The Franklin Plan

I decided a month or so ago that starting after Labor Day i would attempt to spend the remainder of the year getting a bit more organized and a bit more productive, etc. My model for this is Benjamin Franklin's "plan". Franklin's plan consists of the 13 aspects below. Franklin's approach was to focus on one virtue each week, and he kept little charts to monitor his progress. I'm not quite that committed, but these still match pretty well with my own goals.

1. Temperance: Eat not to dullness and drink not to elevation.

This one's fairly hard. I'm no glutton, but i indulge a little too often in vending machine snacks and California Cabernet (though not usually at the same time). I can't really reduce calories all that much since i have certain dietary requirements imposed by my running schedule; but i'm trying to reduce or eliminate the pure boredom eating.

2. Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation.

Not a problem for me. I think i've got this one squared away.

3. Order: Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time.

Another tough one. I have too much crap for everything to have a place, and i've got the attention span of a fruit fly. My approach to this one is to fastidiously remove as much from my house that i don't really need, and to develop a sort of informal schedule for getting necessary stuff done. The first step i've taken is to start getting up at a regular time. I'm using my cell phone as an alarm clock to wake me up at 5:30am, which gives me time enough to both work out and get stuff ready for the day.

4. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.

I think the trick here for me is figuring out what i ought and what i ought not. I figure i have to get my kids to school with their homework more or less done, i have to do solid work at my day job, and i have to keep my house from collapsing into a vermin-infested rubbish pile. Beyond that, i'm not quite sure what this means. Are we talking generic good deeds here? Family and financial responsibilities?

5. Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself: i.e. Waste nothing.

I'm cheap, so i think by the standards of our consumer-driven society i'm relatively frugal. On the other hand, i don't think i can claim to waste nothing. I spend too much on books that i only read once, and food that is more packaging than nutrient. My main goal here is to eliminate my credit card debt and adhere to a budget.

6. Industry: Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary actions.

Man, this is hard. There are just times when i have to sit down and watch 10 minutes of idiot spew on one of the 400 cable channels. Plus which i spend several hours a week involved in "unneccessary" actions if you want to get all technical (running and martial arts training, blogging, hanging out with my kids). I think if taken literally, this one is a recipe for nervous breakdown. I'm boiling this down to wasting less time watching TV and reading the Internets, and setting better priorities so i'm getting the important stuff done.

7. Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.

Screw other people. But seriously, as i've mentioned here before, i think my biggest problem in this vein is a tendency for sarcasm. OK, not so much a tendency as a lifestyle. I'm really trying to curb it, but it's hard to give up 40 years of hard-won snark.

8. Justice: Wrong none, by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

I'm having a hard time figuring out how this applies to my life. It's not that i'm saintly or anything, it's just that my life doesn't really afford that many opportunities to screw over other people.

9. Moderation: Avoid extremes. Forebear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

I've always like the bumper-sticker slogan "Everything in moderation, including moderation". I'm really convinced about the benefits of moderation, but i also think it's good to ocassionally just go off the deep end. A properly lived life should have a few hangovers. I think this also conflicts a bit with some of my hobbies. Can one be "moderate" in one's pursuit to run a faster 26 miles?

10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes or habitation.

I'm like totally down with this one. Except for leaving the laundry in the living room.

11. Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring; Never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.

Within the bounds of monogamy, i refuse to acknowledge that "too much sex" could be a problem. I'm ignoring this one.

12. Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.

I have a slight physiological advantage on this one, since i have low blood pressure and a resting heart rate of around 40. It's actually kind of hard for me to get untranquil. The one place where i'm applying this is one is on the freeway. You know the St. Francis bit about being an "instrument of peace". I try to keep that in mind when people are cutting me off in traffic. My inclination is, of course, to run them down; but instead i've decided to be the guy who lets everybody into the lane, doesn't flip anybody off, and forgives the ocassional brain cramp. Of course, in California when people get pissed at you on the freeway, they might shoot you; so there are practical reasons for this too.

13. Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

Humility is something that everybody thinks they have until their opinions are challenged. I've sort of re-learned the concept of humility in recent years to mean: the willingness to learn from other people even if they have less experience than you. I doubt this makes me much like Jesus or Socrates, but i figure i'm also less likely to be killed for my beliefs.

Hoist the Mainsail, Ye Scurvy Lubbers

Yes, it's Talk Like A Pirate Day, the most important holiday of the year. My pirate name for the day will be:

My pirate name is:

Black Tom Flint

Like anyone confronted with the harshness of robbery on the high seas, you can be pessimistic at times. Like the rock flint, you're hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you're easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

End Of The World As We Know It

If it's a true story, this is the most beautiful thing to come of the Katrina tragedy.

I'm hoping that in a week or two, after the details are filled in and some sanity has returned, that the catastrophe in Louisiana and Mississippi will seem comprehensible somehow. Right now, i'm in total cognitive dissonance mode. Even if you account for the disastrous incompetence of the federal government and the unprecedented scale of Katrina, it's still hard to accept how horrible it all appears. In some ways this is harder to fathom than the 9/11 tragedy, if only because then we could all be angry at an external enemy, something that we could ally against and punish. This time we have to face that we're vulnerable, unprepared, and in many cases helpless. The most frustrating thing is that we know, cynical as it may seem, that after all of the recriminations and political fallout we still won't be any better off.

Mighty Sailin' Man

Gilligan is Dead. The news that Bob Denver has died bummed me out. Gilligan's Island was my first favorite TV show, and i still contend that it's underrated. There was a time when GI was virtually synonymous with bad TV, though that was long before the advent of such horrors as Big Brother, The Surreal Life, and various other indicators of the decline of Western Civilization. It was, of course, silly and implausible as if that mattered. However, i remind you of an episode in which the castaways put on a show that combines the text of Hamlet with the music from Bizet's Carmen. And the producers of the show assumed that people would probably know about both Hamlet and Carmen. How i wish we could all be that stupid again.

Pirates and Global Warming

My favorite meme in recent memory is the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which was a response to the ridiculous actions of the Kansas State School Board to introduce intelligent design to the "science" curriculum of that state. There are a few reasons why i think this is so cool. First, it's funny. It's not especially original-- people ridiculing creationists have invoked magical, mythical creatures since time immemorial (usually giant purple chickens, etc.), but this instance has a particular depth and texture that is unprecedented. There's an FSM creation myth and FSM paintings and FSM iconography and FSM scripture ("touched by His Noodly Appendage"), and even an FSM Holy Week. Second, it really does expose the essential ridiculousness of ID, even if it is, as must be the case, preaching to the choir (must be because ID is designed-- no pun intended-- to be evidence-proof). Third, it involves pirates.

Worshipers of the FSM, called "Pastafarians", know that one must don full pirate regalia in order to teach the beliefs of FSM-ism (I'm wearing an eye-patch right now, i swear. Ask the parrot if you don't believe me). The key scientific evidence in favor of the FSM is the clear correlation between the increase in global temperature and the decline in the number of pirates.

Sure, it's smart-alecky and all. But a good dose of clever humor goes further than the pronouncements of experts. Most of the scientists asked to speak before the Kansas board declined, realizing that if the board were interested in intellectual honesty they wouldn't be having a hearing to assess the relative merit of evolution vs. ID. The FSM won't have any affect on ID true-believers, but at least it's more fun for the rest of us than yet another dry refutation.

Hike the High Country

Nothing will make you appreciate the necessities of life like a good hike that's mostly above 9000 feet. Food, water, oxygen. Warm clothing. Protection from the rain. And nothing will make you eliminate the unneccessary things like having to carry them on your back.

