Year: 2008

Mentos Moment

Click to enlargeYou’ve perhaps, if not probably, seen videos of what happens when Mentos candies are dropped into bottles of diet cola. The reaction is due to the carbonation, and diet soda is better because it isn’t sticky. There’s now a Geyser Tube™ kit you can buy that will make it possible to waste some Mentos and a bottle of soda from a safe distance for ten seconds of excitement. Eric and his cousins Sarah, who pulled the string, and Kate, who complained the demonstration wasn’t very exciting, demonstrate.

[flv:/Video/2008/APR/Mentos.flv 440 330]

I’m glad Eric took the video in front of the garage. This gives me a chance to tell you that Glenn, our contractor, is visiting again, but there’s no big project like last year, when he remodeled the porch. In a few days the bit of vinyl that’s above the garage door will be gone, replaced with cedar shingle, and that chimney will be removed. It belonged to a wood stove that was gone long before we bought the house ten years ago.

Pratt Garage

Media Matters

Having been, in a relatively small way, in both the broadcast and print media, I’m fascinated by the blurring effects the Internet has had between these industries. Newspapers have been hit the hardest, and they’re doing what they can to adapt, mostly by taking advantage of the Web.

One innovation is to use blogging software, so letters to the editor can now be comment threads. Another approach is to add video. The suburban paper here, The Metrowest Daily News, posts videos on YouTube that are relatively rough, but servicable. Some are interviews, while others capture events, such as this suspicious truck fire at a Bose (the Wave Music System) Corporation parking lot.

Larger newspapers, such as The Boston Globe, are now posting slickly-produced videos to complement their feature stories. The video below goes with the story at this link, and I think it does a good job of helping to get the writer’s point across.By the way, as I’ve pointed out before, the newspaper business had decades of warning that changes were coming. The very thing that was a great burden and expense, the printing and distribution of paper, was also a primary reason (along with literacy) for the success of newspapers, because it gave them control over access.

Papers liked to promote the idea that a single copy would be read by more than one person, but of course they preferred that not too much of that went on. Readership is only a guess, while circulation is a known number, and it’s always better to sell more copies.

Ian Smith’s Shiny Discs

Brian Sibley’s friend Ian Smith has started Shiny Discs, a video review of videos. Smith’s pleasant and relaxed un-US presentation is a relief to us Yanks, accustomed as we are to hyper hyperbole in our movie reviews. Smith does a brilliant job of extracting every detail out of a new DVD of an old Dr. Who that he calls middling. I’m therefore looking forward to his review of a Who installment that has him stone the crows surprised with delight. (I try to sound more British where and when I can!)

Boston Straggler

Done! You don’t get a medal if you don’t finish the race, and my finish time in the Boston Marathon, as tracked electronically by ChampionChip® was exactly 4:35:00. That put me in the back of the pack, but given my overall readiness, and my ankle’s tenuous condition (it held up pretty well), my most optimistic estimate was for 4:30, so I’m pleased with this result.

The weather was pretty good, although it got sunnier and hotter than I thought was expected. The “ultra sweatproof” sunscreen I used did OK, but I still have some mild redness in a few spots.

I must say thank you to all of the volunteers, especially those who hand out the water and Gatorade, and the people at the finish line who provide the space blankets and unlace/lace shoes to get the electronic chip. Thank you everybody!

As always, the spectators are super. Running past the screaming women of Wellesley College is the one time I can get a sense of what the Beatles heard constantly for at least a few years.

This year I would also like to say thanks to the guy doing a good job of singing Buddy Holly’s “Every Day” at the Dunkin’ Donuts on the Framingham/Natick line, and to the college kid in Boston who was blasting Blind Faith’s “Well All Right,” which also happens to be a Buddy Holly song.

There are, however, two annoyances I see every year during the race:

  • It’s nice that some of the spectators want to hand out their own water, but they should use paper cups. Plastic cups don’t crunch down flat and they get in the way.
  • Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is always well represented, and I certainly respect and appreciate the work that’s done there. But their charity runners have a habit of running side-by-side in large groups, sometimes across almost the entire road. Once their initial euphoria has worn off, and the running gets much more serious, after ten miles, they start to break up into their individual paces, but prior to that they are clusters of rolling road blocks.

So that’s it! All done, and I feel OK. Time for a shower and nap.

26 Miles, 385 Yards

Tomorrow is Marathon Monday! I shall, for the seventh time, tackle the Boston Marathon. I will be jogging this one in, folks! Age and injury have conspired against me, and I suspect that my days of sub-4:00 marathons and sub-1:45 half marathons are behind me.

The injury is the outcome of overuse, combined with a car accident six years ago, a few weeks after that year’s BAA marathon. I was hit from behind by an elderly man and pushed into the car in front of me. This damage is from the initial impact…

…and this is from the second collision.

I braked as hard as I could to avoid hitting the other car, and this was the result. A sprained ankle.

After a couple of months I was able to start running again. I thought everything was all right — it felt all right — but beneath the ligament that had been torn, a tendon was shifting, and rubbing, and building up scar tissue, as seen in this MRI. When the problem became serious I had trouble walking, let alone running. In fact, the reason I started blogging was because I had extra time that would have otherwise been spent on the road.

Thanks to two rounds of physical therapy, and some excellent custom orthotic inserts made by Jerry Pratt (no relation) after more than a year I was able to start running again. My right ankle is still comparatively weak, but I can use it. The question now is, will it hold up and go the distance? Less than 24 hours from now, I will know the answer.