 1 innocent man, then the blood of the one outweighs justice on the others. This case smoldered and festered for a decade. It broke 3 days ago, and now Paterno is flushed without being given the dignity of even defending himself. Couldn’t they have waited a week to get the facts together? Hadn’t he earned the right to a fair trial, or at least an opportunity to share his side of the story?

People will jump at any opportunity to feel superior to other people. They will search for any excuse to tear down a hero. Maybe they were justified this time, but frankly, the mob, in all of its manifestations, terrifies me. When mobs make mistakes, they cannot be unmade. I don’t know what will come of this investigation, I just know that witch trials are not a good thing, even if they occasionally burn real witches.

Addendum
Since I wondered about Mike McQueary’s free pass, extra details have come out. So, how does it change things for McQueary if he did, in fact, go to police? This is why you need to wait until details come out – now, if this is true, you have to wonder why the police didn’t do anything. Pressure from an almighty football program perhaps? Where’d the pressure come from? Paterno? Curley? The president? Did McQueary tell the police and Paterno, but sugar coat the description to the point that neither took it seriously? Questions remain.

Missed Opportunities

First off, I don’t remember how explicit I was on this…but I had surgery on my left achilles last Wednesday. It feel pretty good now – I’ve been off the sauce since Saturday, and as I type, I’ve had my foot in an un-elevated position for several straight minutes. It’s not even throbbing, exactly. It’s doing well. I’ll have it out of the soft-cast that I have in a week and a half. I’ll be off the crutches sometime after that, and out of the walking boot a couple months later. There’s a decent chance that the left achilles will no longer be my impediment when I try to run again, in, say, January.

In unrelated news, I have missed my calling in life several times over. I’m decent at a lot of the things that I do. But I would have been an excellent military man. I love structure, punctuality, and performing excessive acts of physical prowess. Sorry for the lack of proper parallelism in that list. I’m not gonna fix it, but I know it’s there, just letting you know that I know, if you know what I mean.

Second, I should have been a Native American, circa about 1500. I’d vote Iroquois. I’m not a fan of the Indians from the southern US and Mexico, but the Plains Indians and those form the East Coast, I think those guys really had this world figured out. In fact, if we ever, you know, lose 6.5 billion people along with human civilization, I think we should revert to their lifestyle. It’d be nice to emulate them now, but it’s not exactly plausible in this overpopulated mess that we’ve created over the last few hundred years.

Third, and most realistically, I should have been in Star Fleet. It combines the structure and pursuit of excellence found in the military with flying around on space ships, fighting aliens, and exploring new worlds. What’s not to love? The Borg, maybe.

Fine, Links

Starting here and moving through to here, I haven’t laughed so hard in weeks. Speaking of the Facebook replies, I misread this one last night…

Blank Slate

In a stroke of irony, I had a vague concept for a post, one that I was going to call Blank Slate. But then I couldn’t remember what it was. It’s gone, empty.

I don’t really feel like journaling – never have liked the cataloging of banal events. Stuff happens, good stuff, bad stuff, mostly indifferent stuff – don’t nobody care, and me, I don’t care to write whatever I might be able to dredge up. Adam and Bethany had a baby. That was cool. He was 2 oz short of 11 pounds. They delivered him lathroscopically. I swear that’s a word. There are enough people on Google that also think it’s a word to get some hits – but Google mostly assumes that I mean arthroscopically, and honestly, I might. In either case, I was kidding. It makes no sense to have a baby arthroscopically, or lathroscopically, should that technique exist. Though at one point the nurse came in while we were talking about my surgery, to be consummated in the same hospital next Wednesday. Bethany told her I was having a c-section. I was holding the baby at the time and told her we were putting him back in. It didn’t make a lot of sense, and nobody really laughed. I did inside, but even then, not that enthusiastically.

People keep telling me the surgery is going to be painful. Feet and hands, they warn. I hope it is. I haven’t had a good, dull, extended pain for a while. That’s why I’m having surgery, after all. I can do all kinds of normal things, but I can’t run like I want to run. A few miles into any race, even an easy one, you feel this sickening desperation, this revulsion, contempt of mind directed at your body. Rebellion of body against mind. Revolt of brain against soul. The rupture of millions of alveoli, the tang of blood in your throat. A numbness of the tongue, death of the outer shell of all muscles. And then you stop, but relief doesn’t come right away…it’s like your drowning, and you finally hit bottom and you’re struggling for the surface, then you burst through but you are gasping, gasping. You spend the whole time wondering why you do it. But then when you can’t, you go crazy and eventually someday someone does something stupid like take a hunk of tendon out of your foot and stick it in your calf – it doesn’t sound particularly reasonable, does it?

It’s a matter of identity. I’ve known people who have been willing to nearly kill themselves solely to maintain their identity, and, white collar though I might be, I’m no better.

I’ve decided to write in halting, jarring, ill-formed sentences from now on. I’m sorry if it bothers you. I don’t feel like making five point paragraphs. I like structure in my life, but don’t particularly feel like subjecting myself unnecessarily to grammar. Language is my tool; I am not a slave to it. I’ve been working on processes at work, with someone who constantly makes unilateral decisions but then presents it to me as though I’m allowed to disagree with them, only to swap me down when I do, which I always do. The process is her overlord – but process is a tool. It’s the age old problem of worshiping the creation. Missing the point. Words mean whatever the hell I want them to mean, and sentences bend and fold about my whimsical little finger. It’s not the other way around.

I miss it, whatever it is. I miss it apathetically, but miss it nonetheless.

