Running for the Turkey

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Turkey run bib

Two great things I saw today at the annual Albuquerque Turkey 5k.

The first was a teenage girl, obviously quite fast, no doubt on her high school cross country team, dawdling with her dad. He kept told her to go ahead, that he didn’t want to slow her down, but she just smiled and hung back with him.

The other was another pair, dad and teenage son. At the starting line, I saw them winding a tether around their hands, and I realized the kid was blind. They ran together, obviously had done this a million times, smoothly and easily, and they were fast. They kicked my butt.

I ran pretty fast for an old guy, 24:48, faster than I’ve run it in five years. This is my 11th turkey run, and the little chart I keep of all my races is a healthy record of my gentle physical decline into middle age.

Bibliographies

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I wrote a little DTD of my own over the weekend to use for biblliographic information I’m starting to collect for my book. I needed something to structure the data, and emacs/psgml/DTD seems like a good starting point, since it’s a tool chain I already use and am comfortable with. Perhaps this is a wheel I’m reinventing, but my structure is parsimonious (author, journal, date, title and room for open-ended notes), so it should be easy enough to move it into some other data storage bin if and when I decided on making a change. And thanks to python/libxml/libxslt, dealing with the data is relatively easy.

Suggestions for bibliographic dialects of XML and related software are welcome.

The underlying issue I’m grappling with is a need to adapt my work style. Writing newspaper stories, I can just blunder ahead. Both literaly and metaphorically, I can easily keep up to 10 bits of knowledge in a heap (either in my brain or physically, via notebooks or research papers on my desk) and find whatever I need. Beyond 10, though, it gets increasingly difficult to rummage around and find stuff in a way that’s quick enough to keep up with the writing. I regularly bang up against the limitations of this technique when writing longer newspaper stories. It obviously will fail completely when trying to write a book.

More Anonymous Sources

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So the military has released James Yee, the Guantanamo chaplain who media stories had suggested has become somehow complicit with the Muslim terrorists being held there. But wait! I thought the stories said Yee had become sympathetic with the terrorists, and was keeping classified information on his computer. We’d better go back and check on that, see who it was who mislead us. Oh no! We can’t. The stories were based on information from anonymous sources.

Wildfires

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Spent some time this evening with an old paper by Tom Swetnam and Julio Betancourt on climate variability and its effects on ecosystems in the southwest. It was published in the Journal of Climate in 1998, which I don’t think is on line, though there seems to be a short version here. Reading it years ago marked the first time I really got the linkage between decadal climate variability, drought, and widespread wildfire.

Here’s the part that got my attention:
Continue reading ‘Wildfires’ »

Groundhog Day

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William Grims on leaving the restaurant beat at the New York Times:

The downside is that you have to do that again and again and again. It?s like ?Groundhog Day.? You wake up the next day having eaten a four-star meal, you must go out and eat another four-star meal. And you get up the next day and you have to go out and eat another four-star meal…. And on top of it nobody feels sorry for you. It?s impossible to gain sympathy.

Oh, The Humanity

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From the Nov. 17 Sacramento Bee:

On Oct. 19th, while piloting the super-freighter The Grande Tetons down the Columbia River, Capt. Jackson collapsed from a heart attack and fell on the ship’s control mechanisms, causing the ship to lose control and careen across the river. The massive ship then plowed into the combination Sardine Canning & Dynamite Factory on the wharf resulting in a huge explosion and raining sardines all over the town. A radio announcer nearby was heard to cry out, ‘oh the humanity -‘.

Details here.

Trade

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I don’t really understand free trade issues, so I’ve been reading a bit and ran across this. It’s about a big country in the Americas where people are upset because their nation is losing manufacturing jobs to low-wage workers in other nations.

Eat a Peach

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I love it when I find out something I thought I knew isn’t true.

It’s such a great story – Duane Allman dies crashing his motorcycle into a peach truck, and the boys in the band name the next album Eat a Peach. It’s got such perfect literary depth, too:


Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I was a freshman in college when I read T.S. Eliot, and that whole “eat a peach” line was huge. So to think the good ol’ boys could play guitar like that, with those two driving drummers, and quote Eliot and ride their motorcycles until they died was such a romantic notion.

Turns out it’s just a story stoned college students tell one another. It wasn’t a peach truck. And it wasn’t Eliot.

Sigh.