What I’ve Learned So Far

This Flickr collection contains nearly 1,500 crisp images of propaganda and advertising posters from the Soviet Union.  My Russian is so rusty as to be nonexistent, but the visuals here are fascinating.

Just a little mash note here for my favorite ultrarunner, Scott Jurek. Today he won the Spartathlon — 152+ miles from Athens to Sparta — in high style, becoming the first American to win the event, and posting the best time ever for anyone besides ultrarunning legend Yiannis Kouros.

Way to go, Scott!

A huge controversy rocked the world of cricket last month when Pakistan was judged to have forfeited a Test against England — the first forfeiture in Test cricket’s century-plus history. For those of you unfamiliar with cricket, Tests are the biggest nation-versus-nation matches there are; they are followed obsessively by cricket fans around the world.

In this case, referee Darrell Hair, an Australian whose impartiality vis-a-vis cricketers from the Subcontinent has often been questioned, ruled that Pakistan had tampered with the ball to influence its “swing” — that is, the break in its movement between bouncing off the turf and reaching the batsman. Unlike baseball, gridiron football, soccer football, or many other sports, cricket uses the same ball for a long, predetermined period, with new balls being introduced only at certain, designated stages of the game. Since Tests run for up to five days (think of it like a baseball playoff series, except that the score is computed cumulatively), the condition of the ball and the timing of the appearance of the new ball influence the strategies that both teams use during the game. Hair judged that players from the Pakistan side had doctored the ball in some way — this could mean scuffing it, or lifting the seam that runs in a circle around it. In protest, the Pakistan team stayed in its locker room rather than reporting back to the field promptly after one of the normally scheduled breaks in play.

Pakistan’s captain, Inzamam-ul-Haq, was tried by the International Cricket Council (ICC) for (1) doctoring the ball, and (2) bringing the game into disrepute. He was exonerated on the first charge, thanks in part to spectacular testimony given by Geoff Boycott, a bluff Yorkshireman who is today a cricket broadcaster and was, in his prime, one of the best cricketers in the world. Having examined the ball in question, Boycott testified, “That’s a good ball, not just a playable ball.” Boycott is still ranked among the top 15 batsmen ever for runs scored in the course of his Test career — which ended nearly 25 years ago. So he should know something about the condition of balls in play. The ICC officials seemed to think so, anyway.

Inzamam was found to have brought the game into disrepute because of the locker-room protest. For this, he was given a light suspension that will cause him to miss four of the shorter (one-day) international matches. That’s not such a big deal. The big deal is that the pride of the Pakistani side has been restored. This was a huge issue in Pakistan, enough so that Inzamam may be receiving congratulations in person from President Musharraf.

So, who’s to blame for this tempest? The fall guy seems to be Darrell Hair. Perhaps this is as it should be — although opinions differ — but the ICC do seem to have picked him out as the man to bear the brunt of it. But they’re doing it disingenuously: the ICC have said that Hair will not officiate during a tournament held in India because they cannot guarantee his safety. As this column from Cricinfo (the online Mecca of cricket) points out, Indian officials have recently ensured the security of Musharraf, Tony Blair, and George W. Bush on state visits — and Hair hasn’t even received any personal threats.

Now I’ll just retreat behind my facade of an ordinary American who knows nothing about this game called “cricket”.

Did I mention I signed up for the Austin Marathon? No?

I signed up for the Austin Marathon.

Their site informs me I still have 142 days to get ready. The farthest I’ve ever run at one time is (roughly) half a marathon, so I’ve got my work cut out for me.

More on this after Amazon delivers the copy of The Blind Side I just ordered, but for now I’ll note that Moneyball is one of my favorite books of this decade, and I can hardly wait to read Lewis’s new book. I’m a much bigger fan of baseball than football, but I did grow up in West Texas, so I consider myself a football native speaker.

John M. (Mike) Ford died recently, as discussed in this rememberance by Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I wish I knew his work better, but I’m already a changed man for having read his poem “Against Entropy”.

The idea that he could offhandedly debut this work in a blog comment thread . . . I’m at a loss for words. It’s wonderful.

R.I.P. Mr. Ford.

Well, at least part of a fancy Berkeley education is now much easier to access, as this Mercury News story discusses. All thanks to the miracle (?) of Google Video.
Berkeley courses available on Google Video

This is a nice supplement to MIT’ OpenCourseWare series, which has been running for at least a couple of years now.

Now more than ever, it seems, education in just about anything is available to anyone with Internet access.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve run myself through the stress-mill about a particular project, which by now is overdue. Mostly I enjoy high energy and a fair amount of get-it-done gumption, but from time to time I hit some internal wall that puts me in this situation.

If you’re stressing out about something you cannot control, the solution lies in acceptance, or else in putting yourself out of range (physically, emotionally) of the stressor. But if you’re stressing out about something you do control — well, it’s only your own fault. Let me just leap to add the corrective here: this situation is only my own fault.

