Whiny, Selfish Captains of Industry - Why I won't be seeing Atlas Shrugged

When I first read Atlas Shrugged (in college), I really got into it. I read one of Ayn Rand's other novels, and read a lot about Objectivism. A couple years later I realized why it appealed to me so much, and since then I've completely changed my mind about it.

Don't get me wrong - Atlas shrugged is a good piece of fiction. I even consider it a good counterpoint to a lot of the 60's socialist-hippy science-fiction that some of my favorite authors have cranked out, or (yech) most anything by L. Ron Hubbard. It is well-written story with good characters, but (like Battlefield Earth) the main focus of the story isn't the characters, it's the philosophy. In Ayn's case, a set of social and economic ideas called Objectivism.

Atlas Shrugged appeals to people initially because they sympathize with the powerful, hero-like characters in the book. At the risk of gross generalization, everyone likes to picture themselves as a powerful person. Everyone likes to think their contributions are important. Everyone likes the idea of sticking it to people who don't appreciate them. Everyone somewhere has a selfish core that wants to believe the world revolves around them, and that's exactly what this book appeals to. Normally I wouldn't care, but given the outsized attention this book has received over the years, the number of "Going Galt" cultural references, "Who is John Galt?" bumper stickers, company names, etc. that I've seen, and the powerful people who subscribe to Objectivism, it's a philosophy that worries me.  Some of it's most powerful proponents are former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, and R-WI congressman Paul Ryan, who created the Medicare-slashing U.S budget proposal that Republicans just passed in the House in Representatives.

When you take a step back, Atlas Shrugged is simply about the richest, most powerful people in the world  whining that their contributions aren't appreciated. One after another, they say "I'm going to take my jacks and go home", then take their magical talents off somewhere to wait for the world to come crawling back on it's knees begging them to deign to run civilization for the rest of the poor helpless folk who can't do anything for themselves.

Objectivism is inherently and unabashedly selfish. There's even a term for it: "rational self-interest". The theory seems to be that the world will be great if everyone acts only in their own self-interest. Ayn rejects feelings, emotion, and faith as irrational, which (if you're a Star Trek fan), would make her the ideal Vulcan.

My understanding of Objectivism sets it diametrically opposed to, and completely incompatible with Christianity. Aside from Ayn rejecting that religion has any value, just about anything espoused by Objectivism is the complete opposite of what Jesus "would have done".  This makes it a complete mystery to me why Atlas Shrugged is so popular with the Tea Party, unless they're just pretending to be concerned about "family values", and are really just in it for the money.  For some reason Ayn is the one atheist in the world that isn't a demonic cultist on her way to hell. Rather, she's been turned into some sort of economic patron saint, and copies of Atlas Shrugged are given away like it's the Bible.

Needless to say, I won't be forking out any money to see this movie.  It's completely in my own self-interest to save my twenty bucks and take my kids to see Rio, which will probably do a better job of preparing them to function in a society where you actually care about people.  In fact, I may find a charity to give it to, as "irrational" as that would be, in order to offset a small amount of the societal damage this book has caused.  As far as I'm concerned, anyone who wants to emulate this book is welcome to take off and go live in a valley by themselves somewhere. The rest of us will get along with the business of trying to make the world a better place in our own small, flawed ways, whether we're appreciated for it or not.

Jumping on the weightloss bandwagon

My associate Mattbear has inspired me to share my own weight loss/fitness status, so I'll start with some history:

A little over two years ago, I was at my highest weight - 230 lbs. (I'm 5'11", for reference) I started running a few times a week, doing aerobic kickboxing classes at the gym, and eating better, and dropped 19 lbs. over about 9 months. It was rather painful, but culminated in running a 5k marathon, and I was in much better shape overall. But then we moved, our instructor got pregnant and left for a while, and I was basically just slacking and eating whatever, and crept back up to 218 over the next year or so.

