Olympianisms

Having watched and lived the Olympics for the past few weeks, I thought I'd share some thoughts:

1. Dressage should be called Horse Dancing. And the horses should have to be born in the country they're representing since they're doing all the work. And also this shouldn't really be in the Olympics.

2. I followed both the Heptathlon and Decathlon for the first time. These struck me as being the Liberal Arts degree equivalents of sports: be good at many things, but probably not great at any. This isn't completely true of course since Jessica Ennis would've won the gold medal with her 100m hurdle time, and Ashton Eaton would have qualified for the finals in at least the long jump, but still... watching some of the athletes in some of the events seemed cruel almost. The 1500m final for the men was an awkward watch.

3. Maybe the best achievement of the games -- a Maasai warrior setting a world record in the 800m. Kenya dig it! If the Kenyans keep getting bigger and stronger they're going to start Jamaican us crazy in the sprint events too.

4. The medal count thing is ridiculous. And so is all the bickering and accusations of cheating. The teams and coaches from all of the big countries are using any advantage they can all the time, and calling out anyone for anything -- apart from taking steriods -- is a bit small. The whole medal table should be re-ranked by some sort of GDP and population algorithm.

5. Cool that the rowers don't stand on the podium for the medal ceremony. Weird that they give two bronzes in judo and wrestling.

6. Little disappointed that I didn't get any love for the "I say Lightning, U-sain Bolt" post. Thought that was pretty clever.

How to make an extra-small wool sweater

1. Take one part warm water
2. Mix with one adult large wool sweater.
3. Enjoy!

I say "Lightning",

usain "Bolt"

My contribution for The Onion

Would be something to do with the rider of a fixie (fixed gear bike with no ability to coast, no brakes, and narrow handle bars) in a big city being incredulous about crashing fifteen times in one day.

Fifty shades of awkward

Number of people sitting next to me on my flight yesterday who were shifting nervously while reading Fifty Shades of Grey: 2

Later I would learn that they were husband and wife.

As for me, I played Tiny Wings and slept with my mouth open. 

The Day of Er/uk

This article crossed my mind yesterday afternoon when I was peeing while eating a bowl of cereal: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/garden/the-freedom-and-perils-of-living-alone.html

Ponyriding on volcanos

I once read that real men should only walk or run. There is apparently no dignity in skipping or half-running or crawling or limping or speed walking. And I mostly agree that those are not ideal.

Horses of courses have more well defined gears: they walk, they trot, they canter and they gallop.

But not all horses.

Icelandic horses are very small. Perhaps in an effort to compensate, they decided to do more. So they learned to tölt, and some even learned to do the flying pace. The flying pace! It's like the human equivalent of parkour.

6 gaits! Or 5 if you lump cantering/galloping into one gait, which to me just seems petty.

Well done Icelandic horse.

Michael Lewis' new book Boomerang is proof that American novelists really love national stereotypes

Despite all that, I really enjoyed the book.

It's not really that new either and even thought it's topical it's definitely still worth a read. And that's the case even if you have little to no experience or even interest in the GFC, as it now seems to be affectionately called.

You might remember that, along with Lehman Brothers, Iceland was a first chip to fall in the GFC. Here are a few notes/stereotypes from the chapter on Iceland that I found most amusing. Having been there this past weekend for a wedding I've added my own conclusions afterwards.


Iceland


Many Icelanders believe in the existence of so-called hidden people, or elves. [This is cool enough that I purposely avoided asking questions that might disprove it.]

All Icelanders know Bjork. [Met some people that regularly saw her at the pool. Met others who just knew where she lived (a house painted completely black with swans in the windows). Spotting Icelandic celebrities in Reykjavik seems as easy as knowing who they are.]

Icelandic women appear to lack a genuine connection to Icelandic men. (Since I was there for a wedding between two natives, I can say that this one appears to be a bit of an exaggeration at best.]

Icelandic men like stubble. [Unequivocally.]

You know how when two people (usually males) are walking towards each other on the sidewalk, and both refuse to adjust their path or the trajectory of their shoulders to avoid bumping into each other? Apparently Icelandic men seek out the contact. [Didn't have any problems.]

And now for a couple of my own preconceptions with comments having actually experienced the place:

Icelandair seems like an awesome airline. [No, it's not.]

Icelandic people eat strange food, like sheep brain. [I think so. Strangest thing I ate was whale sashimi.]

It looks like mars there. [It looks like mars there.]

Inspired, nay brazenly stolen and slightly adapted from the works of Werner Herzog

Graca. Woman.

You constantly revile me with your singular lack of vision. Be aware, there is an essential truth and beauty in all things. From the death throes of a speared gazelle to the damaged smile of a freeway homeless. But that does not mean that the invisibility of something implies its lack of being. Though simpleton babies foolishly believe the person before them vanishes when they cover their eyes during a hateful game of peek-a-boo, this is a fallacy. And so it is that the unseen dusty build up that accumulates in the furthest and darkest corner of the bedroom exists also. This is unacceptable.

