11.24.03
Utrecht
On Saturday I went to Utrecht, home town of Marrije Schaake, the wonderful English-language book blogger who had sacrificed a precious day out of [Inter]national Novel Writing Month to show me around her city.
Utrecht is about half an hour's train ride south of Amsterdam, and everyone from Amsterdam seemed to be going to Utrecht with me. Holland has zippy bright yellow trains that look just right under the leaden November skies, and I enjoyed my first glimpse of the Dutch countryside, squeezed in for five minutes between endless Amsterdam suburbs and endless Utrecht suburbs. It was all misty green fields with grazing cattle, a sight that would have looked just like a steam-pressed Vermont if not for the occasional windmill, the total absence of orange plaster reindeer, and the stately canal that ran along the railway, with banana-shaped barges each pushing along a fearsome bow wave.
Utrecht looks like it was built in two phases - the first sometime in the seventeenth century, and the second in 1962. I was particularly taken with a somewhat Orwellian building along the town perimiter that looked like it was being boarded by a flying saucer - the result of an art competition that made everyone so happy they decided to keep the look, creepy intergalactic al-Qaeda connotations be damned.
Not to be outdone, central Utrecht countered with a building that had come down with some kind of architectural Ebola. One day, the mystery of what people spiked the water with at 1960's planning board meetings will be exposed, and then perhaps there will be justice.
But the rest of old Utrecht was wonderful. I was particularly taken with the canals, which have a kind of landing along one side and doors that lead directly to house cellars across the streets, so that goods can be moved directly from the boats, without having to hoist anything into the street.
The Dutch have this genius for making good use of available space - the whole country reminds me of one of those tiny but chic Manhattan studio apartments where the bed, kitchen, and most of the major furniture seem to fold away into the walls when not in use.
Our first stop in Utrecht was the Centraal Museum, which has a number of very nice paintings and an amazing 12th century canal boat that had been perfectly preserved in the local muck until someone accidentally dug a hole above it in the 1930's. Marrije told me that a pair of Roman boats had also recently been found (and when I say 'boat' in all these cases, I mean something that would easily fill a hockey rink). I would love to know what this part of the world must have looked like then, right on the edges of the Roman Empire, with great canal boats plying their trade around the countryside. It was warmer then, too - a veritable toga climate. But I guess you can never go back.
The Centraal Museum has a quirky collection of paintings - some Pink-Floydy surrealist stuff, some forgettable modern pieces, but also a whole slew of wonderful pictures from earlier times (17th-19th century). I particularly liked one room, where they had hung pictures on a transparent central divider, so you could see both the front and the back of each canvas with its multitude of museum stickers and collector's stamps.
One of the best exhibits was a period dollhouse from the 1600's [?? - I am terrified in advance of all the corrections Marrije is going to send in], which had been commissioned for The Most Spoiled Child in Holland. Everything was done to scale, in overwhelming detail, including miniature paintings special-ordered from well-known painters of the time, delftware, furniture, kitchen tools, carpets, fabrics, tapestries, and hand-sewn books. Not only was it neat to see the craftsmanship that went into the dollhouse, but it showed that all of the artifacts we were seeing in austere isolation - pictures, porcelain, decorative art - had originally been displayed in a huge overwhelming ostentatious heap. I am impressed by this idea of turning art into kitsch through sheer accretion.
In a typical touch, the dollhouse had a little flashlight in a plexiglas holder next to it, so you could peer into its depths. Little conveniences like this pop up everywhere in Holland. The country has user interfaces down pat, with the sole exception of the mystifying Amsterdam doors whose top and bottom halves operate independently. I got a letterbox flap right in the goolies the first time I tried to enter my Amsterdam hotel.
Our second stop was the Universiteitmuseum, a marvelous brains-in-formaldehyde institution with all kinds of horrific specimens floating colorless in jars, motley deformed baby skeletons, and an awesome array of medical and period dental tools that made you clutch your mouth in reflexive pain. Particularly arresting was the collection of wax body part replicas of various skin diseases, which Marrije pointed out was the most useful way to teach diagnosis in the days before color photography. The mold of a penis with second-stage syphillis belongs on the front cover of any "Sex Can Wait!" curriculum.
After a final glance at a very earnest exhibit on modern dental retainers (complete with a 'build your own retainer' interactive table with wire and pliers), we headed out back to the Old Botanical Garden, and from there into the center of the old town.
Utrecht is bustling, old, and very pretty. The central landmark is two thirds of the Domkerk, a beautiful 14th century church that lost its nave in a 1674 hurricane. Rather than rebuild, the locals patched up the nave-shaped hole with bricks, and so the church and its tower remain separated by a nice plaza.
I walked around Utrecht in a pleasant tourist reverie, the kind you fall into when someone trustworthy is ferrying you around an unknown place. The town was packed with shoppers, and the store windows were doing their best to attract them, with beautiful displays of marzipan fruits, antiques, and somewhat mystifying juxtapositions like a giant wooden clog with carrots in it.
As we stood in line for Italian sandwiches in one store, Marrije casually turned to me and said "So do you know about Sinterklaas?". Suppressing the urge to ask if she meant Santa Claus, I confessed that I had never heard of the chap.
A shocked hush descended over the store. The shop girl stared at me and tittered. Long seconds passed in silence. We all stood around the vast chasm of my ignorance, looking down. Somewhere a baby started to cry.
Safely back on the streets, Marrije gave me a crash course on the Dutch St. Nicholas tradition.
