If you had to give up one of your five senses, which one would it be?
Oh ho, this is a difficult one. Lessee, we're talking about:
- Taste
- Touch
- Sight
- Hearing
- Smell
Process of elimination will provide the easiest means of attack. And so: sight is out--to impractical to lose. Hearing is out--life without music is unworkable. Touch is out--far too much rides on touch for simple survival (is this a sharp thing or a dull thing*?) Smell is also key for survival, while taste is less so. Taste it is then: I could live without taste, as long as my eyes and ears are fed.
Glad I got THAT sorted out.
*Note: you are correct, this blog post IS in fact a dull thing. Good work!
Total elapsed time of my first sprint-distance triathlon: 2:34.
Total time I believe I can take off if I master open water swimming, work on hill climbing, and get to my goal running pace of 10min/mile (and also, find out how to fix my bike chain if it become lodged between the bottom bracket and the chain ring while climbing a big-ass hill): 1 hour
I am doing my first triathlon on May 17--the Trek Women's Tri. The distances are wee: 1/2 mile swim, 12 mile bike, 3.1 mile run. So I was feeling quite plucky about it. Until last weekend.
I went out to Decker Lake on Saturday for a swim clinic to get introduced to open water siwmming. I have been in open water--lakes and such--but only swam in a random, recreational fashion. Not trying to get anywhere in particular, and usually ending up on a floatie of some kind, all reclined and relaxed. Trying to actually GET somewhere specific, as quickly as possible, in cold water with a decent current, is a whole and woefully different story. I was fairly demoralized, although it was comforting to hear the other women in the group express the same concerns afterward.
While I was there, I decided to go drive the bike course, so I knew what to expect. Here's what I did not expect: it is the very same course I ran last December for the Decker Challenge Half-Marathon. Why is it called the Decker Challenge? The HILLS, the big fucking HILLS. I trained all season last fall on hills for the Decker, and had a blast--I even PRed. Now, I knew we were doing a 12-mile bike in the same vicinity as the Decker Challenge but had conveniently decided it could not possibly be the same course. The Trek Women's is supposed to be a beginner's triathlon--surely they wouldn't expect us to bike up those fucking hills? OH BUT THEY DO. I love tackling a hill on foot but avoid them on my bike. Just don't see how I would be able to keep from rolling backwards.
Also, I have not gone on any 12-mile rides in prep for this event. Stupid, I know, but there it is. Been counting on bike commuting a couple times a week to prepare me (and that's only a 6-mile ride). l live in a super-hilly neighborhood but plan my route to bus/drive past the hills before I hop on the bike.
So I was freaking out pretty bad and decided this morning to call in sick (I said I had a case of rickets, but it should clear up by noon) and go for a long ride. Did 14.2 miles in all, and tried to corner and downhill more aggressively. (I'm a total wienie on the bike, riding the brakes on downhills and around corners.) I kept thinking of that scene in Bring It On where the smartass cheerleader tells her brother (in cheer-speak) to "Be. Agressive. B. E. Aggressive" in pursuing Kirsten Dunst's character. That helped, a lot, actually. It also helped that I had XTC's "Life Begins at the Hop" in my head, because how can you be tense with that song in your head?
Actually feeling fairly fantastic right now. I did have to walk my bike up one of the hills on my home but made it up another nasty one. Most of the ride (10.2 miles) was on the Hike&Bike Trail, so I was riding through gravel quite a bit, requiring greater exertion. Today's really the last day I have to work out HARD before I start next week's taper, and I'm quite pleased with today's ride. Nothing like doing a lot of sweating to feel lighter and cleaner, somehow.
I have some photos of the Decker route I took during last December's half-marathon. What a blast that was! I PRed to the tune of 12 minutes faster than any previous half-marathon time. AWESOMENESS.
My kindly boyfriend brought me a bag of ice afterward, so I could take the customary post-endurance-event ice bath. It IS as unpleasant as it sounds, yes, but it is also helps prevent soreness to a miraculous extent. The boyfriend stayed downstairs while I took my bath (evidently, wanting to see me naked does not include "and also shivering and griping about the self-inflicted cold") but Steve The Cat wandered in and kept me company during the required 15 minutes.
