A triumphant Wanjiri in Beijing. (Image by 正在休渔期.)
In a sad and bizarre story, the great 24-year-old Kenyan long-distance runner Sammy Wanjiru, who became the first marathoner from his country to win Olympic gold, apparently killed himself in a leap from his home’s balcony after a domestic dispute. From the just-published Reuters report:
“Jaspher Ombati, the regional police chief for the area, said Wanjiru appeared to have sustained internal injuries after the fall and was confirmed dead by doctors at a nearby hospital.
‘It is not yet clear whether it was a suicide or if he jumped out of rage or what caused him to fall to the ground,’ Ombati said of Wanjiru, who also won the Chicago and London marathons.
Ombati said Wanjiru’s wife, Triza Njeri, had come home to find Wanjiru in bed with another woman and locked the couple in the bedroom and ran outside. Wanjiru then leaped from the balcony, Ombati said.
••••••••••
Wanjiru in 2009, as he prepared to run the Chicago Marathon, which he won:
"Are you having paranormal activity and need honest trustworthy investigators?" (Image by Paul Sapiano.)
Got Ghosts? We Can Help…Contact us.. (Ny/Pa/Nj/Va/De/Md)
Are you having paranormal activity and need honest trustworthy investigators? Please email us, our team would be happy to help you FREE of charge!! We supply our own equipment. All inquiries are strictly confidential. We come out for a FREE consultation and then set up a time convenient for you to do a thorough investigation and go over all evidence we find with you at the end of the investigation. We also have a psychic, who is a huge asset to our team and we are very lucky to have her with all her talents. She can do cleansings of your home or business and get rid of any unwanted spirits if you chose. We use state of the art equipment; live voice recorders, night vision cameras, emf detectors, infrared thermometers, digital and 35mm cameras, video recorders, franks box, dvr system with cameras, motion detectors, laser grid, k-2 meter, lap top, along with other cutting edge equipment. This allows us to capture as much evidence as possible If you have any photos you would like us to look at or video please contact us. Looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you! Website: Spiritparanormal.net If you have any pics you would like posted on my website contact me. Our weekends are getting booked up as you can see on our web site so please set up your time asap. We have been fortunate to have a large team in which everyone gets along great which makes for a perfect fit for us! Having a large group is extremely a huge benefit since this allows us to capture evidence from everyones cameras and recorders etc.
Physicist Leonard Susskind presents a TED Talk about the Richard Feynman he knew, the person and the scientist.
Feynman was the rare physicist famous enough to be featured in People magazine. From a 1985 piece: “As a young scientist at Los Alamos during the development of the A-bomb, Richard Feynman delighted in exposing security lapses by picking the locks on safes and filing cabinets that contained top secret information, leaving behind notes signed, ‘Same guy.’ But there were even earlier warning signals that the Nobel prizewinning physicist and California Institute of Technology professor had, as one friend says, ‘a mind that works differently from other people’s.’ As a toddler in Far Rockaway, N.Y., his father, Mel, a uniform salesman, read him excerpts from the Encyclopedia Britannica. And as a teenager he read advanced calculus for pleasure.
Now Feynman, 67 and considered one of the world’s top theoretical physicists, can claim another achievement: his deliciously amusing autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (W. Norton, $16.95). Co-authored by Ralph Leighton, a math teacher who started taping conversations with his friend Feynman seven years ago, the book spent 14 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, a surprise to practically everybody—including the author. ‘I had no purpose in doing the book other than to amuse my friends,’ says Feynman.
A picturesque, unscientific collection of anecdotes, including instructions for picking up a woman in a bar, Surely You’re Joking has earned Feynman $56,000 so far and has elicited reaction from some unexpected quarters. ‘I got a call from a topless dancer,’ he says, ‘who claims we had a mutual acquaintance 15 years ago.'”
"The man threw the bone in the cart, also an old shoe that had been brought to him by another dog."
Horse and cow bones were scattered all over Brooklyn in the 1870s. In its July 21, 1877 edition, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle used its customary sensitivity in profiling one bone collector who made his living from such refuse. An excerpt:
“A seedy looking German, with tangled hair and beard, propelled a small handcart slowly up Flatbush avenue on Thursday. At his sides were three large dogs of mongrel breed. When near the corner of Dean street the man spoke to the dogs, and they immediately quitted his side and began running through the gutters of the neighborhood streets. Soon one of the dogs returned with a large bone in his mouth, and this he deposited at the feet of his master. The man threw the bone in the cart, also an old shoe that had been brought to him by another dog. It commenced to rain and the man and his dogs sought shelter under a neighborhood shed. An Eagle reporter had his attention attracted to the man, and after considerable trouble engaged him in conversation.