Word of the Week of the Year

It’s been a while since I’ve had a word of the week. Yesterday, not knowing its meaning, I began saying “perspicuity” compulsively. I wasn’t sure if it was a real world – Jen suggested I really mean promiscuity, which is something entirely different. Thankfully, Google is smart enough to guess what I was trying to spell, and, low and behold, it’s a wonderful word. An obscure way to proclaim clarity! Just what I needed for ironic declarations of my own lucidity!

Here she is.

Occupied Territory

I tried to ignore the whole Occupy Wall Street thing for as long as I could. At first, it seemed like any normal obnoxious protest – the sort that the Tea Party people have patented in the last few years. But longevity has proven to be the protesters biggest advantage. It allows them to leverage the fact that they’re unemployed and have no where else to be. Which is, incidentally, part of what they’re protesting about. It’s a perfect storm.

It’s difficult to ascertain exactly what they want – there is no unified theme other than general discontent, mostly centered on economic matters. By the way, correct me if I’m wrong here. If, for instance, they were to produce a modern day Magna Carta, limiting the rights of the Wall Street oligarchy, what would it say? I think if you asked, you’d get a smattering of suggestions, some contradictory, some absurd, but some reasonable if impossible to implement.

I happen to find it ridiculous that any employee of a company would be paid more than a million dollars a year. It’s different for the owner of a business – if he’s successful, he can’t help it. It’s different for an artist, author or athlete – they rightfully collect royalties for their goods or services. But to have a board of directors conspiring to sequester $200 million dollars of profit within their little holy huddle is sketchy. It’s not a free market, remember. Once you take a federal bail out, once you know that you’re “too big to fail”, you no longer need to invest in a way that ensures your future existence. You can toss around money carelessly. In addition, you can use your money as power, further insulating you for “fair” market pressures. There’s not much free market about voting for your own raises.

But the unions don’t really have it right either. This chart is an egregious example of manipulating statistics. Check out the time scale – instead of witnessing a precipitous drop in pay (which might make people think, “good, we’re fixing it”), you see a slow decline, which instead manipulates people’s opinion toward their point of view. Then, you create a chart like this, the number of workers who can be supported on a CEOs salary. There’s a big problem with the logic that if you paid a CEO less, you’d hire more workers. The quantity of work hasn’t changed when you pay a CEO less. You see, I happen to believe that you are supposed to pay people when they do work. Giving a CEO generate no additional work, so why pay someone to do nothing? That’s why I hate unions, at least one of the many reasons, but that’s a different topic.

So, if you cut CEO pay, where should the money go? Personally, I don’t think that’s the most effective way to spread that money toward more civic duties that gold plated crappers (get it, “duties”?). Let the CEOs make $20 million a year. Just don’t let them get off on $3 million in taxes. Get rid of their loop holes, and raise their income tax. And/Or…never pay another bail out again. Make it a constitutional amendment. It would force the companies to re-invest some of the money they throw away on rich people into making the company more liquid and better able to handle the shocks to the economy that they help to create. It’d make them more cautious so as to prevent such shocks from occurring in the first place, and more ready in case it did happen.

So, you want a Magna Carta?
1) Cap tax deductions for individuals at $100,000 a year. That’s a ton. It hurts people who bring in more than $300,000.
2) Increase the income tax rate to, say, 43% on those earning more than $300,000 a year. By the way, my little family makes a friggin ton of money a year, and we should be paying more taxes on it. So, change the rate for the upper middle class too. Whenever the politicians talk about tax cuts for me, I think “geez guys, shouldn’t you be helping someone who actually needs help?”
3) Write an amendment preventing the government bailout of private corporations.

Perhaps it’s a start. Republicans will never do it – most politicians won’t, given how rich you have to be to get in in the first place. Don’t get me started on that – campaign finance reform is one of the most critical things that needs to happen if we’re ever going to set this straight.

One more note: I feel bad for people who have invested time and money in a college education, and yet can’t get a job. I’m sure many of them had more than 12 hours of frat party infested classes a week, and I’m sorry that those people picked a field that makes them unemployable. When the economy turns, they’ll get snapped up. If you spent your teenage years blowing off responsibility and dodging sage advice, and if you never really caught on that hard work is the way to earn your stripes, I’m pretty sure it’d be unfair to give you handouts. You’re like a poor man’s Freddie Mac. All that to say, I think blind, unjustified entitlement is something that impacts the rich and poor indiscriminately. I find it hard to believe that the protesters are made up of any different moral fiber than those they are protesting against. But whatever, it’s at least going to put the Tea Party on its heels, and that’s a good thing.

Germany Pictures 1

I have something like 120 of these to edit. The first 30ish are out there.

Achilles Last Stand. Again.

The title refers to the epic Led Zeppelin song off the album Presence. It’s not the first time I’ve used it. I’m actually a little surprised that it’s only the second time.

Anyway, sometime toward the end of June in 2006, my lingering achilles tendon problems became debilitating. I took some time off and fought my way back for one more season, before finally giving up around the end of July in 2007. It’s been over 4 years of halting recoveries and ineffective miracle cures.

Today, I ran a “race”. I’ve been running about 8 miles a week since May (I actually calculated it)…so it’s not a race like what I used to do, when I was running, say, 10 times that. I had no delusions of victory, or even a decent time. I was doing it for two reasons: a lot of friends from my group at work were doing it, and I became morbidly curious about how poor my fitness really was. Also, my continued health doesn’t matter. If I can’t walk well tomorrow, it’s no big deal. I’m having surgery on the achilles on 10/26 – today I was on house money.

I figured I could probably run something like 26:00 for the 4-mile race. At this point, my body doesn’t remember how to hurt itself and I’m sure I ran 25:58 precisely because that was my goal – I scaled the pain to the time of what I thought I could do, because doing any more would have required more fortitude than I currently know how to muster. I decided not to race anyone – I went out slow, 6:47, then 6:40. I spent the entire race passing people, closing with two straight 6:16 (with the last mile up the hill) miles. I ran 20:27 on this course in 2005, for what it’s worth. 6 years. That’s a long time.

