2013 Colchester Triathlon

Pictured, at least a few people finished behind me on the swimming. 

Sunday was the 29th annual Colchester Triathlon, and my fourth, and the results are in (actually, the results were immediately in, because this year we had anklets with chip timers in them).

Also, for the first time since I began participating, the transition times were broken out from the race times.  Now I'm not sure whether I actually did better than my last year's times, or whether I was actually slower on the racing legs because last year's racing legs included the transition times.  I think, maybe, or maybe am just hoping, that it's the former.

This year vtsportsimages got nearly everyone on the swim, bike, and running legs, so I now have a swimming picture (see how kind I was to wear a rash guard so you're not blinded by my pasty white flesh?) to go with last year's cycling picture (apparently, I look more or less exactly the same on a bike from year-to-year).  I will not be showing a running picture until I learn how to run properly, or at least look like I'm running in the picture.  :-)

Takeaways:

1. I was advised to get a wetsuit.  Maybe if I can find one on clearance.
2. My conditioning was better, but could still be improved.  A couple of spectators were alarmed by my loud breathing (I do that even when I've only been running 5 minutes, much less 25; I'm like Monica Seles out there, only if she sang snatches of "I Wanna Be Sedated" during the bike leg).

Primary goal for next year: wetsuit or no, improve that swim time.  I'm finishing 96th on the swim, 83rd on the cycling**.  That's not good enough for someone who considers himself a swimmer.  I know I can crack 2min/100 yards, so there has to be more pool/lake time next year.  A better running time will have to flow from improved conditioning through swimming; at 40+ years and a 6'5" 200+lb body, I simply can't commit to doing more running to train (the wear and tear would be too much).

** Note: All Sports Events has an interesting concept of how far 1/2 a mile is.  An 18:34 1/2 mile is closer to a 2:15 / 100yds pace than a 3:27 / 100yds pace. 

Frankie and Johnny Are Married (2003)

Now available in videocassette and DVD!

I love getting these "old" movies out from Netflix.  I mean, jeez, this is around when we ditched all our VHS tapes and cut the cable.  I guess they wanted as wide a distribution as possible in the home video market, because it grossed only $22k in the theaters.  Ouch, which is too bad, because this movie definitely deserves a wider audience.

Frankie and Johnny Are Married has some absolutely wonderful moments, I love the real-life married couple playing the semi-fictionalized versions of themselves, Stephen Tobolowsky provides a few good minutes for Michael Pressman to reflect, and David E. Kelley's two short scenes are great (especially the second, where Pressman asks him how Kelley and Pfeiffer manage their personal relationship amid the potential for professional jealousy).  

Overall, it's almost a very good film.  I recommend it, but be prepared for the rough patches where you'll find yourself checking the time.

Old news

This has been the week of learning about old news.  In no particular order:

1. daddytypes' amazing Marxist review of the Crayola Factory in Easton, PA.  This speaks for itself.
2. The existence of the LandfillHarmonic Recycled Orchestra.  Again, speaks for itself.
3. Ryan North's review of the novelization of Back to the Future.  (note: this will be given further comment at a later date)
4. David Milano's project to read H.P. Lovecraft to kids around Halloween and have the kids draw pictures of Cthulhu.  This is now on the calendar, along with the yearly reading of A Night in the Lonesome October.
5. The fact that North Dakota is not a state. 
   
   How is this not huge news?  I mean, after 100+ years of pretending North Dakota has been a state, I assume we'll just go on pretending that it was a state all those years, just as soon as they fix the state constitution.  Of course, it took 16 years just to put together a bill to make those corrections!!!  What the hell, North Dakota?  The scary part is that when I google north dakota not a state, I get a bunch of posts that mention the story, but no follow-up on whether they actually fixed their constitution.  Well, did they?!  Or have they been so busy trying to ban abortion that they forgot?

Statistical follies: "peak" cars in VT

UVM economist Art Woolf suggests 

Vermont may be on the declining side of a “peak cars” curve.

...and offers the following graph as evidence.
 

The problem is that simply looking at the number of registrations is misleading, because registrations are strongly associated with the size of the driving population.  This is noted in the title and article, but the author doesn't actually, you know, deal with it.  We're really interested in whether the typical Vermonter is more or less likely to own a car now than 10-20 years ago.   A more useful chart would look at the number of registrations, relative to the size of the driving population (say, by plotting the ratio of registrations to population on the vertical axis) over time. 

Moreover, the numbers in the bar chart in the article don't match the numbers from the census (the census is counting buses, but the census numbers are lower than Woolf's, so maybe Vermont has negative buses?).  And, of course, the article contains no references or (heaven forbid, because it's only 2013) links to the data source the author is using.