The man gave his name as Herman Groschel, and said he resided in the Sixteenth Ward. Picking up a large bone from his wagon, Groschel said, ‘Bones like that are very best. I can get about a dollar and thirty cents a barrel for them. That is what is called a shank bone, and they are much sought after by bone dust manufacturers. When it is made into dust the bone is sold to sugar refiners. Rib bones are not good for making bone dust to be used in refining sugar; when they are burned they cannot be worked into as fine dust as the shank, head and back bones.’
‘Are the bones of all kinds of animals made into bone dust?’ queried the reporter.
"In neighborhoods where there is a large poor population I do very well."
‘No,’ replied Groschel, ‘the bones used are principally those of horses and cows. Common bone dust is made of all kinds of bone, but the small bones generally find their way to the fat renderer. Some of these bones in my wagon look very dry, but the bone boiler will manage to get fat out of them.’
‘Do you find many bones by traveling through the streets with your dogs?’
‘In neighborhoods where there is a large poor population I do very well. Take them wards where there is a large tenement population and a great deal of refuse is thrown into the streets, as the poorer classes very seldom enjoy the luxury of owning ash barrels.’
‘Do you pick up anything else but bones?’
‘Old iron or bottles,’ replied Groschel. ‘I used to do a little in rags, but some years ago I brought home some rags which were infected with smallpox and my girl caught the dreadful disease. Since then I haven’t picked any rags.’
‘What do you do with those old shoes I see in your wagon?’
Groschel smiled. ‘I burn them,’ said he. ‘They do me instead of coal.’
The stench arising from old leather when burning is almost unbearable, yet many of the rag pickers and bone gatherers use no other fuel. Without exception the bone and rag gatherers are either German or Italians. They live cheap, are generally saving, and many of them have accumulated considerable sums of money.”
Robert D. Kaplan’s famous 1994 Harper’s article, “The Coming Anarachy,” imagined a future of global scarcity, environmental disaster, overpopulation, crime and tribalism, with nations lacking genuine boundaries and central government control. It would be a vast divide of haves and have-nots. Some of it has proven true, some not. Kaplan’s most spot-on prognostication foresaw terrorist organizations operating without regard to borders, existing as their own sovereign nation across nations. An excerpt:
“Also, war-making entities will no longer be restricted to a specific territory. Loose and shadowy organisms such as Islamic terrorist organizations suggest why borders will mean increasingly little and sedimentary layers of tribalistic identity and control will mean more. ‘From the vantage point of the present, there appears every prospect that religious . . . fanaticisms will play a larger role in the motivation of armed conflict” in the West than at any time for the last 300 years,’ Van Creveld writes. This is why analysts like Michael Vlahos are closely monitoring religious cults. Vlahos says, ‘An ideology that challenges us may not take familiar form, like the old Nazis or Commies. It may not even engage us initially in ways that fit old threat markings.’ Van Creveld concludes, ‘Armed conflict will be waged by men on earth, not robots in space. It will have more in common with the struggles of primitive tribes than with large-scale conventional war.’ While another military historian, John Keegan, in his new book A History of Warfare, draws a more benign portrait of primitive man, it is important to point out that what Van Creveld really means is re-primitivized man: warrior societies operating at a time of unprecedented resource scarcity and planetary overcrowding.” (Thanks to The Electric Typewriter.)
Hunter S. Thompson in all his glory in Vegas and Hollywood in 1978.
From Lucian K. Truscott IV’s review of Fear and Loathing in Las Vagas in the July 13, 1972 Village Voice: “Hunter Thompson lived in Aspen then, and his ranch, located outside town about 10 miles, tucked away up a valley with National Forest land on every side, was the first place I stopped. It was late afternoon and Thompson was just getting up, bleary-eyed and beaten, shaded from the sun by a tennis hat, sipping a beer on the front porch.
I got to know him while I was still in the Army in the spring of 1970, when he and a few other local crazies were gearing up for what would become the Aspen Freak Power Uprising, a spectacular which featured Thompson as candidate for sheriff, with his neighbor Billy for coroner. They ran on a platform which promised, among other things, public punishment for drug dealers who burned their customers, and a campaign guaranteed to rid the valley of real estate developers and ‘nazi greedheads’ of every persuasion. In a compromise move toward the end of the campaign, Thompson promised to ‘eat mescaline only during off-duty hours.’ The non-freak segment of the voting public was unmoved and he was eventually defeated by a narrow margin.
