OK, I “earned” my degree a while ago, but 20 years isn’t that long. I guess the real message here is that language, like the world it describes, is changing a lot more rapidly than it used to; I doubt that the typical 1992 resident of Earth could have come up with 10 common action words that were unheard of in 1972.

My list (and you’re invited to produce your own before scanning mine to see how much overlap there is, as most of these are obvious):
Read the rest of this entry »

“Stay safe!” “Have a safe trip!” “Be safe, OK?”

Most of us are guilty of addressing people with one or more of these phrases. I’ve done it many times and will surely do it again. When you get right down to it, these are no more useful than “You’re in my prayers.” In fact, they arguably translate to the same thing.

I have told a number of my friends on the East Coast, bracing for the possibility of a powerful windstorm this weekend, to “stay safe.” Maybe the fact that I have only written this in e-mails and not said it out loud lets me off the mental hook I’ve constructed and jammed into some needless wall in my mind. But I can’t help but be amused by common turns of phrase when they are essentially goofy.

I mean, what do I expect to change about the people I know by telling them to stay safe during, say, a transcontinental commercial flight? If I deliver these magic words, even if by text message, will this change the course of events? Will my friend have an epiphany and say “Fuck! I’d better sit up in the cockpit!” and take over in the event of an aircraft malfunction? I suppose it’s possible.

In some ways telling people to stay safe when a known hazard is heading their way makes more sense, as more factors lie within the sphere of their control under these circumstances. But most of my friends are not blithering waterheads, so in theory I don’t need to tell them to, say, not go sea kayaking in the middle of a category 4 hurricane, or make a sport of catching falling bricks or playing with live downed wires in the midst of a ruinous earthquake. Even if I had a habit of choosing such friends, they’d be quickly selected out of the population given the number of possible ways to behave in lethally stupid ways.

By the way, don’t be offended by any of this. Keep on keeping on, because it is what it is.

“Yes, the Beach Boys started out in their garage. So did most bands that went on to huge success. But so did the thousands upon thousands of wannabes who never went any further than that.”

People have a difficult time with the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. This is probably founded more on stubborn optimism than ignorance, but either way it’s entertaining. Whenever I hear something like this, I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes, this one by Carl Sagan:

“[T]he fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

There’s a guy I’ve written about here a number of times who fits this mold perfectly. He’s a top-tier crank who denies the benefits of high-mileage training for runners lacking what he declares to be unusually favorable genetics, and instead suggests that the route to success for the average runner — even those training for marathon — involves running three times a week and doing lots of weight work and sprinting. Not surprisingly, this fellow was, much to my amazement, quoted in the same Competitor article that featured an equally cranky guy advocating more or less the same garbage. The two of them share an important trait, one common to every would-be revolutionary: They have convinced themselves that mockery of, and arguments against, their ideas are rooted in fear and a conditioned unwillingness to consider alternatives to conventional wisdom. Whether they started with this stance or developed it over time after being serially marauded so as to dispel cognitive dissonance is unclear, but it doesn’t matter. They are Sagan’s Bozos. Read the rest of this entry »

I am bemused by the fact that the same load of groceries that would qualify me as a health nut most everywhere I’ve lived makes me a nutritional pariah among my associates in Boulder.

My usual purchases include some combination of the following: pasta; tuna fish in water (solid white if I’m feeling flush, chunk light otherwise); whole-wheat bread or bagels; low-fat or nonfat cheese slices; fat-free or low-fat salad dressings of various kinds; fresh, frozen (usually) or canned (vegetables), the latter typically including chick peas; cole slaw or lettuce; some kind of pretzel-based snack food; skinless boneless chicken breasts; a two-liter of diet soda (not lately, though); and sometimes, Sour Patch Kids or lemon drops. Now and again I’ll get Egg Beaters and I don’t get skim milk as often as I should, but I’m dealing with a very small fridge at the moment. Read the rest of this entry »

