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Flat is the new black

Astrophysics takes a $63M cut, but there's $133M for the literally insane idea of bringing an asteroid back to earth.

Airplane movie reviews

Wolverine – awful

All Is Lost – good, except for the ending

Rush – good (the actors were well-chosen to match the real people, and the story was pretty much true to the documentary)

Lauda/Hunt documentary – good

Malavita – insulting


I watched parts of a few others, but nothing else leaps to mind.

Nothing

There is basically nothing you can do if you’re not little people that will get you fired.

Mouse

Brent Simmons wrote a short essay about his cat, and the point of view of the mouse.

Picture the equivalent for a human, he says. As if it were a fiction. Scary.

But it isn’t fiction. That’s how I feel every night cycling home on the unlit Forest Service road, overhung by trees. I’ve seen that creature, not 100m from there. It was invisible, and large, and silent. There would be no defense [1].

That’s how the mouse feels, I suspect.

[1] Yeah, it’s rare. But of the two people killed by cats in CA in the last 20 years, on opposite ends, I’m a FOAF of both. The lizard brain doesn’t know statistics; the hackles go up every night.

Anchorman 2 was so bad that it killed film

Film lasted more than 100 years, but it couldn’t survive A2.

Picture of the day 20 January 2014

Rosslyn B&W

Picture of the day 20 January 2014

Rosslyn

Thursday

A hummingbird flew up to the fountain while we were getting a drink, drank out of the stream, and hovered within 30 cm of my face while I held the spigot open for him, checking me out, yawing slightly back and forth.

Thanks Mr. Hummingbird.

Picture of the day 16 January 2014

branches

Old skool

They replaced all the old POTS phone with VoIP phones, which are basically digital. Except they look pretty much just like the old phones. And sadly, have the same crappy user interface. Make a mistake dialling, and you have to hang up and start over. There's no delete button – why not?

It's skeumorphism in all the bad ways – they imitated the analog so slavishly that there are very few benefits to being digital.

And what genius decided to make the outside line 9, as in hit 9-1-626-867-5309 to dial an outside number. No, no one is ever going to fat-finger 911.

Nested

I came >< this close to buying a Nest thermostat (was kinda waiting for V2.0). Just the kind of gadget I'm predisposed to, and I've been looking into remote home automation – turning lights on and off remotely, etc.

Now I'm really glad I didn't. Well, relieved is a better word.

X of the year 2013

Climbing: El Chontacoatlan, Taxco del Alarcon, Guerrero, Mexico, Thanksgiving. I sent Mantis, the first pitch of Mala Fama, and Procopio, all third try. Great climbing, fun partners, one of the best trips ever. This is my favorite kind of climbing. Close second: Maple, May and September. Sent ZT and 49, several one-fall burns on Dry Times and Functional Idiot, and two two-fall burns on Spacelord. Also good trips to the Gold Wall (Hillbilly Limestone, Subdivision, Regeneration, Aurum, Check Engine), and Column of the Giants (Sugar Brown).

This is probably my best climbing year ever. I sent a bunch of 12s at various places in a few tries, including a very good day at Bear Crag where I did Jagged Sky and Mercy Buckets back-to-back. I even got to where I could do the warm-up and the one next to it on a fairly regular basis. I should have put in that wall years ago. Thanks for all the holds Nino.

Climbing gear of the year: La Sportiva Solutions, and Send Downgrader thighpads. Holy cow. Everyone’s caught up to 5.10 in rubber, and the fit and performance of these shoes is just amazing. For years I put up with 5.10s crappy fit (other than the Moccasym which is still a great shoe, but seriously, for almost every other 5.10 shoe, who has fucked-up heels like that?) and lousy quality (fast breakdown of fit, broken velcro, delaminations) because the rubber was just so much better than everything else. Sure, you could buy Boreals or Sportivas and have them resoled with 5.10 if you wanted to add $50 to a $150 pair of shoes. Come to think of it, Solutions are about $175, so you’re kinda still doing that. But they’re comfortable, perform, stick, and are high quality. Just light years beyond the Teams that 5.10 made to compete with them. Or anything else. So I think from now on, Moccasyms or Sportiva.

