Month: December 2022

1. Ever heard of Nachi Falls? Me neither. It’s obviously a standalone attraction in the southeast portion of Japan, but it is also at the end of the Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage Route, a walking route that is over 1,000 years old.

Photo by Tom Vining on Unsplash

2. The Ringer’s Brian Phillips with maybe the finest piece of writing I’ve read this year, no joke, on the legend of Pelé, the Brazilian Boy Who Remade Soccer in His Image. Even if you don’t like soccer, this is terrific storytelling.

So here’s how this goes. In the late 1940s, in the city of Bauru, in the southeast of Brazil, a group of boys sets out to see a dead body.

The dead body belongs to a pilot. A pilot who has crashed his plane. Actually, it’s not a plane; it’s a glider. Do you know about gliders? I didn’t really know. Picture a small plane without an engine. Another plane tows the glider up into the sky and then lets it go. And the pilot can steer it. Can bank and turn, etc.

The idea is that you go up in a glider and you soar. But gravity ultimately pulls you down.

Hopefully gently. But down.

3. The 2 bike and 1 wheelchair boys finished. 48 days to cycle across the USA, finishing in L.A. with a police escort. A really fun finish.

4. Every year Semi-Rad’s Brendan Leonard re-publishes this piece about this year being the year to practice maximum enthusiasm. If you’re in a rut, this is a great thing to read to day (or maybe tomorrow) and it is a reminder that bringing joy, or attempting to bring joy to other people’s lives is a good thing. I did buy the Practice Maximum Enthusiasm sweatshirt so I’m fully qualified.

Do you like to laugh? Most people do, don’t they? Including baristas, waitstaff, and retail personnel. Perhaps you have at some point had a real conversation with one of these people. This can sometimes begin by sincerely asking those people how they are, instead of treating them like a machine that makes you coffee or orders your salad. This opens the door to making them laugh. If you play your cards right, you may be able to high-five them at the end of a conversation.

Remember yesterday, when you saw that one thing that reminded you of that one friend of yours, and you thought about how if you sent that friend a photo of the thing that reminded you of them, they would smile? But then you didn’t send your friend that photo, and it wasn’t awesome. Don’t do that again.

5. The only reason I knew about Nachi Falls before you did (I’m guessing that this is accurate, but you may known about it before me) is from Elina Osborne and her taking the Kumano Kudo Pilgrimage walk with her brothers. This is delightful.

1. Ever heard of Corsica? Well, maybe you have, it is an island in France, but I would have guessed it was Italian based on the name and historically was a part of Italy at one time, but was annexed by France and was the home of Napoleon Bonaparte. And it is just north of Sardinia, which is part of Italy.

Photo by Lukas Tennie on Unsplash

2. Beau Miles is doing 12 days of newness, all leading up until the new year. Things like getting a proper haircut, a massage, a triathlon (but very atypical type of triathlon), etc.

3. We’ve heard plenty about walls over the past few years, but Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas are proposing a binational river park for 6.3 miles along the Rio Grande, and an attempt to restore the river and will include 1,000 acres, 500 on each side of the border. I like thinking about new ways to solve problems and there’s no guarantee that this will work, but restoring the river and creating a park between the two cities sounds at the very least something to try.

4. Don’t you just love how things get found, especialy when it feels as if every inch of this planet has been photographed? Via Live Science, 168 new geoglyphs have been found at Nazca some of which were created 100 B.C to 300 A.D.

5. Via Colossal, the Scottish town of Newburgh in Scotland has their young children design their Christmas decorations, including a “Happy Nemo”, a red snowman, a dinosaur decorated like a Christmas tree, etc.

Bonus. A nice historical look at the Christmas Truce of 1914.

1. Ever heard of São Miguel? Maybe, but most likely no. São Miguel is the greenest of the Portuguese Azores archipelago (the nickname is Green Island). I don’t think I’ve posted this before, but I definitely think it is a new picture. So enjoy!

Photo by Joao Louro on Unsplash

2. The 2023 Tournament of Books by The Morning News is a good list of books, 68 total works of fiction, all to be whittled down to the best book of 2023. So, if you need a good fiction book, and yes, you should be reading fiction, even as an adult, this is a great place to start. And the reason you should read fiction is because there is no other vehicle, other than television or movies, that allows you to experience something that someone else is experiencing.

