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Remembrances of Tom Purdue
24th April, 2013. 4:41 pm. How I spent my Sunday
I spent my Sunday in excruciating pain and hypothermia. It was awesome. I've done "mud runs" before, but the Tough Mudder is said to be the hardest of them. It's certainly the most difficult one I've done: 21 obstacles over 12 miles of up-and-down muddy terrain. The bag containing my muddy clothes weighed over 15 pounds at the end of the day. Some of the obstacles are physically difficult: scaling a ten-foot wall (or an eight-foot overhang, though I cheated a bit on that), climbing a hay bale, leaping muddy barriers while hip-deep in water. Many others are about facing what might be painful: hands and knees through a ditch(gloves helped; my knees are scraped up but it's really not that bad), mild electric shocks (uncomfortable but not exactly painful), leaping over a fire into a water pit (hey, I was already soaked at that point), jumping 15 feet down into water (an obstacle which apparently killed somebody, the first death in the history of the event, though the articles are unclear about just what happened). I'm rather proud of how I faced these, with a reckless disregard and a rather touching trust that the challenges were unlikely to be permanently damaging. I loved flinging myself headlong down a slip-and-slide, not realizing until the last instant that it ended with a four-foot drop. The most physically painful one, of which they are gleefully proud, is the Arctic Enema: a quick dip in a dumpster full of ice water, which you must duck your head under. As with most painful things on the course, what it really needs is the awareness that the pain isn't going to kill you and will be over soon. If you think before leaping, you're screwed. If you just jump in, everything else is about just getting out, and your mind is so focused on it that it literally didn't hurt until I got out. It took a moment to re-orient myself, but I didn't even take the mylar blanket they offered: the day was still warmish at that point and I ran myself warm. That was early on. Towards the end of the day, exhaustion combined with being cold and wet, and I whiffed several of the last obstacles. I made no real progress on the monkey bars (which plunged me into even more water, and from the constant splashing, nobody else was making much progress, either). I climbed to the top of the net of the "Pirate Booty" obstacle, but my legs were starting to cramp from electrolyte depletion, and since the idea of falling 20 feet to the ground didn't appeal I decided that discretion was the better part of valor. The final obstacle was designed as an exercise in pain: running through a field of electrified wires (hooked up, I suspect, to an electric fence source). The effect is more "unpleasant" than "painful", but having gotten zapped once, I fell to the ground and couldn't motivate myself to get up and get zapped again, so I finished on hands and knees. My knees are pretty scraped up, in fact, but that's OK. I'm incredibly proud of this. I'd do it every weekend, if I could: the obstacles make running more interesting. I'm sore in places I never get sore, which is great: I've worked out things that I don't usually work.
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25th March, 2013. 7:13 pm.
I really hate to let my cynicism get the best of me, but I am very slightly worried about a downside to the recent acceleration of the shift in favor of gay marriage. It makes it easier for conservative members of the court to justify an argument of the form "It's unfair, but we're going to defer to the legislature, because as conservatives that's what we do [except when we don't]. After all, public opinion shifts means that you can deal with it legislatively, right?" Except that our legislature is deeply broken. We've got many checks and balances in the system, to protect the minority, but taken as a group and combined with a bias to inaction, it means that a fairly small minority can block almost anything. A change has to jump through many, many hoops: a majority in the House, a super-majority in the Senate, surviving a veto threat from the President, and then again surviving the Supreme Court. The only way to achieve anything involves trumping all of those at once. Despite a recent poll showing 58% approval for same-sex marriage, there's no way that translates into 60% of Senators voting to overturn DOMA. Not today, not a decade from now. Maybe two decades from now. And justice delayed is justice denied.
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22nd January, 2013. 2:31 pm.
I caught the first episode of Game of Thrones last night. Thus far, I'm not impressed. The visuals are all quite lovely, and you could put Sean Bean's face on anything and it will become more interesting. But I found the story so far very blah. There were more mutilations in the first fifteen minutes than I ever really needs to see, and while I really don't have any objection to boobies, I'd really like to avoid having the director come on screen and say, "Look! Boobies! You like boobies, right?" OK, that didn't actually happen, but it sure felt like that. Look, if I want boobies, I'll download some. Tell me a story. And the story here felt very rote. "Oh, look, it's all sort-of-medievalish-or-something." I got minor amusement from the fact that there were different costuming styles in the different places, but it didn't feel organic. I didn't feel any history to them. I know that it's hard to really judge a series from its first episode, while they're still figuring out what they're going to do. I gather it's gonna get all wheels-within-wheels, and that would be nice. I'm always hoping to find a TV series worth watching in that precious region where it's neither stupid or dull.
