My Wife Got Picked Up at the Playground

One of the challenges of being a new stay-at-home mother is meeting people to hang out with. For several months, my wife struggled to meet other mothers with kids our son's age.

 

Recently, though, she's been a little more suave.

 

<warning bell #1: how convenient the brochure>

 

On Sunday, we took our kid to our neighborhood park, the local hangout and meet market for young families and dog owners. We met a woman at the park who had two sons, two and three years old, who had moved here weeks ago from L.A. They struck up a conversation while my kid shovelled gravel on me. My wife and this woman exchanged phone numbers and email addresses. Her contact info was on a brochure she just happened to have on her. <ring! ring!>

 

As we walked home from the park, my wife was proud of herself for "picking up" a new friend. "Look at me!", she beamed. We read the brochure. It was a relatively benign piece of "collateral" from Primerica. Some financial planner/life insurance thing. <warning bell #2>

 

Ring! Ring! The woman called tonight to see if my wife wanted to meet her at the park one day... and also if she and her husband could come over to our place to discuss their financial planning business. <warning bell #3: sales call, anyone?> My wife tried hard to get out of it and managed to relocate our "financial planning meeting" to the park.

 

Suspicious, my wife hopped on all-knowing Google. First, she found the woman's husband. His high school alumni bio (who has a high school alumni bio?) mentions that they met while attending Brigham Young, where she majored in fashion design. <warning bell #3: from Mormon fashion design to financial planner?>. His bio mentioned that his wife owns a modeling agency. <warning bell #4 !!!>

 

Naturally, my wife followed the lead. We'll be damned if those models, billed as being "very reliable", don't look like call girls. <warning klaxon: uh WOOOO gah! A Morman fashion-designing financial planner and madam?>

 

Next, my wife Googled the woman's name. The result? She's a stripper! YouTube? Check - she's on there. Stripping. So now we've both seen entirely too much of our new neighbor and future financial planner. And it's not like this was youthful indiscretion: the photos and videos were dated "2007".

 

The moral of the story: be careful who you pick up at the playground.

 

So tell me in the comments: what do we do? Do we call and bail? Do we just not show up? Do we go and see how long we can keep a straight face?

Interbike 2008: USA Crits Finals

We went to the Bicycling magazine-sponsored USA Crits Finals race at Mandalay Bay to support our 8-man VeloNews team. I don't know everyone on the team, but it included Ben Delaney (editor of VeloNews), Sean Watkins (Triathlete ad sales), Dave Walker and Mark Gouge (VN ad sales), Andy Pemberton (VN publisher), and others. 

Here we are all lined up on the fence, cheering on the team. Me, Jay, Deena, Nate, Lisa, John Duke, Lisa Bilotti, Heather Gordon, John Duke, Chris Dinneen, Jen Soule, and others who were on and off the fence. 

Ben Delaney looking tough.

Steve Frothingham and Joe Silva from VeloNews.com.

The pack chases a break, which they caught in one lap of the 6/10th mile course.

The industry race finish. Bicycling mag came in second, Ben Delaney fifth.

While milling about the hospitality tent, we saw Taylor Phinney, Mark Cavendish (who gave Jen a smooch on the cheek), George Hincapie, Henk Vogels, and the ever-present Nelson Vails.

Interbike 2008: the Sinclair party

The Sinclair party is Interbike's notorious soiree. Despite the desperate attempts to score invites, it's really rather tame, as it's 70% married men, 20% unmarried men who report to the married men, 9% women in the cycling industry, and 1% strippers. 

Somehow it's still the "cool" event to attend. I've been to a few now, and I report back with the "married men" version. 

A few shots from around the Voodoo Lounge which is atop the Rio.

The panorama video.

Interbike 2008: the booth

John Muir Was Awesome

After chuckling through Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, shivering through Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, meandering through Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, and thirsting for more of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, I've decided to build a library of great outdoor books. 

Most recently placed into the stacks is The Wild Muir: Twenty-two of John Muir's Greatest Adventures, selected and introduced by Lee Stetson, illustrated by Fiona King, published by the Yosemite Association, ISBN: 0-939666-75-8. 

Lee Stetson is an actor who has dedicated his career to the study and reenactment of Muir's life. I imagine he has a bushy beard, and I imagine he's a strange fellow, in no small part due to the fact that he's likely spent many of his evenings in front of Yosemite campfires acting like a crazy Scot who talks to wildflowers. (To an Alaskan wildflower: "Ah! My blue-eyed darlin', little did I think to see you here. How did you stray away from Shasta?")

John Muir's insanity is what made him so effective. Muir was a fearless man, a man so honed into competence by his life experience that there was no situation in which he found himself powerless. Muir did not hesitate to commit insane acts because, for him, they were perfectly rational. A young man who wished to climb a mountain with Muir was told, "These foolish adventures are well enough for Mr. Muir, but you have a work to do, you have a family...and you have no right to risk your life on treacherous peaks and precipices.". Muir would argue, like Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire, that the risk-taking lifestyle of the naturalist is far saner than that of "civilized society". 

