1. At the age of 23, anthropology major Lauren Bush had visited more countries outside the United States (at least seven in the Global South) than her Uncle George did by 2000 — true or false? (True.)
2. Hopefully it’ll still be on the front page, but here’s a video of Radioactive Sago Project performing Nick Joaquin’s “The Summer Solstice” live, at Libro.ph. (If not, reload. PS: “miskol” is the 2006 word of the year.)
3. Of course I’m pre-ordering this.
4.
At the end of practice, Pati ushers two medium-size stray dogs inside the fence. He tells his players to line up for conditioning, blows his whistle and watches his team thunder downfield. The dogs take off after the players, their chase instincts triggered. They catch up to the last runner, bark and snap at the player’s ankles. The runner speeds up to avoid being bitten, and the dogs go after the next-slowest runner. Pati slaps his hand against his thigh and laughs.
“See that?” he says. “That’s what we call a speed coach in American Samoa.”
From Eli Saslow’s Washington Post article on high school football in Pago Pago. (Thanks for the link, Viva!)
5. I love the pathos / absurdity of this piece by Jessica Zafra, like something out of a Hal Hartley movie. If he remade Bicycle Thieves or something.
6. I’m trying to get my online friend Ardee to sell me the iPod diptych for my new apartment.
7. Speaking of the new apartment, which you’ll read more about later: Walk Score calculates your place’s proximity to restaurants, bookstores, bars, libraries and so on. My new place is fairly walkable (68/100), even higher than my previous one by the beach (54). (It doesn’t factor in certain crucial elements, though: my old Ithaca addresses kept scoring a whopping 92/100 — and it’s true that there were indeed hardware stores, parks, movie theaters, etc., within a quarter-mile radius — but it doesn’t tell you that most of these are strung along the steepest-ass hill in a city that has snow on the ground six months out of the year. The difficulty of the slope is helpfully magnified when trudging in knee-high snow; your descent is equally facilitated when the slush freezes to ice. Okay, Ithaca rant over.)
That said, I haven’t even gone walking through my neighborhood — even though Fentons is literally less than half a mile away. Most of my time has been spent getting books into shelves (and splitting them into smaller categories as opposed to just “fun” and “work”) and driving back and forth from the gleaming two-story Target store in Albany. It’s so big it has its own freeway!
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