While it’s not technically correct to say that a number divided by zero is infinity, in a certain sort of intuitive way it is true. How many miles will I bike before I burn through a gallon of gasoline? Well, I can bike forever and not one drop of gasoline will be consumed. Therefore, I get infinity miles to the gallon. Q.E.D.

The good mileage is not the main reason I’ve gotten so into biking lately, but it is certainly a bonus. Neither are the health benefits my main motivation, though they also are profound. No, the main reason I’ve been riding all over and around the capital of our fair nation is that it’s fun as hell.

These days, though, I’m catching myself getting just a bit smug on my daily commute. It takes me about 30 minutes to drive to work in traffic, though it’s only a six mile drive. Lights and traffic make it a chore, partly because DC has never heard of traffic sensors. Every single light is on a timer. Even if no car has approached 16th street from some minor side street in seventeen hours, that side street a green light every 45 seconds anyway. The 65 cars lined up on 16th street wait the 30 seconds, just in case a driver should happen to drive down that street someday, and then they continue on their way until they hit the next red light a couple of blocks down. Hurry up and wait. Hurry up and wait. I hate driving in this town.

I can bike to work in about 35 minutes. Part of that speed comes from being able to blow off red lights and stop signs when no cars are coming, as God intended for us all to do, and part comes from being able to hop up on the sidewalk and circumvent the long lines of cars waiting at stoplights. I’m usually the first vehicle at the intersection even if I pulled up last. Sometimes I have private moments of gloating when the same car passes me at several sequential stop lights. “See, buddy?” I find myself thinking, “You should ditch the car and ride with me. It’s just as fast and a hell of a lot less annoying.”

Now with gas prices as they are, I have another reason to gloat. As the poor souls who bought Lincoln Navigators and Ford Expeditions trudge down the road, watching the gas gauge dip visibly every block, I pedal along for free. I’ve filled up my car once since the beginning of June. It’s due for another sometime soon, but not until I next get in it, which could be late next week or even later. It only needs a fill-up now because I made two trips to and from Dulles airport a couple of weeks back. Instead of burning expensive gasoline, clogging up the air with my exhaust and clogging up the roads with a 1.5-ton,15-foot by six-foot steel contraption that transmits but a single piece of human cargo, I zip along on a 21-pound, two-foot by six-foot vehicle that runs on body fat. What’s not to love?

Read More . . .

Exactly one month to the day after our return from Italy, the photographic documentation is ready for viewing. We took over 300 pictures, and I have painstakingly winnowed that count down to a hundred or so that really capture the essence of the trip. I diligently cropped and edited them. I hope you appreciate all the work that has gone into the presentation.

1. I bought the newest version of Photoshop Elements, since my old version won't run in Leopard.
2. I cropped, edited, improved contrast and saturation, corrected camera distortion, rotated, fill-flashed, and otherwise improved the pictures for your viewing pleasure. But they still maintain that in-the-moment rawness that you crave.
3. I installed Gallery (open source photo gallery software) on the website to add new functionality (but an inferior aesthetic) to the photo page. However, this is a tradeoff for the greatly reduced amount of time I have to spend manually editing HTML and tweaking CSS code. And you can view the pictures in multiple resolutions.
4. I have painstakingly written terse and cursory captions for over half of the photos.

So I hope you enjoy the presentation. It is here: Paul, Corinne, and Thea's Italian Adventure 2008.

I would like to think that I’m a pretty smart guy. I feel smart. I know a lot of things, when I can remember what they are. I come up with clever solutions to complicated problems. I have read a lot of books.

But no amount of being smart seems to help me with my most profound shortcoming: I’m kind of dumb. You might say absent minded, or forgetful. There is a “special place,” whose whereabouts I know not, that beckons me with a siren’s call whenever my conscious attention is not needed here and now. I just disappear.

Often it happens in my down time, when my mind gets all wandery. Or when I’m driving, especially when I’m listening to music. I’m justing singing along, playing air drums, and suddenly notice I’ve missed my exit. Or that I’m driving my standard route to work even though it’s Saturday and I meant to go to Trader Joe’s, which is in the opposite direction.

Today, for instance, I was driving to the airport to catch a flight to Albuquerque. I’m going out to visit C., who is studying the Navajo language on the reservation in Arizona. I put on Blood on the Tracks, and was so busy trying to decipher the lyrics to “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” that I missed my exit. And it’s not just that I missed my exit. I forgot that Interstate 66 doesn’t actually go the airport. You have to take the Dulles toll road, the exit for which is several miles before you hit 66 when you’re on the outer loop of the beltway.

Heading west on 66, and having an inkling that I had made a mistake, I called C. to ask.

“Hi, hon. I miss you, can’t wait to see you tonight when I land. By the way, does 66 go to Dulles?”

“No, you have to take the Dulles toll road. That goes to Dulles. That’s why they call it the Dulles toll road.”

“Crap.”

Read More . . .

This year’s international adventure will be in Italy. We leave next week. C’s sister has been there for a semester, and having finished her school obligation, is currently wwoofing in some little village somewhere. We’re flying over next week to join her for two weeks of traveling about.

We have a nice circuitous route planned which gives us ample time for visiting archeological sites, seeing art and architectural what-have-ya’s, not to mention a few days of quality beach time on the Mediterranean (my favorite place so far in the whole world). We’re taking our snorkels. We’re taking advantage of cheap RyanAir flights booked well in advance. We’re spending one night on a ferry from Sardinia to Naples. It’s got everything. The only thing it doesn’t have is a whole summer. Damn this whole “vacation time” thing.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about No Country for Old Men. I went to see it for the second time on Sunday, to give the subtleties of the dialogue and screenplay a second chance to rattle around in my brain. Simply haunting. I’ve always dug the Coen brothers, but this one takes it to a whole new level.

I don’t have anything new to say about the film, at least not now, at midnight on a weeknight, but I did want to share the beautiful Carter Burwell song that plays as the credits roll. Once the song started, I decided to sit through the credits until I saw what it was. Only two songs are listed, one of them a Mexican traditional, and this isn’t one of them.

Carter himself (here) tells us that there are only 16 minutes of music in the movie, almost six of which are this as-the-credits-roll song. A little searching turns up the song title and artist, but finding more than the short excerpt he posts on his site is very difficult. It’s not on iTunes, and there doesn’t seem to be a soundtrack for sale. In the end, I dug through the HTML around his flash player and found the link to the mp3, so you can listen to it without having to pay the $9 to see the movie again. Although that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

The song is called “Blood Trail.” As it fades in, you think it’s just someone walking through the sand. Then you realize it’s a bit too regular to be footsteps, but you’re still thinking about Tom Ed Bell’s dream to pay much attention. If you stand up and leave right away, you’re probably out of the theater before the guitar, bass, and drums come in around the 1:45 mark. That would be your loss.

Of course, if I’d just done a little more diligent research, I would have come across a much better picture of the Hoff, one more suited to a pet adoption website. Maybe they would have left it up just a bit longer.