Race Report: Motatapu Ultra Maybe a half-hour earlier, I had thought, “What if nothing really happens during this race, and I don’t have anything to write about?” Then I fell into the river. I guess to be more accurate, I was already in the river, as I had been walking/jogging in it for almost a mile and a half—I just stepped in the wrong spot and fell kind of sideways, up to about my armpits. This was about Mile 21.5 of the Motatapu Ultra, a 52.5 km/32.5 mi race on New Zealand’s Motatapu...
3 days ago • 9 min read
Friday Inspiration 473 I kind of wondered, “is it just me, or is this a really good 3.5-minute film about a guy who bike commutes in Oklahoma City?" It has 46,000 views on YouTube, so I feel like I’m not alone. (video) This post from the Tales From Retail subreddit is about someone bringing an ADMIRABLE amount of coupons to a checkout, but it’s also possibly the most literary thing I’ve read on Reddit, and I am definitely saving it to maybe use in my writing course in the future. At first I I...
9 days ago • 2 min read
Friday Inspiration 472 You may not be a pizza history nerd to the degree that you’ll watch this entire 24-minute video, but I am, and I would just like to point out that around the 4-minute mark, we are introduced to Peter Regas, who is just a regular guy/financial trader whose “passion job” is researching the history of different pizza restaurants around the U.S., which I think is just inspiring. Also, if you believe the first pizzeria in the U.S. was Lombardo’s in New York (I sure did),...
16 days ago • 2 min read
Reminder To Touch Grass The snow felt like it was just going to keep coming, like the news has been, but at least you can ski on snow. I pushed our shovel down the middle of the sidewalk, clearing a path, heaving piles of snow onto the parking strip. I mean, somebody was going to have to do it. I usually shovel the walk of the house next door too, and the other house, the other next door, because I might as well, while I’m out there. Nathan lives four doors down, on the corner, and we don’t...
17 days ago • 1 min read
Friday Inspiration 471 I support Van Neistat on Patreon but I don’t always get around to watching every single video he puts out—which is a bummer, because there’s always a gem somewhere in most of his stuff. I particularly enjoyed the reference to “Eastern laziness vs. Western laziness” in this one, which you could probably alternately call “Eastern relaxing vs. Western relaxing.” (video) I assume that you, like me, have had no less than one thousand instances in your life in which you had a...
23 days ago • 2 min read
Friday Inspiration 470 I have been slowly listening to Oliver Burkeman’s new book,Meditations for Mortals, and a couple of the sections of this short video draw on chapters of the book. I don’t quite know how to describe his work—it’s not quite “anti-productivity,” but he sure makes me feel better about not getting everything on my to-do list done. If you don’t have eight minutes to watch the full thing, I’d recommend watching the short section on “Productivity Debt” starting at about 3:30....
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
"I do." We had not died on the drive there, which felt like a small victory. When we woke up, it was raining in town, freezing a quarter-inch thick on every flat surface, including the street in front of our house, which I’d tentatively tried to walk on and pronounced it a skating rink. People on our local subreddit said it was treacherous out there, stay home. We discussed our options, wasting time and building an anxious feeling that maybe we wouldn’t get to ski at all that day, which would...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Friday Inspiration 469 The first month of my freshman year in college, I borrowed Legend: The Best of Bob Marley and the Wailers from Adam Davis, a new friend from Wapello, Iowa, who lived down the hall from me. It went into a 3-disc CD changer in my dorm room and I believe it stayed in that position until I finally gave it back to Adam at the end of the semester, when I finally bought my own copy. The most reggae I had heard, up until that point, was whatever samples and homages were on...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Friday Inspiration 468 I’m not a road cyclist, and haven’t gone on a proper group ride for years, but damn if this video didn’t make me happy, and also make me subscribe to this guy’s YouTube channel immediately. (video) I love Anne Kadet’s Substack because of her combination of curiosity and her willingness to investigate that curiosity, in New York—for example, her latest post in which she asked people on the subway what they were looking at on their phones(kind of surprising results too)....
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
