Hard to find a better place to run than the Specific Northwest. Moderate temps, beautiful flora and fauna, undulating roads and trails. What more could one want besides more daylight and sunshine in the winter?
There are two types of runners, creatures of habit who run the same out and back every time, and higher life forms, like myself, who know “Diversity is the spice of life”. That said, since the move a year ago, I’ve backslidden a bit in that I do a similar route about half the time. Three miles to Priest Point Park along Boston Harbor Rd. Once there, loop the lower road and head home for 6.2, loop the upper road and head home for 6.4, or like last week, loop the upper road and the 1 mile wooded trail for 7.4. The bike lane on BH Rd is about 8′ wide and I routinely see deer.
Hard to get my stretching in afterwards when the labradude insists on cuddling.
Correction: This should’ve been titled “My Standard Run”. Unlike my brother who has a 1,000+ day running streak going, I’m only running 3x/week. Also, for all the geezer triathlete readers looking for an edge, I’m having skin cancer surgery Friday morn and the doc has banned me from swimming for 3 weeks. But as a former guv of CA once said, “I’ll be back.”
Addendum: There’s nothing worse than just having worked up a lather 2.5 miles in and then having to stop while otters cross the road. Kidding. I haven’t seen an otter in year one. Maybe the sign is just local character.
“The new status symbol,” according to a doctor at UC Berkeley, “is the single most effective thing you can do to reset your brain and body.” Can you guess? Need another clue?
“For years, studies upon studies have shown how bad sleep weakens the immune system, impairs learning and memory, contributes to depression and other mood and mental disorders, as well as obesity, diabetes, cancer and an early death.”
“New research carried out online has found that 59% of 28,113 respondents preferred to eat chocolate rabbits starting with the ears, 33% indicated that they had no starting point preference, and 4% indicated that they started with the tail or feet.”
I’m concerned that 41% of you don’t know the proper way to eat a chocolate rabbit. Anything besides the ears is just wrong.
“Researchers conducting the online search also found increased reports of confectionary rabbit auricular amputation-that is, ear amputations of chocolate bunnies-in late March through mid-April for each of the 5 years studied.”
Fav scientific phrase of all time. . . confectionary rabbit auricular amputation.
“. . . human adults and children appeared to be wholly responsible for the amputations. Although several reconstructive efforts might be used to re-attach the ears, this may be a futile effort, since often the rest of the rabbit soon succumbs to a similar fate.”
If you believe that, you haven’t met Angelo Carusone, market force activist.
Carusone explaining his difference making to Eric Lach:
“When you create critical mass, even if other ads are still running, they just won’t pay the same rates. Bill O’Reilly is the Fox News standard-bearer, he’s still their highest rated program, their most valuable asset from an advertising-and-revenue perspective. An advertiser that’s going to stay is not going to pay the same, they’re just not going to do it. At worst, even if Bill O’Reilly stays on the air until he’s ready to leave, his advertising rates will diminish. And the more advertisers that leave, the more that will be affected. It’s market forces.”
When O’Reilly was harassing women at FOX he wasn’t thinking about smart, socially conscious people leveraging social media to shape public opinion. But maybe he should’ve been.
The problem with most diet books, and with popular-science books about diet, is that their impact relies on giving us simple answers, shorn of attendant complexities: it’s all about fat, or carbs, or how many meals you eat (the Warrior diet), or combinations of food groups, or intervalic fasting (the 5:2 diet), or nutritional genomics (sticking to the foods your distant ancestors may have eaten, assuming you even know where your folks were during the Paleolithic era). They hold out the hope that, if you just fix one thing, your whole life will be better.
In laboratories, it’s a different story, and it sometimes seems that the more sophisticated nutritional science becomes the less any single factor predominates, and the less sure we are of anything. Today’s findings regularly overturn yesterday’s promising hypotheses.
On top of that:
. . . research seems to undermine the whole idea of dieting: extreme regimens pose dangers, such as the risk of damaged kidneys from a buildup of excess uric acid during high-protein diets; and population studies have shown that being a tad overweight may actually be fine. Even studying these issues in the first place can be problematic. Although the study of the Mediterranean diet, for example, reflects randomized controlled experiments, most nutritional studies are observational; they rely on so-called food diaries, in which subjects record what they remember about their daily intake. Such diaries are notoriously inexact. No one likes admitting to having indulged in foods that they know—or think they know—are bad for them.
