"It’s not a (green) revolution until somebody gets hurt"

It’s a good thing I run, and not only because I’m going to celebrate Easter in an Italian home: it’s podcast time, and, man, are there ever some top-quality podcasts out there. They don’t provoke quite the same endorphin kick as Donna Summers, but they do send the neurons spinning.

I just listened to Thomas Friedman’s presentation (“Hot, Flat, and Crowded,” the same title as his latest book) to the London School of Economics. This will surprise a lot of people, but: I like Thomas Friedman. I hesitate to define myself as a “capitalist”, but, in fine e in fondo, I do believe in capitalism. I think competition and incentivization work better than standardization and regulation (while I also believe that policy plays an important role in regulating competition that turns ugly). I’m certain I can’t summarize Friedman’s book in two lines (especially since I haven’t read it), but two phrases from his presentation deserve repeating:

- “It’s not a revolution until somebody gets hurt”. That is: forget all this nonsense about “101 easy ways to green the planet” … and actually implement policies that actually force innovation to actually green the planet.

- “Wouldn’t it be great if Barack Obama and his wife and their two girls got on their bicycles and biked to the White House? Now that would be leadership.” I agree. That’d be awesome.

I’d love it if some of you listened to the program and shared your thoughts.

More on Meat

Let’s talk a little more about meat. And about another argument I’ve made (without ever getting anyone to agree with me): that Italians in general have a very low level of nutritional-dietetic awareness. (And that this explains why the levels of childhood obesity in Europe are among the highest in Europe, and why obesity-related diseases such as diabetes are growing rapidly in Italy.)

My roommate – who I really like – provides me with an endless source of material for reflection (and, sometimes, pique) . Yesterday, she suggested that I might like eating in the University dining hall. When I said I preferred to “pack a lunch” – a behavior almost unheard of among Italian students – she asked why, and I explained that the meals served in the cafeteria were much more expensive than anything I might prepare at home, and that I find the offerings to be generally “unhealthy”. She disagreed: “I really think you should go. You can find some really good, healthy options. For example, on Wednesdays … Bistecca alla Fiorentina. It’s just the steak and a little olive oil drizzled on top. That’s it! Very light.”

Well, that is it, and, actually, that’s the point. To make sure I hadn’t misunderstood anything, I took an “ask for clarification” moment and ascertained that, in fact, I had understood perfectly: we were talking about a broiled porterhouse steak about two inches thick and twelve inches long. A little math gave me the nutritional facts on my roommate’s “light, healthy” meal (or, really, that part of her meal). If I assume the smallest possible weight (let’s say 400 grams), the leanest cut (trimmed to 0” fat, select grade), and discount the added oil – not to mention the bread, dressed salad, and Coca-Cola that almost surely accompany the meat – we’re talking about a consumption of about 1200 calories, 85 grams of fat, 32 grams of saturated fat, and 260 mg of cholesterol. And, given what I’ve seen in Italy – enormous portions of meat and fattier rather than leaner cuts – we could be understating those figures by perhaps 30%. We’ve already exceeded daily recommended limits for fat and saturated fat, we’re not so far away from those for calories and cholesterol, and we’ve considered only the meat consumed during lunch.

If this were an isolated example, it would be … an isolated example. But I’ve met with lots of similarly absurd health-related claims. Among other foods that Italians have tried to convince me are healthy: kebab (fatty pork meat served with fatty sauce), Bolognese bread (super-refined white-flour bread flavored with pig fat), Milanese-style steak (fatty beef, breaded and fried), and deep-fried vegetables.

What’s most interesting to me isn’t that Italians eat this, ah, “stuff”. It’s that everyone – Italians, Americans, Martians, everyone – maintains that Italians have better food habits than “everyone else” and most especially than Americans. It’s certainly not true in many “particular” cases, and I’d argue that’s not true even on average.

Surprise.

Back to . . . Italy!

