Motorcycles

A fine young man who worked at my gym, who was working on his degree at the University of Texas, who had another job at Maggie Mae's, who had a mother and a sister, died early this morning in a motorcycle crash. He was 23. I had only met him once or twice, but the mood at the gym, which closed early today, was despondent, as this man was obviously highly regarded by all who worked with him. He was driving his motorcycle home last night after work, along Lamar Street near 26th Street (close to Pease Park), which makes a sharp turn at that spot. He didn't make the curve tightly enough, wound up in the oncoming traffic lane, and collided with an oncoming car. He was wearing a helmet, but died at the scene.

I've long wondered about motorcycles and whether they should be legal. I won't make that argument here, but at a minimum, one has to question whether their risk may not be excessive. Unlike cars, with airbags, seat belts and plenty of steel between you and the pavement (or the other car), motorcycles offer no such protection. Even if you wear a helmet, nothing else stands between the rest of you and the immovable object you may collide with. Motorcycles are also more difficult for car drivers to see than other larger vehicles. Even if the motorcyclist is driving perfectly, another driver may swerve in front of him because he can't see the motorcycle. Motorcycles also have a lot less wheel contact with the road, and are much more susceptible to skids, slides, and spills, particularly in adverse conditions. Finally, motorcycles are harder to drive than most other vehicles. According to the Insurance Institute of America, motorcycle fatalities have been increasing, with 2007 having the highest amount fatalities since 1975. Motorcycle fatalities have increased every year for the last 10 years. Finally, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the fatality rate per registered vehicle for motorcyclists in 2007 was six times the fatality rate for passenger car occupants.

Every day of our lives, we make numerous decisions to accept some risk of death. Generally, that risk is infinitessimal, but often it is somewhat higher. Every time you cross the street, operate a car, take a plane, get in a taxi (especially there), or perform one of countless mundane acts, you voluntarily accept some risk of death or injury. Its impossible to avoid. Stay in your house long enough, huddled in the basement with one light bulb and a supply of tuna salad and mineral water, and chances are a plane or an asteroid will crash into the house, or radon gas will seep in, or Mormons will break in...you get the picture. You can't avoid risk. But that doesn't mean you should court it either. Clearly there's some line that divides acceptable and unacceptable risk. Everyone must decide for themselves where the line is drawn in their own life.

The lore of motorcycle culture has certainly gripped our nation for some time. Perhaps it owes to some association with vague concepts of "freedom." Movies and books have glorified that association. But like the Marlboro Man or Dean Martin or other pleasant faces put on dangerous activities, the inescapable fact remains that motorcycle riding remains a dangerous activity for reasons I've described.

Millions of Americans ride motorcycles responsibly every day, and I can't conceive of any American government that would ever ban them, at least not in my lifetime. But, just as there's no safe cigarette, there's really no safe motorcycle. Hopefully all of you and all your friends and family will be extremely cautious when it comes to motorcycle riding (and give a wide berth to motorcyclists on the road as well).

Town Lake Pictures

Every town has something its local Chamber of Commerce plays up in its "Move to/Visit Our Town" brochures. In New Orleans, its the food and music. In Memphis, the music. New York has lots of things. San Francisco...moral bankruptcy and overaggressive panhandling? I can't imagine what Lubbock says. "Come to Lubbock, it sucks less than Odessa."

Here in Austin, Texas, the big cheese pushes music and the outdoors. By outdoors, we generally mean the Barton Creek Greenbelt, Zilker Park and Town Lake (now "Lady Bird Lake"). A 10 mile (mostly) gravel hike and bike trail next to downtown rings either bank of the lake, and a 2 mile stretch on either bank is enormously popular, particularly on pretty days like today.

Although we haven't had nearly as much rain as previous years, there's still some color on the trail this spring. This afternoon I went out and took a bunch of photos of some of the red buds, wisteria, and other springtime color that decorates the Trail this year. I'm in the process now of putting them on my flickr site, which you can access with the link on the right. Hope you enjoy. More importantly, hope you can come here soon and enjoy the beautiful spring!

Girl Power

Who are we kidding? Look at that - look how she moves - it's like jello on springs – they must have some sort of a built-in motor. I tell you it's a whole different sex.

Jack Lemmon, "Some Like It Hot"

42 year old Dara Torres doesn't move like jello on springs, and will be kicking your ass later for thinking so.

