As I said earlier, it was a shame the race was cancelled. I still had a great time, though.  See the rest of my dad’s marathon pictures here.

Link the first.

I was searching for a ZIP code aggregator, and came across this fun piece of coding out of MIT. Go ahead, play around with the ZIPDecoder. Put in your ZIP and watch the map constrict to show your area. No matter what anyone says, there is some logic to the post office.

Link the second.

And, very quietly, Google Maps has added the Chicago Transit Authority stops to its repertoire.

Link the third.

I use a Mac at home but I use the Autumn picture on many of the Windows PCs I work with. It’s simple, it’s not tacky, and it reminds me of, well, autumn.

But where can one find Autumn? Luckily, Vanity Fair is on the case.

Some time ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert Ballard, the man who discovered the ships the Titanic and the Bismarck and who was responsible for finding chemosynthetic bacteria on the ocean’s surface – thus ushering in a new era of exploration on the seafloor.

We talked about pushing the limits of human exploration, about man’s constant search to push beyond the limits of what is currently known, and how that drive has created the world we live in today, complete with its technology and its medicine and all that. This was a man who was and still is at the forefront of his chosen field, and whose name has become known to everyone around the world because he chose to push himself.

There were some other great parts of the interview, too – about finding perfectly preserved wooden ships at the bottom of the Black Sea and so on – but those are stories for a different time.

In any case, last Friday I got to spend some time talking with William ‘Billy O’ Oefelein, the pilot on the last Space Shuttle mission. You don’t get many opportunities to talk to real astronauts, because – as opposed to other childhood-memory careers like ‘fireman’ and ‘policeman’ and baseball player’ – there just aren’t that many astronauts. He was full of bons mots like ‘The history of humankind has always been about exploration, and that’s what we need to do with space’ and ‘it’s fun to tell people why we continue space exploration, because it’s an investment in our future.’

His accompanying photo was one of those ‘that looks really, really super hip’ moments, since he’s just, you know, floating in space with the Earth visible behind him.

Apparently being an astronaut isn’t all fun and games and Space Shuttle flights, though. He’d been working for NASA for more than eight years … and in that time, he’s done one 13-day mission. Let’s do some quick math:

(8 years)(365 days) = 2920 days.
13 days / 2920 days = 0.45 percent working days

In the three-and-a-half years that I’ve been at my job, that ratio is like me publishing a magazine for five-and-three-quarters days. Just 5.75 days out of 1,277. But the payoff of being shot into space is probably a more exhilarating experience than, you know, putting out an issue.

Oh … and apparently astronauts have blogs, too – finally bringing the power of instant publishing to space. It’s about time.

After a morning of grinning and bearing it – or, if you prefer, grabbing our ankles and saying ‘thank you sir may I have another!?’ – by putting up with fake Southern hospitality, we swung through Tupelo, Mississippi, on the way to Alabama. If you know your history of The King, you’ll know that Elvis Aaron Presley (who, incidentally, has the best middle name in the history of the world) was born in 1939 in Tupelo.

While I declined to pay any money for the privilege of touring the six-by-12 foot trailer-esque thing in which Elvis was born, I did take some great pictures of an old lady sitting on the porch swing, so that was a plus.

But nothing could prep me for the redneck sideshow carnival campground visible from the side of Interstate 20 between Birmingham, Alabama, and Atlanta.

I had been warned that we were coming up on Talladega, the raceway that I had peripherally heard of by means of Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. I should have seen the 1974 Pontiac with a Dale Earnhart ‘3’ flag on one side and a Dale Earnhart Jr. ‘8’ flag on the other as an indicator of what was to come. But I was caught unprepared, for when we rounded a corner, I saw …

Trailers. Pickups. Rebel Confederate flags. Shirtless men atop said trailers. Lawn chairs. Smoke from (I’m guessing) bonfires that were burning effigies of hated drives … and tires, maybe. It was like the footage from Woodstock 1994, but replace the sea of bodies with any sort of redneck conveyance, and there ya go. As far as the eye could see. And according to my calculations, this impromptu Talladega parking lot was a straight 10-mile shot, not including roads and turns and things like ‘traffic,’ from the actual raceway.

