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Not Long Now

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-08-07T09:12:26-07:00

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Olumpics Arrival

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-08-05T17:46:05-07:00

I had lunch today with Bob Bowman, Batman’s coach, and we were talking about being appreciative of the situation. ...“The athletes from the larger countries may complain about this or that, but there are people here that are going to live better during these two weeks than they have ever lived before.” I thought about it for a moment, and even though I knew he wasn’t talking about me I said: “Well, I think I may be one of those people.” I’m a spoiled American, I know that, but I’m having an incredible time so far. I don’t want to gush too much, but the following post (which covers the first two days here) is pretty much an advertisement for the Beijing Olympics. ...I don’t know what you’ve heard or read about this Olympics, but I can assure you that this place is about ready to burst with excitement. Everything is huge, everything is organized, everything is planned and prepared and just in case there’s a problem there’s 50 Chinese standing on every street corner willing to help. I’ve never been to the Olympics before, but from what I can tell, China wants this Olympics to dwarf everything that came before it. ...Basically, if you read my last post, you can disregard the word substitution key…because this place is awesome. Monday was travel day to the Olympics, and I decided to dress for the occasion. I donned the sweater vest again because it’s so outrageous, but this time I wore the white shorts instead of the white pants to go along with the white shoes. Before departing Singapore Dara Torres noticed I was dressed for success and asked me: “Mark, why are you so dressed up?” and I responded “Dara, I’m going to the Olympic Games, I thought I should look nice.” It was a good thing I did dress well because the flight to Beijing, onboard Singapore Airlines, was the nicest flight I’ve ever been on. I believe the plane was the largest commercial aircraft in the world, the service was incredible, and the food was worthy of a fine dining restaurant. I am not making up the next sentence: I could live in my seat on the Singapore Airlines plane for at least a month without a single complaint. We arrived in Beijing in the afternoon, and hundreds of people were waiting for us at the airport. (Actually they were waiting for Batman, but everyone else got a lot of attention too.) We were hurried onto buses and taken by police escort through Beijing. In preparation for the Olympics, Beijing did a bit of an environmental makeover. Thousands of trees line the sides of the freeway from the airport, so much so that it felt like we were going away from a city rather than towards the city. A thick blanket of greenery was our only view until we were in the middle of Beijing. The Olympics dominate every aspect of Beijing and for a tourist coming to the city you’d probably miss out on the typical cultural experience. The city in clean as a whistle and the streets are free of congestion. The planning for this event is obvious at every turn, and, with the barricades, high-tech name tags, and general security presence, Beijing has the feel of a post-apocalypse city. On Monday night we went to the Water Cube, which is only a couple of hundred meters away from our dorms, but takes 20 minutes to get to because you have to walk to the bus depot and then drive around the village to get to the venue. We’ve all seen the Water Cube and gawked at it for the past 2 years, but finally seeing it was pretty special. It really is different than any other pool I’ve ever seen because the architecture of the building was given more planning and thought than any natatorium before it. (If you’re a Gene Hackman fan rest assured that the pool itself is regulation size.) The interior of the Water Cube is beautiful, and the spectator seating goes up and up and up. I was however a bit disappointed to see that so many of the prime seats in the natatorium have been reserved for media. China wants these Games to be broadcast to the world, which is fine, but Olympic tickets for swimming are scarce, and many of the athlete families will have to watch their loved one swim from a television screen rather than in person because the journalist section takes up half the seating. ...It’s new, clean and organized. I think I can’t tell you who my roommate is by name, but he’s the world record holder in the 100 Butterfly and an incredibly cool guy.... The dorm buildings are neatly organized into rows and each country has a group of rooms together in one building or, in a few cases, the entire building. (USA and China, the two largest delegations, have at least 2 full dorm buildings.) Every nation puts flags outside their windows and doors so that as one walks around the village you are aware of which building houses which country. Actually, that’s not entirely true: every nation displays the flag except for America. Because of security issues, America is absent from the dorm flag display. Finland is here, Australia, Switzerland, and Brazil are as well, but based upon flag representation America hasn’t showed up yet. The funny thing is, because everyone knows that America IS here, and because there’s only 2 buildings in the entire village without any flags, it’s certainly obvious which buildings house the American athletes. I know this post is getting long so I’ll finish with a quick analysis of the Village cafeteria.... Now, put about 5 buffet restaurants in there and add a McDonalds. Throw in a couple of thousand chairs and you have your Village cafeteria. The food is excellent and there are Chinese people everywhere interested in making the experience enjoyable. Six people, all doing different jobs, served me one piece of chicken and a scoop of rice, and when the sixth and final person handed me the plate they all looked at me, smiled and said “Enjoy your lunch.” ...The first picture is of me enjoying my sweater vest at the airport. The rest are from a few places around the village. In some of the pictures I may be wearing a giant name tag with all kinds of electronic wizardry on it. For the next two weeks I’m basically supposed to sleep with that around my neck. I can’t go anywhere without it (sometimes I take it off for photo purposes).

Secret Codes Revealed!

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-08-03T12:42:43-07:00

Sunday night in Singapore This is my final post from Singapore, and tomorrow I will be in the Olympic village in Beijing. I feel like I Aubrey Montague from “Chariots of Fire” writing home to his mum. Actually, at various points over the past few months, I can identify with all four of the major characters from that movie. I’d love to write that during the journey thus far I’ve emulated the life of Eric Liddell, but often times I find that I am behaving like Harold Abrahams… We leave for Beijing tomorrow and there is a logistical item I wanted to share before I get there. Apparently blogs are monitored quite strictly (some are getting this as an e-mail some are reading it on a blog). Not only are there China laws, but there are also Olympic laws and both sets of laws carry with them a punishment for lawbreakers. The China laws are pretty straight forward. Don’t write anything bad about China. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I don’t plan on being critical of Beijing just in case. However, if criticism is warranted and necessary, I’ve created a word substitution key for readers. If I have something critical to write about Beijing I’ll refer to it as Stockholm, as in “The smog in Stockholm is really bad.” (Word substitution key at end of post). The Olympic laws are totally obnoxious. There are restrictions on the use of the word “Olympics,” and restrictions against posting pictures, so if you’re reading this at swimroom.com, usatoday.com, wsj.com or 10kswimmer.com you won’t be able to see any of the pictures I may be referencing. (I may have just broken a rule in the previous sentence by advertising websites). Also, I can’t write anything about any of the other swimmers so, hereafter, Michael Phelps will be referred to as Batman. The point is that there are lots of rules and I hope the administrators of those sites are able to censor me when I forget. Additionally, if you want to get more information on the particulars of the race in Beijing and of Open Water Swimming in general, go to 10kswimmer.com. Steve Munatones, one of the most knowledgeable members of the 10k swimming community created a website with up-to-date info of everything pertaining to the race. There’s a popularity contest currently underway and I am in a close battle with a guy from Egypt - your support in my favor would be appreciated. Final thoughts from Singapore I’ve got to give credit to the people of Singapore. When I was back in Palo Alto I signed quite a few autographs, but most of the fans wanted my signature because they recognized I was in the same costume as Batman. Here I have people coming up to me saying “Mark Warkentin, could you please sign my autograph book? Good luck in the 10K in Beijing.” They even pronounce my name correctly. The autograph books themselves are incredibly impressive. Many of the people would take a picture one day then return with the developed photo the next day. All the athlete photos would be organized alphabetically and next to each photo was an accompanying athlete biography. It’s not hard to see why Singapore is an incredibly successful country. On Saturday the USA Team was invited to a 6 course dinner at the country club we’ve been training at for the past week. I sat at a table with Chinese people who lived in Singapore because it’s a more financially advantageous location. At least that’s what I gathered from our somewhat spotty conversations. I was given another crash course in Chinese and again I forgot almost everything, except now I also know “Thank You” which is pronounced “Shea Shea.” The attached picture is of me enjoying a Singapore country club salad, or as I call it “A culinary garage sale in a glass.” My final practice this afternoon was pretty good. Coach John gave me a set that we’ve done a few times over the past year. 50 Ez 50 Strong – 29 100 Ez 100 Strong – 1:00 200 Ez 200 Almost Fast 2:02 400 Ez 400 Fast 4:07 800 Ez 800 Fast 8:28 At the end of a long week of training, working with less sleep than I normally get, I was pretty happy with the result. Next stop - Beijing Word substitution key in case I need to criticize China: Beijing = Stockholm. As in “The smog in Stockholm is really bad.” Chinese people = Norwegians people. As in “The Norwegian guy that I stood next to in the elevator could have used a shower.” Chinese food = Danish pastries. As in “I’m sick Danish Pastries.” Chinese bathroom = Soviet Gulag. As in “A Soviet Gulag is a place one doesn’t want to spend a lot of time.”