I will tell you this Graca, not as a taunt or a threat but as an evocation of joy. The joy of nothingness, the joy of the real. I want you to be real in everything you do. If you cannot be real, then a semblance of reality must be maintained. A real semblance of the fake real, or “real”. I have conquered mountains and visited the cold shallows of the ocean by snorkel. Nothing I have witnessed, from cloud canopy to crustacean, assailed me liked the caked debris haunting that small plastic soap hammock in the smaller of the bathrooms. Nausea is not a sufficient word. In this regard, you are not being real.

Now we must turn to the horrors of nature. I am afraid this is inevitable. Nature is not something to be coddled and accepted and held to your bosom like a wounded snake. Tell me, what was there before you were born? What do you remember? That is nature. Nature is a void. An emptiness. A vacuum. And speaking of vacuum, I am not sure you’re using the retractable nozzle correctly or applying the ‘full weft’ setting when attending to the lush carpet of the hallway. I found some dander there.

I have only listened to two songs in my entire life. One was an aria by Wagner that I played compulsively from the ages of 19 to 27 at least 60 times a day until the local townsfolk drove me from my dwelling using rudimentary pitchforks and blazing torches. The other was Dido. Both appalled me to the point of paralysis. Every quaver was like a brickbat against my soul. Music is futile and malicious. So please, if you require entertainment while mopping the flat, refrain from the ‘pop radio’ I was affronted by recently. May I recommend the recitation of some sharp verse. Perhaps by Goethe. Or Schiller. Or Shel Silverstein at a push.

The situation regarding small, oversized or shallow spoons remains unchanged. If I see one, I will kill it.

That is all. Do not fail to think that you are not the finest woman I have ever met. You are. And I am including on this list my mother and the wife of Brad (the first Brad, not the one with the thumb). Thank you for listening and sorry if parts of this note were smudged. I have been weeping.

Your money is under the guillotine.

er/uk

To you mom

To my mom, who started swimming lessons. And to everyone else who never stops making the most of their extra seconds.

Every second counts

And today, we all get an extra one. Make the most of it.

Here are a few suggestions:

1. Start a garden.
2. Take a cooking class.
3. Write a thank you letter.
4. Watch Season 2 of Game of Thrones
5. Read up on Skrillex, the hot new DJ who looks like a lot of alt/emo Spanish girls. 

It's been a long time -- nearly 3 years -- but I've decided to try my blogging hat back on.

Though that couldn't mean less to the entire population of the world minus about 30 people, I still feel some pressure to find my old voice.

So for that reason I'm going to start with a bombshell; something hard hitting and topical and thought provoking. A blog post that will get everyone talking and make everyone remember why they checked into er/uk regularly or semi-regularly or maybe once by accident.

Not many of you will know this, but about 8 months ago, I made the decision to stop wearing jeans.

Change is never easy, but it was a change I wanted to make, because I didn't find jeans to be comfortable any more. These days you'll find me in cotton twill, linen, cotton-linen blend, and very occasionally wool, which is far less comfortable than jeans.

No regrets. Thanks for tuning in.

Part 2

Blog is Dead

I'm going to be real with you right now: blogs are old hat. Or if you don't have an old hat, think of the shirt you have hanging in your closet but haven't worn for several years. It's not so bad that you've actually taken it down and put it into a charity bag, but if you're really honest with yourself you know you'll never wear it again.

Things that are in right now:
1. Wasting lots of free time watching sports.
2. Reading Twitter, but not actually Tweeting.
3. Having a girlfriend.

It takes me back

Back to when I asked for a Nintendo, and my dad said "No". And so then I just had to watch my friend Kirk Snyder play. It looked like so much fun.

I could do this all day

http://soytuaire.labuat.com/

Saw this on NPR: All Songs Considered.

$.25 life

AHHHHHHHH! SEVERAL SECTIONS OF THIS ARTICLE ACCURATELY SUMMARIZE ME!

But more elements directly pigeonhole Oliver, so that makes me feel better.

www.eyeweekly.com/features/article/55882

Some key passages:
Boomer and post-boom parents with more money and autonomy than their predecessors has resulted in benignly self-indulgent children who were sold on their own uniqueness, place in the world and right to fulfillment in a way no previous generation has felt entitled to, and an increasingly entrepreneurial, self-driven creation myth based on personal branding, social networking and untethered lifestyle spending is now responsible for our identities.

The Quarterlife Crisis remains largely a middle-class, Stuff White People Like kind of problem, and usually manifests itself where certain problematic social norms used to exist, like who had access to education and interesting work, and who was allowed adventure and self-determination.

Having so much — youth, ability, independence — can feel like the worst possible scenario.

I wasn't spoiled as a child, and I'm not headed back to graduate school, and I'm not in debt, but I do identify with parts of this. And more than the specifics, I identify with the general theme of the article. I need boundaries -- feel free to suggest some.

Could be worse though.

The Grant Study

Most happiness/social psychology research is bollocks, because everyone is different and people are happy or unhappy for so many different rhymes and reasons. Sells a lot of books though.

