Author: Jackson

Jackson Don’t Surf!

~ Jackson ~ 1 Comment

The WSJ on “the fitness rage of the summer:”

In lakes, rivers and bays where the surf is never up, Americans in skyrocketing numbers are standing on boards and paddling, a balancing act that strengthens the muscles of the legs, buttocks, back, shoulders and arms.

“Stand-up paddle surfing is a valuable new form of cross-training, in part because it’s so low impact,” says Cindi Bannink, a triathlon coach in Madison, Wis.

For an industry long dependent on California and Hawaii, the trend is rapidly forging new sales territories. “Suddenly, our fastest-growing markets are places like Chicago, Boise and Austin, Texas,” says Ty Zulim, sales manager for Surftech International, a surf-board maker and distributor based in Santa Cruz, Calif.

For years I dithered over buying a canoe or kayak until finally, this past May, I pulled the trigger on something else entirely: a Versa Board.

The manufacturer, LiquidLogic, advertises the Versa Board as a hybrid kayak/paddle board, though it might be more accurate to describe it as a stand-up kayak. It’s hollow and made of polyethylene, just like a sit-on-top kayak, with more of a prow and keel than a surfboard. It also has a retractable skeg to help you maintain a straighter course and avoid fishtailing. But it’s also much flatter than most SOTs with barely any gunwales.

Regardless, the end result is stand-up paddle surfing — and I love both the Versa and the sport.

My indecision over whether to buy a canoe or kayak hinged on several factors. I wanted a vessel light enough to port without the help of another adult but also large enough to accommodate my two peeps, each of whom weighs about 50 lbs. I also wanted something that would be equally at home in the salt marshes and creeks near my house and off the beach in Long Island Sound. I’ve done canoeing and kayaking, often in salt marshes, and enjoy them equally. Canoes can accommodate people and gear, but are notoriously susceptible to waves and difficult to re-enter (or even launch) in swell. They’re also awkward to move about on land alone. Kayaks are a better option for my conditions, but are limited in the number of riders who can hop aboard. My best choice for a kayak was to buy a two-person SOT and then try and squeeze my extra son onboard. But I hesitated, unsatisfied.

Then, back in the spring, I was at the beach when a young couple appeared, walked down to the water, launched a pair of paddle boards, and proceeded to serenely paddle across the cove. The third option struck me.

SUP is a phenomenal workout for arms and shoulders but especially the core. As the trainer above notes, it’s very low impact — you’re so distracted by the scenery and getting to where you’re going that you don’t realize until the next morning how sore your muscles are. It’s easy on the back too, unlike kayaking. Whereas in a kayak all power comes from arms, shoulders, and back, on a paddle board the torque of the stroke is diffused throughout the body, easing the strain. And, again, it’s the best core workout I’ve ever experienced. I’ve always had a weak middle without any definition to my abdominals. That’s changing.

Paddle boarding can be tricky. Offshore, you need a good pair of sea legs, and I’ve had several rough moments when the chop has swamped my Versa. The toughest is when the swell hits on the beam, as is often the case when I’m paralleling the beach — and this in the relative calm of the Sound. The Versa is perfect for my needs, but if you intend to spend most of your time on open water and you’re not packing 50 lbs. of chicken nuggets and chocolate milk fore and aft, you may want to buy a more traditional board. It’s instructive that the photo accompanying the Journal story shows Laird Hamilton and his daughter paddling on a river, not offshore. Ditto for Gerry Lopez in this New York Times article.

Paddle boarding is receiving crazy amounts of media attention these days. It deserves it. If you’re on the outside looking in, go get yourself a board and paddle. The water’s great.

The Apathetic Agnostic

~ Jackson ~ 1 Comment

I was laboring over a longish response to this Slate piece by Ron Rosenbaum calling for a distinction to be drawn between agnosticism and atheism. Then I remembered my blog is on the googlenets, and I imagined the comments section of the finished post going something like this:

I clicked here from someplace and I know fuck-all about you but based on what you wrote about atheism I think you’re stupid and terrible.

Actually, I didn’t say anything bad about atheism. I simply said agnosticism is a fundamentally different approach to the issue —

What “issue?” There is no “issue.” Because there’s no God.

Well, you see, from an existentialist point of view —

Are you an atheist?

As an existentialist, the existence of God is not —

Then you think God is real?

He might be. But even so, ultimately his will is inscrutable and therefore —

Where’s your proof!? You have no proof.

Well, a theist would answer that by saying —

Do you believe in Santa Claus too?