In the Footsteps of Somerset Maugham

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-08-02T20:48:27-07:00

Sunday the 3rd of August in Singapore In January of 1947 my grandmother, on her way to the mission field of India, traveled through the harbor in Singapore. At the time she was 8 months pregnant with my dad. Thus, I am the third generation in the Warkentin line to have been in Singapore as a precursor to a major life event, and even though I am going to the Olympics, my story pales in comparison to my predecessors. (My Grandmothers trek to India is, without a doubt, the greatest adventure story I’ve ever heard.) I called my Grandmother the other day (she’s fascinated that I can call on a wireless computer from Singapore to California) and let her know that I may have walked on the same streets that she walked over 60 years ago. I spent Wednesday and Thursday between the hotel and the pool and didn’t venture into the city. Preparation for the 10K race on August 21st (airing on August 20th in the evening in America) is going well. I’m at the maintenance point of my training so there isn’t much to report from the swimming end of things. All is well in the water. Thursday was also preparation for skit night. (Every first-time Olympian must get together in groups of about 5 and perform a funny skit for the team). My character in the skit was John Naber (former Olympian now working as an NBC broadcaster) and I shaved my face – save the mustache – to get into character. I got a few compliments on my impersonation but I felt like I hit a double when I really should have hit a home run. I had Friday morning off from practice so I decided to do a bit more exploring of Singapore. I studied the subway maps, researched local favorite spots, prepared a plan and embarked at 6:30 am. The first stop was Little India which was a huge mistake because Little India is on the same schedule as every college fraternity in America - Friday doesn’t really start until about 11 am. I wandered the desolate streets looking for action and adventure but found nothing but the smell of curry. I then went to the harbor and took a cable car ride, over the ships and activity of the harbor below, to a small island with bursting with lush vegetation. Santosa Island is somewhat environmentally protected (no skyscrapers) and visitors can enjoy a day at the beach. I took a few pictures of the Merlion and then went back to the mainland in search of Raffles Hotel. For a Western visitor the Raffles Hotel is probably the single most popular destination point in Singapore. Birthplace of the Singapore Sling and famous for the refined and polished custom of afternoon tea, the location is steeped in history. Built in 1887 and named after the modern founder of Singapore Sir Stamford Raffles, the Raffles Hotel has been THE place for dignitaries and socialites traveling through Singapore. I ventured upon the hotel as a sweaty, shorts and t-shirt wearing tourist. It was one of the rare times in my life that I was truly embarrassed of my attire. My outfit cheapened the experience (and ruined the décor of the hotel) and I vowed to return dressed more appropriately later on that day. When I got back to my hotel I searched my wardrobe for the most outrageously over-the-top high-society outfit available, discovering that the ensemble in the attached photo was the perfect selection. The sweater vest, given to me for the Olympics by the USOC, combined with the pants and shoes that will be worn for the opening ceremonies, is so obnoxious that I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I went back to the Raffles Hotel confident that I would add to the scenery of sophistication. (The walk and subway ride to get from my hotel to the Raffles Hotel was rather humorous because I was essentially wearing a Halloween costume). Unfortunately I arrived too late to participate in the afternoon tea, but I wandered around the hotel lobby and courtyard and got a picture taken in the historic Billiard Room. I also went to the Long Bar (located in the Raffles Hotel), site for the creation of the Singapore Sling. As a member of the USA Swimming Olympic Swim Team I am bound by an honor code not to consume any alcoholic beverage until after the Olympics, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity completely so I ordered the famous drink virgin style. The drink was tremendously overpriced at $15, considering it consisted primarily of ice, sugar and syrup, but this may be my only time in Singapore and as the local saying goes: “Where else should one partake of the Singapore Sling but at the Raffles Hotel." mdw

Smoothies and Spit

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-07-29T14:28:36-07:00

I’ve been in Singapore for nearly 3 days and I have yet to find the dark underbelly. Singapore is not like Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, it’s more like Dr Seuss’ Whoville. The people are, from this observers’ perspective, absurdly good-natured. While exploring the city yesterday I witnessed a guy digging a trench next to the road. He was sitting in his backhoe and he had an enormous grin on his face. I watched him for a few moments and he didn’t stop smiling the entire time – the guy was REALLY enjoying digging with his backhoe. I continued to explore, and while walking in the downtown district I encountered a few locals here and there, and they were all positive and upbeat. Even the electronics salesman that tried to sell me a digital camera for twice the actual value was really quite friendly about the whole matter. The place is also incredibly clean. There’s no spitting (as the attached photo indicates) and no chewing gum. There’s also no litter – anywhere. Apparently there is a strict no-tolerance policy on everything, but I jaywalked 3 times yesterday and I didn’t get flogged, so I think it’s more of a myth. Singapore is a success, and I’m interested to find out if there is a Letters to the Editor/Complaint section in the local newspape. The downside to Singapore is that if someone is looking for authentic Southeast Asian culture I doubt this is the place to visit. All the street signs/menus are in English, everyone speaks English, and there’s a Starbucks on every corner. With all of the banks and high-end shopping, Singapore is capitalism on steroids and could easily be confused with a very humid Newport Beach . As for the training camp itself: I’m pretty tired. The reason that I went out exploring the first two days was to prevent myself from sleeping in the middle of the day so as to acclimate to the time difference. However, it didn’t seem to work out the way I intended. I did double practices the first two days here (8,000 per) and explored the city in between sessions. Unfortunately my body didn’t adjust, so I was awake most of the night. Right now I’m tired from traveling, swimming, exploring and not sleeping. The combination showed last night and this morning at practice when I had a couple of awful sessions. Today I decided to take a different approach to my adjustment process and am going to try and rest any time I can, regardless of the hour. One observation from the pool that’s pretty funny. Every day the swimmers all get in the water for a 7am training session and most of us do an 800 to 1,000 meter warm-up. During this warm-up period time all of the coaches go to the coffee bar and have complimentary cappuccino or espresso. They then return to the side of the pool, with a cup and saucer in hand, and casually sip their morning beverage. It’s rather funny to watch 15 coaches, who typically chug coffee from a 7-11 Styrofoam cup, daintily sip cappuccinos during practice.. Skit night is forthcoming. Attached picture is of me enjoying a made-to-order smoothie at breakfast. The martini glass is a nice touch, and I asked for white chocolate chips on top to make it completely obnoxious. mdw

Another Take on the Olympics

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-07-23T09:23:03-07:00

We've had my nephew's Olympic swim diary. Now it's time for a break with a friend's take on how Chinese Olympic policy will affect the yen and your wallet. The Fox Business announcer pronounces his guest's surname, "Mi-nerd, " short i sound, when it is actually a long i sound, "m-EYE-nerd. "

The Repeated Adventures of Mark Warkentin

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-07-21T12:31:48-07:00

I have a blog, but I don’t think Dan Rather will be worried. The blog is at swimroom.com. Josh Ilika, who some of you may know as the guy that gave a really, really, really long speech at my wedding, created a professional website for the swimming community and fans of swimming and it actually gets a lot of web traffic. I’ll still be sending you posts directly, but if you want to post a response for the ENTIRE WORLD TO SEE then you can go to his site. He gave my posts the title “The Adventures of Mark Warkentin” which makes me sound like Dora the Explorer’s sidekick. The blog is currently accepting suggestions for an alternative title. Also, I’ll be swimming exactly 1 month from today. Post 3 on July 21st 2008 Ralph and Me On Saturday the team went to San Jose State University to do processing for the United States Olympic Committee (USOC). Last week we’d already gotten a lot of clothing from USA Swimming but the USOC (the parent governing body for all American Olympic sports) has a different set of clothing for the athletes. At certain times over the next month the USOC wants all American athletes to look like a team, regardless if we are 10K swimmers or basketball players or high jumpers. For instance, when we get off the plane in Beijing, all American athletes are required to wear a particular outfit – no questions, complaints or requests otherwise will be tolerated. Similarly, when we give official press conference interviews we are required to wear an outfit with a particular sequence of shoes, pants, shirt and jacket. Diana can attest to the fact that I hardly ever dress correctly for any social engagement, so I’m a bit nervous of the dress code police that will be monitoring my outfits. The primary focus of the processing was to get fitted for our Opening Ceremony attire. My good friend Ralph Lauren is the official outfitter of the USA Olympic Team, and I’ve got to give the guy credit for designing a pretty cool looking Opening Ceremony uniform. The uniform was modeled after the 1920 Olympic Team uniform as seen in the movie “Chariots of Fire”. Let me back up. We got to SJSU and were taken into a room about the same size as your high school basketball gym. The room was set up like a grocery store, except instead of frozen foods, dairy products and vegetables, the room was filled with shirts, shoes, pants, jackets and hats. So, per instruction, we all grabbed a Home Depot Shopping cart and started filling them up. It wasn’t a free-for-all (I had a checklist of things that I was issued) but it was still a rather surreal experience. It took about an hour and a half to get through the room and I was as happy as a pig in mud. My favorite part was getting our measurements taken by a tailor with a thick Italian accent. He looked me over once: “44 Regular, 32 Long” and someone appeared with a sport coat and pants. We chatted about suits, neckties and buttons as he sized me up, finishing with “Excellent, this is very nice.” When I got to the last section of the room my shopping cart was full (actually it was overflowing) and my face hurt because I had been grinning for at least a full hour. It was a lot like that moment on your wedding day when you realize that you’ve been smiling for a long time because the muscles in your cheeks hurt. After we got through the clothing section we were taken to a room where we got measured for commemorative Olympic rings. Now I’m not a jewelry man, but it’s hard not to appreciate a ring that looks like it could be used for a Roman Empire style signature. We won’t get the ring until after we get home from the Olympics, and I’m sure I’ll never wear it, but it felt rather stately to pretend to be Ben Hur for a brief moment. I left the USOC processing having achieved a longtime goal. Former Olympians always talk about the day they got their shopping cart and filled it with Olympic stuff, and for so many years it was a fantasy that I feared would never become a reality. After the processing I did the math: averaging 30 hours a week for 50 weeks a year I have been training for 62.5 days of every year for the last 15 years. Sometimes, when the practice got really lonely I would question the motives for it all. Why? What’s the point? Is it all worth it? I don’t want to be callously materialistic and say that my experience on Saturday was the point for the struggle, but I will say that because of my experience over the past 2 weeks, I am more appreciative of the struggle itself. I don’t know if I would have appreciated Saturday if it had been an easy road to get there. It was something that couldn’t be bought with money, only with time, pain and sacrifice. I’ll cherish it because I know it was difficult to get there, not just because I was there. When we got back to the hotel we were told that we had more stuff than we could possibly wear in China and that we had the option of sending some of it home. I packed up a box and sent it back to Santa Barbara because I knew that there was a very good chance that something might get stolen or lost in China and I wasn’t about to let that happen. I’ve got some stories on other topics that I’m working on, but I thought I’d share that one for now.

