A while ago I realized I've been lucky enough to do a lot of traveling, and also play in a lot of ultimate tournaments, so I made spreadsheets to keep track of it and aid my memory. I love spreadsheets. Here is the summary of the data, including the District of Columbia:
States I've been to: 50 (all except Alaska)
States I've driven across: 45
States I've slept a night in: 46 (no WV, MI, or MS)
States the Jeep made it to: 47 (no CA, AK, MI, or HI)
States my Subaru has been to: 16 (in just over 4 months)
States I've lived in: 8
States I've climbed the high point of: 15
States I've skiied in: 9
States I've played ultimate in: 31
Ultimate tournaments played: 76 (over 6 years)
Most Tournaments played in one year: 20 (2008)
Career Winning %: 59.3 (262-180)
Finals Appearances: 12
Tournament Victories: 7 (3 with M.U.T., 3 with Dartmouth, 1 with Madison)
Teams Played For: 23 (not counting hat tournies)
Most tourneys with one team: Dartmouth A (24), (2nd is Pimpdags with 12)
Callahans: 2
I thought this was all interesting at least.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
Concert
I'm not much of one for concerts. In fact I've only been to 4 in my life: A Beatles tribute band with my parents when I was in middle school (awkward), Michael Franti & Spearhead last winter (awesome), Dropkick Murphey's this past fall (my ears still hurt), and one this past weekend. A lot of my friends like going to concerts, probably because they're from places where cool bands like to play, like New York, Boston, or California. If I was a from a place where Dave Matthews plays every year, I'd probably have gone too. Unfortunately the only big names that ever seemed to play in Oklahoma were Garth Brooks, Toby Keith, Faith Hill, and the like.
Until this past weekend. In a scheduling decision that still baffles me, the Black Eyed Peas were opening for U2 (U fucking 2!) at OU's football stadium on October 18th. Both of these bands are on my relatively short list of bands I would be willing to see in concert, so of course I went and also made a special trip to Colorado to bring Mar along too. My parents, as providers of the tickets, were also present, a situation that actually wasn't as awkward as you might think provided that I didn't look at them while I was dancing and singing along to 'My Humps'.
BEP especially played a lot lip service to their presence in my home town, with Wil.i.am frequently uttering phrases such "What's up [pause] Oklahoma!" and "it's so great to be here in [pause] Oklahoma" as if he himself couldn't quite understand what he was doing in this state. U2 was a little smoother in their location mention, referencing their 1983 concert at OU's basketball arena a mile down the road. "It took us 26 years to make it that last mile" Bono said at one point, which sounded sweet at the time, like we were all part of U2's odyssey as a rock band, but could also be interpreted as 'it took us 26 years before we were willing to come back'.
Poking fun at my heritage aside, this was an amazing concert. The crowd of 60,000 was rowdy and knew the lyrics when asked to sing along, and both bands flat out rocked. I was a little worried about how the BEP's would sound given the heavy use of computer sound effects in their music, but they sounded great, getting me jumping up and down and yelling the lyrics as they sang "I gotta feeling', and setting most of the girls (especially including Mar) in the stadium screaming as Fergie let the guys rest and sang "Big Girls Don't Cry".
Of special note was the stage, which cost over $30 million, looks like space ship, and it nicknamed 'The Claw'. After U2's opening song, Bono paused and greeted the crowd saying "how do you like our Mothership?". U2 clearly has played a lot of concerts on this stage, and knew extremely well how to use all the features of the stage's ability to play in the round to make it feel like each section in the stadium was close up to the band and being played to specifically. My favorite two songs that U2 played were probably "Beautiful Day", which allowed to Bono to fully utilize his emotional, arms-spread-to-the-sky style of singing (that and the stage turned blue! See below), and "Sunday Bloody Sunday", which is simply one of the best songs ever and was amazing to hear live.
Finally for those of you interested in seeing what this concert is like, their performance at the Rose Bowl this Sunday is being streamed live on youtube and U2.com.
Until this past weekend. In a scheduling decision that still baffles me, the Black Eyed Peas were opening for U2 (U fucking 2!) at OU's football stadium on October 18th. Both of these bands are on my relatively short list of bands I would be willing to see in concert, so of course I went and also made a special trip to Colorado to bring Mar along too. My parents, as providers of the tickets, were also present, a situation that actually wasn't as awkward as you might think provided that I didn't look at them while I was dancing and singing along to 'My Humps'.