A few months ago I decided to get a handle on things again. I can't say I've make any drastic changes in my life, but it seems to be working, and I'm dropping a pound or two a week. Basically, this is what I'm doing:

Cutting down on food intake:
My eyes are always bigger than my stomach. In fact, it seems silly but I noticed that I have this tendency to get a little panicky if for some reason I think I won't get enough food at a meal. I'm not sure where that came from, but for instance, if I walk into the cafeteria at work, I would always look for something that looked big and filling, which usually ended up being full of meat, dairy, and grease (burgers, fries, lasagna, pizza, fish & chips). In the morning, I would always eat a big heaping bowl of cereal, or a big bowl of oatmeal plus a donut, but I basically always had this subconscious goal of being "full". So, my first change is to simply start eating less, and remove this emotional/stress component of my eating.

This is my standard diet now: A small (half-normal) bowl of raisin bran in the morning, plus coffee (soy milk, no sugar). A big vegetable-and-tofu salad at lunch (Intel has a great salad bar, so I'm spoiled here), with wine vinegar for dressing, water to drink. And pretty much whatever for dinner, although I try to make it non-dairy, and I try not to eat as much. If I'm feeling snacky, I can usually distract myself with some water or an apple, but I usually just try not to think about it.

Improving Food Quality:
Basically, I try to avoid dairy and sugar. I'm not a big salt fan normally, so that's not a huge issue. Honestly, if you can simply avoid cheese and processed sugar (corn syrup, etc.), your diet will become healthier exponentially by default. For instance, I used to eat a lot of ice cream. Ice cream is the food of the devil. It tastes great, but contains solely the worst things you could possibly eat - pure dairy, pure sugar, and tons of salt. I don't drink soda or juice anymore, mostly just water. I'm not a vegetarian, but I try to eat only "whole" non-processed meats (whole fish, steak, sliced ham, bacon). Stuff with dairy in it (bread, etc) is generally fine, but I avoid cheese and cream-based sauces/dressings. It's odd, but when I have eaten a lot of cheese lately (had a burrito for lunch one day), I can definitely feel the difference - I just feel heavier, and more congested somehow.

I can't say I'm always successful, I will sometimes eat a cookie in the afternoon, make some waffles, or eat pizza with the kids, but overall my diet "trend" has improved drastically.

Exercise:
I'm currently doing my one-hour aerobic kickboxing class every Monday, and jogging about two miles (40 minutes or so) a couple evenings a week. I would like to start doing some actual weight lifting to work on my upper body more, but haven't got there yet.

Monitoring:
I weigh myself in the morning after I get out of the shower. I've noticed that my weight can fluctuate by a pound or sometimes two from day to day, probably due to water retention, which I'm guessing depends a lot on how much salt I ate the day before. In general it's at it's lowest the morning after my kickboxing class, and will pop up and down a bit during the rest of the week. I can definitely correlate my diet quality and amount of exercise to whether I lost any weight that week though.

So, my current status: two weeks ago I got down to 206, the lowest weight I can remember. I had this work conference and started slacking (eating out & conference food) and missed kickboxing one week, so my weight popped back up to 210, then settled back to 208. I went kickboxing this week and am back on my cereal/salad regimen, so as of this morning I'm back to 207.

My goal was to be under 200 before Burning Man, but I don't think I'm going to make that. I think I stand a good chance of being below 200 *after* Burning Man though, so I would be very happy with that. I'm going to get myself a present, or celebrate somehow when I break the 200 barrier, haven't decided what yet.

Long-term, I'd like to get down to 185. According to this Ideal Weight Calulator my ideal should be 182-200, so 185 seems about right. I'll hereby set a goal for that of the end of 2008. Will update weekly, wish me luck!

News Trifeca

Unlike some people who don't update their blog nearly enough (hint hint), I actually have a job, which I will use here as my excuse for not updating my own blog nearly enough. However, a few things struck me today, which I feel necessary to relay:

I was seventeen in 1991, when Nirvana's "Nevermind" album came out. On NPR's All Things Considered show yesterday was a story about the baby on the cover of Nevermind. Give it a listen. He apparently lives in California, is seventeen now himself, and has his own brand of teen angst which landed him in military boarding school for six months. He disparages Guitar Hero and thinks our generation was probably cooler than his. And yes, you should feel old in... three, two, one... now.

Note: I had originally posted something snarky here about "Spam King" Eddie Davidson escaping from prison. Given the ensuing tragedy, and apparent desire of this man to inflict unforgivable harm on the people who loved him the most, I no longer found it funny and have removed it.