In the end, there weren’t too many people in front of me, maybe 8 or something like that. It really changed my perspective, I thought I’d be in crowds the entire time, but really, even running as slow as I was, it’s still in kind of rarefied air. Competitive runners are so much faster than non-competitive runners that I can degrade 5 and a half minutes, and still be in the former category. I also always thought that I was faster because of how hard I worked. While I think my body remembers the 25,000 miles I’ve run on it, I also think that this proves that I am just naturally talented. You’d think I would have guessed that after my grandfather was an excellent semi-pro soccer player, my father was a scholarship runner, and after my brother rose to the cusp of Olympic caliber.

The idea is not to stay in this netherworld between fast and slow after the surgery. It will be a long process. I’ll be immobilized for 2 weeks, then a long and gradual set of physical therapy will follow. I hope to be able to ride the exercise bike by sometime in December. Maybe I’ll start to jog, really, truly, slowly and shortly, jog by sometime in January. If all goes to plan, I’d go from nothing to 40 mpw by May – 5 months, that’s a slow ramp by any standard. Then to 60 mpw by July. Then fitness by September.

Who knows. I only get to play this trump once, and I’m not going to cripple myself if that’s what is required to run fast again. If running works, then I’ll keep moving up until I can see how well it works. If not, oh well. But I’m more excited than I have been in years – there’s an actual, honest to goodness chance this might work. And if it doesn’t, at least I will have tried – there will be no more what-ifs.

And next time I show up at a race, I’ll use my real name.

Care for a Drink?

One place where I go to work has no potable water in bathrooms or water fountains (which don’t exist at all; they don’t, after all, make water fountains to spout water that you cannot drink). Instead, we have a Poland Spring-like jug in the lab. Unfortunately, we haven’t had cups for weeks. A few clever individuals wrote their names on the last few plastic cups – so there’s an entire jug of water, but only 5 people can use it.

Today I added my name to one of the guy’s cups. Now instead of just saying Holtz, it says “Holtz + Furst”…the insinuation being that I now also drink out of his cup. I added a quarter of an ounce of water to the cup and left it there, as though I had just finished a fulfilling drink before returning the cup to its original location. I have been laughing either internally or externally since I thought of doing this a few days ago. It’s almost as irrationally hilarious as the three person prayer group scenario. I have no idea why these particular things make me giggle like an idiot, but I cannot help it.

Deutschland

In the olden days, I’d go on vacation and I’d be leaving behind a motley collection of roommates to maintain security around the house. Plus, it wasn’t my house in the first place – whatever went wrong might be a pain in the ass, but not a major problem for me. All that to say, I used to blog about vacations before and while they were happening.

Anyway, we went to Germany on the 8th, and just returned home yesterday. It was pretty fantastic, what with the teutonic efficiency melded seamlessly with the overall quaintness of the place. Instead of running down what we did, I’m going to think of random things that are different in Germany versus here.

1) Mass transportation. They have 80 million people in the size of Montana (which has less than a million people, incidentally) and these people are spaced perfectly for mass transit. There are cities to serve as hubs, while everyone else is condensed in pockets every two miles across the countryside. In the US, we have the hubs (though they are generally much further apart), but then hundreds of miles in between. I thought about it a lot. It wouldn’t work here. I also thought about how I might generate my own country based around the most efficient mass transit concept. I didn’t come up with anything useful. Still, mass transit, a great system for Germany and for those visiting it.

2) Doors. In America, our interior doors are rectangular. They are in Germany too…but the…damnit, I can’t explain it. I’ve been trying to explain it all day. You know where the little latchy thing that’s connected to the knob mates to the door hardware on the frame? That side of the door is not flat. It’s two tiered. German doors (and Austrian, from my 3 days there) have a second tier which sort of interlocks with the door frame. It makes a more insulated connection between the door and the frame. It also whacks the frame when the wind blows. I like American doors – I don’t think the extra complexity is justified, particularly for interior doors.

3) Roads. We drove for a few days. The country roads were glorified driveways, but driveways that went for dozens of kilometers (a few less dozens of miles, for those who need English units) at a time and were meant to support bi-directional traffic each traveling at 60 mph on windy roads. I’m a reasonably aggressive driver – if not angry, at least fast. But in Germany, it was all I could do to avoid ramming oncoming traffic on these super narrow roads. It would have had a hard time speeding if I tried. Plus, everything was manual transmission – I’ve been jabbing at the floor of my Honda ever since we got back. The roads are certainly more charming, and even though I never made it on the autobahn, it was nice to have an 80 mph speed limit on a road that would undoubtedly be a 45 here.

4) Personal culpability. In the States, the entire mindset is built around the idea that your problems are always someone else’s fault, and that someone should be forced to pay restitution toward you somehow. It’s not like that in Germany. It is a rule based society – if you follow the rules, you’re right. If you don’t, you’re wrong. Here, if you’re a victim, you’re right, if not, you’re wrong. I liked the fact that if I walked against the cross-walk signal, a German would mow my ass down without blinking. Damn straight, it was my job to follow the rule. Driving was the same way, also bike riding. You need to take care of yourself, and not rely on the government to cuddle you with it’s oppressive mandates for safety. It’s ironic, because Germany has a much bigger set of civil services than the US…but still more personal freedom, since the man’s not forcing you to wear a helmet while riding a bike.

5) The Exit Man. In the US, Exit signs are marked with the unoriginal “EXIT” text. In Germany, they picture a cartoon man running like hell for the nearest door. In some signs, he’s being chased by a raging inferno. I wanted to find one where he was actually on fire and screaming in agony. I have to say, the Running Man definitely conveys a sense of urgency to me. I approve.

