From the good old golfing days

Back in fall of 1993, the last semester of my studies at Professional Golfers Career College in Murrieta (the college have long since moved to a bigger and more modern campus in Temecula), I spent every Tuesday and Thursday mornings at the driving range of either Menifee Country Club, Sun City Golf Club, or the newly opened Red Hawk Golf Club, giving free swing lessons as the practical part of the college's Techniques of Teaching class.

It wasn't my favorite part of the course. I was there at the college mostly to pass the time while I got old enough to be allowed to play on professional tours, and never intended on any teaching or club professional career. I was what they'd call a 'visual learner'.... What I really looked at tended to get pretty well imprinted in my head, and became hard to get rid of (forget). So, I avoided looking at any golf swing that I would have any problem assimilating into my own swing. When I would go out golfing with others, I'd take very good care to not look directly at their swing. I'd just look at the ball being hit, but not the hitting process.



Naturally, that didn't work very well when I had to correct other people (especially amateur golfers)' swing. My professor, the late Gordie Severson, who happened to also be my own swing coach back then, found that endlessly amusing and got into a wicked streak of sending for me when he'd find particularly obnoxious golf swings that needed fixing. In hindsight, I suspect that was his way of building my tolerance for exposure to really hideous stuff some people do in the process of trying to hit a dimply little white ball...
But I digressed...

Anyhow, the most memorable swing I still can't get out of my head to this day (bless you, Gordie!), I was called to after having scored a much nicer looking swing on the other end of the golf range at Sun City Golf Course. I arrived at the appropriate stall and glanced at Gordie who was trying very hard to hide a growing smirk on his face while indicating that I should take over trying to fix the swing of the grumpy looking gentleman in front of him.

I resigned myself to being on the butt end of another unintentional practical joke from my golf professor and turned to have a glancing look at as the man made a few practice swings. Wouldn't you know it, it was one of the most beautiful golf swings I had ever seen! Something of a very fluid mix of the swings of the young Davis Love III and Steve Elkington; exquisite use of leverage while being beautifully compact at the same time. 

I couldn't believe my eyes. I think I even broke into a very hopeful smile at the thought of being able to actually look at a golf swing full on without fearing having it stuck in my head and messing my game up.

Then the man stepped up and put his iron clubhead behind the ball...

Two full minutes went by, and he still had not progressed into the swing from his address... If you golf, then you know, two minutes standing on top of the ball translates to an eternity and a month. His beautifully relax stance transformed into a tense huff and puff, veins were popping on his neck and forearms. My heart sank... this gorgeous golf swing was going downhill fast.... and he hadn't moved an inch. I glanced back at Gordie, who had turned beet red and was quivering in place from a heroic effort to stifle a chuckle.

'Bastard!' I cursed under my breath, as I watched my designated 'pupil' finally inched his club into a jerky and laborious backswing, took a long pause at the top, and then proceeded to bash down on the ball, producing a perfect shank that nearly took the golfer in the next stall out.

"Well?", snarled my pupil, "What did I do wrong?"
'Oh, you caught me by surprised and I didn't have a good look,' I lied as my pants let off a wisp of smoke, 'Could you hit another one at the 150 banner for me, please.'

Nearly six more minutes, and only two actual swings (and two completely murdered range balls... and they were the abominable two-piece craps of golf balls rather than the wholesome but soft three-piece balata spheres that I was used to hitting) that produced rather undesirable results along with a stream of vocalized grumpiness,... and I was out of stalling option. Luckily for me, I had begrudgingly seen many golf swings in my teens to have one that seemed to offer the solution.

One of the ladies I had golfed with in tournaments in Asia back around 1991 had this weird habit of swinging the club forward past the ball before taking it back into a proper backswing. I never understood before why she did that, but she was a pretty good ball striker for it. So I got up to demonstrate to Mr Tense how I would like him to, as a matter of experiment, when he next addressed the ball, to swing the club forward to point toward the target before taking it back into the real swing and then just go on to hit the ball.