No. But the question doesn’t really have any bearing —

Your arguments are weak. You are an idiot.

I have a four-year degree in philosophy and religion, and I believe I can contribute to the —

Well, la-de-da! Look at Mister Fancy Pants! You still suck.

And then I said, screw it. I’m good.

Good Riddance, Robert Byrd

~ Jackson ~ 2 Comments

Robert Carlyle Byrd was born in North Carolina in 1917. After his mother’s death the following year, he was adopted by his aunt and uncle and raised in West Virginia.

In 1942, at the age of 24, he joined the Ku Klux Klan, where, according to Byrd, his felicity for bureaucratic politics was discovered. But by the early ’50s, Byrd announced he was no longer a dues-paying member.

Frederick Lewis Allen on the 20th-century rebirth of the Klan:

At first, in the South, white supremacy was the Klan’s chief objective, but as time went on and the organization grew and spread, opposition to the Jew and above all the Catholic proved best talking points for Kleagles in most localities. (Only Yesterday (New York: Perennial Classics, 2000), 58)

Remember that back in the day, “Catholic” was shorthand for Italians, Irish, Hispanics, and Poles. In other words: immigrants. Further, the KKK, just like Hitler, conflated “Judaism” with “Communism.”

R.A. Patton, writing in Current History, reported a grim series of brutalities from Alabama: “A lad whipped with branches until his back was ribboned flesh; a Negress beaten and left helpless to contract pneumonia from exposure and die; a white girl, divorcee, beaten into unconsciousness in her own home; a naturalized foreigner flogged until his back was a pulp because he married an American woman; a Negro lashed until he sold his land to a white man for a fraction of its value.” (Ibid., 59)

Byrd and 18 other senators (17 of them Democrats) filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — a bill introduced by fellow Democrat John F. Kennedy, shepherded through the House and Senate by Democrats, and eventually signed into law by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson. Byrd also voted against the Voting Rights Act the following year, though he did vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

Byrd also voted against the nominations of Thurgood Marshall (appointed by Johnson) in 1967 and Clarence Thomas (appointed by George H. W. Bush) in 1991. These men are the only two African-Americans to ever sit on the Supreme Court. Byrd was age 49 at the time of the first vote; 74 at the time of the second.

So in most of these negative votes, Byrd voted against his fellow Democrats. He wasn’t toeing a partisan line, but instead was motivated by something else.

But he changed, say his supporters! Byrd wasn’t a racist! He apologized, disavowing his previous prejudices and actions.

In 1982, Byrd’s grandson died, which apparently provoked a crisis of conscience in the 64-year-old senator. Byrd, when asked in a C-SPAN interview what vote he would change if he could, replied that he would switch his vote on Kennedy’s Civil Rights Act. He explained:

I lost a grandson in 1982. Fine-looking young man. Six-feet five, three hundred pounds, seventeen years old. Loved the outdoors. I lost him. He died in a truck crash. I won’t go through all the deep valleys that I tread during the following two years. I was majority leader then, I believe, at that time, which did take my mind away from that great tragedy to some extent. Anyhow, it came to my mind at that time how I loved this grandson. And it also came to my mind that black people love their grandsons too. And I, the more I thought about it, I thought, Well now, suppose I were black and my grandson and I were out on the highways in the mid-hours, the wee hours of the morning or midnight, and I stopped at a place to get that little grandson a glass of water or to have it go to the restroom, and there’s a sign, Whites Only. Black people love their grandsons as much as I love mine, and that’s just not right. And so we, who like myself were born in a Southern environment, grew up with Southern people, knew their feelings about the Civil War and all these things, I thought, My goodness, we ought to get ahead of the curve really, not have the law force us to do it, we ought to take down those signs. Well, that is what made me come to the conclusion that if I had to do it over again, I’d vote against that. I’d vote against that law.

Byrd realized black people love their grandsons too. In 1982. At age 64.

He wanted “to get ahead of the curve” on civil rights. In 1982. The same year my angel was the centerfold and Rocky Balboa was pounding on Clubber Lang.

Today the lilies of the Internet and the MSM bloom with memorials and eulogies to Robert Byrd. He was the longest-serving senator ever! He wrote a four-volume history of the Senate! He voted against the Iraq war! Byrd was also a hillbilly racist elected to the House and later the Senate in the 1950s by capitalizing on bigotry and kept there, in part, by the same. Only decades later, when his views became untenable to his comfortable lifestyle, did he claim to abandon them. In his prime, Byrd would have loathed me, my family, and just about everybody I know based on our ethnicities and/or religions. And today I’m supposed to feel reverence or get dewy-eyed for this POS?

