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​Friday Inspiration 519​
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A heads-up: Registration opened for my Running To Stand Still writing + trail running course on Tuesday, and we have a $300 Early Registration discount if you sign up by midnight MST on Saturday January 17 (that’s tomorrow). If you like the sound of six days of mellow trail running, talking about writing and creativity with a group of fun people, and hanging out in the mountains of Montana, here’s the link for more info.

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This [professional enduro mountain biker] guy waited for McDonald’s to close to see if he could ride his bike for 24 hours straight in the drive-thru, an endeavor I respect immensely. (video) (thanks, Devin)

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From the “key takeaways” at the top of this article: 1) Scientists have identified a stone wall nearly 400 feet long, lying 30 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. 2) It was built by hunter-gatherers more than 7,000 years ago, though its purpose remains uncertain. (via Kottke)

In 1983, artist David Hammons made a bunch of very round snowballs and sold them for $1 alongside other street vendors in Cooper Square in New York, and now I have to watch the documentary about him because the trailer at the end of this piece about his “Blizz-aard Ball Sale” looks fantastic. (he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page!)

My friend Nick Triolo mentioned this to me at least three times (twice in person and once in his Substack) before I finally got my act together and started listening to it: Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, by Jad Abumrad, who you may be familiar with from his fantastic Dolly Parton’s America podcast from 2019 or his other, also quite successful podcast that he did up until 2022, Radiolab.
​Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube​

As I understand this (from reading about it on WebCurios), this is basically a live visualization of plane traffic for every airport in the world, made possible by three different websites and a bunch of computer magic my brain is too small to understand but WOW is it fun to click around a little bit. Kind of fun to type in your local/favorite airport and see what's going on right now.

I follow the r/FoundPaper subreddit, and there’s often some interesting/mysterious stuff in there. This is less mysterious, but kind of a window into a nightclub’s operating instructions for when Carrie Underwood made an appearance there.

I met Evan Ward on our 2022 Freeflow Institute writing workshop (when we sea kayaked around the San Juan Islands in pre-season temperatures and semi-dicey weather), and I’m not saying the writing course necessarily had anything to do with this piece Evan wrote about volunteering to help people fix bicycles, but I loved it, both for the narrative and the reminder that sometimes doing simple things for people can make the world feel a little less crazy.

I forgot to mention this last week and we’re now halfway through the first month of the year, but if you’re a Strava user, I started this club a few years ago called “100 Grand,” and it’s basically for people who track how much they go uphill. If you get to 100,000 vertical feet (in one sport, or all sports) in a year, I send you a sticker. If you want one. And if you get 400,000 vertical feet, I will send you four stickers. I like the metric of vertical feet (or meters) because it has nothing to do with performance—just reminding yourself to go uphill every once in a while. Anyway, here’s the link to the clubif you’d like to partake for the next 349 days.

Finally: I recorded this My Favorite Things podcast interview with Andy Pearson, ultrarunner, podcast host, and VP of creative at Liquid Death, in May 2024, and I finally published it. We talk about Back to the Future Part II, Calvin and Hobbes, Andrew WK, On the Road, and The Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls in America. There’s some crazy stuff in this episode, but the craziest thing to me was when Andy mentioned that he once had a co-worker who “didn’t like music” (!?!?!?!)