KRAC Blog

When the weather is like this, there is no reason not to tear off a couple of five milers. Saturday I went up Delaware to the park, around the Ring Road, out to Nottingham, over to Elmwood and home. Today I went up the Parkways, over the pedestrian bridge to Nottingham, around the Ring Road (going counterclockwise this time), then down Delaware and home. (A little shy of five, I think, but not by much.) Maybe I wasn't fast, maybe I didn't look so good (all right, I was plan old slow, and I was plan old ugly), but I felt great, and it was great to be out there. I almost didn't make it out today-- it was three o'clock before I stopped putting it off and got my ass in gear, and by the second mile I knew I'd done the right thing. Days like this the reward comes later-- but it was too nice not to get out and do it.

One of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite movies is the part in "My Dinner With Andre" when Andre Gregory orders something in French. The Wallace Shawn charactor is clearly intimidated by the very elegant restaurant, and the waiter helpfully murmers, "The quail, very good." Shawn siezes upon this and says that he will have the same. When the dish is brought to the table, he is taken aback. "I didn't realize they'd be so... small," he says. This is how I feel every year when I get paid for my annual teaching gig. Don't get me wrong-- I love to do it, and I would probably do it for free. It is a lot of fun, and it is an honor that the law school asks me to do it. Even so, when I open that envelope I think to myself, "I didn't realize it'd be so... small."

I'm going to take a good sized piece of it down to Fleet Feet tomorrow, and see what they have for an over-pronater this season.

Wine enthusiasm: Try a Malbec from Argentina: I had a bottle of Bodega Salentein Finca El Portillo Malbec, 2001 over the weekend ($8.99 at Premier for a Wine Spectator 90 score!). A red which might be described as the opposite of a soft-feel Merlot. It would make a great everyday red, went great with meatloaf, sesame noodles and a spinach/bacon/parmesan salad. I also bought another Malbec, Don Miguel Gascon Malbec, 2002, for $7.99 for a Wine Spectator 87, but haven't tried it yet.

And while I'm posting: Jagger's account of the 1969 drug bust. (Via The Morning News.)

One Hundred Albums You Must Remove From Your Collection Immediately. I have twelve-- mostly all on vinyl, if that makes a difference. "Bob Marley & the Wailers - Legend
While there's nothing inherently wrong with Bob Marley or the song selection on this greatest hits collection, there is something wrong with the omnipresence of this CD. It is the Hotel California or "Stairway to Heaven" of the reggae world, which means that its fans have ruined the album for everyone, including you, by playing it into the ground. Every Birkenstock-wearing, hackey-sack-playing, REI-shopping bastard in the whole world has played this disc at every party, gathering, and road trip in the history of the world, and I for one have had enough. Now it's my turn to get up and stand up for MY rights. If you don't remove this from your collection, I will."

That should be jaguaro, not jaguro. Sorry.

You must check out the list of the one hundred records you must remove from your collection immediately. I have several. It's pretty harsh! Go to jaguro.org/feature/archives/000007.html.

I did my 54 miles at the Park yesterday with a bad cold. Painfully slow.

After I leave the office today I'm running three laps on the Delaware Park ring road (about 5.4 miles) to remind my body what running more than 5K feels like. I've been on the treadmill and Dave and I have had a few morning 5K runs since the cold snap ended, but treadmill running is deadly boring even if you've got "Holidays in the Sun" blasting through the headphones.

Following up on last Sunday's foray into the buzz bands (which resulted in the purchase of Modern Jazz Quartet's "Django" - - I'm sorry, rock and rollers), I ordered the following from Amazon:

ZZ Top, Greatest Hits - sometimes you just have to hear "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide" . . . or "Tubesnake Boogie" . . . or "Cheap Sunglasses" . . . or "Pearl Necklace"

Supersuckers, Evil Powers of Rock and Roll - everybody needs more Supersuckers

Cracker, Cracker - the only Cracker record I don't own

Doughboys, Playboys and Cowboys: The Golden Years of Western Swing - I think there are about 100 songs on this collection, for $21!

Various Artists, A Tribute to Ray Davies - Jonathan Richman, Fountains of Wayne, Cracker, Queens of the Stone Age and more

I bumped my Saturday workout a bit today-- four miles running, half hour in the pool, along with my usual weekend weight work. I don't know that the swimming is really going to do anything to improve my running, but it is a blast. Because my limit on the treadmill is 5k, I went where the miles are and ran outside, and that's where I learned today's lesson: treadmill miles are one of the things that have been holding me back. It's just not the same as running in the real world, where there is wind (a lot wind, actually) and hills (not so bad, but they were still hills). Sure, going hamster-style is low impact, but that means that when you hit the roads for real, you're that much less well prepared.