And if you’re crawling up routes (cough, Jailhouse, Chonta, CotG, Maple), the Send thighpads (I’m on a campaign to call them what they are) are the shiz.

Magnetron locking carabiners are pretty good too, as are belay glasses.

Climbing class of the year: The falling and movement class from Arno Ilgner. While I’m not a big fan of the self-help woo of Warrior’s Way (and I always want to say it like “Wayne’s World”), my logical mind does appreciate the logical way of thinking about climbing that Mr. Ilgner presents, more especially in Espresso Lessons. After a couple of decades of climbing, including scary stuff, it’s nothing I didn’t know, but like the proper notation in physics, just writing it down in the right way makes it more obvious. You can say there are four Maxwell equations, and work for years to understand how they’re Lorentz invariant, symmetric, relativistic, or you can write them down in the proper way and it becomes obvious. Arno Ilgner helps me think about it in an obvious way. And I could have done the exercises in his books without the class, but doing them in a class with instruction was truly worth it. I recommend it to anyone who has trouble with their head, or falling. And to anyone who doesn’t yet know how to give a soft catch.

Exhibit of the year: Eggleston at the Met. I didn’t like Eggleston at first, but he grows on me. Also Morell at the Getty, where I got to sneak along with a group of patrons he was guiding, which was fun. Serendipity. Pier 24 is what all art exhibits ought to be. Man Ray/Lee Miller at the Legion of Honor (yeah, I know, 2012), Oldenburg at MOMA. Crewdson at LACMA was eye-opening, thinking about photography.

I have tickets to Turrel at LACMA in a week so I’m excited about that.

Music of the year: Nothing hit me on the head like the National did a couple of years ago, not even the new National. I listened to a lot of new stuff on Spotify. I like the Mountain Goats, but they’re not new. Just new to me.

Book of the year: still waiting for something to grab me like Lost Books of the Odyssey did last.

Movie of the year: Anchorman 2 is probably the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Nothing stood out as awesome, though I’ve been saving Upstream Color for a rainy day when I can give it my full attention. American Hustle was good.

TV show of the year: Archer. I laugh out loud every episode. Justified is good, I’m still working through Breaking Bad, and 30 Rock is missed, especially Alex Baldwin. Walking Dead got slow and pointless. I need to try Louie CK.

Non-climbing gear of the year: I’m fully converted to iPad-dom now. Love it. Also this retina MBP is pretty satisfying, especially with a Belkin Thunderbolt dock and an IPS monitor and a half-dozen disks connected. I also invested in a light alarm clock, which is so much better a way to get up for the 5 A.M. gym call than an obnoxious buzzer. The NEX-6 is a good camera, but I still love the D700, which just fits my hand. I haven’t pulled the trigger on a D800 yet – maybe if the price falls. Though the one request I’ve had from buyers is to print bigger, and the D700 is about the limit for the Epson 3880 (which I’m also very happy with, despite needing to replace the cartridges now for $450. Ouch). And I’m happy with Mavericks, which restored printing to the Epson and the Phaser, although it’s not clear that I have my color profiles sorted yet. Still too dark. I had this fixed then something changed.

Syncing is also a strong contender. Evernote, Dropbox, iCal, Contacts, etc. As is Siri, who is starting to get me though she can’t pronounce names and once made me laugh for five minutes about a missed voice recognition (“can I borrow your tent” became “can I borrow your tits”. I sent it anyway.).

Easy unbreakable encryption of email and cell phone would be a champion if someone could make this happen.

Personally: The Forerunner says I ran or cycled 1258.88 miles this year, though I didn’t always carry it so that’s an under. But yeah, not my best year in mileage. On 31 December 2012, I was averaging 6:36 per mile when I executed a class 2 ankle sprain. Then at the end of April I had an unfortunate encounter with the dread poodle-dog bush and clindamycin, both of which had a months-long ill effect. About which the less said, the better. Avoid the dread PDB. So not my best year for overall fitness, though I’m climbing as well as I ever have, so go figure.