Mark Warkentin on Peking Olympics

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-07-17T14:20:34-07:00

I was the only swimmer that hadn’t just spent the previous 2 weeks at the exhausting Olympic Trials and so I was a bit more alert than my teammates upon arrival at SFO. Most of the swimmers were pretty emotionally drained by the Trials, and the first day was more about recovering than anything else. USA Swimming is having an extended domestic training camp together as a team before we leave for Singapore on July the 25th because the coaches and team leaders don’t want us to go back home and swim on our own.... This is a problem because there are so many swimmers that are just excited to be going to the Olympics at all. USA Swimming, on the other hand, doesn’t care WHO made the team, they only care about winning medals at the Olympics. So, we have a 3 week training camp where we all swim 2 times a day and we keep our competitive edge by racing each other on a daily basis. On Tuesday we were taken to the pool where we had a short meeting to determine what training group we would be broken into.... Since I’m the only 10K swimmer on the team I don’t have anyone that wants to train long distance with me. The result is that I join the mid-distance group for their training session and then swim an extra 2,000 meters after everyone else is done. My training partners in the mid-distance group are a veritable who’s who of the American swimming world: Michael Phelps, Erik Vendt, Klete Keller, Peter Vanderkay, Ryan Lochte, and Larsen Jensen. ...Tuesday night Pete Carroll, football coach at USC, was brought in to give us a bit of an impromptu motivational speech. ...It feels rather momentous to be training in this group because I know that at the Olympics the athletes I’m swimming with are going to get the bulk of the primary TV coverage. ...I’ve often said that the reason I didn’t quit swimming 3 years ago (when I probably should have quit) was because I wanted to get a T-Shirt that said I was on the USA Swimming National Team. Well, Thursday I got the T-Shirt that said I was on the USA Swimming Olympic Team. In fact I got an entire bag of stuff that indicated I made the Olympic Team: shirts, shorts, sweatpants and jackets all with the USA Swimming logo’s on them. ...I told the group that I’ve had a series of accidents in the past few years, but none was more memorable than cutting my leg with a chainsaw. After the introductions Erik Shanteau (who qualified for the Olympics in the 200 Breaststroke) made the announcement that he was recently diagnosed with testicular cancer. He said that it appeared to be under control for the time being, and that he intends to swim at the Olympics.... It was shocking to hear that he was diagnosed the week before Olympic Trials and then he competed and made the team under the circumstances. In between practices on Friday we had a meeting called “Being a good Ambassador” where we learned about how to be good visitors to China, how go give good interviews, and more importantly what NOT to do over the next month. ...Another rather special event on Friday was when the entire team signed a flag adorned with the letters “USA” in big letters above the Olympic Rings.... All the athletes were promised that we would each get 1 for ourselves to keep, and as a result I made sure to sign my name legibly on each flag, just in case that particular flag would end up at my doorstep. ...The media and fans had been told that Saturday would be the only day for interviews and autographs during our stay in Palo Alto, so the pool deck was packed.... The problem is that Michael can only sign so many autographs and Dara can only give so many interviews at one time.... This is where I step in. I happened to be one of the guys that facilitated the fans with a picture or an autograph while they waited for someone else.... (I don't write this with any bitterness, I'm really just happy to be apart of this whole thing, but it was a rather awkward moment that I can now chuckle about.) ...Today, Sunday, is a day of rest and we don’t have any swim practices so I went to Menlo Park Presbyterian Church and enjoyed the service. ...This post has a bit more swimming info than the first post but I thought that the swimming readers would appreciate some specifics. I also included the first post (from last week) below in case you didn’t get it. ...Sunday night the men’s team and the women’s team had separate dinners at the homes of USA Swimming supporters in the Palo Alto area. When one team breaks up into two teams and embarks on separate adventures, there is always the question as to who is going to have a better experience. In this case the men’s team dined with the family of Ted Knapp, assistant swim coach at Stanford, and had an excellent Mexican themed BBQ.... When I was at USC I remember practices being exciting, but it wasn’t like this training camp. Competing against Michael Phelps and Erik Vendt and Larsen Jensen and Peter Vanderkaay is intense because I MUST be on top of my game every practice.... (For example: Kick set on Monday 5x200 on 3:40 with 2,4,5 fast. I went 2:58, 2:54, 2:52 on my fast ones - all fairly decent times.... When you have to be perfect to win a workout, you often find that you lose more than you win and there is nothing that hurts a swimmer’s confidence more than losing.... This training camp is a perfect situation for my personality because I am going to get to compete with the best in the world for about 3 weeks. Then, at the end of the training camp, when I am going to be a bit drained, I get a break from the competition and get to do practices alone for the last few weeks leading up to my race.... The main set: 2x400 moderate on 4:40 went 4:28, 4:22 2x300 moderate/strong on 3:30 went 3:15, 3:12 2x200 strong on 2:20 went 2:07, 2:07 30 seconds rest 10x100 strong on 1:30 started at 1:01 moved down to 1:00 towards the end 5x100 almost fast on 1:40 went 59, 58, 58, 59, 58 5x100 fast on 2:00 58, 58, 58, 58, 57 Did the first part of the set with Erik, Pete and Larsen. When we got to the last 2 sets of 5x100 Larsen and I were the only ones still swimming and we had a fairly good audience of swimmers and coaches watching us go head to head on fast 100’s. It was simultaneously very painful and exciting to be doing all out 100’s next to America’s best distance swimmer (and holding my own) in front of an elite coaching staff.... The highlight of the meeting was a 3 minute music video featuring an up-tempo rock song with the chorus line “How Many People Want to Kick Some A**?”... This particular music video did the trick again, emphasizing a few races from Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta and Sydney, but culminating with the dramatic 4x200 Men’s Freestyle relay from Athens where underdog American squad out-touched the Ian Thorpe Australian team. After the video the men’s team had a separate meeting and Frank Busch gave a speech about gang mentality. Frank’s point: there is tremendous power that a group of men, all working together for a cause, have at their disposal. ...Coach John (SBSC coach) gave me this workout by myself because the rest of the mid-distance group was doing a lot of fluff and very little meat.... 800 swim moderate/strong went 8:48 3x1000 buoy only moderate went 11:18 on all 800 swim went 8:42 600 swim went 6:29 400 swim went 4:12 200 swim went 2:02 100 swim went 57 ...I was pretty beat up after Monday and Tuesday, but I fought my way through a tough Wednesday morning practice with Larsen even if I didn’t feel top notch. Here’s the set and my times (all swim): 3x400 on 5 went 4:19, 4:15, 4:13 3x100 on 1:20 went 1:02, 1:02, 1:01 1 min rest 2x400 on 5 went 4:17, 4:15 5x100 on 1:20 went 1:02, 1:01 remainder 1 min rest 1x400 on 5 went 4:15 7x100 on 1:20 went 1:03, 1:02, 1:02, 1:01, 1:01, 1:00, 57 This afternoon I was supposed to go to a nearby reservoir to do some “Open Water Training.”

Really Inconvenient Truths

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-07-10T09:49:35-07:00

This Ugandan child is most likely dead by now. Interviewed by Dennis Prager, author Ian Murray explains why in a radio interview, the audio of which follows.

Choice not an Echo

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-07-02T09:02:59-07:00

From Hugh Hewitt we have the campaign in a nutshell: John McCain is a given. He's an American hero, a tough, ornery nationalist, a centrist maverick, strongly in support of victory in Iraq, hell on porkbarrel spending, not much on the social conservatism of the evangelicals but against abortion rights and gay marriage. He's not, as he likes to joke, as "old as dirt and as scarred as Frankenstein," but he's been a force in national politics for nearly three decades, and there is no doubt about his character or his courage, though many conservatives doubt his attachment to issues that drive them. He will fight for immigration reform, though this time with a much stronger set of border security measures. The key: McCain will pursue victory in the war, deter our enemies because of his reputation for strength and defend the country via aggressive pursuit of terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever they are, and get most of the judicial nominees right. He'll keep taxes where they are if he can. Obama, on the other hand, is just now coming into focus for other than the already committed Obamians. He had a stumbling, bumbling close to his primary campaign, and the opening weeks of his general campaign have been marked by flip flops and lurches left. Here's the core of Obama: He's hard left. He wants the marginal rate on total federal taxes, including his social security tax hike, to immediately rise at least 57% on the highest earners. Obama wants to raise taxes even in a weak economy, though this is a recipe not just for recession but worse. Obama also wants to raise taxes on dividend income and to return the death tax to its highs of eight years ago. Obama has proposed more than a trillion dollars in new spending. Obama wants to cut and run from Iraq, with withdrawals of crucial forces beginning immediately upon his entry into office. Obama has never met one on one with General Petraeus and has not been to Iraq in more than 900 days. He is indifferent to the incredible progress made by our troops and the Iraqi Defense Forces and the Iraqi government in the last 18 months. He supports the decision extending habeas rights to Gitmo detainees and he thinks the most liberal member of the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is a great model for future Supreme Court appointments. Obama supports gay marriage, and opposes the California constitutional amendment to restore marriage to the definition overturned by a 4-3 vote of the California Supreme Court in May. He supports abortion on demand, including partial birth abortion. Obama has the slightest grasp on history, and routinely makes the sort of errors about basic facts that shock knowledgeable observers, like arguing the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit in Vienna was an example of the benefits of one-on-one diplomacy. Obama is not a strong friend of Israel. He spent 20 years in a church that was openly hostile to Israel, and he reversed himself on Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel after one day of criticism by Palestinians. Obama is running a dirty campaign, and the serial assaults on John McCain's service, most visibly by Wesley Clark but by many others closely associated with Obama, is repulsive. These are not hits by independent 527s but by close associates and advisors of Obama. Michelle Obama's campaign rhetoric has been very divisive, is full of anger and resentment about "moving the bar," and not being proud of the country, and has led to her high negatives with the public. Obama's close friends, mentors and associates are deeply troubling: the radical pastor Jeremiah Wright, the unrepentant terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, the convicted swindler Tony Rezko, and now a long line of "public housing developers" who took the money and failed to deliver on promises of safe and secure housing for Obama's poorest constituents. Obama's judgment on key appointees is suspect, and he has had to fire the head of his vice presidential search team because of ties to the subprime mess and dump numerous "foreign policy advisors" for their hostility to Israel. Obama, like the other leaders of the Triple D Democrats --the Don't Drill Democrats-- doesn't care about the price of gas, and refuses every initiative to increase supply and thus bring that price down. Obama has broken his word on his commitment to public financing of the campaign and to meet John McCain in frequent debates. Obama can't be trusted to keep even high-profile promises he made even only weeks ago. Away from a teleprompter Obama stumbles and stutters and lapses into a closed circle of cliches that betrays almost no reading or curiosity about the world around him,and a massive ignorance of the war in which we find ourselves. Even when he works from a prompter he says nothing at great length with wonder phrasing but zero substance. His crowds are enormous and his coffers overflowing, the products of a highly energized and vitriolic left that expects --believes it will be owed, in fact-- the spoils of the election. If Obama wins, the sharpest lurch left in American history is ahead of us. Barack Obama is not only the most radical nominee of a major American political party in history, he is also the least prepared and the least informed. He has spent less than four years inside of the United States Senate, and much of those years have been spent away from his job and away from the capital he wants to lead. But he is protected and his campaign nurtured by a MSM that swooned for him long ago. The prolonged and serious scrutiny of his background and his proposals will not be forthcoming in any consistent way between now and November. That's where we are on the eve of the 4rth of July, 2008.

