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.

new look for skidictionary.com

Thanks to the web talents of Jared and the graphic-design skillz of Richie Jay, there is a whole new look over at my lexicographical endeavor, skidictionary.com. Go check it out... you can search for stuff, but since there are still not very many entries online, the best way to browse the dictionary right now is probably to start here, on the Recent Changes page.

some old videos

I just got around to uploading a few old videos of myself from New Zealand and Winter Park onto YouTube. As soon as they approve them they should be viewable here.

u.s. nationals wrap-up

Today was the fourth and final day of official competition here at the U.S. Disabled Alpine Championships in Waterville Valley, N.H. For me, it was a pretty weak ending to a pretty strong season. I had been hoping to come away with my first national title but ended up with only a 5th-place finish in GS and a DNF in slalom. (Because Waterville's race hill is not homologated for speed events, this was the first U.S. nationals not to include a super G or a downhill.) In addition to the two official "championship" races, we raced another GS and slalom that counted as regular Nor-Am races. Those didn't go much better for me; I didn't finish the GS and managed 3rd in the slalom.

Tomorrow should be interesting... they set aside some of the prize money provided by the event's title sponsor, The Hartford, for the winners of a head-to-head, pro-style disabled race, similar to the annual World Disabled Invitational race at the Wells Fargo Bank Cup in Winter Park.

world leader pretend

On March 12, one of my all-time favorite bands, R.E.M., was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, along with Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, The Ronettes, Patti Smith, and Van Halen. It was an awesome ceremony in which R.E.M. were introduced by Eddie Vedder and played a four-song set that included collaborations with both Vedder and Patti Smith, and you can watch it streaming online here.

In a recent Rolling Stone piece in which the members of R.E.M. comment on their discography, Michael Stipe says that "the big moment" on their 1988 major-label debut, Green, is the song "World Leader Pretend":

It's a tribute to Leonard Cohen, using military terms to describe a battle within. I was so proud of the lyrics and my vocal take that I refused to sing it a second time. I did it once. That was it.

You can tell that Stipe was proud of the song back in 1988 as well, since until 1998 it was the only R.E.M. song that ever had its lyrics printed on the album's sleeve or booklet. "World Leader Pretend" has always been my favorite song off of Green, too — not only because it's a beautiful song with great guitar and piano lines, a string arrangement, and countrified pedal steel, but because it's one of those rare songs that make me, a not-particularly-close listener of lyrics, pay attention to the words coming out of the singer's mouth:

I sit at my table and wage war on myself
It seems like it’s all, it’s all for nothing
I know the barricades, and
I know the mortar in the wall breaks
I recognize the weapons, I used them well

This is my mistake. Let me make it good
I raised the wall, and I will be the one to knock it down

I’ve a rich understanding of my finest defenses
I proclaim that claims are left unstated,
I demand a rematch
I decree a stalemate
I divine my deeper motives
I recognize the weapons
I’ve practiced them well. I fitted them myself

It’s amazing what devices you can sympathize
This is my mistake. Let me make it good
I raised the walls, and I will be the one to knock it down

Reach out for me and hold me tight. Hold that memory
Let my machine talk to me. Let my machine talk to me

This is my world
And I am the world leader pretend
This is my life
And this is my time
I have been given the freedom
To do as I see fit
It’s high time I’ve razed the walls
That I’ve constructed

It’s amazing what devices you can sympathize
This is my mistake. Let me make it good
I raised the walls, and I will be the one to knock it down

You fill in the mortar. You fill in the harmony
You fill in the mortar. I raised the walls
And I’m the only one
I will be the one to knock it down.

I won't pretend to know what Stipe's getting at, exactly, with lines like "It's amazing what devices you can sympathize"; what I love is his wordplay. First of all there's the line "This is my mistake; let me make it good." There's a great ambiguity here: does he mean "Let me make my mistake well" or "Let me fix my mistake"? I'd like to think that Stipe realized it could be interpreted both ways at once, and I love the idea of "making a mistake well."

Another thing that's always struck me is Stipe's employment of one of English's most delicious homophone pairs, raise and raze. Though pronounced the same, they mean exactly the opposite of one another. From the context (not to mention the lyrics printed in the album's booklet) it's clear when the wall is being "raised" and when it's being "razed," but it's fun to substitute the opposite meaning in each instance and see how it affects the lyric's meaning.

The last thing I want to talk about is the section that begins "I proclaim that claims are left unstated." (A nice line in itself, no?) Stipe begins this line and the next two with three different verbs — proclaim, demand, decree — that the linguist J.L. Austin called "performatives." (Forgive me for getting all linguistics-major-y here, but bear with me.) A performative verb is one that accomplishes something simply by the speaker uttering it: by saying "I proclaim..." you are proclaiming something; by saying "I demand..." you are demanding it. Contrast these with what happens in the fourth line of the section, "I divine my deeper motives." Divine is an ordinary, non-performative verb; by saying "I divine..." you are not accomplishing anything. You are just stating what you do, or have done. By using three performative verbs in a row, Stipe has tricked the listener into hearing his narrative voice as an authority. (Who uses performative verbs like proclaim, demand, decree? Officials, politicians, people signing treaties and cutting ribbons.) But when he gets to "I divine..." he has pulled the old switcheroo. It turns out that this narrator is not an authority figure after all; he is just a normal human being (with "deeper motives," even!) trying to get in touch with his feelings by making proclamations, demands, decrees. The joke's on you, dear listener — Stipe's not being performative at all; he's just being introspective.

And some people say pop music is shallow...

Zoncolan results

Here I am, a week after writing my last blog post and I haven't even been able to post it yet. I'm now in another metal tube, heading from Italy back to Colorado, only this time for some reason we're heading much farther north than usual, up over Greenland. I suppose, barring any unforeseen difficulties, I'll be able to post this tonight when I get home to Winter Park.

It's been a worthwhile trip. We drove about four hours from Munich down to Arta Terme, Italy, which is tucked up in the Dolomites in the northeastern corner of the country, very close to both the Austrian and Slovenian borders. We had two days to ski the race hill and settle into our hotel before the first race, which was a slalom on Monday.