It’s a good thing that I spent a part of my afternoon prior to the tackiness of Tupelo and the difficult-to-comprehend gathering by the side of I-20 at the home of Nobel-winning writer William Faulkner.

I’ve decided that in order to write the Next Great American Novel, I have to either a) move to Paris, or b) purchase a reconstructed Civil-War era mansion where I will spend my days figuring out how to deal with my newfound literary fame. Or I could make like Faulkner and do both.

Either way, it was great to see someone who, as a way of figuring out his own thoughts, wrote daily postings and notes on his own walls.

Again: He wrote on the walls of his own study to make sure his ideas were both immediately accessible and constantly surrounding him. Now all I have to do is buy that Civil-War era home … any donors?

---

A Footnote on the Southern Economy, Wal-Mart and the Super Happy China Buffet.A fully mature free-market economy consists of many interlocking, often unquantifiable factors competing in a (mostly) privately owned, laissez-faire structure. Such an economic arrangement is propped up by many different factors: the amount of industry, the type of manufacturing, et cetera. It would seem that, in order to maintain a healthy economy, it would be a good idea to ensure a wide breadth of retailers, producers, suppliers and the like.

This is not the case in the South. I’m all for open markets, but the one thing I’ve noticed is the preponderance of Wal-Mart in the South. And by ‘preponderance,’ I mean that *every single town* we’ve passed by or been through – if its population is greater than, say, 3,000 – has a Wal-Mart. Like clockwork, we saw a Wal-Mart every 40 or so miles. And many of these are Wal-Mart Supercenters. In case you don’t know, Wal-Mart Supercenters sell standard fare – as well as food, thus eliminating the need for just about any other sort of store within the immediate area.

While I don’t have anything against Wal-Mart, I’m just noticing that the entirety of the Southern economy is predicated on one single (omnibus) retailer. If Wal-Mart were to go under, Enron-style, the South would be more than screwed. Well, I suppose people could still find foodservice establishments, which brings me to part two of my economic analysis.

As a sub-tier of the Southern economy, you have your restaurants. Sure, there are the McDonald’s chains and the gas stations and such, but far and away the most prevalent restaurant is the Chinese buffet. You have your Happy Buffet. You have your Super Buffet. You have your China Buffet. And, of course, you have your Happy Super China Buffet. It’s all the same crap, and there are at least four of them in each small town.

Right next to the Wal-Mart, of course.

I’m absolutely sure a Harvard Business School case study could be written about this.

Some people want a bodyguard. Others want a personal servant. After some deliberation, I’ve decided I’d like to hire a 60-year-old Brooklyn Jew as my assistant.

We started a round of golf on Sunday morning with three of us, so the course added a fourth to round out the group. We had the pleasure of meeting Augie, a 60-ish guy who seemed nice enough. He even put up with my golfing hackery - missing the shot off the tee, taking three swings to get out of a bunker, so on - so I figured he was a great addition to our crew. He told some jokes and made himself a member of the group.

The foursome ahead of us, however, was one of the slowest-playing groups I’ve ever seen. We’re talking wait-20-minutes-on-the-fairway slow. It didn’t take long for Augie to bring this fact to their attention: ‘Hey, you mind picking up the pace?’ And this is just after one of our group hit a ball directly into them without the requisite warning. The group, for some reason, was not amused.

This is why I want my very own Brooklyn Jew. Having grown up in the Midwest with a good deal of Catholic guilt, I find myself unable to tell people to piss off unless they’ve done something particularly egregious, like eat a baby. Or drive in the left lane.

Brooklyn Jews, I’ve discovered, don’t have that verbal filter. That couple that wandered past the ninth fairway on the way to their car? Yep, got an earful. I believe the words ‘are you deaf’ and ‘unfuckingbelievable’ and ’schumucks’ were used, all things I wanted to say … but deferred to the Brooklyn Jew.

While I can’t pay much, the position is now open.

As much as it pains me to say it, I might actually like the state of Tennesee.

