T-Minus 8 Days

8 days til marathon, and the final double-digit training run is in the bag. (Very rainy --- and cold! ---; my watch didn't find satelites until I was 2 miles in.) I don't want to jinx myself but, folks, I'm feeling pretty good about this one.

Waldo

Capitol Hill debut.


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Little League All-Stars

There comes a time in life when, after years of elementary-school triumph and perfect-attendance awards, you make your peace with the idea that you'll probably never win another trophy.

Then, along comes a summer in D.C. that sees you winning two.

First, "Tuesday Heartbreak," my motley crew of a Stetson's Pub Quiz team, goes the distance to win the summer league and take home the coveted [somebody somebody] memorial cup. Which we promptly ask to be filled with beer.

Then, one week later, I learn that across town at the Stanford Softball awards banquet -- an event scheduled against pub quiz -- Coach Chris announced this year's Rookie of the Year and, lo and behold, it's me:

Full disclosure: As the only rookie to string together enough appearances to qualify for, and then actually attend, the season's year-end tournament, I consider this a victory by attrition. Put it this way: it helped my chances that I effectively had no real competition.

Still, to victory, dear readers. To victory.

Capital Softball

It's the end of softball season in D.C. and time for the modest summer's-end tournament. Necessary elements?

First, acquire sponsorship and arrange the league's 70 teams into a seeded double-elimination bracket:

Second, encourage all 70 teams, with branded sun-tents and carnival games in tow, to show up to a NASA-owned softball complex: Third, obtain the services of a caterer to provide the teams with hours of grilled fare:

Then, finally, top it all off by requisitioning a truck that literally dispenses beer from taps protruding from its side:

And there you have it. Play ball!

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Update: After a heartbreaking 5-4 loss to Boston College in the opening round, Stanford defeated Colgate and Johns Hopkins to stay alive and advance to the next round of the play-in bracket. More next week.

Good to the Last Drop

I'm back from a week-long biking and mountain-climbing adventure in Alaska (where I took a still-unedited video and no pictures) and a weekend tubing-and-camping trip in Shenandoah (where I took neither video, nor pictures). But, fear not, dear readers! I do have one item to share from my travels: a single picture of what one must resort to when CVS runs out of Poland Spring. Meanwhile, in other news. . . .

After a 10-day break it was back to marathon-training today for a 10-mile run on the treadmill, which left me dead tired. And, of course, crazy thirsty for baby water.

Roosevelt Island

Found it on the second try.

A Few Historical Fibers

I finished James McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom" earlier this week (the same day, coincidentally, that Gov. Mark Sanford announced that he was continuing the long South Carolinian tradition of seceding from unions).

Commuting in D.C. is very compatible with listening to audiobooks, and at just under 40 hours, Battle Cry had been my faithful companion for around two months. Though focusing a little more singly on military history than I was expecting after David Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought (the preceding volume, covering 1815-1848, in the still not-yet-completed Oxford History of the United States series), Battle Cry was especially readable in D.C., given its helpful ability to breathe life into the area's statues and placenames. (I will now forever think of Farragut North as the "Damn the Torpedos!"-Metro Stop, for instance. "Full speed ahead!")

Double-bonus, the book also contained some pretty solid explanatory trivia--it's 1861 and the North needs thousands of new military uniforms; you're in the textiles business, but you're short on wool. What do you do?

To fill contracts for hundreds of thousands of uniforms, textile manufacturers compressed fibers of recycled woolen goods into a material called "shoddy." This noun soon became an adjective to describe uniforms that ripped after a few weeks of wear, shoes that fell apart, blankets that disintegrated, and poor workmanship in general[.]" (p. 324)

And just like that, a new word is born.

Beautiful.

Boot Camp: Day 1

Four months to go, the training begins today.

Three years after running the Mayor's Marathon in Anchorage, I'm ready for round two: I've signed up for October's Marine Corps Marathon in D.C.


As I did the first time around, I'll be following the "Casual" training schedule posted on the New York Marathon's website. It's an 18 week program, and today is Day Zero: Tuesday of Week One.

Since I've been running a fair amount since moving to D.C., my plan is to take advantage of the early weeks' shorter mileages to see if I can push myself to run faster. McMillan offers a handy "equivalent performance" calculator that motivated me pretty well three years ago, and it's one-for-one in 2009 already: if I want to run a full marathon in 3:45, McMillan says I need to be able to run 3 miles at a 7:25 pace; so, this morning I ran 3.1 miles at 7:24.