That morning I felt really great, ready to turn in a good performance... maybe that should've been my first clue that things weren't going to go my way. As soon as I got onto the course for the first run, things felt weird. The snow outside of the race course had been really soft, starting to turn slushy by 9 or 10 a.m.; on course, it was a different story. After sliding around on the first few gates, I started to find a rhythm on the next few — only to lean in badly on the entry to the first hairpin and slide off-course. After maybe 15 seconds of racing, my day was over. Even worse, in the second run all three of my male monoskier teammates went down and out as well.

I finished the GS the next day, and while at the time I was pretty disappointed with my 12th-place finish, I think finishing two solid runs built up my confidence a bit. It was also pretty encouraging to see Gerald and CDY have better races, finishing 6th and 7th. On the morning of the final race, a super G, I didn't have much motivation: I hadn't had a decent finish yet in Italy, the course didn't seem well-suited to me, and my warm-up runs just felt off. Before the start I told Nick, "If I have any success today, it will be a fluke." I didn't make any major mistakes in my run, and got to the bottom having thoroughly enjoyed it. It's nice when ski racing is actually FUN, even if "fun" doesn't always correlate well with "successful." Somehow, though, I crossed the line in second place, and only three more skiers who came down after me were able to beat me. Suddenly I had my first top-5 World Cup finish of the season, in the last World Cup race of the season. Not only that, CDY gave our men's monoskiing team its only podium of the season, finishing third.

For the U.S. Ski Team's press release on the races, click here. For complete results, go here.

randomness

I'm writing this from inside a metal tube about 33,000 feet above the North Atlantic Ocean. At home it's 11 p.m. and at our destination, Munich, it's 7 a.m., but whatever time it technically is here, it doesn't feel like sleepytime. Despite the many other things I could be doing right now to pass the time — like doing seven Sunday crossword puzzles, or watching the movie Happy Feet, or reading a magazine so pretentious that it insists on spelling out all numbers, like "five thousand thirty-two" (that would be The New Yorker) — I have instead been listening to Jay-Z while staring at the little animated map that I can call up at the touch of a button on the LCD screen behind the balding head of the man in front of me. (That was a lot of prepositions. Whew!) This map amuses me to no end, because (a) I am a huge dork, (b) it gives distances in miles even when displaying them in German (show me one German person who has any sense of how far "1431 meilen" is), and (c) it depicts extremely obscure cities but not important ones. Apparently this cartographer lives in an alternate dimension where New York and Paris are not worth noting on maps but Stephenville, Newfoundland and Keflavik, Iceland are. I mean, if you're going to mark a city in Iceland, surely Reykjavik is the natural choice, no?

While I'm on the theme of stream-of-consciousness rants, let me tell you about how cool my computer's current desktop background is. It's a manga-style cartoon of Boston Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka hurling a flaming, planet-like object, accompanied by some Japanese characters I can't read. I downloaded it from The Onion's website, where it accompanied a story titled "Excited Red Sox Fans Eagerly Await Debut Of Matsuzaka's 'Ultimate Galactic Dragon Gyroball Pitch Power Explosion'." I love The Onion; I really do.

Continuing with the randomness, here's something I've been worried about lately. When you enter the town of Fraser, Colorado (the town line is just a few hundred feet from my house in Winter Park), a sign proclaims Fraser "The Icebox of the Nation." Ever since I moved there, I've heard it said as gospel truth that Fraser has the coldest annual average temperature in the lower 48. But a recent New Yorker article about Sublette County, Wyoming, notes that it, too, claims to be "the icebox of the nation." Disturbed, I did some Googling and discovered that at least five other towns — International Falls, Minnesota; Pellston, Michigan; Truckee, California; Stanley, Idaho; and West Yellowstone, Montana — also claim the title. Which one is truly the Icebox of the Nation? And more pressingly, why do they all insist on the anachronistic word "icebox," anyway? Wouldn't "The Refrigerator of the Nation" be more au courant?

blog? i have a blog??

No, I hadn't forgotten, and no, I wasn't too busy to update it — just too lazy. I haven't done any racing since last time I posted, but that will change soon. On Thursday the whole U.S. team leaves for the World Cup Finals, on Monte Zoncolan, Arta Terme, northeast Italy. We will race two super G's, a GS, and a slalom on a hill most of us have never been to before. The rumor is that conditions there are decent, thanks to snowmaking and a relatively high altitude. Many other European ski areas are already closed for the season or have too little snow to host a race, thanks to spring-like conditions all winter long. We were scheduled to be racing in Abtenau, Austria right now, but those races fell victim to the balmy weather and were canceled a couple weeks ago.

In other news, I spent five days at the end of February driving around Arizona with Jared in a ridiculous car — a silver Chrysler Sebring convertible, the kind of car you would buy if you were going through a mid-life crisis but were too conservative to consider a Miata. And it wasn't even that warm, so once we left Phoenix the top was up most of the time. We did, however, have a great time in various Northern Arizona locales, such as Jerome, Flagstaff, the Hopi Rez, Ganado, and the Hubble Trading Post.

In Keams Canyon, we met up with a Hopi potter named Karen Charley and spent the better part of an afternoon talking to her and learning about her pottery. Then we took Karen and her granddaughter out for dinner at the Hopi Cultural Center on Third Mesa, where Jared and I stayed for the night. She also set up a meeting with the superintendent of her school district whose board she serves on in Jeddito the next day, and Jared (a teacher) had a good time talking with him about their situation.

On our first day we had hit up Arcosanti, a crazy concrete desert experiment in "arcology" (architecture + ecology). But we met so many cool people there that we decided to go back and stay there for our final night. We made some friends, learned their bronze casting, and even played music with some of the workshop kids there. I may end up going back to do a workshop there myself some day.

Jared took some good photos, and he has posted them online here.

oh dear

I just realized that I never wrote anything about the super G's earlier this week here in Winter Park. See, I had written this nice long post but then Safari took a safari and crashed. Anyway, I was really happy with my run the first day and ended up second, a couple seconds behind the Australian speed specialist Shannon Dallas. The next day, though, a small mistake cost me big-time and I ended up in fifth place — my first non-podium finish of the Nor-Am season. D'oh!