BEP especially played a lot lip service to their presence in my home town, with Wil.i.am frequently uttering phrases such "What's up [pause] Oklahoma!" and "it's so great to be here in [pause] Oklahoma" as if he himself couldn't quite understand what he was doing in this state. U2 was a little smoother in their location mention, referencing their 1983 concert at OU's basketball arena a mile down the road. "It took us 26 years to make it that last mile" Bono said at one point, which sounded sweet at the time, like we were all part of U2's odyssey as a rock band, but could also be interpreted as 'it took us 26 years before we were willing to come back'.
Poking fun at my heritage aside, this was an amazing concert. The crowd of 60,000 was rowdy and knew the lyrics when asked to sing along, and both bands flat out rocked. I was a little worried about how the BEP's would sound given the heavy use of computer sound effects in their music, but they sounded great, getting me jumping up and down and yelling the lyrics as they sang "I gotta feeling', and setting most of the girls (especially including Mar) in the stadium screaming as Fergie let the guys rest and sang "Big Girls Don't Cry".
Of special note was the stage, which cost over $30 million, looks like space ship, and it nicknamed 'The Claw'. After U2's opening song, Bono paused and greeted the crowd saying "how do you like our Mothership?". U2 clearly has played a lot of concerts on this stage, and knew extremely well how to use all the features of the stage's ability to play in the round to make it feel like each section in the stadium was close up to the band and being played to specifically. My favorite two songs that U2 played were probably "Beautiful Day", which allowed to Bono to fully utilize his emotional, arms-spread-to-the-sky style of singing (that and the stage turned blue! See below), and "Sunday Bloody Sunday", which is simply one of the best songs ever and was amazing to hear live.
Finally for those of you interested in seeing what this concert is like, their performance at the Rose Bowl this Sunday is being streamed live on youtube and U2.com.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Obama in Yellowstone
This would be a better post had I actually written it soon after President Obama visited the park back in August, but whatever. I'm also not quite sure what counts as free information to give out in terms of the logistics of a presidential visit, so I'm going to be careful...
The week before the president visited was a rather hectic one at Yellowstone as every division collectively messed themselves preparing for it. Even geology got involved, as my supervisors were placed on a geyser emergency team for the visit and put on stand by in an undisclosed location to be ready in case something went wrong (Old Faithful doesn't go off?). They also were nice and removed the rather suspicious-looking temperature loggers (a small circular base emitting a radio frequency with a 2 meter wire extending from it) from any pool the President would be near.
The most entertaining part of the preparation was hearing what the wildlife people had to deal with. As anyone who has been to Yellowstone knows, there are a lot of bison there. These bison don't give a crap about cars and will stand in the middle of the road and just stare at you.
Well, apparently it is a major security issue if a presidential motorcade has to make an unscheduled stop (i.e. to avoid hitting a bison), so there were park rangers put in charge of keeping the bison herds away from the motorcade route. How they did that I don't know, I got the feeling while I was in Yellowstone that a bison wouldn't move even if I was bumping it with my car.
Additionally the president's family was going to have a picnic lunch at a location where two ravens known for stealing picnic lunches liked to hang out. The bird people were told to 'get rid of them'. Ravens are smart though. Imagine trying to catch something on the ground that can fly and knows you're trying catch it. Don't know how they pulled that one off either.
Finally, both of these issues ended up being irrelevant as Obama ended up flying in to Old Faithful instead of driving and the picnic was for the staff while the president ate indoors at a lodge. All in all the president was in the park for maybe 3 hours. Just a bit less than the reported average length of a visit to the park (I don't get that stat either). Instead of being annoyed though at the much ado about nothing issues created by the president's visit, my supervisor came away very impressed with the professionalism and quality of the work done by the secret service in preparing the park for the president to visit. Those guys don't mess around and know exactly what they're doing in a very elaborate system. Apparently there are multiple advance teams of agents leap-frogging each other in advance of the presidential visits and also a small fleet of aircraft carrying motorcade vehicles around the country, so that everything is ready before Air Force 1 is even in the region.
As for me, I spent the day Obama was in the park staying as far away as possible. Traffic was already bad enough without having to deal with an Obama-jam. The bison and elk jams were already annoying me enough.
The week before the president visited was a rather hectic one at Yellowstone as every division collectively messed themselves preparing for it. Even geology got involved, as my supervisors were placed on a geyser emergency team for the visit and put on stand by in an undisclosed location to be ready in case something went wrong (Old Faithful doesn't go off?). They also were nice and removed the rather suspicious-looking temperature loggers (a small circular base emitting a radio frequency with a 2 meter wire extending from it) from any pool the President would be near.
