The Misery of Kettlebells and Writing

By: | July 12, 2018

There’s no crying in baseball. There’s no crying at the gym, either. Yet there I was by the slant board with tears streaming down my face. I am an ugly crier. Worse, once I start I cannot stop. My face was turned to the wall, so my instructor hadn’t yet seen the tears. “You’re overthinking it,” he said. “Why don’t you take a break. Run a lap.”

I am not new to gyms, but six months ago I joined a Serious Gym. Serious Gym isn’t like my previous gyms. Each day is a different workout, and you do the workouts together as a class. Most of the strength workouts rely on kettlebells, a weight that resembles neither a kettle nor a bell. Instead imagine a cannonball with a thick handle on top.

Most sources trace the origin of kettlebells to Russia, where they were first used as counterbalances to weigh grains and other goods. And then men did what men do: They started swinging them around and turned a mundane tool into an exercise torture device and a measure of manliness. Continue reading →

What I Would Have Posted on Facebook, If I Were Posting on Facebook

By: | July 11, 2018
A human tower on the National Mall
The sort of thing I might have posted on Facebook, if I were posting on Facebook: A team from Catalonia builds a human tower on the National Mall during the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, July 8.

I’ve been a bit of a Facebook addict for years. The pictures of pets! The interesting articles! But, when stressful things are happening in the world, I find that Facebook mostly exists for me to soak up everyone else’s panic about current events, like a human anxiety sponge. During a particularly stressful week last month, I decided it was time to finally take that Facebook break I’d been thinking about.

Of course, being on Facebook didn’t mean that the impulse to post on Facebook went away. For the first week or so of the break, I took note every time I wanted to post something and wrote it down somewhere else instead. Here’s some of what my friends missed.

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Redux: Peter Pan Complex

By: | July 10, 2018

I wrote this last year after a story I wrote for Nature. As the axolotl is inches toward extinction in the wild, along with so many creatures these days, it’s worth it to remember what makes them so cool. 
Last month I published a story in Nature about the sad story of the axolotl. It’s a tragic tale of an incredibly bizarre creature looking at extinction in the wild. Of the many odd attributes of the axolotl – ability to regrow limbs, giant cells, laughably big genome – the one that always gets mentioned by science writers is their neoteny.

At first glance neoteny is one of those weird classifications – like radial symmetry – that is hard to describe and usually only applies to “lower” animals. Essentially it means that an animal never truly reaches adulthood but rather becomes a sort of giant breeding baby. To quote a lot of other science writers, it’s kind of like Peter Pan.

Presuming Peter Pan never went through puberty but somehow got really big. And then, um, started having sex as a giant hairless boy?

It’s kind of cool but also kind of random. In the world of evolutionary quirks, it’s not really as interesting as, say, venom or the ability to fly. Some critters never really grow up. Great, log that away as dinner party trivia that should never actually be used in a dinner party. Right up there with “Why pus smells bad” and “The difference between a quasar and a pulsar.”

Then I stumbled on a theory that turned this whole idea on its head. You see, it seems that we humans are also neotenic. Continue reading →

No Mow Summer

By: | July 9, 2018

A hammock nearly obscured by long flowing grassesThis summer, I decided not to cut the grass in my backyard. I’ve long argued for letting a little more wildness into our gardens, but the cult of the lawn is a powerful cultural force and for years I, like most of us, have conformed and kept the back lawn mown.

Ideally, I’d some day like to have a xeriscaped garden without any lawn at all, but removing turf grass is back-breaking work and I’ve only nibbled away at my lawn, expanding beds and creating a few new ones.

So this year, my children suggested that they would enjoy playing in the backyard more if it was a bit more wild and varied. I have been traveling and working a lot. And I am more worried about the state of the nation than what my neighbors might think. And so we haven’t mown. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | July 7, 2018

July 2 – 6, 2018

I start the week with a bad thought:  the part of your mind that’s the general contractor, the project manager, the executive? It’s good at making decisions, not so good at knowing when the poor idiot carrying them out is splatted on the ground weeping.

On a stormy night, Jessa flies over her country during the Canada Day fireworks, fireworks going off in every small town — pinches of hope flung into the sky, she says, like salt thrown over a shoulder, and the sky answering with heat lightning.

Rose had bad thoughts too — who doesn’t these days? — and to soothe herself, goes to certain sites on the internet.  Then she goes a step farther and asks the internet which sites it finds soothing, and the internet answers.

Sally doesn’t understand bitcoins and blockchains so she does the natural thing and asks some guy on the internet.  He explains it clearly, thoroughly, in context and with honesty.  These people are patently bug-nuts.

