I heard this conversation between two women at a wine reception a while back:

Woman A: "waiting for you while you were getting wine, I heard way too much about this lady's divorce"
Woman B: "oh no! It's like 'stop, too much information, I didn't want to know that!'"
Woman A: "exactly"
Woman B: "so what happened with her divorce?"

The horrific earthquake in Haiti has brought out a familiar din from believers: "thank insert preferred deity here that I or someone I know survived"

Philosophers and atheists (not a mutually exclusive set) have often pointed out a problem with this thinking: does it mean that preferred deity wanted to kill everyone who did die? I find this one of the more perplexing things about our reaction to crises. Our brains flood us with a huge rush of relief when we or, in a sort of mental proxy, someone we know/care about, survives a dangerous event. By all means: be happy! Celebrate that survival. But at the same time, don't diminish the loss of others. Plenty of god-fearing people die every day. The stock response, by believers, to that is something about God having a mysterious reason for His capricious choices.

Without trying to address an age-old question about God and suffering, I have to say that such a response is a bunch of patronizing bullshit. Tell me to thank god when I survived while my spouse/sibling/parent/friend died and I might just punch you in the face.

If we step back and look at the statistics, believing in a god does not improve your odds of surviving a calamity like that. Rather, it is living in a structure that was built to withstand an earthquake, tsunami, tornado, hurricane, or whatever natural disaster is a risk where you live. Since it costs money to live in such a structure, you might be better off thanking money for survival, rather than god.

My heart (and money) go out to the survivors, let's leave God out of it.

Picture the scene with me: Christmas day, 2000, a snowy, cold Salt Lake City duplex. 2 Fire trucks outside, a few police officers, a burnt out living room smoldering with the remains of our possessions. A barefoot, pajama-clad Jeffrey and Emily sit in a firetruck, wondering if the cats made it out alive, wondering where we'll sleep tonight, wondering what's next.

"they think there's a meth lab and a grow house in the basement, we're calling Hazmat"

That would be the SLC cop who decided that my beer brewing supplies and jalepeno pepper plants were much more nefarious than they were.

Thankfully saner heads prevailed and Hazmat was not called out.

I thought that was just something you see in paranoid, isolated, ignorant Salt Lake City. I was wrong, Kirkland has the same problem.

Last spring I decided to invest money in www.chefbyrequest.com (I highly recommend their food, it is both healthy and tasty). They deliver food to my door every night so that I have good meals for the day. One of my neighbors decided that wasn't food in that bag, it was drugs!!!

Rather than talk to us, they called the Kirkland police. I don't know what the police thought of staking out our house all night and then following the dark-skinned delivery man back to his evil lair, only to discover that the cooking going on there wasn't meth, but seared tenderloin with mushroom sauce and Santa Fe vegetables. But maybe they were amused.

I hope someone was.

When we returned to our old house today to see how the cleaners did, we discovered this note on the door. Apparently our (extremely nice) landlords have been warned: let in druggies like those two again and you will pay.

The brave note-leaver and cop-caller couldn't be bothered to identify themselves (we might "whack" them) but they sure were going to make sure no disreputable types like us ever invade their neighborhood again! No longer will my running and biking through their hallowed streets be an offense (damn you triathlon training that has me up before dawn...)! No longer will my BMW offend their eyes and ears with its mockery of their boring cars.

Out damn spot!

So they can get back to ignoring their drug-using kids and get back to spying on each other.

The Mormons would be proud.

Triathlons have a "Transition Area" where we setup our bikes, shoes, nutrition, etc. so that when we come out of the water we can throw off that wetsuit and put on those biking shoes/helmet/gloves. Then, after biking we have a place to put our bikes and get our asses running.

These transition areas are off limits to spectators, including photographers, because 1-we don't want people stealing/messing with our shit and 2-when we race in from the legs, we don't want to have to crash into some lollygagger who didn't see us coming.

Usually, as a participant, you are in these transition area as little as possible--you need to be out, tearing up the course! But if you are part of a relay team, then you can come and go as you please while waiting for your team to finish or for your leg to start.

Well, last Sunday I was the swimmer on my team. That meant I was done early and since it was a 1/2 Ironman distance, the biker was out close to 4 hours and the runner was a speedy 1 1/2 hrs. So I had a lot of time to hang out with my camera in the Transition area.

I posted some of my friends' pictures on Facebook, but also took some other shots that I thought were interesting from a photographic perspective. Those went on Flickr.

I still feel a bit like everyone does photography and I really hate getting onto bandwagons. But I do enjoy the process of figuring out what is a good shot and how to make my camera take a good shot. I think it will be years before I'm consistently good at it, but you gotta start somewhere!

And knowing just how hard it is to train for triathlons, I have a huge amount of respect for these people who come in at the top of the event. They deserve to have their achievement recorded.

