Blowing & Drifting

Others may aspire to imitate Frank Gehry's titanium-on-everything approach to architecture, but we are happy to put aluminum foil in the windows and call it po-mo.

As attractive and cutting-edge as this looks, I'll be happy when our new blackout shade arrives from Menards and we can sell these 13-some feet of Reynolds Wrap to some collector of early 21st century vernacular architecture and design. Faux shutters not included.

I just finished reading an astounding series of articles on China's enormous push into Africa. The series appears in the business magazine Fast Company, so it's tilted toward the economics of Chinese investment in Africa. Specifically, it examines China's effort to acquire the African resources (wood, petroleum, iron, other minerals) necessary for Chinese industrialization - and, as the series author, Richard Behar, points out, for American consumerism.

The six pieces in the series all include the requisite statistics and analysis, but the series is also studded with excellent, terrible, and illustrative anecdotes, such as the plight of the impoverished Mozambican loggers who, having worked three months for a Chinese company in the wilds of their home country, discover that the company's managers have left without paying them. There could be more of this kind of storytelling in the series, but Behar uses what is there to convey the colossal scale - both horrible and wonderful - of the invention of "ChinAfrica." For my taste, he does too little to connect China's engagement with Africa to its precedents, American-led neoliberal investment in Africa (among other places) and, of course, the European powers' brutal colonialization of the continent, which ended just about one African lifetime ago. Perhaps he's saving that for his book.

A bit from the first piece, just to entice you to click through to the whole series:

There are already more Chinese living in Nigeria than there were Britons during the height of the empire. From state-owned and state-linked corporations to small entrepreneurs, the Chinese are cutting a swath across the continent. As many as 1 million Chinese citizens are circulating here.

Following on the recommendation of the guy at the New York Times who's training to ride one of this year's toughest Tour de France stages, I picked up a copy of The Rider, a novella by the Dutch writer (and serious cyclist) Tim Krabbé. I finished the book last night, and, ladies and gentlemen, I can't recommend it enough. This is a fantastic book - mostly the first-person tale, told by "Tim Krabbé," of a 140-km race in the mid-1970s. Granting that the book is only 130-some pages, I read it in two long sittings that cumulated to about the same time as it takes the narrator to finish the race - a neat little trick.

As a "cycling book," it definitely has its appeal to serious riders (a category that hardly includes me) and those interested in the Tour de France (a category that does include me). Cycling names and events figure prominently in the story, which means really getting the story requires Wikipedia or a good history of the Tour. But aside from that, The Rider uses just enough literary experimentation to tell a gripping story: the race is narrated mostly kilometer by kilometer until the final pages, which are told centimeter-by-centimeter. This works because Krabbé is an excellent writer, and the translation is believably good. An especially great, self-aggrandizing and self-mocking line which resonates with my own current training: "Coppi, Bartali, Lebusque, Kléber, I've never felt their pain, I'm the only rider in the world whose pain I've ever felt; that makes me a pretty unique individual."

(You should, of course, acquire this book through your local bookseller, not one of those big companies. The Carleton bookstore got the book into my hands in about the same time it would have taken Amazon.com to get it to me, without levying any S&H charges, and with a nice personal touch: the bookbuyer also got a copy as a Father's Day gift to her husband, a serious amateur rider.)

I was up in Minneapolis today to attend a seminar by Edward Tufte, a noted thinker on the best ways to present data. He's a hellaciously smart guy, an excellent speaker, and an agent provocateur on many things that I find interesting: how to write better, how to integrate images and words, how to combine old tech and new tech in a meaningful way, how to understand and formulate complicated arguments. Not incidentally, he also loves Apple - even as he also claims that OS X is almost as good as the original graphical-user interface developed by Xerox PARC about a quarter-century ago.

<whining>So while I thoroughly enjoyed the seminar itself, I did not enjoy the bad arrangements. By my calculations, there were 504 people attending the seminar today. At breaks and lunch, we all had to exit through one skinny stairwell or three small elevator cars. While waiting, I reminded myself of the origins of the term "a crush of people." The sardinian quality of the event forced me to cancel a much-anticipated lunch date with a friend (sorry, Squab!) and to consider making a break for the door well before the seminar ended. I didn't, thinking it rude and enjoying the last bit of the seminar.

Bad decision. Not only did I have to negotiate the aforementioned elevator mess, but once I was in my car on the top of the parking ramp, I had to wait 22 minutes before I could get a space in the queue of departing cars and then spend another 17 minutes inching down the decks. Not that I was tracking either my progress out of the deck or through the streets and down the freeways toward home.</whining>

Suffice to say, after this reminder of some of the downsides of the big city, that I'll welcome my eight-minute bike commute tomorrow. I'll use it to think about some of the great stuff Tufte talked about, like sparklines, why the iPhone is excellent, motion pictures from the 17th century, and how to detect a concealed handgun.