Needless to say, my friend Gary and i survived our backpacking expedition in the Mount Baldy Wilderness. It was a great trip, though exhausting. It wasn't the length of the hike so much as it was the steep up (or down) inclines and the altitude. At 10000 or more feet it's hard to catch your breath. The Mount Baldy Wilderness is a roughly triangular patch of forest, river, and mountain of about 7700 acres. We hiked a route which took us up the western trail to the summit of Baldy (or as close as you can get to it), down the eastern trail, and then across the base of the triangle on a 3.5 mile crossover trail.

The initial trail head is at about 8700 feet and you go up only gradually for the first few miles. The trail at this point follows one fork of the Little Colorado river, through meadows and stands of aspen, Douglas fir, and Ponderosa pines. It's incredibly beautiful country, especially this summer because they've had significant rain and everything is green and flourishing. One could point the camera in almost any direction and get a good photo.



We both felt pretty good through these first few miles, even with the heavy packs. The weather was perfect, sunny skies and just a bit cooler than ambient. Soon though the trail started to head sharply upward and we slowed down quite a bit. We stopped near a stream to get some water and food and take the packs off, but at the time we had no idea how far we were from the summit. As we approached 10000 feet i started to suck wind pretty hard and Gary was having some pain in his hip. My rule of thumb for backpacking has always been that you can make around 2 mph uphill and 3-4 downhill, but we were probably closer to about 1 mph on these sections. After a series of switchbacks that ran up the side of a ridge, it flattened out a bit. Eventually we came to an interesting bench of rock poised right at a saddle point on the ridge so that there were views in both directions. Although it was beautiful, i nicknamed it The Bench of Desperation, since we felt like we'd been walking for a long time and we had no idea how far we were from the summit.

We were probably only about a mile out at that point, but as the altitude approached 11000 feet, it was pretty hard going. Gary started a pattern of walking 100 steps and then stopping for a rest. We counted unique species of mushrooms. It was eerily quiet-- no wind, no birds, no scurrying wildlife or protective squirrels, not even a cricket chirping-- yet the sky was clear except for a few isolated rain clouds. Finally, we reached the border of the wilderness area and the Apache reservation, which is as close as you can get to the summit of Mount Baldy if you're not Apache. Gary's GPS put the altitude at 11,164 feet.

We rested for several minutes, drank some water and ate some trail mix. Then we started down the East trail. The character of the trail was almost immediately different, and i don't just mean its relative downness. There seemed to be more water, so the flora was markedly different. We also found a spring flowing from the rock just below the trail about 1/2 mile down. The most interesting site on this part of the trail (and perhaps the whole hike) is the debris from an airplane crash. I don't know enough about airplanes to identify anything from the wreckage, but it was clearly a large plane that hit the mountainside hard and scattered the debris widely. On the internet, i found evidence for both a DC-3 crash in April of 1937, and for a B-24 crash in 1942. The latter seems the more likely candidate, because there was an unmistakable Air Force marking on one part of the plane, and this was definitely a military aircraft.



A short distance further down the trail we came to a rocky promontory that gave us a great view of the whole wilderness area and points beyond. It was both a gorgeous view and also a good excuse to drop our packs and stop walking. After a bit we loaded up again and started down the trail, keeping our eyes open for a decent place to spend the night. Sunset was still more than an hour off, but we figured it would get dark early since we were on the east side of the mountain. We finally found a relatively flat spot with a fire ring, so we made camp and tried to start a fire. Turns out that it's hard to start a fire with wood that's been rained on for several weeks. We managed to get a small blaze going, and Gary fired up his WhisperLite stove to boil some water. We used the water to reconstitute some red beans and rice, which, even though slightly crunchy, was very good after a full day of pack mule duty.



In relative terms, it wasn't a bad night in the tent. It remained abnormally quiet, but we both managed to get a little sleep and it didn't rain. At about 5:30 am i finally heard a few birds signaling the impending dawn. I got up and tried to start a new fire, but i just couldn't keep it going. Gary got up a bit later and boiled some more water for oatmeal and coffee. He checked the GPS and realized that we'd probably spent the night on the Apache reservation, onto which the trail wanders for one short section. We'd planned to hang around the camp for a while, but we decided we should probably move on.