I'm not sure yet what my goal for this go-round is going to be, but I'm toying with 3 hours 40 minutes, or a marathon of 8:24-minute miles. Could be a tall order, but I think it's doable.

Sea to Shining Sea

I'm back from a long weekend in Alaska, where I was far too distracted by the weather and fun to take any pictures.

I did take a quick video panorama before heading out to bike the Hope road, though. It works as a kind of visual metaphor for the weekend: gorgeous, dizzying, and brief.

Go Card! (Updated)

I've been playing on Stanford's alumni softball team since moving to D.C., in the (slightly intense) Capital Alumni Network league. (Seriously, there are something like 64 teams in the league, and the season ends with a huge double-elimination tournament.)

After a brutal 0-4 start, with punishing losses to perennial powerhouses Maryland, Penn State and Emory (and a foolish loss to Johns Hopkins), something miraculous happened in this weekend's PAC-10 Alumni tournament: we went 3-0, sweeping Cal, Arizona and Arizona State.

PAC-10 Champions! Go Card!

(Now if I could just stop hitting pop-ups . . . )

Curio: The Lost State of Frankland

It could have been #14:

I've been reading a lot of histories in the past few months, and have started to amass a pretty good stock of historical curios. The latest comes from Lawrence Friedman's "A History of American Law":

Commenting on early America's zeal for state constitutions, Friedman off-handedly mentions that even "the residents of the 'lost state of Franklin,'" in the early 1780s, gave into the movement. (p.72)

What?

Turns out, the far-west residents of North Carolina weren't too happy when their home state offered to give all of North Carolina's lands west of the Appalachian mountains to the national government, in exchange for the government's assumption of North Carolina's Revolutionary-War debts. (Of note, most of the original 13 colonies had no western border and made similar bargains, ultimately leading to the creation of the Northwest and Southwest territories, and to another odd historical curio: Connecticut's non-contiguous "Western Reserve" in Ohio.)

So, the angry Carolinians did what they thought any self-respecting American should do: they declared independence, drafted a constitution (the first version of which, rejected by voters, would have banned lawyers, doctors and preachers from holding elected office), and petitioned Congress for admission to statehood.

Even crazier?

A majority of the original states gave Frankland their blessing: 7 of the 13 voted to admit the eight North Carolinian counties (which would later comprise the northeast corner of Tennessee) into the Confederacy as the tiny, tiny state of Frankland:

It wasn't the two-thirds required by the Articles of Confederation, though, so Frankland withered. After officially changing its name to "Franklin" and trying to rally the respected Mr. Benjamin F. to its cause (he declined), the citizens of Frankland/lin ultimately gave up the ghost after realizing that it was going to be a lot harder not to get killed by members of the Creek and Cherokee Indian Nations (whose lands they were, after all, invading) without the assistance of North Carolina's militia. The "State" collapsed, having existed just shy of a (pretty respectable) 4 years.

Next up: a couple of items from Daniel Walker Howe's "What Hath God Wrought."

Stay tuned.

The Washington Post Hunt

A few friends and I participated in the Washington Post's excellent 2nd Annual Post Hunt this Sunday.

For those that don't know, the Post Hunt is puzzle-based adventure of sorts--teams of unlimited size march around downtown armed with the Post's Sunday magazine and a bag of goodies distributed at the starting line. From noon to 3pm, teams must find and solve 5 puzzles, the answer to each of which is a number. Each numerical answer corresponds to one of many cryptic phrases listed in the Sunday magazine, and at 3pm Hunt-founders Dave Berry, Tom Shroder, and Gene Weingarten reveal a final clue which, in theory at least, should allow teams to make sense of the phrases --- and then race to win the game.

None of the members of my team participated in last year's Hunt, but we'd heard enough to be pretty excited. One of our teammates had grown up playing the Miami Herald's related, and much longer running, Tropic Hunt, and in combination with the website for the 2008 Hunt, her stories had definitely whet our appetites.

And I'm happy to report that our self-christened "Team Awesome" performed incredibly well---for the first half of the game. We solved 4 of the 5 initial puzzles before 35 minutes had past, and the 5th puzzle took us longer only because it couldn't be solved locally (and it took us a while to give in to that possibility).

