goodbye evans

When I talked to my parents on the phone today, I learned that Evans Huber, a childhood friend of mine was struck by lightning and killed last night while camping in Baxter State Park with his mom and brother. I had not seen or talked to Evans in years, but I was affected by the news. Two years younger than me, Evans grew up on Peaks Island, Maine, where my family spends our summers. His parents and mine were close friends, and my mom and dad had recently started visiting more regularly again with Lare, Evans' dad. I remember Evans as the quintessential island kid, curly-haired, barefoot, bike-riding. He hung out with the island crowd, the kids who snuck beers on the Back Shore and jumped off the towers at the ferry dock, but also seemed more interested in the world beyond Peaks, a trait he no doubt inherited from his parents.

Evans went to McGill University in Montreal and graduated the same year I did, in 2005. I hear that he was in love with a woman he met there, a Canadian, and was planning to get a visa to move to Canada and live with her. His brother Emmett is still an island presence at the age of 18; he was hit by the bolt, too, but survived. Their mom, my mom's friend Lois, was uninjured.

How do you deal with something like that if you're Evans' family? I have no answer. I have never been touched by tragedy in that way, and I am grateful. I do not know how I would or could respond to the death of my own brother, but I know that I am looking forward to seeing him next week, even more than I was before I heard the news about Evans.

ITEM: team "you know, for kids" stuns in pub quiz debut

DENVER (AP) — In a debut that rocked the local drinking community, a new team calling itself You Know, For Kids took third place last night in its inaugural GWD-sanctioned pub quiz competition, held at area ex-pat bar The British Bulldog. The team, composed of three members of the U.S. Disabled Ski Team and two of their hangers-on, seemed not unhappy with its performance, but universally agreed that it "could have done better, considering."

The team roster consisted of secretary-general Carl Burnett, Director of Professional Sports Studies Chris Catanzarite, VP for '80s Music Affairs Nick Catanzarite, Exchecquer and Former Mullet-Owner Gerald Hayden, and Hot Nurse/Science Geek-in-Residence Mary, who spoke to the AP on the condition that her last name not be used. (Full disclosure: OK, this reporter does not actually know Mary's last name, and is too lazy to find out.)

The team faltered in the early rounds due to overconfidence in its knowledge of 1980s popular music (they knew their Bon Jovi but not their Belinda Carlisle), but rallied when Hayden and Mary arrived, advancing to fourth place, then third. After two stellar rounds, including a Catanzarite-brothers-led dominating performance in the sports round, the team seemed a shoo-in to advance to the top two. Undoubtedly through administrative subterfuge, the team instead fell back to fourth place, necessitating an eleventh-hour (literally) rally to secure its final position in the top three.

Reached for comment at his Greenwood Village workplace, Burnett vowed, "We'll be back. Just wait till next week, when we'll be sure to do some pre-gaming before the quiz starts. The Bulldog's list of performance-enhancing substances sure is delicious."

power invasion ministries

Yesterday while biking along the Platte River trail here in Denver I saw a building that scared the hell out of me. It's a fortress-like concrete edifice, nearly circular in shape, located in a barren industrial area. Two large signs on the building identify it as the home of "Power Invasion Ministries," with a King Arthurish sword-and-shield logo. Of course I had to Google it when I got home from my ride -- was this really a church, and if so, who or what were they invading with their power? And why were they located in what looked like a fallout shelter to be used in case of industrial accidents?

I found their website (which includes the breathtakingly candid slogan "Desperate people, desperate for God"), and it answered my first two questions. Apparently, the "power" part comes from Acts 1:8: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.” They don't cite a biblical verse mentioning an "invasion," but their mission in that regard is spelled out pretty bluntly. The Power Invasion folks apparently believe they have been

[a]ppointed and anointed by His Power to Invade [sic] the greater metro area of Denver by uprooting, tearing down, destroying, and overthrowing the power of darkness; and called to build and plant a new foundation.

