Thanks to my mountain biking neighbor for this find.
‘Life Is Short, You Don’t Get To Do It Twice’
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What I’m Listening To
Podcast. The Rise & Fall of Mars Hill by Christianity Today. Places the church’s decline in a broad sociological context, excellent production quality. Central question—Why do people keep elevating charismatic leaders whose fame and lack of character is their undoing?
Related. Fav podcast host, Jack Hough, Barron’s Streetwise. Can’t get enough of his self deprecating sense of humor, smarts, and personality more generally.
Music. Leon Bridges Essentials, Apple Music. Dig this profile of Bridges.
Forgive Me, For I Have Sinned
On Sunday I was fine cycling up Mount Saint Helen’s until I wasn’t. My legs mutinied during the last few miles before the top, cramping so badly that any pedaling was tough. Five salt tablets, gels packed with more sodium, a protein bar, and four bottles of gatorade weren’t enough when the cramping went from bad to worse on the return.
From the top of the volcano you descend very quickly for about 6 miles and then climb about 8 more before descending another 23 to the start (74 miles total, 6,900′ of elevation). For the first time in 15-20 years I had to stop on a mountain climb about 3-4 miles from the last top at Elk Rock. I found some shade on the other side of Spirit Hwy and attempted to sit down on the shoulder and I don’t know what, stretch I guess. Problem was my knees wouldn’t bend so I basically fell over while holding my bike which end up resting on my shoulder and neck.
A car stopped. It was the Park Ranger/Angel who topped off our water bottles at the closed Visitor’s Center at the top 45 minutes earlier. “Are you alright?!” “Yes,” I lied, “but I have 3-4 miles to go to meet up with my friends and I’m a little worried they’re gonna wonder what happened to me.” He took off and informed them that I was near dead on the shoulder 3.5 miles below, but would be along eventually.
Time will tell what the Cosmos will extract from me for lying to the best Park Ranger ever. In my defense, he was driving a Honda Civic, so it wasn’t like he could transport Blanca and me to the top of the climb. He did ask if I had water though and although I had one bottle left at that point, it was dumb (even by my standards) not to take him up on the offer of more.
Without my friends shepherding me down the mountain, I would’ve been in trouble because I would’ve been in the hot sun another 20 minutes without enough liquid. Pro-tip, if you ever SLAM into the wall on your bike in the mountains, do it in the company of Mark, Allen, and Dennis.
How many salt tablets does a guy need to take?
Paragraphs To Ponder—Haiti
By Maria Abi-Habib.
“With broken bones and open wounds, the injured jammed into damaged hospitals or headed to the airport, hoping for mercy flights out. A handful of doctors toiled all night in makeshift triage wards. A retired senator used his seven-seat propeller plane to ferry the most urgent patients to emergency care in the capital.
A day after a magnitude-7.2 earthquake killed at least 1,300 people and injured thousands in western Haiti, the main airport of the city of Les Cayes was overwhelmed Sunday with people trying to evacuate their loved ones to Port-au-Prince, the capital, about 80 miles to the east.
There wasn’t much choice. With just a few dozen doctors available in a region that is home to one million people, the quake aftermath was turning increasingly dire.
‘I’m the only surgeon over there,’ said Dr. Edward Destine, an orthopedic surgeon, waving toward a temporary operating room of corrugated tin set up near the airport in Les Cayes. ‘I would like to operate on 10 people today, but I just don’t have the supplies,’ he said, listing an urgent need for intravenous drips and even the most basic antibiotics.
The earthquake was the latest calamity to convulse Haiti, which is still living with the aftereffects of a 2010 quake that killed an estimated quarter-million people. Saturday’s quake came about five weeks after the Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated, leaving a leadership vacuum in a country already grappling with severe poverty and rampant gang violence.”
Sentence to Ponder—Afghanistan
“As flights prepared to depart, people clung dangerously to the sides of military planes even as one taxied down the runway.”
Genuflecting To The Right
In large part, Trump’s 2016 upset of Hillary Clinton was attributed to his personal bravado. His supporters liked how he repeatedly said crass things that paralleled their thinking. Finally, a politician who just shoots from the hip, focus groups and polls be damned.
If there’s any truth to that analysis, how do you explain the contents of this article, “Trump Keeps Rejecting Pleas From Allies for Pro-Vax Campaign”?
Paragraphs to ponder:
“More than 400,000 Americans had died of coronavirus when Trump left office, and the death count has swelled to more than 600,000 since. But as Trump has settled into a post-presidency defined largely by prolonging his anti-democratic crusade and settling scores with Republicans who crossed him, the former president has privately dropped hints about why, exactly, he has been so derelict.
According to two of the sources who have spoken to Trump about this, he has occasionally referenced polling and other indicators—such as what he’s seen on TV—that show how the vaccines are unpopular with many of his supporters. This has left the impression with some of those close to Trump that he doesn’t want to push too hard on the subject, so as to not ‘piss off his base,’ one of the two people said.”
Maybe Trump was never that distinctive of a politician. Or the ‘swamp’ changed him. Add ‘being too busy assessing which way the political winds were blowing to help us get the upper hand on the ‘rona’ to his legacy.
The NBA’s ‘Glass Ceiling’
Becky Hammon, San Antonio’s Assistant Coach, will most likely be the first to break it. She was a finalist for the Portland Trailblazer job that went to Chauncey Billups.
“Please don’t hire me to check a box, Hammons requests.”That’s the worst thing you can do for me. Hire me because of my skill sets and coaching, who am I as a person, hire me for those.”
Can You Guess Our Transportation Future?
The Irrelevance of Other People’s Feelings
The title of Ruth Whippman’s newest essay is “What We Are Not Teaching Boys About Being Human”. I’ve long been perplexed by why my female students are, on average, so much more successful than my male ones. Whippman’s insights strike me as the beginning of what inevitably is a multifaceted answer.
The heart of the matter, according to Whippman:
“The lack of positive people-focused stories for boys has consequences both for them and girls. In the narratives they consume, as well as the broader cultural landscape in which they operate, girls get a huge head start on relational skills, in the day-to-day thorniness and complexity of emotional life. Story by story, girls are getting the message that other people’s feelings are their concern and their responsibility. Boys are learning that these things have nothing to do with them.”
Tokyo 2021
I refuse to conform to the ‘wrong year’ crowd.
I’m awarding #24 the Olympic Spirit award and #27 the Defying Gravity award. Maybe adding a steeple hurdle that you have to clear would spice up the long jump?
Another thing, if we have to keep track of medals by country for some reason, shouldn’t we adjust for population? If we did, this would be the Top 21.
Pressing Pause 