Unlike most of your inert, corpulent husbands and boyfriends, sitting on the couch thinking about whether to get a third roast beef sandwich and licking cheetoes residue from their fingers, I’ve been exercising relatively non-stop since 1978 (save for times trying to rehab from injuries or my heart surgery). When I first started, and particularly when I went to Texas and started working out at Gregory Gym, almost the only people I saw in the gym lifting weights were men. There’d be about one woman for every 20 men in the weight room. Also, running on campus or out on the trail (or in Kingwood on the ironically-named asphalt “greenbelt”), most of the runners were men, and while you’d see some women walking, it was rare to see women running. Women took aerobics classes. I distinctly remember talking to women at the time about this, and reading about it too. The prevailing attitude was “I don’t want to get big and muscular.”

Nothing gets by me, of course, and lately I’ve begun to notice feeling outmanned while working out. That’s not a comment about my still incredibly high above normal testosterone levels (I mean really, the tests don’t have a measurement as high as my levels). Rather, I’ve noticed that most people at the gym are now women. Most people out running, and particularly most of the people really out training hard, are women. More and more, women have begun to outnumber men at triathlons, fun runs around town, training groups, and other recreational athletic competitions and endeavors like fitness competitions. Westlake housewives everywhere are killing themselves with pilates, yoga, weights, running, tennis, macrobiotic/South Beach diets, botox and other cosmetic enhancements, while their Frank the Tank husbands log a lot of couch time.

What up?

This obviously relates to what is considered “attractive.”

In between glances at your watch and discreetly looking around to see if there’s anything more interesting going on around you (without letting your wife or girlfriend see), have you ever noticed at the museum all those Renaissance paintings of nudes? Let me put it a little more directly - all the naked fat chick pictures? Yeah. Believe it or not, back in the day, that’s what counted as hot. Those women were the Marissa Millers and Petra Nemcovas of their day. Probably explains why the bikini was so long in coming.

That kind of body type really doesn’t turn the heads so much anymore (except maybe at the trailer park or on Springer), but even as late as the 1950s and 60s, the “ideal” woman had a somewhat veal-like soft body quality. Think of the sex symbols from then: Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Brigitte Bardot, Grace Kelly, Mamie Van Doren…those girls weren’t logging a lot of gym time. The look was soft: soft skin, soft muscles, slender, with large breasts (where possible). Marilyn Monroe, sexiest woman in the world, and all that, was a size 12.

Less than 40 years later (really a short timespan), with eating disorders, exercise, and speed all the rage, today’s “ideal” female body type is starkly different: athletic, toned, hard, lean, and with large breasts. Conformity to meet this ideal is brutal. Let a female celebrity gain, say, 20 pounds and go from a size 0 to size 6, and the collective media lowers the boom. With Dara Torres and Elle MacPherson walking around over 40 and all rocked up, no wonder Debbie Clemens felt the need to hit the HGH. Which Roger had no idea was going on.

I think tastes changed, like they always do, when TV and movies and other media began featuring stronger-looking women. This happened gradually, but in stages. Keep in mind that during all this progression, the adults of today (particularly in the key advertising demographics, and particularly men) were growing up watching, admiring, and feeling the impact these women were making on culture.

This all started on television. First and foremost, and always, was Emma Peel (Diana Rigg). She paved the way for Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon), Wonder Woman (Lynda Carter), Police Woman (Angie Dickinson), and eventually Charlie’s Angels. These were attractive women, but turn your back on them and they’d kick your ass. Emma knew (and used) karate, and could fight with knives. She had a male partner, but for the first time, the woman sometimes was saving the man from danger. She was just as smart as the men, and generally outwitted them. But she was also attractive and very sexy. In their own way, all these later incarnations were strong and tough, but feminine.

Around the same time, women athletics began to take off. The first really famous of this bunch was Wilma Rudolph, who won three gold medals in the 1960 Rome Olympics despite having a sprained ankle. Then in 1968 came Peggy Fleming, another attractive woman athlete, with grace and beauty, but also an athleticism not generally associated with female beauty. Then in the early 1970s, girl next door Chris Evert began dominating women’s tennis, routinely besting the likes of Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova. Again, these women were attractive and athletic, physically accomplished and yet desirable as well.