I am addicted to Wonkette.com, partly because the commenters make me laugh with their incisive wit and willingness to offend in the name of righteous snark. Today, though, is clearly going to be an emotional day for everyone, as evidenced by one commenter.
Okay, so I was doing fine. I drove to the polling place, found a spot to park, and got in the “A-L” line. There was about a half an hour wait, so I bought a cup of coffee from the kids who had ingeniously set up a refreshment table by the front doors of the elementary school. The couple in front of me had a very happy baby. It was all good.
When I finally got to the front of the line, I gave my address and received my ballot. I walked over to the voting table, picked up my Sharpie, and filled in the bubbles—just like on the S.A.T. At that point, I was almost home free. I walked to the back of the gym, put my ballot into the scantron machine, returned my privacy folder, and accepted, with thanks, my sticker.
Then it was out the door and down the hallway. The line was long—very long, especially for Connecticut, which is not a swing state by any stretch of the imagination. There were the doors. If I could just get through the doors and to my car…
Suddenly, a fifty-year-old African American woman merged next to me. She had just voted, too, and she had an “Obama/Biden” button on her jacket. I held the door open for her as we went outside. It was 6:33 A.M.
As we walked in step down the sidewalk in front of the school, she turned to me. “Thank the Lord,” she said. “The sun’s coming up!”
I got into my car and wept.
Yes we can. And, yes, I did.
What did you think about the Vice Presidential debate?
I think we may well be doomed.
See Matt Taibbi's article, Mad Dog Palin.
Hammel on Trial at the Cactus Cafe; February 14, 2006
Hammel was magnificent: a crazy, sweaty, foul-mouthed, 50-y.o. bald man. He kept addressing the crowd affectionately as "you fuckers." He stated that he was nostalgic for assassinations, that nobody got assassinated anymore, possibly due to a lack of 3-name individuals (John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman, etc.). To remedy this deficiency, he wondered aloud, perhaps David Lee Roth or Ronnie James Dio could be persuaded to join in. "Maybe if we armed Yo Yo Ma."
Continuing the assassination theme, later he sang a sold about Pat Robertson, the chorus of which was "With your brain on the cross behind you." He led the crowd in about 8 iterations of this chorus, with a massive grin on his face the whole time. "This is fucking great!" he exclaimed in between the fourth and fifth repetition. He sang a song about jerking off only to thoughts of his wife, as well as other romantic songs. Having a child has really mellowed him. He told many many funny stories, and my face hurt from laughing by the end of the 2 hours.
My friend the Mathemagician posited the following troubling development with an associate of his:
As the Mathemagician, I have lived my life under the assumption that the world operated under both the mathematical and philosophical principles of transitivity. You know the transitive property. Really, you do.
It's the property that says, "If A implies B, and B implies C, then A implies C". Here's an example:
A = It is raining
B = Water is on the ground
C = The ground is wetSo, if it is raining, then water is on the ground. If water is on the ground, then the ground is wet…And by the transitive property, we all know that if it is raining, then the ground is wet. A implies C. Makes sense, right?
Here's where the Mathemagician gets bamboozled. Let's assign new values to A, B, and C:
A = a habitually drunk guy who is disrespectful towards women and pees on things when he's drunk
B = a guy for whom no woman should have amorous intent
C = a guy who does not have a girlfriendOkay, let's verify this. Does A imply B? Yeah. Does B imply C? Uh huh. So, obviously, A implies C. It's a no-brainer! I mean, come on! Oh, wait. It doesn't. Nope, it doesn't. Huh? The Mathemagician is confused. I don't want her to get hurt.
I have Word Fu wisdom for you, Mathemagician.
Several additional characters, the alphabet apocrypha, exist between the letters B and C. You don't hear these letters in That Song, and you won't see these characters in elementary school rooms, as their deletion from the alphabet proper caused huge dissent and armed conflict in the alphabetic community back in the year [redacted]. You only learn about them in grad school, and only if you take Professor [redacted]'s class at [redacted] U.
The first character, [redacted], looks a great deal like the Batman symbol and signifies "but I'm sure all he needs is the love of a good woman, and I'm just that woman; he simply hasn't met anyone as special as me--he told me so." The reason for its original removal from the alphabet: a group of neutral parties called bullshit on that.
