I could not sleep last night, or most of this morning. It was a fitful thing, falling asleep while the birds were rising to their day’s task. Whistle and tweet, and there’s the lightening sky, how neat.
It reminded me of every all-night ever pulled in the history of man. You remember the thrill of the first all-nighter. It was a great feeling, defeating the night, beating the sun to its sense of purpose, only to strangle yourself on snores a few hours later. Youth.
And here you are missing out on four deleted paragraphs devoted to the evolution of the all-nighter’s impact on your body. As you know, you begin to cope less and less with it.
Anyway. The problem with being wide awake at 3 a.m. is your choice of television, which is to say every shopping channel, SportsCenter’s greatest hits from 1983 and infomercials. The most challenging thing on television? The Transformers movie. You can’t fall asleep to that because you’re too busy being annoyed at how bad the thing is.
Headline News, searching for the sweet spot of news and entertainment irrelevance, had a package where Jersey Shore regulars give their insight into the economy. Here’s your tip: two guys from Jersey Shore have an opinion on the economy. Wrestle with that awhile. And then digest their take home message: Italy is in much better shape than the US just now. I refer you to this handy 2010 Economist infographic on the PIIGS. Judge for yourself. Me, I’ve now watched two minutes of people who’s stature in the world has been determined by their appearance on a show with the word Jersey in the title.
I have a strict rule: No Jersey Anything watching. And I have in-laws, lovely, thoughtful, sweet, lightyears beyond the stereotypes, in-laws in New Jersey. But, still.
What you think you know about the London riots is probably understated. This map, if accurate, gives one pause.
Not that you can see it on American television, but, then, that is why we have the Internet. The initial spark was a police shooting, but this now seems to be a bit of youthful discontent, hooliganism, opportunism and the slowest governmental response to a swelling issue in quite some time. Here’s a Sky News reporter, shooting in his neighborhood tonight:
Here’s an overview piece that basically says no one knows why, and no one has done much yet to stop it. It doesn’t seem if there will be any solutions anytime soon, given all of the dynamics in play.
Meanwhile, my little presentation is coming along. It now has a central point. I have also downloaded the appropriate PowerPoint template. Tomorrow words will begin appearing on it, as if by magic.
That rather looked something like a jail cell, didn’t it? It shouldn’t even have appeared monastic, honestly. We’re on the lovely Lewis & Clark campus. Small liberal arts college, some very nice scenery, though we are mostly stuck in the one building, Smith Hall.
We took a little afternoon walk to a nearby circle, sat on a bench and chatted for a minute, just to break up the reading and thinking.
Nearby is the 35-room Tudor-style Frank Manor House, built in the 1920s for Lloyd Frank, of the Meier & Frank department store family. I’m told he donated the land to the college, and today his former home houses the administrative offices.
Elsewhere, I’m writing a literature review. And that’s day three of my writing retreat.
Pedaled 35.8 miles this morning. And, as I told The Yankee (who beat me home today) I bonked so hard I physically felt it. There I was, struggling along, wondering if it was too early to start trying to count the remaining hills in my head when it felt as if a 10 pound weight had been dropped upon each shoulder.
The last six miles were done in sheer defiance.
But it was a lovely day for a ride. Bright, quiet, few cars on the road as I moved away from town before “rush hour” and stayed in the country for most of the ride.
One of my goals is to pass a moving car. Just getting up from a redlight doesn’t count. Waiting for a safe path to turn doesn’t count. I almost had one in the neighborhood once. He was adhering strictly to the speed limit and if I’d only had a little more juice left in my legs I might have made it a compelling race. Thought I had another one today:
Yes, tractors would count. He turned off just before I caught up to him. Chicken. I’d entertained the notion of following him, but he went down a gravel road. I, too, am a chicken. The fun of it was that, had I not slowed to compose a photograph I might have overtaken him.
Tractors would count.
One of the nice parts about the route we took this morning is that much of it is so far out in the middle of nowhere you can go miles without seeing a car. You also have great scenery:
I love that stuff, and this area is full of fields that used to feature working houses or barns that are now storage or little more than rusty, rotting windbreaks. Occasionally you get to see things you aren’t really sure about:
Maybe it isn’t a mirage. Couldn’t say. This was on a stretch of road I’ve pedaled on once before, notable for the calm, quiet pastureland and that there is no store for miles and miles around. You instinctively nurse your water through here, even on a hot July day, because you don’t know when you’ll find a place with more to sell you.
Near that house:
I’m always on the lookout for a flat field with a lone tree and nothing in the background but horizon. The parts of the world I live in are too hilly and too covered in trees to see it, but somewhere on the great plains this place exists. I don’t know why I look for that setting, but I have an urge to take a photograph of it. I look and I look, and I find neat little places like that. You probably wouldn’t even notice that from a car. I speak from experience, having spent countless hours on sleepy country roads driving from one family dream to another family event.