Finally, I saw this story about former NASA astronaut and Apollo 14 moon-walker Dr. Edgar Mitchell going on the record, claiming that we've been visited by aliens and the government is covering it up, although they're going to go public with the information any time now. I really want to go crash the local UFO convention this year, it would be a hoot. If Dr. Mitchell had actually seen them himself while walking on the moon I might lend him more credence, but I'm afraid all it really proves is that astronauts are just as gullible as the rest of us. But you never know, I could be being paid by the government to spread disinformation, or they could just be controlling my mind directly with radio-controlled spy cockroaches. Now where did I leave my tinfoil...

Now back to your regularly scheduled (non)work day.

Retrofuture

One thing I love is old science-fiction. I find it fascinating looking back at how people in the past imagined the future would look, and how it actually turned out. I ran across a series of 16 pictures drawn by a french artist (feuilleter?) in 1910, showing his concepts of life in the year 2000. (You can click on the pictures to see a larger version) He hit a lot of things really accurately that probably weren't too much of a stretch - electric trains, motorcycles, "automobiles of war" - but I'm impressed by the "Correspondance Cinema", and that one "At the School" where the teacher is dropping books into a mechanical machine that appears to put the information straight into the kids' heads. I'm also intrigued by the one titled "Un Diner chimique" - "A chemical dinner" where there's no actual food, just little flasks & things. The last one appears to portray what looks like horse-drawn carriages, if you removed the horses and stuck wings on them.

All in all, I think he got it pretty spot-on, conceptualizing the technologies that really ended up defining our lives on this end of the century - cars, airplanes, automated manufacturing, processed foods, computers. 2010 is going to be coming up soon - what are your predictions for the year 3000?

Damn You Barack Obama...

He says it better than I can.

Roxy Freshly Painted

Been slow on the updates because, well, the Roxy project has been taking rather longer than anticipated. However, she was painted last weekend, and I'm really impressed with the results.

I popped over to the shop on Tuesday and shot some pictures... put them up on my Picasa album here. They're a bit dark, I hope to get her out in the sun at some point, but ooh, she's shiny.

Anyhow, will keep y'all updated on any progress.

Postcards from Jupiter

I've had this picture (on the left) as my desktop for the last week or so. At first glance it doesn't look like much, black and white, moon rising. Nice, but not too attention grabbing.

It gains a little more significance however when you're told that this is an actual photo of Europa, rising over Jupiter, taken two months ago.

This photo was taken on February 28th by the New Horizons spacecraft, which just passed through Jupiter's system on it's way out to Pluto.

It blows me away that NASA doesn't get any decent headlines these days, that the media would rather play "Paris Hilton Goes to Jail" than follow the astounding things that we're doing in space. Let me recap this particular mission:

- NASA Engineers basically built a robotic, solar-powered telescopic camera, designed to operate in deep space.
- They stuck it on an Atlas V rocket and blasted it into space in 2006.
- They put it on a trajectory to slingshot around Jupiter on it's way out to Pluto, a journey of about three billion miles.
- A year or so after launch, it just passed Jupiter (approximately 500 million miles away), travelling at 47,000 miles per hour. This slingshot maneuver sped up the craft, saving about three years travel time.
- Said spacecraft took this picture of Europa rising over Jupiter, then broadcast it back towards the earth.
- NASA picked the picture up from a satellite dish somewhere, and stuck it on their web server.
- I downloaded it, and here I am talking about it.
- We should expect more photos, of Pluto, in about eight years.

If you want to see more astounding photos from this mission, go here.

My other favorite is an animated photo of Jupiter's moon IO and the 180-mile-high volcanic plume from its volcano Tvashtar.

New Horizons is by no means the first. By way of a little history, NASA's first spacecraft to do this, Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972. It passed Jupiter in 1973, and then headed out of the solar system. The last signals were received from it in 2003, when it had travelled about 7.5 billion miles.

It's now about 8 billion miles away, travelling at 27,000 miles per hour. It should reach the Aldebaran solar system in about two million years.

Each one of these missions enables us to learn incredible things about our solar system, and raises more questions for future missions to investigate.

Interesting News Night

Was driving home listening to NPR and heard two stories back-to-back that grabbed my attention.