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19th December, 2012. 4:44 pm. My vacation
A quick timeline summary of my latest vacation to England (with a side trip to Rome): ( Part 1: Mon through WedCollapse )More later.
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27th March, 2012. 3:37 pm.
The news today is that Justice Kennedy seems skeptical of the individual mandate, and that's the ball game. I'd meant to post on this yesterday, about how I'd steeled myself for that months ago. It was in response to a New York Times poll suggesting that most people don't want it anyway. I deleted the post for dropping the f-bomb too many times. I'm trying to reach equanimity about it. Yeah, the nation is going to be worse for it. Yeah, hatred and fear have defeated any chance of being better than we are. There will never be another health care law; that one existed only due to a perfect storm of events that will never occur again. In the end, the Obama experiment is already over, and answered in the negative, regardless of this decision. Will America come together around a centrist President? No, no they won't. Americans claim they want centrism, but they won't actually turn out to vote for it. It's the extremists who turn out, and the legislature will end up pandering to them. There's no point in trying to attract centrists. Even if they win an office as important as the Presidency, there won't be a sufficient number of them to pass any legislation. Obama may well win reelection in the fall despite this, but I honestly can't imagine why he'd want to. There's more to the Presidency than legislation; it's arguably the least of a President's duties. But it's the most visible, and this isn't really about Obama anyway. It's about what we want as a country, and the answer, apparently, is "to stop the other guys from winning," regardless of whether it's good for the country or not. I actually don't care all that much about health care legislation. I don't like health care, and to be blunt, if I ever need a lot of health care, I'd just as soon let it kill me instead. I don't see this as about me, but rather about us. And apparently, there isn't an "us". Or rather, an "us" and a "them", and I'm going to always be "them". The only way to cope with that will simply stop wanting there to be an us.
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23rd March, 2012. 2:24 pm.
Here's the thing: sluts use condoms. Conservatives are spaztastic about birth control pills because they seem to think it promotes sleeping around. But birth control pills provide only birth control, not death control. Ya know what's even scarier than an unintended pregnancy? AIDS. Birth control pills are what women in committed, long-term relationships use. Married women use birth control pills. Girls who are sleeping around use condoms, which provide both birth control and death control. Even those who are on the pill also use condoms. The pill serves many other purposes that have nothing to do with sleeping around. Arguing about birth control pills is just the wrong argument. If you really want to stop fornication, you go after the condoms. And then you can make it abundantly clear that you're not interested in personal responsibility. You just hate sex.
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14th March, 2012. 9:15 pm. Piratz Tavern story makes it to the Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/bar-rescue-gets-the-boot-in-silver-spring-after-piratz-tavern-renovation-goes-bust/2012/03/14/gIQAu9NpCS_story.html
Jon Taffer would say Tracy and Juciano Rebelo had a crisis of a different sort: They had a crisis of confidence. He notes that moments after the unveiling of Corporate Bar and Grill on Feb. 18, a staff member told him that, “In the morning these [customers] are going to be welcomed by a pirate.” What’s more, he says, the owners did not open for lunch immediately after the makeover. “How can you say lunch works if you’re not open for lunch?” he asks. Plain and simple, the TV host thinks it’s lunacy to revert to a concept that didn’t work financially for the owners in the first place. “They’re out in left field,” Taffer says. “I think they’re a bunch of fools.”
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5th March, 2012. 12:03 pm. Advice for Limbaugh advertisters: ignore my boycott
To all you companies advertising on Limbaugh: I am boycotting you. I will never buy your product. The key word here is never. I am not going to start patronizing you if you pull your advertising now. By supporting Limbaugh, every, you were a hateful piece of shit. If you imagine that you are less of a hateful piece of shit by deciding that this latest scandal is the last straw, then you are also a stupid piece of shit. You knew that he was this hateful all along. The best you can possibly claim for yourself is that you were so mind-bogglingly idiotic that you weren't aware who your target demographic was, and were so desperate for customers that you would use any advertising medium that hit it. And you're no less stupid today than you were yesterday. So I'm boycotting you, but this isn't one of those "win me back" boycotts. You can't fix this. You helped make the political discourse in America today so irretrievably poisonous. Limbaugh told everybody who would listen that I was stupid, that I was racist, that I hated America, that nearly every woman I've ever known is a slut, and then he took a break to advertise for your product. He can't take back what he said: people believed him, and now they despise me. Until those people stop despising me, I'm not going to purchase any of your products. And since that's not going to happen any time in the foreseeable future, you might as well carry on advertising. You've made your bed, and we're all lying in it.
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