I hate saying I’m “stressed out” (look, I can’t even bear to write it without quotation marks) for the same reason I hate to say I’m “busy”. People are all the time saying “I’m so busy” — as though life has visited this condition upon them, when in fact their schedules are packed by their own choosing. Thyroid cancer, that descends on your beyond your own control. Not “busy” — “busy” is your own damn choice.

Ditto “stressed out”. There are people with ten times as much grief in their lives as I have, yet they don’t stress about it because they have a better grip on their situations. Invariably when I feel this way, it’s because of something I’ve done — or, more typically, failed to do. Maybe I haven’t completed the project, or maybe I haven’t even started the project, or maybe I haven’t gotten clear on what the project is and what I expect from myself in the course of it.

The antidote is to undo all of these things. Get clear on your responsibility, even if you do so only to then beg off from it altogether. Get clear on your timetable and how much work is going to be required of you to meet it; this may imply renegotiating other, outside responsibilities that will have to sit on the back burner for a while. Get clear on the very next step you have to take to get the project moving.* Do that thing, and then some other little thing that nudges you in the right direction, and then something else.

I’ve used this metaphor before: Sometimes a basketball player, even a great scorer like Michael Jordan, will open a game flat. Nothing feels right, nothing looks right, the ball leaves his hand the wrong way, every shot is clanging off the rim or missing entirely. Experienced players have a good antidote for this: they work for one easy shot. They get a layup, or a couple of free throws. A breakaway dunk. Whatever. But they do something to put the ball in the hole one time to get themselves unstuck. This frees them of their mental funk — the basketball version of “stressing out” — so that they can get back into their normal ways of playing and scoring.

My engine has been running high lately: I’m giving a lot of energy to a number of projects that are important to me. But I know the engine has been wasting a lot of its horsepower in friction and vibration. Now (and dig the artful [?] mashup of my two metaphors), I’m looking for layups to get the engine better aligned with the transmission. So, expect a lot more posts here as I work to get things off of my mind, and just to experience the satisfaction of getting some things done.

‘Cuz this being “stressed out” thing? It stinks.

~~

*Yes, you hear the echo of David Allen here.

Perhaps those of you in Austin have seen my feature, “Save the Planet on the Cheap,” in the current issue of The Good Life magazine? If not — get thee to a newstand!

Here’s a teaser for the piece, which talks about my own efforts to live more sustainably on a regular ol’ middle-class budget:

[Environmental activist Brandi] Clark discussed several informational resources full of suggestions for improving sustainability. One that I found particularly enlightening was the “Ecological Footprint Quiz” at the Earth Day Network site. The quiz, which requires only a couple of minutes to take, uses a short series of questions about your lifestyle choices—how much you drive, the size of your house, and so on—to estimate your environmental impact on the planet. At the end of the quiz, you find out how many Earths’ worth of resources it would take to sustain your lifestyle for everyone now living. Turns out my current lifestyle implies 3.4 planets.

I took the test again and made a few adjustments. This time, I chose less packaged food and more local food (which cost less energy to deliver), less meat and dairy products (which require more land to raise), and less car mileage in favor of more time on my bike. (If you’re not a bicyclist, you could also garner benefits from using mass transit or by using Austin’s new CarShare program.) My number immediately dropped to 2.2 planets. The quiz is hardly a scientific study, since it relies on rough estimates, but I found it compelling as a thumbnail sketch. My goal, at least today, isn’t to get my number down to 1.0. For now, I just want to bring the number *down*.

For the sake of comparison, I went back and took the quiz one more time, imagining what my life would be like if I commuted in from an oversized tract house in the far suburbs, drove an SUV, and ate a typical supermarket diet of packaged foods grown far away. The verdict: 7.9 planets.

Now, folks, your humble correspondent is not a paragon of green living. But you don’t have to be a genius to figure out that needing 2.2 Earths (or even 3.4) to sustain a lifestyle is a heck of a lot better than needing 7.9. We do not have all the answers to climate change right now, but we are far from helpless to do anything about it.

Even if (gasp!) you don’t read the whole thing in The Good Life, please do go take the footprint quiz. It’s eye-opening.

A new acquaintance of mine suggested Mandola’s for an afternoon meeting a couple of months back, and since then I’ve been making it a regular part of my Austin restaurant rotation. Mandola’s has an Italian deli, market, and bakery in which you can get all sorts of delicious meats, cheeses, imported packaged foods, and fresh dolci, along with a seriously strong cup of macchiato. Their bakery makes wonderful breads.

Mandola’s is also a serious restaurant, albeit with a casual air. My family has liked their pizzas (the kids’ cheese version satisfied my kids, and they weren’t complaining about their handmade Italian cookies, either), and my wife and I have enjoyed several things from their menu, including sandwiches (very slightly pedestrian, but who’s perfect?), ravioli, eggplant parmesan, and especially the Sicialian tomato salad, which is very simple but incredibly delicious thanks to the quality of its ingredients. With seating indoors or out, it’s a nice place for a business lunch or a date, and kids are welcome.

The short version: I’ll keep going back. It’s well worth a try.