The most entertaining part of the preparation was hearing what the wildlife people had to deal with. As anyone who has been to Yellowstone knows, there are a lot of bison there. These bison don't give a crap about cars and will stand in the middle of the road and just stare at you.
Well, apparently it is a major security issue if a presidential motorcade has to make an unscheduled stop (i.e. to avoid hitting a bison), so there were park rangers put in charge of keeping the bison herds away from the motorcade route. How they did that I don't know, I got the feeling while I was in Yellowstone that a bison wouldn't move even if I was bumping it with my car.Additionally the president's family was going to have a picnic lunch at a location where two ravens known for stealing picnic lunches liked to hang out. The bird people were told to 'get rid of them'. Ravens are smart though. Imagine trying to catch something on the ground that can fly and knows you're trying catch it. Don't know how they pulled that one off either.
Finally, both of these issues ended up being irrelevant as Obama ended up flying in to Old Faithful instead of driving and the picnic was for the staff while the president ate indoors at a lodge. All in all the president was in the park for maybe 3 hours. Just a bit less than the reported average length of a visit to the park (I don't get that stat either). Instead of being annoyed though at the much ado about nothing issues created by the president's visit, my supervisor came away very impressed with the professionalism and quality of the work done by the secret service in preparing the park for the president to visit. Those guys don't mess around and know exactly what they're doing in a very elaborate system. Apparently there are multiple advance teams of agents leap-frogging each other in advance of the presidential visits and also a small fleet of aircraft carrying motorcade vehicles around the country, so that everything is ready before Air Force 1 is even in the region.
As for me, I spent the day Obama was in the park staying as far away as possible. Traffic was already bad enough without having to deal with an Obama-jam. The bison and elk jams were already annoying me enough.
Monday, October 05, 2009
The National Park Service
It was very interesting the past 6 months getting to see how the National Park Service operates from the inside, especially since I got to observe it at two very different national parks- Guadalupe Mountains and Yellowstone.
The largest conflict I saw the exists in the management of a national park is balancing protecting the park resources with creating a good visitor experience.
An example of this from Guadalupe starts off like a joke: "How many park rangers does it take to plant a cherry tree?"
The back story is that rangers at Guadalupe are trying to recreate the orchard that existed at a preserved ranch house in the park that now serves as the park's cultural history museum. Trees would provide shade and show visitors how early settlers cultivated in the desert. The answer to the question: 6. 3 to transplant the tree, 1 one to operate a backhoe, and 2 to watch and make sure no potential Native American artifacts were dug up or damaged. Conflicts of the resource vs. visitors were rare at Guadalupe though, mainly due to the management of the park as a wilderness area, which dictated rather strictly what could and could not be done within the park boundary.
Yellowstone is a different story. A good anecdote from there comes from Mammoth. What many people don't realize is that the Park Service is more than just the big wilderness parks we've all heard of (Grand Canyon, Yosemite, etc.), but in fact includes nearly 400 different sites, most of which have a purely cultural significance (Battlefields, monuments, memorials, and the like). Therefore a majority of park service employees, and to a smaller degree park management policy, have very little to do with wilderness. One of the park policies I've seen crop up a couple times is one that dictates any human artifacts more than 50 years old within a park must be preserved by the park.
In Carlsbad Caverns this means rangers are responsible for preserving a pile of trash (empty cans of beans, loose wire, broken light bulbs) left by guano miners in the 1930s. In Yellowstone is means the lush grass of the parade grounds the army created at Mammoth in the early 1900s must be maintained.
This grass provides an artificial food source for a herd of elk that hangs out in Mammoth nearly constantly. I saw the herd probably 4 out of 5 days, in numbers from 20 to over 60. In the fall this herd attracts multiple bull elk during the rut that are very aggressive and often chase visitors who get too close or damage cars or other property.
This is obviously a concern for the park service. A visitor who got chased across the parade ground at Mammoth by a horny bull elk is probably less likely to return, and there are two main ideas on what to do about this: 1) Get rid of the food source. Kentucky bluegrass is not a natural staple of an elk's diet. Get of the grass, get rid of the herd. This is suggested by people in the Yellowstone Center for Resources. 2) You can't get rid of the grass, the park is required by law to preserve it. Instead you have to have park rangers haze the elk (make very loud scary noises, poke them with sticks, make them chug beer, etc.) until they get annoyed and leave.
So one option involves breaking a law while the other involves annoying the crap out of a herd of wildlife, which seems counterproductive to the park's primary missions of preserving a natural environment. Given these options, it's easy to guess what the park is doing about this situation: nothing.