What Tomorrow Brings

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-06-16T20:52:33-07:00

Now Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let's go out to the field." And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. Then the LORD said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" "I don't know," he replied. "Am I my brother's keeper?" The LORD said, "What have you done? Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground.(Genesis 4: 8-10, King James Version) If you take that Scripture seriously, much more innocent blood is crying from the ground. Since the Supreme Court's Roe v Wade decision legalizing abortion in 1972, over 48 million babies have been scraped, sucked and ripped from wombs. The overwhelming majority of those killings has been for the convenience of parents. If you believe in an eternal, never-changing, all-powerful God, He does hear, and He does act. He acts with mercy and forgiveness until such time as a people refuse to repent, and then the nation comes under His judgement. That's why I'm not so concerned about tomorrow's rush of gays to altars and registry offices in California. In March four justices of the state Supreme Court overturned an eight-year-old referendum passed by 61% of the electorate that banned gay marriage. The recent ruling also overturned more than a century of state law that defined marriage as a between a man and a woman, not to mention shrugging off millennia of global tradition. In a country under judgement, you won't see democracy at work. There will be no recognition of authority except that of force and fear, so as conditions worsen, every man will become a law unto himself. Everyone will rationalize whatever he does to meet his comforts and desires. We already see this in an increase in crime and a decrease in civility. Divorce will become rampant; the abandonment of children, commonplace. Sexual activity will start at lower and lower ages. That's only the beginning. It gets really bad after that--natural disasters, wars, plagues, famine. Although people will be shocked by these things, they will be so used to either denying God or mocking Him, the only godly solution left to them is to blame Him for the troubles. Then it gets worse. What tomorrow does bring is another indication that we have lost our way. As we sense sea changes all about us, as we fret about things we can't yet see, we cling ever more tightly to the false hope of values that are founded on nothing more than fad and fancy. We want to believe, if we just tolerate everything and everyone, there will be no reason for anything to ever come after us. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 3And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them. (Romans 1: 18 -32, KJV)

Hell Hole

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-06-10T22:23:05-07:00

The bodies floated. They were part of the aftermath of last month's Cyclone Nargis that cut across the Irrawdy Delta of Myanmar. The sawing vortex of wind and rain, and the storm surge that followed killed 23,000 people and left a million homeless. Nature's worst is child's play compared to the atrocities committed by the government. Myanmar used to be called Burma when it was a British colony. Independence came in 1947. A leftist military coup in 1962 instigated "The Burmese Way of Socialism," kicking off more than 40 years of steady economic decline and periodic outbursts of ethnic cleansing. In 1989 the ruling generals changed the name of their killing fields to Myanmar. The current strong man is General Than Shwe. After refusing foreign aid to victims of Cyclone Nargis, Shwe's State Peace and Development Council allowed show displays of humanitarianism. Among them was a tent city put up and supplied by the United Nations. When the reporters left with their sound bites and footage, the refuges were sent packing and the food distributed to Shwe's soldiers. I know two people whose names I can't mention because they are returning to Myammar to continue whatever they can do. In the past they set up home churches and brought money to buy food and medical supplies from the regional thugs. Bringing material directly into the country is vorboten because there is less chance for profiteering. The churches they help shepherd no longer exist. The people fled to a town above water. There the military conscripted males over the age 12, and put the elderly, women and children into boats. They boats, they were told, would take them to a refugee center. None arrived. A medical missionary has video of the bodies that floated. They were bloated and pierced by bullets.

I Explain God, Part 1

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-06-07T12:09:41-07:00

I'm a Christian fundamentalist sadly aware the label makes many people think I'm anti-science, condemn them to Hell, want to police what goes on their bedrooms, and am filled with prejudicial hatred that come out in jokes like: You know why Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad don't eat with their left hands? Because they're afraid of licking off their brains. å The list of negatives goes on and on. In the interest of understanding and brotherhood, I would like to clear up the grosser of these misunderstandings and so offer this irregular series to give Bible-based, Spirit-filled insights of what it means to have God smile on me and not you. Let's examine the most important issue. I do not want to be in your bedroom. Honest to God, unless you lead with a 36 double D rack, own a chain of liquor stores, can yodel and have invited me with a fetching jingle of your handcuffs, I don't even want to be in your house. I'm not asking what you do in your bedroom, so please don't tell me. Don't tell my children. Don't bring a cucumber to elementary school as part of the syllabus for an anti-pregnancy prevention program. In case you haven't notice, in spite of increasingly detailed sex education, illegitimate babies are on the rise while the age of unwed mothers is spiraling downward. I'm sorry. I take that back. There are no illegitimate children in God's eyes. But I think that fathers who abandon their children and girls who keep having babies to get more welfare are on the road to Hell. In fact, I think most people I know are on a superhighway to Hell. H-80 I call it, and good riddance I say. If you had my neighbors, friends and family members, the point would not have to be discussed. As it is...and here's the rub...if I get the chance, I'm supposed to talk them out of it. I'm not supposed to nudge them there in any way. For some people there is confusion on this point. Christian fundamentalists are lumped in with Islamic fundamentalists. Islamists think most people are going to Hell too, and if you lived in their countries, you could understand it. But the worst you'll get from a Christian is some foamer on a street corner giving you a little comic book. For the Moslem, it's strap explosives to a kid and send him into the local pizza parlor. For you seekers after Truth, look here again for when I give more apologies. My wife says that should be apologetics, but what does she know? She's Catholic.

Your Money or Your Life

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-06-03T13:33:47-07:00

Confession: I have not seen Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth. People say I shouldn't have an opinion about the environmental issues raised until I have. Their logic suggests I cannot have knowledge of syphilis until I catch it in a Mexican whorehouse. In both cases, I would rather avoid the spirochetes. Contention: There are people who want you to be afraid. They will hold a gun or some such to your head. In your fear, you are apt to believe you will survive only because of their good pleasure. That's the power they want over you. We call them extortionists, kidnappers, armed robbers, rapists. ...Never for a moment think they are aware of being wicked or bad. To their minds their good is everyone's good. ...For example, yesterday Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) kicked off a Senate debate on global warming. He believes greenhouse gasses will fry us all. Mr. Reid says Science backs him up.... A former Vice President says we're goners too. So, we the people need to be punitively taxed on energy use, and in some instances prosecuted and jailed. This will boost the cost of everything, will kill a lot of jobs and force you, if you haven't already, to use mass transit. Then there will be pressure on government to fix food prices, extend jobless benefits, and expand public transportation and continue to subsidize traveling graffiti shows. That's the short list. All of these cost money, and will require increasing taxation and very tight bureaucratic controls to bring about. The restrictions, however, will be for our own good. We won't survive without them. But suppose we can't do anything about the gun at our heads. Two weeks ago I saw an astronomer with a telescope and heard him tiredly explain to concerned civilian who was passing by: "Yes. ...Or suppose the gun isn't loaded. Or what if there isn't a gun at all? A large body of expertise on global warming is contrary to the consensus Mr. Reid so comfortably assumes. In a May 19th WoldNetDaily story, reporter Bob Unruh takes on one the more famous Greenies for being full of the ol' Shinola. I have excerpted the article below, but it deserves a full read. More than 31,000 scientists across the United States, including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s in fields including atmospheric science, climatology, Earth science, environment and dozens of other specialties, have signed a petition rejecting the assumption that the human production of greenhouse gases is damaging Earth's climate. "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate," the petition states. "Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth." The Petition Project actually was launched nearly 10 years ago, when the first few thousand signatures were assembled. Then between 1999 and 2007, the list of signatures grew gradually without any special effort or campaign. Now a new effort has been conducted because of an "escalation of the claims of consensus." Project spokesman and founder Art Robinson Petition explained, "Mr. Gore's movie asserting 'settled science' conveyed the claims about human-caused global warming to ordinary movie goers and to public school children, to whom the film was widely distributed. Unfortunately, Mr. Gore's movie contains many very serious incorrect claims which no informed, honest scientist could endorse." WND submitted a request to Al Gore's office for comment, but did not get a response. Robinson said the dire warnings about "global warming" have gone far beyond semantics or scientific discussion to the point they are actually endangering people. "The campaign to severely ration hydrocarbon energy technology has now been markedly expanded," he said. "In the course of this campaign, many scientifically invalid claims about impending climate emergencies are being made. Simultaneously, proposed political actions to severely reduce hydrocarbon use now threaten the prosperity of Americans and the very existence of hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries," said Robinson. The late Professor Frederick Seitz, the past president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and winner of the National Medal of Science, wrote in a letter promoting the petition, "The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy and of technologies that depend upon coal, oil, and natural gas and some other organic compounds." "This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful," he wrote. Accompanying the letter sent to scientists was a 12-page summary and review of research on "global warming." Steitz wrote, "The proposed agreement would have very negative effects upon the technology of nations throughout the world, especially those that are currently attempting to lift from poverty and provide opportunities to the over 4 billion people in technologically underdeveloped countries." Robinson said the project targets scientists because, "It is especially important for America to hear from its citizens who have the training necessary to evaluate the relevant data and offer sound advice." But you can bet not one of them will be invited by Senator Reid to testify before his Congressional cronies.