O! O! The adventures I'm having! I've been seeking out the stranger quarters, as usual, by my extraordinary but still incomprehensible "gift". I'm not sure about the roots of my gift, but I've identified several possible sources of my unusual ability to find, in any collection of people, the crazies: subconcious intention, an internal wierdo magnet, or - aha! - magic. Regardless, I am, much like the sister in the awesome photo I copied today at the National Museum of the Mountain in Torino, having one heck of a time. Getting to know the Crazies is an involved undertaking, and my internet access, following suit with the rest of my life, is often more than a bit unpredictable. Hence: You'll have to grab me with a crampon - or, now that I think more about it, a glass of wine and a piece of dark chocolate would be much more effective tools - and I'll gladly story you up. I'll have more time to color in the shadows, that way, too. For now, a children's picture book about my last few weeks:

After the chateau in theLes Audes, France, I went to work on a git (a type of rural B&B) in the Alps, still in France, still part of WWOOF. They advertised for help in their organic garden, preparing organic meals for guests, and setting up a system of solar panel. After using my fantasy-to-reality translator, which only works on location, I discovered that a better translation of this would be: washing dishes. Essentially, I just washed dishes. Hours and hours and hours of dishes. Nothing against dishes, really: in fact, it's a chore I could even say I kind of like. But I already know how to wash dishes . . . it's the organic farming and the solar panels I was hoping to learn about. Here's my valley, near Briancon, France:

Anyway, I took advantage of the situation and hiked all around the area. It was beautiful!

I also did a lot of hiking because the family had three demon-children, and I did everything I could to avoid being in the crazy house. I think flowers and mountains and walking are much nicer than demon-children. And, adding to my obsession, I discovered that a branch of the Camino de Santiago passes right by the gite doorstep! So I had to follow it . . .

Also, I'd become obsessed with doing a Via Ferrata. They're kind of like JV rock climbs: they can be really challenging, but they don't have to be. There are iron spikes and handgrips already in the rocks, and the site rents you equipment, so you can basically just show-up-and-go . . . from there, you can make it as hard or easy as you like. (You know which way I chose.) This also turned into a crazy adventure: I was exactly halfway up a 500-foot sheer rock wall when the weather suddenly changed. A storm came, a storm with hurricane-force winds and pelting sideways monsoon-like rain. I had no choice but to go down . . . or up . . . so I went up . . . ! It felt like a real adventure, anyway. Also, I dig the helmet, and am thinking about replacing my bike helmet with a Via Ferrata model:

The Crazies started to make me a little too crazy, so I bailed out of France and into Italy. I made it to Turin, where I'm staying with Silvana, an amazing woman I linked up with through Hospitality Club. She's an incredible host and even took me to Eataly (also an extraordinary place, worth checking out the website) for a Welcome-Back-to-Italy pizza:

Choose-Your-Own-Adventure

So: I’m WWOOFing in France. (It’s a long story, but the short of it is: I got fired from my sweet bike job. So I decided to turn it into a positive and learn French!) I’ve spent the last few weeks on a chateau / wine estate / garden / B&B / restaurant in Le Aude, a beautiful but atrociously hot, fly-ridden part of Southern France. It’s kind of near Barcelona, Spain – that’s probably the easiest way to describe it. My “estate”, La Sabine, makes reds, whites, and roses – I like the whites the best – and they host dinner-concerts on their patio every Thursday night. I’ve been disappointed in the experience in that I haven’t really learned what I hoped to learn – about wine, about organic agricultural production, about restaurants – but I have a learned a lot of other things - about business and entrepreneurship and toilets and psychiatriac problems -, progressed with French to the point where I think it’s now fair to say that I “speak some French”, and seen an area of France that seems a little off the foreigner-beaten track.

My favorite experience so far was my hitchhiking-trekking-and-camping adventure last weekend. This was an adventure of the choose-your-own variety with a turn-to-page-X option every five minutes. It took me 14 different pick-ups to get to the Peyrepetuse Castle and back, and along the way I met, amongst others, a dealer of “strange African paintings”, a Belgian cyclist, a Brasilian musician, a stoner-cum-boat-builder, a stoner-cum-raver, and a couple of stoner-cum-Rastafarians. My most interesting ride, however, came from an 82- (“and-a-half”) year old man from the area. I could understand this guy easier than lots of other people, believe it or not, because he spoke a local dialect that seemed closer to Spanish than to French. He went on and on and on about the oak trees. There are white oaks and green oaks. Green oaks and white oaks. Look! There are some there! And there! And there! (We were driving through a forest.) The man was obsessed with oak trees.

