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.