Sinterklaas lives somewhere in Spain, with his trusty sidekick Zwarte Piet (Black Peter), who presents all sorts of thorny racial problems. Once a year, Sinterklaas hitches up his horse and heads for Holland, to the great delight of the country's children. To hear the nice website tell it:
In the first weeks of November, Sinterklaas gets on his white horse, [loyal Sinterklaas sidekick Black] Peter ("Piet") swings a huge sack full of gifts over his shoulder, and the three of them board a steamship headed for the Netherlands. Around mid-November they arrive in a harbour town - a different one every year - where they are formally greeted by the Mayor and a delegation of citizens. Their parade through town is watched live on television by the whole country and marks the beginning of the "Sinterklaas season".
Sinterklaas and Black Peter roam the Netherlands for a few weeks, deputizing assistants (the English-language Amsterdam Times had a headline yesterday that read "Sinterklaas Assistants Assaulted") to help them cover the entire country. Zwarte Piet roams around ducking down chimneys (one reason he is so zwarte) and checking to see if the kids have left a treat for Sinterklaas's horse in their shoes (hence the carrots-in-clogs display above). If he finds a treat, Piet swaps it for a gift.
On December 5th, the whole country celebrates the holiday:
] Most places of business close a bit earlier than normal. The Dutch head home to a table laden with the same traditional sweets and baked goods eaten for St. Nicholas as shown in the 17th-century paintings of the Old Masters. Large chocolate letters - the first initial of each person present - serve as place settings. They share the table along with large gingerbread men and women known as "lovers" . A basket filled with mysterious packages stands close by and scissors are at hand. Early in the evening sweets are eaten while those gathered take turns unwrapping their gifts and reading their poems out loud so that everyone can enjoy the impact of the surprise. The emphasis is on originality and personal effort rather than the commercial value of the gift, which is one reason why Sinterklaas is such a delightful event for young and old alike.�
(There's another good explanatory site on Sinterklaas, as well as another blogger's view of the Belgian version of the tradition, both worth a visit)
Not five minutes after Marrije dropped me off at the train station for my return trip to Amsterdam, I ran into an entire band of Zwarte Pieten, white guys in blackface playing New Orleans-style funeral jazz as they danced their way through the pavilion, and boy was I grateful for the context.
Back in Amsterdam, I could suddenly see Sinterklaas artifacts everywhere. They had been there all along, but I just didn't notice. I wonder what else I'm missing?
A big, big thanks to Marrije for her hospitality!
11.21.03
A Morning In Iceland
I knew that those troublemaker sunspots were rotating back into view this week, but I was still afraid to get my hopes up too high. The gate agent saw the geeky glint in my eye and was kind enough to reassign me to a window seat on the northern side of the plane. I was going to try to see the aurora.
My last image of America was a silent television channel showing images of Michael Jackson and saying something about an arrest warrant. I thought to myself "boy am I glad I don't have to deal with this". I was heading to Iceland, and I estimated the chances of Bjork being put on trial for child molestation as nil. It was one of many reasons I was glad to be leaving the country.
What finally convinced me to make this journey was this prospect of spending nine hours in Iceland on a layover. I figured I could get off the early morning plane, ride into Reykjavik, and be back in time for my afternoon flight to Amsterdam. I had always wanted to visit Iceland, but since it comes right after Japan on the list of most expensive tourist destinations, I figured I would never get to go. Now I had the perfect chance to conduct a surgical tourism strike - in and out before the authorities would have time to attach the suction hose to my wallet.
It was a spectacularly clear night over New England, the kind where you can see every city and major road as a little string of interconnected lights, intricate and beautiful. Down on the ground, it's all WalMarts, Kwik Stops and cars blocked in traffic, but from twenty thousand feet it looks like jewelry.
I got my aurorae. The light shows started somewhere past Labrador. I had seen the northern lights from a plane once before (flying home from Cincinatti), but then they were only the faintest glow over the northern horizon. The only way I recognized them was because they slowly changed shape over time, with an occasional rapid flickering, like a computer screen filmed by a TV camera. These lights were unmistakable. There was a distinct green ribbon snaking from west to east, and though my mind knew that it had to be a hundred miles above us, a trick of perspective made it look like it was at the same altitude as the plane. As I watched, the ribbon intensified and diminished - parts of it growing so bright they began to show colors, and then dimming back down again. Above the ribbon were long streamers of green light, whizzing around.
Like an idiot I ignored the spectacle to eat my dinner, and of course it was gone when I went to look again. It stayed gone for an hour or so, but as we crossed Greenland the ribbon came back, much brighter this time, and with two of its friends. They looked for all the world like they were above, below, and at the same height as the plane, and all three were wriggling intensely. Big snakes playing in the sky. The people in front of me were huddled at their window, too, which made me happy. The plane jumped around and shuddered, but I had found the cure for turbulence.
Iceland is disturbingly new. I don't mean that the buildings and habitations are disturbingly new, although there is not much that survives from before the nineteenth century, but rather that the land itself, the stuff you walk on, doesn't have a good track record of just lying around and being there. My own corner of Vermont is built from sediment and sludge that has eroded off the Appalachians since they were Himalaya-class mountains two hundred million years ago. By contrast, the lava flows near Reykjavik date back to 1266. They're practically still warm.
The country has two hundred thousand earthquakes a year, most of them undetectable, and it's slowly spreading apart. Most of the population shares our fondness for the North American plate, and is westbound, but the lion's share of the island (including the bit where Bjork lives) is heading east with Europe.
Everything about Icelandic geography screams 'Under Construction - Please Come Back Later!', but the Icelanders are a stubborn and resourceful people, and seem perfectly content to wait it out while the various volcanoes do their business and the lichen gingerly get to work turning the rock into something approaching soil. So what if the locals have to make fenceposts and houses from (Siberian!) driftwood, and import whatever wood doesn't float in of its own accord? And so what if the occasional polar bear also floats in, arriving hungry from Greenland on an ice floe, and has to be destroyed before it makes a dent in the population?