He wasn't keen on it, but as nothing else seemed to have worked for him lately, why not try this weird youngster's strange suggestion. As anyone would predict, the first swing didn't produce a good hit (it's quite a change going from the normal start of any golf swing), but it was still the most solid hit he had that morning. So he tried some more.

It was amazing to see the gorgeous Davis Love III/Steve Elkington-esque golf swing rematerialized and making contact with golf balls on that range. Even Gordie was at a loss for words. (Served him right!) He could diagnose the problem as well as I could, of course, but telling someone to relax.... and actually getting any relaxation out of them. Now, that was a dilemma.



It was a good learning experience for both me and the golfer (who left the range that morning never being told to relax at all). I still don't like looking at other people's golf swings even though I don't golf anymore, but I learned then to appreciate being exposed to different things and ideas. You never know when they would come in handy in giving you more choices of solutions to problems, and understanding why people do things differently. There are as many different ways of smashing the golf balls as there are of skinning a cat.... so to speak.

Happy Thanksgiving 2019

It's the last Thursday in November, and the one holiday I really quite like in the USA - Thanksgiving Day. Being grateful for what one's got should be a daily rather than an annual thing, of course, but it is nice to have a full day off work to really reflect on how not so empty my glass is, even without comparing it with ones belonging to others.

It wasn't so many years ago that good health was not something I could take for granted. I still remember not being able to walk a city block without stopping to lean on my cane and gasp for air, having all the joints going thermonuclear at all hours of the day, and being so tired that getting to the safety of the opposite sidewalk while crossing the street felt like the last mile of an ultra-marathon in the waterless Sahara.

My health isn't perfect now, and I have to really force myself to exercise when I don't want to (and that is more often than not). But I've finished two consecutive Belgian Wafer Rides, ridden 4 solo rando permanents, commute everywhere almost exclusively by bike, cycled up both the highest and the steepest paved roads in the county, hiked many rugged miles with my buddy, and even given a good impression of an Energizer Bunny at my workplace. It's all a lot of work that isn't always even slightly pleasant, but every bit of it is worth it.

Use it or lose it, my oncologist mom used to say. And, darn if she isn't right. I may bitch about things, still, but at least I do have the energy left to bitch - for which I am very grateful!

Luck, has also been on my side so far. No, I haven't won the lottery or anything. But, to be on foot or on bicycle in traffic almost everyday in the USA for 8 years now and still haven't gotten hit by any car yet takes just about as much luck as it does constant vigilance and skills. 2019 has been a terrible year in my cycling family accident-wise. You can do all the right thing, and still get broadsided by inattentive driver. A few of my friends separately ran out of luck this year. Now one is dead, one paralyzed, and another still recovering from spinal fracture.

When people take their eye off the road while going 55 mph, they cover just over 80 feet every second completely blind to where their car is heading. That's over half a football field every 3 seconds. There isn't much I would be able to do if a driver drifts into me at that speed, even if I see them coming in my helmet-mounted rear-view mirror.

Needless to say, though, being situationally aware and taking all possible caution decreases one's chance of being hit, or hitting something on the road. But sometimes it is just down to luck to not be in the path of a car that isn't being carefully driven, or to not have a suicidal squirrel squirrels into your front wheel and sends you flying off to who-knows-where when it locks up and does an impromptu endo.

There were also a lot of luck involved in running into these lovelies with the camera ready to shoot.

I'm also very grateful for all my friends and family, and even to people I'm not friendly with. The former are amazing support in good and bad times. The latter keep me humble and challenge me to consider different viewpoints, and, in some extreme cases, really increases my appreciation of the more ethical human beings. Contrast is important in life. As Satan/Woland says in one of my all time favorite books;

What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows also come from trees and from living beings. Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light? - Mikhail Bulgakov, Master and Margarita

There are many mundane little things, and many more substantial things that I am grateful of, of course, but who has time to read this when there are turkeys and green beans and stuffing and many other things in the oven and on the stoves to keep an eye on today? This has already gone on long enough, so I'll just stop now and wish everyone a very Happy Thanksgiving with many things to be grateful of all year long.

