I Guess I'm Going to be running For Another Year

Having just purchased 5 new pair of running shoes and all.

Having just purchased 5 new pair of running shoes and all.

Join With Me In Bravely Pointing-Out The Obvious

Not one, but two smart and sensible friends had the following Facebook posting yesterday:

like Being Muslim does NOT mean you are a terrorist. . . like if you agree.

Perhaps I am over-analyzing this, but I see a subtext here. What is the point of the FB entry unless they think there's a lot of Americans out there who think that every Muslim is a terrorist. Liking such a statement is not just agreeing with it, but also lending support to what I think is a pernicious assumption: That substantial numbers of their own fellow countrymen are benighted and in need of correction.

I think the opposite is true. Sure, in a country of some 300 Million people, there are bound to be plenty of wackos like the one who thinks McDonald's responsible for more murders than terrorists are. For my part, I think our country has treated Muslims in an exemplary fashion. If anything, we have been mau-maued into being too trusting. How else to explain the situation of Major Hassan? It was only after he murdered 13 and wounded many more of his fellow soldiers that anybody noticed his obvious radicalism.

Pictures of Pictures

We visited NYC in days long before the invention of digital cameras, so these are digital pictures of the photographic prints we made.

This shot is a reflection across the atrium. The camera is on the railing just in front of my belly--used a timer of course.

The small white lights are Christmas decorations and you can see them in the previous picture as well.

NYC skyline from a distance.

What is that spiky thing at the top of the picture?

Last Week's Movies

We brought two Netflix movies with us to our NH trip: Avatar and Fantastic Mr. Fox. At first I thought they were total opposites of each other, but on further reflection, I'm not so sure that is true. As usual, "Blake" has great reviews of Avatar and Fantastic Mr. Fox. As for this post, it will just be random musings and criticism.

Avatar:

"Unobtainium", Really Mr Cameron? Did you call it that just so that if it was a bomb, you could claim the whole concept was parody? Two problems: One, why is this stuff so valuable? It cannot be essential for interstellar flight since Humans got to Pandorum without it. Two, all the stable elements are already accounted for.

Can any evolutionary biologist even imagine a scenario where plants and animals would have that braid thing which allows the humanoids to control them? I mean, it is great for the Na'vi, but what do the other plants and animals get out of it? One can imagine this being done via genetic engineering, but the Na'vi are stone-aged people.

Speaking of stone-aged, there is some point in the movie where the hero claims that "we don't have anything they want". Nonsense on stilts: How about cooking pots and pans, knives, hatchets, swords and a myriad of other useful things you can make out of metal? Much more likely is the scenario where the natives fight over a discarded Coke bottle as in The Gods Must Be Crazy.

Rather than starting a war with the natives, here are a couple of ways the Humans would really have operated, you know, if they were actual Humans and not two dimensional black-hats: The Humans would set-up a trade alliance with one group of Na'vi and exchange metal things, trinkets and exotic food like Mars bars in payment for driving away the Na'vi which are living over the mine. Or the Humans could have just tunneled under the tree from miles away, etc.

I could go on till the end of time finding whoppers like the above, but one final one before turning to the next movie. What mechanism allows the remote control of the Avatars? Physically, they are complete and there is no radio receiver on-board. We know this because (spoiler alert for those who still haven't seen the thing in the year since it came out...) at the end when the hero's mind is moved to his avatar, they didn't yank-out any hardware or make any physical changes to the avatar. So, why doesn't it operate autonomously in the first place? The mind is a construct of a working brain after all...

On to Fantastic Mr. Fox

Yeah! I liked it a whole lot more than Avatar. First a caveat; Fantastic Mr. Fox is first and foremost a Wes Anderson film. I like his style of films and so, no big surprise, I like this too. Mr. Fox is much like the character played by Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums. George Clooney plays Mr. Fox as a younger, hipper lovable rogue, but it is essentially the same part. The similarities to other Anderson films are abundant--my wife and I both exclaimed how the tunneling sequences in Mr. Fox were a lot like the cutaway of the ship in The Life Aquatic...I think "Blake" more ably delves into the Wes Anderson style, so I won't go beyond this.