Adventures in on-line pharmaceuticals: "Sweet Lord. How many e-mails do the Viagra people have to send me? "73% off VIAGRA!" they scream at me. "We've slashed prices because of the competition!!", which is exactly the kind of thing you want to hear coming from your pharmacist. "dan Theresa amanda Butthead nothing abgrossm steph quebec Doobie!" the e-mails triumphantly conclude, bypassing my spam filter. "sparky jesus1 groin infection!"

I get a hundred of these e-mails a day. Clearly, the online Viagra people know something about my penis that I don't.

So my reasoning went like this: maybe if I bought some of their sweet precious Viagra, they would shut the hell up. As a bonus, I would actually own some Viagra, which I could use to surprise my wife on Valentine's Day. "Oh, darling!" my wife would exclaim. "Twelve hours of painful, nonstop intercourse? You shouldn't have!"' (Via Drink Me.)

The problem-- or a problem-- with downloading individual songs is that it eliminates the pleasure of the obscure song on the second side-- the song that is really your favorite, that you use on mix tapes, that you very seldom hear.

Of course, this is a pleasure that is nearly lost already, because the concept of Side One and Side Two-- and each as a discrete unit is long gone. What remains are bloated, over-stuffed CDs, or, I suppose, I-Pods with ten million billion songs on them, and no context whatsoever.

Oddly enough, though, this is not completely true. Sometimes there is a song on a CD that you overlook that turns out to be a happy little find once you notice it. This happened to me most recently when I was compiling the Hornby disk: the Aimee Mann tune that Hornby has on his list happens to be on the only Aimee Mann side I own, but I'd never really listened to it. It's good, but in the context of the over-all work I'd missed it. (Actually, it's worse than that-- the album, "Whatever" starts off with a very heavily produced sound, and "I've Had It" is much simpler-- it sounded to me like they ran out of money). My point, I guess, is that this sort of serendipity is lost in the download world, and more rare in the CD world than it used to be

Sunday I was at Borders, using the headphones to listen to a bunch of records from the latest critical favorites I've been reading about. I was ready to buy, and I wanted to hear a record that was so good that I had to run out to the car and blast it all the way home. I tried:

The Thrills,

The Shins,

Jet,

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs,

The Dandy Warhols,

The Strokes

and some others. On another day I listened to The White Stripes. I couldn't pull the trigger on any of them, although I almost went for Jet (a nice, but a little too clean Ron Wood/Faces-like guitar vibe), and am still thinking about The White Stripes. I'm not saying that any of them sucked; I like guitar bands, they're guitar bands, and I kind of liked them all, and I'm sure that there are some great singles in among the songs on those albums. Rather, I felt that these bands are mostly re-inventing the wheel, and I already have a nice set of wheels. Maybe that's why downloading individual songs has become the way to go.

Reading about the seizure of the tractor trailer loaded with 1,277 pounds of hydroponic marijuana got me to thinking. First of all, isn't it marvelous that people from so many different races and cultures were able to work together on this project? The Buffalo News reports that the driver of the rig was Shamus MacLeod, 29, and that the three men who allegedly planned to meet him at a Pembroke truck stop, Sing-Chahal Kirphal, Baljinder Kang and Havinderpal Singh were all busted. Talk about your melting pot.

Talking about it over dinner, I mentioned that it was a shame that the reefer was probably going to be destroyed once whatever prosecution takes place is concluded. "Perhaps the government could sell it, and donate the money to a worthy cause," I mused. CLA saw the wisdom of this: "Yeah, like D.A.R.E.," she said.

An excellent essay on "scumbag rock" at The Morning News had me listening to "Stay With Me" over the weekend. It's tempting to think that that there was a ton of that sort of music being pumped out at the time, but really there was never that much, and there was certainly never enough. After the Stones and The Faces who else was there, really? That loose guitar sound with the honkytonk piano was never good enough for too many bands that might have made more great rock'n'roll. Somewhere along the way (I'm looking at you, Pete Townsend) people got the idea that they were supposed to be writing operas, or Making Artistic Statements. Big mistake. Going down that road is what rendered The Kinks' output from this period useless, for one. There was probably no saving Rod Stewart, so I suppose we should be thankful for the worthwhile things that he did produce. Still the only good singer Jeff Beck ever worked with, and the stuff on Mercury as well as the Faces material. Hard to believe that someone with those kind of chops could have become the sort of self parody that is now crooning Cole Porter-- what it illustrates, I'd say, is exactly how important Keith Richards really is. Mick is every bit as much of an asshole as Rod, but the Stones have managed to keep the faith.

Some time back (as I recall, there were ribs involved) we were challenged to list the songs and the sides that were most important to us. It was, and is, an interesting exercise: I got caught up with the songs, and posted an "A" list, an "Honorable Mention" list and a "Must to Avoid". Tom's list of songs and sides followed. Over Christmas I read Nick Hornby's book mining the same vein, and before I passed it along I burned a CD of his song picks. Since then I have been seeking out the songs that constituted these lists, and in doing so I have learned a few things.

