Month: February 2024

The photo on the left is 10 years ago. Maybe my worst picture that I know of. I think I have another where the double-chin is really prevalent, but those two are definitely my worst photos. The photo on the right is from November when Fitsum and I ran a Thanksgiving 5k. So much has changed and I am pretty sure that 10 years ago I started that journey to not look the way that I did, I am pretty sure it started with some light weights and I definitely started watching shows on YouTube, a channel called Fitness Blender where I would do HIIT workouts in 20 of 30 minutes. That eventually resulted in running, at first short distances and then eventually long distances. I consider myself a non-elite athlete. Non-Elite is a term that I’ve stolen from a YouTuber named Kofuzi, who reviews running shoes and is really good at it.

I’ve never run a straight road marathon and my best half-marathon time (maybe my only time) is 1:50:14 in Fort Worth a couple of years ago. My fastest 5k is 22:52 run from the race of the photo on the right. It’s probably decent to good for a runner who is nearly 50 years old. I can’t remember where I read this, but even if you are a run-of-the-mill athlete that’s not going to break any records and everything you do is recreational at best, you should still train like you are a high-end athlete. Do sprints, and hill work if you like to run (maybe the same if you like to bike) or if weight training is your thing, do it like you mean it. Test for your max and try to make gains, no matter what it is. It seems silly, but when you notice the improvement it’s rewarding and encouraging.

Father John Misty’s Real Love Baby is a fun listen. I don’t know why I love home videos of people dancing, but I do.

Strays: Quentin Tarantino has a coffee shop in LA dedicated to Pam Grier and it’s called Pam’s Coffy with coffee blends from Tarantino himself. Somebody order me a mug (even though I really stopped drinking coffee) . . . wrap your brain around this. The most luminous object ever detected, a quasar called JO529-4351 is 17 billion times the mass of the sun. This quote from Christian Wolf is terrific: “We have discovered an object which has previously not been recognised for what it is; it’s been staring into our eyes for many years because it’s been glowing at its brightness for longer than humankind has probably existed. But we’ve now recognised it, not as being one of the many foreground stars in our Milky Way but as a very distant object.” Glowing since before humankind existed. Science is awesome . . .

The current Beau Miles video is about the trek of one Angus McMillan, described by Miles as murderous and yes, that would seem to be the case. As Miles grew up as a young Australian lad, he was led to believe that McMillian was an explorer and pioneer, one to be celebrated. Heck, one to even have a trek named after him of more than 220 kilometers through the rugged terrain of Omeo and Dargo in 1864. The tricky part here is that he was murderous, particularly of the Kurnai indigenous people, which you could generally know that this is  south-east Australia. Check out this resume, not all by the hands of McMillan, but he’s got more than one entry (which is not good):

1840 – Nuntin- unknown number killed by Angus McMillan’s men
1840 – Boney Point – “Angus McMillan and his men took a heavy toll of Aboriginal lives”
1841 – Butchers Creek – 30-35 shot by Angus McMillan’s men
1841 – Maffra – unknown number shot by Angus McMillan’s men
1842 – Skull Creek – unknown number killed
1842 – Bruthen Creek – “hundreds killed”
1843 – Warrigal Creek – between 60 and 180 shot by Angus McMillan and his men
1844 – Maffra – unknown number killed
1846 – South Gippsland – 14 killed
1846 – Snowy River – 8 killed by Captain Dana and the Aboriginal Police
1846-47 – Central Gippsland – 50 or more shot by armed party hunting for a white woman supposedly held by Aborigines; no such woman was ever found
1850 – East Gippsland – 15-20 killed
1850 – Murrindal – 16 poisoned
1850 – Brodribb River – 15-20 killed

And then check out this quote from a squatter (that’s someone who is stealing land right from under your nose) named Henry Meyrick as to what he and probably others thought about the indigenous peoples there:

The blacks are very quiet here now, poor wretches. No wild beast of the forest was ever hunted down with such unsparing perseverance as they are. Men, women and children are shot whenever they can be met with … I have protested against it at every station I have been in Gippsland, in the strongest language, but these things are kept very secret as the penalty would certainly be hanging … For myself, if I caught a black actually killing my sheep, I would shoot him with as little remorse as I would a wild dog, but no consideration on earth would induce me to ride into a camp and fire on them indiscriminately, as is the custom whenever the smoke is seen. They [the Aborigines] will very shortly be extinct. It is impossible to say how many have been shot, but I am convinced that not less than 500 have been murdered altogether.