Pushing on to the 1980s, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition made a monumental change in popular thinking about women’s body types. Unlike other forms of cheese from that era, the SI swimsuit models weren’t soft, doughy, compliant looking playthings, but were fit, lean, athletic, and looked like they could compete in the swimsuits they were modeling. These weren’t anorexics or Twiggys—these women were muscular and toned. And big as well.

Finally, thank the hair bands. Yes, the 1980s heavy metal videos were ridiculous. Larry Flynt thinks maybe they went a little far in objectifying women. But once you look past all that, and admittedly it’s a bit difficult to do so, you notice the women being objectified weren’t the more customary waifish stick figures that had been in magazines. Kate Moss could never have been in a Whitesnake video. These women looked like if you crossed them, they’d cut you. They, too, were big, athletic (well, the ones who weren’t smoking anyway), and strong. (BTW, 25 years later, the Hot for Teacher video is still pretty robust. Man, I sure miss Diamond Dave.).

That last bit aside, during all this time, society was changing as well. Women gained economic options—they could go to work as something other than a teacher or secretary. They could keep working after getting married or even after having kids. They could even be independent, like Mary Tyler Moore. As they became used to more freedom and to options long deprived, it was only natural they’d want to play the same games the boys did. Title IX ushered in that freedom to play sports, to train, and to excel at athletics that until then was seen as inconsistent with the unyielding soft, “ladylike” image women were held to. These girls grew up playing sports and being in shape. Unlike their male counterparts, who eventually became sloven prisoners to video games and cheap beer, women became more interested in athletics and training as an expression of that new strength. Also, I think it offered an opportunity for the kind of interaction and teamwork with other women, with training classes and groups, workout partners, and team or partner sports, which more characterize women’s relationships than men’s.

As media began to feature these kinds of women prominently, it was only natural that the masses would follow. Little boys who became big boys during this era grew up with these kinds of women dominating the cultural landscape. Little girls who grew up to become big girls began to look at them as having the type of look that society at least allegedly aspired to.

Now, women can and do play all the boys’ games. While men and the front porch most of them have hanging off their mid-section sit on the couch, hang out at sports bars, or hole up deer blinds on weekends. Now that’s progress!

****

24 ways that women are similar to fish. This is from the “Barney’s Blog” section of the “How I Met Your Mother” page on the CBS web site:

1. Both attracted to shiny objects
2. More fun to catch while drinking
3. Neither travel well
4. There’s others in the sea and/or bar
5. Three words: catch and release
6. Both travel in protective groups
7. Small bladders
8. The deeper you go, the scarier they get
9. Their weight largely determines their value
10. [EDITED: My lawyer has requested that I remove this one from the blog… hint: crabs!]
11. They get all ornery if you try to grab their tail
12. Bears will eat either of them
13. Sometimes I likes ‘em wild, sometimes I likes ‘em farm-raised
14. You must document great catches or no one will believe you — video preferred
15. Easier to reel in if you let them wear themselves out first
16. Seen the movie Splash? Case closed
17. Cold blooded. Looking your way, Stacy.
18. Neither can operate a vehicle
19. They both eat things
20. The harder they shake their tail, the farther they’ll go in life
21. Scales are important to each of them
22. They never have to buy drinks
23. Umm… Eggs? Duh
24. Can hook either with a great line

****

Like Pam in Urban Cowboy, these girls know exactly how to get themselves a cowboy. Pay close attention ladies:

SXSW 2009: Welcome to Austin, Spend Your Money, Then Go Home

Now is that any way to behave at a rock and roll concert?

Jim Morrison, The Doors, “Absolutely Live”

No, indeed. There’s just certain ways to behave at a rock show. Of course, Jim may not have been so right about that plan to get fat, grow a beard, produce an insipid album of poetry, move to Paris and die in the bathtub after using heroin. Even Keith Richards thinks that plan may not have been well thought out.

Anyway, like Jim said, there’s a right way and a wrong way to behave at a rock show, but sadly, many of you seem not to know it. The plague of van-driving guitar strangler groups, recording industry swine, hipster dufuses, and directional school spring breakers known as South By Southwest once again is poised to blight the People’s Republic of Austin, making this an opportune time to review the rules for concert and festival going. Actually, the cash-in-on-the name movie and interactive festivals have already begun, and with them the proliferation of twenty-something slackers garbed in black, mobbing Jo’s Coffee and squirrelishly darting across traffic to get to the next event on the day’s agenda. Austin already is awash with B- and C-level celebrities, industry events, faux ninja-dressed Yankees and Californians, and smug Austin Chronicle self-aggrandizement. But hey, if it weren’t for hucksterism, you couldn’t have art now could you? Signed, Andy Warhol.