So, what about all that "opposite" stuff from the start of this bit? Well, there is the obvious: In Avatar there is huge expense spent making the thing look wonderful and yet the story is moronic and the characters totally predictable. In Mr. Fox, the production values are low; you hardly ever forget that you are looking at stop-action animation. Yet the characters are human, at least in spirit, full of personality, humor and idiosyncrasy. Plus, it is an interesting and believable story.

So far, so good.

So far the trip to the White Mountains is going well:

--We were, just barely able to get all of our stuff into the Saab and so didn't have to take the Yukon. Yea! The Saab is more fun to drive!

--There was heavy traffic most of the way but still, people in the fast lane were (mostly) going pretty fast, so we made excellent time.

--The weather has been great.

--Our condo dinner plans have gone well so far: Spaghetti & meatballs with garlic bread and salad for the first night's dinner. Breakfast of bacon, boiled eggs, pastry & toast. The next lunch was mostly leftovers plus PB&J. Tonight, steak, baked potatoes, green beans and fresh baked toll-house cookies.

--My wife really has this dinner planning down to a science.

--The kids fight and feud as per normal, but I think they are having a good time.

Above, the kids play in the Saco River. The water was cold, though not frightfully so and incredibly clear.

White Town - Your Woman

White Town - Your Woman
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I like the video but what first attracted me to this song is how they used a reedy version of the Star Wars Emperor's Theme by John Williams--cheeky! Well, if they did it on purpose. It is not exactly an obscure series of movies.

Old comment which acts as a review, kind of...

I had posted this as a comment last year on The Bit Maelstrom review of Inglourious Basterds.

Someone at work had just seen the movie and I knew I had written something about it somewhere. I thought it was on the above mentioned blog, but searches there were in vain (I probably misspelled Inglourious Basterds). I searched on Althouse, where "Blake" the author of The Bit Maelstrom sometimes comments and found a few posts about the movie in question. Naturally, being an inveterate and excellent movie reviewer, he had a comment there with a link to his review. I made the following observations in his comments section:

My wife and I saw this last weekend.

Yes, the lack of distinction between regular German soldiers and NAZIs really bothered me and I am glad someone else noticed this too. My wife thought that since most people don't make any distinction, it would have complicated the story. My view is that if there is a distinction to be made, the filmmaker should make it. They had the time to talk about nitrocellulosic film stock, but maybe they had time to do that because it is a subject that interests our filmmaker.

A couple of other things too: 1) The Zoller character was, I thought, presented in a positive light early on. But then right at the end he is kind of a jerk. Wife reminded me that he did have the girl essentially arrested in order to join him at lunch with Goebles and that was kind of jerky... 2) There were two independent plots against the theater and neither of them interfered with the other. There could have been some very nice tension if--in each case--something unexpected happened that left doubt as to the plot's success. After the denouement, all the plotters would come to the conclusion that their plot worked since they don't know about the other one. This could lead to all kinds of post-event intrigue. There was a better movie in there somewhere.

Yea! I helped the team again.

Men's 40+

9.  GREATER LOWELL ROAD RUNNERS 
40:39   43:09   44:06   45:06   45:47 (47:40) (49:52) = 3:38:47
John Dowling, Fil Faria, Ken Goodin, Glenn Stewart, David Pecchia, Tom Amiro, Michael Brodeur

Scenes from the race

The girl handing out water probably ran in the 3K which was just before our 10K race.

The Race start: We began on this bridge, ran a couple of miles through neighborhoods, back over the bridge, another 4-mile loop and then finished by crossing the bridge one more time.

These nice ladies got us fired-up before the big, steep, mile-long climb; which was just ahead.

The elite ladies start: #334 won the race and the smiling runner # 73 is 45 years old and won for her age division.

Added: Some pictures of the race posted by Locallyrun.com...

The hill

Done!

A couple of hundred feet till the finish.

Bridge of Flowers 10K

233 28/67 M4549 45:47 7:22 David Pecchia 47 M 554 Chelmsford MA GLRR

This is a long ways from my best 10K time, but this was a very difficult course (all hills) so maybe I should not feel so bad.

