Craziness

So an overpass melted near the Bay Bridge due to a tanker truck fire. Many of you will remember it as the bridge Dustin Hoffman drove across (in the wrong direction) to pursue Katharine Ross at Berkeley in The Graduate. I might not have, had I not seen that movie 4 years in a row at Stanford Sunday Flicks. But I digress. The truck driver suffered second-degree burns, but fortunately, no one else was hurt. Video here.

Just when you though the Bay Area commute couldn't get any more onerous . . .

Where have I been?

And how did I let two weeks go by without a post?

I just did my third and final 20-mile training run for the Cleveland Marathon, and it did not kill me. So I know I'll be able to finish the thing. Now I'm on the couch, full of Gatorade (yuck) and fresh strawberries (mmmmmmmmmmm).

While it is a blatant publicity stunt, I'm glad that Gov. Ted Kulongoski spent a week making a show of living off of food stamps. Maybe I'm just cynical and he got invited to no fancy dinner parties during that week, and the fridge and pantry in the Governor's mansion weren't stocked to outlast the Siege of Leningrad. Still, I'm glad he drew attention to the hunger problem that is so dire in Oregon as well as so many other places. I knew there was a reason I voted for Kulongoski in that last primary before I left Oregon. He's a good kid.

I was of course sad to hear that Mstislav Rostropovich is no longer with us, the man Yevtushenko called "the Human Cello" in his novel about the 1991 Soviet Coup whose name escapes me. As a one time cellist and a lifelong Soviet history buff, I would have loved to sit with him for an hour and listen. He struck me as a less grumpy, less reactionary Solzhenitsyn.

Oh, and Boris Yeltsin--totally missed that one too. Nothing I can add to the voluminous obituaries, really, except that I remember being a college student in Moscow right after his reelection in '96, when he disappeared from the public eye for many months while recovering from a quintuple bypass. I also remember him winning the runoff election by giving a cabinet-level post to the third-place finisher in the first round of voting, Alexander Lebed, only to fire him not long after the runoff. Complicated legacy, democracy and free markets combined with rule by presidential decree and rampant corruption, blah blah blah.

Unbreakable

Did my second 20-mile run today, and feel strangely pain free. I might be getting the hang of this business. And most importantly, no chafing this time. And I'm off for warmer climes in mere days--WOOHOO!

Floating nuclear reactors? Seriously, who greenlit this? Sigh. Russia's stellar environmental record continues. I hope none of them, you know, get bumped or sink or experience any of the other stuff that can go wrong at sea. They might not have a Clean Water Act with a citizen suit provision over there . . .

At last, a scandal in which the American public can get interested:

One that just about everyone can understand. Paul Wolfowitz is in trouble for giving his girlfriend a huge raise and a promotion at the World Bank, something that's against the rules, not to mention against common sense. Some of you may remember Wolfowitz as the guy combing his hair in the news feed at the beginning of Fahrenheit 9/11, or perhaps as the Deputy Secretary of Defense in the first George W. Bush administration, a principal architect of the Bush Doctrine which has yet to lead to the flowering of peace and democracy in Iraq.

It's sunny and beautiful here today. I'm beginning to feel marathon strong. I continue to covet a Vespa, although it won't do me much good out here.

Too many words on here. Here's a funny visual:


toothpastefordinner.com

Wow, just wow.

There have been eleven earthquakes near Kaktovik this week. (Sorry--couldn't find a non-registration version of the story.) Kaktovik is the easternmost village in my home region, the North Slope, and seismic activity is a rarity.

It's also right by ANWR--anyone still want to argue that oil drilling there is completely safe? That is, if the myriad spills, pipeline leaks, and shoddy oversight by regulators on the North Slope isn't enough to discourage more drilling, let alone drilling on protected land.

UPDATE: Here is a nonsubscription version of the story. And props to the 2 profs who taught my "Natural Hazards and Human Survival" class at Stanford--it might've been a way for a liberal arts major to knock out a science requirement, but I learned something, and I still think earthquakes and volcanoes are cool.

I specifically said

that Kurt Vonnegut is not allowed to die. Nuts. But it wasn't the smoking that did him in.

Know how I know it's spring? I'm running in shorts and my legs are covered with mud from the knee down when I get home. The mud has kind of a Jackson Pollock look on me. It did snow today, but it's still shorts weather for the road work.

Again with the arms race? It wasn't a good idea then, and it isn't a good idea now. First we expand NATO, originally designed to protect us from the Russians, right up to Russia's borders, then we talk about missile bases in Eastern Europe? Maybe I'm just not smart enough to see what security that gives us.