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.

coyotes, alligators, speaking Minnesotan, and carillons.

Regarding recently mentioned wolves and foxes, let me just link this site called The Daily Coyote, featuring gorgeous photography by a woman of her companion coyote (apparently, it's not so much a pet as a coyote whom she half-raised which now hangs out).

My sister-in-law posted a FB picture today of she and my brother with an adorable tiny alligator (or very similar-looking lizard). While i would just be absolutely delighted (no, seriously) if a pet alligator were the newest addition to the family, it looks as though it's illegal to feed an alligator according to Florida laws (where my sibs live). According to an article from the Florida extension service, " Alligators make terrible pets. Although baby alligators may seem like a cool pet, it is illegal to possess or take an alligator without the proper licenses and permits from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Alligators are purely instinctual hunters and do not show affection. Unlike cats and dogs, alligators will never love the hand that feeds them."

i have been listening/watching FAR too much of this rather long but super awesome Lumineers live performance. It features a fantastic version of Dylan's Boots of Spanish Leather, but the whole thing's good.

My friend and biking partner Asuka linked a clip called 'How To Speak Minnesotan'. It's also long but mocumentary style; it was apparently based on a book of the same name by former Prairie Home Companion writer Howard Mohr. i liked the bit about waving. My mother called when i was in the middle of watching it, and upon hearing what i was doing, replied that (communicating with the natives) might be a useful thing to learn.

The Carillon bell tower on campus has recital on Sundays at 3pm, and this past Sunday featured the theme from the Game Of Thrones show in epic fashion. Regarding the Carillon, it's played by master carillonneur Lyle Anderson, and is one of three such towers in Wisconsin. Interestingly, the carillon is the heaviest musical instrument in the world, and from the wikipedia article, "In German, a carillon is also called a Glockenspiel; while in French, the true glockenspiel (a percussion instrument consisting of a set of tuned metal bars) is often called a carillon."

she-wolves, ginger beer, belly buttons, class assimilation, etc.

"Please call me She-wolf, and don't make me wear a pantsuit." - quote-of-the-day from my lovely labmmate Holly, who has been nominated for a teaching award.  They wanted to know her preferred title for the certificate. She has been playing a Game of Thrones board game under the honorable title 'She-wolf' (appropriate, because she's pretty awesome, from the North, and everyone knows the Starks are the best).

Anyway. My cohort recently played poker for Tyler's birthday. Several things came from this:
Ginger beer. It's like ginger ale, only super kick-your-sinuses-in-the-teeth spicy and usually expensive, but Bryan discovered that the Goya variety is inexpensive and ridiculously spicy. Like, don't inhale over the glass directly after pouring spicy. Woo! i'd also prefer to not know the ingredient which is responsible for the kick.

i directly added rum to this somewhere around the start of the game, and strongly recommend resulting beverage.

We had a discussion regarding belly buttons, and the origins of innies v/s outies and whether there's a genetic component. Short answer, no. They're the result of a surgical scar due to the cutting of the umbilical cord, and whatever skin remains (or is due to an umbilical hernia). As reported, 90% of people have innies, and some folks lack them completely due to subsequent surgeries (for instance, the model Karolina Kurkova). Additionally, as most of you have recently read, there happens to be a lot of person-specific bacteria in navels (most folks don't go around trading belly button bacteria). Also, science has proven that T-shaped ones are the most attractive or whatever. Another thing that was kicked up while researching this is the practice of lotus birth, which is when people just let the umbilical cord fall off naturally (sometime around days 15-20 post birth?!).

Fashion blogger Garance Dore recently posted a (semi-nsfw) note regarding how human females refer to their sex-specific anatomy. It's an interesting concept, and the responses that follow are even more so. (Nods to Jack and 'lady bits'.) This is even more interesting/timely in light of the (rather nsfw) Awkwafina song that Bryan brought up at poker.

(Musical) Assimilation of my class is nearly complete. It happened like this; i frequently trade music back and forth with Jack. For instance, i was doing my taxes on Friday, listening to the Lone Bellow, and she signed online. i flooded her with music links (oh, man, i had this song on repeat for over an hour, and also discovered that The Civil Wars have a tremendous cover of MJ's Billie Jean, though sadly lacking the beloved moonwalk), and inquired about her opinion regarding the mandolin. She responded that she hadn't considered it much, so i linked this. Jack approved and posted it as her gchat status. Holly clicked it, and apparently it took her a minute to piece out that she had indeed clicked on something Jack linked and not me. A ha! i'm greatly pleased.

Also, i offer up this striking collection of pictures taken at a rockabilly Vintage car show in Vegas by the always incredible Scott Schuman. Gosh.

champagne, eccentric muscle contraction soreness, and shanties.

Regarding champagne, i learned yesterday that 'veuve' (as in Veuve Cliquot) means widow in French; apparently the wine-making company was taken over by a woman, Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin, who was widowed at 27. She went ahead to turn the company into one internationally known for champagne as well was revolutionize the process though the invention of riddling, or removing of the lees (yeast sediments) from the bottles before selling them.

Also regarding wine, comet vintages are wines made in years where there were comets, which were said to have a highly positive effect on the wine. From a friend's FB link, here's an article from the 1930s on the benefits of consuming alcohol.

Jack and i climb. i've got a 48-ish hour lag when it comes to muscle soreness. This is not terribly uncommon, but we were curious about why it's not immediate. i looked around online a little, and came across two pretty decent, researched articles covering delayed onset muscle soreness (one and two). It's said to be mostly attributed to "eccentric contractions", or when muscles lengthen, disrupting the order of your muscle fibers and leading to eventual muscle soreness.

Tripped over on Out Of Context Science today, this is an informative and entertaining article regarding why you might have to pee when you're diving.  This raised the question; why are they called 'sea shanties'? A quick toss through wikipedia puts forth that it's probably derived from the French word chanter, or 'to sing'. There's a disambiguation for shanty, with the other entry belonging to shantytowns. In that instance, "Shanty may have derived from the Irish seantigh, pronounced shant-tí, meaning "old house". The synonym shack may also have passed from Gaelic into English from teach, pronounced chaċ, meaning "house"."