Everyone knows just how much I love SXSW, having long sung its praises. But like Sondheim, observing that art is an attempt to bring order out of chaos, I feel compelled to remind all of you visitors that this is not Vietnam, this is a festival. There are rules. These rules protect us, the locals, and you, the visitors, by keeping us from wanting to run you over with our pickup trucks.

Basically, the two rules are that you need to act like a guest, and plan ahead. Don’t put us out or impose on us to the point where we have to go vigilante on you. These two basic principles have many applications.

As you move about the streets from club to club, don’t dart out in front of traffic to cross the street. There’s plenty of cheap beer wherever you’re headed, and another band's going to come on stage when this one stops. Don’t roll up on us and ask where Sixth Street is, or South Congress. Some place more obscure? OK. But dammit, find out where a town's main attractions are before you go. Like life, have some rudimentary idea where you’re headed before you start. Would you stop someone on Columbus Avenue and ask where Central Park is? Probably not, well, not successfully at least. That’s what the guidebook you should have brought is for. Likewise, know where the gig is before you leave your hotel or your buddy's van. Don’t cut across private property, particularly people’s yards, and don’t lead the parade down streets with your 12 best friends from Seaside Heights or East Hanover. Don’t roll into private businesses asking to use their bathrooms, and if you should happen upon some free to the public restrooms, don’t move in. Don’t clog restaurants to the point where a place that normally takes 10 minutes to get a table turns into two hours. People-nothing is worth waiting two hours for, and there’s probably another place just as good that’s not a two hour wait. Don’t pack our own bars (particularly those that aren’t on the SXSW list), and if you do feel obliged to crash, leave your slurred boasting about your own hometown for another time. I’m talking to you, Southie guy. No one wants to hear about Jonathan Papelbon or how the Sox are going to be a wicked pissa this year. Leave our women alone too. If you want to work your game on another festival-goer, go right ahead. That’s just “assumption of the risk.” But leave non-combatants alone, kind of like the proverbial farmer’s daughter. Do not engage in spontaneous celebrations or demonstrations out of character with where you are. No mass high-fiving, jiving, and profiling when you’re standing in line at Popeye’s. I don’t care how cool you look playing the bongos Mom gave you for your 15th birthday that you brought for the trip. And lay off the cell phones. No one thinks you’re calling your office back in LA, and for the most part, wouldn’t care if you were.

Going to and from the festival sites also implies certain additional rules. Don’t stand around clogging the way selling your crap, which probably violates copyright laws anyway. Don’t wear stupid costumes or outfits. The music festival hasn’t started yet and I’m already done with the hordes wearing all black. Look, I know you think you're so Joey Ramone, but you really look like someone that got kicked out of a Cheap Trick cover band. To that end, don’t go native on us either. I know you’re dying to cowboy up with those “genuine” cowboy boots you bought at a gift shop in the American terminal at DFW, but leave the boots in your hotel room. Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny thinks you look ridiculous. Don’t wander in and out of traffic. That’s a real street and those are real cars, not a video game. When driving, don’t slow to a crawl at every downtown intersection so you can read the street sign, turning a long line of cars behind you into your own modern wagon train. No careening across three traffic lanes so you won’t miss that turn. In a parking garage, it is permissible to go faster than five miles per hour, and spaces aren’t going to magically open up if you go slow enough-this isn’t the Hackensack Bloomie’s outlet and the rest of us have somewhere to be.

And for God’s sake, Corey Hart wanna-bes, I don’t care how cool you are, don’t wear your sunglasses at night.

So if you’ll just follow these very simple rules, we’re all going to get along just fine. Welcome to Austin!

* * * *

Tonight as I wrote this over some dinner at Central Market, I was surrounded by a ladies' "knitting circle." Are there any women over the age of 25 who don't knit? Did I miss something? And is there a transition period or do you go from "Ladies' Night" to "knitting bee" in one fell swoop? Mental image of the scene in Gone With the Wind of the ladies knitting at the table at Ashley Wilkes's house as Melanie reads aloud from David Copperfield. Life isn't nearly as exciting as it used to be.