Invade, uproot, tear down, destroy, overthrow -- wow, those are some strong verbs. I suppose that's the point, but like the ministry's building, its intentions scare the hell out of me. These people would like nothing better than to see people like me either converted to (their particular brand of) evangelical Christianity or driven out of town. These same people are on the pulpit every Sunday denouncing the spread of ideas they find dangerous -- including, I'm sure, fundamentalist Islamists, whose ambitions exactly parallel their own. One recent Power Invasion sermon (by "Pastor Randy") was titled "What you Tolerate May Destroy You." In a free society, I am reluctantly willing to tolerate the existance of groups like Power Invasion Ministries. But I really hope their Pastor Randy was wrong about the destruction part.

what is g.o.p.?

On the Brooklyn-based neo-Afrobeat group Antibalas' awesome 2007 release, Security, is a 12-minute slab of funk called "Filibuster XXX." After seven frantic, instrumental minutes, West African-accented vocalist Amayo starts in with some of the funniest stream-of-consciousness political musings ever committed to wax:

What is G.O.P., class?
Let us examine the cronynynynynism:
Is it Greedy Old People, class?
Is it Guilty Of Purjury?
Or, let's try this one...
How about Gas, Oil and Plutonium?

It would be fun to keep going...

• Guns Offer Protection?
  
• Generating Offshore Profits?
  
• Grumbling Over Palestine?
  
• Governator Obliterating Priuses?
  

Well, class, what is G.O.P.? Can you add to the list?

what the deer said to the beaver

(click to enlarge)

mt. hood camp #2 wrap-up

I was back at Mt. Hood again for 10 or 12 more days on snow and got back on Monday. The ski team just posted a great press release about the camp, which includes a photo of all of us on the croquet lawn.

sadler's ultra challenge

Lately I have become a bit of an armchair cycling fan. (No, not cycling IN armchairs — that would be absurd.) I have been catching stages of the Tour de France on TV, but lately I have turned my attention to an equally exciting race: the Sadler's Ultra Challenge. This is an eight-stage, 267-mile endurance race for disabled athletes, run every summer for 22 years from Fairbanks to Anchorage, Alaska. There are divisions for wheelchairs and handcycles, but in recent years the handcycling category has come to be far more popular and competitive. This year the race, like most elite handcycling races over the past few years, has been dominated by the Mexican-American Alejandro Albor. This guy is really amazing; I've seen him ride and he makes it look so effortless, which I assure you it is not. A double amputee, Albor has a built-in advantage since he's not dragging any dead weight, but he also has a unique style of movement, sort of rolling back and forth over the handcranks of his bike. (He is one of the few handcyclists I've seen who uses alternating cranks, like a regular bike, rather than double/simultaneous cranks.)

You can read Ian Lawless' blog entries about the 2007 Ultra Challenge here and view complete stage-by-stage results here

the sentence dictionary

If I may brag just a little bit, I am really excited to have just been hired as a freelance lexicographer for Oxford University Press. They — no, we! — are beginning a new collaborative online project to compile something called the Sentence Dictionary. Essentially it will be a web-based dictionary based on the already-existing New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE) and New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD), Oxford's major single-volume dictionaries of contemporary (British and American, respectively) English. As I understand it, the Sentence Dictionary will include headwords, pronunciations, definitions, and etymologies identical to NODE and NOAD, but will include much more thorough documentation of each word's usage "in the wild," as it were — in a list of real-life examples for each headword. This will be particularly useful for foreign learners of English, and for native speakers looking up unfamiliar words that they wish to use idiomatically in their own writing.

The examples are to be culled from a corpus of contemporary English, the billion-plus-word Oxford English Corpus, which contains many thousands of books, web sites, magazine articles, stories, journals, blogs, and the like, all of which have been hand-selected and tagged for their country of origin and vetted for quality to some degree. Oxford's corpus software is able, in many instances, to tell when a word is being used as a particular part of speech and in a particular sense; for example, it can tell with reasonable accuracy when ground is being used as a noun meaning "earth," a past participle of "grind," or a verb meaning "stop (a plane, etc.) from flying." But the software's accuracy is far from 100%, and even when it does make the correct choice, a human is needed to determine which are the "best" examples. An example sentence that disparages a particular politician, for instance, is undesirable both because it expresses a strong opinion that may distract from the sentence's illustrative function and because it contains a reference that could soon seem dated or obscure.