A few days ago, I blogged about some mysterious goings-on with giant stacks of cardboard and some open space in front of my office building. It turns out to have been a project orchestrated by some Carls from the class of 2003 - back in town for Reunion - to construct an elaborate pavilion for their class. The project was apparently supposed to culminate in a huge arch, but didn't quite get that far. This afternoon, it looked like this:

As arches go, it was more harrumph that Triomphe, but it was still awfully cool and, from a distance, beautiful in a serpentine way. Vivi rather liked it, and even engaged in a short game of hide-and-seek with Julia. (The game would have been longer but for Julia's preschoolerish insistence that "you guys aren't doing it right." Further guidance wasn't forthcoming.)

This little trip to and around campus capped a pretty good summer solstice. True to longest-day-of-the-year form, both girls were up waaaaay too late. But isn't that what endless daylight is for?

The girls' actual bedtimes have, for the last week or so, been pretty brutal, with plenty of trouble from the younger one. but at least all those shenanigans have been preceded by this wonderful scene (about which I've already blogged): Julia "reading" (actually reciting) Vivi's favorite books to her, and then singing a medley of "Rockabye Baby" and the Barney "I Love You" song. It sounds crazy, but it works. Don't they look happy?

From the New York Times:

"A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times, according to one measure by RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer use habits. The company, which draws its data from 40,000 people who have tracking software on their computers, found that on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day."

I'd say that, in an average day, I check my email far less frequently times and send about a quarter as many instant messages but would consider 40 websites an solid morning's work. 

These numbers appear in an article about how "Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload," right down to forming "a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge."

Interestingly, most of these methods are technological, like a way to shut down your Google email for 15 minutes. I've found, in my 14 years in the knowledge economy, that the only really good methods to "fight information overload" are social ones. I make a point to simply turn away from my computer and read or write on paper while facing my window. I walk a document over to someone rather than email it. Or, hell, I get up and go to the restroom or even eat my lunch outside while reading some off-printed Chronicle of Higher Ed articles. 

In short, I don't, and I'd wager than most other workers of my general species don't, really need (expensive) IT to combat IT; they need simply to reject it, if only for the duration of a lunch break or the time it takes to mark up a paper copy of a draft memo.

The girls took unprecedented three-hour naps today, which was fantastic for them and for Shannon. (Over dinner, Shannon and I guesstimated that Julia has probably taken no more than five three-hour naps in her four years of life.) It was also good for me, because I had a long evening with two well-rested and very happy girls. When the girls were finally to bed just before eight, I headed downstairs to take care of all the usual evening stuff. I was not looking forward to the pile of dishes, a bunch of homeowners'-association stuff, and whatever other miscellany needed doin'.

Then it struck me anew: my wife is the best wife ever. She did all the dishes, cleaned up the whole kitchen, tidied the living room, and generally took care of things. Father's Day was yesterday, but apparently the spirit lives on! Thank you, honey!

I. The past few days, Julia has been saying that, when she grows up, she wants to be a ballet teacher "for partly" and a "rock 'n' roll teacher" for the rest. (No, she hasn't seen School of Rock.) Today, driving home, she added that she'd also like to be a banjo teacher. In other words, she's just an M.F.A. away from performance artist.

II. Saturday at breakfast, Julia exclaimed, "Daddy, look! Can you do this with your fingers?" I looked over to find her flipping the bird right to my face, like some sort of put-upon celeb confronting a paparazzo.

III. Julia has been enamored lately of a magazine story featuring a character named "Max Mole." If you can say that out loud without thinking of a certain seven-letter curseword, you're a better person than I am. As is routine in these kinds of situations, Julia complements the story with extended role-playing games, and I'm invariably Max Mole. I have to bite my tongue to keep from laughing when she yells excitedly, "Daddy, you be Max Mole!" so quickly that it sounds just like, "Daddy, you [curseword]!"

Reading the excellent Science of Sport blog- written by two exercise physiologists with expertise and interest in endurance sports, especially running - I recently came across a post on the Comrades Marathon in South Africa, which was held for the 83rd time today. As has been the case over the last decade, Russian runners dominated today's run. Leonid Shvetsov won the men's race with a new course-record time of 5:24:46, a staggering 13 minutes up on the second-placed finisher, to become the first back-to-back winner of the race in  twenty years. With a time of 6:14:36, Elena Nurgalyeva won the women's event, 1:15 up on her twin sister Alesya; the Nurgalyevas have won five of the last six women's races.