Hiking local

I consider myself lucky to have grown up before the age of the smart phones. It's amazing how many people I know here would sit indoor and stare at pictures like these on their smart phone screen, when the place the photos are from is only a mile and a bit away.

My friend Cornelia and I have been hiking all over the preserve once a week for the past year or so. It's a cherished active decompression time from work and other not-so-uplifting news we hear daily. It isn't always a pleasure hike. The terrains here can be very gnarly, the overgrown vegetation gives cover to many stingy insects and sometimes moody snakes (though, luckily, we somehow haven't come face to face with those legless critters this year), and the summer heat this year seems more humid than ever.

But, there is also nothing quite as therapeutic as a good and strenuous nature hike with a cheerful pal where we regularly run into wild critters doing all sorts of crittery antics.

Huffing and puffing in the clean air under a big sky while dodging the many manifestations of the ubiquitous poison oaks, loose rocks, and sweat-loving gnats (tho the latter mostly avoid me, thanks to my Picaridin bug repellent lotion) is a great way of keeping the pudge off while gaining time to put things in perspectives.

It's great to be able to see pictures and watch videos of people and places on the other side of the oceans. But it's even better going out into the nearest wild and experiencing first hand the non-digitized landscape around you. Then, you know what you have to lose, if you don't take care of your own surroundings.

Sep 4th, 2019: Edit to add - another upside to going hiking; nature preserves are among the very few places left in the USA that hasn't been shot up by an American gun nut... I mean, they've done malls, concerts, all sorts of school, churches, synagogues, mosques, and even daycare. You're much safer going hanging with rattlesnakes than with gun-packing assholes.

Switchback-lust

I have a thing for switchback turns on narrow country roads...

A switchback high up Nate Harrison Grade on Palomar Mountain.

I wonder what a psychologist would have to say about that. An incurably twisted personality? A fixation on the now rather than the future?

Al Bahr Dr on Mt Soledad, completely twisting itself into a knot.

I like climbing up and descending down switchback curves, with the road ahead only revealing itself to me a little bit at a time as I round its corners. Switchbacks are almost only found on mountainous roads, of course. Their sharp turns cut down the road gradient on steep routes up mountain ridges and faces.

Not quite a switchback, but a tight ring around Mt Helix.

In a way, not being able to see far ahead makes many of San Diego's tough mountain road climbs seem more manageable. I get pretty demoralized sometimes when I look up and the climb seems keen on continuing on forever.

There aren't many San Diego roads twistier than Camino del Aguilar on Starvation Mtn.

 The tighter the switchbacks, the more to keep me occupied with what I have to do right now. It's like living in a perpetual survival mode...

Round the turn for more and more climbing on Camino del Aguilar.

Of course, one can't live like that forever. There's only so much psych to wear down before you blow...

A tight switchback on Mesa Grande Rd climbing up from Lake Henshaw.

Luckily, this isn't the Alps or the Andes, and there is no road going higher than 6500 ft or so in San Diego County. You might suffer for an hour or two at the most, but all climbs do end... usually before your reserve runs out. And then... the view... and the twisty downhill that a cyclist doesn't have to worry about keeping to the right edge of the road while descending. We are more maneuverable than cars, and it's easy to hold the same speed (or even faster) navigating the curvy downhills as those big lumbering machines do.

La regina del mondo...

The same exhilaration experienced by Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Titanic as he perches on the nose of the ocean liner, breaking into the fair wind like 'the king of the world'... without having to buy an ocean cruising ticket or win a card game and then getting sunk by an ice burg in a frigid ocean.... or something like that.

December spirit

Sweetwater River (before & after)

I went riding in the mountains of Jamul the other day and was passing through the Sweetwater Bikeway on my way back to town when it dawned on me that the riverbed was looking cleaner than usual... Most of the shopping carts that had made themselves at home  in the river were gone! A big thank you to whoever got down and dirty (and probably quite wet) to drag them off to a more suitable shopping carts haven!