Iceland has about half as many people as Vermont - somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000, - spread in a ring shape around an empty interior. The jewel in the ring is at Reykjavik and the adjacent penninsula, where half of the population lives. The interior is so desolate that even Icelanders won't live there, which is pretty much the definition of "uninhabitable".
Keflavik airport sits on a penninsula about half an hour's drive west of Reykjavik, the capital. If I have my facts straight, the airport dates from the Second World War, when the government looked at a map, looked at its census figures, and asked the British to invade them before the Germans did. The airport had an illustrious Cold War history, too, and now serves as a critical source of smoked salmon and cable sweaters for air passengers on the transatlantic route.
I arrived a little past six in the morning, exchanged fifty dollars for some Icelandic funny money and got straight on the bus to Reykjavik. It was pitch black out, so there was nothing to see on the ground (daylight later on didn't change that, the area turned out to be a lunar landcape of rock). But my eyes were glued to the window, because the unearthly light show in the sky was still going on. If you have never seen the northern lights, the best description I can come up with is 'enormous things happening quickly'. The still photographs don't convey the rapid, strangely biological way the aurora pulses and dances around you. It catches your attention.
The bus let us out at a hotel in the middle of a gigantic, empty field. This field turned out to be another airport - the domestic one in the heart of Reykjavik - and there was about a mile of open ground between me and the city. It was eight o'clock and there was not the barest hint of dawn. The ground was slippery with frost. It was not an auspicious beginning, but then again I had made it to Iceland, the northern lights were out in all their beauty, and God in his providence had given me a functioning pair of legs and a decent hat. I spotted a footpath up ahead and, feeling like MacGyver, verified that it headed north by looking up and finding Polaris. Naturally the star was almost directly overhead. "You're about as far north as it gets, you dumb Polack!" it said.
The Chicago Tribune used to have a great columnist named Mike Royko, who was an institution at the paper for many years before his death. One of my favorite columns of his described a practical joke he and his fishing buddies once played on a gullible friend. They waited for him to fall asleep at about ten o'clock, quietly reset his watch and all the clocks in the fishing cabin to be four hours fast, and woke him up at midnight to head out onto the water. They played dumb while he slowly began to panic, as hour after hour passed with no hint of the sun. They managed to keep a poker face until he stood in the boat and started screaming "WHERE IS THE SUN?!?" at the eastern horizon.
I felt exactly like that guy on my morning in Iceland. On the bus, I had been anxious that the sun would rise before I could go out and look at the aurora from a dark field, but I needn't have worried. It took me an hour to cover the first mile, mainly because I kept staring up at the beautiful sky, and there was no hint of sunrise. The aurora brightened and faded every ten minutes or so, until suddenly Someone turned the switch up to 11, and the northern sky just ignited. It was no longer a green light, but sheet of white, yellow and red covering the entire horizon. I stared at this grand finale, took a useless picture, and decided when it ended that I had better find my way to a hot beverage before I froze in place.
I wandered into the city at nine o'clock, with now the barest hint of blue on the eastern horizon. People were bustling about their morning business - doctors in well-lit offices doing paperwork in their lab coats, moms bustling well-bundled children off to school. A whole bunch of young kids were playing soccer on a playground. It was a disorienting sight - my body clock felt like it was two in the morning, the sky certainly reinforced that impression - and so I had to resist the urge to yell at the kids to go home and go to bed.
For all the darkness and high latitude, it was only a touch below freezing, and I warmed up as I walked along. I was tired from lack of sleep and walking so far in the pitch dark, so I started to get a little slap happy. Walking past a road called the Hringbraut, I spent the next ten minutes muttering:
Hringbraut keeps falling on my head
But that doesn't mean my eyes will soon be turning red
The Icelandic language looks like a bad night at the Scrabble board, so any bit of writing proved entertaining in my altered state. I read off road signs, parking regulations, and when I got bored with the Hringbraut song went back to repeating a public health slogan I had seen at the airport - "Smokkur fyrir okkur" - which is Icelandic for "Take care - with condoms!"
At half past nine I was in Reykjavik's pretty shopping district, which is strung up with white Christmas lights. Delivery men were running about, but to my horror all the cafés were closed. The only places open seemed to be sweet shops, all of them sporting a big Coca-Cola sign. I walk along down to the water, where it was now bright enough to clearly see the great mountains across the bay. The harbor was beautiful, with dozens of fishing boats and ships of all sizes moored in the still water.
Wherever it is that people of Reykjavik go to eat a tasty, hot breakfast, I did not find that place. The best I could find was a gas station, where I bought a cup of something masquerading as coffee, and headed back into the chill morning. A few more blocks brought me to the large square pond in the middle of the city. It was a pretty kind of park, with row houses along one edge, and a big modernist building anchoring the downtown side. A large number of ducks and swans were swimming in what was essentially an ice bath. Other ducks were standing on patches of invisible solid ice (hallelujah!). I had to admire the powers of denial or self-discipline it takes for a migratory bird to sit in ice water at sixty four degrees north latitude in November, thinking "no worries".
Ten o'clock, and I could see! The sun wouldn't actually clear the horizon until eleven, but I knew it was officialy daylight because the streetlights winked out.
It wasn't terribly cold out - a mere thirty one degrees - but I had a heavy backpack on, and however charming the city, the prospect of spending another five hours pacing through Reykjavik was disheartening. I decided to take the advice of the woman who sold me my ticket into town and go catch the eleven o'clock bus to something called the "Blue Lagoon" - a geothermal spa from where you could continue directly to the airport in time for an afternoon flight. It sounded like a tourist trap, but it also sounded like a warm place where I could sit down, so I made my way back to the desolate bus stop.