Results from all the Nor-Ams are finally posted here.

biracial, cilantro, picaroon

What do these three words have in common? No, they're not subject-lines from spam e-mails, although they sound like it. All three of these fantastic words were contained in a single game of WEBoggle, my favorite online word game. If you follow the link, prepare to waste hours...

got advice?

Musically speaking, the band Cake may have gone downhill lately, but they're still a clever group of guys. Their website features a section in which the band attempts to answer fans' queries for advice; recently, a reader named Tim presented them with a doozy. Rather than attempt to answer it, the band has offered a copy of their new rarities CD, a t-shirt, and a signed vinyl LP of their first album, "Motorcade of Generosity" to the reader who can write the response to Tim's question, which you can read here. Good luck...

salami

Theoretically I'm watching the Stupor Bowl right now, but football really doesn't hold my interest, so I'll write a self-satisfied blog post instead.

I finally managed to win a slalom race today, the opening day of the Winter Park Open disabled Nor-Am races. I had an ugly first run but was in the lead by half a second or so, enough to put me in a position where I could give my all on the second run and win the race by several seconds. It was a nice confidence booster, even though I know it probably would've been good enough for, like, seventh place in a World Cup race.

more eric lindley/deth p. sun

A little while ago I blogged about this guy Eric Lindley, who I went to college with, who makes great music. His first real CD arrived in my P.O. box today and I'm listening to it right now and it's pretty awesome. Some of the songs maintain the spare, creepy acoustic vibe that his demo CDs and live performances have, while others are sort of fleshed out with other instruments. (In case you missed the original post, you can listen to some of his songs on his MySpace and if you like it you can buy the CD for 11 bucks on his label's website.)

Anyway one of the most arresting things about the CD, besides the music, is the awesome cover art. It is from a painting done by a guy whose (real) name is supposedly Deth P. Sun, which he says is Khmer. I just spent about half an hour looking at the paintings on his website, which go very nicely with Eric's record. He paints a lot of cat people, turtle people, mountains, rainbows, iconic words, and other odd sights. His work is sort of cute and scary at the same time, kind of like his name.

I think this might be my favorite painting on his website, but maybe it's just the caption that does it for me: Brushing Teeth

On an unrelated note, we race Nor-Ams the next three days here at home in Winter Park.

from the x games athlete lounge tent

...which has free wi-fi, naturally, as well as many diversions and much free food.

I guess I am now officially an Xtreme Athlete, having competed in my first X Games and made it to the semifinals. Now it's time to go party like an Xtreme Athlete.

Tune in to ESPN tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon beginning at 2 p.m. ET and maybe you'll catch me racing, although they might only show the finals. I wish I could be more specific about the time of the broadcast, but alas...

If you want to cheat and peek at the results now, head over here for the results and here for the full story.

spokane, wash.

Racing in Kimberley finished up today with a slalom. I had two solid runs (my second run was fifth-fastest) and finished eighth — not my best result, but I was satisfied with my performance. As soon as we got off the hill, five out of the six U.S. monoskiers on the trip loaded into a van to drive down to Spokane and catch a flight to Denver for the X Games.

Halfway there, though, we got a phone call: our 6 p.m. flight out of Spokane had been cancelled, and we would be stuck here for at least the next 12 hours. We considered our options and decided to take our rescheduled 6 a.m. flight to Denver tomorrow, then hop on a United flight directly to Aspen. If all goes as planned, we should make it into Aspen around 10:55 a.m., just in time to get on snow around 1:00 for the preliminary rounds of the monoskier X competition. Fingers crossed, I'm going to try and get some sleep...

Today's results are here.

GS in kimberley

Booooo. I made a big mistake on the top, flat section of my first run in today's giant slalom, and then a few gates later I went down, making a foolish mistake by leaning into a turn on the steepest part of the course.... DNF.

Slalom tomorrow... one more shot at a decent result.

super G in kimberley

This afternoon finds me asking myself that most frustrating question in ski racing: "Why wasn't I fast?" Today's super G was a fun course on a fun hill with soft snow, which is what I'm most accustomed to these days. Despite a foggy upper half of the course that severely limited visibility, I thought I had a decent run, maybe good enough for a top-5. But I was already in fifth when I crossed the finish line, and soon slipped back to 10th. At least I was still the top American finisher in my class — although by all accounts Nick and CDY both had great runs going before, respectively, falling and DNFing. I guess hopefully we'll see on the video of today's race why I was so slow.

One bright spot was that my friend Shannon Dallas of Australia got his well-deserved first World Cup win today. Full results can be found here, and USSA's press release is here.

I'm currently listening to music by a Dartmouth acquaintance of mine, Eric Lindley. He makes introspective, spooky acoustic music along the lines of Iron & Wine or CocoRosie. If this sounds interesting you can listen to some of his songs on his MySpace page or buy his new CD here.

aspen world cup wrap-up

I'm on an Alaska Airlines flight from Denver to Seattle; from there I'll transfer to Spokane, where we'll all pile into rented minivans and drive four hours or so up to the faux-Austrian village of Kimberley, British Columbia. We'll get to sleep in tomorrow and perhaps freeski a bit in the afternoon, and then we have three more days of World Cup racing — a super G on Wednesday, a giant slalom Thursday, and a slalom Friday. Immediately after the slalom, five of the team's six monoskiers will hightail it back to Spokane, fly back to Denver, and drive up to Aspen (which we just left last night) for the X Games' Monoskier X event on Saturday afternoon. It seems a little illogical to go to so much effort to compete in a crazy, somewhat dangerous race, but what the hell. You only live once.

Sorry I've neglected to post the results of the later Aspen World Cups... I'll give you the rundown of the last four days:

Tuesday, GS #1: I put together two solid — but not stellar — runs, finishing as the top American (seventh place) in a race that features a slew of DNFs (did not finish) thanks to a difficult hill and variable snow conditions. Germany's Martin Braxenthaler wins the men's sitting category handily, repeating his feat from both super G's.