The next mile or so was relatively flat, sort of along a contour line at around 10400 feet. At one point the trail ran across an open area of bare rock that gave us more views of the surrounding valleys. This trail, unlike the west trail which featured primarily trees, is characterized by geology. We reached a series of switchbacks that went down a ridge through some of the oddest and most fascinating rock formations i've ever seen. There were towers of rock that looked like giant cairns of boulders built by giants. There were caves and ledges in the cliff faces above us. It looked almost as if the rock had been worn away by flowing or receding water, but this would have happened long ago since this is still way above the river.



Finally we came out into open meadow again, running along the other fork of the river. After a mile or so of this relatively flat terrain, we came to the eastern trail head. Fortunately, Gary had the presence of mind to realize that we could leave our packs here for the hike on the crossover trail, and then drive back when we reached the other trailhead. That was good, because the crossover trail would have sucked with the extra weight. It was a nice little trail, though not as well maintained as the other parts, but we were both too tired by this time to enjoy it much.

Backpacking is a strange pasttime for me in the sense that i'm alway really excited to get started when i start, and always really happy to finish when i stop. It's not like watching a movie, or even playing most sports, because instead of period of relatively consistent but predictable enjoyment, backpacking tends to give you periods of pain or exhaustion in exchange for moments of unexpected, transcendent joy. I can't count the number of times over the years when i've been right at the moment of thinking "Why the hell am i doing this to myself?" and then i'll come around a corner and see a view (or an animal or a tree) that makes me feel lucky to be alive. It also make me appreciate civilization, though the effect is temporary.

Up and Away

Here is where is i plan to be this weekend. My best friend Gary and i are backpacking up Mt. Baldy this weekend. I haven't been on many backpacking excursions since my kids were born, other than a short trip to the Anza Borrego desert a couple of years ago (with the kids) and a trip to the Superstitions many years ago (without the kids). So, anyway, i'm psyched.

Alt Country

This is an entry i first put on my "other" blog (my Yahoo 360 page). I've updated it a bit in light of some new bands i've found.

My musical tastes tend to fixate on one particular genre for a period of time until i suck all the flavor out of it and then i move on. Over the years this has included everything from speed metal, to baroque music, to rock en español. My latest obsession is the alternative country genre, whose best known exemplar is probably Wilco. Alt country is a vaguely defined genre, so it covers a lot of ground from very folkish to nearly punkish. On the other hand, it's one of those "you know it when you hear it" genres. If i had to describe alt country, i'd say that it is any type of music with identifiable traces of roots music, but with lyrics that are more interesting than the typical c+w song. As a disclaimer i should mention that i've always had a fondness for country music in general. If you don't recognize the essential genius of Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, or Flatt and Scruggs, then i can't guarantee that you'll dig alt. country.

One of the benefits of working for an on-line music service is that you have reason to cull through craploads of music metadata as part of fixing a problem or adding a feature. Since i have an overactive sarcasm gland, i tend to pick out amusing and/or silly band or album names (they're just more fun to test). Sometimes, i make an effort to listen to these oddly named bands or albums just for kicks, and more often than not i find that the band name was the first and last clever idea that the band had.

One notable exception in my opinion is Drive-By Truckers, who have become one of my favorite bands. DBT is somewhere in the southern rock, country rock, alt. country mixture of genres, but with a noticeable punk component (i hear shades of Social Distortion). They're a bit of an acquired taste if you have no previous attraction to southern or country music (if you had a Molly Hatchet album when you were in high school, you'll probably love DBT, you old son of a bitch).

I'd been listening to Wilco quite a lot before i found DBT, but as of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, they'd ceased to be an alt country band. It was my interest in DBT that really got me to explore Wilco's predecessor bands, offshoots, and similar bands. This is my list of interesting stuff in this musical space, which ranges from fairly country to pretty much alternative, but since it's my freakin' list i'll put whatever i want on it.