It turns out that the man was obsessed with oak trees because oak trees have acorns, and acorns are what the wild boars eat, and this man, at the age of 82 (and-a-half) continues to hunt wild boars. In fact, last year he caught a wild boar that was 130 kg – about 280 pounds, or three mes!

This is important because it helped me to “identify” some of the “night sounds” that graced my camping-in-the-wild experience that night. I have, admittedly, no training in identifying wild boars. But I am absolutely convinced that the snorting not at all so far from my tent was – yes – a wild boar (and probably one that weighed 130 kg, too). Though I’m not usually one given over to fear, I will admit that I was terrified for most of the night, motivated to pursue an early-morning 6 AM departure, and even more motivated, at 5:55, to forget the rest of my PowerBar and skedaddle, right through the blackberry briars and garrigue scrubland, to someplace far, far away from where I had camped.

On the plus side, I saw a beautiful sunrise over Peyrepetuse Castle, hiked a good bit of the long-distance Cathard Way, soaked my feet at the gorges of Galamus, met some interesting people along the way, and at least temporarily sated my taste for adventure.

Here are a few photos.

Tim Moore Fan Club

I just finished an awesome book, French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France. Author Tim Moore is a (purportedly) unathletic Brit who decides to cycle the Tour de France route. Being unathletic, British, and riotously sardonic, Moore naturally transforms his tour into one long misadventure. This is the same guy that walked the Camino de Santiago with an ass, and there too basically went looking for crazy things to happen. What he does is pretty amusing to begin with, but what he thinks about it (and what he thinks about in general) and how he says it are just wickedly funny. If I had to choose a writer-model, this would be the guy. Anyway, he’s too good to not tell you about. Here are a few of his lines that made me smile . . .

. . . Attracted perhaps by my attempt to encapsulate the works of Heronymous Bosch in a single sound, and perhaps by leaking ceiling, the proprietress had seen fit to enter my room at a moment which coincided unhappily with my wild, humid egress from the cubicle [shower].

. . . And though cycling might be the national sport of France, from what I saw that day strimming [weed-whacking] runs it a close second. Every garden and field buzzed with Canutean attempts to hold back the green tide, to keep the undergrowth from overgrowing. I even saw a couple of leather-faced fellers with scythes, which was pleasingly traditional. Death must be dreading the day when they upgrade him with a strimmer.

. . . I put the hammer down but it bounced back and smacked me in the teeth.

And also literarily pleasing but of primarily – ah . . . – “cultural” interest, Moore also makes me laugh with what he has to say about my adopted countrymates. If I were in sophisticated company and trying to be supremely diplomatic, I think I might respond to these comments with an “I can appreciate what you’re saying, Tim. More wine?” Actually, if I were in sophisticated company, I probably wouldn’t be discussing Tim Moore, and if I were somehow discussing Tim Moore, I’m quite certain I wouldn’t proffer these examples, but I think it would be cool if one could, in “sophisticated company,” discuss Tim Moore, as well as politics, sex, and religion. Furniture upholstery and regional weather peculiarities only take me so far. In any case:

. . . [He was sick to his stomach and uncomfortable all night:] As dawn prodded at the curtains I was still writhing and groaning like an ankle-tapped Italian footballer . . .

. . . They’ve never needed a Seventies revival in Italy: along with fare-dodging, drink-driving, and sexual molestation, littering is just another in the nation’s impressive roll-call of lingering period pastimes.

. . . Simon O’Brien had been at Nick and Jan’s place in the Pyrenees the night before the Tour passed their front door in 1997, and offered a stark warning of what can happen when you’re out there in the dark with a paintbrush, how your intended ALLEZ CHRIS can find itself evolving into an EVERTON FOOTBALL CLUB or a FUCK THE MANCS. The Italians, however, sated these unseemly urges in a more appropriately artistic manner. Their preferred icon was the erect penis, sometimes as an incidental prop in a scene depicting unpopular riders eagerly fellating or sodomising one another, but more commonly as a stand-alone icon, a vast, scarlet-frenumed, wispy-scrotumed deity solemnly spanning both sides of the carriageway.