More on Warkentin

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-05-16T13:49:43-07:00

A Long Swim to China By KEVIN HELLIKER May 16, 2008; The Wall Street Journal, Page W4 Last week, about 55 men plunged into a Spanish river for the highest-stakes 10-kilometer swim in history: The top-10 finishers would win a ticket to the event's Olympic debut in Beijing. As it turned out, the swimmer widely expected to win -- Australia's Grant Hackett -- finished 15th. And in a triumph that went largely unnoticed in the U.S., an unknown named Mark Warkentin finished seventh, making him the first (and so far only) member of America's 2008 Olympic swim team. "There's not a person in the world that thought I had a shot at the 2008 Olympics," says Mr. Warkentin, 28 years old, who had tried and failed to qualify for the U.S. Olympic team in 1996, 2000 and 2004. His swimming career at the University of Southern California had been undistinguished. His transformation from an unremarkable pool swimmer to an open-water Olympian reflects a determination rooted in family history. His father, a national champion decathlete named John Warkentin, had longed to be an Olympian. "During 10 years of their marriage my parents were so focused on him making the Olympics," says Mark Warkentin. "And he never did." What enabled the younger Mr. Warkentin to succeed was the International Olympic Committee's 2005 decision to launch a 10K open-water race in Beijing. In the pool, he routinely lost races to slower swimmers who executed stronger surges off the wall. That all-important maneuver -- the flip turn -- bedeviled Mr. Warkentin. "I was terrible at it," he says. Waters Without Walls In waters without walls, however, he thrived. He demolished the field in a few amateur races and won his first international professional competition. Last October, when the U.S. held its 10K Olympic trials, Mr. Warkentin won, landing a spot in last week's international qualifying race. Of the four Americans -- two men, two women -- who swam in Seville, only Mr. Warkentin qualified for a berth in Beijing. During the first three-quarters of last week's race, Mr. Warkentin hung back, trailing as many as 20 swimmers. Entering the final mile, however, "I worked my way into the top 12," he says. Aquatic races that last hours often are decided in the final seconds. Finishing strong, however, is typically dependent on a tactic that is foreign to pool swimmers: pit stops. Three times as he passed feeding stations last week, Mr. Warkentin spun onto his back to receive from his coach a squirt of Gatorade or dollop of energy gel. Each feeding cost him about two seconds -- by pool standards an eternity. But during the last quarter mile, those fuel injections -- which some contestants skipped -- paid off for Mr. Warkentin. "In the final three minutes of the race, I passed five or six guys," he says. He finished 16 seconds behind the winner, Russia's Vladimir Dyatchin, who came in at 1:53:21. He also finished eight spots ahead of the presumptive favorite, Australia's Mr. Hackett. A two-time Olympic gold medalist in the 1,500-meter -- heretofore the longest swim at the Olympics -- Mr. Hackett also holds the world record in that event. He has been called the greatest distance swimmer in history. Mr. Hackett's performance last week suggests that such prowess isn't easily exported outside the pool. Not only did he fail to break the top 10, but after the race he was disqualified for intentional body contact. In a sport notorious for vicious jabs, such penalties aren't uncommon. But in interviews with the Australian media, Mr. Hackett suggested that his infractions were minor next to the bruising he took from other competitors. Mr. Warkentin doesn't doubt it. To make it known that encounters with him will be painful, he says, "I've delivered a few beatings," always in retaliation. Four days after the Seville 10K, Mr. Warkentin took second place in a five-hour 25K world championship race, finishing only half a second behind the winner. That performance boosted his confidence about winning a medal in Beijing. In the Olympics, Mr. Warkentin says he plans to swim a "riskier" race. That means swimming near the front of the pack throughout, so that a strong finish could land him a medal, ideally gold. The risk: Swimming harder in the first three-quarters could leave him depleted at the finish. Amid a season in which Speedo's new LZR suit has been hailed as enormously advantageous, Mr. Warkentin says that most of the swimmers who finished ahead of him in Seville wore other brands. He himself is sponsored by TYR, whose suit he says he will confidently wear in Beijing. His main financial sponsor has been his father, the failed Olympian, who is now a successful businessman. "It's a great experience to share your victory with someone who suffered a lot of failures," says Mark Warkentin. Write to Kevin Helliker at kevin.helliker@wsj.com

Warkentin Speaks

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-04-18T09:40:00-07:00

My nephew Mark Warkentin and I collaborated on trying to sell a college life series, so I know him as a writer. But there is an aspect of his life -- rough water swimming -- that I know hardly anything about because it is a grueling sport requiring such unrelenting practice and intense concentration as to be alien to my rather comfortable experience of The Sporting Life. Fortunately, Mark can express himself well, and I copied two of his emails from last year's Australian competition, Warkentin Down Under and Postscript: 2.500 Meters. Below, today's Wall Street Journal features a story on swimmers such as Mark who have passions for cold, wet and pain. ...During an open-water race early this year, a competitor elbowed American swimmer Micha Burden, fracturing her rib -- and underscoring the brutal potential of this little-known sport. Even by the standards of open-water swimming, however, the elbowing is likely to be unusually forceful next month in Seville, Spain. That's because something unprecedented is at stake for those who swim long distances in open water: a shot at Olympic gold. For the first time in more than a century, the Summer Games will feature a long-distance open-water swim, and the top 10 finishers in the men's and women's races in Seville will win berths in the Olympic contest this August in Beijing. ...The newest sport at the Olympics," Steven Munatones, a onetime open-water champion, declares on the Web site he recently created called 10Kswim.com. The 10-kilometer race will plug what many aquatic fans regard as the biggest gap in the Summer Games -- the absence of any swimming event longer than 20 minutes. The roughly two-hour swim -- nearly seven times longer than the previously longest swim, the 1,500-meter -- will give marathon swimmers the same chance for Olympic stardom that marathon runners have had since the 1896 advent of the modern Games. The 10K debut comes at a time of growing recreational passion for so-called open-water swimming. In part, this growth reflects the fast-rising popularity of the triathlon, an Olympic event since the Sydney Games of 2000. The triathlon's first leg consists of an open-water swim measuring 1.5 kilometers in the Olympics. Yet open-water swimming is also gaining fans because of its inherent difficulties. Many more people have reached the summit of Mount Everest than have swum across the English Channel. At a time of mounting interest in fitness and adventure, open water increasingly is recognized as the last frontier. Open water presents challenges rarely encountered in the pool: waves, often icy temperatures, the absence of direction-helping lane lines and collisions between swimmers. "It's common for someone to come out of the water with bruises or a black eye," says Paul Asmuth, a former world-champion American marathon swimmer and current coach of the U.S. team. ...Instead of a rough sea or a river with currents, it will take place in a lake-like rowing basin built especially for the Games. The race will involve four trips around a 2.5-kilometer course that will likely be free of waves and currents. But enhancing the difficulty of the swim will be fresh water -- salt water adds buoyancy -- and in any case the pursuit of open-water swimming's first Olympic medals is expected to unleash extraordinary aggression. "There's going to be a lot of body contact, and the flatter the water is, the more physical the race will be," says Mark Warkentin, winner of the U.S. 10K trials last October. Swimmers will lather grease on their ankles to keep competitors from pulling on them, he says. Indeed, open-water swimming features an element virtually unknown to pool swimming -- disqualifications for rough-housing.... But they can't always see what happens below the surface: The competitor who fractured Ms. Burden's rib received no infraction. To many stars of the pool, open-water swimming is the sport's Wild West. ...The field will consist largely of former pool swimmers, because little infrastructure exists for developing open-water specialists among children. ...Long-distance swimming dates back to ancient times -- long before the invention of the bicycle -- yet the Olympic 10K swim is making its debut decades later than did long-distance cycling. ...But early in the new century pools proliferated, and the world's premier swimmers essentially abandoned open water. As a sport, swimming became obsessed with scientific measurement -- strokes per lap, milliseconds per turn -- something that is hard to impose on open seas. Indeed, it is likely that no two swimmers of the English Channel have ever swum the exact same distance. ...staged a 20-some-mile race on the California coast, inducing 102 contestants to brave chilly waters and strong currents for prize money that totaled $40,000, according to Conrad Wennerberg's "Wind, Waves and Sunburn: A Brief History of Marathon Swimming." ...That same decade, Atlantic City, N.J., started the 22.5-mile Around the Island Marathon Swim. By the 1980s, open-water races were common enough that America's Mr. Asmuth could put his accounting business on hold for three months and travel around the world competing, his prize money more than sufficient to cover his expenses. Leaders of the sport created a federation to run races, raise prize money and designate world champions. But the case of Mr. Asmuth illustrates how obscure the sport remained, largely because it had no slot in the Olympics. One of the most accomplished American swimmers of the past half century, Mr. Asmuth won seven world championships, and 15 years after his retirement, one of his records still stands. ..."Had the Olympics had a 10K swim in the '80s, I would have been expected to win it," says Mr. Asmuth, who is now general manager of a California winery called Napa Valley Reserve. After years of lobbying, leaders of the sport persuaded FINA, the century-old regulator of international pool competitions, to embrace open-water swimming. Under FINA's guidance, the popularity of 5K, 10K and 25K championships skyrocketed, putting the sport within reach of its Holy Grail: the Olympics. After a decade of FINA lobbying, the IOC in 2005 agreed to add open-water swimming to the 2008 Games. Since its acceptance as an Olympic event, the sport has become enormously more competitive, gaining the interest of pool stars such as Australia's Grant Hackett. The world-record holder in the 1,500-meter swim, Mr. Hackett won the gold medal in that event in the 2000 and 2004 Olympics, and hopes to defend that title in Beijing. But he also won his country's 10K trials and is regarded as a likely Olympic medal winner -- assuming he qualifies in Seville. Just as marathon foot races are less predictable than 100-meter sprints, distance swimming is hard to call. In any given race, a dozen or more swimmers are legitimate candidates to win, says Stephen "Sid" Cassidy, chairman of the open-water committee for FINA. ...But at the U.S. trials last October, staged to determine which two women would go to the qualifying race in Seville, Ms. Burden won the 10K race. Now, a top-10 finish in Spain will guarantee her a shot at Olympic gold. At age 26, she says, "This is the moment I've been waiting for."