The bus driver turned out to be a very amiable man who looked spookily like John Ashcroft. We climbed in a microbus, picked up a French couple shivering back in town, and then headed off to the Blue Lagoon.
Ashcroft was an excellent, low-key guide, and pointed out interesting sights like the President's house and the stretch of road where we were most likely to see an arctic fox (there is a hen coop nearby that the fox is apparently fond of). Leaving the westernmost of the towns adjacent to Reykjavik, we emerged onto a featureless field of rock - it looked like the surface of the moon. Up ahead stood an enormous factory built on an empty lava field. This turned out to be an aluminum plant - power is so cheap here that it's profitable for Iceland to import Australian ore just to smelt it into metal.
As we neared the Blue Lagoon (visible as a giant cloud of steam halfway up the ridgeline) Ashcroft explained that there are three things cheap in Iceland - water, air, and electricity (though I bet you could also get a good price on igneous rock). To make power in Iceland, you just have to dig a hole, stop when you hit superheated sea water, and build a geothermal plant on top. The Blue Lagoon, fancy name nothwithstanding, is basically a repurposed runoff pond for one such geothermal plant. The pressurized water comes out of the ground at 240 degrees Centigrade, but is cooled to a more endurable 38 degrees before reaching the bathing area, to avoid poaching the patrons.
The lagoon has a funny origin. When the power plant was built, water was just dumped onto the ground, where it was supposed to percolate back down through the porous lava. But instead it formed a little hot lake, which quickly became an illicit swimming spot for local teens. When teens with skin problems started suddenly being cured of psoriasis and other serious afflictions, it naturally attracted some attention. After much interrogation, one of the teens owned up to taking nighttime swims in the runoff pond, and a great spa was born. The water was mildly curative, full of beneficial minerals and blue-green algae, and it probably didn't hurt that the site was ten miles from the international airport.
The spa complex is nicely built - as you approach it, you see enormous clouds of steam billowing far into the air, much like they do from Middlebury College's ridiculously ill-designed Center for the Arts, which burns through $800,000 worth of heating oil every winter (oops - that's confidential!).
The approach to the spa is through a kind of deep trench through the lava, which is foamy and dark and looks very lethal, making you reflect uneasily on the recentness of its arrival. The spa itself is spacious and full of nice thoughtful touches - you can rent a swimsuit (because who thinks to pack one, to Iceland?) and you are given a little waterproof bracelet with a tag on it that lets you in the main swimming area and also serves as an electronic key for whatever locker you choose to leave your stuff in. The locker rooms even have hair dryers, although none of the men I was with wanted to look like a sissy and actually use one.
After changing and showering, you walk out into the freezing cold and yelp your way into the enormous pool of blue water, which is four feet deep and covers at least an acre. It's like being in a hot bath, assuming your tub is lined with volcanic rock and is full of Norwegians. The water is an opaque sort of turquoise and quite salty. A lotion-like substance precipitates out of the water in places, and it is sold by the spa staff as an expensive cosmetic cream. To me, it felt more like pond muck back in summer camp, squeezed between my toes. But I notice that my feet have been lovely ever since.
Once you leave the spa, you walk straight into a restaurant. The atmosphere is convival, Norwegians notwithstanding, and the room even lets in great portions of sunlight (stingily administered through a notch between two volanoes on the horizon).
I soaked for an hour, until my hands had turned raisin-like with wrinkles, and then stood for another ten minutes under the waterfall, where it felt like hot rocks were being dropped on my shoulders. Going back to the airport, I was a transformed man. Clean, relaxed, smelling very faintly of volcanic sulfur, I had a quick meal of square meat on dark bread and then fell asleep at the gate, waking just long enough to get myself to the Netherlands.
If you are flying to Europe for any reason, you would be silly not to check out Iceland Air. Just like Vegas, where they make layovers longer to maximize passenger gambling, Iceland Air tries to give you long enough between planes to zip over to the Blue Lagoon (my nine-hour layover was an unusually long exception), and the tour staff is used to whisking passengers there and back between flights. It costs a whopping $25, on top of the $304 (all taxes included) I paid for a round trip ticket between Boston and Amsterdam. Instead of spending eight hours in a plane, you can have two shorter flights with a hot bath in between, you can see Iceland, and you can arrive in Europe in the early evening, just in time to check in for a good night's sleep.
Mmm... sleep...
6:57 PM11.19.03
Holland or Bust
Tomorrow morning I leave for Boston, where I'll have a fish supper with the curious frog (curious enough to slog all the way out to Logan!) before boarding a late evening flight to Reykjavik. From there on, it's another evening flight to Amsterdam, and from there a string of adventures that I hope to write all about on the site.
My girlfriend has lent me her digital camera, I've got a fresh new battery in the laptop, and I have firmly vowed not to touch email or the web except for purposes of updating this site. So for the next two weeks, this will be a write-only medium. If you send me email and get no response, please don't take offense - I'll face the onslaught on the long flight back home, December 2nd, and answer every message like a man.
12:04 AM11.12.03
John Titor On Wheels!
The John Titor story has now popped up in a BMX discussion forum. Read the thread and decide for yourself if these guys wear helmets.
I'm curious about how often specialist forums get invaded by these kinds of off-topic ideas, and more generally about the symbiosis between blogs and discussion boards. My own sense (based on my log files) is that the latter have a ton more readers, but I don't know where to find hard data.
There's a thousand (really pompous) PhD dissertations waiting to happen in the space connecting IRC, blogs, email, mailing lists, discussion boards, and the commercial Web. Bioinformatics tends to be about using computational techniques to model real-world ecosystems and analyze genomes. I wonder if any biologists are going in the other direction, and using traditional techniques to study the ecosystems that form online?