And a final passage, which I think summarizes my current perspective perfectly, and explains why I am reasonably happy cleaning toilets for no money in France:

. . . Actually there was something else. Wheeling ZR [his bike] back out through the Holiday Inn’s automatic doors and into the misty sun I’d seen a roomful of sales-conference delegates staring bleakly into their Styrofoam cups as a bald man drew pie charts on an overhead projector; one of them turned to me as I cleated up and as our eyes met we both understood an important truth: however wretched my day might be, even if it meant going back to Belfort [254 km] and back, his was going to be far worse.

I think that says it! Rock trumps scissors, scissors trump paper, paper trumps rock, and toilets trump cubicles every time you play.

2008

Two thousand eight is a great year, in my opinion: Not only is it the International Year of the Potato, it's also the International Year of Languages.

Did you know . . .

. . . That there are over 1200 varieties of potatoes cultivated in the "potato park" at the International Potato Center in the Peruvian Andes!?

. . . That, of the 6700 languages in existence, about 50% are considered "in danger of disappearing," and that, in fact, one language does disappear every two weeks?

Thus, tomorrow I am going to eat a pomme de terre and study francais. (Not to be confused with eating french fries.)

The French Villa

The last month has been a blur for me. (But not for you, since I haven't written anything at all, so you're welcome for sparing you that slightly "twanged" feel I'm sure my Ashe-slant writing imposes, and sorry for not assuring you that I haven't, in fact, been kidnapped, though that's an apology you'll probably have to pass along since the kidnap-worriers are precisely the same subgroup as the non-computer-users. Anway, moving forward . . .) I finished up my last papers in Bologna. Packed up my apartment. Said goodbye-for-the-summer (isn't that a cottage song?) to everyone I knew. Flew to Salt Lake City (where they lost my bags). Did training in the Salt Lake City office of my new favorite company, Backroads (http://www.backroads.com/) - learned how to repair bikes, drive a trailer, and handle tricky customer service "challenges". I was so impressed - the training program, the trainers, and the leader-focus of the company just knocked my new bicycle-style socks (but not my new bike shorts, because they're spandex with a tight padded butt and thus remained firmly in place) off. And then, and then . . .

Went on a mock trip to Southern Utah - Bryce and Zion National Parks. This was awesome, and also holy-shite-level hot. On the awesome amazing side, it was beautiful. I slept my first night on the bank of a desert river. (Actually, as one of my co-leaders pointed out, it's not actually a desert. But it's sandy and sand-colored and cloudless and little-red-horned-guys-with-pokers hot, so I think the label is perfectly, though not scientifically - how do you like that one!? - justified, and I'm going to continue using it.) Since it was - yep - hot - I went tent-less and lay in my sleeping bag listening to the running water, peeking at the moon and the stars, and feeling impressed, even in my slumber, by the red sandstone cliff in front of me. With my training group, I made lots of fancy picnic lunches, did some public speaking exercises, went on some hikes and bike rides . . . and ate food prepared by camp chefs that you'd never in a million years guess didn't come out of a professional kitchen, enjoyed the company of my awesome co-leaders (at least most of the time - the too-many-leaders-in-one-campsite virus definitely unleashed a few strains of hyper-competitiveness), and learned a ton. It was really awesome. And then . . .

Got my summer assignment: Family Camping Trips in Southern Utah. Yep. While the Canyons were spectactularly beautiful, and I'm spectacularly in love with Backroads, I was less than thrilled with the assignment. It's all about the match, kind of like choosing a college, and looking at the three principal elements of the trips - "Family", "Camping", and "Desert" - none of them really got me going, especially since I really believed I was heading back to Italy to do trips that essentially focused on biking and gastronomy. But a miraculous intervention occurred, and . . . I write to you now from a villa in France! My scheduled changed at the last minute, and I'm now kind of an "all-Europe back-up." I'm stationed in the Leader House - although I prefer to refer to it, according to my mood, as either the "Villa" or the "Chateau" - in Provence, and I'm scheduled to do a trailer drive to the Czech Republic and to be on-call as a replacement leader for any last-minute leader injuries or the like. (And I guess they almost always use these on-call people, so - for me - that's great.)

Not bad, eh! (My two housemates right now are Canadian. I haven't yet heard any ehs flying around, though. I think it would be an interesting study to quantify eh usage per province. These guys are from Montreal.)