6) Roofing. In Germany, everyone’s house as reddish ceramicish roof tiles. They are built to last 200 years.

7) Longevity. We can’t build stuff in the US as nice as the Germany houses. Remember that they’ve had a 1000 years to iterate through lodging. We had to build everything from scratch a couple hundred years ago, and for most Americans, our ancestors only arrived here a hundred or so years ago, and with NOTHING. German property assets have been accruing for a millennium, with about 800 years of development being accomplished by the very cheap feudal labor system (who emigrated to America once they were supposedly free). It’s no wonder the quality of all houses is so much better – they’ve had a lot longer to develop. At least in the quaint little towns that weren’t decimated by Allied bombs 65 years ago.

8) Pillows. Everywhere I stayed, I got one pillow which essentially disintegrated beneath my head. My head has never been so poorly supported in its pampered life. It’s actually a toss up between my camp pillow and those hotel pillows.

9) Beds. The beds tended to be two twin beds shoved together. It was kind of nice, actually. Each bed had its own set of bedding and its own inertial frame, partially insulating you from the movements of your spouse. Jen has been officially spoiled by the space. I’m going to whack her several times in the middle of the night tonight, until she starts appreciating a standard queen sized bed again. That’s right, and you like it. That or I’ll sleep in the other bedroom.

10) Pork. There’s a lot of it. And pretzels. And don’t get me started on the beer.

Lee Katia

I haven’t chimed in on the two headed Lee-Katia monster yet because none of the models (or forecasters) have any idea what to do with them. Lee is spinning circles around southern Louisiana. People like Doomsday Joe Bastardi continue to say that it’s thisclose to starting to strengthen again, but since he’s been wrong about it for the last 48 hours, I don’t believe that forecast. I continue to not see Lee as as big a threat as people are saying.

As an aside, I’m convinced that some weather forecasters develop a sort of “recent disaster bias”. I’m not sure how to explain it exactly, but if there was recently a disaster (such as Irene), they see the predictions of the storms immediately following as more dire than they would see them if they weren’t just shown an example of a disaster. It’s like watching a violent movie, then visualizing scenes of violence all around you as you walk around in real life. Anyway, I think this effect is tainting people.

The real rub in the forecast is how Lee, a cold front, and Katia interact. Lee is scheduled to merge with the cold front and get pulled Northeast sometime in the next 1-4 days (highly uncertain, see). Some are saying major flooding problem – me, I see the storm as being comparatively dry at the moment. I’m sure we’ll get a few inches of rain, but disagree with Henry “Storm Bias” Margusity’s calls for doom on the scale of Irene. Unless…Katia makes it far enough west and follows Irene’s same track. Now THAT would be a disaster of unprecedented proportions.

Most models show Katia heading west, hitting the front somewhere between NC and 300 miles east of NC, and then bouncing back NE. It all depends on how Lee and the front work together. It’s all very complicated. I don’t think we’ll have a good forecast on it until Thursday. And hopefully I’m out of the country by then.

Cleansing Waters

People do not, generally speaking, keep things because they believe that they will use them again. People keep things because they remind them of their past. Things root people – they prove and validate their existence; they provide a map, a trail, sign posts. Whatever I am now, this is who I was or who I could have been before I was. Time passes, but the past is fixed and immutable.

To some, the thought of an unchangeable past is a millstone about their necks. To others, it is a reminder of dream dashed, hopes left unfulfilled. In either case, there is a steady consistency to the past; it is yours and can never be taken.

I went home to Goshen for about 30 hours on Monday and Tuesday. The water having subsided, I helped move several tons of saturated furniture and assorted boxes – decades of the past, submerged, ruined, erased. Some of it was mine, some my brother’s, some my mothers, but most my father’s.

On one hand, the past is already dead and gone. You can never return to it, you might watch it in hindsight as an observer, but you may never again live in it. On the other, the past is encapsulated in the present. The past lives forever in the person, scribed permanently across time and space, locked and frozen into every scare or line on the brow. The past already happened, died, and decomposed into the present. Physical things might remind one of the past, but they themselves do not own it. The past was not thrown away with the couch and mattress; so long as there is a future, there will always be the past, feeding and anchoring the present.

Irene Whatever Number It Is

I’ve been writing a lot at work, on Twitter and on Facebook regarding the storm. We’re definitely looking at a major deal for the east coast, and I happen to believe that it’s organizing in such a way that it’s going to strengthen over the next 24 hours. It’s 115 mph now (with a central pressure indicating it’s stronger than that) – I feel pretty decent about it getting to 125-130 mph with pressure dropping below 940 mb sometime in the next day. I’ll let you know if I disagree with this forecast at any point.

Irene 4

All right peoples, here’s the latest. First off, check out this article, comparing this track to previous ones. I posted my current forecast in the bench logs at work, but it looks an awful lot like Bob’s path, though I speculated that the eye would hit the Outer Banks (but not the potent eastern eyewall). Otherwise, it looks pretty much dead on. For reference, a couple of days ago, I was suggesting it would be like Floyd’s track.

Last night, I suggested that the NHC’s forecast intensity for nowish was too low. It was – as we speak the storm is 120 mph, though it’s done strengthening for the next 12 or so hours as it goes through an eyewall replacement cycle.

Cutting to the chase. Here in Maryland, I see sustained winds 35-40 mph at times late Saturday night. We might see a gust of as high as 60 mph during some particularly violent rain band. It will otherwise be generally breezy, say 25-30 mph. The models have halted their eastward retreat from the coast – in fact, the latest round, while remaining nearly the same with respect to North Carolina, have actually pulled the track westward back over Rhode Island.