There always are a lot of things not going 'right', and it's always tempting to get pessimistic about stuff (which is probably why doom-selling is a perpetually profitable business). But there really is no knight in shining armor who is coming to rescue us out of whatever problem we have. The guys and gals that went and cleared up the river didn't just sit at home and pray or hope that someone will rid the riverbed of all those trash. They just went out and did the dirty work themselves.

Local children volunteers picking up trash around Mt Helix Nature Theater.

And it isn't just grown ups who are doing cool things like this that benefits the whole community. The other day I ran into a bunch of kids at the summit of Mt Helix who were going around picking up trashes that some inconsiderate visitors had left behind. Despite of some sentiment that kids today aren't as responsible or proactive as previous generations, the trashes were most likely left by grown ups and were being cleaned up after by kids not old enough to even have a provisional driver's license yet.

The sign... is gone! (And the prevailing local sentiment is markedly more cyling-friendly)

A month or so ago an anti-cyclists sign posted on a private property at Four Corners (the intersection of Lyons Valley Rd and Honey Springs Rd) in Jamul became news and drew a lot of outrage... from both cyclists and drivers who don't like cyclists. But most people aren't murderous maniacs even when behind the wheel of an automobile. Thanks to the many kind, reasonable and good neighborly locals who brought up the issue at their community meeting, the sign has been removed and I can report that just about all the cars and trucks that passed me on the area's narrow roads last Saturday were a pleasure to share the pavement with.

This graffiti on the GWL keeps getting friendlier and friendlier!

Aside from the many obvious signs that things have gotten much BETTER over the years rather than the other way around (people are not only living longer and healthier, they are also freer to voice complaints and discontent without getting shipped off to Siberia or some place worse), there are also more subtle signs of that all around, if only we would focus more on them and not just on the ills of the world. The world will never be free of ills and icky stuff, and we all will still do stupid things once in a while. I just think that life would only continue to be better if every time we start to slide into the find-things-to-get-outraged-and-complain-about mode, we break the cycle early and go out to find good and useful things to do and people who do good and useful things to praise instead. At least try that for a month... It's the holidays season after all.

August is here already?

Living next door to a singing coach with no star pupil really makes one appreciate the rarity of great singers better! One voice student in particular, a tenor who sings mostly Broadway tunes, has been taking lesson two to three times a week ever since I moved here last September and has not gotten even a little bit better. Is that some sort of an indictment against the teacher?

But then I shouldn't be too hard on the voice coach neighbor... after all, I can often flee from my pad and go ride my bike around the neighborhood (or to one of the libraries nearby) while he is stuck in close quarter with that out-of-tune drone singing for a full hour every visit. What torture we all must endure sometimes to make a living!

On a more cheery note, though, our weather has been unseasonably cool for the last week and a half, and that made for some really good bicycling trips around town.


Alas, summer is warming up again, though, so I'll be stuck riding close to the ocean for a while.

Just a few of my favorite views riding around Mt Soledad.

Luckily, there's Mt Soledad, this little hill a few miles to the north, that has lots of cool little roads to explore and is so close to the shore that the heat isn't a problem there much of the time.

Knitted ramps & trees in Kensington & South Park.

Side note: what's with all this knitting thingy that's being wrapped around structures and trees around town of late? It's rather cute... though a bit wasteful (but then wastefulness in art isn't such a crime, I imagine).

Holidays Greetings

Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas! Joyeux Noël! Frohe Weihnachten! Честита Коледа! Schöni Fäschttäg! Buon Natale! Feliz Navidad!

Best of wishes to everyone for a safe and happy end to 2012 and a marvelous and healthy 2013!

For my fellow fans of one Vesselina Kasarova, the amazing Bulgarian operatic mezzo soprano, here is a little year end treat.