Muir's tolerance of danger stemmed from his sense of capability, which he forged through years of challenges and misadventures beginning in childhood. Muir grew up in Scotland in an austere farming family. For excitement, the young Muir and his friends would turn to what they called "good scootchers"; games of brinksmanship that would make Johnny Knoxville grin. Muir writes of one scootcher that involved trying to nearly--but not quite--fall off the roof of a two-story farmhouse. When Muir's family moved from Scotland to Wisconsin as homesteaders, Muir's father asked the 19-year old to dig a 90-foot deep well with a shovel, pickax, hammer, and chisel. Muir spent an entire summer moving earth and chiseling through bedrock until he was nearly suffocated by carbon dioxide gas that filled the bottom of the well. Muir later taught himself to swim by rowing into the middle of a lake and jumping in. Danger was the young Muir's calling.

So when he decides to climb the sheer rock face behind Yosemite Falls, we're unsurprised that, upon reaching a pitch "dangerously smooth and steep", Muir "concludes not to venture further, but does nonetheless". When Muir becomes stranded in a blizzard atop Mt. Shasta (without a jacket), he lays flat on some geothermal vents, sometimes holding his breath to avoid billowing clouds of acidic vapors, until the skin on his back scalds and blisters and a set of barometric instruments freezes to his face. We're awed, but not surprised, when Muir hikes off the mountain alive, though badly frostbitten. 

The Wild Muir presents 22 riveting adventures in beautiful succession, building to the climax in which it offers two versions of Muir's cliffside rescue of a young pastor in Alaska; one from Muir himself and one from the pastor. The pastor slides down a gravelly slope and barely catches himself to prevent a 1,000 drop off a cliff and onto a glacier. He dislocates both arms. Muir recounts the rescue plainly, pulling the man off the cliff, the difficulty of re-setting the man's arms in their sockets, a long trek back to camp. The pastor's account is not so plain and it is from him we learn that Muir hoisted the man off the cliff by clenching his collar in his teeth. 

Unlike many of today's outdoor heroes, Muir reserved his glorious description for his surroundings instead of for himself. Muir is often credited as the father of Yosemite and the American National Park System, but Muir is underappreciated. Muir's towering ability and selfless love of nature was the spearhead that killed the old European view of nature as enemy, igniting a passion in the American West for nature as playground, as source of renewal.

A parting image of Muir the botanist from the young pastor: "With all his boyish enthusiasm, Muir was a most painstaking student; and any unsolved question lay upon his mind like a personal grievance until it was settled to his full understanding. One plant after another, with its sand-covered roots, went into his pockets, his handkerchief and the "full" of his shirt until he was bulbing and sprouting all over, and could carry no more... Then he began to requisition my receptacles. I stood it while he stuffed my pockets, but rebelled when he tried to poke the prickly, scratchy things inside my shirt. I had not yet attained that sublime indifference to physical comfort, that Nirvana of passivity, that Muir had found."

Wish you were here...

We measure the years in Interbikes... From Vegas with love -- wish you
were here.

Publishing Thinks Its Sky Is Falling

Economics is called "the dismal science", yet I find myself constantly teasing my English-major coworkers for their tendency to live out their stereotype. Is it ironic that gallows humor is more English-majory than Economics-majory? Probably not; I've most likely misused the word.

Ironic misuse aside, publishing seems to believe that rumors of its death are greatly underestimated. New York Magazine just published a story, "The End", in which the magazine surveys that past 40 years of developments in the book publishing industry and suggests that the industry believes in its own imminent demise.

Those English majors who qualify as "longtime industry observers" may find the article all too familiar, but for those of us of a more cheery disposition might find the historical review and trends at least educational, if not dismal.

GoLite Semi-Annual Warehouse Sale Price List - Fall 2008

Here's the price list for GoLite's warehouse sale. Click to see it bigger.

The prices aren't as good as prior years. I think GoLite has ratcheted up the prices to about 55% of the retail price.

Some of the prices on this list don't agree with the prices charged at the register. I got a jacket that was $5 more than expected and some running shorts that were $5 less than expected.

Google creates its own web browser, "Google Chrome"

Holy tabbed browsing, Firefox! Google plans to launch a homegrown web browser on Tuesday, September 2!

Official word from Google

The first screenshot, via Webware.

What this means for the PC, for Microsoft, and for Google, via TechCrunch.

And check out Google's clever launch cartoon, which is their version of a thorough product tour (one that includes both the attic and the basement!).

Update 9/2: Download Google Chrome from here. It's a wicked speedy browser!

Are you unconvinced by Google's brand? Take their Chrome tour.

Update 9/3:

• Cnet speed tests Chrome.
• Lifehacker compares Firefox 3, Chrome, and IE8.
• Google engineer and blogger Matt Cutts answers questions about privacy, conspiracy theories, and similar concerns about Chrome.