First up, for us at least, was a strange collection of monuments (embeded videos aren't working, so click-through to see a recap of the puzzle):

The pencil in our goody bag was a pretty big tip-off, so the vacuum cleaner immediately suggested Hoover to me. Other teammates quickly realized that the "Boo" and "Cannon" statutes represented one president (not two, as I was thinking), and that made Eyes-and-Hour pretty smooth sailing. Our team finished this puzzle in about the time it took us to walk the distance from the ghost statute to the hour glass and was feeling pretty good about our puzzle-solving prowess as we headed off to the next location.

The second puzzle we encountered might have been my favorite:

I actually hadn't bothered to read the rules closely (despite scouring other sections of the Sunday magazine and solving the crossword puzzle the night before on the off chance that it'd feature in the end game), so text-messaging was not, for me, an obvious avenue for arriving at a solution.

But my intrepid teammates were all over it and it didn't take us to long to get this one. We had one false start -- we actually first texted "No Accountability" to the number because the actors were repeatedly saying "there's no accountability in the text" when we arrived, and we took the phrase a little too literally -- but it didn't take us too long to try again with just "Accountability." (Interestingly, texting "no accountability" to the number also prompted a response: a text arrived telling us that 50% of respondents had voted "no" in the Post's Express poll.)

Our team was suspicious of the third puzzle:

This puzzle troubled us because we thought it was easy--too easy. We noticed the "in gold we trust" line right away and then spent the rest of the first half of the game worrying that reading 893 off the sign was too obvious. Nope.

The fourth puzzle was also a high-water mark:

Despite missing the rule about needing a text-messaging capable phone, I had noticed that there was something seriously odd about the clock-repairman's "First Person Singular" article. Our team had puzzled over the article at brunch, so we recognized the clock-man on sight and had little trouble with puzzle after receiving the clock-man's clue. A teammate spotted the missing "i" (which we especially liked, not knowing that "First Personal Singular" is regular feature of the Sunday magazine), I caught the "x," and someone else then piped up with the "s."

We got to the fifth puzzle around 12:30, and it stumped us for a good long while: We actually noticed the statues on the Hunt map pretty early on, and thought they could be important, but since every other puzzle could be solved locally, we spent a long time scratching our heads at the Old Post Office. We stared at the actors; tracked their movements and hand gestures; compared them to the statue of Ben Franklin also in the plaza; and scrutinized the facade of the building for any additional clues. We made a list of every synonym for "statue" we could think of, and wondered whether "Greek," "Roman," "Classic," or "Marble" could somehow be a cipher that would let us convert the phrases in the clue into numbers.

Ultimately, we marched back over to the spot on the map that showed the statue with the eagle on its head, in part because I hadn't seen a statute in that area when we'd walked past it earlier, and I thought that in-and-of-itself might be an additional clue: maybe something else would be waiting there for us?

Sort of. We discovered that I was totally wrong--the statues on the map did correlate to real-life statues--and were very relived to find a sandwich-board wearing man standing next to the eagle-pooping-out-the-earth. We then spent the last hour of the first phase of the game marching around downtown in search of a free-standing polyp and sledgehammer.

(For the record, the figure holding the sledgehammer in the final statue is definitely not a "girl." A hermaphrodite, maybe. Or a transgendered biological male, perhaps. But we were looking carefully for signs of "Alice" and the little package we found convinced us it wasn't a statue of her. Which, I'll add, did worry us a little.)

The team celebrated the end of phase I with a snack break, and then returned to the main stage eager to crack the "End Game" clue:

Sadly, though, I have to report that our team never even got out of the gate on this one.

We knew "it starts 5-3" was important. We thought we were probably looking for a phone number. We figured Dave Berry had just given us "the end." But I flipped E-I-E-I-O on its horizontal axis, declared "hey, it's symmetrical!" and then promptly started concocting all sorts of wild theories that lead absolutely nowhere.

The team associated the letters in E-I-E-I-O with their alphabetic values (5-9-5-9-15), flipped it around and tried 535-1959 x5. Wrong number. We tried it without flipping the E-I-E-I-O around. Wrong number. We associated the letters of E-I-E-I-O with their telephone key-pad values. Wrong number. Flipped around? Wrong number again. I then noticed the big number 2 on the map and said "hey, maybe 'it starts five-three' means 'it starts at five minus three = the big number two," and inspired the team to race off to the location marked by the big 2 on the map. Where we found only a bunch of similarly clueless dullards.