I don't know why this recording of Handel's Ariodante from the Liceu in Barcelona in 2006 hasn't been made commercially available yet. But here is a bit of it to give your holiday a dramatic stir.

Musing: Where Have All The Flowers Gone (or something like that)?

This shot was taken in spring, when the wild flowers were blooming all over town.

Those wild flowers are gone now, of course, though I wonder if the pavement still remembers the beautiful colorful little bee charmers that used to cast shadow on them early and late in the days.

Why would anyone want to live forever? It might be okay if one has really short memory and forgets everything soon enough that things always seem new and exciting. Somehow I doubt that that is part of the much longed for concept, though. People want to live long and remember everything. Something like a retentive slab of pavement. I suppose I'm odd in that I'd rather be the flighty wild flower. Long life is too boring for me. 

How to help those affected by hurricane Sandy

You've probably heard of Hurricane Sandy, that icky nasty supersized storm that hit the US northeast earlier today. 

HMS Bounty replica was no match for the giant hurricane (Photo: US Coast Guard)

If you'd like to help in the relief effort, please consider donating blood at the blood bank near you and perhaps a little money to any of these worthy aid organizations, too:   

 
American Red Cross: Operating emergency shelters, providing medical care, supplies and clean up supplies to emergency areas.

Americares: This organization distributes emergency medical and clean up supplies.

Humanist Crisis Response: Funds emergency rescue and medical operations.
 
The Salvation Army: Provides food and emergency shelters to those displaced by the storm.

Feeding America: Provides food to local food banks.

The Humane Society: Rescues and shelters displaced pets. 

You never know when a freak disaster might strike your town instead of others'. Let's pay it forward and spread some good karma around!

Thinking about things while watching the London Olympic Game

Like many other sport fans I've been spending a lot of time indoor glued to the tv set since the London Olympics started last week. Not that I have any Olympic aspiration, mind you, but it is fun and mostly inspiring watching all sorts of summer sports being played at such amazingly high level.

US Olympic Training Ctr in Chula Vista, CA.

I suppose what drives many athletes and many fans watching these games is the competition and the competitive spirit. But obviously, competitiveness means different things to different people. Is it a cultural differences thing? Some people are driven to beat everyone else, while others are driven to be the best that they can be (even if they don't beat anyone). The two surely aren't the same...

Take the recent badminton scandal where players from the Chinese, South Korean, and Indonesian teams got disqualified for trying to throw their matches in order to avoid having to play a better team in their next round. I don't know if I would call that 'cheating', but it definitely is unsportsmanlike. They were trying to beat the other teams by gaining unearned advantage in the drawing rather than trying to play their best in every game. It is 'the ends justify the means' rather than 'it isn't about winning or losing but how you play the game', sort of thing.

No matter whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game that reflects who you really are.

I've read some rationalizations that blame this gaming of the system on the system itself, but this surely is problematic. Should we only do the right thing when it benefits us or when we know we can't get away with not doing so, rather than just because it is right? Gaming the system may win an athlete a coveted medal, but, aside from the financial and social advantages gained from 'winning', does it really feel right to win - knowing that the win was obtained in a questionable manner?

Having spent a bit of my developing years in different cultures, I'm afraid that question would produce different answers, too... Some cultures actually do think it a virtue to outfox others even if the outfoxing violates the spirit of fair play. 'The ends justifies the means (do whatever it takes to get the win, regardless of fairness)' or 'how you play the game matters more than what result you get'. For myself, I'd throw my lot in with the latter. Focusing on winning or losing makes one's happiness dependent on others' performance. Focusing on how one plays the game is a lot more self-contained. Natural ability is largely a matter of luck. Personal integrity, on the other hand, is an earned quality, and one that nobody else can ever take from you without your consent. Having both is ideal, but if I could only have one, I'd go for the latter every time.