The Comrades is a staggering challenge: its course cover 87 kilometers (54 miles) and a truly sickening number of significant climbs. The race route is reversed each year, so that in odd years it runs "down" from the inland city of Pietermaritzburg all the way to Durban, on the coast, and in even years it runs "up" from Durban to Pietermaritzburg. In either direction, it's brutal: exactly 4 minutes (1.2%) separate up- and down-run records, both of which are owned now by Shvetsov, and only 14:40 separates the women's records (just 4.0%).

Quite the national race, Comrades is steeped in South African history. The race was started in 1921 as a way to commemorate the then-still-new country's Great War veterans, and after World War II the race was used to both reinforce and protest apartheid. Interestingly, black runners were allowed to compete in 1975 - well ahead of the destruction of the apartheid regime in the late 1980s - and the winningest male racer, Bruce Fordyce, used his 1981 race to protest apartheid. (Wikipedia provides much more information about the race.)

Aside from the politics and elite athleticism of the race, it's also a brutal, horrid physical test. The worst part is that you can run the whole thing and - because of the strictly-enforced twelve-hour time limit - still not "finish." Here's a passage from Amby Burfoot's first-person story of running the race in 2006:

A half mile from the end of the race, I hear the first faint echoes from the finish-line announcer. Race winners Oleg Kharitonov and Elena Nurgalieva have broken the tape more than four hours ago. Here, in another 60 minutes, running's most dramatic moment will be played out. At precisely 11 hours, 59 minutes on the time clock, the director of the Comrades Marathon Association will emerge from a tent and march to the finish line. There, dressed in a dark jacket and tie, he will turn around, his back facing the oncoming stream of runners. He will raise a gun and wait for the seconds to tick down.

All around, pandemonium breaks loose. Thousands of spectators stare at the executioner, imploring, "No. No. Don't do it." Then they look the other way, to the frantic flow of runners struggling for the finish. Some are sprinting with joyously upraised arms, some walking, some being carried by teammates, some literally crawling on their hands and knees. The crowd breaks into a rhythmic, throbbing chant: "Go...Go...Go...Go..." The atmosphere is electric, the suspense building. "Long before someone invented 'Reality TV,' we had the real deal right here at Comrades," race manager Renee Smith had told me two days earlier. The national television audience skyrockets in the final minutes, as all South Africa tunes in for the tense Comrades conclusion. Who will make it? Who won't?

At 12:00:00 on the race clock, the gun is fired, and the Comrades Marathon is over. Those who fail to break 12 hours will receive no medal for their effort. No time. They won't appear in the newspaper agate or the official results program. They'll get no credit toward their "green." They will become, in effect, in this country with its wretched history of human-rights violations, a nonperson. A nonrunner. If you want, you could tell your friends that you ran Comrades. You could say you finished in, oh, 12:20. But you didn't. Because there is no record of it... There is some solace only for the first nonfinisher. He or she becomes an instant hero, interviewed live on TV and pictured on the front page of every newspaper. To many South Africans, the Comrades runner who goes all that distance, for nothing, is more symbolic, of something, than the race winner. That's another great tradition--one I think we can all embrace, even if we're not sure what it means.

Ouch, in every sense.

I feel like I should run this race.

I'm not one to be too perturbed by weather, good or bad. I mean, I'm as strongly drawn outdoors by a bad blizzard as a 70-and-sunny June day.

That said, tornadoes do get me a bit freaked out, and this photo - by Iowan Lori Mehmen - has freaked me out more than a bit.

Read about it in the Times.

For whatever reason, Julia tonight decided to not only join me as I read bedtime stories to Vivi, but to actually "read" those stories to Vivi - something the little had stopped asking for, it's been so long.

After getting all the preliminaries out of the way, Julia sat down with Vivi's favorite two books on her lap and Vivi sat down right next to her, folding her plump little hands in her lap. When Julia started to read (in a strangely booming voice), Vivi looked over at me, an arm's length away, flashed an enormous grin, and giggled with disbelieving delight. Translation: "Big sisters are awesome." I wish I had taken a picture to commemorate the epitome of sisterly love.

VIVI

Vivi spent much of Wednesday morning showing off new skills. Looking at a puzzle piece showing a purple cephalopod, she pointed to it and said, "octapud!" Just a few minutes before, she had showed off her newfound ability to build sixteen-piece block towers as tall as she is.

