Friends...I'm off to ultra...

...for a weekend of bliss

Impatience is a Virtue (or "The Undisputed Badass of the Year")

Hideaki Akaiwa was at work on March 11th when the earthquake and then the tsunami hit his hometown, Ishinomaki in Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture. The city was covered with water ten feet deep -for days. Hideaki’s wife was missing somewhere in the flooded area. Rescue workers told Hideaki that all they could do was wait for the military to come help. But the 43-year-old man did not want to sit idly by while his wife was missing, so he put on some SCUBA gear.

Regardless of how he came across this equipment (borrowing, stealing, buying, beating up a Yakuza SCUBA diving demolitions expert, etc.) Hideaki threw on his underwater survival gear, rushed into the goddamned tsunami, and dove beneath the rushing waves, determined to rescue his wife or die trying. I’m not exactly sure whether or not the dude even knew how to operate SCUBA equipment, but according to one version of his story he met his wife while he was surfing (which is awesome, by the way), so it doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch to say that he already had a little experience SCUBA diving under a more controlled situation. Of course, even if this dude didn’t know how to work the gear I’m certain that wouldn’t have stopped him either – Hideaki wasn’t going to let a pair of soul-crushing natural disasters deter him from doing awesome shit and saving his family. He dove down into the water, completely submerged in the freezing cold, pitch black rushing current on all sides, and started swimming through the underwater ruins of his former hometown.

Surrounded by incredible hazards on all sides, ranging from obscene currents capable of dislodging houses from their moorings, sharp twisted metal that could easily have punctured his oxygen line (at best) or impaled him (at worst), and with giant f***ing cars careening through the water like toys, he pressed on. Past broken glass, past destroyed houses, past downed power lines arcing with electrical current, through undertow that could have dragged him out to sea never to be heard from again, he searched.

Hideaki maintained his composure and navigated his way through the submerged city, finally tracking down his old house. He quickly swam through to find his totally-freaked-out wife, alone and stranded on the upper level of their house, barely keeping her head above water. He grabbed her tight, and presumably sharing his rebreather with her, dragged her out of the wreckage to safety. She survived.

Hideaki wasn’t finished, though. His mother was still missing. Read the rest of the story at Badass of the Week. Warning: lots of strong language. The rest of the story is here.

Aurora Borealis

The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

Terje Sorgjerd took footage of the Aurora Borealis around Kirkenes, Norway, near the Russian border. A week of footage is condensed in this beautiful time-lapse video.

Wilco - California Stars

This song probably illustrates why I like Wilco so much; it's the imagery. You listen to Jeff Tweedy sing and it's like he's telling his story just with emotions. I love how he sees life and how he tells it.

This song makes me feel like it's the end of the summer somewhere in the late 90's up in Northern California. You hear that Wilco is doing a small outdoor set in the afternoon and decide to go with your then girlfriend (or current husband... whatever). It's just when the last warm rays of sun disappear into a speck on the horizon filled with pine trees when this song starts playing.




I'd like to rest my heavy head tonight
On a bed of California stars
I'd like to lay my weary bones tonight
On a bed of California stars

I'd love to feel
Your hand touching mine
And tell me why
I must keep working on

Yes I'd give my life
To lay my head tonight on a bed
Of California stars

I'd like to dream
My troubles all away
On a bed of California stars

Jump up from my starbed
Make another day
Underneath my California stars
They hang like grapes
On vines that shine
And warm the lovers' glass
Like friendly wine

So I'd give this world
Just to dream a dream with you
On our bed of California stars

I'd like to rest my heavy head tonight
On a bed of California stars
I'd like to lay my weary bones tonight
On a bed of California stars

I'd love to feel
Your hand touching mine
And tell me why
I must keep working on

Yes I'd give my life
To lay my head tonight on a bed
Of California stars

I'd like to dream
My troubles all away
On a bed of California stars

Jump up from my starbed
Make another day
Underneath my California stars

They hang like grapes
On vines that shine
And warm the lovers' glass
Like friendly wine

So I'd give this world
Just to dream a dream with you
On our bed of California stars

So I'd give this world
Just to dream a dream with you
On our bed of California stars

(Dream a dream with you)

Rebecca Black - Friday

When the week is feeling long, just know that Friday is coming soon.

Whales may embed their name in clicks...