If you know of such efforts, drop me a line.
9:56 PM11.11.03
Armistice Day
The War to End All Wars ended eighty five years ago today. One and a third million dead in France, a million and two thirds in Germany. Seven hundred thousand lost in Great Britain, in Russia nearly two million, in Romania two hundred thousand. Seventy thousand Canadians, one hundred thousand Americans, a quarter million Grecians Greeks, a third of a million Turks (who themselves exterminated a million and a half Armenians).
In a century full of evil, the Great War still manages to stagger by the magnitude of its futilty. Its bitter fruit defined the rest of the century - the Russian Revolution, the Second World War, modern industrialized genocide (pioneered in Turkey, perfected in Germany and the Soviet Union), total war.
Even the holiday itself is sullied. The decision to end the war on a nice string of numbers (11:11 11/11) meant more soldiers had to die. The armies kept fighting until the end.
Laurent at navire.net writes a very moving post about visiting an American cemetery near Paris. Even if you don't speak French, go visit his site to see the pictures - they say it all.
Aaron Straup Cope posts a reading list. One of the mysteries of time is that as great wrongs recede into it, they lose their power to shock and to teach. World War One has already slid safely into history, and soon into oblivion.
11:55 PM11.10.03
That Lucky Old Sun
Longtime readers of this site will know that I'm a sucker for dangers outside the realm of ordinary experience. Whether it be comet impact, devastating hyperfloods, giant killer earthquakes, enormous creatures underneath the sea, the failure of the Atlantic conveyor, evil undead food crops, megatsunamis destroying the East Coast, or biosphere-devouring nanotechnology, you're likely to find me worrying about it on this site, whose last post will read "I... told... you... so".
So imagine my delight last week when the Sun started going crazy, producing not one, not two... but a whole string of enormous flares, including the Nov. 4 behemoth that broke all previous records. Several of these hit our planet head-on, disrupting a few satellites and exposing airline passengers at high latitudes to the equivalent of a chest X-ray. It was double the pleasure for me - not only was there the Terror From Above thrill, but I also happen to live at a decent latitude, so any coronal mass ejection (oh yeah, baby!) means the chance of seeing beautiful aurora.
With all the activity, I found myself spending a lot of time on the Space Weather website, which is a great place to go if you want to know whether to look up on any particular night. SpaceWeather covers flares, meteor showers, eclipses, aurora, and even has a handy table of recent Earth-asteroid encounters for the truly anxious.
I also became a regular visitor to the NOAA's Auroral Northern Hemisphere map, which shows auroral activity in near-real time, so you can tell if it's worth going out to stare at the horizon. Auroras are always present, in an oval whose southernmost point is roughly opposite to the noonday sun, but their extent and intensity varies widely depending on a bazillion factors, all of which you can read about on the University of Alaska's Aurora FAQ. As if there weren't enough reasons to like Canada, it's one of the best places to consistently see aurora - while Europe is at a similar geographic latitude, the Canadians have the north magnetic pole in their (enormous) backyard, so their magnetic latitude is higher. That means more light shows.
All of this solar commotion comes on the downhill part of the 11-year sunspot cycle, during which the sun breaks out in spots, and then clears up again. A little rooting around led me to NASA's Solar Physics website, which is yet another one of those outstanding uses of the web that government agencies seem so mysteriously competent at creating. The site is pitched exactly right - it assumes you know some physics and astronomy, unlike many "Did You Know?" CNN-style explainer sites - and it includes some amazing solar eye candy for people with broadband. But the substantive part is just as impressive. I tend to assume that what I learned in high school and college is roughly what is known today, forgetting that fields like solar physics (and cosmology, and so much else) have been totally revolutionized over the past ten years thanks to space probes and computer modeling.
So there was plenty on the site to make my jaw drop. Most amazing was the fact that the Sun is filled with reflecting sound waves. The entire surface of the star oscillates up and down in California-sized pieces, moving at roughly a five minute cycle. The sound waves come from hypersonic convection currents (!) in the outer layer of the star, and are trapped within. Here's what the sun sounds like, courtesy of Stanford's Solar Sounds page (something nice for the linkbar).
Not only is the Sun pulsing with such trapped sound waves, but they enable scientists to do actual imaging of the far side of the Sun, by looking at interference patterns and other such in the bouncy waves. Again, do not attempt this without a computer. You can see a nice plot of the Sun's nether side (which should soon be showing those big fat sunspots that clobbered us last week) on the SpaceWeather.com homepage.
A little digging around on the solar sites unearthed a nice mystery for the disaster-seeking part of my brain. It turns out there is a period from 1645 to 1715 called the Maunder Minimum, during which there are almost no records of sunspot activity, and the reports of aurora go way down. Intriguingly, this period falls right in the middle of the Little Ice Age, a period from c. 1350 to c. 1850 in which Europe and North America experienced much harsher winters than at present. This leads some scientists to posit a link between solar activity and our own climate. Given the commotion over Kyoto and greenhouse gasses, it would be very significant if the Sun turned out to be in charge of the global thermostat.
If I were in charge of the global thermostat, everyone would be freezing.
"Do you realize what it costs to heat this place?"
5:58 PM11.06.03
Notorious Sex Offender Objects To Tax Cut
Bubba, come back! All is forgiven!
MT How vulnerable is this administration? What are the main targets of opportunity?