PS: Since the Olympics vibes on the web seems dominated by the notion of Asian athletes' bending of the rule, I don't think those badminton players did any worse than what the Great Britain track cyclist did in intentionally crashing in order for his team to get to restart (and not have to suffer from being slow taking off the first time). Unethical is unethical regardless of nationality or skin color, and to have the temerity to go around talking about it as if he had done something clever... Ugh! Hindes and his likes could learn something about sportsmanship from Victoria Pendelton and Jess Varnish, GB's women's team sprinters who got relegated out of medal contention for a marginal and unintended rule violation. Everyone goofs every now and then, but it takes character to own up to it without excuses.

Just A Thought: When Atheists Are Ugly...

I'm an equal opportunity dissenter. As much as the evangelical/radical Christians irritate me when they do something like ambushing people at the only in/out access to a non-religious concert venue or picketing at funerals of gays or other people whose lifestyle they presume to disapprove of or attempting to force kids in public schools to study their religious creation myth in science classes or using political/social/financial influence to try to force their religious dogma on the general public, etc:

I'm even more irritated when atheists do something like this (the Friendly Atheist's gleeful bashing of Chuck Colson upon learning of his death a few hours before). And that the majority of atheists who turned up to comment on this article are cheering him on rather than calling him out for it only adds insult to the injury. 

No, this spitting on a freshly dead 'enemy' even before his corpse got cold doesn't compare to what many religious people have done on the indecency scale, but since when is it okay to behave like a bunch of morally depraved folks just because you think the other folks would do the same hideous thing or worse? Do what those you condemn would do, and you yield any high ground you might have had on them. Shame.... godless or not.

A morbid thought while walking the dog

I was walking the roommate's new dog around the neighborhood yesterday. It was a good break from hours of proof-checking a bunch of geometry. 

Everything was blooming! My eyes loved the sight of colorful flowers and fresh green leaves, but all the flying pollen proved unsettling for my nose, which tried its darnest to run off to angiosperm-free pasture. We hobbled by a church about a mile away that was looking a bit more circus-y than usual. 

When prayers can't expel bugs, call Terminix...

You know, Noah shoulda gotten rid of the bugs when he had the chance... Surely bed bugs and other land-based pest couldn't have survived the supposed global flood if they were refused ark space, could they? 

Cross on top of a Christian church steeple

But, at any rate, looking at the weirdly humorous temporary look of the church a thought came to me that I ought to be grateful that the Romans used crucifixion on Jesus. I mean, what if they had decided to hang him instead? Can you imagine looking at churches with a noosed gallow on top of them instead of a cross? 

Moroni statue on top of the San Diego LDS Temple

At least the Mormons have the good sense to put a shiny golden trumpeting angel on top of their temples... though they sort of ruined it by naming the dude Moroni (imagine having to live through high school with a name like that!)... 

Somebody asked me about the temple-top statues once; I think they all face toward Jackson County, Missouri, where the Latter Day Saints believe is the location of the original Garden of Eden. I know that's not what the Bible or any other non-Mormon legends say, but it is quite ingenious, really. If only I could have used 'divine revelation' as excuse for making things up while answering my history and geography tests during my school years I would have aced everything (and cried 'religious bigotry!' if the answers were marked wrong)... Alas, I'm not religious. My professors would have flunked my atheist butt right out of school.   

Right. Back to work I go....

And that was 2011

Hello! Hello! I hope everyone is well and having a good end of the year holidays season!

I had a rather unexpected change of residence again a month ago. Was going to move out of state to snowier pasture, but was blown away by a whirling wind of weirdly freaky circumstances and now I'm hanging in limbo for another month. May still move to another state later in January, or may stay put as a Southern Californian beach bum. Don't know how it'll go. We'll see!

For a boring smorg, 2011 was rather eventful: I made some new friends and got closer to a few who are effortlessly even nicer and more caring when the times are rough than when the going is good. Even if you don't know who you are (darn these good Samaritans! They do good deeds so naturally that they don't recognize their own goodness much of the time!), you are a jolly good fellow, fellas. Thanks very much!

Being boring can be a virtue in dog-trainers...

