...And yet another update on Phil's career options
In case the previous video was too focused on one specific skill set that Phil possesses, here's a broader view of his capabilities.
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September 27, 2008
September 23, 2008
Update on Phil's career options
Back in November of 2006, I speculated that Phil might have a future as a longshoreman or tennis player.
Those ideas still seem plausible in that Phil remains a man of action rather than a talker. However, in light of his latest stunt -- escaping from a crib whose sides are almost as tall as he is -- it seems more likely that he'll become a circus acrobat or an action-movie star.
September 22, 2008
Nowhere to go but up
About 100 meters into the men's invitational section of Saturday's Sundodger cross-country meet, I found myself in dead last among the 100 or so participants.
This sort of thing does happen to me every so often. At the 2003 PNTF cross-country championships, I initially trailed all 14 of the other runners before advancing to 9th. Back in 1997, I started and finished 4th in a four-man 800-meter event. And then there was the Little Three (Amherst, Wesleyan, and Williams) cross-country race in 1991, when I had food poisoning. I remember my coach yelling "Way to move up!" about halfway through that 5-miler, even though I was still in last. I suppose what he meant was that I was getting closer to the 2nd-to-last guy, whom I ultimately passed to secure 28th place in the 29-man field.
But back to Saturday. My workouts for the past month have been so dismal -- about 15 seconds per mile too slow -- that I was not particularly surprised or angered to find myself playing the caboose. My attitude was one of morbid curiosity: would this get even worse? Would the five Seattle U. freshmen just ahead of me pull away? Or could I salvage something from the race with sensible, even pacing?
Similar thoughts apply to my fall season as a whole. I'm off to a start that can only be described as dreadful, with no guarantees that things will get better. But what do distance runners do in these situations? Occasionally the discomfort and the sense of failure overwhelm us, and we quit. But mostly we keep going, hoping that if we stay smart and stay focused, we'll eventually get our reward. We keep running, rightly or wrongly, out of habit.
On Saturday my habits carried me to 68th place with a time of 26:15 on a flat, fast 8K course where I had clocked 25:34 in 2005 and 24:57 in 2006. Three athletes stormed by me in the final straightaway, although one eased up just before the finish and I passed him back -- a small but tangible payoff for my persistence. Perhaps larger ones lie ahead.
September 17, 2008
Old-school medicine
In the TV show House, Dr. Gregory House regularly pushes his patients to the brink of death in various ways, always as part of some crazy high-risk scheme to save their lives.
Biomedically savvy viewers may dismiss these scenarios as unrealistic, but yesterday I came across this historical note while skimming Microbiology in Action by Heritage, Evans, and Killington:
One old cure for syphilis, used before penicillin became widely available, was to give the patient malaria. This causes regular, predictable bouts of fever. Treponema pallidum [the bacterium that causes syphilis] cannot tolerate repeated fevers.
Can't you imagine House doing this? I can almost hear him saying to his team, "C'mon, you guys -- penicillin is expensive, but malaria is FREE!"
September 6, 2008
A Roche Boo-Boo
Today we received a flyer from Roche-Bobois, a Paris-based furniture company. The online version looks like this:
I wonder which day is the unexceptional one. (Yes, they're open seven days a week.)
The "8 exceptional days" sale is an annual tradition; apparently the bad math is, too.
Likewise, Roche-Bobois held a Leather Days sale this past May 10-20 -- billed as "10 days of very attractive prices." If anyone can tell me what the prices were like on the 11th day, please leave a comment.