Wednesday, GS #2: The rest of the field starts to figure out the hill — but not the Americans. I fail to finish the first run after misjudging a big knoll in the middle of the course. In the afternoon I join a posse of fellow DNFs (Gerald, Ricci, CDY, and two Italians) to explore the rest of Aspen Mountain. It is Gay & Lesbian Ski Week in Aspen, and we manage to catch some of an event called "The Drag Race," which features costumed (though not necessarily all cross-dressing) participants showing off their style on skis and snowboards before a panel of judges. We see four men dressed as poodles, a female "priest" performing a same-sex mock matrimony, and a close-to-seven-foot snowboarding queen who we hear won the event last year. Then I ride the gondola to the top of the mountain with a screenwriter who wrote Air Force One and who uses his cell phone in the gondola to reschedule his appointment with his personal trainer. At the top, we take pictures of each other and, following the Italians' sensible lead, order beers and drink them on the mountaintop lodge's sun-drenched terrace.

Meanwhile, Braxi wins again, and Nick has the Americans' best (and only) male monoskier finish in seventh place.

Thursday, slalom #1: This is the event where it seems like I could be starting to become a contender, but I make a major mistake in each of the two runs. Still, it's good enough for another seventh-place finish — just behind Gerald, who has a stellar second run. Braxi wins his fifth straight race, although Austria's Jürgen Egle is close behind.

Friday, slalom #2: I go down in the first run but finish the course. Starting the second run in third-to-last place, I have my best run of the week. Only four skiers are faster than me that run, but I was so far behind in the first run that it doesn't matter — I still finish at the back of the pack. Still, my final race run of the Aspen series is encouraging, giving me a morale boost going into the Canadian races, not to mention valuable World Cup points. I now stand in fourteenth place in the season-long overall standings (PDF), the top American in my category so far.

Better yet, Jürgen wins the race, finally knocking Braxi to the second step of the podium.

For full race results, click here. For the full text of the USSA press releases, head over here.

World Cup super G's in aspen

Well, I can't really say that today went how I was hoping. I made a really unacceptable line mistake in the first run that led to me blowing out of the course and not finishing the first race. In the afternoon, I skied a decent line but was just plain slow... I finished tenth. Perhaps the worse news was for the U.S. team in general: Laurie was the only one on the podium in either race, and in the second one my finish represented our team's top placing in the men's sitting class... not a good start to the season.

To make matters worse, I was just informed that I've been fined €100 by the IPC for "failing to report to the yellow-flag zone" after blowing out of the course... maybe tomorrow I'll explain what that means. Maybe then I'll have some good news to report as well.

USSA press release here
Official results here and here.

asspen

I'm comfortably ensconced in a room at the Silvertree Hotel in Snowmass, Colo., but tomorrow morning sometime around 11 a.m. I will be racing down Aspen Mountain — the region's old-school, steep, hardcore ski area — at around 40 m.p.h., hopefully on my way to kicking some Austrian ass.

Word.

congrats to chris k.

Chris Klebl is a really nice guy who is quickly becoming one of the world's top disabled nordic skiers. It's really nice to read about his success:

VUOKATTI, Finland (Jan. 13) - Paralympian Chris Klebl (sit-ski; Heber City, UT) added a World Cup podium to his resume Saturday, finishing second in the 10K to open the Disabled Cross Country World Cup season in Finland.

"This is kind of a surprise," said Klebl, who became a four-time national champion earlier this month in Houghton, MI. "I really didn't plan on peaking until Germany (the second World Cup), but I'll take it, I'm stoked - this was a good way to start the World Cup season."

Klebl credited time-on-snow for the victory, saying that he's had over 70 days of training in Utah prior to starting the competition season.

"I've been really fortunate because I've been able to get in a lot of training. The Europeans have been hurting - it can't be good when you have Paralympic champions saying they've only been on snow three times. So physically, I'm feeling good."

Head Coach Jon Kreamelmeyer couldn't have been more excited for Klebl's first World Cup top-3, praising the second year Team member for his outstanding work ethic. "I'm extra proud of Chris, he's put in a lot of time and work into this season and he deserves to be up there," he said.

Read the full press release here.

monoskier x: what is?

On January 27 at 2:00 p.m. MST, I will compete in the new Monoskier X event at Winter X Games 11 in Aspen, Colo. EXPN.com has this to say about the rules of the event:

Mono-Skier X debuted as a demo event at Winter X Nine and now makes the jump to a medaled event at Winter X 11. Mono-Skier X is modeled after Winter X mainstays, Snowboarder and Skier X with one key difference that the event features the top disabled mono-skiers in the world.

Mono-Skier X is a fast and furious course race that features disabled sit-skiers racing over tabletop jumps, banked turns, rollers and gaps. Like the other X course disciplines at Winter X, Mono-Skier X is a fusion of motocross and downhill racing on snow.

In each of the qualifying races, the winner advances to the Final, while the 2nd place finisher goes to the last chance qualifier. In the LCQ, the winner advances to fill out the 4 racer final. In the final, the first racer to the bottom takes home the gold.

Competition Format: Men and Women

Round	Athletes	Runs	Score
Qualifying	12 (3 heats of 4)	1	Winner advances to Final, 2nd place goes to LCQ
Last Chance Qualifier	3 (1 heat of 3)	1	Winner advances to Final
Final	4 (single heat)	1	1st thru 4th place

Got it?

huntsman cup wrapup

Writing this from Park City, Utah, where we just finished up three days of racing at the annual Huntsman Cup. I didn't manage a win but did land on the podium every day, making it five straight this season. I'm happy to be skiing so consistently although I'll admit I was a little disappointed not to finish better than third in today's slalom. Rather than try to recap all the races for you, for now I'll just post links to the relevant press releases and result lists.

GS 1 (Fri. 1/5): release | results
GS 2 (Sat. 1/6): release | results
SL (Sun. 1/7): release | results

bid on my race suit

If you're reading this and you or someone you know is a ski racer, this may be of interest... I donated my race suit from the Paralympics last year to Gould Academy, my alma mater, for a fundraising auction they're doing. Bidding is open now through Feb. 4, and as of now you could pick it up for a song at $100. Go here to view the auction listing.

rough day

I'm writing this from Park City, Utah, where we're getting ready for the annual Huntsman Cup races, which run this Friday through Sunday. The rest of the team skied at Deer Valley this morning while I stayed behind tinkering with my monoski. At noon I joined the others at Park City Resort to run some slalom.