• Drive-By Truckers. 'Nuff said already.
  
• Wilco. OK, you gotta have Wilco on the list but listen to the first 3 albums (AM, Being There, Summerteeth)
• Uncle Tupelo. The key members of Uncle Tupelo were Jeff Tweedy, who went on to form Wilco, and Jay Farrar, who went on to form Son Volt. These guys are sometimes credited with inventing the alt country genre, but i think that's a bit of a stretch.
• Son Volt. After DBT, this is probably my favorite alt country band. Much of their material will remind you of early REM, especially Reckoning. Jay Farrar has a perfect voice for this genre. Farrar recently reformed the band with new players and released the album Okemah and the Melody of Riot, a very good album with some overtly political material.
  
• Lucinda Williams. Pretty country, but with an attitude. She's got a great voice. If you like Lucinda, you might also like Mary Gauthier.
  
• Slobberbone. Another band on the same label as DBT. Fun.
• Magnolia Electric Co. A new band formed from the ashes of previous bands. They've got a new album (What Comes After the Blues) that sounds sort of Neal Young-ish.
• Whiskeytown. Ryan Adams's old band. Adams is now doing solo material that i'd classify as more rock than alt country, but it's still good stuff.
  
• Tift Merrit. More country than rock, but some interesting songs. She performed live here at the San Diego office about a year ago.
• Vic Chesnutt. Sort of folk, but with a southern/country feel. Sui generis.
• The Jayhawks. I really love the Jayhawks except when i find them annoying. It's a mood thing.
  
• Steve Earle. You gotta respect Earle, if only because he looks rode hard and put up wet.
• Richmond Fontaine. This oddly named band made one of the best alt country albums, Post to Wire, which contains a song of the same name that is one of the best alt country songs ever made.
• Damnations (aka Damnations TX). This band appears to still exist, although they don't seem to have release an album since 2002. One of the members of this band (Deborah Kelly) sings on the Richmond Fontaine's song Post to Wire, which is how i found out about them. Their 1999 album Half Moon Mad is one of those obscure gems that you only find a few times in your life. It's a great album.
  

There are dozens of other artists in this general area. There are some more straight country stuff i'd check out if any of this appeals to you, like early Waylon Jennings, Hank Williams, Lyle Lovett, Sugarland, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Nickel Creek, even the Dixie Chicks. There's also plenty of older music out there to which alt country owes a debt: Gram Parsons, Neil Young, Johnny Cash, The Grateful Dead, etc., and the entire universe of bluegrass and roots music. I also highly recommend the web site Cheezeball.net, a site dedicated to alt country in all of its glorious cheesiness.

I Want Teleportation Now

I was at Fry's with my kids the other day looking at cell phones, and i was amused at how much the typical cell phone looks like a Star Trek communicator (there must be a word for this phenomenon, where fiction anticipates the future while also influencing it). Then yesterday Slashdot linked to this WSJ piece entitled Requiem for the Future. The basic point of the piece is that the future we anticipated back at the time when we (old folks) were kids and men were walking on the moon never really came to be. We're not on Mars. Not only haven't we established bases on the moon, we haven't even been back.

The recent shuttle mission emphasized how little we've progressed in the last few decades. When i was a high-school senior (1982) i entered a contest called the Space Shuttle Student Involvement Project (you might remember stories about bees flying around in space, or plants growing in microgravity,etc.). I wrote a proposal to do diffusion experiments in space, and i won a trip to Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama (Turns out that doing diffusion experiments in space wasn't a half bad idea. Several real scientists had already thought of it, and in fact done it. The biggest effect though was primarily due to lack of convection currents, which i knew nothing about). We got to visit several of the labs (including the one where they made the exploding bolts that hold the shuttle on the launch platform), and we met astronauts and mission specialists. It was cool. The shuttle was fairly new, and this was long before the Challenger disaster so we could still imagine the shuttle as being a sort of highly reliable space airplane that was the first step in making outer space a permanent outpost.

