books

books / cycling / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Lightly browned, but only just barely
23
Dec 20

Lightly browned, but only just barely

I’m going to try something different. Sitting still isn’t getting it done. Maybe moving around will mean something.

So I rode my bicycle through London.

On Zwift, of course. No one is traveling to London right now. People are still trying to get out of there, last I checked. New York is clamping down on visiting Brits, and we’re not allowed anywhere right now either.

But an hour in The Big Smoke gets the heart rate up and loosens all the muscles. It’s a good thing.

I had three little sprints, as you can see in the spikes of the graphic details the watts. Maybe, for a half a second, I could have turned on part of a toaster.

I’m not a big watts guy, because I don’t produce a lot of watts, but maybe I could learn.

Anyway, felt better after an hour on the bike. I’ll have to try that again tomorrow.

Elsewhere, not a lot going on. I am working on a image for Christmas, and I’m looking forward to wrapping up a book this evening. I’ve almost taken a mid-day nap two days in a row. So, that’s the pace of things, which is a lovely, lovely pace of things.

So … look forward to a brief book mention tomorrow. Which reminds me I forget to mention one two back. On Sunday night I finished McCullough’s book on the Wright Brothers, and mentioned it here on Monday. But, before that, at some point last week, I finally finished Richard Hughes’ Reviving The Ancient Faith.

I say finally because I started reading this, according to the traditional receipt bookmark, in 2006. I put it down about a third of the way through. And I never give up on books. It’s also as thorough as can be — and Hughes discusses, effectively and believably, why it isn’t more thorough. It’s an issue of source material, and even still, he churns out a cool 385 pages. The style was the problem. It’s almost a monograph, and it makes for dense reading, but its a serious treatment of serious people and their most serious subject matter.

I wrote a little about one person on Twitter last week.

It’s a good book about the Church of Christ, and it traces its way through the last few hundred years of people trying to figure out the belief system. I got this book wanting to learn about people to compliment what I’ve always learned about the Bible. This book does that, at the broadest level. The top review on Amazon says all the necessary things:

After forty plus years attending the Church of Christ, I am just now hearing the names of Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone. This is a very hard book to read for those of us who were raised Church of Christ and were never told of our origins or early leaders. Your belief that you are a member of the Church founded in 33 AD will be shattered. Here the curtain is pulled back and the leaders, editors, college administrators, who have formed Church of Christ doctrine over the years are exposed. The amount of debate, fighting, and bickering among the leaders through our short history is very disturbing. If you are happy in the Church of Christ and are looking for material to strengthen your faith, this book is not you. If you want to see how the Churches of Christ have developed by reading history that has been hidden away, this book may change you life.

In that light, I suspect it would be a disconcerting read for some. But history isn’t always easily palatable, which is one of the things that can sometimes make it fun.

The human parts are what really make it work. I learned that when I finally got a history teacher in school who made it about those people and emotions, and not just names and dates. And, so, here, one of the most interesting things I read in this book wasn’t even in this book. That Philip Mulkey, Sr. character, the 18th century preacher excommunicated for adultery, perfidy and falsehood, wasn’t in the book. That one description of Nancy Mulkey, near the end of the book, where it finally had the opportunity to talk about women in the church, had the one brief passage, which, in turn, led me to a late-night search which intrigued me. A long family line of preachers. And then Philip Mulkey, Sr. had his difficulties, whatever they really were. A person’s weaknesses and bad choices aren’t automatically amusing, but there’s a personal story there. It’d be worth learning more about, I’d bet.

But Mulkey isn’t in the book I’m wrapping up tonight, which I’ll briefly mention here soon. And he likely won’t be in the one after that, either. I may never know more about him than what a few genealogy websites can tell me.

Makes you think, and wonder, and worry, doesn’t it?

adventures / books / cycling / history / Instagram / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Look! Up in the air!
21
Dec 20

Look! Up in the air!

I got setup on Zwift and a new indoor trainer this weekend, a gift from my lovely bride. Let’s see how bad this can hurt me.

Quite a bit, it turns out. That was a Saturday afternoon introduction ride, and for the next several rides, I’m sure, I’ll try to formulate the way that this style of riding is similar, and completely different, to being on the road. And I can’t wait to try to get better next week!