In the days before the Freak Power spirit, Thompson’s ranch served as a war room and R&R camp for the Aspen political insurgents. Needless to say there was rarely a dull moment. When I arrived last summer, however, things had changed. Thompson was in the midst of writing a magnum opus, and it was being cranked out at an unnerving rate. I was barely across the threshold when I was informed that he worked (worked?) Monday through Friday and saved the weekends for messing around. As usual, he worked from around midnight until 7 or 8 in the morning and slept all day. There was an edge to his voice that said he meant business. This was it. This was a venture that had no beginning or end, that even Thompson himself was having difficulty controlling.
‘I’m sending it off to Random House in 20,000-word bursts,’ he said, drawing slowly on his ever-present cigarette holder. ‘I don’t have any idea what they think of it. Hell, I don’t have any idea what it is.’
‘What’s it about?’ I asked.
‘Searching for The American Dream in Las Vegas,’ replied Thompson coolly.”
"Within this group is a quixotic band of soldering, laser-cutting, software-programming types who, defying all economic logic, contend that they can reverse America’s manufacturing slump." (Image by littleBits.)
Anand Giridharadas has a really good piece in the Sunday Times Magazine this week about littleBits founder Ayah Bdeir and the American culture of manufacturing things, in the wake of the credit-default swap scheme that made nothing and left us nearly bankrupt. An excerpt:
“If you lived in Detroit in 1961 and watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho at a drive-in, you might have caught a 30-minute trailer called ‘American Maker,’ sponsored by Chevrolet. ‘Of all things Americans are, we are makers,’ its narrator began, over footage of boys building sand castles. ‘With our strengths and our minds and spirit, we gather, we form and we fashion: makers and shapers and put-it-togetherers.’
Fifty years on, the American maker is in a bad way. Such is the state of American industry that waste paper is among the top 10 exports to China, behind nuclear equipment but far ahead of traditional mainstays like iron and steel. Manufacturing employment has fallen by a third in the last decade alone, with more than 40,000 factories shutting down. More Americans today are unemployed than are wage-earning ‘put-it-togetherers.’ But the American romance with making actual things is going through a resurgence. In recent years, a nationwide movement of do-it-yourself aficionados has embraced the self-made object. Within this group is a quixotic band of soldering, laser-cutting, software-programming types who, defying all economic logic, contend that they can reverse America’s manufacturing slump. America will make things again, they say, because Americans will make things — not just in factories but also in their own homes, and not because it’s artisanal or faddish but because it’s easier, better for the environment and more fun.”
••••••••••
The 1961 “American Maker” trailer mentioned in the article:
From “Invasion,” Tom Junod’s 2010 Esquire piece about his house being besieged by an army of those tiny colonists known as ants:
“A few years ago, I interviewed the great biologist E. O. Wilson right before he and his colleague Bert Hölldobler published their magnum opus, The Superorganism. The book, a study of ant societies, was an exploration of the notion that ants are such organized organisms that they almost don’t count as individual organisms at all but rather as cells of the colony they serve. The colony is the superorganism, and as Wilson told me, ‘an ant colony is far more intelligent than an ant.’ I’ll say. An ant by itself is an inoffensive creature, at worst a crunchy annoyance, smidgeny and obsessively clean and, above all, dumb, with a pindot of a brain. An ant by itself is not going to get any ideas… the problem being that it’s rarely by itself, that it’s representative of something, and that what it represents not only has ideas — it has designs. Wilson’s book proposes that what an ant colony possesses is a kind of accumulated intelligence, the result of individual ants carrying out specialized tasks and giving one another constant feedback about what they find as they do so. Well, once they start accumulating in your house in sufficient numbers, you get a chance to see that accumulated intelligence at work. You get a chance to find out what it wants. And what you find out — what the accumulated intelligence of the colony eventually tells you — is that it wants what you want. You find out that you, an organism, are competing for your house with a superorganism that knows how to do nothing but compete. You are not only competing in the most basic evolutionary sense; you are competing with a purely adaptive intelligence, and so you are competing with the force of evolution itself.” (Thanks Atlantic.)
“A World for Women in Engineering” is an excellent 20-minute doc made by Bell Labs in 1975. It’s a look at a multicultural collection of women working for Bell during the age of feminist ascendancy and the push for the Equal Rights Amendment. A testament to the times as well as a love letter to science.
