last meals, Sexy Arbor Day, Crazylegs

Holly linked this particularly fascinating/creepy article regarding a collection of photos staged of the last meals of various infamous condemned prisoners. Tracing it, there are a few more here; one prisoner in question asked for pie along with his meal but didn't eat it, apparently telling the guard he was 'saving it for later'. Err.  The artist in question, Henry Hargreaves, has some other really interesting stuff on his website.

Also, as a once-certified arborist, i was particularly pleased to see that woot.com shares my treehugger tendencies. They even made up a Flight-Of-The-Conchords-esque music video. Yes (and yikes)!

Today was Crazylegs, a 5 mile race with 20,000 participants run on the last Saturday in April every year here. It's named after a pro-football player and former UW-Madison athletics director, Elroy 'CrazyLegs' Hirsch, who, according to wikipedia, was tagged by " by Chicago Daily News sportswriter Francis Powers who, upon witnessing him play for the Badgers against the Great Lakes Naval Station in 1942, wrote "His crazy legs were gyrating in six different directions, all at the same time; he looked like a demented duck."

The race starts off at Capitol Square, winds onto campus by the lake, and finished in what might be the largest kegger ever (outside of Germany, okay) at the UW football Stadium, Camp Randall. What this means, in practice, is that the guy down the street (mile marker 4) from my apartment plays the Rocky theme, looping, for 5 hours at full volume (or possibly, cranked up to 11), and a person can't even escape because the street is shut down. i am completely serious. Ya know, it strikes me that this is just one of those things that you have to embrace about Madison or go crazy.

Googling Crazylegs also pulls up a competitive eater, Crazy Legs Conti. Interesting.

As i related to my friend Brandon via email (and post here because it was just fantastic), because not many of my friends are fans and that's okay,  i took myself to a Josh Ritter concert last week. It was as absolutely awesome as you'd expect, and i was surprised at the range, album-wise, of stuff he played. He freaking opened with Idaho, made us all howl to the Wolves, and killed the lights, stood on the edge of the stage sans microphone, and belted the majority of Thin Blue Flame (<3) by himself (and i TOTALLY went all fangirl). There was a really decent mix of new stuff, too, and the encore was To the Dogs or Whomever. YES.