I thought of this on my ride today. I have a list of questions I’m going to ask should I ever get to speak with someone in Management in Heaven. One question is “How close did I get to walking over buried treasure?” Another is “Was my purpose something small, like not letting someone off the phone so that they could not leave their home and narrowly miss a horrible accident? Or was it bigger, like eating all of the Little Debbie snack cakes?” I have a whole list. And now this: “How much time did I spend on little two lane country roads?” I wouldn’t ask that out of despair, at least not anymore, but out of wonder. There can be a great joy that can be found in getting from here to there, even on paths you’ve taken your entire life.
Or on new paths. Today I found myself at an intersection that featured an old country dining restaurant, a decrepit fireworks stand, a Dollar General, a stand-alone ice dispenser and a random country grocery store. I’m going back with a fistful of dollars.
The Yankee took me to lunch today. She wanted salad, so we visited Panera, where they now give you a pager, ask for your social security number, blood type, mother’s maiden name and the lotto numbers you play. When your food is ready they call your name.
I had a brief chat with the guy at the pickup counter.
Are the pagers broken?
“No … “
And that was it. They don’t use them, his voice trailed off as if he hadn’t considered being asked such a question, as if the local franchise had been unsure, all this time, about how to use those big chunks of black plastic. How does the home office know what is happening in all of the various satellites operating under their signage near and far?
I liked Panera better before the prices went up and the cups got tiny, back when there was a little craft on display in their sandwich making process. Today I had warm soup dipped from a warming vase and a sandwich with cold cuts. This will run you about seven bucks. The cups, though, are the thing that get you. The Panera drink glass is now the size of most people’s water cups. The Panera water cup is a diminutive thimble. As if they have a staff member, the guy who’s on this mysterious “Pager Duty” walking the floor making sure no one ordered a water and pumped in a little carbonated lemonade instead.
Give the place credit, though. This particular Panera actually has seating, a concept which is as foreign in most of their restaurants as the pagers. This is a happy accident. This Panera is in a strip mall and was previously a … my memory and the Internet don’t recall what it was, let’s call it a specialty boutique retail store of indistinct origin or business model. They’ve capitalized on the space, and there are plenty of tabletops. In fact the room segments itself nicely, along the front are the college kids, in the back are the silver foxes.
We try to sit in the middle.
Links and stuff: Students at the University of Alabama put this little video together on life after the April tornado. Do check it out:
There’s plenty still to do around the state in recovery. A lot of that has been done so far by way of social media, and no one has been more prominently centered than James Spann. He’s a humble guy who downplays his role, but if ever a meteorologist was a hero before, during and after a storm, he’s your guy. He’s talking here at the recent TedxRedMountain event.
You want pictures? The Atlantic is running a deep photo essay on World War II. Good stuff.
You want words? Brooks Conrad is a baseball player, the kind you might celebrate because he came up the hard way and made it through grit and perseverance. And then there was the night when his life all but came unglued. You don’t have to be a huge baseball fan or even a Braves fan (I’m neither.) for this story.
I seldom get change, and I long ago deleted the Currency ‘N’ You feed from my RSS reader, so I’m behind on this, but I must ask: was there something wrong with the Lincoln Memorial?
Did they lose the carving template? Have to replace the stamp heads at the mint?
Because, surely, one of the greatest monuments a society has to offer wasn’t found unworthy of including on our smallest monetary unit.
Lincoln, himself, seems a bit different. On this particular penny it looks as though he shaved his cheeks, but maintains a goatee. Some of the detail could be polished down, though, so let’s give that a pass. But the Memorial? The Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005 does us a disservice here. Marian Anderson, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Nixon meeting the protestors, a scene for every movie that is set in Washington D.C. Best of all: did you know you can see Lincoln’s statue inside the Memorial on the penny?
No doubt the intention was to give people some reason to be excited about the currency again. (Having some always makes people enthusiastic.) Change is good, people are fickle and get bored. Sure. But, this Captain America castoff?
Seems a lot of people have this view. There are 141 comments there, and four people admitting liking the new shield theme. (A diluted version of the British pound’s redesign.) Not a good percentage, but since no one has any money …
I’ve yet to see any of the 2009 pennies. I want to like them, but everything Fast Company says about them is true:
In honor of Lincoln’s 200th birthday, the penny fell victim to an image series of four cartoony tableaus of Lincoln’s life: his famously non-descript log cabin; a hilariously buff, superhero Lincoln reading on a log; a disproportionately statuesque Lincoln standing in front of the Illinois Capitol Building (which everyone will mistake as the U.S. Capitol); and finally the U.S. Capitol Building itself, bizarrely under construction. As a set, the coins look nothing like each other–“United States of America” appears in different type sizes; “One Cent” in different sizes and arrangements–and individually, they make no sense as a timeline of Lincoln’s life.
After reading that I went through all my coins, just to be sure I didn’t have any of those offending Lincolns. Lots of the old Memorial coins, about two dollars worth, there are all of the state quarters and, somehow, 42 varieties of nickels.
Dimes will be next, then. Maybe they can sell them out to sponsorships. Now there’s an economic stimulus plan no one has considered.
Hey, buddy, can you spare a Google?
Added a Google+ button to the top of the page, moved around the icons and so on. Come visit! Catch up on Twitter. There’ll be something on Facebook. I’m everywhere!