 Inspired by the amazing Youtube clips by Kikopup (Emily Larlham) I also acquired another side job/hobby of dog-training. There are dog-trainers and then there are dog-trainers! It is amazing what you can teach just about any dog to do with positive-reinforcement technique only... with no punishment at all! Once you get the concept, it is quite easy... Of course, the hard part has to do with training the dog owners to stay with the program and not give in to intimidation/punishment-based 'short cuts'. As tempting as they are short cuts have ways of coming back to bite you in the long run! Anyhow, I got to meet quite a lot of cute and cool dogs in the past year for this. It may make the neighborhood cats more wary of me (you look sort of like a human but you smell like 4 or 5 different dogs. What the flea is wrong with you???), but on the whole it really is a lovable experience!

I slacked off this year a bit on the opera/concert-going front, though. I don't know if I'll be around to catch the San Diego Opera's 2012 season yet, but it sure looks a very tempting one! For the first season since the 2008 market crash the SDO now has enough cash flow to put on four operas instead of just three. What's more, they even managed to poach Renee Fleming, who will turn up here in America's Finest City for a concert in March.

Renee Fleming is coming to San Diego on March 24th, 2012!

After years of dodging religious evangelists at street corners and bus-stops, I broke my tradition and hung out with a few Mormon missionaries for quite a few months. A few are staying friends even though there isn't much hope of them ever converting me to that strangely socialistic and polytheistic religion. It is possible to love people even while being utterly repulsed by their dogma, I found. I hope our encounters benefited them as much as they benefited me.

Ever since I broke away from religions I've loathed to look back on the days that I spent in one. The missionaries reminded me of my younger evangelical Christian self, and it has been endlessly fascinating to re-examine things from such a different perspective. The more I learned about Mormonism the more inclined I am to worry about my new friends... but these gals are intelligent, I think, perhaps more so than I was. If I could escape my net, then I'm sure they can, too... and their journey is one they have to make themselves.

Having been such a slow reader of late, I am surprised to find that I managed to read more books than I thought I would in 2011. Robert Conot's River of Blood: Years of Darkness about the 1965 Watts Riot in Los Angeles started of the year on an alternatively chilling and instructive note.

I'm a genre-spree reader. I get into a certain sort of books and read a bunch of them one after another. Having labored through Bill Clinton's pudgy biography, My Life, I went a bit flaky and picked up Andrew Morton's Diana: Her True Story from a pile at a thrift shop's books section... along with one biography of her former spouse, Charles: Prince of Wales, by Anthony Holden. While Morton's homage to Princess Diana seems to have been written by someone a bit overly sympathetic to his subject, Holden's treatment of the young Prince Charles (before he married anyone) is quite fair and incisive. Pele's autobiography, Pele: My Life and The Beautiful Game, was a revelation. I already knew of his technical grace on the football field, but what he overcame to get to where he was and to still maintain his integrity was very inspiring.

Reading Gordon Ramsay's Roasting in Hell's Kitchen somehow didn't make me admire the man more. I love his UK version of Kitchen Nightmares, but the US version put a bad taste in my mouth (why does Fox have to turn every show into another version of hyper-sensationalized Judge Judy?). His sure is an interesting life, though he is such a type-A personality even in writing that I needed a break from the dude by the end of the book.

Even though I'm not a fan of operatic coloratura sopranos (though I'd make exceptions for Edita Gruberova and Natalie Desay), I was not above picking up Beverly Sills' Bubbles while browsing a local bookstore one summer evening. For all the bubbly persona she displayed in her public image, the gal was one tough cookie... and a heck of a singer, too!

I also got into a spree of real life adventures reading with Bear Grylls' Facing Up, Sir Edmund Hillary's 'Nothing Venture, Nothing Win', Stephen Venables' Everest: Alone At The Summit, Freddie Wilkinson's One Mountain - Thousand Summits, and Peter Jenkins' Across China. Except for the last one, these recount high-altitude climbing. Grylls was the youngest Briton to summit Everest in 1998 at age 23. He is better known to us Americans as the weirdo who does dare-devil stuff doing extreme survival things on a tv program where he seems to enjoy taking his clothes off for a skinny dip and eating raw fish fresh from the stream. Somehow his book persona seems quite more normal and sane by comparison. 