Reverand Oprah

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-04-05T18:46:03-07:00

This shouldn't be too hard. Imagine a world in which God is in you no matter what you've done. There is no sin; your salvation comes only from within; all ways lead to harmony and therefore you don't have to apologize for your way. Then imagine someone who puts your beliefs into action. But it just so happens that his way is to despise you, to lust after your spouse, to poison your dog and to refuse to pay back a debt. Without an absolute God Who is just and Who is jealous of His justice, broaching no other ways but His way, you end up with a lot of demigods at each other's throats. An observable fact of life is that there are few Janusz Korczaks, Deitrich Bonhoeffers or Mother Theresas in our midst. Most of us have secret thoughts we don't want out in the open, and at some time or other we have done crappy things that we know were bad. That should be cause for a bit of humility. Unfortunately, the more money and power a person has, there's the temptation to believe those blessing indicate that everything is OK. You're not like the herd; your motives are more pure. Humility need not apply. People answer to you, not the other way around. Thus someone like Oraph Winfrey is not likely to square her life to any standard except her own pleasure, her own will. She's thinks she is doing a noble thing by proselytizing her doctrine to people who watch television, don't do much thinking and are consequently as gullible as children. Her ideas ultimately will make them either very unhappy or so self-righteous that they won't know how close they are to Hell.

Obama Unmasked

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-03-21T11:29:50-07:00

The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud By Charles Krauthammer WASHINGTON -- The beauty of a speech is that you don't just give the answers, you provide your own questions. "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church?... So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright. An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which "controversial" remarks? Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented the HIV virus "as a means of genocide against people of color"? Wright's claim that America was morally responsible for 9/11 -- "chickens coming home to roost" -- because of, among other crimes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?) What about the charge that the U.S. government (of Franklin Roosevelt, mind you) knew about Pearl Harbor, but lied about it? Or that the government gives drugs to black people, presumably to enslave and imprison them? Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: "There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?" But that is not the question. The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave -- why doesn't he leave even today -- a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) "God damn America"? Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction. His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence, and (b) white guilt. (a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, "who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others? "I can no more disown (Wright) than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus' time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did grandma. Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred? (b) White guilt. Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, "We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country," and then proceeds to do precisely that. And what lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course. This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt, while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination. But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

Sowell Gets It. As Usual.

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-03-13T09:57:21-07:00

'Non-Judgmental' Nonsense By Thomas Sowell March 12, 2008 What was he thinking of? That was the first question that came to mind when the story of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's involvement with a prostitution ring was reported in the media. It was also the first question that came to mind when star quarterback Michael Vick ruined his career and lost his freedom over his involvement in illegal dog fighting. It is a question that arises when other very fortunate people risk everything for some trivial satisfaction. Many in the media refer to Eliot Spitzer as some moral hero who fell from grace. Spitzer was never a moral hero. He was an unscrupulous prosecutor who threw his power around to ruin people, even when he didn't have any case with which to convict them of anything. Because he was using his overbearing power against businesses, the anti-business left idolized him, just as they idolized Ralph Nader before him as some sort of secular saint because he attacked General Motors. What Eliot Spitzer did was not out of character. It was completely in character for someone with the hubris that comes with the ability to misuse his power to make or break innocent people. After John Whitehead, former head of Goldman Sachs, wrote an op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal, criticizing Attorney General Spitzer's handling of a case involving Maurice Greenberg, Spitzer was quoted by Whitehead as saying: "I will be coming after you. You will pay the price. This is only the beginning and you will pay dearly for what you have done." When you start thinking of yourself as a little tin god, able to throw your weight around to bully people into silence, it is a sign of a sense of being exempt from the laws and social rules that apply to other people. For someone with this kind of hubris to risk his whole political career for a fling with a prostitute is no more surprising than for Michael Vick to throw away millions to indulge his taste for dog fighting or for Leona Helmsley to avoid paying taxes -- not because she couldn't easily afford to pay taxes and still have more money left than she could ever spend -- but because she felt above the rules that apply to "the little people." What is almost as scary as having someone like Eliot Spitzer holding power is having so many pundits talking as if this is just a "personal" flaw in Governor Spitzer that should not disqualify him for public office. Spitzer himself spoke of his "personal" failing as if it had nothing to do with his being governor of New York. In this age, when it is considered the height of sophistication to be "non-judgmental," one of the corollaries is that "personal" failings have no relevance to the performance of official duties. What that amounts to, ultimately, is that character doesn't matter. In reality, character matters enormously, more so than most things that can be seen, measured or documented.Character is what we have to depend on when we entrust power over ourselves, our children and our society to government officials. We cannot risk all that for the sake of the fashionable affectation of being more non-judgmental than thou. Currently, various facts are belatedly beginning to leak out that give us clues to the character of Barack Obama. But to report these facts is being characterized as a "personal" attack. Barack Obama's personal and financial association with a man under criminal indictment in Illinois is not just a "personal" matter. Nor is his 20 years of going to a church whose pastor has praised Louis Farrakhan and condemned the United States in both sweeping terms and with obscene language. The Obama camp likens mentioning such things to criticizing him because of what members of his family might have said or done. But it was said, long ago, that you can pick your friends but not your relatives. Obama chose to be part of that church for 20 years. He was not born into it. His "personal" character matters, just as Eliot Spitzer's "personal" character matters -- and just as Hillary Clinton's character would matter if she had any. --------- Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.

Berkeley Baboons

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2008-02-09T08:30:29-08:00

You are watching the adult end products of schools that teach very little but leftist dogma and a narcissistic brand of political correctness. I've had a particular animus against Berkeley, California, since I wrote Dispatches From The Homefront, in 2001. Moslems had attacked us, but we hadn't yet fought back. Still, a self-righteous city council refused to allow fire trucks to fly the American Flag and show solidarity with New York City's 9/11 firefighters. At the time I said I was going to boycott doing any business with the city. Now I think it is time to do quite a bit more. When citizens hate the country so much that they effectively give aid and comfort to our enemies, why contribute to their ease and safety with Federal tax dollars? No subsidies for fire, police, sanitation or schools. Especially schools. Given the evidence of their parents, Berkeley is a place where every child needs to be left behind. A more moderate form of protest may be found at MoveAmericaForward.org. Scroll down and sign the petition.

Thanksgiving News

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-11-19T08:23:00-08:00

It's been more than a month since my last posting, but I'm not dead. I've been hard at work on a project, about which I wish strangers were as quick as "Colonel Taggart" has been in responding to requests for permission to use some of their material. C'm'on, Dusty, speak to me! In the meantime I want to talk briefly about Christmas. Last year I touted a book for gift-giving, A Monk's Alphabet, by Jeremy Driscoll, a Benedictine monk. He's a smart guy, funny too and a wonderful writer. He gave me permission to reproduce a story from his book. (The above link will take you to my review that includes that story, "First Love.") The latest is that A Monk's Alphabet is coming out in paperback on December 1st...or the 11th depending on where you look it up. Either way, it's in time for gift-giving, not mention cheaper than what you had to pay in 2006. Although Father Jeremy is a religious man, his book is not abut religion in a preachy sense; more specifically, he's not trying to convert you to Christianity any more than Graham Green, Flannery O'Connor or Evelyn Waugh tried. Fr. Jeremy is very different from those writers, but he belongs on the list. That's why his book is good for giving to friends and family on other occasions. The anniversary of Pearl Harbor, for example. Around the fifth day of Hanukkah when you've run out of ideas. As a way to keep thoughts from straying to the obscene and the irreligious during Ramadan. Kwanzaa. My birthday on March 19th. The possibilities are endless. In other news Vitorio Sanzone (known to me and the other 200 close personal friends on his email list as Vito or Veet) writes, "...the military ordered 1,000 copies of The Courage To Be Brilliant." Said book was published by Vito's company Vitorio Media Inc. and was authored by Martha Monahan with me tagging along. Veet, which military? Give me a call. Another note. Yes, Mrs. R., you are absolutely right, you have hit the nail on the head, gone to the heart of the matter and gotten the crux of it as it were. The way to make money on the internet is to have Google and other sponsors place advertising on your site. There's a good movie coming out, Liberty. It has been more than a year in the making, on weekends and such, with a shoestring budget, prayers and sweat equity that is priceless. Psst, Chris. Clarence. Google would have had to pay for that. Know what I'm saying? A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

Knee Deep

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-09-29T22:14:24-07:00

Mel Tari says he walked on water, but the fact is, he was only knee deep in a miracle. Some skeptics would say that negates the whole thing, but I'm one who wishes I had the same fire in my belly. Have a great Sunday.