I’m not feeling very confident about the baseball game we’re taking my father to on Saturday night. Would have been fine if we did the day game. The good news is that once it starts raining, we can just leave – it’s not gonna get any better once it goes downhill.

I’ll have more tomorrow – the track will be largely fixed by then.

Addendum:
So much for fixed – everyone has shifted the track 30 miles WEST last night. People like Doomsday Bastardi are calling for a track on a line from NC to Albany, which blasts the entire coast. All of this still puts us here in MD to the west of the center of the storm, on the weaker side, and 100 miles on the weaker side. But it could be 5 mph more vigorous all around than I last mentioned.

Irene 3

First off, Irene is showing a more and more easterly track. I’ve always been east of the official guidance, and the NHC is still lagging. Now, it’s looking like a grazing blow on the Outer Banks, followed by a landfall in Cape Cod. To me, that means not much at all for my location in Maryland.

By the way – the most recent satellite picture shows a pinhole eye emerging. Irene is 90 mph now – I expect a burst of intensification, a major burst, over the next 24 hours. NHC says 110 mph in 24 hours. I’ll go for 125 mph. I think it’s gonna wind up. We’ll see.

Irene 2

Everything is shifting slowly eastward in the track of Irene – in fact, some models are missing the US entirely. The National Hurricane Center is lagging on their forecast a little bit. If they knew about my momentum rule, they’d be able to fix it early. At this point, to miss the United States entirely would put some egg on the faces of all those models who were so bullish for the last week.

Whereas the NHC shows a landfall in the middle of South Carolina (with a track up the east coast that would take the bulk of the remnants over Maryland), I’m thinking it’ll be east of this. I’m thinking Wilmington, NC, re-emerging near Norfolk, with a path that curves along the US coast, skimming easternmost Long Island and making a second landfall on Cape Cod.

Irene is enormous right now, and also quite disorganized. If she can pull herself together, she’ll be a beast – if not in max wind speed, at least in total power. I think she will. I have no reason to doubt the NHC’s assertion of Category 3 – though I’ll say 125+ mph instead of 115 mph. By the time it gets to Cape Cod, I could see it as a 70 mph storm.

Needless to say, this one needs to be watched.

Addendum:
The NHC is now forecasting essentially what I was saying yesterday. Here’s the track, with the only difference being that they make this more of a problem for Maryland than I was, by tracking it further west after landfall. Oh boy…

Backlog Cleared

I have flushed the backlog of photos from the NW. Now, time for an enormous backlog of photos from Deutschland.

Irene is Familiar

I was going to title the post “Me, Myself, and Irene”, but I got an overwhelming sense that I’ve already used that title. I don’t think I have, upon searching for it. I have, however, posted on Irene before. Last time, she went out to sea. They re-use the same names every 7 years, unless the storm causes a sufficient amount of damage or generates enough casualties, at which time they take it out of the rotation. 6 years ago at the end of this month was Katrina, and you can bet that you won’t be seeing that name attached to a hurricane again.

Meanwhile, the tropical season has had a large number of named systems, all of which have been exceptionally weak. In a lot of ways, it seems like a “cook the books” scenario, where the NHC is naming storms to 1) validate their prediction for the yearly total or 2) validate the predictions of some global warming models. Whatever the case, it’s a bit excessive, though only one or two of the storms didn’t pass the eye test, so I won’t protest too much.

As for this year’s Irene…
I see Irene has being a hurricane in a day and a half, right before it smashes into Hispaniola and is disemboweled. The models are shifting the track progressively north, so I think it will emerge as a minimal tropical storm and then slide just north of Cuba. Once it hits the Gulf Stream, all bets are off, particularly if it continues to slide north and picks up a larger stretch of it. I’d predict landfall in Georgia (and most of the models do), but it looks like only 6 hurricanes have done that since 1854, with only two in the 20th century (David in 1979 as the last). It’s a rare track since hurricanes tend to start to curve away near the coast, and it’s tough to curve into that concave shape. I’ll guess that it’s going to be more like Gaston in 2004, at least for the landfall and thereafter. Intensity is anywhere from non-existence to 130 mph, so I won’t venture a guess yet. Those islands can really gut a storm.

Emily the Tropical Disaster

Not in the sense of destructive capacity either. Now tropical depression Emily continues to look ragged and exposed. She’s been ragged, disproportional and weak for her entire trip across the Atlantic and through the Caribbean – and nothing at all has changed.

It’s been a very lackluster tropical season thus far, and there’s no real signs of it heating up. Still, peak season is 5 weeks away, and 5 named systems by now certainly isn’t a bad numerical showing. Once you take into account the cumulative strength of the storms, however, you see that they are all weak, and some could be accused of being declared only to cook the books for climatological purposes. I’m not sure how many of these would have been flagged as a tropical system before the days of satellite, when a storm had to be bad enough to be noticed before it was classified officially.

Open Letter to the Republican Party

I have no republican representative (since I live in Maryland), so I found a nearby one. I’ve sent this to him, my Rep (Sarbanes, a dem), and to Paul Ryan. Here’s the letter:

Rep Bartlett,
As a Maryland resident, it is difficult to find a Republican ear – though you represent a neighboring district, you’re the closest thing I’ve got. It is a difficult time to be a member of the Republican party in general – I would know, I am one. A hardline group of radicals have ridden a surge of populist support into the House. These supposed “Tea Party” members tell people what they want to hear – does anyone, after all, want to pay MORE taxes? Of course not. They have drafted a plan to pigeon hole other Republicans into an inflexible “I will never raise taxes” statement, questioning your very legitimacy as a red-blooded American should you back away from this pledge.

