The Great Solar Eclipse of 2017 crossed the continent, from Oregon to South Carolina, and gave millions of people the chance to witness one of the most awe-inspiring events in the natural world.

But you had to be within the "path of totality", a narrow band across the earth's surface several thousand miles long but only about 70 miles wide. Outside that band you would only see a partial eclipse, not a total eclipse.

And there is no such thing as a "partial total eclipse", despite the impression blogs and the news media might give. I honestly think that's why so many people misunderstand the utter beauty of the spectacle; they may have seen a partial eclipse in the past that was total somewhere else, and even though they weren't in the path the news kept gushing about it being a total eclipse, so they assume they must have seen a total eclipse and just didn't find it all that impressive.


Posted by Dan 08/29/2017, revised 09/06/2017

Winter for me means a lot of training, but there isn't much to talk about in the way of races. However, an incident in December got me thinking about how people treat each other, and some of the common attitudes within the triathlon community, but also in society in general. Admittedly, I can't keep pace with Twitter, so this commentary would have been a lot more relevant three months ago, but sometimes it seems like the immediate and impulsive nature of social media doesn't really allow for deeper introspection. I hesitated for a long time before posting this because the story was no longer current, but as time went by, the themes stayed with me. I became more aware of my own tendency towards quick judgment, and I observed all around me the persistent habit of categorizing strangers as The Deserving or The Undeserving, usually based on completely arbitrary distinctions or inaccurate perceptions.

Here is what went down in December:

Danielle Dingman, a talented young athlete who is relatively new to triathlon, qualified for her pro license last season. Faced with typical financial barriers as an unsponsored rookie, she opted to launch a GoFundMe page where friends, family and perhaps even anonymous donors could help her pursue her dream of a career in triathlon racing.

Apparently, this rubbed some people the wrong way.

Brad Culp, a writer and former Editor in Chief for Triathlon Magazine, was quick to condemn this move with the sarcastic tweet "Go Fund Yourself." He pointed to prominent athletes whose early years were consumed by long hours devoted to (high wage) careers that ultimately enabled financial freedom without the help of a "handout." He further expanded on his rejection of Dingman in an article on the TRS website, and other pro athletes chimed in, affirming his stance.

There was a compelling element to Culp's argument, as he presented Dingman as a self-absorbed, dreamy millennial who hoped success would land in her lap. His stereotype appealed to the part of the psyche that says, "Yeah, you know what? I've had to make sacrifices. Why should you get anything for free?" By leaning on that American cliché of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps," he taps into the familiar tendency to indulge in moral superiority, looking down upon the lazy and undeserving. Indeed, I've observed that often when people debate, they seem more preoccupied with attempting to prove "how hard I've had to work," than they are with actually making a salient point. In some convoluted way, invoking hard work is universally expected to lend credibility to your opinions.


Posted by Kimberly 03/06/2018

It was immediately apparent that the $25 30 day visa in Indonesia was not long enough so we made an executive decision to stay for 31 days for a mere $20 extra. While in Sumatra we took a night boat to the remote Mentawai Islands south of Padang. There we stayed with a local Mentawai family and enjoyed jungle trekking and experienced traditional Mentawai medicine man rituals. It became apparent why all the medicine men are all so thin and wiry; the rituals go through the night and involve singing, chanting and dancing until you collapse from exhaustion. Then you repeat.

Mentawai medicine man dancing away evil spirits

Posted by nik 02/06/2009, revised 02/24/2009

I suppose it's been too long since I've updated you all on my life. I don't have anything in particular to focus on, so I guess I'll do another bullet-point-posting... those seem to be the most reader-friendly anyway. I've really settled into life here, and I've truly been having an incredible time! I don't feel like any minute has gone by that hasn't been spent exactly the way it was meant to be spent. The problem is... most of my minutes apparently weren't meant to be spent on schoolwork. Well, let me rephrase that: The "problem" is most of my minutes weren't meant to be spent on schoolwork.

Anyway, yeah. Here's a summary of what my minutes were meant to be spent on:

• sitting in the sun or in the grass under leafy trees on campus, listening to great music on my headphones or chatting/ playing cards/ generally relaxing with friends that wander by; a lot of my minutes were meant to be spent doing exactly this... and it never gets old!
  
  
• group dinners on Sundays; for the past 3 Sundays, my roommates and I have gotten group dinners together, usually around 10-12 people. So far, we've had a sushi dinner night, a breakfast-for-dinner night (pancakes, eggs, and bacon all done outside on our flat-top BBQ!), and finger-food night. It's always good fun.
  
  
• playing beach volleyball on Friday nights with my 4's team, the Flogging Mollies (my roommate/teammate Scott was wearing a Flogging Mollies shirt when we had to submit our team name); we're really starting to come together as a team, and it's a lot of fun - I look forward to it all week.
  
  
• playing ultimate frisbee; my Monday-night team, Second Skin, is also really coming together to play well together (when we had to choose team colors, we chose 'skins,' which ended up working out really nicely, 'cause even at night, it's still really hot here). I still don't really know the rules, but I run and I throw and I catch, and it seems to working out alright. I'm still getting used to it being a non-contact sport, though. Apparently you're not supposed to body-check your defender in this game.
  
  
• brewing beer. Scott and I got fed up with high prices for bad beer, so we started making our own. Our first batch won't be ready for another 2 weeks, but I'm excited to be able to have quality beer around again! Well, we'll see how quality the beer-by-beginners actually is. Dave! Neil! What am I going to do without your expertise??
  
  
• laughing at silly things like the fact that the word "expertise" looks like something you do to be expertly in shape.
  
  
• laying out in my hammock on the back patio, enjoying the minutes that were definitely not meant to be spent doing schoolwork.
  
  
• drinking all the PG Tips tea that Mom and Dad sent me. At the rate I'm going, I'm actually going to drink all of that tea in the time I'm here, easy! (they sent me 2 boxes of 80 bags) Many of my minutes are actually spent brushing my teeth, too, for fear of the stains resulting from so much black tea intake.
  
  
• going on cool field trips for my Indigenous Australians class. A local Aboriginal elder named Rusty took us out for a day all around the area, sharing with us some of the incredible vast sea of knowledge they have about the land. It was really cool to learn about the uses/dangers of any plant around us, to learn how to read animal tracks (type of animal, gender, age, purpose of their movement... so much to be interpreted from such a seemingly simple thing!), to hear stories of tradition, myth, origin, culture, to visit a burial ground where I could feel the presence of generations and generations of Aboriginal culture, to see cave paintings right in front of my eyes that were painted there by a hand that moved across the rock thousands of years ago... yeah. There were some pretty cool minutes spent doing this stuff.
  
  
• watching Australia's "Biggest Loser" with all the roommates. This is the time that we all take a break from whatever we're doing (or not doing, in my case), and come together in the living room to watch people lose weight while we scarf down pizza or ice cream or cookies.
  
  
• ...then there's a couple minutes here and there where I throw an assignment together. Those minutes usually come immediately before the minutes that were meant to be spent handing in said assignment.
  
  

All in all, it's a glorious life. A girl can get used to this.

Me with Rusty, a local Aboriginal elder. I would love to have 5% of the knowledge that he has about the land!

Posted by Whitney 04/23/2008, revised 04/23/2008