Yo, Gargoyle

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-09-07T14:39:47-07:00

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Queen of the Stardust Ballroom, Red Earth White Earth and Gore Vidal’s Lincoln tip an iceberg of prestigious credits. ...In ancient times gargoyles, sometime called chimera, served as drainage spouts for Egyptian and Greek temples built by pagans who apparently had never seen a rain gutter. ...Originating in idol worship was not good for their reputation, but the 7th Century Bishop of Rouen, later canonized as St. Romaine, reputedly believed that there is some good in every one of God’s creatures, including a forest dragon that terrorized folks who wandered too far beyond the city walls. Beguiled by the Bishop’s tenderness, the dragon turned to helping the citizens of Rouen, and in honor of him they carved the dragon’s likeness to adorn the cathedral and let water off the roof. ...The one I like has the Bishop hooking up with a condemned prisoner to subdue the monster. It was called Gargouille, a derivative of the French word for gullet and progenitor of our modern word gargoyle. Gargouille thrashed around in the Sien, was part human, part demon, and had a tendency to spew water all over the countryside, causing vast flooding. ...Tonto always come back to camp, sometimes blooded, once with rope burns around his neck, but with vital signs almost as good as Kimosabe’s and full useful intel. So, as the felon showed himself to be as quick on the get away as Tonto would have to be, the Bishop formed his fingers in the sign of the Cross.... Or like Christopher Lee in Dracula: Prince of Darkness and again in Dracula Has Risen From The Grave. ...It’s clear that a crucifix couldn’t kill Dracula, but in the Bishop’s day there was no profit to be made from a sequel.... Gargouille then inspired likenesses that were sweat hog ugly, carved in stone and stuck on the roofs of medieval cathedrals to show evil spirits what fate would befall them if they wandered too close. In modern times sleeker gargoyles in stainless steel were placed atop the Chrysler Building in New York City to ward off Ford motorcars. Take the gargoyles of yesteryear, mix New Age thinking into their post-modern stories, and they become misunderstood, sort of like King Kong, or downright heroic, like Mighty Joe Young. Disney produced a kids’ animation series followed by a knock-off, direct-to-video movie in the mid-Nineties that made gargoyles superheroes lazing about an ancient Scottish castle.... Feeling needed again, the gargoyles ward of “modern threats to humanity”— judges who let murderers walk free, black pimps who beat up their ho’s, greasy white tweakers, a couple of U.S. Senators. ...Don’t you wish Disney could imagine some real and present evil, like media companies that flirt with the occult and then sell it to the kiddies? The gargoyles Bob and Rick introduced to television a quarter of century earlier just wanted to be left alone. But when they were disturbed, it was like stepping on green mambas.... The monsters lived in the desert, so there wasn’t much water spewing; but they were bad ass when that used to mean something. ...As they pack it up for further investigation, they unwittingly disturbed the gargoyle equivalent of an Indian burial ground, and if you ever saw Jeremiah Johnson, you know what that means. They are driving back to a university when monsters dive down off the hot rocks and give them a bad time, denting their car and such, and clearly wanting to tear the occupants limb from limb before they retrieve the ancestral bones. ...A long day at Wolper, a couple of scotches, a pretty good warmed over dinner and I was ready for bed, or more correctly, the snoring nap you take before the wife yells, “Turn off the TV and come to bed!” ...I just never associated it with the Bob and Rick I met two years later and worked with off and on for the next fifteen. ...Further, although entertainment professionals incorporate socialization in their dealings, and that may include chitchat about past projects or past lives, the work at hand always hangs over them like a Sword of Damocles. Whether there is a lull, a meal or a party, the talk always comes back to the present work.... When I am socializing, I’d rather fill my mouth with food and drink than my head with the details of other people’s lives. ...When I’m in a Greyhound Bus Depot and people find out I’m a famous Hollywood writer, I’m swamped with stories of murder, extramarital affairs, Jesus saved me from drugs, let me show you something in the alley, and you should write the screenplay ...Neither Bob nor Rick struck me as the kind who cared whether you could get half off on a can of Spaghetti-Os, but you never know when eccentricity will come screaming forth, so its best to keep one’s guard up. ...Bob came out of the Marine Corps, and then, I don’t know, he sold space ads for The Hollywood Reporter or Variety. ...By 1969 Rick was an associate producer on The Reivers, a film that put Steve McQueen in an adaptation of a William Faulkner novel. McQueen introduced Rick to Bob, or it could have been the other way around. Regardless, secretaries and development assistants over the years led me to believe that Chris-Rose Productions was the result of Steve McQueen suggesting the two should get together and put on their own shows. Whether that’s true or not, it brings us back to the early piece called Gargoyles. I was at a party at Bob’s house a dozen years after its making. There was either another writer or a director present who knew one of the best inside stories I have ever heard. ...At the time of Gargoyles making in 1972 the slogan “Black Is Beautiful” had become “Black Power” with a clenched fist. California appellate courts overturned murder and assault convictions against the Maoist leadership of the Black Panther Party, freeing the leaders to fight off kidnapping, embezzlement and more murder charges. For reasons that are an enigma to me, intellectual and media elites began to accept the Panthers in the romantic revolutionary light in which radical leftists bathed them. Co-founder of the Party Huey Newton was in prison for killing a prostitute and addicted to drugs when the University of California, Santa Cruz, awarded him a doctorate. Eldridge Cleaver, the self-confessed rapist of white women who said he practiced on ghetto girls, was lionized for jumping bail and fleeing to Algeria. Angela Davis, a middle class woman turned Communist, feminist, university darling, Panther and owner of the shotgun used to blow off the face of a judge, inspired a worshipful song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. ...Maluena Karenga’s whole cloth invention of Kwanza as a uniquely black holiday, with pseudo roots in African animism, gained wider, unquestioning acceptance. ...A person who needed his consciousness raised was a racist, patriarchal, probably a Republican or a Christian fundamentalist, a person in some way spiritually and mentally deformed.... Therefore they already knew that The Man was the problem and did not need their consciousnesses raised.... Hence when faced with a radical spewing hate or just a misguided fool spouting nonsense, most blacks and whites kept their opinions to themselves. ...He and Rick had a movie to get and only twenty-one days to do it. On the second or third day of shooting the lead gargoyle stepped out of a scene and took Bob aside. “Some of the bros are saying that my dialogue makes me sound like an Uncle Tom.”