In an encounter that even the most rank S2V rom-com would reject as too Hollywood meet-cute, I met someone I really liked, a lovely, nice young cyclist. But hey, I live in Hollywood, or close enough. Even though it didn’t work out, the good news was that I seized the chance, didn’t blow it. At least not entirely. Still debating that one in my head. At least I didn’t walk away regretting a missed chance. And still… it could happen.

Sequestration, flat or shrinking science budgets, and JWST sucking all the air out of the room for basically the rest of my scientific lifetime means that I pushed all in against the wrong flop late in the game. But what are you gonna do? I had aces in the pocket, position, and a good sized stack. It was the right decision. The EV was good. Sometimes the flop doesn’t hit you.

Person of the year: Edward Snowden. Fuck the pope, and fuck Time. Let me know when the pope supports contraception, women priests, and priests being married. Or even not molesting little boys. Until then it’s all talk, and talk is cheap. Snowden actually did something, at great cost to himself.

Dogs of the year: Alex and Milo, of course.

AM2013

A nation of laws, not men

Unless you’re the head of national intelligence, or a major bank. Then you can commit perjury or launder billions in drug money with absolute impunity.

God forbid you hit a few home runs or win a few TdFs or have more than a few thousand dollars in cash while driving through Texas or have a pipe in your pocket in NYC or soap in your car in North Carolina. Then you can expect to spend some time in prison or be bankrupted.

Bad moves

Anchorman 2 is quite possibly the worst movie I’ve ever seen.

Pitch for a third movie – having given $44 to Will Farrell, a team of movie lovers must stop the making of Anchorman 3 at all costs.

In any other year, however, Pacific Rim would be up there in the running for the Prometheus award.

Wrong assumptions

So I’ve been catching up on my reading, which is to say, I might have picked up a bit of the breakbone fever down in Taxco. On one of the semi-regular trots to the back of the house, I managed to pluck one of the climbing rags from the stack [1].

The saddest thing is it only takes one trip to read the whole thing anymore.

Anyway, there’s a apparently a semi-regular thing in the mag from a guy living in a van, climbing full-time. He climbs 5.9-ish, which is no problem. Moderate climbers should have a voice in the rags too. It was not always thus. In this column, he’s sketching on WI2+ (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and wondering whether he should go sport-climbing, or bouldering, which he sucks at. Whether he wants to be Hayden Kennedy or Chris Sharma. Conrad Anker or Daniel Woods. Generation Rad or Generation Trad? In the end, he decides that he’d rather be in the mountains.

But here’s the thing. It’s a false dichotomy. Because all those people climb 5.13 sport without blinking. Kennedy and Anker climb well in the mountains because they’re absolutely solid at higher grades. And that’s always been true, whatever 5.topend is, for whatever era. Pick your alpine hero. He or she might have been climbing 5.10 at the top end, but 5.11 was the top end then. And more likely, he or she was climbing 5.11.

Maybe this guy doesn’t want to put in the time at the gym, or the boulders, or the crags, clipping up. But the people he’s using as examples are bad examples.

Modern alpinists might not be amongst the best sport climbers in the world, but they’re not slouches. If they’re firing 5.11 A3 WI4 in Patagonia, it’s because they’ve got 5.13, and A5, and M7 solidly in their skillset. They clip bolts. They hangdog. They project. They train. Then, when they go to the mountains, they send.

Sure, you can find examples of people who don’t, and didn’t, do this. But it’s the exception, not the rule. More so now than ever.

Generation Trad or Generation Rad – there’s no such thing. Generation Trad climbs 5.12 on bolts. Generation Rad frees El Cap. Ueli Steck solos 5.13! You think he got there without clipping a bolt or two — thousand?