Annie Lowrey’s Slate piece, “Let in the Super-Immigrants!,” argues that America’s quickest path to economic turnaround is to fast-track educated alien workers to citizenship status, favoring the highly skilled over the poor, huddles masses. The opening:
“This winter, George Mason economist Tyler Cowen publishedThe Great Stagnation, an ebook arguing that the United States has exhausted all its easy sources of growth. We have, Cowen says, no more low-hanging fruit: no more cheap frontier land to farm, no more places to build new interstates, no rural homes to electrify, no more girls to send to school and then add to the workforce. From now on, Cowen says, growth will be slower, and transformative innovations like toilets and telephones will be rarer.
Cowen is alarmingly convincing, and The Great Stagnation received a round of queasy applause from the chattering classes—including from this publication. But maybe there remains one last shiny, fat apple hanging right in front of our faces, one last endeavor that would bring us fast, costless, and easy growth. It is immigration reform. The United States can grow faster by stealing the rest of the world’s smart people.
Today, the Obama White House is reaffirming its pledge to do just that.”
"I am well groomed gentleman." (Image by Herbert Ponting.)
Magic Sex Bed – $100 (Norwalk, CT)
I am moving selling my magic sex bed. When I moved to Connecticut I purchased this bed from a guy who ran his “store” out of a room below a Dunkin’ Donuts. I checked out the floor model, liked it and decided to buy it. The next day I picked up the bed at warehouse in Wilton and the legend began… This bed has been amazing. I had my fair share of lady friends before the bed, but things really took a turn for the better once I got this bed. I am not sure what the actual count was, but let me tell you it was nothing short of respectable. I am moving now and tried everything to take this bed with me, but things have fallen through at the last minute. If you are looking to turn things around in your own life and need a bit of luck consider this bed your knew rabbits foot!!
The bed is not dirty. I am a well groomed gentleman and even if it was dirty you would probably still want to buy this bed.
"Have you ever been analyzed? I was afraid of it at first." (Image by Carl Van Vechten.)
Longform made an incredible find with “The Duke In His Domain,” a 1957 New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando by Truman Capote. The former was already an icon thanks to Streetcar, The Wild One and On the Waterfront; the latter was still roughly a decade from publishing his masterpiece, In Cold Blood. Capote traveled to the set of Sayonara in Tokyo to interview Brando, who was at the start of a long personal decline, still somewhat accessible but increasingly less so. An excerpt:
“The maid had reëntered the star’s room, and Murray, on his way out, almost tripped over the train of her kimono. She put down a bowl of ice and, with a glow, a giggle, an elation that made her little feet, hooflike in their split-toed white socks, lift and lower like a prancing pony’s, announced, ‘Appapie! Tonight on menu appapie.’
Brando groaned. ‘Apple pie. That’s all I need.’ He stretched out on the floor and unbuckled his belt, which dug too deeply into the swell of his stomach. ‘I’m supposed to be on a diet. But the only things I want to eat are apple pie and stuff like that.’ Six weeks earlier, in California, Logan had told him he must trim off ten pounds for his role in Sayonara, and before arriving in Kyoto he had managed to get rid of seven. Since reaching Japan, however, abetted not only by American-type apple pie but by the Japanese cuisine, with its delicious emphasis on the sweetened, the starchy, the fried, he’d regained, then doubled this poundage. Now, loosening his belt still more and thoughtfully massaging his midriff, he scanned the menu, which offered, in English, a wide choice of Western-style dishes, and, after reminding himself ‘I’ve got to lose weight,’ ordered soup, beefsteak with French-fried potatoes, three supplementary vegetables, a side dish of spaghetti, rolls and butter, a bottle of sake, salad, and cheese and crackers.
‘And appapie, Marron?’
He sighed. ‘With ice cream, honey.’
Capote, world-weary in 1959. (Image by Roger Higgins.)
Though Brando is not a teetotaller, his appetite is more frugal when it comes to alcohol. While we were awaiting the dinner, which was to be served to us in the room, he supplied me with a large vodka on the rocks and poured himself the merest courtesy sip. Resuming his position on the floor, he lolled his head against a pillow, drooped his eyelids, then shut them. It was as though he’d dozed off into a disturbing dream; his eyelids twitched, and when he spoke, his voice—an unemotional voice, in a way cultivated and genteel, yet surprisingly adolescent, a voice with a probing, asking, boyish quality—seemed to come from sleepy distances.