None of us at that event would have suspected that 23 years later the shuttle would still be the most sophisticated form of space travel, and that it would still have a lot of flaws to overcome. At that time our relatively brief lifetimes had seen the space program go from almost nothing, to manned space flight, to moon landings, to the shuttle. I'm sure that we all assumed that by the turn of the century we'd be on our way to Mars.

Of course we did see amazing technological progress in those years. That year (1982) just happened to be the year that the Arpanet became the Internet, and you can now buy commodity computer hardware that's as powerful as the supercomputers of that time. Cell phones didn't exist then (though you could get a car phone). As the WSJ article also points out there have been some interesting space missions in that time, especially to Mars (and of course, the Hubble). But nothing that feels like it came out of the science fiction of the past.

NASA gets blamed for this, for a lack of vision or something. But i don't think NASA is at fault so much as a general lack of enthusiasm for the idea of human space travel. Maybe as our perceived standard of living has leveled off and even dropped, the idea of spending money to go to the moon seems frivolous. Maybe there's a general malaise regarding technological progress in general.

But my personal crackpot theory is that computers and the Internet exposed us to the idea that outer space is not, as we previously thought, the final frontier. We can now imagine the prospect of virtual worlds that are not only different from ours, but limited only by our imaginations. Even science fiction changed (e.g., Gibson's Neuromancer and the whole cyberpunk thing, The Matrix). If our motivation for going into space was simply exploration (and not the technological challenge per se, or commercialization), then the virtual world offers as much without the danger and unpleasant space trips. Of course, the benefit of real outer space is that we could encounter things that we haven't yet imagined, but it's gonna be damned hard to get there. That's why we need teleportation, now.

Random Walk

I have no idea how people keep up with these things on a daily basis. It's magic.

I guess the trick to having an active blog is to have an active life. My life over the past couple of weeks has been like that Kids in the Hall sketch where Kevin McDonald is determined to stick to his to-do list regardless of what's going on around him (like he goes to the bank in the middle of a robbery and gets taken hostage but still insists on getting stamps,etc.). It's been a productive time, but boring. Unless you find the repair and maintenance of a 2000 Nissan Frontier to be fascinating, in which case have i got a story for you.

The only semi-interesting thing we managed to do over the last couple of weeks was seeing Yo Yo Ma at the Civic Theater. He was with his Silk Road Ensemble, so the music was not the standard classic fare. There was Mongolian opera, Chinese music, Persian classical music, Indian music, gypsy music-- much good stuff. The highlight of the night for most of us, especially my sons, was a piece by Sandeep Das, a tabla player, along with several other percussion instruments. It was amazing, both because of the strange rhythms and the unusual instruments. There were several string instruments- violins, Ma on cello, and a bass- carrying a line of melody throughout the piece, which provided a nice anchor for the rhythmic improvisation. Very cool.

My martial arts instructor decided to leave town to finish up college at Cal State Fullerton, so i have to break in a new instructor after 3 years. He was also my kids instructor, and my wife's tai chi instructor, so it's kind of like losing a member of the family. For a going-away present we bought him a copy of Sun Tzu's The Art of War and Morihei Ueshiba's The Art of Peace. I figure that should keep him busy, and possibly confused.

I've spent the two weeks since the SF marathon doing nothing but eating. I think i've put on about 5 pounds. Ultimately, it'll probably be good for my body to give my joints a rest and just get fat for a few weeks, but i feel a bit bloated at the moment. I start a new cycle in about mid-September in order to prepare for the PF Chang Rock'n'Roll marathon in Phoenix in January. I intend that to be my all-out effort for Boston qualifying, so i'm sort of psyching myself up for it. It's gonna be a tough holiday season, since i'll have to be a bit more careful about what i eat.

A real random walk is a Markov chain, which means roughly that the direction of the next step you take doesn't have any dependence on the steps you've taken in the past. That seems like a good metaphor for my life at the moment.