What to do?
Amid the constant back-and-forth of various hypotheses, orthodoxies, and fads, it’s more important to pay attention to the gradual advances, such as our understanding of calories and vitamins or the consensus among studies showing that trans fats exacerbate cardiovascular disease. What this means for most of us is that common sense should prevail. Eat and exercise in moderation; maintain a diet consisting of balanced amounts of protein, fat, and carbohydrates; make sure you get plenty of fruit and vegetables. And enjoy an occasional slice of chocolate cake.
The problem with that, common sense is not common.
For our International Honors program, an alternative general education program. January 2018
Economic Anxiety, Consumer Culture, and the Limits of Materialism
In this course we’ll draw on insights from economists, psychologists, humanists, and political scientists to better understand why economic anxiety is intensifying, how consumer culture reinforces materialistic values, and the negative consequences of both. We’ll also explore case studies of communities and countries that are intentionally pursuing pro-social values as we reassess and refine our preconceived notions about money’s importance. Ultimately, we’ll ask, what is the contrasting impact of materialistic and pro-social values on our fellow citizens, the earth, and ourselves.
My daughter Jeanette, who inherited my fondness for documentaries, just turned me onto The Bad Kids. Like Frederick Wiseman, The Bad Kids filmmakers don’t narrate their film, instead the participants’ unfiltered stories are told through video close-ups and dialogue.
If a documentary’s value hinges on whether it provokes fresh thinking, The Bad Kids succeeds. An alternative public school for struggling 11th and 12th graders in the SoCal desert, Black Rock students play a self paced game of credit retrieval, which appears to consist of reading textbook chapters and then answering some questions or writing essays. The principal has the perfect mindset for the place, she’s fearless and fierce in loving the kids unconditionally, but even she describes the curriculum as a game.
Among the lessons of BRHS. A principal and teaching staff, even if relentlessly optimistic, can’t compensate for a caring parent or two. Too much damage is done by the time they’re 17-18 years old. The students don’t struggle as a result of distracted parenting, they struggle because their parents have been an overwhelming negative presence in their lives. The parents abuse alcohol and drugs, they fight violently, they allow partners and extended family to harm their children, and they crush their dreams. What would be surprising is if the kids didn’t struggle with alcohol, drugs, and anger. And to top things off, the parents usually require them to move out at age 18 if they haven’t resorted, like Joey, to sleeping in bus stations already.
The premise of the principal and others seemed to be that everything will be much better if the students just retrieve enough credits to graduate high school. As if a high school diploma is going to undo the years of disastrous parenting and enable them to find a job that pays a livable wage. Globalization means there are far fewer manufacturing jobs. Increasingly, automation means even fewer jobs, especially for people lacking strong math and engineering backgrounds.
Among other things, Black Rock High School is a story about parents harming their children. I’m interested in the sequel. What will become of the “Bad Kids” in the next 5-10 years? Poor parenting has knocked them for a loop, but now they’re about to deal with the effects of globalization and automation and the widening gap between the rich and hopeful and poor and hopeless. High school diplomas or not, will they end up homeless, incarcerated?
Until the school district provides BR students meaningful vocational education and until WAY more of California’s public education resources go to strengthening their bodies and minds, the endearing students featured in the film and, in some cases their infant children, will likely add to the homeless or prison rolls.
Poverty has been done to these kids, it was not of their own doing; as a result, if we truly believe in equal opportunity in life, we have a responsibility to do more than hope a heroic principal can work miracles on them. Nearly all of them need the same two things, to distance themselves from their parent(s) and to find a safe and secure place to live. Which got me thinking about this young couple.
Granted, a Tiny House based curriculum, emphasizing math, sustainability, and a series of construction-based trades and skills, would take considerably more resources than California’s property taxes generate. Which means convincing super wealthy philanthropists to invest less in Ivy League students in order to invest instead in Black Rock High School’s much more vulnerable young people. Land, supportive zoning changes, infrastructure for the tiny homes, and materials are all needed. If Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and their peers could buck the trend laid out in “The Problem With Modern Philanthropy“, and form democratic partnerships with the poor young adults in this film, we’d have reduced drug addiction, violence, homelessness, and prison populations, meaning a safer, more secure, more vibrant democracy.
Pressing Pause 