This is where we freelance lexicographers come in. In a test exercise I did for Oxford as part of the application process, I went through hundreds of potential example sentences (all for words beginning with adv-) and determined which were the most suitable. (Let me say that I have a much fuller appreciation for the subtleties of the word "adventure" than I did before!) Apparently my soon-to-be bosses agreed with my decisions in enough cases that they want me to do more such work for them. It's not the most dynamic sort of task, but it is kind of dorkily influential. I am now a lexicographical taste-maker of sorts, however anonymously. How exciting!

the first russian winter games

The big news in sports yesterday, as far as I was concerned, was the awarding of the 2014 Winter Olympics and Paralympics to Sochi, Russia. By all accounts, Vladimir Putin's presence at the IOC meetings in Guatemala City (!) did wonders to secure the choice of his country's bid over Salzburg, Austria and Pyongchang, South Korea.

I'm pretty happy with the result. Although none of the three cities has ever hosted an Olympics before, Austria has done so twice, both in Innsbruck (1964 and 1976). Obviously, Austria is accustomed to, and well-suited for, hosting winter sports. Most of the facilities they would've used for the Games were already in place, a major selling point for their Olympic bid. But picking Salzburg would have been a safe yet boring choice. Athletes in most of the winter sports already compete in Austria all the time, and with the exception of Switzerland it is essentially the only country where alpine skiing is a major, front-page sport. In short, holding another Winter Games in Austria would do little to boost the popularity of winter sports by creating new fans.

Neither Russia nor Korea is known internationally as a winter sports destination, and yet both would desperately like to become one. Both Sochi and Pyongchang have invested millions of dollars to attract skiers and snowboarders, even hiring top ski-resort managers from the Alps and Rockies to oversee their operations. Putin himself is known to enjoy skiing at Krasnaya Polskana, the mountain range near the Black Sea that will host all the snowsports for the Sochi Games, and when I visited Pyongchang last year for disabled World Cup races, the slopes were crawling with wealthy business people from Seoul and beyond. Pyongchang's major ski resort, Yongpyong, has taken things to a typically East Asian level of excess, installing amusement-park rides at the base area and providing skiers with high-pressure air hoses outside the lodge to clean the snow off their equipment.

I guess that's part of the reason I favored Sochi over Pyongchang: the Koreans just seemed to be trying too hard. It's certainly a plus that they'd already hosted well-organized World Cup events in alpine and disabled alpine skiing, and they'd already put in a runner-up bid for the 2010 Games (they lost out to Vancouver). But to some extent the Koreans were trying to pass off cubic zirconium as diamonds. From my experience, Korea is just not a world-class winter wonderland. It's cold, but not particularly snowy. (When we there, in January, the only snow to be seen was the manmade stuff on the ski hill.) The mountains are no taller than the Appalachians. And the host city they'd selected is not so much a city as a collection of villages, full of tacky new brass-and-marble hotels, not charming chalets. And as tasty as Korean food can be, the stuff they fed us athletes there was pretty sub-par.

