photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on The place where summer and fall meet
18
Sep 19

The place where summer and fall meet

This was a little spot I stumbled into over the weekend at the race upstate. The leaves are turning up there, the buzzing things are still singing their chorus of eternal summer:

God bless ’em.

This was in a little spot between the road and nothing. From a car you wouldn’t even notice this, looking for all the world like just a little place they scooped the soil up to mound for the road above. In this little clump of trees, not even a tree line, really, there was a little bridge:

And of course, the accompanying 4-wheeler trail.

If you walked over that bridge, crossing the thick mud patch below where the rain and road drainage inevitably gathered, you’d see a little house and barn off in the distance about 150 yards away. It looked charming enough. Who knows what prompted them to build that little footbridge, aside from muddy boots.

I’m telling myself these yellowed because they got snapped off in a storm, not because they knew what was coming:

I should enjoy the fall, it is a beautiful fall we get here, but I can’t get over the feeling of: Again?

movies / photo / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off on I’ve seen this one! (Star Trek edition)
17
Sep 19

I’ve seen this one! (Star Trek edition)

I went to the movies this weekend:

And I wrote about it here. Some excerpts:

I know I saw Wrath of Khan in theaters, but unless I saw it in a re-release I was six-years-old. And while I saw all the subsequent movies, even the lesser ones, in the theater, and I’ve seen The Motion Picture several times, I’d never seen this on the big screen:

While The Motion Picture is still a slogging sort of rough cut of a film, it has its place and it was worth seeing. There’s a group, Fathom Events putting nostalgic movies in the big theaters on slow days. So there’s often a throwback on Tuesdays and Sundays. This was the first I’ve heard of it, but I’ll be back for other select other films in the future. There was even a little mini-documentary before the movie — probably something produced to run before a DVD or some banquet event. Though this is a problem:

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo / running / swimming / video — Comments Off on A fast race
16
Sep 19

A fast race

It’s difficult to put a full day of racing, and the many weeks of training beforehand, into less than 60 seconds that you shot on a phone. So I won’t try. But this, nevertheless, was Saturday, a half Iron. That’s a 1.2-mile swim, a 56-mile ride and a 13.1-mile run to you and me:

The Yankee won her age group, cause she’s awesome:

Her goggles broke in the water, so she swam with one eye, and was the fifth woman out of the water. Her knee was aggravating her on the run so she wisely took it easy. What we’re saying here is that she can go faster if she needs to.

adventures / food / Friday / photo — Comments Off on Half parmesan pretzels and a pie, please
13
Sep 19

Half parmesan pretzels and a pie, please

When I was in college — ahh, sweet college — there came this new restaurant downtown. All the drinkers liked it because they had a bajillion beers on tap. I forget the number, somewhere between 27 and 72, I’m sure. Truly it was impressive for the time, and probably still is today.

It was a pizza joint, and it turned out to be a really good pizza joint. You can have the taps, bring be the pretzels:

Ate there a lot in school. And then we moved back there years later and ate there almost weekly. And by then there were more franchises of Mellow Mushroom opened up nearby. So I could enjoy it several places.

And now I live in a college town with exceedingly average pizza. It’s a bizarre phenomena, really. The old Pizza Hut is now a Mexican restaurant, El Ranchero Mexican, which kept the iconic Hut silhouette and gets good reviews online. The consensus best pizza in town is on par with a good day at the Hut way back when. In a college town. Isn’t that sad?

So to get good pizza, to get Mellow Mushroom, we have to go an hour-and-a-half up the road, to the north side of Indianapolis. If you think I’m not trying to find reasons to go there regularly, or how to enlist students from that neck of the woods to bring me some back when they return from home you’re wrong.

So very wrong.

My social media campaign to get Mellow Mushroom to open a store here and clean up is also underway.

cycling / history / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on Ancient Greek Wikipedia, not as accurate as today’s
12
Sep 19

Ancient Greek Wikipedia, not as accurate as today’s

I have a late-ish night in the studio, which means there was time for a bike ride this morning. So I set out on a casual 20-miler that featured my first dropped chain in quite some time.

It was no problem. Cruise to a safe stop, hop off, slip a finger inside the chain to move it off the drive train and then line it all back up on the gearing. It meant maybe 30 seconds to stop, a greasy finger or two and a nice little, funny embarrassment. How do you drop a chain going downhill, anyway?

Who cares? No one cares. I don’t either. It was a bike ride. You get quiet little moments like this:

And you get … not exactly the sunrise, but that moment after the inevitability of planetary rotation when the sun says “No, really, I mean it.” The part that’s more about the tree line than a primal miracle.

Some Hellenistic astronomer, Eratosthenes maybe, figured this stuff out 2,260 years ago. He calculated the planet’s circumference based on shadows. He figured out the earth’s axis and had some early Leap Day ideas. He created the first map of the known world. He was a mathematician, a geographer, a poet and music theorist. He was the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria and pretty much invented geography.

You wonder what he would have done if he had the Internet.

We have this simplistic image in our heads about people who didn’t know about the earth orbiting the sun and the rotation of the planet finding the sun chasing the moon across the sky, and the terror of each night: What if it doesn’t come back? And you can find out all about the Greeks and the scholars who followed them refining and revising the data. Today you just accept what your favorite weather app tells you will be the precise sun up and sun down moments. (Time is a construct.)

But spare a thought for those first regular people, after Erathosthenes and his math friends figured this stuff out. Imagine how they felt, what they must have thought, when they heard the “news.”

And that’s just the Greeks. There’s another 93 gods and goddesses related to the sun on Wikipedia alone.

We have this simplistic image in our heads about people who don’t know that Wikipedia is still incomplete and the terror of actual research: What if I have to go to a non-crowd sourced site? You wonder what Erathothenes would have done with Wikipedia. He died in his 80s. A common version of the story is that he’d gone blind, so he couldn’t read and see the world behind him and so he starved himself to death in his depression. But we don’t really know. Wikipedia is quite certain about it. So maybe its a good thing he didn’t have a dial up modem.

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