I have no idea how this is happening. Based on my experiences last summer, I used to think the place was populated by twangy rednecks listening to country music. But on a business trip a few weeks back, I found that while that music part of the equation does ring true, the city was surprisingly cosmopolitan. I looked out my hotel window on a train station that would be at home in any European city and a Art Deco post office that had been converted to a museum (and the site of a photo shoot I held last year - reflective marble walls are not so good for glare-free images). Guided by a local, I drank at a bar with more than 150 beers on tap, including Boddingtons (!) and Smithwick’s (double !).

The key difference, I think, was that rather than hitting the touristy establishments - in all fairness, we did duck into Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, where we were accosted by a prostitute posing as a plastic-surgery nurse - that this time we visited the less well-known honky-tonks.

And it was at one of these that I fell in love.

The reason is simple: One of the most angelically beautiful women I have ever seen was standing in the middle of the room, looking world-weary and smoking a cigarette. Then she got on stage and proceeded to play a little number they called ‘Bluegrass Swing.’ I could go into details about how the band was made up of three sisters and their shaggy-haired brother who didn’t seem to notice the exquisite attractiveness of their violinist, guitarist and vocalist and instead chatted among themselves while sometimes deciding to play songs, but suffice to say they were really, really good.

This picture was found on the Interweb with the caption ’she reminded me of a model who had been abducted from a lingerie shoot by radical hillbilly musicans.’ So true.

I reserve judgment on the rest of the state, but Nashville, you’re okay.

Given the amount of information we as modern consumers have available at nearly every moment of every day, there’s only one sure-fire way to disconnect from every other human being on the planet: Move into a new apartment.

Your mail doesn’t arrive for a few days. Same for your newspapers. Cable hookup is a far-off dream, and your bastard neighbors all have passwords on their wireless internet networks.

So, wrapped up in my own world of paint fumes and unopened boxes on Monday afternoon as I changed my living room from beige to a deep red, I apparently missed one of the largest political rallies in recent memory. And I had even been warned about the immigration march the night before, when a friend of mine - who owns a restaurant - said that his Mexican workers were instructed to show up the following day, that they would not be given special dispensation.

And I forgot all about it. I figure I’ll give myself through the weekend to stop being a hermit and to come out of my shell. Still a few days left …

Your appearance is a direct invitation for judgment. So, inviting strange looks and stares - honestly, without really considering the consequences of my actions - I went and shaved my head. With a razor. Skinhead bald.

Taking such a drastic step in one’s appearance radically alters the projection you give to the world. Suddenly strangers were either very positive or very negative toward me, based on appearance alone. I stopped being Normal Guy and became What’s-His-Agenda Man. Was I a Hell’s Angel trapped in a white-collar day job? A very small bouncer with a runner’s frame? Or just that middle-aged, balding guy? Looks were now more inquisitive than glancing.

But the interesting part is that I could feel myself falling into a pre-described role. Natually, I picked the hardass, rather than the balding old guy, persona. ‘I look like I’m going to smack someone or, at the very least, glare at them balefully,’ I figured. ‘Time to stop being a nice guy and smiling at people.’

And the permanent scowl really does have its time and place, such as at a very crowded concert - rather than pressing up around me, people seemed to give me a bit of room. And walking to the bar was a breeze. Granted, there was drinking involved, and I could have been imagining things, but perception is nine-tenths of reality. Or something like that.

While the hair is gone, the angry outlook is still a work in progress. I’ll keep you posted how it’s progressing.

I spent last evening as an observer in a marketing class at the University of Chicago. Another prospective student was with me and, while I didn’t know him, we seemed to get along. We were making idle chitchat - god forbid we should speak to the other students - and eventually I asked what he does.

‘I play for the Chicago Bears,’ he said.

That stopped me in my tracks, but not because he played in the NFL per se, as I’m not one to get flustered in those sorts of situations. It was more out of the parochial mindset that says professional football players aren’t allowed to scout for MBA programs. I could tell the guy wanted to blend in, though. After a break halfway through class, he leaned over and said ‘the cat’s out of the bag.’ Apparently word had spread that a member of the Bears was sitting in the class and, sure enough, someone slid a legal pad in front of him:

‘You’re really Hunter Hillenmeyer, right? Could you …?’