We were training on CB's, a long, steep hill that used to host men's World Cup races every year. (I usually like the trail, and I like to say that they named it after me.) The course today was on the steepest part of the run, and the snow was mostly man-made, a contrast from the stuff we've been skiing on in Winter Park. What's more, I was skiing on a new shock absorber and my monoski just didn't feel right. These factors came together to foreground some of the weaknesses in my skiing, and the result was that I had an absolutely awful day of training. I didn't make it through the course once, blowing out or falling several times each run. The coaches kept offering advice, but all I wanted was to be left alone and try and work my way out of the hole I was digging for myself. On days like today it's really hard to make yourself keep skiing when you know it's not going to get any better. All I can do is put today behind me, be glad it was only a training day, and redouble my efforts tomorrow.

(The linguist in me wonders: why redouble? It's not like I've already doubled them...)

what makes bode different

If you've been following the current World Cup season, you may know that Bode Miller already has three wins this year, more than he won all last season. He's still as unpredictable as ever — winning one day and missing a gate five seconds into a course the next day — but he's still one of my role models in ski racing, for one simple reason: he races for himself and no one else. He wrote a whole book outlining his philosophy on this, but I think it's summed up well in something I just read in his online diary:

"The best run I've ever laid down was in Val Gardena back in 2001 — I came in 6th, but to this day it stands out in my mind as nearly perfect. "

Is Bode Miller just delusional, or does he have a bad sense of when he's skiing well and when he's not? I don't think that's the case. There might be a hundred reasons he didn't win that day (bad wax choice, a strong gust of wind while he was on course), but if he's never felt better on his skis than he did that day, and he can recall that feeling and harness it for future performances, that's something significant. For 99% of athletes, if you ask them to recall their best day, it will be a day they had their best results. But not for Bode: he has that rarest of abilities, the power to separate his own feelings about his performance from the outcome associated with it.

bramble in n.y. times

As astute NTAA reader Botice has pointed out, the sports section of yesterday's New York Times featured a profile of my teammate Kevin Bramble, Paralympic downhill champion, monoski designer/builder, and lover of cannabis, alcohol, and women. You can read the story here (free registration required).

The article begins with the observation, "Kevin Bramble is a madman." This is not inaccurate. The whole profile, in fact, does a pretty excellent job of deconstructing one of the most intriguing and self-contradictory people I've ever met. This is a guy who, at times, literally seems not to care whether he lives or dies, and yet seems to survive incidents no one else could; a guy who tells a story about getting banned from a particular California town for an incident involving an underaged girl, an empty wine bottle, and a video camera, and yet has told me, passionately, about his desire to meet a woman to settle down with (he's now engaged, apparently); a guy who gets more media coverage than anyone on the team except maybe Ralph and who bragged to the Times that he has "taken [my] sport to a place it had never been" and yet is easily the most down-to-earth person on the team; a guy who never trains and has atrocious technique, yet regularly wins downhill races by full seconds; a guy who wants to be a successful businessman and yet missed an appointment to meet with me so I could try his monoski and perhaps purchase one — because he was in jail. As a result, I'm one of the three current U.S. team members who doesn't ski on his equipment, but somehow I still like the guy.

There are a few facts the article doesn't get quite right. For starters, a caption implies that the accompanying photo shows Bramble building a monoski; in fact it appears to be some kind of wakeboard. And the story says that he "left" the team in 1999 because he wanted to go powder skiing instead of racing, while my impression on that trip was that he was kicked off the team for telling a staff member to go fuck himself. And Bramble himself is wrong when he dismisses the accomplishments of Bode Miller, saying "He didn’t invent the skis. He hasn’t redefined the convention”; in fact, that is pretty much exactly what Bode did at the Junior Olympics in the late 1990s when he became the first racer to have significant success using new super-sidecut skis. But the article's only egregious error is one of omission: it doesn't mention Bramble's significant "lifestyle-related" health problems, which (combined with his distaste for training) have kept him from attending any team training camps or competitions since the Paralympics. Given that there are no downhills scheduled on the disabeld race circuit this year, I'll be surprised if we see him show up to a single race this year other than the X Games sit-skiercross at Aspen in January. For all intents and purposes, Kevin Bramble seems to be retired.

coincidence? OK, yeah, probably.

Who knows, maybe the art director of Jay-Z's 2006 Kingdom Come was a fan of Warren Zevon's 1978 Excitable Boy. (Or maybe Hova himself is? Now that would be odd.)

finally...

USSA got around to putting out a press release about Friday's GS in Breckenridge. Our head coach Ray had some nice things to say about me, and they put a very unflattering photo of me at the top. I like these better, althought I'm still making the same weird constipated face in the action shot. You can see and download these photos and others here.

From the New York Times:

BAGHDAD, Dec. 12 — At least 56 people, most of them laborers looking for work, were killed today when a pickup truck packed with explosives was detonated in a crowded square in the city’s center this morning, Iraqi officials and witnesses said. At least 220 more were wounded.
...
American military officials have described the battle for control of Baghdad as a steady stream of individual killings of Sunnis carried out by Shiite death squads, punctuated by bombings and larger attacks carried out by Sunni insurgents or Al Qaeda members against Shiites
....
The speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, Mahmud Mashhadani, a Sunni, also denounced the attack, saying it was the work of “outlaws and those without a religion.”

Riiiiiight. This sure sounds like the work of the Iraqi Militant Atheists' Brigade. We just need to teach the bombers to be more passionate Muslims and this will all be solved.

categories

Wikipedia has a category for almost everything. They should have a category for "People whose names and biographies sound like they should be fictitious, but aren't." Then they could include 47-year-old Mexican ski racer Prince Hubertus von Hohenlohe-Langenburg, who raced in the World Cup super combi race held yesterday in Reiteralm, Austria, placing last — about 24 seconds behind winner Ivica Kostelic and 16 seconds behind the second-to-last-place finisher.

Free U.S. Ski Team pin to the first reader who posts here with the correct pronunciation of the name Hohenlohe. (And I don't know the answer, so you better also convince me you're right.)

sometimes you win by not losing

I managed a win in today's GS, even though I skied better yesterday. A mistake in the first run left me in third place, two seconds behind Tyler and one behind Nick after CDY and Gerald both crashed. My second run was solid but I didn't think it'd be enough to move me up to first or second. I didn't count on both of my remaining teammates crashing, giving me my second career Nor-Am win.