That’s quite a way to say that you think a human is not a human.

The good news is that the Kurnai are the traditional owners of Gippsland, the area where McMillan trudged through, which has led to trying to understand what “traditional owner” means. What I can tell, Australia is more open to the idea of giving back rights to land that was occupied by others before Europeans arrived, that there’s a difference between land rights and native title, land rights are created by the government and are like perpetual leases while native title is the recognition of pre-existing indigenous rights.

Back to Miles, he’s running because he hates that there is this track named after a man who murdered so many people. The video is great too because Miles fails his first attempt at the run, it’s too hot and he doesn’t urinate (that’s not a good combo) and he gives it another go in the second video (it’s a 3 part series).

Good on Beau for making me do a deep dive on something I never would have known about.

Texas Monthly’s Peter Holley writes about a man and the hog he raised that tried to kill him:

The memories feed off the mystery that surrounds them. More than a year after the attack, Riley still has no idea what caused his favorite animal to turn on him. They’d both been in the pen earlier that day and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Waylon’s pen-mate, an easygoing female warthog named Peaches, wasn’t in heat and Waylon wasn’t being cornered when he attacked, nor did he appear to be guarding his food. Extensive therapy has helped Austin work through traumatic memories and flashbacks that plagued him for the first year after the attack. A part of him now feels grateful for what happened. He frequently thanks God that Waylon attacked him instead of one of his family members. He credits the attack with bringing him closer to his then girlfriend of three months, Kennedy, whom he hopes to someday marry. He is also grateful that he didn’t stop fighting, not just because he gave himself another shot at life, but because—in a twisted Texas warrior sort of way—he survived an encounter with an animal that is built to battle lions. How many individuals can say that?

There are times that I hesitate to write about things, but then there may be things that although these things are incredibly personal, it may benefit someone to know that certain things happen. This isn’t so much about my kids as it is about certain kids in their schools who use racist terms to refer to them or use racists phrases in front of them. the N-word, monkey, slave, African (not in a good way) are the ones from this year. Oh, and a “joke” when the lights go out in the locker room that no one can see Youssouf unless he smiles. You wouldn’t think that junior high kids would say things like this, but they learn it from someone, maybe their parents, older siblings, who knows. The point isn’t to say why these things happen, but rather that that do. And it would be so easy to be in denial that these things happen, but they are. And my kids are good kids, not perfect, but good kids. They don’t get in trouble, Fitsum is in band, cross country, and tennis, as well as National Honor Society. Youssouf is in honors classes and is maybe the best athlete that the junior high has ever seen. If it’s happening to them with parents who have friends who are teachers and we know enough people to tell us what’s happening that we are able to do something about it. And this isn’t to say that the administration hasn’t been responsive, because they are and have been. There’s only so much you can do after the fact, but they make every effort make sure it is addressed. If your response is that these are merely a few bad apples and yes, that is true, but I would also tell you that it is more prevalent than you think and despite how far society has moved forward, it still has a long ways to go.

Brendan Leonard is a blogger, a professional one, and he put out a video about making a shed. Strike that. It’s not about that. It’s about starting a family. His dog dying. Working hard. Completing a project. Love having many languages, for those of us who know how to say I love you by just working hard and never looking up because sometimes find the right words is hard. Make sure and let those people know that you are saying I love you by putting your head down and doing the one thing that you know how to do, which is just work. It’s okay to say that.

We get a little less serious. Two guys climb a wall, but not vertically, which hard, but horizontally.

A unified theory of f#ck$.

This is one of my answers to the question of, why give a fuck about work? Why love your work? It won’t, of course, love you back. It can’t. Work isn’t a thing that can love. It isn’t alive, it isn’t and won’t ever be living. And my answer is: don’t. Don’t give a fuck about your work. Give all your fucks to the living. Give a fuck about the people you work with, and the people who receive your work—the people who use the tools and products and systems or, more often than not, are used by them. Give a fuck about the land and the sea, all the living things that are used or used up by the work, that are abandoned or displaced by it, or—if we’re lucky, if we’re persistent and brave and willing—are cared for through the work. Give a fuck about yourself, about your own wild and tender spirit, about your peace and especially about your art. Give every last fuck you have to living things with beating hearts and breathing lungs and open eyes, with chloroplasts and mycelia and water-seeking roots, with wings and hands and leaves. Give like every fuck might be your last.