I admit that I do not know your personal record. All I have to say to you is that it is your job to do the right thing for this country, not to win a marketing battle or prove that you’re a “real republican”. People have used such pressure to force all varieties of political and religious leaders into all sorts of reprehensible activities over the course of human history. Tea party members represent a modern day McCarthyism, and are running a budgetary witch trial.

Your job is not to fit in with this mob – though a year ago it looked like this was the only way to win an election. Your job is to do the right thing. I am not a politician. As a reasonable human being, I understand that there is an exception to every rule, that reasonable people can have reasonable disagreements without either side being evil, and that compromise if impossible if one side has adopted a stance that is inflexible in every scenario.

There’s an exception to every rule. Now is the time for BOTH sides to compromise. Now is the time to listen to the voices of reason. The Tea Party members have been the most vocal in the past year or two, but remember that the mob is fickle and those same people that swept them into office will turn against them when their very way of life is threatened by our politicians actions. In the process, you will have alienated another group – the educated and reasonable Americans whose country is being hijacked by the outer fringe.

Good luck, do the right thing, be brave,
Eric Furst

For Paul Ryan’s, I apologized up front for lying to his email pre-screen:

I apologize for lying about my home state. If you were in the Wisconsin state legislature, and not pulling puppet strings for the rest of the country, I would not be contacting you. The truth is, your actions from your corner of Wisconsin impact the rest of us, across the country. Me, I don’t have any Republican representation – I’m from Maryland, between Baltimore and DC – the bluest of the blue.

Then pasted most of the same letter, and ended:

Good luck, do the right thing, be brave – remember that you’ll be running for president some day, and then you really will have to answer to all of us.

The Northwest

Here’s the first chunk of pictures from the Northwest. It’s nice there. For instance, here – not only was this nice looking, but it was also about 62 degrees with a 30 mph wind. A chill breeze, all the time. Ahhh…

Shady Dealings

Think through this with me…I have subscribed to a specific service for the last 7ish years. A few months ago, I changed the credit card that I had on file with them, as my old card was cancelled. In entering the card, I got my name right…I got the expiration date right…but I swapped two numbers – switching the last four in the number from 6769 to 6967 (notionally). Yesterday, I come to learn that the vendor had used that card for my yearly fee and managed to charge someone else, apparently the person with the swapped numbers. That person complained that it was a fraudulent charge, and no one was happy.

So, riddle me this.

First, apparently the person’s card had the same expiration date as mine. That, people, is fishy. The cards were only a couple hundred apart – it’s a 16 digit number, mind you, a couple hundred is a very small portion of it. Do you mean to tell me that credit card companies issue credit card numbers sequentially?? So, if I were to take my card number and add two, I could use my same expiration date and start charging stuff?

No, you say, your name wouldn’t match. Well, it sure as heck didn’t match in this case! I had my name on the account, not Joe Blow’s from 6967. I called the credit card company to see how this was supposed to work. First, she said, she hopes that they don’t issue the numbers sequentially (more on that in a second). Fine, maybe it’s a coincidence, there are really only maybe 36 realistic expiration date options, certainly some will line up. Second, she said, the vendor is supposed to validate the name before making the charge. And then the credit card company is supposed to validate it on their end too. So…how exactly did that charge go through? It’s like boarding an airplane with someone else’s boarding pass!

Back to the number…I have input my credit card number wrong in the past, and the website has immediately informed me of my error. How did it know without spending 30 seconds trying to make the charge? I always assumed that credit cards are like license keys for software – they follow a specific codex, and meet certain criteria to be a valid number. It’s not as though humankind somehow fills up 10 quadrillion credit cards (though we try), no, there are additional constraints on the cards that make an instantaneous validity check possible. Like, for instance, maybe all cards starting with 5466 can be summed to 93…or something like that. If I put in a 7 instead of a 6 somewhere in there, it will sum to 94, and they won’t even have to verify my account. Anyway, I’m surprised that the number I accidentally entered was even valid (though it does pass my rudimentary check). Let alone that it shared my expiration date. And apparently my name.

Shady dealing number two is simpler. We accrue vacation time at work. I have a maximum total accrual of 240 hours, after which point I lose them. Since I wasn’t allowed to take vacation near the holidays this year, the same week that I went on my vacation, I hit the cap. Actually, I should have been 241, though I was stopped early because I pegged it. But then, the same week, I dropped 20 hours of vacation in my time card.

The nice thing for them to do would be to subtract the 20 first, then I’d be a far cry from overflowing the bucket and they could accrue the full amount. The piddly thing would be to add and truncate, then subtract. Guess what they did? It’s like the banks that process the debits to an account and fine for bounced checks, even though the widow’s social security check arrived the same business day as the checks hit the account. Just the little things.

Garden

The latest set of garden pictures, though now at least a month old, are here.

Home Security System

The way that I prevent people from figuring out that I’m no longer home is to not post about it on the internet. So, Jen and I spent the last 10ish days traveling to the Tacoma area, then Eugene, then the Oregon coast, then Tacoma area again, then to Des Moines (eventually), then back to Baltimore today. While more pictures are to follow, I felt it important to shove out the Doorenbos (aka, Doorbendos) wedding photos ASAP. Here they be.

Hypothetically

Stephen has the 5K at US Nationals in Eugene, OR tomorrow night. Looks like they won’t be televising it until 11 PM on the East Coast, so no one will see it. There are two things that could happen.

First, Bernard Lagat is the prohibitive favorite. In national championship races, particularly ones where one runner is the clear favorite, everyone tends to sit back and kick. The most likely scenario is that the race will go out in 4:32 as some poor schlep get stuck up front. Lagat will sit in 3rd and eventually blast everyone.

There’s another good American in the race – Chris Solinski. He is recovering from an injury – if he weren’t he might try to hammer a fast pace and suck the kick out of Lagat. But, with his injury, he has no motivation to do that. He has the time, he just needs to be top three. It’d be foolhardy for him to risk blowing up by running in the lead.