Suffice to say we were situational friends. He liked me because I didn’t want to talk football, and I liked him because he helped solve my crossword during the boring parts of class. The first one he filled in: 7-Down - ‘Like many new stadia.’ The answer, as you can see, is ‘domed.’ His contributions are in green.

Leave it to an NFL player to fill that one in for me.

After we leave class, I find a slew of text-message responses from my friends, ranging from ‘can i come to class? tell my boy hunter i say hi,’ to ‘tell him good interception sunday. he’s the hottest bear!’ Apparently Hunter’s the new hotness on the defensive* line. Either way, I never thought I would be sitting in a marketing class next to a professional football player. The world gets stranger every day.

*[Correction, Nov. 10, 2005, 2 p.m.: I originally referred to Hillenmeyer’s position on the offensive line, but that would make getting an interception difficult. He’s actually a defensive linebacker.]

There once was a man slated to pick up a rental car for a business trip. After filling out the necessary paperwork at his local Enterprise, the kindly employee gave her verdict with all the seriousness of a cancer diagnosis:

‘We’re putting you in a Nissan Altima,’ she said.

‘Does it have a CD player?’ our central character replied. God forbid there be a road trip without music.

However, upon his exit to the parking lot where his intermediate-size Altima waited, the Enterprise worker realized she needed to bring his contract. She ducked into the office, and returned bearing good news.

‘We’re not putting you in the Altima,’ she said. ‘How about that right there?’ She nodded toward an Infiniti RX45.

‘Yeah, I could do that,’ our man replied.

Satisfied that his place would be cemented in the big-boy lane on the highway, our protagonist made his way to the bank, where he attempted to deposit a check. Upon entering his PIN, however, the machine malfunctioned - forcing him to (gasp!) speak to a teller face-to-face.

After filling out the necessary deposit slips, he asked said teller for $20 against the recently deposited amount. She informed our hero that unfortunately, she cannot, as his account was overdrawn. No cash!

This plucky adventurer realized his options were slim and none, yet decided to make the best of the situation. He would take the non-toll roads out of Chicago in his silver pimp ride. He would leave his dry cleaning to be picked up next week. He would use credit cards. The trip continued in true pay-for-it-later comfort. And it was Good.

Crisis averted, he became the Cashless Man in the Luxury SUV. Look for the next installment of our series, the Broke-Ass Magazine Editor on Public Transit, next week.

A new breed of medical advertisement has caught my attention lately: Have you seen the guy with the busted-ass face peering out at you from your morning newspaper yet? ‘Cause it freaks me out every time.

Rather than using the typical ‘ask your doctor about Wellexetra’ or so forth, we find a gentleman whose face looks like it went seven rounds with a young, tire-iron wielding Holyfield plaintively -agressively? - looking at you while the caption reads ‘If Hep C was [sic] attacking your face instead of your liver, you’d do something about it.’

The grammatical case notwithstanding - the ad copy should use the subjunctive mood ‘were’ rather than the indicative ‘was,’ not that I’m picking nits - I was fine with feeling inadequate after Enzyte’s Natural Male Enhancement pills and I was fine with thinking of many things at once before finding out I actually had Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. But now I have to be fine with something I won’t know exists until I get screened for this ’silent killer.’ I’m sure I’m being (shortsighted / callous / medieval), but I make a concerted effort to get medical advice from my doctor, rather than, say, advertising.

As if I didn’t have enough to be neurotic about (say nothing for beaten faces on my morning commute), now I’ve also found out just what would happen were a Category 4 hurricane to hit New York City. Next will be earthquakes in Chicago and locusts in Seattle and armies of zombie-like Hep C sufferers in Topeka.

Oh, were all those ads I mentioned sponsored by drug companies putting out for-profit ads? Nevermind then. I’m sure they have my best interests at heart, like freaking me out of my morning stupor by showing me an abused face. Thanks, modern medicine!

I can’t put a spin on this past weekend, so I won’t try.

I should be coming up with an ‘angle’ in order to better present an event I covered on Saturday afternoon for a freelance project. This task should be easy, considering the event was a dog fashion parade.

