free variable

I’ve been idly thinking about translation lately, so I was happy to run across Scott Cairns’ poem “Adventures in New Testament Greek: Nous” this morning. If you’ve spent time in the neighborhoods of the liberal arts that I used to haunt — or even if you haven’t — you’ll probably find it as delightful as I did. (via Alan Jacobs.)

Lately I’ve been thinking of Facebook and Twitter as a sort of digital Pompeii — evidence of peoples’ past activities will persist, barely-comprehensible and frozen in time, even after the posters have stopped writing about the great runs they just had, the hilarious and poignant antics of their kids, the dated pop-culture references they share with you, and so on. Unlike Twitter’s firehose, which privileges novelty above all, Facebook’s interface calls out prior events and actively encourages you to participate and interact in certain ways, which can lead to points of surprising emotional resonance.

For example, Facebook sometimes reminds me to send a message to a deceased friend on his birthday. I usually react to these sorts of notifications with a mixture of renewed thankfulness for my friend’s life, including all the memories that have occasion to surface once more, and renewed sadness at their present absence. It merely traces along scars, though, to receive an automated suggestion that my friends who have gone to their rest are good candidates for demotion to the “Acquaintances” list because I don’t interact with them all that often these days.

Andrea was out of the house at suppertime today, so I ate with the kids by myself. I made them grilled cheese sandwiches and steamed carrots, but I made myself a spinach salad with avocado and salmon. They ate all of their carrots and most of their sandwiches before taking about a third of my salad. WT was pretty polite about it (“Dad, could I please have some more salmon with spinach and salad dressing on it?”), but Maggie was content to serve herself from my plate, one handful at a time.

Next time, I’m just making one big salad.

Anyway, here’s the dressing my kids loved so much; it’s pretty simple, but I consider that a point in its favor.

Avocado and citrus salad dressing

Blend together the following until smooth:

• juice of one large orange or 4 Tbsp lemon or lime juice
• 5 Tbsp avocado oil
• 1/3 large, ripe avocado
• salt and pepper to taste

This is probably enough for four salads unless you’re in the habit of really drowning your greens. It’s also great on sweet potato fries.

Dear St. Olaf College,

Although I may never totally let you off the hook for selling WCAL, ignoring the myriad helpful suggestions I offered you in the enthusiasm of youth, and raising tuition and fees by over 250% in the last 12 years, I still love you — after all, you introduced me to my wife and many of my lifelong friends, you more than adequately prepared me for additional higher education, and you taught me to like Haydn, among other things.

As you surely recall, one of my favorite pieces of apparel is this sweatshirt:

I’ve had it since I was 16 (i.e., for more than half of my life!), and although it is faded, too large, and frayed at nearly every seam, I intend to keep it until it completely disintegrates, because there hasn’t been a St. Olaf sweatshirt since that’s worth the great memories I associate with the Hill. I thought I’d lost it once. In the frenzied post-graduation move-out exodus, a friend accidentally liberated it from my coatrack peg in the Huggenvik House, believing it was hers and she’d left it behind while hanging out. I was despondent until it showed up, neatly wrapped, as a surprise wedding gift over a year later. (Well played, Wilsons!)

Although I continue to hold out hope otherwise, I’m beginning to doubt that you will ever make a piece of St. Olaf-licensed apparel that is nearly as great as this classic sweatshirt. What I’m realizing now is that you may not have to. You see, this afternoon, I received a small parcel from one of the officers of the St. Olaf Cycling Club. It contained the items pictured below, either of which is almost certain to steal affection from my venerable sweatshirt:

I’m pretty sure that wearing a cycling cap off the bike, even for demonstration purposes, is a Rule #22 violation, but it runs afoul of Benton’s Second Sartorial Law in any case. So mea culpa BUT GOOD GRIEF IT SAYS “UM YA YA” ON THE BRIM. Fortunately, I should still have some long-sleeve weather left this spring in which to wear this excellent kit, and I expect to find myself thinking “Fram, fram!” instead of “sur la plaque!” while so doing.

Seriously, though, you should fix the sweatshirt situation, because the cycling club is just embarrassing the bookstore here. I’m pretty sure that the climbing wall, the fancy science center, the sommelier service in Rand, the heated and asbestos-free practice rooms, the chairlift on Old Main Hill, and whatever other decadent amenities you’ve installed since I graduated wind up tasting like ashes in the mouths of students who can’t enjoy them in worthy licensed apparel.

best,
Will Benton ’00

Via DF, Ziptastic is “a simple API that allows people to ask which Country, State and City are associated with a Zip Code.” This is truly excellent, and it addresses a longstanding pet peeve of mine.

In a similar vein, I’m pleased to announce my latest project. Ageist is a simple API to determine whether or not an individual is older than 13 given his or her birthday. (As an example, click here to see how old the Pixies album Trompe le Monde is, if you want to be really depressed.) While it does not (yet) calculate one’s racing age, I suspect certain race-registration websites could employ some combination of Ziptastic and Ageist to eliminate most of my user-experience complaints.