We had a nice walk on Sunday. The park nearest us was closed for surfacing repairs, said the sign. But the swings were open. And she is excellent at flying through the air.

She got that high because I helped push a little. We agreed that the days of high-altitude ejections was behind us. Knees and age and all that. But you’re always a kid again on a proper swing set.

Speaking of flying through the air, I finished up the David McCullough book, The Wright Brothers, last night. This was certainly one way to end a chapter on a down note.

I enjoy McCullough’s work, and have read about half of his immensely well-regarded catalog. This book seemed a bit rushed in the back-half, however. Having worked through the significant achievement of flight, the book glosses over training of Walter Brookins in Montgomery, Alabama and others elsewhere, the barnstorming and so on. It’s not the authoritative text, and is hardly extant, but it’s a good opening read on the Wright family.

Speaking of up in the sky, saw this cloud on this evening’s walk. I guess I was thinking about antique flight because, in the few moments before I could to a clear view of it, the shape reminded me of a dirigible.

Clouds being some of the most ephemeral and over-observed items available to us, it probably looked like a dozen things to a dozen different sets of eyes while it was lazing about today’s calm sky. What was your bunny was someone else’s turtle and my steampunk airship.

Planetary movement being predictable in ways that clouds are not, we all knew to go outside and look this evening. And, here, we had a good glimpse of the mislabeled Christmas Star.

I was sure, when I first read of the Great Conjuction a month or so ago, that we wouldn’t be able to see it because of the season’s regular dose of cloud cover — almost as predictable as the planets! — but we had a brilliantly clear and cool night.

And if you, like me, wondered if this or a similar planetary conjunction might have been central to the Christmas story, some astronomers who know how to calculate those things did the math and said, maybe, possibly, but also perhaps not.

books / cycling / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on ‘And the chain tension in harmony with the correct gear’
15
Jul 20

‘And the chain tension in harmony with the correct gear’

Today, on the bicycle, I had an interesting ride. It was one of those days where I really understood gearing, anticipating shifts in all of the right places. It wasn’t la volupté, the voluptuousness, by any means. I seldom get that spare moment Jean Bobet described:

Its magic lies in its unexpectedness, its value in its rarity … It is more than a sensation because one’s emotions are involved as well as one’s actions.

The voluptuous pleasure that cycling can give you is delicate, intimate and ephemeral. It arrives, it takes hold of you, sweeps you up and then leaves you again. It is for you alone. It is a combination of speed and ease, force and grace. It is pure happiness.

I didn’t have that, but I was really in tune, understanding, anticipating, the shifting today. I really had it down in a fine and intimate way. One click here, push over the roller and two pops there. It was one of those days where I really understood it, until I completely and immediately forgot it all. One of those days.

(I really need a haircut.)

Probably it means I have been riding those particular roads too much recently. Indeed, as we see by today’s installment of the irregular feature of Barns by Bike:

As I am sure I’ve written here before, this road was also on the first bike route we rode here. We see it a lot. Do you ever wonder what’s inside people’s barns? You have time on a bike to think about such things.

Anyway, some roads are like that. Everyone has their regular routines. You have to work to escape them sometimes. You see la volupté a lot less frequently. Far too little, in fact. But it’s one of the reasons you keep going out there. Just one of them.

books / history / links / Thursday — Comments Off on Things I read
2
Jul 20

Things I read

I subscribe to Bookbub, a service that sends me emails about books I might like. You sign up, pick your genres, and they send you daily links to Kindle books onsale. I’ve gotten some decent books off the list. Certainly each of them have been worth the money I’ve paid. All of the books range from $.99 to $2.99. And aside from the algorithm sometimes wandering around, it’s been a great service. I tell all of the readers I know about it. No one seems as excited by it as I do, which is fine, but it is a mystery.

Two years ago I got an offer for a complete set of James MacGregor Burns’ three-volume masterpiece, “The American Experiment.” It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Club award. It was 4,000 pages of reading. It was on sale for $2.99.

The modern world is weird.