Venables' account of his amazing first oxygen-free ascent of Everest via the Kangshung Face is gripping and gives a great glimpse into what sort of mentality drives people to risk so much to achieve something that doesn't really seem to benefit anyone. Freddie Wilkinson's telling of the 2008 K2 disaster not surprisingly made me revisit the similar story of the infamous Everest tragedy of 1996. It amazed me that the only two climbers (Chhiring Dorje and Pemba Gyalje) on K2 in 2008 who had enough stamina to mount a rescue attempt after having summitted the peak themselves were, like Anatole Boukreev and Lopsang Jambu on Everest in 1996, superfit professionals who were climbing without the aid of supplementary oxygen. It's food for thought, at least, that in the end technological short cuts are no match for knowledge and rigorous preparation.

Sir Edmund Hillary's memoir is now one of my favorite books for his no nonsense and amazingly understated and unassuming narration of his remarkable life. The man was so bent on not crowing about his own abilities that I almost felt the urge to slap my mental image of him in the head... Of course he mentions his ascent of Everest, but that is only an icing on an already remarkable cake, I think. I hadn't known anything of his leading an expedition to the the South Pole, and the various other things that he went about doing that most people would only dream about. It takes a very secure man to not let all that get to his head.

I don't climb high mountains, though that doesn't stop me from reading about them.

Peter Jenkins didn't climb any mountain in his book, though he walked across quite a magnificent expanse of foreign landscape. I was familiar with him from his first book, A Walk Across America, a very interesting tale that got a bit less interesting for me when the dude turned religious toward the end of it.

I got 3/4 way through Rebecca West's venerated tome, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, about her travel through the Balkans in the 30's, but didn't finish it. It is an amazingly insightful book... though sometimes the author annoys me to no end with her philosophy.

The more interesting books I read this year, though, were Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Akio Morita's Made in Japan, Azar Narfisi' Reading Lolita in Tehran, Stephen Jay Gould's Ever Since Darwin, and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Malinowski's account of the Trobriands of the Kiriwina Island (near Papua New Guinea) almost made me wish that I had majored in anthropology in college instead of biochemistry. If Indiana Jones could write a book about his exploits... I don't know, I think I'd still go for Prof Malinowski's vividly objective prose.

Akio Morita was a co-founder of Sony Corporation, and his self-made story is one capitalist Americans would love to claim for our own but can't. I suppose most of you readers will have read Narfisi's book and already wonder how to write like that in one's second language. Being a slow slug I'm still trying to catch up on the background reading required to completely understand her lessons!

Having to take lots of biology classes in college saved me from having to catch up on much background readings for Stephen Jay Gould's Ever Since Darwin, though I still found that I feel a bit smarter each time I re-read the book. The man made critical thinking seem so sexy...

Oddly enough, I found Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible reading through one of my favorite Mormon missionaries' favorite books list. It is a remarkable book. I should have liked to come across it while I was still a teenage Jesus-freak. I don't regret having gone down that road once, but I do regret the amount of time I spent on it... that and the lost opportunities. The book probably reads quite differently for those going through a religious phrase than it does for me. All the same it still flabbergasts me a little how anyone can read and like this thing and still volunteer to go on a religious mission afterward.

Anyhow! Tonight the calendar flips to a new page. I guess I will be staying up late, though mostly to try to get more work done than to watch the ball drop in Time Square. I don't think the cats around here even know what a 'new year' is, so I don't really celebrate days like this as much as normal people do (on the other hand, I love it when the wind changes to bring in a new season... or when the earth does strange things like trying to swallow the moon like it did earlier this month!). I'll be too busy to post much here for a week or two, so here is thanking everyone for putting up with my rambling posts. Wishing you all a very happy holiday season and 2012!