Here are some links to a press release and photos from yesterday's slalom. Both of those sites should have updates for today's race pretty soon.

close, but no cigarillo

First race of the young season today in Breckenridge, Colo. We raced slalom first and I've been feeling pretty positive about my slalom these days, so I felt a lot of pressure from myself to perform well. On the first run I totally did, winning the run by about a second. I didn't make any real mistakes, but I didn't feel outstanding either so it was a nice result to beat some of my perennial rivals like Tyler and CDY.

I'd only been in that position after the first run once or twice before, and it's tough. It's way too easy to start picturing myself on the podium when the race is only halfway over. I had to keep refocusing myself over and over again as I waited a couple hours for my second run. Sixteen male monoskiers had finished the first run, which meant that that after the top fifteen were reversed to determine the second-run start order I'd be starting second-to-last — way too much time to sit at the top and think about how I could win, how I could crash, and that I really had to pee. When I finally pushed out of the gate I skied just as well as I had in the first run until I got to the course's only flush. I bobbled coming out of it, and while I recovered almost immediately, I had lost a little bit of momentum. The rest of the run was smooth, but when I crossed the line I knew I had given too much away. Sure enough, Tyler beat me by 0.4 seconds or so.

Despite that, I certainly learned something today about being in the lead, and I was stoked about my skiing.

USSA press release

Disabled Alpine Tunes Up at Keystone Team Set for Hartford Ski Spectacular

KEYSTONE, Colo. (Dec. 4.) - The U.S. Disabled Alpine Ski Team capitalized on the recent training agreement with Keystone Resort, scoring five days of unparalleled training on the U.S. Ski Team's exclusive Starfire training run on North Peak.

"It was the best training we've had in a long time," said Coach Ben Roberts. "It was great for us to be on a steep, challenging hill with hard snow. We are expecting these conditions at our Aspen World Cups (Jan. 17-21) so it was great preparation for those races. Everything the Alpine Team has been saying about how great the training is at Keystone was is true."

It was the third and final on-snow training for the Team before the competition season opens Dec. 7 with the 19th Annual Hartford Ski Spectacular at Breckenridge, CO."The opportunity for us as members of the U.S. Disabled Ski Team to train on the same hill as the U.S. Alpine Teams was invaluable," said 15-year veteran Chris Devlin-Young (sit-ski; Campton, NH). "We had very hard snow and steep terrain, just like at our World Cups. We almost never see conditions like this during training, only at our races."Devlin-Young was joined by George Sansonetis (standup; Fraser, CO), Ralph Green (standup; Brooklyn, NY), Hannah Pennington (standup; Denver, CO), Sandy Dukat (standup; Chicago, IL), Carl Burnett (sit-ski; Cape Elizabeth, ME), Brad Washburn (standup; Highlands Ranch, CO) and Gerald Hayden (sit-ski; Fresno, CA). Also on board for the week were development athletes Ian Jansing (Granby, CO) and Ricci Kilgore (Reno, NV) of the Winter Park National Sports Center plus their coaches Hiro Taniguchi and Erik Petersen along with volunteer coach Matt Weiler from Aspen's Team Summit.

"The training was incredible," added Coach Kurt Smitz. "It was really nice to catch up with John McBride (combined coach for the men's Alpine Team) and the other alpine coaches who were on the hill with us and at the NorAm. Our athletes are really stepping up in preparation for our first races."

To continue that preparation, the team now heads to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, CO, to wrap up their series of physical testing sessions before opening the season at Breckenridge.

19th Annual Hartford Ski Spectacular Schedule:
Dec. 7 - Slalom
Dec. 8 - Giant Slalom
Dec. 9 - Corporate Challenge

Disabled Alpine World Cup to Open in Aspen

ASPEN, Colo. (Nov. 22) - The U.S. Disabled Ski Team is set to open the 2007 International Paralympic Committee (IPC) Alpine World Cup tour Jan. 17-21 at Aspen Mountain. Hosted by Challenge Aspen, U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) and Aspen Skiing Company, the U.S. Team joins more than 15 nations in the quest for the Nations Cup.
Over 80 athletes will compete in super G, giant slalom and slalom for a total of six out of 17 World Cup races on the 2007 schedule

"Challenge Aspen is very excited to host the fastest disabled skiers in the world this January and show the town of Aspen how incredible they really are," says Kevin Jardine, Director Of Skiing.

Jardine and Bryan Peterson, both residents of the Roaring Fork Valley, were coaches for the 2006 U.S. Paralympic Team and the U.S. Disabled Alpine Team. They have been instrumental in securing the bid for the Disabled World Cup and are working for a successful event as members of the local organizing committee.

Following the Aspen races, the World Cup will move on to British Columbia for three competitions before taking a short training break. Five more races will then run in early March in Abtenau, Austria, before the World Cup finals slated for Arte Therme Zoncolan, Italy on March 14.

Aspen/Snowmass, considered one of the worlds top ski areas since the Aspen Skiing Company hosted its first FIS World Championships in 1950, has become an international hub of sport and culture. The picturesque ski resort was chosen to host this years event based upon the excitement and support of area residents during prior World Cup events. World Cup racing events have helped build Aspen/Snowmass' reputation as one of the top ski resorts in the world.

Volunteers interested in working with the World Cup races are asked to contact Evan Zislis at Challenge Aspen at 970.923.0578, extension 17, or via email at evan@challengeaspen.com.

Raich, Schild to join mile-high club?