Sochi, on the other hand, is terra incognita for most winter athletes outside Russia. To my knowledge, it has never hosted a major international ski or snowboard event, although I'm sure hockey is popular there. But my impressions of the place are pretty favorable. The city of Sochi itself is a resort town on the Black Sea, with palm trees and a mild climate year-round. But the surrounding mountains, which are less than an hour's drive from town, are snowy and huge: Mt. Elbrus, at 18,000 feet, is taller than any other in Russia or Europe. In footage from ski movies I've seen, the Krasnaya Polskana range is a powdery paradise, with some of the most extreme lift-serviced terrain anywhere on the planet. In short, the only reason Sochi is not already known outside Russia as a winter sports destination has to be economic or political. Russian democracy is still new, and negative stereotypes about the country still abound. In deciding as it did, the IOC has given Russia a huge opportunity to show the world how far it's come and to transform its Black Sea region into a true international tourism destination. Let's hope the Russians take advantage of it.

ewwwww

"Spilled pig parts shut down Edens"

"Northbound lanes of the Edens Expressway were closed for more than seven hours Sunday after a dump truck carrying greasy pig parts toppled and splattered its load across the highway."

mt. hood wrap-up

USSA has put out a nice press release summarizing our most recent training camp at Mt. Hood.

I also just stumbled on some pretty decent photos of us skiing at our last training camp, at A-Basin in May, including this one of me. (You can view a larger version by mousing over the image and then selecting "medium," "large," or "original.")

new photos

I just uploaded a bunch of photos from my trip thus far to my Flickr page. Flickr won't let me create sets since I'm not a Pro member anymore, but you can view just the pics from this trip by starting here and then scroll through them by clicking Next.

yreka, ca

I'm writing from Yreka, California — not to be confused with nearby Eureka, California. (Although they look like they should be pronounced the same, Yreka is actually pronounced "why rica." I would have to look into it further to be sure, but I'd bet this is a spelling-influenced pronunciation.) Yesterday I drove here from Mt. Hood, where I've been training for the last couple weeks. (Well, minus a little side trip to Chicago... but that's another story.) Along the way I had breakfast in Government Camp, had lunch and did some shopping in Bend, and had dinner in Ashland.

I checked into an Econo Lodge here in Yreka last night and was going to just go to bed, but instead I took a stroll through town. I'm glad I did, because I ended up in this bar called the Log Cabin Club with a bunch of Native Americans playing pool and made a bunch of short-term friends.

spit on a stranger

Lots going on these days and I need to get some sleep, but I had to mention a brush with stardom I had this evening. Just this morning I was skiing at Mt. Hood in Oregon, and in the afternoon I flew to Chicago, where I'm spending a few days at the biennial conference of the Dictionary Society of North America. Exciting! My friend Shifra and her boyfriend Ben met me at Midway Airport to pick me up, and while we were waiting around for my bag, I saw a tall, familiar looking figure walk by. I was pretty sure I knew who it was, but then I was certain when he picked up a guitar case. "Holy shit! That's Stephen Malkmus!" I gushed to Shifra and Ben. They stared at me blankly. "You know, from Pavement?" I said. "He lives in Portland, Oregon so it makes sense that he would be at this carousel. Wait, he must've been on my flight!" But SM and his girlfriend had already made a hasty departure and I was left gawking fanboyishly, with a sudden urge to go check into my dorm room and listen to "Spit on a Stranger" and "Gold Soundz" and "Here" on my iPod.

UPDATE: I'm a total idiot for not knowing this, but it turns out that the Pitchfork music festival is in Chicago this weekend, and Malkmus is playing Sunday night! How could I have not known this?? And how am I going to get tickets on such short notice???

ANOTHER UPDATE: I'm a REALLY big idiot. Pitchfork Festival is JULY 13-15, not June. Malkmus has no dates scheduled anywhere until then. Who knows why he's in Chicago.

the wisdom of bansky

Plenty of people more qualified than I (including, recently, The New Yorker's Lauren Collins) have written about the graffiti art of the enigmatic Brit known as Banksy. Fewer people have noted his knack for coming up with snappy, irreverent catchphrases, which are strewn throughout the pages of his books, although Collins does note that Bansky's "talents as an aphorist ... seem to inspire all who cross his path," citing two examples:

• “Never paint graffiti in a town where they still point at aeroplanes.”
  
• “Only when the last tree has been cut down and the last river has dried up will man realize that reciting red Indian proverbs makes you sound like a fucking muppet.“

Going through the latest Banksy compilation, Wall and Piece, I was struck by a number of other quotables:

• "Graffiti is only dangerous in the mind of three types of people: politicians, advertising executives and graffiti writers."
  
