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When I grow up, I want to be exactly like Doris Russel, who still swims at the age of 90. Not only does she swim three-quarters of a mile every day, she actively competes at meets - swimming up to five events in a meet. This is the quote I like best:

"Something about that water is magic," she said. "Once you get in the pool, it's heaven, really heaven. And I love the smell of chlorine. When I get out of the pool, I smell my arms and smile. People think I'm crazy, but . . . it smells so clean."

I love it! I sniff my skin after swimming too! Go Madame Butterfly go!

Not my doing, but cool nonetheless. Note that all of the daytime shots are on I-39/90/94 through Wisconsin. They start after the nap at the newly renovated rest area by the Wisconsin River (~2:21)

Ohio to Minnesota Time Lapse from Dave Lucius. (via Boing Boing)

A few weeks ago, we got to attend the second night of the Banff Film Festival World Tour here in Madison. There were two films that have stuck with me simply for the determination of each of the adventurers.

In the first film, Dominic Gill rides a tandem bike from Point Barrow, Alaska to Puerto Toro, Chile. (Oddly, I tried to used Google Map's bike directions to go from point to point and it couldn't calculate a route.) He documents his adventure in the story, Take a Seat. With the tandem bike, he gets to pick up random people to help him; he even had a website that folks could sign up to ride with him. Overall, it takes him two years to complete the journey.

The second film chronicles Roz Savage as she was Rowing the Atlantic. She sets off on her journey completely solo. She has a satellite phone that breaks just over halfway through the journey. She has no other contact and no medical/supply drops. However, the British Royal Navy did stop by at one point. It takes her three months to complete the trip.

In the weeks since seeing the movies, I wonder and asked some folks, which one would you rather do? Two years of biking with the opportunity to stop and converse with locals, even convince them to ride your bike with you? Or, three months of solitude rowing yourself across an ocean? The results have been mixed. So, which would you rather do?

And when you're done here, be sure to check out the rest of the movies in the festival.

I caught the premiere of the 2010 Summer Movie trailers on HDNet's Trailerama. This was the only one that would be worth seeing (click thru to see it larger):

I had a hard time believing that the reporter missed the story within which she was reporting. Take a look for yourself and see if you catch it:

Out of 352 students, 18 wore an outfit that didn't fit the dress code. And 17 of those 18 - when choosing their own punishment - chose to be paddled, rather than take a three-day suspension. I'll repeat: 17 of 18 chose to be paddled. Now, it doesn't say that if you chose the paddling, you got to go to the prom, but I'm thinking that's not the case. I want interviews from the other 17 explaining why they chose the paddling? Isn't the paddling the story? WTF?

We were watching HGTV's House Hunter's International tonight about an American who quit his job in the US to move to Argentina, where he started a successful real estate business, and now needs a vacation home.

Curious about his business, I did a quick Google search and found his story on his website. Clicking around some more on his site, I found a link to renovations, in which he describes how he spent lots of time and effort on a house in Punte del Este. Turns out, it was the same house he "chose" on the TV show. Only the house they showed him (number 2 on the episode) was the same one he highlights on his website, post renovation! They just took down some pictures that he put up after he moved in. It was a total sham!

How many of the episodes are a big fake? Was the episode before about the wine loving couple moving back to Long Island to a new home right on a vineyard too good to be true? Makes you think, doesn't it? Stupid reality TV.

At the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour last night, we saw the following video, The Red Helmet, winner of the Nissan Outdoor Games. Please take the five minutes to view the fantastic film below:

After that, it makes you wonder: what's your red helmet?

Mine was a simple quote my brother said to me. I've likely said it before here, but I have to say it again. He said to me, "There will always be a first." So true, no matter what you do, you have to do it a first time. Your first swim, first kiss, first jump from a plane, first job interview, first triathlon, and so on.

So, what's your red helmet?

The New York Times looks at the deomographics of "The Great Recession" and the three inputs on how the economy will be redistributed:

All of these trends will serve to increase inequality. Yet I still think the Great Recession will eventually end up compressing the rungs on the nation's economic ladder. Why? For the same three fundamental reasons that the Great Depression did.

The first is the stock market crash. Clearly, it has hurt wealthy and upper middle-class families, who own the bulk of stock, more than others. In addition, thousands of high-paying Wall Street jobs -- jobs that have helped the share of income flowing to the top 1 percent of earners soar in recent decades -- will disappear.

Hard as it may be to believe, the crash will also help a lot of young families. The stocks that they buy in coming years are likely to appreciate far more than they would have if the Dow were still above 14,000. The same is true of future house purchases for the one in three families still renting a home.

The second reason is government policy. The Obama administration plans to raise taxes on the affluent, cut them for everyone else (so long as the government can afford it, that is) and take other steps to reduce inequality. Franklin D. Roosevelt did something similar and it had a huge effect.

Of course, these two factors both boil down to redistribution. One group is benefiting at the expense of another. Yes, many of the people on the losing end of that shift have done quite well in recent years, far better than most Americans. Still, the shift isn't making the economic pie any bigger. It is simply being divided differently.

Which is why the third factor -- education -- is the most important of all. It can make the pie larger and divide it more evenly.

That was the legacy of the great surge in school enrollment during the Great Depression. Teenagers who once would have dropped out to do factory work instead stayed in high school, notes Claudia Goldin, an economist who recently wrote a history of education with Mr. Katz.

I got witness one of the freakiest weather events in Wisconsin yesterday.

I had business in downtown Milwaukee. On my drive eastward into the city, I could see a large wall of clouds hovering over the lake, but it's perfectly sunny and clear everywhere else. As I got closer, more and more cars traveling in the opposite direction were covered in new snow; some had upwards of six inches. It was still sunny where I was driving. As I get closer to the lake, there's snow everywhere, a respectable covering of 3-4 inches. Cars in the parking lot were covered, some nearly 12 inches.

Then, for lunch, we go a bit further into downtown -- say about four blocks -- and it's a literal blizzard. Snow falling at a rate that would put several inches on the ground in an hour. We get our lunch to go and drive back to the office. Not a flake in the sky. During the next hour during a meeting, it would alternate between blizzard and sun, depending on the wind. At the end of the day, I had no snow on my car, but I'm sure that several inches had fallen upon it.

Gotta love the lake effect.

We've been finishing up a bunch of projects this week in anticipation of getting the house assessed to refinance our mortgage. In the closet that had the leak that started it all, I got around to finishing the mudding, while Kris finished painting a corner that had gone naked since we moved in almost three years ago. I repaired the wall from our new bathroom window and Kris painted it. I just got done replacing trim that the previous home owners seemed to have forgot. We hired someone to repair the wall damaged during our front door replacement. And then, we hired someone to fix the cracks and paint the high walls of our stairs.

Day one was promising with some cracks replaced, but others were missed. Day two included the missed cracks and sanding. I could tell they sanded because of the grime that was left behind. It was everywhere. No one closed doors to rooms that weren't being worked on, and it was obvious that no covers nor plastic had been placed at strategic locations. A chat with the painter revealed that they had in fact cleaned (at least that's what he said.) Nonetheless, I spent two hours cleaning up everything that was left behind.

This really makes sense given the outward appearance of our hired painter. Constantly smelling of smoke (you would think working in paint fumes would be enough) he doesn't carry himself like an organized man would. He nearly forgot his jacket within our house on a 10-degree night. Notes are lost or left at home. Paint colors are forgot.

Owning a home and keeping up with the maintenance teaches many lessons. The most recent is that if you interview a someone that doesn't look like they can keep their own house clean, chances are they won't keep yours clean either.