‘The last eight, nine years of my life have been a mess,’ he said. ‘Maybe the last two have been a little better. Less rolling in the trough of the wave. Have you ever been analyzed? I was afraid of it at first. Afraid it might destroy the impulses that made me creative, an artist. A sensitive person receives fifty impressions where somebody else may only get seven. Sensitive people are so vulnerable; they’re so easily brutalized and hurt just because they are sensitive. The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, develop scabs. Never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel too much. Analysis helps. It helped me. But still, the last eight, nine years I’ve been pretty mixed up, a mess pretty much.'”
••••••••••
Dick Cavett interviews a reluctant Brando in 1973. After the show, Brando took Cavett to dinner in Chinatown, and the actor famously punched paparazzo Ron Galella, breaking his jaw. The photographer sued and ultimately agreed to a $40,000 settlement.
Yesterday, I put up a post about the neurological phenomenon Synesthesia, in which the senses merge, allowing some people to taste colors, smell words and identify numbers by their “personalities.” Here’s a Time video, featuring neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, which demonstrates this disorder.
Released the year after the Summer of Love, when the counterculture lost its warmth, George A. Romero’s low-budget landmark, a genre-definer about the undead feasting on the living, can be read as a parable of a culture run amok, feared by those with no desire to join it.
Barbra (Judith O’Dea) and Johnny (Russell Streiner) are young adult siblings headed to a desolate Pennsylvania graveyard to place flowers on their father’s resting place, the way good middle-class children do. Conservative Barbra has no problem with the pilgrimage, but Johnny grumbles about such customs not being his scene. Suddenly he has an out, but not one he’d hoped for: A boneyard zombie seizes and murders him. Barbra escapes to a nearby house, empty except for a bloody corpse, but how long will she be able to stay in one piece since more and more of the undead surround the home? Misery loves company and the terrified woman gets some when a few other members of the living, including resourceful Ben (Duane Jones), also take shelter from the marauders in the humble abode.
Trying to find out what’s turned the formerly sensible world upside down, Ben gets a radio working and listens for information. Did a recent space probe emit radiation that is making the dead rise? Is it something else? The answer isn’t clear, but one thing is certain: A meat-loving legion is cannibalizing the uninitiated and is still plenty hungry. The radio announcer reports that “frightened people are seeking refuge in churches, schools and government buildings.” But none of these traditional bastions of respectability can provide much comfort in a society gone insane.
In one chilling scene, a small child, possessed by the zombie madness, approaches her cowering, pleading mother with a sharp object in hand and demonstrates precocious butchering skills. The following year this scene would be repeated with scary precision for real by sons and daughters of the middle class answering to a zombie named Manson. The dead would rise and the culture would change forever, and no one could ever truly feel safe again.•
"The girl a few years ago was thought to be a little daft and was confined to the Flatnush Asylum for the insane." (Image by Lewis Hine.)
The August 22, 1886 Brooklyn Daily Eagle carried an odd item about a strange girl who earned a living repairing barbershop supplies. An excerpt:
“‘Nothing today,’ said a Fulton street barber to a fantastically dressed young girl carrying a valise and a parasol, much worse for the wear. An Eagle reporter who was present was curious and inquired the meaning of the tonsorial artist’s words. He said: ‘The girl who was just here makes a living by renovating barbers’ brushes. She takes the brushes when the bristles are about ready to drop out and makes them into new ones. Sometimes she also puts on new backs and inserts new bristles, and straightens those which have become bent. A good barber’s brush when new costs $1.50. After a brush leaves the little workwoman’s hands it is as good as new. She charges but 50 cents for her work, and it is well worth that sum. ‘There is a history connected with that girl,’ continued the barber, neatly curling the reporter’s mustache and covering the face with magnesia. ‘She is the daughter of formerly wealthy Brooklyn parents who have become reduced.’
‘The girl a few years ago was thought to be a little daft and was confined to the Flatnush Asylum for the insane. She escaped from the institution and went to Newark, N.J., where she was employed in a brush factory. During the dull months she makes a living by repairing barbers’ brushes. In many ways the girl is a great curiosity and would make a great drawing card for a dime museum. She is able to turn her feet in any direction, which would be an improbability for you or I to attempt. This girl, it must be considered, has enjoyed the gift from birth, owing to the tendons of her feet being broken. I guess she makes a good living at her trade,’ said the barber in conclusion, jerking the apron off the reporter’s neck and crying, ‘Next!'”
"When there is a legitimate demand for a product or service and no legal recourse to purchase said product/service, a black market will spawn to serve the needs of the demand." (Image by miak.)