• "Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place."
  
• "A lot of people never use their initiative because no-one told them to."
  
• "Some people represent authority without ever possessing any of their own."
  
• "There are no exceptions to the rule that everyone thinks they're an exception to the rules."
  
• "People seem to think if they dress like a revolutionary then they don't actually have to act like one."
  
• "Nothing dispels enthusiasm like a small admission fee."
  
• "Painting something that defies the law of the land is good. Painting something that defies the law of the land and the law of gravity is ideal."
  
• "You can win the rat race but you're still a rat. The human race is an unfair and stupid competition. A lot of the runners don't even get decent sneakers or clean drinking water. Some runners are born with a massive head start, every possible help along the way and still the referees seem to be on their side. It's not surprising that a lot of people have given up competing altogether and gone to sit in the grandstand, eat junk food and shout abuse. What we need in this race is a lot more streakers."
  
• "We can't do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves."
  
• "We don't need any more heroes, we just need someone to take out the recycling."
  
• "People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine."

new digs

I am very excited about my new summer job and apartment. Starting June 25, I will be working for the communications department of Charter Communication as a glorified intern. (I say "glorified" because I will be making a half-decent wage and hopefully working on some cool projects, not just making coffee.) And starting June 1, I'll be living with my current roommate, Gerald in Apt. 605 of The Barclay Towers a really nice apartment building right smack in the middle of LoDo, the most central part of Denver. The building has a rooftop pool and gym on the 33rd floor, which is visible via Google Earth. Am I one to brag? OK, maybe a little.

i want to start a band here in colorado called "maine"

Back in the '70s and '80s, some honest, hardworking rock bands would name themselves after their home towns, states, or even continents. This phenomenon gave rise to Boston, Chicago, Kansas, America, and Europe. (I'm pretty sure Asia was a different deal.)

Then, sometime in the '90s, some meddling indie rocker had the harebrained idea of naming his band after a different place than the place they actually came from. If you ask me, this is just a recipe for disaster. Recently, this disturbing trend seems to be ramping up. Look at the situation they've gotten us into:

• Illinois is from Pennsylvania.
  
• I'm From Barcelona is from Sweden.
  
• Beirut is from Santa Fe, New Mexico.
  
• Calexico is from Tucson, Arizona.
  
• Manitoba is from Ontario.
  
• Of Montreal is from Georgia.

If it's been a while since I posted anything, that's because not much is going on these days. The ski season at Winter Park ended on April 14, and since then I've been laying low. I've been talking with my sponsor, Charter Communications, about the possibility of interning with their PR department this summer/fall, either in Denver or at their St. Louis headquarters. Nothing is confirmed yet, but it seems to be looking like a good bet.

I've been to a couple of concerts in Denver lately. I met up with my ski tech, Ian G., at the Gothic Theater in Englewood for a rousing performance by Ted Leo & the Pharmacists. Then last night Nick and I went to see Bright Eyes at a decidedly non-rock-&-roll venue, the Temple Buell Theater at the Denver Center for Performing Arts. Conor Oberst & co. (I counted 12 backing musicians, including two drummers (both women!), two guitarists besides Conor, a bassist, a keyboard/trumpet player, two cellists, two violinists, a sax player, and a flutist!) played mostly songs off of their new album, Cassadaga, but capped off the evening with a raucous performance of the older fave "Road to Joy," which incorporates the melody from Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." Oberst looked dapper in a white suit and encouraged the crowd to its feet, turning a concert-hall performance into some semblance of a rock-club throwdown.

I have also been going to the gym a lot to get started on a new conditioning program for 2007-08, following a lot of Red Sox games on the Internet, and putting off cleaning my desk and my bedroom. Also, I've gotten quite a bit of research done for SkiDictionary.com. Check it out if you haven't already.