First, some guy jumped off the Aurora bridge in Seattle. If that wasn't bad enough, he hit some power lines on the way down, caused a nearby transformer to explode and knocked out power to a small chunk of Fremont.

Second, the residence hall at my former college was evacuated today when the custodian found a duct-tape-wrapped pipe bomb. Damn engineering students, always wanting to blow stuff up.

Oh, and the most awesome tesla coil I've ever seen is up for sale on Ebay, if you've got a spare 14 grand lying around. The description is hilarious.

After all these years...

"..and we'll dodge debrit as we trim the tree underneath a mushroom cloud."
- "Weird Al" Yankovic - It's Christmas at ground zero

"The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly Saddam can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
- Condoleeza Rice - Sept. 8, 2002 CNN's Late Edition w' Wolf Blitzer

I remember watching Ms. Rice deliver the above quote. I don't believe I actually watched the show, but saw the video online sometime later. CNN still has the transcript available.

Four 1/2 years later, I don't know anyone still holding their breath that we're going to find Saddam's "WMDs" hidden somewhere in Iraq. However, we've never had any sort of accounting as to how the Bush Administration so badly (and maybe intentionally) mis-represented the intelligence claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger, which cumulated with Bush himself making this claim in his State of the Union address in January 2003. It appears now that the chickens are finally coming home to roost.

At the time of this speech in 2003, Rep. Henry Waxman, (Democrat-CA), was the Ranking Minority member on the House Government Reform Committee. Two days before we launched the war in the Iraq, he wrote a letter to President Bush asking why this claim was included in his speech, but never received any reply. Over the last four years he's written 16 letters to Condoleeza Rice asking about various white house policy decisions, and has only received answers to five.

But as of January Henry Waxman is now the Chairman (Ranking majority member) of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform - with the power to subpoena people to testify before him. He appears to have lost patience, and wants answers now.

Today, Mr. Waxman sent a new letter , which I highly recommend reading, giving Ms. Rice until March 23rd to give a satisfactory answer to the questions he's been asking about the Niger evidence for the last four years.

He's also requesting answers to some other previous letters on various subjects, and giving Ms. Rice until April 20th for these.

It might not seem like a big deal, but it's great to see someone with some actual authority working to get information out of this administration and hold them accountable for botched intelligence and other goings-on of the last four years which the Republican congress completely gave them a pass on.

Other recent news of note:
Halliburon announced it is moving it's headquarters to Dubai (in the United Arab Emirates). That's right - the company that basically runs the U.S. war with Iraq is moving to the middle east. Senator Frank Lautenberg wants to investigate whether this is because Halliburton doesn't want their subsidiaries to have to stop doing business with Iran.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (Waxman again) is having a hearing on Friday (March 16th) during which Valerie Plame herself will testify about the disclosure of her identity and how it was handled by the White House.

These are interesting times my friends...

Bizarre News Day

Running across some odd (and oddly though-provoking) news stories today, figured I'd share:

First, in case you didn't know, last summer the Washington state Supreme Court upheld the "one man one woman" marriage law. In the Andersen ruling, Justice Barbara Madsen stated that the law had been enacted to "promote procreation and to encourage stable families.", and "The legislature was entitled to believe that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers the State's legitimate interests in procreation and the well-being of children."

So, the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance has decided to have some fun with the ruling, and has filed Initiative I-957 which would limit marriage "to men and women who are able to have children. Couples would be required to prove they can have children to get a marriage license. If they did not have children within three years, their marriages would be subject to annulment."

On it's own web site, the group calls it's own initiative absurd, noting that it is really just trying to foster discussion. It also says it plans to file two more initiatives: "The second would prohibit divorce or legal separation when there are children. The third would make the act of having a child together the legal equivalent of a marriage ceremony."

I love politics. :)


For our second story, Lisa Marie Nowak - a female NASA astronaut - is facing attempted murder charges after harrassing, and allegedly trying to kidnap a woman who was also seeing the male astronaut that she was having a relationship with. Now, I know that being a highly intelligent astronaut and aeronautical engineer doesn't spare you from also being human and prone to crazy relationships and jealousies, but here's where it gets weird. From the article:

"When Nowak found out Shipman was flying to Orlando from Houston, Nowak decided to confront her early Monday, according to the arrest affidavit. Nowak raced from Houston to Orlando wearing diapers in the car so she wouldn't have to stop to go to the bathroom, authorities said. Astronauts wear diapers during launch and re-entry."

and:

"If you were just going to talk to someone, I don't know that you would need a wig, a trench coat, an air cartridge BB gun and pepper spray," said Orlando police Sgt. Barbara Jones. "It's just really a very sad case."


