There’s a cool New Yorker article about Parkour, the cool urban running/ jumping/ climbing/ leaping thing. By no means am I as bold as the pros, but man it’s fun. [via kottke]
Category: life
Time for a Vacation
Several months ago, I decided to attempt a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail this summer. In 2005 I was fortunate enough to hike the southern 1/3 of the trail, about 730 miles from Georgia to mid-Virginia. I’ve had a hankering to get out there again. A while ago I gave notice at the library where I work. My last day there is the 10th, and I’ll be hitting the trail on the 15th. (!)
So, you can expect things to get a little sluggish here between now and the 15th as I put final touches on my preparation. And after that, mlarson.org will be on a little hiatus. With health, patience, and a bit of luck, I should be back sometime in late July or early August with a photo of me smiling on Katahdin.
I’ll miss you.
I think the anthology of Missed Connection Comics could be pretty cool. The concept is to take a missed connection post from Craigslist and comic-ize it. You’ll find some samples here.
Justin wears the camera 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Even in the bathroom. Even on a date.
“Dunbar’s number, which is 150, represents the maximum number of individuals with whom a set of people can maintain a social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person.” [via intriguing social network discussion on kottke.org]
“havent slept in 105 hrs. my eyes are burnng horribly an seem to be bloodshot. as far as reaction time goes, its almost nonexistant. i had friend throw something at me, and didnt even bother flinching.”
I just picked up The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything today. Pretty dern good so far.
Artists, illustrators, designers, and creative folk share the stuff on their desks. I like this voyeuristic peering into other people’s minds sort of thing. Reminds me of the Flickr tags whatsinmybag/whatsinyourbag.
A fascinating story of pranking the 2007 Super Bowl half-time show. Sometimes security really is only theater. Hilarious and frightening.
A list of famous teetotalers. I’m in good company: Gandhi, John Coltrane, Isaac Asimov, Richard Feynman, Henry David Thoreau, Samuel L. Jackson, Xeni Jardin, Penn Jillette, David Letterman, Donald Trump, H.P. Lovecraft, Frank Zappa, and Prince, among others. Fictional teetotalers include Batman and MacGyver. Um… Heinrich Himmler, Hitler, and Osama bin Laden are also on the list, but let’s not get bogged down in details, okay?
A Practical Handbook for the Boyfriend (review: 4/5)
The subtitle says it all, really: For Every Guy Who Wants to Be One/For Every Girl Who Wants to Build One. If you’ve ever been confused or frustrated by a female, you’ll probably find some help here. I was surprised by how much I liked this one. Felicity Huffman and Patricia Wolff managed to put together a book that’s both informative and legitimately hilarious. I can’t think of very many books that I’ve dog-eared more than this one. There are great lines throughout. For example…
- A woman’s emotional checklist reads more like a Russian novel.
- Love up her body the way you find it, or find a body that you can love up.
- Any flat surface where people might perch, she will want to ‘pillowize’.
- Can we please discuss that apr?®s-pee shaking?
- The thing you do isn’t only the thing you do; it represents something else.
- Guys seems able to carry a bigger load of irritants than we can… The BF shrugs, shakes his head, and files it under ‘Oh Well,’ that big category made up of a lot of manila folders, all of which are bulging and ripping at the seams.
The whole thing is written in this conversational tone, and it’s all pretty straightforward. I daresay females could learn a good bit as well. The authors don’t claim to have all the answers, and they don’t make a lot of apologies either. The whole book seems to square with real life. I had plenty of head-nodding, plenty of Aha! moments, and quite a bit of fun. Read this!
Some intriguing design-writ-large ideas about cities qua applications. Cities, like other things we come upon in daily life, should just work:
Given any new city, there are certain things that should be easy for tourists to comprehend without assistance. These things might include: how and when to use the subway or bus, how and where to buy fares for public transportation, how to make a call at a public telephone, how and where to flag a taxi, what to expect upon entering and leaving the airport, how and where to find postal services, how and where to find a police station, et cetera.
A person in California tried to rent out Beth Ann Bovino’s New York apartment through Craigslist. A classic 419 fraud. Although things didn’t turn out so bad, I hope I never get sucked into a news frenzy like Bovino did.
Well said:
This is not meant to put down anyone elseÄôs musical taste, or point out how cool I am. I could (and have) walk into any college radio station and get that attitude aimed at me by some DJ with a crate of out-of-print Lithuanian ska-tech remix 12Ä?s. ThatÄôs no fun! If you want to club people with Äòtude, explain to them why their favorite API sucks. You talk about music to share it, make friends, and find more of it, not to alienate people.
Mental note: be nicer when talking about music.
Interesting graph charting relationships, potentially useful as a guide for writing screenplays. I love the “null set” portion.
The Telegraph has a couple articles on the toxic wife.
I have every admiration for women who choose the selfless task of caring and nurturing the next generation. No, the toxic wife is a completely different species. She is the woman who gives up work as soon as she marries, ostensibly to create a stable home environment for any children that might come along, but who then employs large numbers of staff to do all the domestic work she promised to undertake, leaving her with little to do all day except shop, lunch, luxuriate. Believe me, there is no shortage of the breed and I’ve been inundated with horror tales about them.
I’d like to cover a friend’s car in post-it notes, but I haven’t decided which one yet.
BackpackingLight has a podcast with Scott Williamson, who was the first hiker to yo-yo the Pacific Crest Trail. A PCT yo-yo entails walking from the Mexico-California border northward to the Washington-Canada border, and back south to Mexico again, 2650 miles each way. He was also the first to yo-yo the PCT a second time—that one only took 191 days. Last fall I linked to an interesting, melodramatic essay on his several unsuccessful attempts before completing his first yo-yo. He has now hiked the PCT 9 times. I wish the words “truly inspirational” didn’t sound so clich?©, because those are the best ones I can think of right now. Amazing.
Mark Larson 