Wildflower Update, Daylight Savings Time, Twitter, and the Decline of Western Civilization

Been very tied up on work lately, so I haven't been able to share my brilliance with you as frequently. One of these days I hope to put more time into Daily Affirmations, since it impresses the chicks and all.

* * * *

Did a round-trip to and from Houston today. Went there on SH71, came back on US290. The bluebonnets are out, though it seems a bit early. They aren't exactly thick like in years past. I've heard the drought is going to depress the wildflowers this year. Anyway, there was a modest amount of bluebonnets, and fewer buttercups, paintbrushes, and just a very few winecups, on SH71. Once you get to IH10, there's no more visible flowers. I didn't see much in the way of flowers in Houston itself, except near Memorial Park, where they always do a good job of cultivating flowers in the nature areas. Coming back on 290, the flowers begin to pick up after Sealy and are pretty good in Brenham, as you'd expect, but its still just a sprinkle, compared to the thick fields of springs past. Hopefully later this month we'll see a lot more of the treasured bluebonnet blues and red-orange paintbrushes that make Texas so beautiful each spring.

* * * *

This changing time business has got to stop. Twice a year, it gets harder and harder for me to sleep, and for several days I'm just dragging around all day. I did a little research on this. Turns out we can't blame the farmers, as I'd hoped (I had what I thought were some good "Jessica Simpson starring at the rodeo" lines now rendered useless). Turns out it was that busy-body Benjamin Franklin who dreamed it up, figuring "summer time" would save on candle usage by utilizing more natural light during the late afternoons. Then Europe followed by the US instituted it in World War I, resumed it in World War II, and the US finalized the switchover in 1966. Energy usage considerations appears to drive the debate, and there is a debate, by the way. Historically, DST proponents have urged the Ben Franklin argument-it saves energy by allowing greater reliance on natural light in afternoon hours, rather than artificial light. What did that guy know? He wanted the turkey to be the national symbol, and what was the only governmental office he held-Ambassador to France. 'Nuff said. That kite flier needs to step back. Actually, some UCal geeks did a study in Indiana recently and found that DST actually increases energy usage, because people use more air conditioning. When they get home its an hour earlier and therefore the heat of the day is still present. Naturally they went to the "we need to support Obama" card to get their point across (University of California professors wanting to help Obama by writing a New York Times op-ed piece...that's totally not cliche).

Personally, I prefer daylight savings time over standard time, because I'm usually up later so I like having more afternoon hours. But we should just find which one works better and stick with it. This time-switching business is just nonsense, and in the days of nuclear power plants, 345kV transmission lines, computers, and the internet and the like, has no legitimate justification.

* * * *

What the hell is Twitter, and more importantly, how does it help our lives? Let me answer my question. Twitter is an on-line service for people to enter one-line updates about their current "status." The Facebook Monolith has a similar functionality, in which you can enter your status on your profile page. Twitter allows you to enter your status; the Twitter web site gives examples of "eating soup," "running late to a meeting," and "partying." Entries are called "tweets," which totally sounds like something a bunch of Cal State Northridge guys thought up between bong rips. Twitter explains that "with Twitter, you can stay hyper–connected to your friends and always know what they’re doing." Now that the Bush Administration has concluded, formerly amusing comic strip Doonesbury is left without much to talk about and is trying to return to the funny. Trudeau has satirized Twitter recently with great success. Twitter is slowly making inroads to popular culture, the next symptom of the Great 21st Century Information Overload Epidemic. My cave is looking better and better.

Look, don't anyone take this the wrong way, but for the most part I couldn't care less what you do during your day. I don't care if you're eating soup, or drinking coffee, or moving from the den to the living room, or if you just got back from Home Depot. Tell me quickly if you ran into Catherine Zeta-Jones at Home Depot, or won the lottery, or were trampled in a yak stampede. Otherwise, just assume you need to keep some of your juicy news in reserve so we'll have something to talk about the next time we awkwardly run into each other at the grocery store or at a wedding or funeral. Let's not totally ruin the mystery between us. If you get to the point in life where you're hanging on to my next update to find out if I got a refill on my diet coke, you, my friend, need a hobby (or maybe a date).

* * * *

The Decline of Western Civilization:

Paul Blart: Mall Cop has earned $133 million in gross revenues.

Somewhere, the "Hey Vern" guy is cursing his bad timing, and Billy Wilder spins in his grave.