And our final article of the day - the Washington Post has an article about a community of people who believe the government is monitoring them and beaming voices into their heads. It's an interesting article in that it examines much of the evidence given by the self-described TIs (Targeted Individuals) - the military's new "Active Denial System" (using microwaves to create intense burning sensations in the target), the MIT study that found that wearing a tinfoil hat actually amplifies certain radio waves, the LifeLog project, and post-911 renewed interest by the U.S. government in mind-control programs such as MK-ULTRA. Read that whole wikipedia entry on MK-ULTRA and suddenly the TI community starts to sound a lot more sane.

Ultimately it boils down to the following question, which I will hopefully never have to answer: If you start hearing voices in your head that appear as real to you as everything else, is it easier to accept that you're mentally ill, or is it easier to accept that some nefarious agency (or entity, I suppose) is transmitting them into your skull?

If any of you are ever faced with this decision, let me know.

Beauty is in the eye of the graphic artist.

As it says.. no wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.

Connecticut for Lieberman Follies

I love it when people "hack" the government. My favorite "hack" previously was when San Franciso began deputizing the managers of their medical marijuana distribution centers to make them immune from arrest under federal law. The law had originally been passed to prevent local copy from being prosecuted for breaking federal laws while enforcing local drug laws - which is exactly what it was used for, although this didn't exactly match the original intent.

Anyhow, I might have a new favorite. For anyone who didn't follow the Senate campaign in Connecticut, it went down like this:

Lieberman (previously a Democrat), lost the Democratic party primary in Connecticut to Ned Lamont.
Rather than gracefully bowing out, Lieberman vowed to run as an "independent" candidate, created his own party (Connecticut for Lieberman), and ran for the Senate seat as a member of that party. (Getting large amounts of funding from Republican sources, I might add). He said he’d been forced to take that route in order to allow all of Connecticut’s voters the opportunity to vote for him.
Lieberman actually won (I'll never understand that one) with 50% of the vote.

However, having registered the party to run as it's candidate, nobody bothered to follow up with it after the election. So "government hacker" (and Fairfield University Political Science Professor) John Orman decided to do it himself. He popped on down to the state office and registered himself as the sole member of the party, and subsequently elected himself chairman.

He has restricted membership to "critics of the senator and anyone named Lieberman". Since this party won in the last election, they automatically get to field a candidate when Lieberman's term expires in 2012.
Ormans party chairmanship has now been officially recognized by the Secretary of State, pending any lawsuit over the matter.

Another party rule reads: “If any CFL candidate loses our party’s nomination in a primary, that candidate must bolt our party, form a new party and work to defeat our party-endorsed candidate.”

I love this guy. This will be interesting to keep an eye on...

Roxy in the Shop

Just wanted to post an update on Roxy, although I'm even a bit out of date now. Took these pictures about two weeks ago. She's in the shop being stripped - the pictures show Tony's taken out the interior, and taken off the fenders and the hood. Still doesn't look like much, but she's a work in progress.

He's going to keep cleaning her up, repairing some minor body damage, and get her ready for paint. Cyn and I went to the shop and picked out the colors. Oohh.. I can't wait. She's like a big fat Christmas present that I won't get until March. :)

Meta-Memophage

Eric Kaufman is running an experiment on meme propagation from his blog: Measuring the Speed of a Meme.

The idea is that you read his post, create your own that references it, link back to it, tell your readers to make their own posts about it, and enter the link to your post in Technorati so it can be tracked.

Eric will track the propagation of his meme "across" the internet, and post an analysis at some point.

So, just to be clear, I'm propagating a meme about meme propagation, which is itself measuring meme propagation processes. And if you've read this far, you're now a host. Have at it. :)

Meet Roxy

Meet Roxy (no, not the boy, although he's cute too). She doesn't look like much now, but we have big plans.

