Alton Brown

Closing a bunch of tabs. This was a particularly good couple of days for cool things to link to.

Jacket Copy: "Balloon boy story is right out of Edgar Allan Poe"

The Balloon Boy story may have been a hoax, but it if was, the Heene family is in good company. No less than Edgar Allan Poe had an entirely fictional account of a balloon voyage published in 1844 in the Sun newspaper.

A.V. Club Interview: "Alton Brown"

There have been [topics they wanted to do a show on but couldn't] and there are, and most of those have to do with boundaries set by what Food Network wants to show and doesn’t want to show. You know, they’re not gonna let me do a show about rabbit, because they don’t want to think about killing the little bunnies. There probably won’t be a Good Eats episode on, you know, anything glandular.

LA Galaxy Blog: "Landon Donovan Named Honda Player of the Year and Player of the Decade"

In addition to being named the Player of the Year, Donovan was also named the Honda Player of the Decade. This honor comes as little surprise as he had won the Player of the Year award in six (2002, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2008, 2009) of the last 10 years.

BBC Sport: "Republic face France in play-offs"

The Republic of Ireland will have to beat former World Cup winners France over two legs if they are to make it to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Giovanni Trapattoni's side drew the 1998 champions for the play-offs to be played on 14 and 18 November and will play at home first.

Cyclelicious: "Bikes On Board: Stuttgart cog railroad"

German commuter trains have rush hour restrictions for bikes on board that many Americans who travel by train and bike are familiar with. "Die Zacke" cog railroad between Marienplatz in South Stuttgart to Degerloch, however, features this fantastic platform just for bikes.

BBC News: "At the centre of time"

Without it international travel would be in turmoil and calling friends in faraway places at the right time impossible. Exactly 125 years after the Greenwich Meridian line was drawn, how and why did Britain become the centre of time?

San Bernardino Sun: "Mayor unveils two-story globe design for SBIA"

A spiffy two-story world globe was unveiled Monday at San Bernardino International Airport as a symbol of world travel and sophistication in the city's plans.

The 19-foot objet d'art sits inside a 30-foot-wide fountain in front of the soon-to-be-completed passenger terminal on Leland Norton Way, said Steve Silver of TranSystems, who designed and engineered the globe.

NY Times: "One Reporter’s Lonely Beat, Witnessing Executions "

Of all the consequences of shrinking newsrooms, one of the oddest is this: Fewer journalists are available to watch people die. But Michael Graczyk has witnessed more than 300 deaths, and many of those were people he had come to know.

Jacket Copy: "Happy birthday, Ursula K. Leguin"

Today is Ursula K. Le Guin's 80th birthday. The multiple-award-winning writer is best known for "The Wizard of Earthsea" and is thought of for her science fiction, although she has crossed many boundaries.

[...] "I'm following Tolkien's prescription for fantasy creation. You are making a world out of words, and the only thing that's going to hold it together is its inner consistency.

"Writing science fiction and fantasy allow you to back off a little bit, to try to find the problems that always come back, that we never solve. Like gender relations, war -- once there's more than 50 of us living in one place we seem to have war.

If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats: "Heroes of American Literature #17"

John Steinbeck smoking and reading.

Phew! That's it. And Firefox should be feeling leaner as well. :)

November is Guest Programmer Month on Turner Classic Movies, with every day a different celebrity introducing their favorite movies. I was over on the site just now to check on what the Underground flicks were tonight, and the TCM front page has a nifty Flash-based calendar showing who's the guest which days. Glancing over the names, I kept going "Hey!" and "Cool!" as I saw some favorite folks of mine. Cherry picking:

• Nov 11th - Alton Brown
• Nov 13th - James Ellroy
• Nov 14th - Matt Groening
• Nov 17th - Tracey Ullman
• Nov 29th - Mark Mothersbaugh

I finally got around to reading the Jules Verne article at the Museum of Unnatural History website, located here. I'd had the tab open in Firefox for a week now.

Here's the beginning of the article, which struck my fancy, both as an outdoors guy and writer:

On the 31st of January, 1863, a small volume began appearing in bookstores all over France. It was the adventure of three travelers, led by a Dr. Fergusson, who dared to penetrate the interior of darkest Africa using a balloon. The brave explorers in the story risk angry, spear-carrying natives, ferocious baboons, and slow death by dehydration during their trip. Readers found themselves puzzled by this account. Was it fact or fiction? It read like an authentic travel diary, including detailed descriptions of natural phenomena that was seen and notes taken on the longitude and latitudes as the travelers moved, but the adventures seemed fantastic!