I didn’t buy it, but as I type this, I regret that. I do see a lot of books come back around so if that series shows up again, I’ll jump on it. Though, honestly, that feels more like a bookshelf book than a Kindle book.

Anyway, I generally read the Kindle books at night, which makes it slow going. I stay up until I’m exhausted, then get ready for bed and then read myself to sleep. So it’s a few pages here, a few pages there. Meaning it took a while for me to finish this book.

Wrapped it up last night. Coolidge tells you a lot about the former president you didn’t know, because you don’t know a lot about Coolidge. That’s a product of the man and our educational system, I guess. But here you get a lot of his economic politics, which makes sense given the author. It’s also a complimentary book, perhaps just a tiny bit fawning, which makes sense given that Amity Shlaes is also chair of the board of trustees of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation.

I’m sure it glosses over some of the contemporary criticism. Teapot Dome is in there, and sure, that’s Harding, but it resonated over Coolidge’s administration, but we don’t get what was surely the real heft of it. And perhaps there are other things, too. Which, hey, to a degree that’s fine. I paid $2.14 after tax and it isn’t an exhaustive biography or the most authoritative scholarship, but it’s a decent enough primer. I’d like to find out about the man as anything and there are parts of his life where you’re put in the room.

I love this part. Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone — the vagabonds, they called themselves — have made the pilgrimage to Vermont to see Coolidge before the reelection in 1924. There was the need to give a gift.

Love that line. It’s so New England. Shopworn and perfect.

Coolidge, who was so often a man of few words, probably didn’t say anything like that. Maybe it’s all Shlaes, but the ethos and pathos there say so much. I should make a present-tense version of that and brand it into things I make.

I found photographs of the event. But then I found this:

Ford isn’t whispering to Edison there. The great inventor by then was nearly deaf. You learn in the book that the vagabonds were charmed by Grace Coolidge, the first lady taught at a school for the deaf, and she was helpful with clear speaking and lip reading. The Coolidges had, just a month before, buried their youngest son, at just 16-years-old. And suddenly you’re summering at home and then come these huge leaders of American innovation because campaigns never really stop, even back then.

Here’s more of that footage, if you are inclined.

Having finished Coolidge, I started this book last night.

I mentioned it in a group chat recently and became the butt of many jokes. I’m three or four chapters in and, aside for expounding a little more than necessary on fish, it’s a good read.

Fish was an important part of the Mediterranean diet — still is! And of course this was a staple in England — yep! Northern Europe — sure enough, name a country, we checked! And it’s all in this book. I don’t know if it is going to be the most exhaustive book on salt, but if it isn’t you’ll nevertheless be satisfied. The larger point is how this humble little mineral is a culture shaping, societal forming chemical compound. And so far we’ve only covered China, a bit of India and the first part of selections of Europe, bouncing back and forth across several centuries.

Its Amazon’s best seller in geology. And just look at that list and tell me you wouldn’t dazzle people at parties with the things you could learn from those books. The 19th best seller is about mines in a particular county in Nevada. Number 37? So glad you asked, “Carbonate Reservoir Characterization: An Integrated Approach.”

I’d say that’s the sort of thing you read to get some Stop Bothering Me trivia, but how much of that does one really need?

books / Monday / photo / running / video — Comments Off on Hello, everybody
27
Jan 20

Hello, everybody

How are you? Did you miss me? I would understand if you didn’t. There’s a lot of stuff out there to see and read and watch and hear and do. And if it isn’t in our faces all of the time, we might not even be aware of it’s absence. We are consumerists of the moment. It has probably always been this way, since society reached beyond some arbitrary critical mass of saturation, but let’s blame it on the Internet.

Shame on you, Internet. There’s just so much of you. So much so, that people won’t even notice me. Or, most critically, notice if I’ve taken the day, or many, off.