The story is that when I moved here, I found a gret VW Mechanic, Tony Schoen, who owns German Autowerks here in Beaverton/Hillsboro. One day when I was in there I noticed this trashed-out, rusty bug in the shop. I mean.. the thing looked like it had been sitting outside with no windows for years, it was full of debris and generally looked like hell. He said they were restoring it, but I was skeptical. A few months later I came in for something else, and there was this shiny new light-blue bug with a shiny black interior sitting in the lot with a temporary permit sticker... I didn't believe it, and had to ask "Is that the same bug?" just to make sure.

I got to talking with Tony later on after we sold our Volvo (I recovered their customer database off their laptop when its hard-drive crashed), and he's going to build a bug for me. He's been working air-cooled VW's since the 70's, and claims to have "built" over 100 of them. He had a few 60's models laying around that he's been working on occasionally, so I'm buying one off him, and he's going to do the restoration work, build an engine, and has a guy joining his shop to do the body work and paint.

So, I've tentatively named her Roxy. She's a '67 (last year they had metal dashboards and a flat windshield) and we're going to give her a classic look... trying to stick close to the look of that year, within reason. Going to go with a two-tone paint job, and will eventually have the roof and tail-racks. I'd post a concept picture, but I want it to be a surprise. :)

There's a few more pictures of her current state (Cedar likes her, he hopped right in and started driving) on my flickr site, I'm planning on taking more as the project progresses and posting updates. We're planning on having her done by March, and entering her in a local VW show in the Portland Convention Center.

I'm itching for her to be done, but I got nothing to do but hurry up and wait.

Ridin' the Rails

Writing this entry from the train. Just passed through Olympia, will be getting off in Tacoma here shortly. Visiting family, and going to a Halloween party tomorrow night. First big party we've gone to in, well, years, really. With the exception of Burning Man a couple years ago, I suppose. :)

I love taking Amtrak. If you haven't, I highly recommend it. It's cheap ($30 PDX-SEA), it takes about the same amount of time as driving since the train gets to bypass traffic, and all you have to do is sit there, eat some dinner, drink your Jack & Coke, watch a movie, and write blog entries. They even have power for your laptop now, go figure.

The other reason I love the train is the scenery. The water is nice, and the forest is cool. You get to see a lot more countryside that isn't sliced up by roads, and you have much more time to look out the window than you do when you're driving. But what I love is that, from the perspective of the tracks, you get to see the dirty underbelly of civilization. From the road, everyone presents a nice image - glass-front buildings, or houses with manicured lawns, clean driveways and shiny cars... from the tracks, you get to see all the backs of those buildings and houses, with the junk in the backyard, the rotting cars, colorful graffiti that nobody bothers to paint over.. all the things that people have forgotten, or just don't care about.

And there's also the industrial districts, with giant tanks of who-knows-what deadly chemicals and flame-topped smokestacks, or acres of logs as far as you can see. Or farmland with old dilapidated farmhouses and rusty tractors. I mean, nobody builds their huge mansion, or their shiny new condo building next to the tracks if they can help it. We're such a car-centric culture that it's interesting to see what's behind the scenes, either the stuff that's fallen by the wayside, or the normally invisible industrial structure that makes our society work, but that nobody wants to live near. It's a little glimpse behind the facades of everyday life. And if you're attentive, you can spot evidence of times past, when the train was the quickest way to get from coast to coast, and we all weren't in such a rush to drive from one place to another.

So hop on the train and come visit. I'll pick you up at the station...

GoogleBomb

This is part of an effort to bring all these fun articles about the slease and corruption of GOP Congressional candidates up in the Google search rankings. For more information, go to the Daily Kos article here.
If you want to participate, the HTML source is here.