Funny Girl Meets Her Equal

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-09-04T11:44:50-07:00

But even as I praise her, my guess is she would not be thrilled if I used her real name. ...The reason is that people have a tendency to mistake my tastes as an insult when I refer to anything seemingly outside the bounds of those preferences. I know “Back In The Saddle Again” by heart, believe that Elvis could beat the Three Tenors all to heck, and think the best film music ever is a toss up between “Men of Harlech” from Zulu and Frankie Lane singing the theme from Gunfight At The O.K.... As far as hymnity is concerned, if a church spent a whole year repeating “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” for the processional, offering and recessional, I’d be warming a pew more frequently than at Easter, and I’d put a damn sight more than a dollar in the collection plate too. That I can prefer all the above yet find this singer extremely talented is true musical appreciation, a rare and wonderful thing, but as with so many treasures in this fallen world, expansiveness of taste is often overlooked or totally misunderstood. Suppose for a moment that I am a student of human anatomy, and that my double-wide is packed with works by Doctors Galen and Gray, paintings by Rubens, L’trec and Vargas, every DVD Kyla Cole ever appeared in, plus a collection of almost new Hustler magazines published before Larry Flynn was confined to a wheelchair. Then suppose I am heard shouting something nice about the neighbor lady, the sweetness of her nature, the kindness of her spirit, that sort of thing. ...So here I am with Kip Attaway playing in the background, trying to keep everyone off my tail by calling this real life songstress.... ...When Linda L’stesso and I were freeway close in L.A.’s biological sink, a songwriter and mutual acquaintance kept telling me how funny Linda was, and vice verse, each of us being assured how much chuckling, thigh-slapping amusement would come from meeting the other. ...As far as I’m concerned, that’s good in a gospel artist, so as I got to know more about her, I have to admit to some disappointment. ...This sad event took my current wife out of the country, depleted our bank account and forced an abrupt cut in telephone service just hours before an expected phone call from a producer. ...What was my number again so that he could get back to me at some other time? ...Every drug dealer in Los Angeles had a cell phone, so they were catching on fast with the Hollywood crowd. ...I peddled to the nearest gas station, filled the tires and used the ARCO courtesy phone just outside the executive dinning room of AM-PM Entertainment. ...By now I was down to my last dollar, hungry from all the cycling and pretty well convinced that the producer and I would never connect. ...Food was on the agenda because people whose last names started with A through E were supposed to bring drinks. Usually such affairs—save the whales for Christ, feed the hungry for Christ, teach ghetto children to put some art into their graffiti for Christ—are very much like the secular counterparts from which they copy their concerns.... Therefore you hear a lot of “Jesus Christ”s, first name or last name, but never thrown together as in the secular world to introduce a strong, negative opinion or as an exclamation of surprise, like when you accidentally wander into a ladies restroom whistling “In The Navy.” Either way, these occasions are attended by a few of the rich and famous, the odd true believer and a whole mass of folks looking to network their way to a higher place on the socio-economic dung heap. ...There was a story, reputedly about someone the likes of Norman Lear or perhaps the great one himself, the television producer and social activist who founded People for the American Way. He was supposed to have jumped whole hog into environmentalism, but most greens in the Hollywood branch of the movement were a scruffy, unemployed lot. Hence he proposed an executive committee of his peers that would control the whole group but not have meet with them. ...That makes you a special brother or sister, often called “Prayer Partner,” and puts you on the invite list for an intimate dinner of 100-plus with the pastor, during which he asks you to prayerfully consider giving more money so that you can become a member of Sea Org, the super tight inner inner ring. ...Groups that are just staring out can’t afford the snobbery, which is doubtlessly why I got my invitation to the Malibu shindig. ...Like, I am going to open my Rolodex and give you the names of people I’ve been cultivating so that you can bamboozled them with your superficial charm and flash-in-the-pan talent, making my ass creeping yesterday’s news. ...I never had time to cherry out the Caddy, but as our good Lord would have it, I ran out of gas near a family of farm workers needing shelter.... Friends who weren’t really friends joked that the Century is always driven by an old woman you can barely see except for the blue tint of her hair.... But it is equally true that, if your daytime soaps are interrupted by local coverage of a car chase and the guys with no shirts have been lucky enough to mug an old lady in a Century, you will not see cops stopping them on the 405, the 5 or the 14.... No, that Century is going to take two bullets through the engine block in Inglewood, shred its tires on spike strips west of Lancaster, blow the radiator at Apple Valley and only stop when it runs out of gas east of Barstow.... B was a muscle car, and even with only two-and-half gallons of hoochy mama in her tank, she could take me to Hell and back. With a dollar to my name, bringing drinks to Malibu would be a cinch because, praise God, most show biz folks either are strung out on drugs and alcohol or have turned their lives over to the Higher Power of a 12 Step program. If I paid for the 99-cent special for a litter of Ralph’s house brand orange soda—“Get the second one free”— I could bring relief to the reformed drunks who would show up. ...Some people think that Christians don’t drink, or if they do, it’s only in the closet.... Tee totaling cultists like Southern Baptists are no about everything whereas Presbyterians, Methodists and Lutherans let it ride as a matter of personal conscience, which I've always found easy to tame. Unless it’s a very small private gathering, you won’t find Ketle One or Glenlivet, but I have seen a lot of Christians on their knees with wine, and that’s what I was willing to settle for in Malibu. ...The last time I had a view like that was on the beach with Larry Hagman and a former C.I.A. ...As I plunked my orange sodas on a bare buffet table that was about half the size of a tennis court, I gave her a wink and smile, and said: ...My being a cheapskate would be understood in a Third World Way, as merely the cards I had been dealt by El Señor in the great Lotería of life, and by the way, should remain our little secret. ...Sometime later an Hispanic friend pointed out that heuvos can be a colloquialism for testicles, and the way I pronounced his native tongue could make the unwary think I have the balls of a chicken. ...There were a few guests milling in the palatial living room, and the event’s host and hostess hadn’t yet appeared on the massive marble staircase. ...I began to mix to keep my mind off my hunger, find out what all the idealism was about, show some empathy for seal pups for Christ or whatever. As more and more people arrived, it was clear there was general vagueness about what precisely we were doing together. ...The organizers were about to ask for volunteers to pound nails in Honduras, work a soup kitchen downtown, pass out tracks on Santa Monica Pier, the possibilities were endlessly horrifying. Any networking to my advantage would be for a lackey position at Trinity Broadcast Network, what I secretly called “The Crying Channel.” The only thing to do was to eat and run, so I weaved and dodged my way back to the dinning room, muttering, “Praise the Lord, excuse me, bless you, gimme back my resume.” ...The majority of their sodas and sparkling waters needed but one thing to make them palatable, which was no where to be seen, and after Jim Jones who in his right mind would touch a punch bowl of Kool-Aid? I wasn’t in my right mind, and the Kool-Aid wasn’t spiked with anything except the block of ice watering it down. ...What was clear was that they were at least working professionals because none of them had time to bring anything except bags of stale cookies from the convenience store down the road. ...By the time I got to Phoenix from the Chicago Fire of my life, she and the Mister had moved to a ranch two thousand miles away.... I still see Linda huddling with another woman, their glancing prettily in my direction and starting a wave of tinkling laughter that rippled around the room.

The Icebergs Are Coming, The Icebergs Are Coming!

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-08-14T09:23:21-07:00

Red faces at NASA over climate-change blunder Agency roasted after Toronto blogger spots `hot years' data fumble Aug 14, 2007 04:30 Am DANIEL DALE STAFF REPORTER In the United States, the calendar year 1998 ranked as the hottest of them all – until someone checked the math. After a Toronto skeptic tipped NASA this month to one flaw in its climate calculations, the U.S. agency ordered a full data review. Days later, it put out a revised list of all-time hottest years. The Dust Bowl year of 1934 now ranks as hottest ever in the U.S. – not 1998. More significantly, the agency reduced the mean U.S. "temperature anomalies" for the years 2000 to 2006 by 0.15 degrees Celsius. NASA officials have dismissed the changes as trivial. Even the Canadian who spotted the original flaw says the revisions are "not necessarily material to climate policy." But the revisions have been seized on by conservative Americans, including firebrand radio host Rush Limbaugh, as evidence that climate change science is unsound. Said Limbaugh last Thursday: "What do we have here? We have proof of man-made global warming. The man-made global warming is inside NASA ... is in the scientific community with false data." However Stephen McIntyre, who set off the uproar, described his finding as a "a micro-change. But it was kind of fun." A former mining executive who runs the blog ClimateAudit.org, McIntyre, 59, earned attention in 2003 when he put out data challenging the so-called "hockey stick" graph depicting a spike in global temperatures. This time, he sifted NASA's use of temperature anomalies, which measure how much warmer or colder a place is at a given time compared with its 30-year average. Puzzled by a bizarre "jump" in the U.S. anomalies from 1999 to 2000, McIntyre discovered the data after 1999 wasn't being fractionally adjusted to allow for the times of day that readings were taken or the locations of the monitoring stations. McIntyre emailed his finding to NASA's Goddard Institute, triggering the data review. "They moved pretty fast on this," McIntyre said. "There must have been some long faces.

Krumline To The Rescue

jeffandrus@jeffandrus.com — 2007-08-10T09:06:22-07:00

I didn’t recognize the sender’s name, didn’t see mine in the Send To list, and had no idea who the email’s other recipients were, so presumed my copy was like crossed wires. You know, when you pick up the phone and before you can dial, you hear two strangers plotting a murder, but you can’t get either one to, “Hang up! I’m trying to order pizza!” ...stoked my curiosity to read more, and usually I’m a sucker for a woman, which was what writer was if the sign off, “Wish I had stayed with acting, xoxo, Jasmine,” meant anything. Apparently she was a financial analyst who had an important decision to make for some Daddy Warbucks, and was asking friends, presumably in the money game too, if they would reply to four questions. ...Should I go short or long on Countrywide Mortgage? ...When do you think the Fed will decrease interest rates? ...Is this distressed market a giant opportunity, or am I delusional? ...Any opinion on small caps? As I brooded on how unfairly I’d been graded in economics and other college classes, causing my dad to cut off tuition and me to go to work to pay off gambling debts, one thing led to another, and after a cocktail or two, I fired off a reply. ...I have a unified set theory of the universe that might be helpful to you. I call it “The Krumline Pancake Theory of Knowledge” after W.S. Krumline, Head Hasher 7AM shift, Troy Hall, University of Southern California, 1967. First, recall all the courses you took in college, and don't worry that most were probably unrelated to each other and had nothing to do with your present career. Second, think of them as pancakes, some doughy, some overcooked, all plopped willy-nilly onto a cold plate by an individual who resents the fact that you are going through the food line of life while he's stuck behind the counter working for minimum wage. Third, drop the plate on the sticky linoleum floor of your imagination. Step back because it won't be neat. Some pancakes will be touching; others will not. Regardless, go to the fourth step, in which you imagine a large turkey baster that you ram through as many pancakes as you can.... Whatever is sucked up into the baster is the wondrously interrelated core knowledge of everything you learned. That core can be then applied to anything...well, almost anything...that goes on in your life. You might think that a bit of anthro, econ and chem have nothing to do with each other, but suddenly you're up for some R & R in Bangcock, and it's a big Greek Eureka moment when your loose change comes together with a girl named Suzy and some Tai Stick. Or Boyle's Law, you say, what's that got to do with Ricardo's Theory of Rent, much less Spanish? Well, if you have ever been freezing cold in a bed-sitter in Earl's Court, the Pakistani landlord is going to explain exactly what that has to do with London power authority, and you’ll undoubtedly find yourself saying, “Hey, Cisco, how about trying that again in español?” ...I can't tell you how many times I have used the Krumline Pancake Theory of Knowledge to bring grace and order to my life. Your email asking for investment predictions had the turkey baster in my mind gushing forth like Krakatoa on Pompeii, namely— Should you be long or short on Countrywide? Everybody needs a roof over his head, right? But defaults are at record high, right? Well, two rights don’t make a wrong. I don’t know what that tells you about buying a particular stock, but Krumline told me that his theory can’t cover everything, depending as it does on a single vector unique to etc., etc. Look, I was asleep a lot. Why can't you settle for a little mystery in your life? When will the Fed decrease rates? When Alan Greenspan wants to. Or is he retired? I know he’s married to Andrea...... It’s Ben Somebody.... Just picture the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank putting pantyhose on one leg at a time, making him as human as you or I, and that’s how I can offer the second part of my answer.... If nothing else, it’s a great conductor of electricity. Is the distressed market a giant opportunity or are you delusional? Well, that's easy. Finally, I know this for sure: small caps don't grab the eye like BIG CAPS. Check it out with The Wall Street Journal. And watch for Mr.Murdoch putting in a Page 3 Investment Vixen feature. There’s going to be nothing small about her assets, believe you me. ...I got a reply just this morning. Miss Jasmine thinks my serendipitous response was as sound as any from her experts, and wants to know where I hang my hat on Wall Street. Maybe we can have lunch. Far be it from me to burst a lady’s or the market’s bubble, so I won’t explain that I’m “between pictures” as we say here in sunny southern California, and usually don’t offer financial advice unless I’m swearing at my creditors. But it does feel good, knowing I can change careers any time I feel like it, and the sun will still go weaving round the earth just like Gallo said it would.