All of this is bad for Stephen, according to me. Stephen is in fantastic shape and this is an awesome field. Unfortunately, if the race is slow, it will be hard for anyone to know this. He could run great and come in 8th…and if the race is slow, it’ll be a slow 8th. No one will be any wiser, and the great opportunity will be lost. It’s very annoying.

Best case? One or more of the few guys that don’t yet have an A standard (13:19) decides that this is the right opportunity to try to get that standard. They go out in 4:16, then 8:32. Steve can run that pace, probably sitting two seconds back in 8:34. Then, close in 4:14, moderate kick home for 13:19. It’s within the realm of possibility, but that’s not how national championships work, and it’s a damn shame.

Solution: offer a $100 for the leader at each 200 meter point through the race. 200 meters is short enough that it won’t be like people are kicking for the bonus at the intermediate locations. It will encourage people to get up front and drive the train. If someone tries to take it through fast, they could get a consolution prize of $1500 or something even if they get eaten up at the end. And the USATF would only be paying $2500 total for the privelege of hosting an event that doesn’t feature our nation’s best runners jogging in front of the 900,000 idiots that waste their sleep seeing people run slowly for 3/4 of the race. They could make a graphic of the top 3 money getters in the race, and update it real time as the race progresses. It doesn’t need to convince everyone to race out front – anybody in a national championships field could pace the rest of them fast through 3000 meters. If three unattached guys decided to duke it out up front trying to cover some of their travel expenses, it would change the complexion of the entire race.

But they won’t do that.

Guilt

I used to take a certain amount of pride in the piles of blog posts that I created. Six days as week for years at a time I’d spout random garbage about something or another. At the moment, I just feel guilty. Moment Moment Moment. I don’t like typing that word. It requires that my hands dance in an awkward manner across the keyboard. It’s not so much an outlier, it just felt funny. Moment. Maybe it’s hitting the n after those two m’s in rapid succession. I don’t know.

Anyway, it’s not exactly that I don’t write anymore. Believe it or not, I write somewhat creatively at work several times a week, and in the sort of format that yields occasionally dozens of pages of blither. It has been scratching the itch. I don’t need to type here, because I do there. And I live there, so it’s only fitting that I do everything there. This Friday, for instance, which is tomorrow, I think, I’ll be working 10 AM to 3 PM…then again midnight to 7 AM. That’s fun.

Speaking of fun – it’s my website, I can change topics however I want, and use dashes to do it – I’ll be on vacation soon. We’re going to Washington, near Tacoma, then going to Eugene, OR to watch Stephen run (he’s in 13:22 shape, I kid you not), then going to the coast for a day (assuming we can borrow someone’s car), then back to Tacoma, then to Des Moines for a wedding. This will be my third time in 4 years that I will have gone to Des Moines. I will have spent something like 8 days of my life (maybe 9!) in Des Moines, IO. It’s unbelievable. And you know, I kind of like it there. Good place if you’re interested in severe weather. Bad place if being too far from an ocean (on the east, preferably, as that’s where ocean’s belong) makes you feel like you’re in a house with no windows.

Later in the year, we’ll be visiting Stephen in Germany, then taking a week to tour around on our own. It’ll be 11 total days. I’ve been to Canada twice – once we hiked in from Glacier NP, the other time we drove to Algonquin PP. Never been anywhere else. I do have an umlauts above the U on my name placard at work. Other than that, I’m not really prepared to interact in a foreign country.

The garden looks good. Zinnia, rudbeckhia, and clematis are owning the side of the house. I guess everything is is fairly lackluster. You know, the dahlia looks decent too. And the rock gardenish part is pretty awesome, as far as I’m concerned. But other than that, lackluster. We have a huge quantity of bugs, which I am attempting to manage organically with neem oil extract and some bacillis stuff. Bugs think my attempts are quaint.

Trite. If you tell someone they, or the things they do, are trite, I’m pretty sure you’re a jerk. I’m not sure if it’s possible to use that word without sounding like a tool. Really, if you want to use that word (accurately, with proper flavoring), then you have a underlying desire to feel superior to the piddling masses with their quaint bug organic bug sprays.

Let this be a lesson to you.

I don’t have a word of the week (and/or month/year) this week, but I have been moderately obsessed with the term “first-order” to describe a swag at something. That can be the word of the week.

Thanks, and good night.

Pictures

Some pictures out of the garden and from graduation, now available here.

Climate Change and Severe Weather

Really quickly. I think that global warming is a real thing. I have no idea how it is impacting worldwide weather. Since it is driven by the physics of a massive system, and follows the laws of thermodynamics in particular, weather is a statistical science.

Strong hurricanes occur, not because of “global warming”, but because they are bound to occur occasionally. Only with vast quantities of data can one discuss anything related to causality. These days, however, when there is an increase in severe weather, people tend to attribute it to Global Warming. There may be some truth in that – more heat means more energy, more energy, one might think, means more high energy storms, like hurricanes and tornadoes. Without getting too much into it (I only go so deep on the topic), there is a lot more to it than a simple 0.5 degrees = 8% more tornadoes. For instance, a warmer arctic means less cold air to mix with the warm air from the gulf, leading to less tornadoes. Or, changes in global temperatures might change global wind patterns. These wind patterns may increase the wind shear over the tropical Atlantic. It is possible that global warming might even decrease the total number of hurricanes – a prediction that has been made by some.