 

Using Census motor vehicle registration and population data, I see something more like:

1980	1985	1990	1995	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009
347	398	462	492	515	534	537	516	523	508	588	565	581	557
511	530	563	589	609	612	615	617	618	619	620	620	621	622
0.68	0.75	0.82	0.84	0.85	0.87	0.87	0.84	0.85	0.82	0.95	0.91	0.94	0.9

 

the last row is the ratio of registrations to population, suggesting that the rate of vehicle ownership has increased over the last 30 years.  I'm a little suspicious (okay, a lot suspicious) of the enormous jump from 2005-2006, but have no experience with the data from which I can form a hypothesis, other than, "someone should check that out."

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel; Michael Chabon; 1988

I believe there exists a Michael Chabon novel that I would like, but The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is not it.

I went to the library in search of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, but it was out, and how could I resist a book set in Pittsburgh?  Well... The Mysteries... suffers greatly in comparison to The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which also features a protagonist with a dark past, newly-made gay and potential-love-interest friends who are more glamorous than the protagonist, and dangerous antics involving motor vehicles.  The problem is that while Perks features an important reveal and a reasonably satisfying conclusion, Mysteries just sort of fritters away 300-odd pages.  This might be more "realistic", but isn't very good storytelling.

Citizen, you are not being actively monitored. Enjoy your trip!

Today, about 5-10 miles from the border, my spouse started to receive text messages welcoming her to Canada... even though she never actually crossed the border.  #verizonIsWatching

The Mighty and Their Fall; I. Compton-Burnett; 1962;

Everything I said about the dialogue-happy prose of The Death of the Heart goes double here.  This is a stage play and not a novel.  One chapter in, I don't believe in any of these characters, and am not interested in reading another 200 pages.  Maybe later.  

No back cover comparisons to other writers here; I'd believe in comparisons to Spark, but I greatly preferred Memento Mori to this.

The Death of the Heart; Elizabeth Bowen; 1938

I stopped part of the way into chapter 2.  There's a lot of dialogue.  I like dialogue, but this feels like it should be a stage play instead of a novel.  It's not bad, but not sticky enough to make me want to read another 300 pages of it.  Maybe I'll come back to it another day.

The back cover has the following quote from Victoria Glendinning:

She is a major writer ... She is what happened after Bloomsbury ... the link that connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark.

I'll buy the connection to Iris Murdoch, but would really like to hear more of an explanation of why Bowen's writing has any connection to Virginia Woolf's or Muriel Spark's, except that they are sufficiently famous British women writing at the appropriate times to shed some fame on Bowen. 

Street Smart; 1987

All you should need to know is that Christopher Reeve agreed to inflict Superman IV on the world in order to secure the funding to make Street Smart, which proceeded to recoup less of its budget at the box office than Superman IV.  Oi.

The plot is simple: journalist needs a story and makes one up; it turns out to be true, he gets in hot water for it, and has to find a way out.  It's a good plot, and there are lots of ways to use it, but since the story is about a pimp, it ends up being a gritty little movie about ugly little people. 

This wouldn't be so bad, but I didn't see this movie in 1987.  I watched it for the first time in 2013, and I've already seen Reservoir Dogs.  That movie isn't about pimps, but from 1987's perspective, it was the future of gritty little movies about ugly little people, and once you've seen something like Dogs, you can't go back to the plodding storytelling of Street Smart.

Starting With The Academic Subjects In The Mirror

Apparently we need more funding for Humanities so that our children can write and think clearly.  I really hope the article writer doesn't have a humanities education, because this article is a mess.  He begins by asserting a "war against humanities", but provides no evidence of such a contentious thing, thus we are supposed to assume that there can be no argument against there being an actual war against humanities. 

We are, however, treated to a number of sky-is-falling statements with links to articles and papers provided by, among others, "The Humanities Commission", which is clearly an independent group that has no stake in securing more funding for humanities.

We are then shown a pie chart.  What's wrong with this chart?

What's wrong with this chart is that it makes all of the pies the same size.  But we know they're not.  Size the pies relative to the total funding for each field.  Let's see if that blue wedge in the Humanities is about the same size as those for other subjects.

Now let's think about why STEM subjects might require more funding, especially funding from big sources like the federal government.  I'm thinking that maybe, just maybe, it has to do with the fact that STEM subjects require expensive lab space and equipment that are wholly unnecessary in humanities. Could we do a little digging before slapping this into an article?

My favorite part, however, is the following quote, concerning how students write:

They can assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax. They can meta-metastasize any thematic or ideological notion they happen upon. And they get good grades for doing just that. But as for writing clearly, simply, with attention and openness to their own thoughts and emotions and the world around them — no.

This describes the vast majority of writing published in humanities journals, where you are given tenure based upon how well you've obfuscated the fact that you have nothing new to say, and not, god forbid, on how well you've taught your students to write "clearly, simply, with attention and openness to their own thoughts and emotions."

I agree that being able to communicate your thoughts clearly is important, and I think that can and should be part of a STEM education... and I also think that the Humanities need to take a long look in the mirror and fix their own broken systems.