About six weeks ago, I bought a pair of running shoes. I had been putting on weight over the winter, because I have not been cycling or exercising, except walking to work, and consuming too many calories. I went for a first run on a Saturday afternoon, running over a kilometer, before breaking down and walking for a rest. I ran and walked back, and then I was sore for 3 days. The next weekend I worked on my kayak, pulling the old seat out, which involved lifting and peeling it off the glue – a prolonged resistance exercise. I was sore for another few days. At the end of that week, I was browsing in Munro’s Books and found a remaindered copy of The Runner’s World Complete Book of Beginning Running. It had a couple of chapters with programs for beginning to run. It looked like a useful book, so it was an easy deal.
Author: Tony Dalmyn
Zombies
It’s time to shake up the category list. Social Practice becomes Zombies. In the next few weeks Culture will be folded into Zombies. Politics is Liege & Lief, which is obscure but accurate, with an arcane folk music reference. The old names were too formal, and I had too many subcategories. I will phase out some subcategories, add MT tags to my entries and let the tags lay the trail.
Why Zombies?
Brighting the Spell
Daniel C. Dennett’s 2006 book Breaking the Spell, Religion as a Natural Phenomenon reached the bookstores a few months ahead of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.
Spam & CCode
I have not been posting regularly since the end of 2005, but I have kept up with Movable Type upgrades. The upgrade to 3.33 or 3.34 involved new features that had previously been implemented by the BigPAPI plugin, and made BigPAPI and plugins that depended on it stop working. I had been using CCode and TCode. I had not installed the new versions of CCode properly. It has to do with adding a script to the head of a template and adding a tag into two or three templates. Registered commenters were getting an error message, as I found out yesterday.
Once I turned off CCode, my junk comment folder began to fill up. That’s not a problem – it doesn’t get published and I just delete it. It looks like CCode plugin was working and doing its job, which is hiding the blog from spam comment bots. Giving the bots a false return must put a load on my bandwidth, but saves me from having to clean out the junk folder.
I’m So Special
AL Daily had a link to the Detroit Free Press online, which ran David Crary’s AP book review . The book is getting some buzz – this morning CBC news was running an interview with Jean Twenge, the author of Generation Me, Why Today’s Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable than Ever Before. The publisher and the author have done a nice job with this site – a lot of information consolidated in one place. The theme of the book is that all those things that are supposed to boost self-esteem and make kids feel happy about themselves has created a generation of people with a sense of entitlement, persistently dissatisfied. People never feel as happy as they feel entitled to feel.
On that point, AL Daily has been running a link to Michael Shermer’s piece in Scientific American, “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” reviewing the more sensible books among the recent books about happiness. Happiness seems to be making publishers and bookstores happy.
Religious Shopping Tour
British writer Roland Howard went on a tour to meet people demonstrating the variety of religious experience in Britain at the end of the 20th century. Shopping for God, A Sceptics Search for Value in the Spiritual Marketplace is a travel narrative – he went, he saw, he listened, he wrote. In the telling of the story, he provides background, he discusses a few questions, he suggests he had an interesting inner monologue running during the journey. I haven’t found much information about him on the Web, but Amazon lists a couple of other books about religion.
Bliss Chronicles
The cover art on Don Lattin’s Following our Bliss is a Volkwagen Bus painted in the psychedelic style associated with the hippie movement, which goes with the subtitle “How the Spiritual Ideas of the Sixties Shape our Lives Today”. Lattin has been writing about religion or spirituality for the San Francisco Chronicle and an assortment of electronic media for a couple of decades, which gives him a wealth of material.
Tagged – Five Things Meme
Randy tagged me for the Five Little-Known Things About Me meme. All right then.
Bookstore Visit
While visiting Winnipeg for Christmas, I stopped at the downtown McNally Robinson store and looked at a copy of Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking, by Thomas E. Kida. I did not need to buy this book, but I thought it addressed some key things that contribute to bad judgment.