The overall feeling you get while watching supposedly sane people parade their costumed dogs down the street is almost indescribable, but it’s something between ‘watching the fire department use the Jaws of Life to extract a trapped man from a burning wreck’ (for that horrifying, I-can’t-tear-my-eyes-away feeling) and ‘covertly watching ‘Golden Girls’ at 2:30 in the morning to indulge your crush on Bea Arthur’ (because you’re a sick bastard that wallows in your habit thrice weekly despite being well-adjusted otherwise).

During said spectacle, John and I met/witnessed:

A) a few very nice, seemingly well-adjusted people

B) one batshit woman who takes dogs from backyards in the name of ‘rescuing’ them, and told us she was going to strangle another woman at the event who was making money by selling dogs;

C) three t-shirts that boldly proclaimed ‘I have issues’ - whether the owners were cuckoo for their dogs or just had issues in general, I’ll never know;

D) dogs dressed up as batman, superman, a princess (with the cone hat and frilly pink lace and everything), sunflowers and many other various and sundry ‘cute’ tsotchkes.

Apparently you can get the ‘I have issues’ shirts at Wal-Mart. Oh America! Oh humanity!

The longer I live, the more subcultures I find. Most are harmless pastimes - reciting sports trivia, playing 16-inch softball, performing improv comedy - I find academically interesting, yet hold no real fascination for me. Occasionally, however, I come across a few I simply can’t get my head around - bull riding, NASCAR, sudoku - and I can do little else other than watch these activities in horror.

Muskie hunting sorta explained
I found another one of these and-people-do-this-why?-sort of behavior Saturday night. Apparently there’s a sport called ‘muskie hunting,’ the ‘muskie’ being ‘an angry, really big fish,’ and the ‘hunting’ being ‘a euphemism for fishing all day and seeing no results.’ I get my information from exhaustive Internet research.

So on this particular night, after a very nice, very refined Italian dinner, a friend and I take a cab to some bar described as ‘the one with the moose in the backyard,’ which turns out to be an apt descriptor - there was a, you know, eight-foot high moose in the backyard. We had arrived at that time of the night when the entertainment had ended and the streets had been overrun by drunkards. FIne, great, sure, but under the watchful eye of Big Brother Moose, the effect was slightly unnerving.

Meet Jess, the Muskie Queen
I then found out the event was held to crown Muskie Queen 2005. Suddenly, it all made sense. A Wisconsin bar. Large stuffed fish on the walls. A stuffed moose. Jess, crowned Muskie Queen 2005, was making the rounds and I had the pleasure of snapping my picture with her. She had that air of tired celebrity about her, sick of the meet-and-greet and ready for bed. I think we talked about the University of Dayton. Who knows.

Needless to say, that was enough North Woods fun for me - my quota’s full for the next, oh, ten years. Now if only I could score tickets to the next NASCAR race, I’d be well on my way to scratching off another entry on my list of Stuff I Don’t Want To Do.

Movie I’m still thinking about: Broken Flowers. A friend gave me the perfect adjective to describe Jim Jarmusch films: subtle. Nothing happens, but you’re not quite sure that’s a bad thing. How about this for an Idea? Get depressed - get drunk, lose your job, all that - and go see Broken Flowers. You just may get some existential understanding from it. Me? I just left the theater, puzzled that a movie that flat and uneventful could end so abruptly. But I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks, so maybe it warrants a second viewing.

Bill Murray, you’re brilliant, as always, but I gotta tell ya, Bill, you should start branching out from disaffected, emotionally bankrupt middle-age Oscar-bait characters. Just a quick memo.

Back in the wayback days - May of this year, I think - I attended a professional conference at which a man named Jason Pearce gave a presentation on blog technologies, Flickr, wikis and other such new media nonsense.

So it’s only fitting that yesterday I turned to him for advice. And not only does he send information on the CSS tag {position: absolute} - yes, thank you, I know that syntax is incorrect - but he gives beatnikindustries a shout on his site.

This is a man who signs his e-mails jasonpearce.com. He knows what he’s talking about - learn from him.

[Correction, 11:31 a.m., August 30, 2005: Jason’s site is jasonpearce.com, not .net as previously reported. See comments.]