3. Sort of a long read, The Smithsonian Magazine looks into the likelihood of the existence of King Arthur, going back to text from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, which was written in the 12th century, but tells the tale of the sixth century King Arthur. And this is more of an archeological look at the legend than the story itself.

4. This was really neat, from something called Misconceptions, allows you to scroll through some common misconceptions regarding the continents of Africa, South America, and Europe, for example 2/3’s of Africa is north of the equator.

5. An interesting interview with Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg. Tumblr is a social network, largely used by teens and 20-somethings and in a prior life, it was filled with porn. I actually have used Tumblr previously and should probably resurrect what I had, but as we are watching how Twitter is utilized as a social network, maybe on the other end of the spectrum is Tumblr. Social networks in general are incredibly difficult. And technically, owning a website with any sort of social interaction can be difficult.

1. Ever heard of Jujuy? Me neither. Argentina is really good at the soccer, but is probably way underrated in terms of it’s beauty. Jujuy is a province in the northwestern part of the country bordering with Chile and Bolivia

Photo by Hector Ramon Perez on Unsplash

2. Francis Cade and Justin Levene are biking across America, from Miami to Los Angeles. The thing that they are doing differently is that Justin is doing this on a hand-bike and so it’s 2 bikes 1 wheelchair and 3,000 miles. They are currently about to hit El Paso, so they’ve gone a decent way thus far. It’s also to raise money for Get Kids Going! (don’t forget the exclamation mark) that helps kids afford hand-bikes and things of that nature. They’ve raised something like $75,000 thus far.

3. Space is awesome.

50 years ago, the Apollo 17 astronauts captured an iconic Earth view of the “Blue Marble” as they set sights on the Moon. Today with #Artemis, this time-lapse footage showcases the Earth-Moon transit as @NASA_Orion captured our home planet and the Moon on flight day 13. https://t.co/H9oHsgiHfW pic.twitter.com/ZHIxYKnJy0

— NASA’s Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) December 7, 2022

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4. It’s almost 2023 and Colossal has a round-up of some very different calendars.

5. I can’t remember how or when I found this stuff, but at one point in my life, I was looking for a way to track time and I ran across David Seah’s productivity tools, in particular the Emergent Task Planner was something that I used every day to track my time, something that I had to do as an attorney. There would be days where I’d get a phone call and it was easier to jot down when I got on the phone here along with the time rather than trying to open and start a timer on whatever I was working on. It would also allow me to just easily note when I’d be working on something for blocks of my day. I have used different products for different things, Seah has things for large projects, the daily time tracker mentioned above, and tracking weekly things. Visually, I think they’re really great to look at and not just your typical to-do lists.

1. Ever heard of the Phi Phi Islands? Me neither. They are a small group of islands on the southern end of Thailand and they were made famous by the movie The Beach. Thailand is one of those countries where it seems that the natural beauty combined with the beach are unmatched, or the wow to normal factor is off the charts.

Photo by Jeppe Hove Jensen on Unsplash

2. Kiwi is way too underrated. The humble kiwi is native to China but you can pretty much get this any place, and I didn’t know this previously, but there are also kiwi berries that I am now desperate to try. I make an attempt to have kiwi every day, it’s 2 for $1 at my local grocer, it has 112% of your daily Vitamin C, 38% of Vitamin K, and 10% of Vitamin E. The other great thing is that fruit tends to go bad quickly and if I stick kiwi in the fridge, they’ll last at least a week, maybe more. Pro-tip? Don’t pick the soft kiwi, firm but not rock hard.

3. I only know about Charley Crockett because of 91.7 KXT in Dallas, who will play new interesting music. His latest release I’m Just a Clown is super catchy and from his latest album, The Man from Waco. If you want to know a bit more about Crockett, Garden & Gun has a nice interview.

4. You’ll see this probably Tom Whitwell on the 52 things he learned this year. I don’t know all of the things that I’ve learned and if I were to try to do this, I’d need to make a list starting in January.

5. The difficultness of this doesn’t even register because I’ve been on a mountain bike once. Bicycling’s Kim Cross on Braydon Bringhurst’s attempt to ride up The Whole Enchilada, which usually done downhill and has an average grade of 37% incline. You can also watch.