Craig reports from home, and home is hot, dry, and ready to catch fire if you look at it wrong.  And when it does catch fire and the fire takes control, he watches stunned — a little by fear, a little by awe, a little by love.  “Pyrophilia,” what a frightening word.

Pyrophilia

By: | July 6, 2018

We’ve been living in a tinderbox, precipitation at an all-time low, summer temperatures unusually high, snowpack paltry. The ground feels as if it’ll ignite just from looking at it.

A few days ago a blaze started near Basalt, Colorado, a couple rivers east of where I live, forcing rapid evacuations. It started from tracer bullets at a shooting range that was suppose to be closed due to fire danger, and jumped to almost 5,000 acres overnight. Meanwhile, the Spring Fire on the other side of the Continental Divide has topped 100,000 acres, now the third largest fire in Colorado history, spreading at 16 acres a minute.

Some fires have been burning closer to me, close enough I think about my journals and photographs. One started by a lightning strike ten miles from where I live and topped out at 1,500 acres. Another fire five miles away (pictured above) blackened almost 500 acres, drawing slurry bombers and fire crews before rain accidentally put it out. As much as I fear these fires, there’s something undeniably alluring about them. At times, I feel like cheering them on.

Last week I took my kids to a mountain theme park in nearby Glenwood Springs, and the park was being evacuated, one helicopter with a nozzle and one with a swinging bucket taking turns putting out something burning behind a ridge. Apparently, some nimrod had dragged a couch into the woods, fell asleep on it with his cigarette burning, and started a fire. That’s how a blaze can start that goes for weeks, dreaded uncontainment, hundreds of homes lost, possibly the lives of firefighters. Helicopters were stamping out the spark like boots on smoking grass.

Most summers in the West you have to make peace with smoke from wildfires always burning somewhere, but this summer in Colorado is grandstanding. The other day driving into the mountains near where I live, I watched magnificent plumes of pyrocumulus clouds rise from a pair of converging fires pushing 57,000 acres in southwest Colorado near Durango. Continue reading →

A Bitcoin Dummy Has Questions

By: | July 5, 2018

Even if you develop hives at the sight of the words “bitcoin” and “blockchain”, you probably couldn’t help noticing the shouty news the past week. Bitcoin is down! Bitcoin is slightly up! Way down! Little bit up again. As LWON went to press, Bitcoin was either on the verge of another runaway valuation that would climb to $50,000, or it was a “failed experiment” and cryptocurrency is dead.

So which is it? And more importantly, how is the average person expected to make sense of any of this? Not many articles about Bitcoin make me feel like I understand what is going on, and I’m a technology journalist, so this fills me with unimaginable shame.

But I’ll tell you what – it’s not easy to find sources with a well-rounded perspective. Computer scientists can tell you how the underlying technology works; economists can tell you how monetary theory works; anthropologists can give you the long view of how people have stored value going back to the Babylonians. None of that tells you whether Bitcoin – or Litecoin, or Dogecoin, or any of the other 1564 cryptocurrencies of which half are now swirling the drain – is the future of money, or just the 21st century’s answer to St. Vitus’ dancing mania.  

Maybe I could ask one of the 1564 cryptocurrency experts who have emerged over the past few years? Maybe not. Either they’ve invested in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, and their judgment is potentially clouded by Ponzi-coloured glasses. Or they haven’t, which could similarly bias their perspective to favour cryptocurrencies being a passing fad. Continue reading →

Soothing Yourself, Online

By: | July 4, 2018

I recently read a story that truly resonated with me. I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore, by Dan Nosowitz at New York Magazine was both depressing and eerily accurate, as I too had typed in “nytimes.com” earlier that day looking for something to read or do online. Over the past few weeks, as the news has gotten more and more dire, I have taken notice of the little things I do online to sooth myself. I’ve written here before about watching dance videos. And I recently noticed another, probably weird thing that I do when I need to sooth my anxious soul online: go to Tumblr.com and type in the search bar: “romcom.” Behold, an unlimited supply of cheesy GIFs from movies that I have not seen.

Why does scrolling through these GIFs calm me down? I truly have no idea. I haven’t seen most of these movies. I barely recognize most of these actors. And yet, seeing a wall of dumb, melodramatic, looping animations is like a weird, warm blanket.

This got me thinking, I can’t be alone here. Not in the specifics of the Tumblr romcom search, but in the fact that I even have this habit to begin with. Surely other people have their own forms of romcom GIF therapy? So I asked, and boy did people deliver. Here is a list of what people on Twitter say they do to calm themselves.
Continue reading →