JULIA

Julia, on the other hand, is well past the building-blocks stage, either with respect to language or the actual wooden things. The last three bathtimes, she's endlessly repeated "stodd pee coog," a sentence that cracks her up and which has been variously translated as, "I am a cougar," "They speak French," "Don't forget to wash my ears," and a zillion other zany things.

More usefully, and in true Minnesota fashion, she's appending "and whatnot" to any list. "I would like more broccoli and bread and whatnot?" Or, "Daddy, do I need to wash my body and my hair and whatnot?" It works with almost any sentence - declarative, interrogative, or whatnot.

I fear the day when she starts using Minnesotans' classic passive-aggressive response to things they don't like: "Oh, Daddy, that shirt is... different."

I am clearly being punished by Velosipeed, the god of bicycles, for my post yesterday. 

Today, my bike tire wasn't flat when I left work, but it deflated quite nicely and rapidly about halfway home. I'm now off to see what the %#(&%(&# is wrong with it. I hope it's just a patch that failed, and not a burr in my rim, blowing holes in one tube after another.

New beds and mattresses are all well and good for Mama, but Daddy wants a new bike.

The girls and I ran some errands this morning, culminating in a trip to Cub. The ostensible reason for the trip there was the deposit of a few checks that have been hanging around the the fridge for too long, but we turned the trip into an Exciting Adventure by partaking in the free apples that the store offers to kids.  Julia has been talking about having an apple at Cub for a couple months, so this was a big deal. Such are your dreams when you're four.

Anyhow, we sat at a booth in the sad little snack area to have our apples. Julia was very concerned with consuming every edible part of the apple while not consuming any part of the core, so as she got down to the middle she started prefacing ever nibble with, "Is this the core? Is this the core? Is this the core?" After a couple riveting minutes of this, she finally was down to just the woody bits in the middle, which I duly took from her. Then I looked over at Vivi, just in time to notice that she was holding a little scrap of fruit and her stem. She'd eaten the damn core.

This is not only proof that you can't win, but that you also can only rarely eke out a tie.

After getting those checks into the ATM, we started making our way out of the store, but our paths took us past the nail-polish display. Along with Cub apples, "toenail polish" is another obsession of Julia's, so naturally we had to stop. When Vivi saw her sister take out one of the bottles to examine, she reached for two. Or maybe three. Coulda been four; I was losing track. Giggling as I tried to grab them back, she thus inspired Julia, giggling as well, to take one or two more down. Faced with the horror of an exponential increase in the number of polish bottles in play, I had to laugh, too. Restraining both mischief-makers with a fistful of their dresses, I plucked the bottles from their sweaty little palms and put them back - some in the right spots, some not. I'm sorry, Cub Maybelline Saleslady, for laying waste to your display.

I've just come back inside after rushing out into the backyard and front entryway to rescue our hanging plants and batten down all our patio furniture. We are getting a scary windstorm here right now. The wind is very strange: not exactly blowing or gusting, but just thrumming continuously. The raindrops are gigantic, too. Each one felt like a cup of water hitting my back. I'm not sure I want to see what the online weather site's radar image shows.

It looks like we'll have some crummy weather today here in Northfield, but there's (almost) no way the weather here today will compare with the weather in northern Italy 20 years ago today, when cyclist Andy Hampsten made a magnificent ride up and over the the Passo Gavia, one of the hardest climbs in the Alps, during a horrific blizzard on his way to becoming the first - and so far only - American to win the Giro d'Italia, Italy's version of the Tour de France.

(Image swiped from PezCycling News.)

This city just gets crazier and crazier. The mayor had to leave Monday's city council meeting because he was impaired - apparently due to diabetes. Then this morning - roundabout 7:15 - one of our toilets started to flood because the city is flushing the water mains.

As long as I've been following the Tour de France - since 1989, when Greg le Mond won by eight seconds on the final day - I've been enthralled by the idea of trying to ride one of the great climbs: the great cols - Glandon, Tourmalet, d'Aubisque, Galibier, Telegraphe - or any of the other monsters: the Port de Bales, the Hautacam, and especially the Mont Ventoux or l'Alpe d'Huez. Who knows if it'll ever happen, since a) I'd need to ride a better bike for more than four miles a day and b) holy crap are the guided tours expensive.

But in the meantime, I am hooked on "The Climb," a new blog by Rob Mackey in the New York Times' "Play" magazine. Mackey, a smart, fit guy but by no means a stud rider, is training to try to ride the Tourmalet in July. He's got 33 days to go. It's gripping stuff, frankly - man against mountain, mind over matter, blogger versus naysaying commenters...

A question from Julia, future product manager: "Daddy, have you ever boughten [sic] Tabasco tape ? It's made out of Tabasco sauce, and it's great on a biscuit."