My kidney for sale. Not a joke. – $40000
Hello. Given that you clicked the link, either you are a skeptic, and were flabbergasted, or you really are in need of a kidney to save your life or the life of a loved one.
First and foremost, I am not insane, crude, impolite, or anything that would indicate that I am not in full control of my faculties. I am not homeless, nor am I disease/drug ridden.
I have smoked marijuana, but even a mere student of medicine will inform you of how inconsequential that is. For he purposes of this post.
Because a person’s body is legally their own property, I believe that laws preventing the sale of a person’s organs by the owner of those organs should be regulated, not prohibited. For, as evidenced by current and past trends, when there is a legitimate demand for a product or service and no legal recourse to purchase said product/service, a black market will spawn to serve the needs of the demand.
Thus, I am offering a private party with a legitimate need for a kidney transplant or liver sample the opportunity to discuss with me the possibility of purchasing my organ tissue. I believe that the price that I have quoted is reasonable. Included in the payment, there should be compensation for medical/testing fees of the entire procedure.
Even if you are from a country that does allow the sale of organs, I am willing to travel, as long as expenses are paid for. This is a serious offer and a serious post. Serious inquiries will be handled with the utmost professionalism. Thank you.
"The employees families have to promise 'not sue the compan.'"(Image by Glenn Fleishman.)
If a new report on Think Progress is accurate, Apple is employing curious methods to deal with a series of suicides by workers turning out iPhones and iPads at a soul-crushing pace at the Taiwan-based Foxconn factories:
“In the wake of a huge wave of suicides at Foxconn plants, the company began reforming its practices related to the suicides. Among these changes included installing anti-suicide nets to catch workers who attempted to leap out of company windows. Yet workers are also being forced to sign a non-suicide pact as a condition of employment. As part of the pact, the employees families have to promise ‘not sue the company, bring excessive demands, take drastic actions that would damage the company’s reputation or cause trouble that would hurt normal operations’ in the case of a suicide.”
The opening of “Holy Water,” Joan Didion’s 1977 essay about H2O, a scarce and precious thing in Southern California, with its endless summer, omnipresent swimming pools and expansive deserts:
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. The water I will drink tonight in a restaurant in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens River, and I also think about exactly where that water is: I particularly like to imagine it as it cascades down the 45-degree stone steps that aerate Owens water after its airless passage through the mountain pipes and siphons.
As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant meditation upon where the water is, of an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains, in plumbing on the grand scale. I know the data on water projects I will never see. I know the difficulty Kaiser had closing the last two sluiceway gates on the Guri Dam in Venezuela. I keep watch on evaporation behind the Aswan in Egypt. I can put myself to sleep imagining the water dropping a thousand feet into the turbines at Churchill Falls in Labrador. If the Churchill Falls Project fails to materialize, I fall back on waterworks closer at hand — the tailrace at Hoover on the Colorado, the surge tank in the Tehachapi Mountains that receives California Aqueduct water pumped before — and finally I replay a morning when I was seventeen years old and caught, in a military-surplus life raft, in the construction of the Nimbus Afterbay Dam on the American River near Sacramento. I remember that at the moment it happened I was trying to open a tin of anchovies with capers. I recall the raft spinning into the narrow chute through which the river had been temporarily diverted. I recall being deliriously happy.•
Only one supermarathon has been inspired by a prison break by MLK assassin James Earl Ray.
A brief history of the bizarre and creepy origins of the annual Barkley Marathonsin Tennessee, from “The Immortal Horizon,” Leslie Jamison’s new Believer account of the grueling 100-mile race:
“The first race was a prison break. On June 10, 1977, James Earl Ray, the man who shot Martin Luther King Jr., escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary and fled across the briar-bearded hills of northern Tennessee. Fifty-four hours later he was found. He’d gone about eight miles. Some might hear this and wonder how he managed to squander his escape. One man heard this and thought: I need to see that terrain!
Over twenty years later, that man, the man in the trench coat—Gary Cantrell by birth, self-dubbed Lazarus Lake—has turned this terrain into the stage for a legendary ritual: the Barkley Marathons, held yearly (traditionally on Lazarus Friday or April Fool’s Day) outside Wartburg, Tennessee. Lake (known as Laz) calls it ‘The Race That Eats Its Young.’ The runners’ bibs say something different each year:SUFFERING WITHOUT A POINT; NOT ALL PAIN IS GAIN. Only eight men have ever finished. The event is considered extreme even by those who specialize in extremity.” (ThanksLongform.)