My friend Sulove gave me a copy of this study and because of the approach I think it's worth passing around.

It's a study that's been running for 72 years on a group of 268 men, with the intention of identifying the common threads running through happy lives. It was originally slated as a research in what makes people successful, but the researchers quickly realized that since successful people are often unhappy that didn't make for a very interesting payoff.

www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness -- it's well interesting.


My biggest takeaways:

1. Our happiness depends on how we adapt to change, disappointment and tragedy.

At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or “psychotic,” adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else.

One level up are the “immature” adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. “Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal” people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.”

The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).


2. I like this for a somewhat mathematical conclusion.

[Valliant] identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically.

Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight.

It goes on to say that if five or six of these factors are in your favor, your chances of being happy are quite high. If three or fewer are in you favor, there's almost no possibility that you're happy.

In my view, education, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, exercising and staying a healthy weight are all check boxes. You do them or you do not.

Having a stable marriage is more complicated and obviously many external factors contribute to this which makes it more difficult to control or predict.

In my opinion, adaptation is the wildcard. Bad things happen, we are frustrated by our failures and inadequacies and we are shaken by things that happen to us and to those around us. To some degree I'm sure the way we adapt is innate, but there's also some choice involved. And knowing the different ways we adapt seems like an important step in reacting to things in a healthy way.


3. Other interesting bits and bobs.

The line about how someone will cross the street to avoid talking to someone who gave them a complement the previous day. Some of us find stress in being praised.

Forgiveness is an absolutely necessary part of being happy (and is a vital element of adaptation), but telling someone they should forgive someone causes stress. It needs to happen naturally.

Through all the adaptation and reinvention, it's really about relationships -- keeping in touch, being good to friends and family. It's a virtuous cycle.


4. It's funny how we can sometimes fool ourselves into thinking we're happy.

The entire study seems paradoxical in that each reader will have a different opinion of whether the main researcher is happy himself.

You're o vision

I have friends and family who watch and even enjoy American Idol, though I try my best to forget.

Talk about American Idol in Europe and you'll be reminded that it's a spin-off of the UK show Pop Idol. Not sure why building a machine that spits out F-list celebrities and awful music is a source of pride, but whatevs.

Well long before Pop Idol there was Eurovision, and after American Idol and Pop Idol are gone, Eurovision may still remain. To put the magnitude of this contest into context, American Idol tops out at about 40 million viewers -- Eurovision maxes out 600 million.

The quick intro to Eurovision is that each country in Europe has its own national contest to pick a song and performer to represent their country. Then everyone votes and it's totally based on political relationships and there's all this dodgy Eastern Bloc controversy every year, and in the end a terrible song wins.

The only past winners you've heard of are Celine Dion and ABBA.

More background here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurovision

AND THIS YEAR'S WINNER!

Movies on a plane!

Took a couple of long haul flights recently and was prolific in my movie watching.

Flight 1: London to Singapore

Babel - starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett - 2 hours, 22 minutes
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett - 2 hours, 46 minutes
Bolt - starring John Travolta and Miley Cyrus - 1 hour, 44 minutes

My thoughts:
So that was over 5 hours straight of Brad and Cate, which was a bit much. Babel was definitely the most entertaining of the three; I'm sorry it took me so long to get around to watching it. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (director) is a visionary. For a short story adaptation they sure made Benjamin Button into a long movie. It struck me as a studio movie -- almost too well polished, especially when they superimposed Cate's adult voice onto a 7 year-old girl. Bolt was John Travolta at his finest, so it was pretty lame.

Flight 2: Hong Kong to London

Pineapple Express - starring Seth Rogen and James Franco - 1 hour, 51 minutes
The Wrestler - starring Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei - 1 hour, 55 minutes
Tropic Thunder - starring Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr. - 1 hour, 47 minutes
Che: Part One - starring Benecio del Toro - 2 hours, 6 minutes

My thoughts:
Four movies back to back to back to back is pretty intense, and I followed that up with 3 TV episodes. Since I don't have a TV at the flat, this is how I roll. Pineapple Express was hilarious. The Wrestler was as good as I've heard. Marisa Tomei is still hot, maybe even too hot for an airplane. I thought Tropic Thunder was pretty dumb, and Che was a little too heavy for a flight. Peep Show, which was one of the shows I watched after the movies, is hilarious. One of the best shows around.

I had an awkward moment when I realized my seatmate -- this big fat guy -- was watching WALL-E. I realized he was watching it (and he realized I realized he was watching it) just as it is unveiled that in the future we will all be obese and lazy and rolled around in motorized chairs.

On other flights this year I've watched Australia, Rachel Getting Married, and Madagascar: Escape to Africa.

When I watched Australia, I felt like I was losing money. Rachel Getting Married was GREAT, and I'm pretty sure that wasn't the airplane effect where everything seems better with altitude (see Forgetting Sarah Marshall). And Madagascar is brilliant. There is no funnier cartoon character in history than King Julien.

The End.