This was a New England 10K championship race and so I have to compare it with other grand prix races. The only other 10K in this series that I ran was back in 2007:

326 659 DAVID PECCHIA 44 M 84/197 M4049 CHELMSFORD MA 44:41 7:12

This was a hilly course too, but not nearly so bad. The key metric would be how well I did against men in my age group: 28/67=.4179 84/197=.4264 So, I did do slightly better in this race than in the one from 2007.

Where are they getting these ideas?

Back in the days of the second Gulf War, it was a constant trope of my liberal debate opponents that, "Iraq was a distraction from Afghanistan". That is to say, we could have wrapped things up nicely in the first war, but diverted too many resources away from the "good" war. Anyway, ancient history right? I was just reminded of this when a couple of days ago a smart liberal from work claimed that we pulled troops out of Afghanistan to fight in Iraq.

The press and liberals may have thought that nothing was going on in Afghanistan, but the steadily increasing numbers of troops fighting there would not agree. It is an odd and probably solipsistic view that if we are not thinking about something, it must not be taking place.

The following statistics are from the (I believe) mildly anti-war, National Priorities Project U.S. Troop Levels in Afghanistan

Fiscal Year Troops

2001 N/A

2002 5,200

2003 10,400

2004 15,200

2005 19,100

2006 20,400

2007 23,700

2008 30,100

2009 62,000*

My Wife and I were watching some concert video of The White Stripes and at some point they did their cover of I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself. I noted that it was a cover but didn't remember who made it famous. I thought it was a show tune but in retrospect, I must have been thinking of a great scene from My Best Friend's Wedding.

Julia Roberts plays the friend of a guy who is getting married and since she wants the guy, she spends much of the movie trying to make his fiancee look bad. In this scene, knowing that the girl, played by Cameron Diaz is shy and cannot sing, puts her on the spot at a karaoke bar. The girl tries so hard and is so earnest that she wins over the whole bar and the guy loves her even more. Major backfire!

A little research showed that it goes much further back than this movie.

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD-I JUST DON'T KNOW (WHAT TO DO WITH MYSELF)
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Oh yeah, here is most famous (now) version...

A Short Imaginary Conversation Between Two Private Citizens

Former Gov: Hiya! I see you've gotcher self a sign...

"Teacher": Yeah, I was hoping you'd come by and explain why you quit.

Former Gov: Why? Did you vote for me?

"Teacher": No.

Former Gov: Well then, once I was in office you decided I was doing a great job and are disappointed that I quit?

"Teacher": No. I'm glad you quit.

Former Gov: Maybe it is just me, but normally when I get my way about something I don't also demand an explanation. Furthermore, I gave an explanation--to my supporters--as to why I felt it necessary to resign. They deserved an explanation and they seem to have accepted what I put forth.

"Teacher": I suppose it does seem churlish to ask a question when there is no conceivable answer that would be satisfying...

Okay, now I've really gone off into fantasy-land...

Depressing Blood Pressure and Mood

I did a longish run for the first time in a while and thought ahead, or was possibly procrastinating and took a before-run blood pressure and pulse.

127/78 pulse 63 before. Ran 13.1 miles in modest heat.

112/68 pulse 63 after. I drank about 20 oz of fluid after running and took a shower before taking the after run reading, so this was maybe 30-40 minutes post-run. There are different theories as to the cause of decreased BP after an endurance event. Dehydration: After all, some of the more common BP meds are diuretics, so this makes sense. Though I had replaced most of the lost fluid before taking the post run reading. I think distension of the veins and arteries makes a lot of sense too; they get stretched-out from being under pressure for a while and it takes some time for them to recover their former state.

The time on the run was a big disappointment though; I was on track (roughly) for the first 8 miles and then just felt like there was no energy left and my time reflects this.

Later, I got the idea of giving one of the girl's a math problem related to my recorded pulse rate. 63/minute translates into how many seconds per heart-beat? Naturally it took the girl about five minutes to solve what should have taken ten seconds; and I did require it be solved in the head (no paper, no calculator.)