In the Paris daily Le Figaro a review read, “Is Dr. Fergusson's journey a reality or is it not? All we can say is that it is bewitching as a novel and as instructive as a book of science. Never have the serious discoveries of celebrated travelers been summed up as well.“

The title of this amazing work was Five Weeks in a Balloon and its first-time author was a man named Jules Verne.

(Project Gutenberg has Five Weeks in a Balloon available in plain text and audiobook formats.)

Man vs Wild

Late last week, Denyse and I got to see a couple of new (to us) episodes of “Man vs Wild” on Discovery Channel, hosted by Bear Grylls. Also two episodes of “Survivorman” with Les Stroud. Some amazing guys, and some of my favorite shows. Sort of like real-life Jules Verne characters.

There is a certainly an artificiality to their predicaments, but their lessons and adventures are very real. And their lives have some pretty amazing real stories to rival those of Victorian scientific romances.

Ordinary and extra

This is from Bear's website:

“The difference between ordinary and extra-ordinary is so often just simply that little word - extra. And for me, I had always grown up with the belief that if someone succeeds it is because they are brilliant or talented or just better than me…and the more of these words I heard the smaller I always felt! But the truth is often very different…and for me to learn that ordinary me can achieve something extra-ordinary by giving that little bit extra, when everyone else gives up, meant the world to me and I really clung to it…“

This from a former special forces member and all-around adventurer.

Extraordinary things can be accomplished by doing a series of little things everyday -- like the old story about moving a mountain one spoonful at a time.

19th Century Adventure vs 21st Century Adventure

The last episode of "Man vs Wild" that we saw -- where Bear parachuted into an African savannah from a hot-air balloon (while his voiceover reminisced about the jump he had made in Africa that broke his back in three places) and set off toward a mountain in the distance -- made me think both how much adventure has changed since the days of Five Weeks in a Balloon, and how much it hasn't. The bull hippos will still try to kill you if you get too close, dehydration is still a constant threat, and making it to The Mountain is still a going concern.

Nowadays, though, we can parachute in, have a camera crew capture everything for later broadcast to millions of people around the world, and write about it on a worldwide communications system.

Out Doors

The irony about the "realism" of Jules Verne's travel is that he apparently did relatively little of it, and none in Africa before writing Five Weeks. His wide reading and efforts at getting the science correct went a long way to realizing the details. I imagine that would be tough to pull off these days, where the entire globe can be virtually explored (from above, at least) on your laptop.

I'm writing this after a long period of seeming inability to get outdoors much, despite some beautiful SoCal weather. For whatever reason, it's been all but impossible to will myself out the door. Times like this, when I need most to get out on a trail, is when it's hardest to do. This feeds on itself and just gets worse with time.

There's a handy metaphor there to accompany the literal problem: getting out of the house paralleling getting out of your own head.

How to solve this?

Children of Jules Verne

Ray Bradbury wrote about being children of Jules Verne.

As a member of the Television Generation, I guess we're also children of Jacques Cousteau and Marlin Perkins, not to mention Jeff Corwin and Bear Grylls (and Alton Brown, but that's a different website ;).

Even if your hikes aren't up Everest and your cycling trips aren't the Tour de France, there is still something profound about stepping outside for a few hours. (After millennia of hardscrabble human existence, being under a roof and inside walls is still a magical thing.)

If you're like me and get into phases where What You Most Need also becomes What Is Hardest To Do, I think there's a bit of reprogramming that needs to happen. At least for me, where it becomes the first instinct again to grab the poodle and a leash and go on a walk, rather than grabbing the laptop and remote control for the afternoon.

With the habit re-formed, I'll have those familiar moments about 10-15 minutes into the hike or ride when the sighs of satisfaction kick in, and I start shaking my head. Somehow, I always forget that feeling.

And it just takes a step out the door. A little bit every day.

Like that old story about moving a mountain one spoonful at a time.

Know what I mean?

"I have decided to move from the planet. I'm sorry but I simply cannot remain on a world where Paris Hilton is allowed to publish 'memoirs.'"

-- Alton Brown

"I still believe that television is the most powerful form of communication on Earth -- I just hate what is being done with it."

-- Alton Brown

"There are no bad foods, only bad food habits. I eat cream, butter, and bacon; I just don't eat pounds of it at a time. I use these things when they are needed in recipes and leave them out when they're not needed."

-- Alton Brown

"The way to any woman's heart, be she witch or Wonderwoman, princess or Pocahontas, is through her stomach."

-- Alton Brown