Which is what I’ve done. It was a nice idea and I’m pleased with having done it. I haven’t written anything here, or on social media, though I have kept up a little. I’ve just done the other things in life. And, I suppose, that means I’ve had a little extra time. So I have accomplished more stuff! Well, yes and no. Mostly no, but also yes, in a pleasing enough manner. I read four books. Two of them were essay collections edited by Edwin Grosvenor, one on The Civil War and one on World War I. These were both good. It was, I said to a friend, like reading well-written longform Wikipedia posts on specific subjects. I also read Al Roker’s story about the 1900 hurricane in Galveston. It was a book that tried to walk a line between people who want to know about weather and, yet, no know nothing about weather. It is a great and tragic and amazing tale, one somehow lost in the modern zeitgeist. But the book could have done with another editing pass or two. Also, I finished a book about the archeology of the battle of the Culloden battlefield. We visited there a few years ago, and the interpretation is well done for casual visitors. Most battlefields are difficult, for me anyway, to visualize and understand. Not so, Culloden. Part of that is because of the work that’s been done to return the hallowed ground to what it looked like in 1746. And that’s because of thoughtful scholarship like that found in this book.

Things that have happened since we spoke last…

I got sick! There were about six days of feeling rough, eight days of eating zinc and vitamin supplements and cough drops like candy, and three of those days where I was laid quite low. After that, another week of idle coughing and throat clearing. But I’m fine now. It was, as you might expect, a fine way to bring in the new year. But, with that out of the way, I’m good to go and be virus-free until about 2026 or so.

I returned to work after the holidays, of course. (As did you! Was your office different? Mine was exactly the same.)

The beginning of a semester brings its own odd pace. Two or three weeks in, as we are now, the rush of the start is over and we slip into the rhythm of the term. But, in addition to that early semester rush, we’ve also been working toward a project that just wrapped last Friday. CBS Sports was here, producing an episode of We Need To Talk. They used our studio, some of our students and talked to and about a lot of the local sports world. This is the only clip they’ve put online so far:

It was a good show, a good experience for the people who took advantage of it. And, most importantly, we can move on to other things.

Let’s catch up on everything else with photographs.

Poseidon is still getting into everything. We try to keep him out of the laundry room, but he’s fast. And he knows precisely what he’s going for, the bag randomly sitting between the dryer and the ironing board:

We’ve had gray skies:

A lot of gray skies:

It’s just positively charming in its perpetual dreariness. (It’s not.)

We’re averaging one day of blue sky a week. But on one particular blue sky day we had a nice sunset:

It should just happen more often, is all.

I’ve been running, of course. Even as I was trying to get over my head cold. And I have had the opportunity to use the running light that The Yankee got me for Christmas:

It casts a giant arc of light. Probably looks weird coming at you, but you don’t miss things on the sidewalk or path or road. And it inadvertently spotlights deer. Now we both have one of these ONE80 lights, and we’re big fans. If you run, or work outside at night, or need something that’s ridiculously bright and long-lasting and hands free, this is the one you want.

Also, it has been cold, of course. But happily, so far this year, it has been an unseasonably mild winter. Even still, cold enough.

Only a few days this month have been really bitter. And that’s plenty for the year, thanks.

I got to run with Venus, which you can see in the twilight here:

The Canada geese are just moving back and forth from one pond to another around here.

They think, this is south enough, I guess. They are mistaken.

There is a running path behind our house. It has little tendrils that extend out to the road in front of us, but otherwise, it just exists unto itself, ending in a fallow field on one end and almost seven-tenths of a mile away it ends in woods. It is one of many paths around the city, and we’ve been told that they’ll one day all be connected, which would be a great feature, if you think about it. The realization of that goal may well be long after we can be bothered to care, or live here. But there is a bit of progress on our local stretch of pedestrian asphalt. The path behind us has been extended a bit, recently. Now it goes back and behind the newer developments on the road. Meanwhile, one of the other paths (which joins the larger network on one end and just … stops … on the other end) is growing toward our little path. One problem: the creek in between. Well, that problem has been solved:

Now those two paths just have to link up.

Also, the ponds recently froze:

Definitely the kind of weather I want to be outside in. Fortunately they haven’t been frozen solid. Here’s a shot of a larger pond, just a day or three later. And if you squint at the fuzzy background in the distance it almost looks like that’s some sort of alpine village, which would be an upgrade.

It has been cold enough for the cats to cuddle:

Phoebe is also doing just fine:

And now we’ll try to get back into some normal routine around here, too.

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