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl
--AZ-01: Rick Renzi
--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth
--CA-04: John Doolittle
--CA-11: Richard Pombo
--CA-50: Brian Bilbray
--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave
--CO-05: Doug Lamborn
--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell
--CT-04: Christopher Shays
--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan
--FL-16: Joe Negron
--FL-22: Clay Shaw
--ID-01: Bill Sali
--IL-06: Peter Roskam
--IL-10: Mark Kirk
--IL-14: Dennis Hastert
--IN-02: Chris Chocola
--IN-08: John Hostettler
--IA-01: Mike Whalen
--KS-02: Jim Ryun
--KY-03: Anne Northup
--KY-04: Geoff Davis
--MD-Sen: Michael Steele
--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht
--MN-06: Michele Bachmann
--MO-Sen: Jim Talent
--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns
--NV-03: Jon Porter
--NH-02: Charlie Bass
--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson
--NM-01: Heather Wilson
--NY-03: Peter King
--NY-20: John Sweeney
--NY-26: Tom Reynolds
--NY-29: Randy Kuhl
--NC-08: Robin Hayes
--NC-11: Charles Taylor
--OH-01: Steve Chabot
--OH-02: Jean Schmidt
--OH-15: Deborah Pryce
--OH-18: Joy Padgett
--PA-04: Melissa Hart
--PA-07: Curt Weldon
--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick
--PA-10: Don Sherwood
--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee
--TN-Sen: Bob Corker
--VA-Sen: George Allen
--VA-10: Frank Wolf
--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick
--WA-08: Dave Reichert

Post-Run

Gotta post a follow-up to the Cheetah run... it wasn't easy, and felt good to cross that finish line. Of course, the first serious rain we'd had in two months had to start that morning, so it was cold and wet, and the course was pretty steep - first downhill, then back up. So we walked a bit on the uphill part, but I'm happy with how we did. It wasn't a very serious run (all the "professional" runners seemed to be on the 8k run), but we seemed to do better than people that looked to be in better shape than us. It wasn't a race per-se, but we came in pretty solidly in the middle (140/141 of 293).

It was fun to get out and see other crazy Portlanders (are we Portlanders yet?) running in the cold and rain. There was a lot of info on Cheetahs, and the woman (Dr. Laurie Marker) who runs the Cheetah Conservation Fund was there. A couple of interesting things I've learned about Cheetahs lately:
a) Cheetahs are all basically clones of each other. At some point in the past, the Cheetah population got so small there were only a few breeding pairs left, so they lost almost all genetic diversity when the populaton expanded again.
b) There's only about 12,000 of them left. They get around so fast though that it appears there are many more of them than there actually are, so the local farmers trap them and kill them to protect their livestock without giving it much thought. There are efforts underway to get the farmers to raise and bond herding dogs to the livestock herds for protection, which is apparently amazingly effective at deterring cheetahs, making the herds not such a source of easy kills. The same technique is used by Rocky Mountain farmers in the US to protect against wolves.

So all in all, it was a good first run. I think we're going to need to do small runs like this fairly frequently to keep motivation up. There's another one coming up at the Zoo in November, we'll have to try and arrange child care for that.

Running in Circles

We're running a 5k run at the Portland Zoo tomorrow. Wish us luck. :)

I think it should be fun, really. I never thought I'd consider myself a "runner". I still don't, really, not like the obsessive type. But for two or three months now we've been alternatively running or doing our "aerobic kickboxing" class at least every other day.

I should add that this is the first time in my life, since the weight training class I took in high school, that I've done any regular exercise. The first week I thought I was going to die every time I went running. Came back pouring sweat, out of breath, was all I could do not to just collapse on the couch. I ran a few times on a treadmill, generally around a mile, mile and a half. Then we mapped out a route around our block, which is about 1.7 miles. Took me a few weeks to be able to do that without having to stop every so often and catch my breath. We eventually started going slightly longer routes around the neighborhood, up to 2 1/4 or so miles now, I think. Now I can do three miles on the treadmill. Haven't run that distance on foot yet though, guess I'll find out how I do tommorrow.

Off to bed, gotta get up early and run.

Never thought I'd say that...

Tao Te Ching Number Two

When people find one thing beautiful,

another consequently becomes ugly.
When one man is held up as good,

another is judged deficient.

Similarly, being and nonbeing balance each other;

difficult and easy define each other;

long and short illustrate each other;

high and low rest upon one another;

voice and song meld into harmony;

what is to come follows upon what has been.

The wise person acts without effort

and teaches by quiet example.
He accepts things as they come,

creates without possessing,

nourishes without demanding,

accomplishes without taking credit.

Because he constantly forgets himself,

he is never forgotten.

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