Bah! So close! So frustrating! How could I flip it one way, and then not try flipping it the other way?! Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Stupid, bordering on stoopid.

But still, intensely fun. And there's always next year.

Bonus? A team composed of law school friends that I hadn't talked to since 2003 won:

I pray this picture will be featured prominently in the next classnotes section of the Yale Law Report.

(Photos courtesy of "Zena.")

¡Viva Música Libre!

When it rains it pours--one day after Wilco streams its new album online, Coldplay offers nine live tracks for download. Grab 'em here:

Wilco Will Love You, Baby.

Wilco's been busy since playing the Moose's Tooth parking lot. Take a listen here:

Very preliminary first impression?

I'm only 2 songs in, but it seems more A Ghost is Born than Sky Blue Sky--which tends to make me as happy as a camel wearing a fez.

Street Tar and Summer

They do a job on your soul.

Music for One Musician

This is awesome:

(Even more fun:)

I once spent a roadtrip from Alaska to Connecticut listening to a 13-hour history of American avant-garde music in the 20th Century that left me pre-disposed to things like this. The show (aside from its odd introduction featuring Beethoven's 5th, an explosion, and a clip from Suzanne Vega's "99.9 Fahrenheit degrees") started out pretty strong-- earlier episodes featured Copeland, Ives, and Cage, and the genuinely cool, if very video-game sounding, 1940s-era player-piano experiments of Conlon Nancarrow (one of the first to write music that only machines could play).

The middle portion of the program, though, which contained many hours of Schoenberg-inspired atonal serialism, which was a slog. (It seemed to challenge even co-host "MTT"'s near limitless capacity for reverence.) If the goal was to make music that was both "not beautiful" and "impossible to remember," as the show's writers claimed it to have been, it worked. (To give you a sense of where composers from the era were coming from, a leading academic published an article in a 1958 edition of High Fidelity called, bluntly, "Who Cares If You Listen?" Answer: Not him.)

On the heels of that, arriving at the era of the minimalists --- and hearing Steve Reich's work in particular --- was like having color suddenly flood back into a world that had faded into black-and-white. I was hooked---and have been ever since. Few weeks go by now that I don't listen to Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, or Six Pianos.

The online tone matrix lets you generate sounds that have at least a passing resemblance to some of the minimalists' "additive" music, and that probably explains a good part of its appeal for me. Very cool.

Still, it's hard to compete with the real thing.

Authenticity!

Governor Palin has a Twitter account.




Do you think she does her own tweeting?

I don't think it's a big secret that a lot of politicians' online social-networking is handled by staffers.

(A recent status update posted on Senator Begich's facebook page, for instance, reads "Sen. Begich and Jacob got to do the coin toss at tonight's Alaska Wild game." Since I've never known Begich to mimic "The Jimmy" in real life, my guess is that someone else has the password.)

So, I'm inclined to think that the governor's tweets are really the work of McAllister, Stapelton, or someone else in her communication departments. (I'd be surprised if Gov. Palin is herself a proficient user of tinyurl.com, for instance.)

But what really impresses me about the Governor's twitter entries, over all, is their tone. Some, like the two involving forms of the word "grave" read like McAllister to me. Others, like the post referencing "America's energy," seem to come straight from the SarahPAC national playbook.

But, oh, the exuberance of the remainder! Two exclamation marks in the last tweet alone! 10 exclamations in 19 posts!! Is that not our Sarah?!

If not, you've got to admit it---it's pretty good. Shades of Tina Fey, practically.

Falling From the Tree (Updated)

It’s election day: Croft v. Sullivan, the voters of Anchorage decide.

And so, on this political day, a political question: What do the following individuals have in common?

Croft
Sullivan
Begich
Murkowski
Parnell
Coghill
Kerttula
Egan
Foster

Answer: They’re all former Alaska politicians.

• Chancy Croft, former Alaska State Representative and Senator, father of candidate Eric
• George Sullivan, former Mayor of Anchorage, father of candidate Dan
• Nick Begich, former U.S. Representative for Alaska, father of U.S. Senator Mark
• Frank Murkowski, former U.S. Senator for Alaska and Alaska State Governor, father of U.S. Senator Lisa
• Pat Parnell, former Alaska State Representative, father of Lt. Gov Sean
• Bill Egan, former Alaska State Governor, father of State appointed-Senator Dennis
• Jack Coghill, former Lt. Governor, father of State Rep. John
• Jalmar Kerttula, former Alaska State Representative and Senator, father of State Rep. Beth
• Neal Foster, Member of the Alaska Territorial Senate, father of State Rep. Richard.

