Letters to Holly

Thursday, September 7

Runnin' Dirty. Or Not.

I found myself on the Bad Treadmill yesterday. The gym has three versions of treadmills to choose from: a late '80s version, a mid '90s version, and a late '90s version. I prefer the middle ones as they keep a good pace. Usually. But I know there's one of them that will sucker you into a painful run. The tread belt is slack, and makes running a real effort. The slack belt and my run make the whole apparatus wobble, and it'slike running on a miniature pirate ship in a storm. My shins have a sharp ache. I did manage my two miles, but it took some internal bargaining. I couldn't move to another machine because they were all occupied, and pride kept me going. I don't want to rely on a specific running environment. But this did keep me from running further, which was my plan. I'm already running faster than I plan to in the 5k race, and I have seven more weeks of training to go.

We watched the Sharapova/Golovin U.S. Open match yesterday, and it was awful. Neither woman could rise above meditocrity to end it. It took two hours+ to play two sets. There was also some controversy about Sharapova's coaches using signals from their seats to tell her when to eat and drink. That level of coaching is a no-no. But she did win.

Picture of the Day
My world is a little sadder at the knowledge this will happen.



Here's the problem with it; everyone's a nerd now. If you carry a laptop, PDA, an iPod or pimped-out cellphone, use MySpace or Second Life, or blog the minute details of your life to strangers, you are as nerds were back in the mid-'80s. We're all plugged in to technology, something that just wasn't the norm 20 years ago. The guys from the first film didn't have serious, mainstream job prospects back then. It was NASA or Lockheed Martin. Now? Best Buy offers you the Geek Squad for national repairs. Macs use PC chips. 1337 speak is legible to most teens. Nerds run the world. They won. Game over. Now if they want to make a film about nerds vs. geeks (the fanboys, the hardcore online gamers, the mega critics), then you got a fun film for a current audience.

In the News
Say what you will about the newsbloggers, but they've proven to be correct about the administration more than a few times. They passed along items about military policies, wiretapping, and the Plame scandal before they reached mainstream table conversation. And now Bush admits that, why yes, we do have secret prisons outside the U.S. The trikc here is that the prisons were set up to avoid the Red Cross humanitarin investigations and U.S. law on torture. But Bush claims we don't torture anyone. So why make the prisons secret? The prisoners can't be aware if the facilities are known to anyone, so the secrecy is not for them. It must be for people who would have a reason to object to them. So what would be the reason? The methods used to interrogate them.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

dammit. yet again i type a comment and it doesn't post. and then i don't even retype it. i leave you more comments than you actually are able to read, dearest gregory.