Answer: 19/20 sec per beat or 0.95 seconds per beat in decimal form. The way I did it is to reason that 60 BPM reflects one beat per second and there are three more beats/minute to account for. This is one beat per 20 seconds extra, which is to say that if we take-off 1/20th second from each beat, then we can fit the remaining three in to one minute. It doesn't come out exactly to this amount though since we have freed-up three whole seconds for the three remaining beats, but assuming they are the same length as the other 60, they are slightly shorter than one second each. This estimated answer is therefore off by one 420th of a second.

Summer cooking

A guy could get a pretty good meal without even grilling meat.

Though we did indeed grill meat too.

Not meat in the Catholic sense, but meat in a taxinomic sense. Sorry for only having an image of the raw steel-head and scallops--I got too busy while cooking to take any further pictures.

It was a nice day, so we had the AC off and the windows open. A good time to roast coffee and after the oven was free of coffee (it gives off a lot of smoke) some JoJo's to go with dinner.

Mexican Turquesa

Yemen, Mocha Matari

Idaho, JoJo's Vaishali-style.

At least I helped the team.

Last year I had a disappointing time at the Yankee Homecoming 10-miler. It is in the middle of the Summer, but in the evening--as if these things somehow cancel each other out. It is held in Newburyport MA, which is on the Atlantic Ocean, so one might even expect some cool sea breezes. The weather last year was above 90 with high humidity and not a breath of wind.

I wanted to run it this year because I figured that it couldn't possibly be as bad as last year.

It did not start auspiciously; I gave myself two hours to get there, park, pick-up my number & so forth. Google maps gave the route an estimate of one hour, so I figured that I was fine. Traffic said otherwise. As I looked at the temperature gauge, which hovered between 95 and 97 degrees, I half-way hoped I would arrive too late to race. Route 495 was a mixture of stop-and-go and wide-open lanes and I had spent an hour and a half by the time I got off the highway. I now had to find the race, park, pick-up my race number, run back to the car to drop-off my t-shirt and sun glasses and then run to the start. I got to the starting line right before the gun went off.

Some large races have a starting sensor which keeps track of when you cross the starting line and deducts this from the final time. This can be significant. In Boston from a couple of years ago, I started in the middle of the pack and still took over 6 minutes to reach the starting line. This race didn't have a starting sensor and since I came late I was further back in the pack than I would have liked. Between crowds preventing full speed running for the first mile and the time it took to reach the start, I estimate that I lost around two minutes. This translates into 12 seconds per mile for the whole 10-mile race. It was in the low 90's at the start, but there was a little wind and the humidity was much less than last year.

I think I was running in the mid sevens for most of the way. I didn't really go all-out except at the end though. I was up there on my own and didn't want to be in a position where I incapacitated myself. In the last two miles though, a group caught-up with me and I increased my pace to match them. We all, to one degree or another, sped-up in these last couple of miles since we could taste the finish and the temperature had fallen at least 10 degrees. By the last quarter-mile we were all moving pretty fast and there was even some jostling for position in the curves. For some reason this made me loose patience and I went into full sprint mode for the final 200 yards. I left the group I was in behind and passed another half-dozen runners in addition. It is nice to add a little drama at the end for spectators. It was a little irritating though--if I had all this speed at the end, I probably could have run a faster pace for a substantial part of the second half.

I did help the team though:

9. GREATER LOWELL ROAD RUNNERS

1:02:51 1:03:57 1:11:33 1:16:42 1:30:56 = 6:05:59

724 Jason Bui 30, 2997 Cody Freihofer 22, 1881 Ken Goodin 55,

2134 David Pecchia 47, 2299 John Ducharme 41

Had I not been there, then the 6th and only other team member's time would have been used. He ran it 19 minutes slower than I did and so this would have knocked us into 12th place. Not to disparage him, he is 71 years old and finished first in his age group.

Last year I was 310th and this year 312th, so I guess the better conditions this year helped everybody, not just me.

Update: Looks as if there were a couple more GLRR's there and we moved up to 7th:

7. GREATER LOWELL ROAD RUNNERS

1:02:51 1:03:57 1:08:10 1:11:33 1:16:42 = 5:43:13

724 Jason Bui 30, 2997 Cody Freihofer 22, 762 Fil Faria 45, 1881

Ken Goodin 55, 2134 David Pecchia 47

I swear I am nothing like this. Really!