Climbing well in alpine means moving fast on moderate territory, whatever “moderate” means to you. The truth is, lots of times in the mountains you’re off-route or close enough and climbing harder than you’d like anyway, and you still have to move fast, because sunset or the storm, is unforgiving. But if you can climb 5.12 with the bolt at your feet, then WI4 is not that difficult. You might get cold, or scared, or make wrong decisions, but you’re not gonna fall because you get pumped. That’s off the menu.

Lots more things open up in the mountains if you’re strong at the grade. And for the most part, you don’t get strong at the grade by practicing that grade in the mountains. You push one limit at a time. Either difficulty or danger. Not both.

Robbins got strong practicing at Tahquitz, not Yosemite. Lynn Hill got strong working the World Cup, not the Nose. Look at the people setting the standards in alpine places. The Hubers. Glowacz. Sharma! He didn’t get invited to join the free attempt of one of the hardest routes on El Cap because he had been practicing on El Cap. El Cap makes you weak. Training at Oliana (or the Stronghold) makes you strong for El Cap.

I thought Piana and Skinner had settled this years, ago, but somehow the rad or trad attitude remains. It’s not a logical OR.

The funny thing is, and I know that authors don’t write the titles, is that the title is “The Sorrows and Joys of Being an All-Rounder”, when the author isn’t an all-rounder at all. He can’t boulder. He can’t sport climb. He’s not good at ice, or trad, or alpine, so far as I can tell. There’s no all-round here. “Jack of all trades” means you’re maybe not the best at everything, but you’re good at everything. It doesn’t mean you’re lousy at everything.

I’m not meaning to pick on this dude. He’s living the dream. Living out of his van. Climbing every day. The beautiful thing about climbing is everyone climbs as hard as they can, all the time, whether that’s 5.6 or 9b. Fucking A. Go for it. Do what you want.

But this Rad or Trad false dichotomy still exists, enough so that it gets published in a major climbing publication in 2013 CE, and that’s what I’m addressing. It’s a distortion of reality, and it’s not based on any observation of what’s happening in climbing. Now, or for the last two decades. If you think this, you aren’t paying attention.

There is no Trad. There is no Rad. There is only climbing, and how much any individual chooses to focus on any aspect at this time.

It’s not a mystery how you get better – you train. It shouldn’t be a mystery that everyone — everyone — you read about in the mags and the alpine journals clips a lot of bolts or pulls on plastic or falls on pads, whether that’s their primary motivation or not. And those ORs are probably ANDs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] I don’t read them very often because it’s basically the same articles about the same places and the same techniques, periodicity very short now. Largely by, and about the same people. If not actually the same people. Jeezus H Keerist, another Stonemaster article. I predict next month a Tobin Sorenson article. All those guys are old, fat or dead. As will I be soon.

[1b] The Stonemasters, by the way, held back climbing in the US for at least a decade. While great climbers, sure, the ethics they passed down, and their disdain for modern techniques, tactics, and training still holds back American climbers.

[1c] There are three reasons why American climbers aren’t in general as good as Europeans. The first is we just don’t have enough limestone. The second is the point above. The third is a consequence of the first two – most of us aren’t around good enough climbers. If you’re around 5.N climbers, you’ll climb at least 5.N-1. A few exceptionally motivated individuals will climb 5.N+1. If you’re around 5.15 climbers, 5.14 seems pretty possible. There are only a few 5.15s in the US, and all the US 5.15 climbers live in Europe. So 5.14 is top end in the US, and most places have a plethora of 5.13 climbers. In Europe, 5.14 is NBD, and until the US has tons of 5.14s everywhere, and 5.15 climbers, the best will still go to EU to climb.

[2] I notice that the mag has a tribute to Layton Kor, a tasteful magazine cover from the 80s (not words often used in that combination). It doesn’t compare well to the current issue which looks like a bad mixup of People and PopSci.

[3] I stopped subscribing after subscribing for decades, then started again when they gave me basically free ($5 for a year plus a free carabiner). Time to stop again I think. They’re not writing for me when it’s Yet Another article about nutcraft, by Jeff Achey. Great guy, by the way. Also climbs pretty reasonably high sport and solos El Cap. An all-rounder if you will.