Chef Kerry Sear owned the former "Cascadia" restaurant in downtown Seattle. I thought we were safe from him in 2008 when Cascadia closed, but he has come back, more loathsome than ever.

"Why do you hate him?" one might ask. Why indeed? He first had the audacity to come up with a drink concoction that was part gin martini and part slushy. He combined a juniper-infused sorbet with an already juniper-infused martini and made me an overweight drunk.

That evil bastard.

Then he went on to decide, cruel man that he is, to use his proximity to the Pike Place Market to start selecting fresh seafood and high quality produce for his meals!

The nerve.

I made the mistake of trying Cascadia just as I was starting to lose weight in 2005. Chef Sear had obviously paid some reviewer to give him a good write up, so I gave it a shot. The devil-made-flesh had the audacity to create this lobster dish with ravioli and a citrusy sauce that made me want to eat more and more. How could I ever lose weight with that around?

Damn him.

In an effort to infiltrate his loathsome organization, I held my nose and went undercover to some of his cooking classes to see what kind of addictive poison he was putting in our food. He hooked us with a sausage stuffing wrapped in prosciutto that put 10 pounds on me at a single glance.

He was on to me and wasn't giving up any of his secrets.

Then he went and had a child and suddenly even children were not safe from his evil ways. What child - or adult? - can resist a chocolate-space-needle with ice cream and cotton candy clouds?

The HORROR

And let's not forget his scheming right-hand man, Jeff the sommelier. That insidious snake plyed me with Mavrotragano wine from Greece and made sure that no one else sold it, so I had nowhere to get my supply but from him.

At least he had the decency to skip town when Cascadia closed.

But Kerry Sear, he has gone on to head up a new restaurant and has the pure, heart-of-darkness, soullessness to force his high-caloric genius on the unsuspecting diners of Seattle. He has already begun to undo years of my weight loss at his "Art" restaurant (if by "Art" he means "evil") and is making my life a living hell yet again.

Will I never be free???!!!

I HATE KERRY SEAR!

When I first started drinking, I hated the taste of everything I tried: wine, beer, gin, jager (well, I still hate jager...). But I also knew/recognize/accepted that I had been brought up on fruit punch and soda, and so my taste buds were not ready for anything grown up. I pushed through the initial shock so that I could make up my own mind about what I liked and didn't.

Some of the first wines I could handle were sweet wines like Chenin Blanc or Riesling. MLEIV hated all sweet wines from the start, so we didn't drink them much. Now that I've spent many years trying to understand wine, I've come back to Riesling and have decided that I like it quite a bit, as long as its not too sweet.

This Reuscher-Haart kabinett style Riesling fits the bill just right. It was part of my "wine-merchant's case" from 2007. It is a very dry, solid wine. Lots of pear and lime scent, good feel and a nice finish. It would go with any number of dishes, particularly anything creamy.
three-out-of-four winos

On the sweeter end of the Riesling spectrum is the Hogue Cellars Riesling. I had some of this during my recent stay in Virginia and it worked really well as an after-dinner wine. For some reason, I had a very hard time finding any good Port out there. But given the terrible restaurant selection in the far-flung DC Exurbs where I was staying, I'm not surprised. In any case, if you want something a little bit sweet, this is an excellent, affordable, wine from Washington state (where many great Rieslings are hiding in plain site).
two-out-of-four winos

Also from Washington State is the Chateau St. Michelle Eroica Riesling. It is made in a partnership with a famous German winemaker and is kind of a standard-bearer for American Rieslings. I tried a bottle a few weeks back when I was getting curious about Riesling and thought it was a bit sweeter than the Reuscher-Haart, but less than the Hogue. Definitely a great wine.
three-out-of-four winos

Food is a very personal, and very emotional, topic. Ever try to tell someone from North Carolina that Kansas City BBQ is the best? You may find yourself in a fight. Or tell someone from Texas that you can, in fact, have any food that doesn't involve beef? You are likely to get shot (bad example: tell anyone from Texas that you disagree with anything they believe in and you'll get shot).

This tends to make us very boring people. I was at a dinner recently where a young woman (early 20's) was bouncing in her chair with anxiety at the prospect of trying a small bite of a scallop. She turned to her husband for support:

"I don't know!! Do I like them?"

"What's the worst that can happen? I'm eating it and I'm not dead. Just try it already!!"

(she did, I don't think she liked it--it was too new)

Recently I researched tips on making grits and I kept coming across the same online debate:

It seems that there are purists out there who firmly believe that you cannot make or serve grits in any way other than the one that they were raised on: with butter, salt, eggs, and bacon.

Anyone who tries to get all fancy with cheese or (god forbid!) spices can just go to hell.