BC: Well, I think the economy is a target of opportunity. I think the fact that most of the world doesn't trust us anymore is a target of opportunity. I think the assault on the environment is a target of opportunity. I think giving me a tax cut and then [trying to take] overtime away from 8 million workers is a target of opportunity. ... We're gonna spend $87 billion in Iraq. We're gonna give the 400 wealthiest Americans an average tax cut of $8-and-a-half million. $8-and-a-half million! And that's just a start. And they tried to get rid of the children's health-insurance program. That's 5 million kids' health insurance.
Man, if we can't sell that, we ought to get in another line of work! Either that or I don't live in the country I think I live in.
Interview with Bill Clinton (thanks Anil!)
4:16 PM11.04.03
The New York City Marathon: Now It Can Be Told
My own race day starts at half past five in the morning, on a sofa somewhere in midtown Manhattan. My girlfriend's brother has graciously let me stay in his immaculate 42nd street apartment, and now his little calico cat is licking my elbow, and the alarm clock is blaring to wake me up.
I have caused a storm of controversy in my girlfriend's family with my radical theory that carbo-loading and restful sleep two nights before the marathon are much more important than what happens on the eve of the race. I am about to put the theory to the test - I'm fueled up on bad Chinese food and my night has consisted of tiny catnaps, interspersed with worry.
To prevent an anxiety meltdown, I have laid everything out the night before: battered shoes with Official ChampionChip Marathon RF tag securely attached, running shirt with Official Marathon Race Number securely pinned, running shorts with $20 in cab fare tucked into a secret pocket (I'm putting pecunia non olet to the test). Over this goes an old ratty set of sweats that I will abandon at the starting line. I step out into the New York morning with my Official Marathon Plastic Bag, where I have put my pre-marathon essentials:
- Tom Clancy novel
- Pack of Pims cookies
- 1 Liter orange Gatorade
The cookies and Gatorade are for devouring. The Tom Clancy novel is to fill the time - I've picked a book that's good for mindless reading, yet annoying enough to jettison without regret when it comes time to start the race.
People who say that running a marathon is purely mental are, in my opinion, talking nonsense. But it's true that the race tends to bring out all kinds of mental challenges. On the morning of the race, the challenge is controlling anxiety. It occurs to me that I've gone too far in the anxiety direction as I walk out of the apartment building. I had spent much of the night worrying that I wouldn't be able to find the bus pickup point, but now I see hundreds of people in track suits, all carrying Official Marathon Plastic Bags, converging on a spot a few blocks west of me. Also, the mile-long string of chartered buses idling along fifth avenue is hard to miss, as are the dozens of flare-carrying volunteers and the horde of runners standing meekly in line for each bus.
"Smile!" yells one of the volunteers. She's got a megaphone, and it sounds vaguely threatening. "None of you are smiling! It's gonna be a great race."
To a first approximation, the NYC Marathon is all about standing in line. There's the line to pick up a race number, the line for the chemical toilets, the line to get out of Central Park. The only unusual thing is that, for four or five hours in the middle, the line moves really quickly.
Serious queueing up had started the day before, when I had accidentally tried to cut the registration queue at the Javits convention center, only to be courteously directed to the back of a line that wrapped all the way around the block, down to the water, and around the corner, something approaching a quarter of a mile. Registration was also my first brush with the marathon volunteers, who somehow combine ruthless efficiency with the sunniest cheerfulness. Imagine a Switzerland populated by Mormons - yet somehow all these people come from New York!
The buses whisk us from Fifth Avenue to a staging area just outside of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Earlier buses have arranged themselves on the toll plaza to form a natural corral shape (the level of organization behind the marathon is terrifying), funneling arriving runners into Fort Wadsworth. Swiss Mormon volunteers are already there, at 6:50 AM, to cheer us on. They look to be high school kids. I don't think the Last Trump could have gotten me out of bed at 6:00 AM on a Sunday back in high school.
The sun is just popping over the horizon as I walk through the gates - it's cheery and red, playing innocent. The forecast has been for clouds, but the morning skies are clear and temperatures are threatening to climb into the seventies. For marathon running, that's a scorcher. I cheerfully add it to the list of things I have no control over.
The next three hours pass quietly. More and more people are arriving - I start to see costumes and flags here and there. There's a series of bands playing, but no one is really paying attention to them. People huddle over by the giant tent that says "BAGELS", or the one that says "COFFEE" - others stretch on the lawn. The line for the chemical toilets reaches horrifying proportions; someone finally knocks down a bit of storm fence and the impatient and shameless go off to pee in the woods.
As the starting time approaches, we get up and go to our assembly points. I abandon my sweats and the irritating novel to join the crowd. I can see water bottles flying to the left and right. The crowd starts moving forward, and we pass back out through the even longer bus corrall, the same high school kids cheering as hard as they can (God, they are wonderful). Soon we're almost at the bridge, waiting for the start. A woman in front of me is explaining how the transmitter on her shoe talks to her wrist, so she always knows her exact pace. We are all packed in together like pickles in a barrel.
Mile 0
BOOM! There's a loud cannon blast from the base of the bridge, and everyone gives a cheer. I can see the first runners moving a few hundred feet ahead, and then my own sector breaks into a slow jog, with clothing and water bottles hurtling off overhead. As we get close to the actual start line,there's a sound truck with a bunch of cops sitting on it. The truck is blaring "New York, New York", and the cops and runners all cheer like crazy. I've never felt so pumped up in my life.
Running onto the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, I can hear a delighted, surprised whoop up ahead, and it moves backwards through the crowd towards me at the same speed we are running. Suddenly I step onto the bridge and start whooping myself - the bridge is bouncing up and down beneath our feet, it feels like we're running on a trampoline or a huge, molasses-filled waterbed. Turns out these suspension bridges really are just dangling there.