Perhaps the most interesting thing, from a legal point of view, is that if you believe that you can download anything you want, then mostly what you want is crap. It is not easy to find music by a lot of rock'n'roll artists-- indeed, I would say that if your taste resembles ours, if you want something, it is still easier to go to Championhip Vinyl and buy it. Indeed, if computer viruses or adware are a concern for you, stay away from any music downloads that you don't pay for. IN other words, the record companies are lying. Somewhere, thousands of dead, ripped off black guys are laughing. They still aren't getting paid, but they are laughing their asses off-- "You believed a record company? Serves you right!"

The other thing that was interesting was that if you listen to the lists your friends compose, instead of just reading them, you learn something. What I mean is, when you read lists like these, your tendency is to focus on the things that you have in common. It will come as no surprise to those who know us that Tom and I both had "So It Goes" on our lists, and that there were going to be songs by Neil Young and the Stones was a foregone conclusion. What songs they'd be, well that was open, but that wasn't what made listening to the list interesting. I can only speak for myself here, but the more I play the CD's I have made of the songs that were on Hornby's and Tom's and my lists, the more I am liking the stuff I was not familiar with. It is certainly notable that we have our, uh, phases-- I have a hunch that "Don't Dream It's Over" and "Cindy Tells Me" were being played at similar times in our lives-- but I was completely unfamiliar with Crowded House before this, and now I have a new favorite.

So c'mon guys-- lets have your lists.

"These are for squares . . . Never touch the stuff myself."

Last night Dave and I watched "Drugstore Cowboy." Love that movie!

Because the gym we go to is the gym for the Hyatt across the street, sometimes we see an interesting out-of-town visitor. I ran on a treadmill next to Jerry Rice once, which was probably the highlight, but today was pretty close. In knots of three and four and five a group of young guys wandered in, joking and shoving each other. At first I thought that they might be some sort of boy band in town for a concert, but it soon became apparent that there were too many of them. In fact, it was the L.A. Kings, fresh off a 3-2 OT loss to Columbus, which ended a seven game winning streak for them. I don't think I've ever seen a team come in to work out, but there they were, and they were serious, if rambunctious, more heavily tattooed than I would have thought, chattering away in a mix of English, French and Russian. One doesn't think of hockey players as being particularly chiseled, mostly because they look so bulky on the ice, but I am here to testify that there wasn't a speck of cereal on these guys. It's a pretty serious gym, so the people there are in good shape, for the most part, but there is all the difference in the world between being a 50 year old lawyer in good shape and being a 27 year old professional athlete (golfers excepted).

Stupid html tricks-- I just learned about the acronym tag. Mouse over "KRAC" and see if it works. (Thanks to librarian.net for the tip.)

Saturday I snowboarded. Sunday I snowboarded. Monday night I played hockey. Tuesday morning I ran 5K with Dave. Tonight I watch the dog show in bed.

If what you mean when you say someone is a "strong swimmer" is that the person can swim all day, than yes, I am a strong swimmer. If your criteria also include: "and not look like he's drowning the whole time," well, then, I'm not your boy. This weekend I managed to get two 5k run/half hour swims in, and I found at the end of today's workout that my form was improving. Swimming laps is mighty dull, but so's running on the treadmill. It is possible that the swimming thing's chief benefit will be that when I wear a singlet I will look somewhat less like a lightbulb with arms-- but that is not an insignificant benefit.

I felt pretty good about Mr. Ed's-- it was not a race where my time dropped, but it was the first race in a long time where my time didn't improve, and taking the conditions into account, I figured it was a good enough performance. As I thought about it, however, I found myself thinking about how I could train to run the next one faster. For a long time that was my training strategy-- run a race a month, and point towards that race. It worked, but I don't want to be seduced into speed-- distance is what I need to be doing. The real lesson of Mr. Ed's is that I need to get outside. Sure it's cold, sure it's icy, but outside is where the miles are.

That said, anybody going to run the Chilly Challenge?

One of the little pleasures of the Chestnut Ridge experience are the delightful Bud Light billboards one passes on the drive back. Surely the Town of Orchard Park can have no objection to these, can it? I mean, if that's what this is all about, I totally see where the Second Circuit is coming from. I love my constitutional right to view women in beer ads.

For future reference, from the Olympia Club out Main to the LaSalle station and back is a ten mile loop.

Ugliest shirt ever. I mean, last year's was notably ugly, but the detail on this one really is remarkable, Sure, the snowman is horrible, but I just realized that he is holding a firehose. The artwork is so bad that the advertising, up and down both sleeves, and a longer list of sponsors on the back than finishers, damn near, are really something special.

I love Mr. Ed's-- what a silly race.