Now, I'm all in favor of a well executed classic dish, but let's be clear about something: just because you were raised with a food done a certain way doesn't mean that is the only way it can be done. In fact, consider the possibility that your primary cook, when you were a child, was not actually a very good cook at all!

This is no slight to your childhood, your parents were probably like mine: very busy and not trained chefs. They probably just made what they could afford both in time and money and had to deal with finicky kids who didn't want to try anything new.

But as adults, can't we accept that there is a whole world of culinary experiences out there and we were probably not raised on many of them?

So please: mix and match, try something new, see what works and what doesn't. And if you find you only like the comfort foods of your childhood then go and make them and enjoy them, but don't get all defensive and tell the rest of us that we are somehow bringing about the apocalypse because we want to try shrimp with our grits.

A few weeks ago when I watched this debate between Christopher Hitchens and Rabbi Wolpe. It struck me how different their argument styles are. Hitchens (mostly) relied on evidence and used that evidence as the basis of his logic. Wolpe relied on stories.

It was as if they were talking two different languages.

In college I took some classes on rhetoric, the art of persuasion. Argument by analogy came up there as a very persuasive way to make a point, but very dangerous because people can turn those analogies back on you. In this case, the "God is a shepherd" analogy became, in the hands of Hitchens, a clever observation that God keeps his "flock" around to fleece them, keep them docile, then kill them and eat them.

But somehow argument by analogy works and persists. It is even better when it is a testimonial anecdote. I learned this one in the LDS Missionary Training Center. They taught us that a testimony can't be argued against and is the most persuasive thing you can say. In my experience that was only true if the people already wanted to believe you. To the rest it was just one opinion among many.

It is at the heart of why I don't go out of my way to argue over which political party, sports team, religion, philosophy, or Food Network show is better/worse (well, ok, I'm guilty of that last one...): its not the kind of thing about which people are open to persuasion. They have their belief and everything in the world logically agrees with them--they have many anecdotes and testimonials to support their view.

What's sad is that a good anecdote and some ill-founded facts are all that is needed to start wars. We don't let facts get in the way of what we want to believe.

I wish I could just point the finger at religion on this, but it is part of our brains and religion is just one exploitation of it. The one hope I see is the scientific method, which is constantly gathering and evaluating evidence and has no sacred hypotheses. It is the best thing we have going for us as a species but it is also less persuasive to the masses. No one wants to hear about probability and likelihood, they want firm, prophetic commandments and post facto rewriting of history to claim that you were right all along.

So next time you feel emotionally charged about something, stop and ask yourself what the evidence really is, because it is usually much less substantive than you think and much less persuasive to an outsider than you hope.

Some were fabulous finds, others were not-so-good. But it was an amazing experience, over the next year, to try them, take notes, and expand my wine-understanding.

I thought it might be a good way to keep track of what I liked by posting notes here.

The first one I tried is a Spanish version of Grenache (Garnacha) from a winery in Calatayud in the Aragon region called Las Rocas de San Alejandro.

Grenache is one of the most widely grown grapes in the world, but is usually mixed with other grapes rather than being on its own. Since most American wines are single grapes, it doesn't show up here much at all. I have had some Grenache-heavy mixes before and liked it, so I was excited for this one.

It did not disappoint.

It had a a bit of apple, and green pepper, and blackberry. I'm not a real wine expert, but those are the aromas I noticed.

If you like red wine in general, this is something you should definitely try.

9 out of 10 winos.

In 490 BC the Athenians defeated the Persians at Marathon. After the defeat, the Persians retreated to their ships and sailed on to Athens, hoping to catch them unprepared for a sea attack. Pheidippides ran the 22 miles to alert the Athenians, then dropped dead.

The story is a conflation of two factual events and didn't actually happen, but if a story can be judged by its impact, it was a very important story. 2500 years later (give or take), the British were trying to work out the marathon course for the London Olympics. For several pragmatic reasons, they fixed the race at 26 miles, plus two laps around the track at the stadium.

On November 30, 2008 I decided to try half that distance.

My original plan was to walk 10 miles and run 3 (the "half-marathon walk" group). But at the last minute my trainer decided to go with me and with her pushing me, I ran 10 miles and walked 3. As we passed people who were part of the tail end of the "half-marathon run" group she observed: "those people came to run, and they are walking. You came to walk and are running past them!" I was sore for three days and probably pushed myself further than was wise or safe, but the feeling of accomplishment more than made up for it.

I ended up at 2hrs, 43min, which put me at 14th in my group and 1st in my group+division (1/2 marathon walk, males 35-40)! I even beat several hundred people who signed up for the 1/2 marathon run!

It was a great way to cap my year of competitive athletics and has me excited to get out of my "just happy to finish" phase and start working on improving my times.

First I have to get my knee to stop hurting...