From SkiRacing.com:

Sunday, 12 November 2006
LEVI, Finland — What’s good for the goose, is good for the gander. Benjamin Raich kick-started his defense of the overall World Cup title with a runaway win in the opening men's slalom, matching the result his girlfriend Marlies Schild had registered one day earlier. ... "It is great to win like this after what Marlies did yesterday,” Raich said. "Marlies will fly back with me on the plane and we'll get a chance to celebrate this together. It's really nice."

tux article & photos

I just discovered this press release about our Hintertux training camp the U.S. Ski Team website. The article has a quote from me and a photo of me skiing slalom. If you want to download a full-res version of the photo and see pictures of some of my teammates from the camp, head right over here.

update from WP

I made the move from Boulder back up to Winter Park last week, just after getting home from Austria, and now I'm getting settled in up here. (The Comcast guy was here this morning to set up broadband, and damn is it fast.) I'm living in the same apartment I was in last winter, with my teammate Gerald. There's been a foot of snow on the ground here for a couple weeks now, and the ski area is making a lot of snow, too. We racers get to start skiing here this Wednesday, and then the resort opens to the public on the 15th.

If you need to write to me here, my address is the same as it was last year:

P.O. Box 3090
Winter Park, CO 80482

And my physical (shipping) address is:

21 Kings Crossing Road, Apt. 302
Winter Park, CO 80482

As a side note, this week's New York Times Magazine has a nice primer on how neologisms enter the OED.

last day in Tux

Today was supposed to be our last day of training here in Hintertux, but lots of rain meant the snow was too soft to set a course. (Click here, here and here to see the view up there on the glacier at the moment; as I write this, it's a whiteout on the upper two cams.) So we're back at the hotel packing up our stuff and relaxing a bit. Tomorrow morning at 4:45 a.m. we'll leave for the Munich airport and then back to the States.

This has been a pretty productive couple of weeks for me. I haven't made any major advances in my skiing, but I've become more consistent, especially in my slalom skiing, and I've relished the chance to do plenty of skiing on sub-optimal snow conditions. In particular, it's been helpful to get out on some of the glare glacial ice, the real hard stuff that I used to train on back in Maine but don't see very often — OK, ever — in Winter Park. In fact, the skiing here during this camp has reminded me how helpful it is to ski on that stuff, so I'm thinking about taking my ski equipment home to Maine with me when I go back for Thanksgiving or Christmas and doing some training with my old ski team at Sunday River.

Hans

Today I rode up the gondola with a guy in sixties named Hans. He lives half an hour away in Mayrhofen and has spent his whole life here in the Zillertal valley. He learned to ski as a small boy in these mountains. His family owns a farm in a village he pointed out on the other side of the mountain, but now Hans works in the mountaintop lodge on Hintertux Glacier, serving tourists. I might've thought he'd be bitter about having to make his living from tourism after his ancestors made theirs from working the land, but he saw things differently. Before tourism and modern farm machinery came to Tirol, he said, people had to work too hard just to survive. In the early 1900s, he said, lots of people in Zillertal left Austria for more prosperous places; his uncle emigrated to Chicago, where he opened a schnapps distillery that counted "all the important people" among its clientele. The uncle married an American woman but died childless, so Hans no longer has relatives in America.

I asked Hans if the glacier used to be bigger than it is now. "Oh yes," he said. When he was a child — before the Gletscherbahn, when you could only get up to the glacier on horseback — they used to have to struggle to keep the glacier from tearing down the Spannagelhaus. Now, that building is separated from the glacial ice by several hundred meters of rocks and dirt.

(r)emoting

When operating a European TV remote control, why in the hell are you required to press "1" instead of "Power" to turn the TV on? If someone could explain the origin of this utterly ridiculous practice, I would be eternally grateful.

the push

First of all, check out this sweet 360-degree panorama image of Hintertux Glacier that I just found on their website.

Today was our fourth day on snow here in Austria. The last three days we've trained GS on the same narrow lane. One of the things about training in Europe is that teams set their courses very close to one another, and it can be a nerve-wracking experience skiing 30 m.p.h. down a course, with another skier two meters away skiing a parallel course at the same speed — not much room for error. It's funny how much has been made lately of the American trend toward doing everything faster and more recklessly, when it's the Euros who seem to be faster and ruder with everything they do.

A prime example is the phenomenon known — on our team, anyway — as "the push." The push happens every morning around 7:45 in the parking lot of the Hintertuxer Gletscherbahn gondola, when several hundred junior ski teams crowd into a small area between metal barricades, vying to be one of the first on the gondola when it opens at 8:00 a.m. It's one of those sights that has to be seen to be believed: something happens to make one or two people decide that the gondola might be about to open and pandemonium breaks loose, every kid and coach grabbing his or her equipment and pressing forward against each other to try to get as close to the lift entrance as possible. It's a free-for-all that's simultaneously hilarious and pretty disturbing. I'm sure people have been trampled in the push; this is exactly how people die at rock concerts.

Kildow's Spirit Award Enables Six Physically Disabled Female Skiers Chance to Compete at The Hartford Ski Spectacular in December

U.S. Paralympics // October 17, 2006

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – U.S. Paralympics, a division of the U.S. Olympic Committee, has announced that it will sponsor six aspiring female Paralympic skiers at the 19th Annual Hartford Ski Spectacular in December, thanks in large part to the generosity of Lindsey Kildow, 21, (St. Paul, Minn./alpine skiing) two-time Olympian and winner of the 2006 U.S. Olympic Spirit Award Delivered by DHL. DHL provided a grant of $5,000 on Kildow’s behalf, which was to be donated to a qualified Olympic or Paralympic-related non-profit organization of her choice. Kildow chose U.S. Paralympics. Excited by her gesture, U.S. Paralympics has chosen to match her donation in an effort to reach out to as many prospective Paralympic skiers as possible.

“Our goal in assisting six women to Ski Spectacular is twofold,” said Stacey Wooley, Associate Director Winter Sports, U.S. Paralympics. “We want to create a developmental outlet for middle echelon skiers to compete, in hopes of developing a direct feed to the National Team. We also want to boost the number of elite female athletes vying for a spot on the team.”

Athletes will be chosen by U.S. Paralympics based on their previous participation in local skiing programs and coach recommendations. The top six will participate at The Hartford’s 19th Annual Ski Spectacular, Dec. 3-10, 2006, in Breckenridge, Colo.

Paralympic-eligible disciplines include sitting, standing and visually-impaired. Applications can be found online at http://www.usparalympics.org. Once there, click on the link in the left-hand column of the page. All completed applications should be faxed to Stacey Wooley’s attention at (719) 866-2029. The deadline to apply is November 6, 2006.