This is but one example of many situations where cultural resources, natural resources, and visitor services clash. Visitor services also pose a problem:
"We want to build this facility here so it's close to this must-see sight"
"But your proposed building is literally on top of a geyser cone"
"So?"
"Really? That needs further explanation as to why it's bad?"
Part of my job this summer was to help my supervisors (the park geologists) research and write reports on the geological hazards associated with proposed developments in the park. I'd elaborate, but I'm not quite sure what I'm at liberty to say, especially online. Lets just say the similarity of some of the projects to the hypothetical conversation above makes me shudder a little, and if you're interested in hearing more, I'll tell you if we talk in person.
The good news in all this is that as long as the resource people, the scientists, provided solid data and evidence, natural resources generally won the argument with the visitor services developers, as least in my limited experience. Additionally, the wilderness is much better off, even with damage done by visitors and development, than it would be if it wasn't a park at all. From what I heard the Wyoming state wolf management policy remains (paraphrased of course) "if you see a wolf, shoot it". Sigh.
The largest conflict I saw the exists in the management of a national park is balancing protecting the park resources with creating a good visitor experience.
An example of this from Guadalupe starts off like a joke: "How many park rangers does it take to plant a cherry tree?"
The back story is that rangers at Guadalupe are trying to recreate the orchard that existed at a preserved ranch house in the park that now serves as the park's cultural history museum. Trees would provide shade and show visitors how early settlers cultivated in the desert. The answer to the question: 6. 3 to transplant the tree, 1 one to operate a backhoe, and 2 to watch and make sure no potential Native American artifacts were dug up or damaged. Conflicts of the resource vs. visitors were rare at Guadalupe though, mainly due to the management of the park as a wilderness area, which dictated rather strictly what could and could not be done within the park boundary.
Yellowstone is a different story. A good anecdote from there comes from Mammoth. What many people don't realize is that the Park Service is more than just the big wilderness parks we've all heard of (Grand Canyon, Yosemite, etc.), but in fact includes nearly 400 different sites, most of which have a purely cultural significance (Battlefields, monuments, memorials, and the like). Therefore a majority of park service employees, and to a smaller degree park management policy, have very little to do with wilderness. One of the park policies I've seen crop up a couple times is one that dictates any human artifacts more than 50 years old within a park must be preserved by the park.
In Carlsbad Caverns this means rangers are responsible for preserving a pile of trash (empty cans of beans, loose wire, broken light bulbs) left by guano miners in the 1930s. In Yellowstone is means the lush grass of the parade grounds the army created at Mammoth in the early 1900s must be maintained.
This grass provides an artificial food source for a herd of elk that hangs out in Mammoth nearly constantly. I saw the herd probably 4 out of 5 days, in numbers from 20 to over 60. In the fall this herd attracts multiple bull elk during the rut that are very aggressive and often chase visitors who get too close or damage cars or other property. This is obviously a concern for the park service. A visitor who got chased across the parade ground at Mammoth by a horny bull elk is probably less likely to return, and there are two main ideas on what to do about this: 1) Get rid of the food source. Kentucky bluegrass is not a natural staple of an elk's diet. Get of the grass, get rid of the herd. This is suggested by people in the Yellowstone Center for Resources. 2) You can't get rid of the grass, the park is required by law to preserve it. Instead you have to have park rangers haze the elk (make very loud scary noises, poke them with sticks, make them chug beer, etc.) until they get annoyed and leave.
So one option involves breaking a law while the other involves annoying the crap out of a herd of wildlife, which seems counterproductive to the park's primary missions of preserving a natural environment. Given these options, it's easy to guess what the park is doing about this situation: nothing.
This is but one example of many situations where cultural resources, natural resources, and visitor services clash. Visitor services also pose a problem:
"We want to build this facility here so it's close to this must-see sight"
"But your proposed building is literally on top of a geyser cone"
"So?"
"Really? That needs further explanation as to why it's bad?"
Part of my job this summer was to help my supervisors (the park geologists) research and write reports on the geological hazards associated with proposed developments in the park. I'd elaborate, but I'm not quite sure what I'm at liberty to say, especially online. Lets just say the similarity of some of the projects to the hypothetical conversation above makes me shudder a little, and if you're interested in hearing more, I'll tell you if we talk in person.
The good news in all this is that as long as the resource people, the scientists, provided solid data and evidence, natural resources generally won the argument with the visitor services developers, as least in my limited experience. Additionally, the wilderness is much better off, even with damage done by visitors and development, than it would be if it wasn't a park at all. From what I heard the Wyoming state wolf management policy remains (paraphrased of course) "if you see a wolf, shoot it". Sigh.
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