The other night I dragged my vexingly sore lower limbs past a branch of Fifth Third Bank. While to runners this institution is known as the title sponsor of a 25K in Grand Rapids, Michigan that has served as a U.S. road championship on numerous occasions and will do so again next month, the name of the bank itself invites a sincere question: Why not just call it Seventh Bank? Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes I sit down to write something trivial and a masterpiece ensues. Like most bloggers I have lots to say, but when you strip out the excess there’s barely anything of substance or interest, unless it’s something I’ve written. Testicular explosions and glory to all. Then there’s the fresh fruit act of 1456, designated by Parliament members as the greatest show on Mars. Geeks live there, and invented the socket wrench. You know how a baboon’s vulva swell up when she gets angry? Neon ice cream with fries. Old McDonald had a huge farm, and on that farm he grew some weed; fuck you, buddy. Los Angeles used to have more people than Tikrit, but I have been deployed to both and you don’t want to fuck with the old ladies in Bel Air. Can you say ASSHOLE? It’s like the jocose morbidity of hallelujah. No means of visible support hose. Why even go there? I can do the mashed potato, so Negro, please. Lance Armstrong was as dirty as a teenage boy’s wettest dreams and I once saw one of those idiots eat a bowl of Cheerios and big as a fucking steering wheel. The milk was all swirling and sloshing around in his stomach as we padded along the carpeted hallway so I belted him a good one in the belly with a fire extinguisher and she moaned “awwwwwwwwww, hell’s bells” before projectile vomiting all over her freshly mowed library card. This is a best-selling post, a marvel of modern technology and the most powerful aphrodisiac since pictures of Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Nom nom nom nom. Look at this, a sex symbol! Cymbal. This thing keeps opening and closing like it’s 1799, baby got front AND back. Next time you decide to up and register for the Comrades Marathon, maybe you should read the goddamned application to see what it is you’re signing up from. It’s not a marathon OR a gun club and if you have a criminal record, even for farting in an open container during Oktoberfest, they won’t even let you INTO Toronto, and believe me I tried and they took my fake ID and my Chubby Checker CD collection, which they worked overtime to extract from my sigmoid colon with the entire membership of MENSA looking on silently and dyspeptically. There was no reason at all for them to whip out the reruns of Futurama before that chick could make off with my wallet clenched between her teeth like some hot little swashbuckler number. WA-HOO! say it. I was at the same AA meeting you were when they brought in a keg and said, “this is the last place the cops will ever check.” I got so fucked up that night I barely remember the underage rodeo clowns. I’m sticking this back in Google’s cache where it belongs. Tag this multifaceted and proud, and use it as your Facebook status. Out.

It seems as though a lot more people than I realized use Crest whitening strips. I bet a few people here have gone in for the actual light treatments, which reportedly work pretty well. Someone I know recently fell asleep with a strip in, and woke up with very sensitive teeth. The closest I have come to doing this is passing out dead drunk about 20 years ago with a huge wad of Copenhagen in place. My lip looked like the surface of Mars once I peeled the snuff out, but my teeth didn’t hurt.

Everyone likes a nice smile, but the focus on “the whiter the better” is pretty lame. I’d like to see strips in various other colors. Wouldn’t it be cool to meet people for the first time and offer them an arrestingly gorgeous neon-mauve grin? You could find a complimentary color for the bottom teeth.

Or better yet, not strips but patches for individual teeth. You could do a ROY G BIV across all fourteen top chompers (for those whose wisdom teeth are gone), two teeth per rainbow color. You could have a Pride Flag smile. And screw tattoos, jerseys and hats — your favorite pro sports team could decorate your mouth. THAT would be loyalty.

If Tiger Woods or Gary Busey did this it would probably violate a lot of local ordinances normally applicable to billboards and the like.

I know that the antibiotic tetracycline can cause mottled tooth enamel in infants born to moms who take the drug while pregnant, but this falls a little short of what I’m proposing here and besides, it would be inconvenient to have to be a foetus in order to enjoy the privilege of unfettered and permanent tooth staining.

I have no doubt that people can and do get crowns in various colors, but a Google image search only turns up a few pictures of kids with colored braces. Between the expense of dental crowns and the whimsicality required to undertake this kind of procedure, it would pretty much take a wealthy eccentric with an impulsive demented streak. If I could afford to do this, or anything, I wouldn’t bother because instead I would buy a really nice, expensive car that would be the envy of mindless middle-aged men the world over, like a vintage Lamborghini, and fuck it all up. I’d key the thing myself, put gray primer paint all over the doors over a green base, give the windshield a few love taps with a golf club for a nice spiderweb effect, and dislocate the bumper. An old “Carter/Mondale” bumper sticker to go with a “support out troops” ribbon, plus a decal for the rear windshield from DeVry University, would round out the ensemble. I’d never tire of driving.

There’s a blogger who set a Guinness-recognized world record for the most lifetime blog posts:

Darren joined Engadget in July of 2006, and almost four years to the day (when these numbers were submitted to Guinness) he’d arrived at 17,212 individual posts (since surpassed, of course). That’s single posts on Engadget, Engadget HD, and Engadget Mobile, not duplicated work. We obviously couldn’t be more proud of Darren and the work he’s done (and continues to do) here, and we think this is an amazing feat for one writer. Of course, this is the guy who did 59 posts in a single day at CES 2008. Seriously. To put it in perspective, his current word count is at 3,389,148. That’s War and Peace about six times over.

Yes, that’s over 2,300 words a day, roughly six trade-paperback pages in normal typeface. He’s churned out a total of about 30 novels’ worth of work for Engadget, assuming a typical novel to be about 400 pages. This obviously doesn’t account for whatever e-mails he’s sent and comments he’s written on his own and other blogs. He is clearly the Wilt Chamberlain of Internet blather. I have no idea how coherent or interesting his stuff is; I can only assume he’s not just bashing keys at random and emitting sheer incoherence rather than substance, which would set his writing apart from 95% of bloggers.

I think I’ve topped 50 blog posts in a week at my absolute prolific misdirected-energy worst, and when I catch myself getting anywhere close to this, I wrench myself out of the rut by quitting cold turkey for a while. I imagine that Darren Murph gets paid. I always wished when I was running a lot that I could make a certain modest amount of money per mile completed regardless of pace–ten bucks, say. This would have netted me over $50,000 in one or two years and no less than about $35,000 for a dozen-year stretch from about 1994 to 2006ish.