We recently cancelled our pay television service because we have watched approximately 90 minutes of live or time-shifted TV¹ in the last six months and six months’ worth of subscription fees amortizes extremely poorly² over 90 minutes of programming. This isn’t a knock against our former pay-television provider, which has always provided a good product at a competitive price with excellent and friendly customer service; it’s just that theirs is a product that we don’t wind up actually using often enough to justify a continued subscription.

As you might expect, I had to address a friendly customer service representative’s numerous scripted objections, discount offers, and repeated suggestions that I just put the service on hold and cool off for a while before doing anything rash, all before I could get the cancellation processed in the first place. However, I was surprised that they’ve called me twice in the last week with special offers to try and get me to sign on again. I sincerely appreciate such aggressive customer-retention efforts, but this is quickly becoming more awkward than a teenaged breakup.

¹ I am not counting the half of the Timberwolves-Clippers game that I mostly slept through while recovering from one of our many kindergarten-originated stomach bugs, since I was in such bad shape that it may as well have been a test pattern. Furthermore, we have watched DVD movies, iTunes content, Netflix streaming, etc.; I am emphatically not questioning the utility of the television itself.

² I’m actually having trouble coming up with a way to spend more money on less entertainment without being deliberately wasteful, like buying recently released video games and grilling them, unopened, over direct heat.

I can’t possibly be the first person to have had this idea. With that said, I like it a lot:

As for the ride itself, it was overcast and certainly too cold to refrain from second-guessing wardrobe choices. (Bibs and knee warmers: bad idea. Shorts without knee warmers: worse idea.) Even so, we were doing pretty well until we hit Mt. Horeb and a thick fog rolled in. Just a couple of miles north of town, we were blind beyond about 100m, which seemed like unnecessarily bad odds for us given the size of the shoulders and the speed of traffic.

So we went back to town under rapidly-increasing fog cover and surveyed our options for a few minutes. We considered going to the Grumpy Troll and trying to wait for some sun, but it was before 9 AM and neither of us had any cash. We considered calling Andrea and begging for a ride, but that seemed too pitiful. Anyway, if you were wondering whether it is possible to ride the Military Ridge State Trail from Mt. Horeb to Madison on road bikes with 20 spoke rims and 700×23 tires, the answer is “yes, but only slowly.” (For out-of-towners, this is about 20 miles on crushed limestone and dirt.) I probably wouldn’t do it by choice, but it’s always fun to ride that trail and I don’t think my wheels are too far out of true. And — as an unexpected bonus — I’m pretty sure I can speak Flemish now.

I recently registered for an athletic event using a ubiquitous online-registration service that will remain nameless. Sadly, the process was embarrassing even by the low standards of the domain. First, it required me to enter my birthdate twice on consecutive forms. This is pretty ridiculous by itself, but the second form also asked me for my age on race day and for my assertion that I was older than 13, both of which could have been trivially calculated from my birthdate.

I often get annoyed when I have to enter even the tiniest amount of redundant information on barely-usable web sites (e.g. city, state, and ZIP code even though the first two are entailed by the last) but perhaps I’ve set the bar too high.

Dear Amazon, you know I’m your pal. I still have that handwritten thank-you card you sent me on my fridge, although my motivation for keeping it is at least 60% ironic. So when you do something like this, it hurts me all the more:

As someone who has been nearly maimed by clueless aero bar users in multiple mass-start road cycling events and who has had pleasant commutes sullied by weirdos who (1) are using aero bars on a bike path and while so doing (2) insist on attempting to draft someone who is riding a steel fixed-gear bicycle at sub-competitive speeds, I must plead with you to never again mention bicycle commuting and clip-on aero bars in such a way that someone might construe them as being somehow related to one another or (worse still) part of a desirable combination for shaving 15 seconds off of their Cap City Loop time. Thanks in advance.

(See also: the most appropriate inappropriate web ad ever.)

I was in the “sports nutrition and quackery” aisle at Target last night buying Kind bars and was dismayed to notice that the “hCG diet” craze has apparently made its way out of email spam and on to store shelves. Certainly, the desire for weight loss often causes people to abandon common sense, but I can think of few things I would want in my bloodstream less, even if we’re merely talking about some proteins that mimic it.

My friend Cara recently encouraged some people, including me, to post quantifiable personal goals for this year. Here are a subset of mine:

Fitness

• Run at least 500 miles and bicycle at least 2500 miles.
• Finish a half-marathon in under 2:00.
• Finish the Centurion 50 in under 2:15.
• Enter and finish an Olympic-distance triathlon.
• Enter and finish at least two cyclocross races.
• Lose at least 20 pounds.

Creative

• Capture, process, and post to flickr at least one good photograph per week.
• Compose, record, and produce at least ten songs in any genre or texture.
• Complete at least two currently in-flight carpentry or woodworking projects.
• Read seven good books not related to fitness, photography, or computing; at least two must be fiction.

Professional

• Submit at least one paper to a good conference or journal.

I’ll be tracking these activities on RunKeeper (mostly restricted to my “street team”), flickr, and audio.willbenton.com; I’ll summarize occasionally with posts here that are tagged “2012-goals“