Daily

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.

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!

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.

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...

I try to keep up on financial matters not because I enjoy them but because they inevitably affect my life; they are a necessary evil. So in the course of reading I came across this article in Fortune magazine.

It argues that hard-working, successful, two-income families, making over 250k/year, but who aren't "rich", will be paying for the housing-bust bailout. Its a valid point since that group will likely have a small tax increase. It also plays to Fortune magazine's demographic. It is also completely wrong in its interpretation of the data.

The main complaint in the article is that those profiled are plenty rich, but they don't get to live the lifestyle of the rich because of one simple fact: they all have more than two children. The complaints are all along the lines of "I don't consider myself rich because all my money goes to little Timmy's private school and little Mary's private tutors" and "I have to buy the gas-guzzler and nice house, because I need to cart those kids around and need to live in a good neighborhood for them."

Won't someone think of the children?

So they are plenty rich, they just spend it all on their kids.

Besides the fact that I have (by choice) no children, I find this disturbing on a whole different level: this is how aristocracies are born. Every decent parent out there wants their own children to be great, its a natural emotional urge. After all, the parents give up their own ambitions and lives, those kids had better damn well succeed. So they pile investment after investment on their kids, the best schools, the summer "vacations" at learning-camps, the tutors, because they want to make sure their own seed beat out all the other seed.

But greatness doesn't come this way.

Every civilization has aristocracies. Even kings/tyrants/dictators only have their position at the agreement of either the military or the aristocracy. America is no exception: until Obama, all of our presidents came from either local or national families that can trace their power back many generations. Its part of what makes his election so emotionally satisfying: America is supposed to stand for opportunity, where you don't have to be part of the ruling families in order to rise to the top.

And to be fair, this ideal works better here than anywhere else. But there is a strong emotional pull back to the old world ruling class that our founding fathers cast off (only to create their own ruling class, if a more porous one).

But re-distribution of wealth is one of the cornerstones of why this ideal works better here.

If the only people who get a good education, decent healthcare, or a chance at success, are the offspring of the already educated, healthy, successful, then we all suffer. Have you ever met the children of privilege? All those fantasies parents put onto their children are destroyed by the lazy, consumerist, decadent, and cruel teenagers and adults those children become.

But ask yourself how the parents got far enough to spoil their children in the first place: the parents benefitted from decent public schools, affordable healthcare, and opportunities for success.

So yes: we are being asked to pay back to society. Its because we benefited so much from it. And all that investment in just your own children runs contrary to wise investment advice: don't get emotionally attached to your investments and don't put all your investment in one stock.

"Spreading the wealth" is another way of saying "invest in index funds."

So, though I'm not happy at the prospect of less take-home pay, I'm also willing to pay that price so that the truly brilliant can emerge from the chaos of the next generation. Some will abuse the money, squander the opportunities, become welfare-moms, but the ones that rise above and succeed will offset those losses and we will take a step forward.

My sister-in-law bugged me to sign up on Facebook, so I finally gave in (mostly to see pictures of her and Dave in costume...). On the one hand, its nice to be able to easily connect with my brothers. On the other hand, I have cousins coming out of the woodwork who I didn't even know existed!

When the "friend" requests came in from people whose last names I recognized, I obliged. But then I started seeing who they are. Paying members of the "Keep Marriage Between a Man and a Woman" clubs? All sorts of right-wing, religious ideas floating around their profiles. It made my skin crawl. Not because I disagree with them (which I do), but because they think we share some sort of bond!

I went in and fleshed out my own profile: they need to know I'm an atheist and find religious nut-jobs of all stripes the most horrible part of politics and humanity.

But the nail in that coffin was the status update of one cousin (with whom I thankfully have no personal relationship) who is "terrified" that Obama might win.

"Terrified"!?!?!?!?!? Of what, exactly? In what way would Obama mess up her life? Cutting her taxes? Ending a stupid war that we never should have got into? Regulating banks so they don't play roulette with your money? THE HORROR!

I'm glad it all ends today (God forbid we have a 2000 repeat, but if we do he'd better fucking fight to the end!).

As I said before, politics seems a very transitory thing for a blog and everyone has an opinion (like assholes...), what really bugs me is Facebook and the phalanx of people who think that just because we are related that we have something ideologically in common. Its such a Mormon idea: that your friends are all interchangeable, ward to ward, and that family must suppress their opinions in order to keep harmony. In the end all that happens is the loud ones brow-beat the rest into demurring.

As the apostate-evil outsider I can be safely ignored.

So hopefully today's election will go the way I want. If not, I'm not sure even McCain/Palin could not be worse than George W., but we all seriously underestimated how badly he could fuck up the country, so you never know.

As for Facebook, the jury is still out for me. I'll update it in a way that reminds cousins that their opinion isn't the only one out there and that just because we're related, doesn't mean we relate.

As one anonymous poster from my High School snidely remarked: I seem to have run screaming from my past. Its a gross oversimplification, but on one point it is accurate: I have no Alma Mater.

BYU keeps trying to get me to call them to "update my information." Since the only thing's I've ever got from them are a magazine full of sappy Mormon stories and mass mailings, I don't have a burning urge to call them back. I can see my phone number being sold to every pyramid scheme in Utah County.

I must admit a bit of envy at people who decorate their cubicles with school colors and get all excited about the "big game." Besides not being a big cheerleader type (too much like being in a cult), I don't have an Alma Mater I respect in any way (BYU was and is all about censorship, I just can't support that).

So when the trainer said "now that triathlon season is over, you need to do the Dawg Dash!" I was a bit thrown. The event is in support of the University of Washington (the Huskies or "Dawgs") and involves either a 5 or 10k run and you are encouraged to bring your dog to run with you! I wondered if they would take a BYU alum. I wondered if I could handle being around a bunch of people in school colors.

The event was a lot of fun. I made good time (33 min) on the 5k, considering how many hills they have. I was more than a minute faster than the average time and have been sore for three days (always a good sign). The next day I wore the (very nice) event shirt to work to show my support for my co-worker's Alma Mater.

I don't think I'm ready to adopt a new Alma Mater and I'm still not a cheerleader type (competitive though? yes!) but I am kinda wistful for an institution that I could respect and like enough to call my own.