From Jonah Goldberg of The Corner

Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick

Heard this on the radio this morning. It came out in the late 70's but to me sounds emblematic of much of what would come out through much of the 1980's.

4-mile bookends or not much to report on this day off

My wife likes it when I go with her on the mornings when she runs, but she doesn't want to make me come, so she slinks away quietly. This morning I was drowsy but didn't think I could fall back asleep so I threw on some shorts and a t-shirt and went downstairs. I initially thought she had already left since it was so still on the ground floor, but she was there and happy to have me along.

The main bulk of the day was spent at the CS&T club minding the kids as they did swim team, tennis lessons and then swim lessons. We have a girl who does this the other four days per week but since I have Wednesdays off, she has Wednesdays off too. While there I got another few chapters of Stalin's Ghost read: Our hero has survived being shot in the head and few other scrapes in his suicidal attempt to bring the bad-guys to justice. Also, ran into the mom of one of Dahlia's friends, just back from three weeks in France. Naturally we had a lot to talk about.

Once home, I cleaned-up the breakfast things and lunch things which was enough to run a load in the dishwasher. Next, I put together a batch of spaghetti sauce for dinner tonight and a few other nights. We ate early due to Surenna having to go to a hip-hop workshop. After dinner there were enough pots, pans and dishes for the dishwasher to set-out again on its mission.

After all of this, there was still plenty of light for a run though it was still 80 degrees out. When we haven't had a heat-wave in a while, I sort of relish the idea of blitzing-out a 5-miler in the middle of the afternoon. It is a challenge that I enthusiastically embrace. It has been more-or-less continuously hot here for a solid month and now running in the heat just seems like drudgery. I think that this is the reason for my times being so lame in the last couple of weeks. Still, with heavy heart, I went out for a four miler.

One small reward was that I got to see how fast I was going. The police have put up a radar sign which flashes your speed. I have noticed it in the car and wondered if it would register a runner. There are two criteria that would have to be met: 1. There must be some threshold speed to be met since you wouldn't want it wasting its time flashing zero all day from the speed of the road itself. 2. There must be a reflection threshold. You want it to pick-up a car or motorcycle, but not, presumably, a breeze. this would not seem to be a tough problem since motor vehicles are made of metal, which is pretty reflective to microwaves, versus air which is not very reflective. (There are such things as storm and wind speed radars btw.) The key here is which side of the threshold is a person? I am mostly water and the only metal is a wedding ring and a couple of bits of dental work. The answer is that it did pick me up. It was on a slight down-hill and picked up my speed as 8 MPH from about 200 feet away. Naturally I sped-up and managed to hit 11 MPH (which is a 5:30 pace). I think I could have hit a higher speed but didn't want to pull something and cripple myself. Also, just for comparison; I could run a 1/4 mile in High School at an average speed of 15 MPH. Double also; I was a distance runner and the real quarter milers were much, much faster than me.

Family Fun Day

It was more-or-less just like last year's version at our local co-op pool club. I made the 2nd round in the cannon-ball contest, but didn't win it.

Being forced to sit outside on a hot day (at least we got there early enough to grab a spot under a good shade tree) has some benefit: I had enough time to get back into a book I had started back in January on the flight home from Bombay. I am reading Stalin's Ghost which is the 6th novel in a series by Martin Cruz Smith. The first book is the most famous, Gorky Park probably because there was a big Hollywood movie too. The movie is actually pretty good, it has William Hurt and Lee Marvin in it. It was only through looking into it in the process of writing this post that I realized how many stories there were in this series. I had read the first two and had a vague impression there was more than three.

Anyway, I am really glad I kept reading. The novel was interesting, but fairly involved so to keep track of the characters and plot requires either quick reading or careful attention. The action is picking-up now and so I am eager to find out what comes next. Our hero, the guy played by William Hurt in the movie, has had a girl try to garrotte him in one chapter and in the next a deadbeat dad shoots him in the head. I suspect he will live since the book centers around this character, but we shall see.