The second character, [redacted], bears no small resemblance to the Chuck E. Cheese logo and signifies “you know, he hurts. He drinks because he hurts. And because he’s passionate. And intense. He peed on my checkbook, cat, and favorite green cotton sweater because he’s so intensely passionate, and in pain. There’s something so tragic and romantic about a tortured genius—my tortured genius.” This letter was stricken from the alphabet because no one wanted to go over to its house because it smelled of stale beer, urine, feet, and last week’s King Ranch Casserole.
The third character, [redacted], technically had no pronunciation, although many refer to it as Prince, and signifies, simply, “overwhelmingly hot sex.” According to a Dr. Roger Nelson, a scholar who served as Secretary to the Great Alphabetic Conclave of [redacted], this character’s fate was already hanging in the balance on the fateful day it refused to attend the Conclave to speak on its own behalf. In his seminal work on alphabet apocrypha—It’s As Simple as A, B, [redacted], [redacted], [redacted], C—he relates that he called the character on that day to remind him of Conclave: “It just picked up the phone, dropped it on the floor, [redacted] [redacted], was all I heard.”
The existence of these invisible characters explains the breakdown in transitive logic. Because these rogue alphabandits work unseen and outside the linear, causal systems on which logic relies, their effect is all the more sinister. Mathemagicians would be wise to include these incalculable effects in their calculations, or find themselves, as they say, bamboozled.
HTH! J
The kid and I made, at long last, a pilgramage to Hey Cupcake!, a cupcake vendor working out of the very shiniest AirStream trailer on South Congress. I read about Hey Cupcake! in the paper a few months ago; it's a new business that began selling to students on the UT campus on weekday mornings but is now doing brisk business in a much larger trailer down south. I try to avoid South Congress these days, since we lost our apartment in that area and I'm still sad about that. Still...there were cupcakes involved and we had some extra time today, so off we went.
I took some photos as we stood in line:
Shiny! Also, to have a successful business in Austin, you must have a plexi- or fiberglass representation of your business atop the establishment. Hey Cupcake! takes no chances:
We were not, as a point of fact, underwater at the time. Today was cloudy and my camera phone was confused and shivering, because this is April and why is it 63 degrees out? Crazy cold front. Anyway, the menu is equally simple and compelling:
The kid opted for the Whipper Snapper treatment, in which a shot of whip cream is injected into the center of the cupcake (for free!). These people do NOT fuck around. I had a Vanilla Dream, which I dispatched rapidly to pastry heaven, while the kid had a Double Dose (chocolate/chocolate icing) that was so rich she couldn't even finish it. And I couldn't even finish it for her, so rich was it. Unheard of! So, yeah, we spent $5 on 2 cupcakes (with tip) but damn, they were some intense pastries. The Michael Jackson, by the way, is one of the upper tier, $2.50 cupcakes, with cream cheese on top, chocolate on the bottom. Here's the kid in the midst of her initial attack upon the whipper-snappered Double Dose:
Not missing a trick, even the napkin dispensers are included in the branding (pictured here with both of our cupcakes):
In honor of coming off Effexor (so far, so good), this month's IMP mix has prescription Rx theme. And I cannot BELIEVE I forgot to include Ween's tribute to Zoloft. Sadly, I have already put the mix in the mail. Ah well, I'll include it here to soothe my completionist heart.
1. (These Are The) Good Old Days Socalled 5:17
2. Antidepressant Lloyd Cole 2:40
3. Sold! Enon 2:22
4. Don't Buy the Realistic Spoon 3:55
5. Fixing My Brain Brad Sucks 3:58
6. Fluoxetine The Arts And Sciences 3:38
7. Giving Up Windsor For The Derby 6:53
8. Lithium The Polyphonic Spree 5:24
9. Mother's Little Helper The Rolling Stones 2:48
10. My Little Heart The Postmarks 1:30
11. None Shall Pass Aesop Rock 4:03
12. Pablo Picasso Citizen Cope 3:43
13. Pink Champagne Venus Hum 4:49
14. A Rent Boy Goes Down Apostle Of Hustle 4:08
15. The Same Boy You've Always Known The White Stripes 3:10
16. Scatterbrain (As Dead As Leaves) Radiohead 3:22
17. So Long, Serotonin Tyler Jakes 4:19
18. Wake Up! Les Savy Fav 3:22