New information on the clicks via an article at Wired:

Rendell and his collaborators, including biologists Hal Whitehead, Shane Gero and Tyler Schulz, have for years studied the click sequences, or codas, used by sperm whales to communicate across miles of deep ocean. In a study published last June in Marine Mammal Sciences, they described a sound-analysis technique that linked recorded codas to individual members of a whale family living in the Caribbean.

In that study, they focused on a coda made only by Caribbean sperm whales. It appears to signify group membership. In the latest study, published Feb. 10 in Animal Behavior, they analyzed a coda made by sperm whales around the world. Called 5R, it’s composed of five consecutive clicks, and superficially appears to be identical in each whale. Analyzed closely, however, variations in click timing emerge. Each of the researchers’ whales had its own personal 5R riff...

Moreover, 5R tends to be made at the beginning of each coda string as if, like old-time telegraph operators clicking out a call sign, they were identifying themselves. Said Rendell, “It may function to let the animals know which individual is vocalizing.”..

That individual whales would have means of identifying themselves does, however, make sense. Dolphins have already been shown to have individual, identifying whistles.

The video above (not part of the study) has several minutes of clicks.

The Sweetest Sounds I Ever Read

The Sweetest Sounds I Ever Read

Hear the cadence of 'Call me Ishmael'
By MEGHAN O'ROURKE

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page C12

When a friend of mine recently called a novel "poetic," she didn't intend it as a compliment. She meant that it lacked plot and its sentences were overly ornate. But these qualities aren't what poetry truly has to offer the writer of prose. Novels that are merely lush aren't "poetic" in any meaningful sense.

At the heart of all great poetry is cadence—the way sounds chime off one another—and it is one of the most seductive aspects of any sort of writing. Writing prose without thinking about cadence is like trying to seduce a man by handing him your résumé. The facts are there, but the electric charge isn't.

The American literary tradition is filled with writers who have understood that the power of writing springs not only from the precision of sentences but from the feeling evoked by their rhythm.

Here's F. Scott Fitzgerald in the brilliant last sentence of "The Great Gatsby": "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Note those effortful "b" sounds—the way they intensify the meaning.

Rhythm isn't just decorative. It serves a purpose even in a book like "Moby-Dick," which aspires to social realism. Melville could well have made his opening line "Call me Richard"—it was a popular American name then as now—but it lacks the tragic Old Testament resonance of Ishmael. It also doesn't sound as good as Ishmael, whose two gentler stresses balance out the sentence's strikingly stressed first word. What's more, "Call" and "el" chime off each other, resulting in a sentence that's as sonorous and inviting as "Call me Richard" plainly isn't.

Ernest Hemingway (a master seducer) understood that sentences instill feelings in us. That's why he developed his innovative style, which used few commas and lots of "ands" and one-syllable words. Consider this sentence—one of my favorites—which is the opening line of his short story "In Another Country": "In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more."

Notice that all the words are one syllable except the key adverb "always"; the contrast conjures up the sense of a war that is dragging on. Notice, too, that there's little punctuation. Commas and semicolons break a sentence up into units of breath, offering the reader small chances to pause. In Hemingway's sentence, there's only one comma, and it creates an effective, slight break between the two clauses. It neatly separates the unchanging season of combat from the "we" who, newly distant from it, are plainly still mindful of it.

Deployed wisely, cadence also can make a reader slow down to understand a knotty idea. Marilynne Robinson, a contemporary writer who likes to explore abstractions, also pays more attention to rhythm than nearly any other living novelist I know.

Listen for the regular duh-duh-dum rhythm that settles in after the first two words of this sentence (from her novel "Housekeeping"): "To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow." The sentence is a bit abstract, in truth, but the gorgeous, nearly regular rhythm of it makes you want to repeat the words, turn them over, and understand them.

Of course, it's easy to make a fetish of the musicality of prose. But a writer with an ear for cadence can turn a mediocre piece of writing into a sharper one just by asking if the sound of her sentence connects back to its meaning. All you have to do is close your eyes and listen.

—Ms. O'Rourke is a poet and essayist. Her memoir about grief, "The Long Goodbye," will be published in April.

A fantastic work of comedy

A Perfect Dinner Date

Everything is a Remix Part II (Film)

Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Kirby Ferguson’s series Everything is a Remix started with a look at how songs are recycled from past tunes. This second installment is about movies, and how everything old is new again. Among other movies, you’ll see visual illustrations of the influences you read about in the article In The Beginning: Star Wars. Note: After the credits roll, another movie is analyzed, starting at the seven minute mark.

And here is a special video dedicated to Kill Bill

Everything Is A Remix: KILL BILL from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.