Throw in Ted and Ben Stevens; Eugene and Gretchen Guess; and Mike and Nick Stepovich --- and there may be others --- and I think it’s worth asking: What’s going on here?

It’s certainly not an isolated phenomenon. Younger members of the Rockefeller, Kennedy, and Udall clans all call DC home. New York has the Cuomos. Massachusetts and Michigan have the Romneys.

Nor does the practice necessarily produce bad results—John Quincy Adams was one of the best political figures the country ever had.

But, for me, it raises some questions. To start, how does Alaska’s list compare to other states’? Is politics in Alaska a family business to an unusual degree? Or does every jurisidiction tend to about this level of dynastic representation? And assuming — there’s no reason not to — that each of Alaska’s elected sons and daughters was/is genuinely the best person for his or her job, what does it say, if anything, about how knowledge, resources, and social connections are distributed in Alaska society that so many of our leaders are political progeny?

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Post-Election Update: Sullivan takes it.

Dan will add years 16, 17 and 18 to the 15 that George M. banked.

A for Effort

What is it about R. Kelly's comically bizarre hip-hopera "Trapped in the Closet"?

Like the Kramer Portrait, it casts a seductive spell: you cannot look away.

I don't think it's just the repetition (though it contributes to the mesmerizing effect) or the Dan Brown-esque use of manufactured cliffhangers and dramatic "reveals."

My guess?



R.Kelly:Trapped in the Closet::
Philip Petit (a.k.a. "Man on Wire"):Bridging the Two Towers.

There's something about watching a person dedicate him- or herself so completely to a project, about seeing a fixation pursed beyond the point of absurdity to its logical end---even when the end result is ridiculous, and maybe especially when it's ridiculous, it's just hard to ignore.

It's kind of sublime.

Cataclysm Made Vivid

When Novarupta exploded in 1912 it reportedly sent enough sulfuric ash into the atmosphere that:

"At nearby Kodiak, for two days a person could not see a lantern held at arm's length,"

and

"Acid rain caused clothes to disintegrate on clotheslines in distant Vancouver, Canada."

From: U. S. National Park Service Website, Geology Fieldnotes - Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska, April 2000.

Both facts are oddly compelling. Especially given that there's no real reason why either couldn't happen again tomorrow.

(Given enough time, something similar almost certainly will.)

The Wisdom of Souter

A justice of the United States Supreme Court has just announced his imminent retirement. You get one question. What do you ask?

One of D.C.'s virtues is that it occasionally allows you to play these sorts of games for real.
One day after news of Justice Souter's retirement breaks, I find myself face-to-face with him at a downtown luncheon. More than one article about Souter's retirement from what he's called the "world's best job in the world's worst city," mentions that there are forty-seven 4,000-foot peaks in the White Mountains, and Justice Souter has climbed them all.

Now, as it happens, I walked to Maryland last Friday and, on Saturday, did it again. The routes -- trails in Rock Creek Park -- were pleasant enough, but definitely fell a little short of the "national park" experience. (The Western Ridge Trail's multiple road crossings do it in.) What's a newly minted member of the Alaska's D.C. diaspora to do?

A person in need of some guidance, I figure, hey, why not appeal to the Justice's special expertise?

I tell Souter that I'd read about his track-record of mountaineering in New Hampshire and thought that he, a long-time D.C. resident, would know: if I'm looking for some local Great Outsdoors, where should I go?

Souter gives a little smile and then a two-part answer.

First, he tells me I'm out of luck--if I'm looking for a trail, I should get out my compass and head north. There's no good hiking south of the Massachusetts border.

Disappointing, but not surprising.

What I didn't expect was the unsolicited follow-up: Souter tells me that since he officially made his decision to retire, not one day has gone by that he hasn't found himself drifting off into the same daydream---a bright sunny day, perched atop the highest mountain in New Hampshire, he sees himself above the tree line, a meandering path in front of him, trailing off into the distance.

I think the man knows exactly what he's doing.

ERUPTION!

....and so it begins. Auspiciously.