A few quick topics.
1) Never say that a single event is caused by global warming. The world’s most powerful tropical system occurred in 1979, when everyone was talking about global cooling (Typhoon Tip). The 1930s had the most drastic drought in recent history for the United States – to blame Texas droughts on global warming is scientifically irresponsible. If we had 1000 years of data, we could say that “droughts are more likely to happen when the global temperatures are warmer”, but that’s about it. No single event is ever “caused” by global warming. It’s far too complicated a system for that.

2) The event that I’ve heard most often as associated with global warming is extreme rainfall events. Scientists that that global warming will increase the number of flooding rains. Interestingly enough, people attribute major snow falls to global warming as well – the principle is the same, more moisture is evaporated, and it’s still cold enough to fall as snow.

3) Here’s a chart of strong tornado frequency as a function of year. You’ll see that it doesn’t change much. If anything it has decreased. This year will be a major spike in the graph, but it is not attributable to global warming.

4) Here’s a chart of hurricane frequency as a function of year. You cannot trust the total numbers of hurricanes on those charts prior to the 1960s. Before satellite, a storm that was a minimal hurricane for a day in the central Atlantic was not tallied. As we change the way that we capture the data, the numbers are bound to change as well. I believe that “intense” hurricanes (Cat 3 or greater) are more reliable, as they were unmistakably big events in the olden days as well. It seems as though the number of intense hurricanes has increased slightly, as predicted by global climate models. This chart came from here if you want a scale.

I still really don’t trust hurricane numbers from the olden days very much, even big ones.

All of this to say: the tornadoes this year may, statistically, have been exacerbated by global warming. We can speculate that, but the evidence cannot possibly exist to show us that. They were not caused by global warming. This would have been a major outbreak in 1850 as well.

However…
Just because it’s impossible to have enough data to make a claim that the weather has changed for the worse because of global warming doesn’t mean we should ignore it until the results are in. I honestly don’t believe we’ll have enough data for that for another 200 years. It’s WAY too long to wait to do something. I support global warming initiatives because common sense says that polluting less is better than polluting more. The burning of fossil fuels has been around for a while – as a society, we tend to advance our technologies as time passes.

And so on, I have to go back to work.

Get the Ark

Because we’re in for a ton of rain the next few days. At least today. Yikes.

Fortitude Wanes

A couple of nights ago, while lifting weights for the first time in a few weeks, I paused for a minute before my last set on the bench. It was, by the way, also my second set. I only really had a half an hour to do it. Would you like some excuses? I can make you some. One becomes adept at concocting excuses if he allows himself the opportunity to practice.

Anyway, I lay beneath the silver bar, staring up at it. There was a reflection, a mutated, warped one, fuzzy, unrecognizable, but it was me. As we blinked at each other, some innocuous classic rock in the background, I fell into a brief revelry. “Is that me?” I blinked. That lazy guy that rides an exercise bike 4 times a week. Runs maybe once. Does some push-ups and pull-ups. Hasn’t lifted for a month. Is that who I’ve become, lazy, resigned?

I don’t write anymore. I don’t take pictures anymore. I certainly don’t (in my defense, can’t) run anymore. I’d be flattering myself to claim that I have any useful faith anymore. I lay and stared at the bar, wondering what, exactly, I was if not everything that I once thought I was.

All I do is work and recover from work. I come home, sit in front of the computer for 20 minutes, bother Jen for 20 minutes, shift some dirt around in the garden, eat dinner, ride the exercise bike, get tired, go to bed, go to work. Work. Filthy, mandatory, pervasive, work. At all hours, work. In my head whenever I leave it, in my dreams when I sleep, no running to vent it, just work.

I could hardly recognize the oblate, warped image staring back at me in the bar. Close your eyes, breathe out, silence, breathe in pause and out – UP.

Pachysandra

At the end of a whirlwind trip to Connecticut, I traveled to NY to visit my parents and grandmother. She is 80ish now, and just had pneumonia a month ago. We were sitting on her porch talking about how hard it is to keep up her enormous garden. She recently pulled up a swath of pachysandra.

Mom: Wow, that’s tough to pull up.
Nani (grandma), in thick Brooklyn-ish: No, you don’t pull it up – it’s too hard to pull up. You know what you need though? What you need , what you need is an axe.

That’s right, my grandmother uses an axe to chop out pachysandra. Apparently she thinks she has too many axes as well. I mean, how many axes does an 80 year old woman need?

7 Down, 10 or so to Go

Little Stevie Furst just his 13:29.05 for 5K, collecting some good scalps in the process. He was sitting in last with 5 laps to go too – not exactly sure how he pulled that out, but a 7 second PR…Good way to start a season.

Born in the USA

I know we don’t like CNN. I know Anderson Cooper – bad guy, liberal conspirator. Still, I don’t see too many holes in this investigation of Obama’s birth. I’m not the sort of person that enjoys playing the race card – it’s not really mean to play, generally speaking. Still, when it comes to Obama, when it comes to the litany of laws being written to prevent future Manchurian candidates, it really wreaks of racism. The birther controversy is one of the most obnoxious in recent memory. Ignorance is bliss. I always found it amusing how John McCain actually was born outside of the country, but no one dug into that…

Meanwhile, be on the lookout for some severe weather Wednesday-Thursday around Maryland way (and elsewhere). We’re in line for some nasty storms. At least, the potential exists.

Addendum
I woke up this morning (Thursday) halfway through one of the first legitimate uses of the emergency broadcast system that I’ve ever heard. I’m pretty sure it was for York County, PA, but I’d say that we’re in for an interesting day – if not exactly where I live, nearby. Team Hanna was here for dinner last night, and we identified a tornado on radar near Marriotsville – then had it confirmed by the NWS. Hoping to find another example to show Michael, we went to Alabama and saw the monster that tore through Tuscaloosa and Birmingham on radar. Nothing like having and EF4 tornado handy when trying to show an example of a hook echo and the tornadic doppler signature.