We are running as one big mass - there is no lateral room for movement, and no way to set your own pace. A few desperate runners have hopped up on the curbs or the median divider, trying to run at speed. Some male runners are lining up along the guard rail for a ceremonial salute, dribbling used Gatorade onto the enormous container ships passing underneath.
Mile 1
It takes us 13 minutes to run the first mile, and we're still on the bridge. That's slower than a brisk walk. A man in a full-body Superman outfit is standing motionless on the three-foot-high concrete divider, pointing in the direction of Brooklyn in a Superman pose. We all cheer again. Up ahead I see a big hand-lettered sign reading 'Yo Brooklyn!', and there's the faintest sound of cheering from down below.
Mile 4
We're on Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, surrounded by mobs of people. It's still hard to run at a comfortable pace - we reach the first water table and I almost fall over the runners in front of me, all of whom stop. Little kids are leaning out from the sidewalk for high-fives, there's a school band playing somewhere.
Mile 6
I spot an bookish but attractive woman with a big sign:
MARK![photo of Mark, a bookish but attractive man]
4 hrs = SEX!
I wonder if they're a couple, or if this is a surprise motivational treat.
Mile 12
We're in Greenpoint, Brooklyn - one of the few places outside Poland and Chicago where a Pole can spend his whole life without having to learn a second language. These are my people! I wait until I see a group of Slavic faces and yell "Czy są tu jacyś Polacy? (Any Poles here?)" The crowd cheers! I am intoxicated with my powers; I spend the next mile stirring up Greenpoint, and the rest of the race calling out Viva Mexico! after discovering that Mexican spectators go even more apeshit than my own countrymen. I try Viva Mexico! out on one group of brown faces and a mariachi band strikes up! Huge Mexican flags pop out of nowhere, there is mad cheering. Mexico has had some major marathon heroes in recent years, I don't know if the intense New York fans are a cause or result.
Mile 13
Halfway there! A race organizer with a megaphone tells us we're on a 4:20 pace. Not bad, considering the forced slowdown at the beginning. I can feel my legs working, but I'm not quite tired yet.
Mile 15
Tired. We're on the 59th street bridge, crossing into Mahnattan. Unlike the Verrazano Narrows bridge, this part of the course is on the lower level, so the impression is of an infinitely long, metal-ribbed tunnel going uphill. It's an agonizing climb, up and up, everyone around me is staggering. A group of runners comes up from behind me, singing:
Slow down, you move too fast
You've got to make the morning last
Just kickin' down the cobblestones ...
And then everyone joins in:
Looking for fun and feeling Groovy.
The European runners in front of me exchange a worried, trapped look. They are stuck on a bridge with hundreds of natives who have obviously just gone loco.
Mile 16
Authorities on the New York marathon all tell you that you slowly begin to hear an enormous roar as you descend into Manhattan. That may be true if you're running a 3:00 marathon pace, but on 4:20 the effect is much more subdued. I think back to last year, when I yelled myself hoarse, and commiserate with the crowd. They are maintaining huge enthusiasm, but a lot of them have no noise left to give.
I round the bend coming off of the bridge and there is my girlfriend, ready for the Krispy Kreme handoff. She has picked up a Boston Creme and a Chocolate Frosted, whose job it is to give me enough sugar to reach mile 26. I kiss her and wave the bag triumphantly at the crowd, yelling "Krispy Kreme!", but they don't seem impressed. It will take me three miles to eat the chocolate donut, in between trying to breathe. The Boston Creme will be abandoned in the Bronx.
It is hot and a lot of people are walking. We come to a sponge station and I wipe my forehead - I can taste the salt from my face, I've been sweating like crazy for nearly three hours.
Mile 19
We're at 115th street, and the crowd has thinned considerably. My legs are much more tired than I expected, and getting stiff - I stop at a water stand, and walk a block before running again. The next five miles will be walk-and-run, trying not to let my legs seize up like they crave to do. A man with a big synthesizer is playing some easy listening jazz number. I resist the urge to trample him (must conserve energy). Who the f*** plays elevator music to motivate tired runners?
Mile 20
Crossing over the Willis Avenue bridge into the Bronx. Sections of this bridge are made of iron latticework, so it's been covered with a kind of red carpet that gives this part of the race a ceremonial feel. We're all crazy tired, and it's a long climb into the Bronx. I see a runner in a shirt that says "Italia" stagger off to the right, missing the electronic mat that's supposed to measure our 20-mile split time - an automatic disqualification. "Hey, Italia!" I yell. "ITALIA!" He looks back, and I point at the mat, gesturing for him to turn around and run over it. He stares for a minute and then understands, looking mortified.
Immediately over the bridge stands a big mustachioed cop with sunglasses, straight out of central casting.
"Welcome to the Bronx, ladies and gentlemen!" he yells. "Do you know what people do when they come into the Bronx?"
"What?" we all say.
"THEY RUN OUT OF THE BRONX!"
Message received.
We're running through a black neighborhood, and some of the locals are blasting hip-hop. This is an infinite improvement over Smooth Jazz man. Near the Bronx-Manhattan bridge, a big guy in dreadlocks with a live mike is improvising reggae riffs about passing runners.
Mile 21
A male runner is leaning forward exhausted against a lamppost. He has two brown lines of blood down the front of shirt. White cotton shirts should come with a label: "WARNING: Wearing a natural-fabric T-shirt for runs exceeding ten miles may result in severe nipple damage". I cringe about as badly as you are cringing now - I've been down this road myself, before a nasty training run convinced me to shell out for a proper running shirt.