Passage from the C-SPAN interview is my transcription. Byrd’s response begins around the 18:00 mark of part 2.

Your Tax Dollars at Work on Long Beach West

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Last week was the third anniversary of the cottage evictions on Long Beach West. I made my annual photo safari out to the peninsula to see how the stimulus-funded clean-up is progressing.

Beyond warning signs (ignore) and the construction road leading out through the dunes (great for running), I couldn’t see much difference once I arrived at the cottages. Perhaps slightly less detritus scattered about, but since there’s so much, it’s hard to tell if any of it has been taken away. The cottages themselves continue their deterioration and vehicles like the camper and the pickup truck remain. The blue above-ground water pipe, leading from a hydrant in Pleasure Beach to Long Beach West, is still smashed in several places, making it useless for fighting fires.

Meanwhile, the Connecticut Post continues its superficial reporting about Pleasure Beach and LBW with a feature published last week on the status of the proposed water taxi from Bridgeport to the peninsula. I did some preliminary investigation earlier this year into the water taxi, and after fruitless phone calls and two absurd interviews with Elaine Ficarra, the mayor’s communications director, I realized there is no real plan. Bridgeport requested the funds ($1.9 million — an appropriation, not stimulus or recovery money as has sometimes been reported) without any hard ideas of what to do with them. All departments redirected my queries to the mayor’s office, where Ficarra was unable to answer the simplest questions. How much will be spent on renovation of the facilities already existent on the beach, the status of the docks, what (if anything) will be done with the burnt bridge, whether the water taxi will be publicly or privately O&Oed — “I don’t know” and “I’ll have to check” were Ficarra’s stock responses. It’s not even certain the taxi will run out of the East End, which this editorial assumes, or if it will be based at the Port Jeff ferry terminal clear on the other side of the city.

I asked Ficarra if she has been out to Pleasure Beach since the bridge fire. You can guess what her answer was. I can also guess whether the writer of the feature has been out there herself. I ask that question of everybody I interview regarding LBW and Pleasure Beach and an affirmative reply is the rare exception, not the rule. That to me is the most frustrating thing about covering this story: the disconnected conversations I have in which I inquire about things I’ve seen or experienced on the peninsula and the people making decisions about the place have no idea what I’m talking about.

It’s All Real

~ Jackson ~ 1 Comment

Jerry Brito is off to Walt Disney World:

That said I have to admit that Disney World would not be my first choice of vacation destination. The reason, I tell myself, is that I don’t care for artificial experiences. At Disney World, “cast members” are never allowed to frown, for example. The smell of fresh-baked cookies is pumped into the air around “Main Street.” In fact, the very idea of a long lost American main street is fake.

But then I think, isn’t immersing ourselves in fantasy exactly what we do when we go to the theatre or read a book? Disney World is just intensely more immersive, that’s all. Why not just enjoy the ride?

Exactly. That Disney World is “artificial” is a common criticism but there’s no such thing as an artificial experience. That assumes some experiences are more valid than others. Everything one experiences is real. No one would argue that going to Paris is artificial. Yet is it less “real” than going to a war-zone like Afghanistan? The only way Disney could be described as “artificial” is if you somehow truly believed Paris is just like the France pavilion in EPCOT and equated the two. But of course nobody does that.

Experiences certainly have different weights; the death of a parent has greater reverberations than buying a Slurpee at 7-11 — but again, everything is actually happening. People who distinguish between “real” and “artificial” experiences disassociate themselves from their own lives. It’s what Sartre would call being-for-others. They imagine themselves at Disney from an exterior, third-person point of view and feel as if they have to justify their actions to that faceless observer. It’s anti-individualist.

When people say an experience is “fake” or “artificial,” what they mean to say is that it’s not to their liking. Another friend recently returned from Costa Rica. He reports “the whole place was just a little too commercialized and globalized for my tastes.” Translation: the natives wore shoes. A place is what it is. If he wants something more ethnic and impoverished (which is what the friend really means), there are other places he can go. I don’t travel to deserts because I don’t like deserts. I’d rather go to the beach.

In other words, I think perhaps Jerry didn’t want to go to Disney because, as a 30-something dude without kids, riding the Dumbo carousel doesn’t get his heart pumping. Which, as much as I love WDW, is a sentiment I can understand.