Our first ski team camp to prepare us for next season will take us to A-Basin beginning May 8. Then we head to the OTC in Colorado Springs for a few days of testing, and then perhaps I'll get in a trip to Maine before our next ski camp in June, at Mt. Hood, Ore.

I'll leave you with an amazing photograph. This picture, by one Ron Jenkins, shows a baseball bat that left the hands of the Cleveland Indians' Kelly Shoppach (a former Portland Sea Dog, I might add) and wreaked havoc on the jaw of an unsuspecting fan. I think my favorite part is the concerned reactions of all the people around him, contrasted with the incredibly unconcerned (or more likely, oblivious) cool of the little girl at bottom center. The photo is captioned "Bat out of Hell." I'm unable to post it here directly, so follow this link.

should we talk about the weather? should we talk about the government?

Yesterday I was outside in short sleeves. Last night, the wind picked up and it started snowing. By this morning there were a couple inches on the ground. The clouds had cleared and the sun was out, but the wind was still out in full force. As I sat inside getting my hair cut, gusts blew snowdrifts off of roofs, and the air above the tops of the mountain peaks was full of towering wisps of white. Looking outside now, the gusts haven't let up much. Spring in Winter Park is an unpredictable time.

I met up with a college friend, Andy F., in Denver yesterday. We went to see the new Hamilton Building at the Denver Art Museum. Daniel Liebeskind's modernist creation has very few right angles and very few curves; even inside, structural columns descend at odd angles. It's a great space for looking at art though, and the highlight was "RADAR," a couple's private collection of contemporary work from around the world, from Japanese anime-inspired sculpture to one of Damien Hirst's formalydehyde-preserved creatures — in this case, a bull's head.

Speaking of art, the totally overrated English band Art Brut has an awesomely simplistic song that goes, "Modern art makes me want to rock out!" I could only listen to that song so many times, but that's a slogan I'd be proud to wear unironically on a T-shirt.

what we have here is...

I love discovering a classic that I'd somehow missed until now. Tonight I finally saw Cool Hand Luke in its entirety, and I'd have to put it in my all-time top ten. Paul Newman's Luke is the ideal anti-hero, and the film is the prison-movie antithesis of feel-good fare like The Shawshank Redemption. Plus it has some memorable lines. There's the classic "What we have here is a failure to communicate!" (This one is #11 in the AFI's list of the top 100 American movie quotes of the last 100 years.) And then there's my personal favorite, Luke's line in the poker-game scene that gives him his nickname: "Sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand."

Then perhaps best of all, there's the song "Plastic Jesus," which I first heard my cousins singing when I was probably ten. Later, I heard the Flaming Lips' version, released on their 1993 album Transmissions from the Satellite Heart. But I'd never heard Luke sing it until now.

Plastic Jesus

Trad., arr. Ed Rush and George Cromarty


Well, I don't care if it rains or freezes,
Long as I have my plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Through all trials and tribulations,
We will travel every nation,
With my plastic Jesus I'll go far.

CHORUS
Plastic Jesus, plastic Jesus
Riding on the dashboard of my car
Through my trials and tribulations,
And my travels through the nations,
With my plastic Jesus I'll go far.

I don't care if it rains or freezes
As long as I've got my Plastic Jesus
Glued to the dashboard of my car,
You can buy Him phosphorescent
Glows in the dark, He's pink and pleasant,
Take Him with you when you're traveling far

I don't care if it's dark or scary
Long as I have magnetic Mary
Ridin' on the dashboard of my car
I feel I'm protected amply
I've got the whole damn Holy Family
Riding on the dashboard of my car

You can buy a Sweet Madonna
Dressed in rhinestones sitting on a
Pedestal of abalone shell
Goin' ninety, I'm not wary
'Cause I've got my Virgin Mary
Guaranteeing I won't go to Hell

I don't care if it bumps or jostles
Long as I got the Twelve Apostles
Bolted to the dashboard of my car
Don't I have a pious mess
Such a crowd of holiness
Strung across the dashboard of my car.