My legs are scaring me - when I slow to a walk, the fronts of my thighs feel like they're about to seize up in a massive cramp. I have had one cramp in all my training runs - felt my calf suddenly seize up into a knot, pain like I had never experienced. I'm afraid that cramps in my thighs will make it too painful to walk, and take me out of the race . I pass a woman yelling "Candy! Salt! Salt or candy!" I ask for salt and get a large pinch of Morton's finest. It's too strong to eat straight. Another woman hands me a water bottle and I dump the salt right in - the best drink I've ever tasted.
Mile 23
Fifth avenue, with Central Park on the right. The crowd is getting massive again; for some reason I am resenting them a little bit. They just want to see the train wreck that is an amateur runner after 23 miles.
Remembering Nipple Man, I gratefully accept a Vaseline-coated tongue depressor from a medical volunteer, and grease myself up. Running is a beautiful sport.
Mile 26
At this point I am just running towards the light.
FINISH
Everyone smiles and raises their arms as they cross the finish line. There are photographers up above who are taking our picture; we'll be able to buy a print after the race, if we like. Clever entrepreneurship or crass capitalism? After 26.2 miles of running, I could not care less what it is. I raise my arms and run over the finish line like a good sheep.
Suddenly the whole pack is walking again, just like we were right before the start of the race. A line of very kind volunteers is standing there with medals, putting one around each runner's neck. Another set of volunteers hands out thin aluminized mylar blankets, and suddenly I am standing in a forest of silver and yellow ING Marathon logos, with a faint rustling all around. A third set of volunteers hands out little goodie bags (contents: water, apple, banana, raisins, and 'high protein energy bar', presumably to replace all the protein we lost when our calves fell off at mile 23). All this time we are moving slowly up Central Park, between a fence and a line of UPS trucks where runners can pick up their belongings. A number of people start to make calls on their cellphones. There's a number of people lying on the lawn, being tended to by medical volunteers. A woman to my right is barfing up a few quarts of water. I feel strangely teary-eyed, but remember that weird emotions are common right after the race, and eat my banana in peace.
It takes the better part of an hour to shuffle out of the park, and all the way up to the Blue reunion area on 79th street. I find my girlfriend near the 'C' sign, next to a pack of other Poles all dressed in red. I get flowers! I have finished!
The next hour consists of me and five thousand other runners with their families walking west, trying to find a cab. We get picked up by a Brazilian driver who can't stop congratulating me and asking about the race, unfortunately in completely inaudible tones. He tells a long story about his own running past, but I can barely hear any of it. I smell like a hamper full of gym socks. This is the brief golden hour during which I believe P. Diddy has actually dropped out of the race. My girlfriend has not seen him from her own vantage point, and rumors are flying that he got hit hard in the race and had to drop out. I feel vindicated and secure - my entire race strategy depended on being able to out-endure Diddy, and it looks like I've succeeded. I eat the filling out of a Reese's cup, calling blessings on the head of whoever decided to make peanut butter cups extra salty.
4:30 PM - Showertime. This is the part of the race where you discover exactly where you got badly chafed. You discover this because the shower washes salt from your body into the wounds. The apartment fills with my screams.
5:00 PM - A brief, half-hour nap. There is no position in which my legs do not hurt. I must still be a little salty because the cat is in a licking frenzy at my elbow. I feel something heavy and uncomfortable settle on my head. It is my girlfriend, using me as a pillow.
5:30 PM - My girlfriend, her brother, and both cats are all asleep. Apparently my fatigue has permeated the room and knocked out the unprepared. I sneak outside with the laptop to find a wireless network, and read the crushing P. Diddy news. It seems like half the internet has covered my defeat in real time. For a second I am embarrassed, but then I come to my senses. I've spent the entire day surrounded in goodwill - from the thousands of volunteers and organizers who arranged the amazing spectacle, to the millions of people who cheered us on, to all of the Good Samaritans who handed me bananas, oranges, water, salt - things they had paid for and brought out to the race for the benefit of total strangers. And now I see that online friends have been following my progress, sending email, cheering me against the machine that is P. Diddy.
It's the kind of display I don't know how to recover from. I don't know how better to see the best of New York City than through this race. I'm overwhelmed, happy, tired, unable to climb stairs, and hungry like the wolf. It is a very, very good feeling.
Thank you to everybody who sent in encouragement, or went out to see the race this weekend and cheered us all on. I owe New York City big.
permalink11.02.03
I Have Failed To Smoke P. Diddy Like A Cheap Cigar
(Link via the indomitable Anil Dash).
Thanks to everyone who sent in encouragement before the race. I have shamed the Internet.
(But it was fun)
6:32 PM11.01.03
New York City Marathon
Tomorrow is race day! The New York City Road Runners have an excellent marathon site where you can find out everything you need to know about where to watch the race, and when to expect to see the first runners. The women start at 9:35, and the men at 10:10, all from Staten Island. The leaders are faster than you think!
Do note that you can't get a spot near the finish line without paying for it. Last year, I watched the race from the Manhattan side of the 59th street bridge, and that was a great spot.
I will be running at a 9:20 mile pace or so, dressed in a fetching ensemble of blue shirt, blue running shorts, and white shoes. You can identify me by any of the following:
- Clintonesque body shape and running style
- Race Number: 18307
- Bag of Krispy Kreme donuts held in hand after mile 15 (assuming successful handoff from girlfriend)
- Steely resolve to defeat P. Diddy
- Eyes firmy focused on the prize
- "Dean for America" bumper sticker glued to each sleeve
If you're afraid of pronouncing my name, just yell "Idle Words" or "Take P. Diddy down", or something equally inspiring. And watch out for the guy who runs the marathon every year as a way just to mack on women - apparently he stops and gives his card to every attractive spectator he can find. This is sleazy - don't become another statistic!
The weather forecast is for a lovely 60 degrees with mixed sun and clouds.
See you at the marathon!
11:47 AM( October )