Kildow became the first athlete in the history of the award to win despite not winning a medal at the Olympic Games. Despite being hospitalized after a spectacular training run accident on the second day of the downhill practice, Kildow returned to the slopes to compete the next day, finishing eighth. Still struggling with the injuries, she demonstrated incredible courage and commitment and went on to compete in four of her five events which resulted in two top-ten placements.

During the Olympic and Paralympic Games, DHL honors two individual athletes (one male and one female) and one team with the Olympic Spirit Award for best representing the Olympic Spirit through their courage, commitment, performance, perseverance and vision, both in competition and in pursuit of their Olympic dream.

For more information, please contact Beth Bourgeois, U.S. Paralympics, at (719) 866-2039 or beth.bourgeois@usoc.org.

bis Hintertux

It's great to be back in the Tux Valley in Zillertal, Tirol, Austria. This is a really special place that I've been lucky enough to visit for three years in a row now. To get here you take the highway to Meyerhofen and then drive 20 km up a narrow mountain road that passes through half a dozen small villages. Each village has several classic-looking, family-run hotels and restaurants and a bahn (gondola/cable car) that takes you up the surrounding peaks. Some of these are closed this time of year, but others continue to shuttle hikers up throughout the off-season. At the end of the road you come to the town of Hintertux and then the bottom station of Hintertuxer Gletscherbahn, the series of three gondolas that take you up to the glacier. Our hotel, the Hintertuxerhof, is near the gondola station and surrounded by green, pungent-smelling farmland. There is really nothing like going outside at 7:30 a.m. into cold, sunny air that reeks of cow manure. The three Gletscherbahn lifts take you up 1750 vertical meters (5740 feet) in about 45 minutes; when you get to the top you're in what Zillertal's tourism board calls "Die Gletscher-Welt" — the Glacier World — and it's a really appropriate name. You feel like you're on another planet, with blinding white everwhere, dotted by huge rocky outcroppings, gray and blue cravasses in the ice fields that lie in between the groomed pistes, and then lots of green farmland, houses, barns, and hotels far, far below. From one of the T-bar lifts you can see a swatch of farmland, with a house and a barn, down in an otherwise uninhabited valley over a mile from the town of Hintertux. The dirt road to get there is insane, winding up over an imposing peak; in winter there must be no way to get there except by snowmobile or on skis. This is the way the people here still live, old Tyrolean farmers living alongside flashily dressed ski coaches from Innsbruck.

Actually, the coaches and athletes training here right now are from all over the world. It's common to see ski and snowboard teams here from the U.S., Canada, Japan, Korea, and all over Europe, especially the Eastern European countries that don't have strong alpine skiing traditions but are getting more and more competitive on the world scene: Russia, Croatia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria... last year I even saw teams from Greece and Israel. In addition to our team, there are also disabled skiers training here now from Finland, Slovakia, and the U.K. Everyone is busy up on the glacier from 8 a.m. till noon or 1, running courses, riding T-bars and generally failing to notice what an amazing place this is. Then in the afternoon everyone comes down off the hill, goes back to their hotels, and then goes outside into the 60-degree weather to go hiking, play tennis and soccer, and just generally enjoy the sunshine.

Today was our first day on snow, so we were mostly on our own, getting readjusted to skiing and riding T-bars and trying to remember all the things we were working on improving at Mt. Hood in July. We have two weeks of training here, so in a few days we'll start running courses and by the end we should be taking timed, race-like runs.

getting ready for Tux

It's October, which means that Northern Hemisphere ski resorts are starting to get new snow. (Some American resorts, like Loveland in Colorado, should be opening pretty soon.) It also means it's almost time for the U.S. team's annual training camp on the glacier at Hintertux, in Austria (live cams: 1 2 3). We depart next Monday, the 16th, and will be there until the 30th. I'm looking forward to being back on snow for the first time since July, and also to being back in the Alps. Most of us on the team have certain things we've come to love about central Europe; for me it's the coffee and the chocolate, and of course the mountains themselves. The only things I'm not looking forward to: (1) the heady manure smell that dominates the Tux river valley until it starts snowing down there, and (2) not being able to watch the World Series on TV.

USDST bios

The 2006-07 U.S. Disabled Ski Team still has yet to be officially announced, but I noticed that USSA does have our new bios up over at usskiteam.com. (If you're a regular reader of this site but some of the names look unfamiliar, that's because they lumped the disabled nordic team in with us on that list.) I guess mine is okay, but they always seem to think I've been on the team for a year less than I actually have. (They forgot to list me as a 2002 Paralympian, too.) And then there are a few of the usual typos, of course...

In other news, I've been doing some contributing to Wikipedia lately. Some of the articles written mostly by me are Paralympic alpine skiing, United States at the 2006 Winter Paralympics, Mexico at the 2006 Winter Paralympics, IPC Disabled Alpine World Cup, Disabled Alpine Skiing World Championships, Monoski, Chris Devlin-Young, Seekonk (band), and Phantom Buffalo.

International Talk Like A Pirate Day

The whole pirate meme does seem to be getting a little bit played-out, but here's one cause to rally behind: Tomorrow, September 19, is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. A note on pirate speech from holiday co-founder John Baur, courtesy of AWAD:

I've often heard people talk about pirates' "cockney accents." Wrong! The stereotypical pirate has a Cornish accent, based on the performance of Long John Silver by actor Robert Newton in the 1950 Disney version of Treasure Island. He was from Cornwall, and his over-the-top performance and native accent are the reason people think that's what a pirate sounded like. Of course, pirates came from all nationalities. But the pop culture image is firmly embedded, and Robert Newton is the reason why.

VANOC unveils 2010 emblem

I'm getting a good feeling about the organizing committee for the Vancouver Paralympics and Olympics. They seem to be treating the Paralympics as every bit the equal of the Olympics — case in point: the launch ceremony for the Paralympic logo was a big celebration with performances from some big names in Canadian pop music. Another good sign: the Vancouver 2010 website has no separate Paralympic section like the Torino and Salt Lake City sites did; the Paralympic news and content are fully integrated in the main site, and the Flash photo gallery on its home page mixes shots of Olympians and Paralympians. In fact, the site's current top story and its featured web poll are both about the Paralympics at the moment.