let kids outside

Great editorial in the LA Times about hyper-paranoid parents and fat kids:

Which scenario should provoke more panic: the possibility that your child may become one of the approximately 100 children who are kidnapped by strangers each year, or one of the country’s 58 million overweight adults?

Child-molester hysteria is one the greatest popular delusions of the last ten years.

Did she really think the number of child molesters and kidnappers in the world had increased in the last 20 or 30 years, I asked? “Oh, yes, I think it is increasing. Because of the Internet.”

It doesn’t matter what you think! Reality is all that matters…arrrgggghhhhh!

pretzels + chocolate

I just ganked some chocolate-covered pretzels from the astro colloq – delicious!

tuesday

I got my PC at home running again yesterday – I think I may become a Mac person in the near future. So then I posted my photos from the Devil’s Punchbowl hike the S.O. and I did on Sunday. We hiked to the Devil’s Chair and it was so cooool – it’s amazing that this place is only an hour away (interesting drive over the mountains and through joshua trees), it’s like a hybrid between Arches NP in Utah and a mini Grand Canyon. The nature center had a baby owl that was the cutest thing ever: a big ball of fluff on dinosaur legs. He just stood there and peeped. There was an adult great horned owl outside that had been there for 26 years. We met a ranger that had worked at the park for 33 years! It was warm and sunny on Sunday, but the ranger said they’d get snow today. Yesterday there was some cool fog on the Bailey Canyon trail, visibility was probably ~30 feet at higher elevations. I wouldn’t want to fly my helicopter in those conditions.

Santa Monica Mountains

I’m partial to the San Gabriels, but the Santa Monica Mountains are pretty great. Today, the beast, jesse and I did a ~13mi one-way run from Kanan through the hills and Malibu Creek State Park (where the filmed M*A*S*H) to Malibu Cyn road, then took the awesome ParkLink Shuttle back to my car. The run was spectacular: sandstone rock formations, meadows, mountains, ocean and valley views. We ran hard the last three miles in order to make the 1:40pm (next one was an hour later), then we saw it waiting at the parking lot and waved our arms and whistled so he wouldn’t leave. The driver dude was absolutely astonished that we did the whole route in 1:45, “That’s an eight hour hike!”, us: “uhhhh, running’s faster?”. The shuttle tooks us back into the hills into some funky neighborhoods, ranches, multi-million dollar homes, and a trout pond. I’m tired and I need to make sure I didn’t bring home any ticks.

The Giant Claw

Has anybody seen “The Giant Claw”? It looks good. REALLY GOOD:

Apparently, the giant bird is made out of antimatter! Ahhhh the terror!

so sleepy

JAWS

I watched JAWS again a couple weeks ago, undoubtedly a classic. Whatever you do though, don’t watch JAWS The Revenge. Anyway, I’ve come to appreciate what a great character cap’n Quint is:

Y’all know me. Know how I earn a livin’. I’ll catch this bird for you, but it ain’t gonna be easy. Bad fish. Not like going down to the pond and chasing bluegills and tommycocks. This shark, swallow you whole. No shakin’, no tenderizin’, down you go. And we gotta do it quick, that’ll bring back your tourists, put all your businesses on a payin’ basis. But it’s not gonna be pleasant. I value my neck a lot more than three thousand bucks, chief. I’ll find him for three, but I’ll catch him, and kill him, for ten. But you’ve gotta make up your minds. If you want to stay alive, then ante up. If you want to play it cheap, be on welfare the whole winter. I don’t want no volunteers, I don’t want no mates, there’s too many captains on this island. Ten thousand dollars for me by myself. For that you get the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.

ACONCAGUA

I want to climb Aconcagua. Apparently in the Andes people chew coca leaves to relieve high altitude headaches but I think you can get a prescription for diamox that does pretty much the same thing.

Carnival!

It’s like 12:41am and I’m still awake. This is CRAZY. Oxy Distance carnival 10km didn’t go quite as well as planned, but it wasn’t terrible either: ran 33:29.82 for 13th and for the first time in three years, I didn’t get lapped by The Beast. I talked to JUICE supporter John beforehand, and he planned on running the pace I wanted to run so after an 81 first lap in traffic (57 runners!) I thought we settled into a nice 79sec pace, but he began to slow imperceptably, and I passed him before two miles but it was almost too late by then. And right when I passed him there was this huge chasm up to the next pack so I had nobody to run with. Then a few laps later my achilles starting hurting, at 6km it was killing me and was definitely affecting my stride. Fellow JUICEr Chris was reading me splits and 81s and 82s started creeping in there and there was nothing I could do about it. But it wasn’t all bad – I had friends cheering me all around the track which made it fun (here’s jesse, then on this turn is my college coach, then the caltech team is on the backstretch, there’s jason and chelsey, then megumi is on this turn, then the claremont guys are right here…) and also prevented me from quitting due to the injury. My college buddy jason and his S.O. showed up to watch before they leave for Prague on Tuesday; a bunch of us went to fantastic pizza at Casa Biance in Eagle Rock afterwards, and good times were had by all. Except for my achilles tendon, which gave an emphatic NO to a warmdown and will probably sentance me to a week of the elliptical machine for those six miles in spikes.

Back in CA!

I spent the last week at the lunar and planetary science meeting in Houston. The meeting was great, lots of interesting stuff. Houston: not so interesting. I did have some great sushi there, so it’s not all bad. It doesn’t seem to be very pedestrian friendly – no sidewalks and broken crosswalk signals everywhere. I didn’t see a single person out running (slightly odd), nor did I see anybody out walking (very odd). Oxy 10k is tonight, I’m signed up but my damn achilles has been bothering me just walking around, so I imagine it will be extremely unhappy with spikes on the track. If you’re served monkey meat at a wedding, don’t eat it. I have Texas beating UCLA in the tourney final, with Durant scoring 57 points and pulling down 23 boards.