A Drag

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Want to take your conditioning to the next level? Get yourself a Magic Carpet Sled, stat.

Then take it outside, load on a plate or two, and run with it as fast as you can. Even 400 meters is terrible, especially after you slam past the lactate threshold about a minute in, perhaps halfway through a lap. Rest and repeat – just once or twice more – and I promise you’ll be totally cooked.

All Hallows

In a brilliant parenting move, my mother used to let my brother and me sell her as much of our Trick-or-Treating haul as we were willing to part with. At a cost of what couldn’t have been more than $20 all in, we gleefully handed over at least half of the candy collected, reducing the odds of both our developing childhood diabetes and our making her totally crazy from weeks of sugar-addled antics.

Still, candy sales paled in comparison to the more crucial candy swapping: trading terrible stuff with friends who had poor candy taste, and who’d give you something you actually wanted to eat in exchange for pointless crap like Almond Joy and Mr. Goodbar.

So I particularly enjoyed this helpful instructional video, on how to trade candy like a pro:

Chorus

It’s amazing how big of an impact small improvements can make in your life.

Considering it’s just ten bucks, the SoundBot HD Shower Speaker sounds remarkably good, and has transformed an otherwise fairly forgettable ten minutes of my day into an off-key sing-along that invariably brightens my mood.

Apologies to my dogs who are forced to hear it, but there’s nothing like belting terrible, terrible Top 50 pop to start the day on the right foot. Selena Gomez, look out.

Brave

“The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all”
– Sir Richard Branson

Ise

In the Mie prefecture of Japan, you can find the Ise Jingu, a grand shrine to the Shinto goddess Amaterasu-omikami.

The shrine was built 2,022 years ago. But it was also built two years ago. Because the Ise shrine, which is made entirely of wood, is disassembled and then rebuilt anew every twenty years.

When the Ise shrine was being erected for the first time, Augustus was erecting his Roman Forum. Emperor Ping of the Han Dynasty was expanding the Weiyang Palace. In Africa, Natakamani, King of Kush, was planning his pyramid in Meroe. And in Mexican cities like Uxmal, the Maya were busy constructing temples of their own.

By now, you can still find the majestic ruins of all of those structures. But you can’t find the Roman Empire, the Han Dynasty, the Kush or the Maya; they’ve all gone extinct.

Two centuries back, when the Ise Shrine was built the first time, it was presided over by an order of Shinto monks. Shinto monks from the same lineage preside over the shrine today.

Nearly every culture has a history of grand architecture, of constructing impressive places they think will establish their perpetual permanence. But, perhaps, it’s not the structures that make a culture permanent, and the building of them that does. Held together by their purpose, by the regular schedule of care, of destruction and rebuilding, the Shinto monks have continued forward for two millennium. Unlike those extinct civilizations, their destination is impermanent. But their journey is perpetual.

Pitcher

Po-chang needed a master for his new monastery, so he called all his monks together and set a pitcher before them saying, “Without calling it a pitcher, tell me what it is.”

The head monk replied, “You couldn’t call it a piece of wood.”

The cook walked up and kicked over the pitcher spilling the water and walked away.

The cook was put in charge of the new monastery.

Some People Call Me Maurice

While all the cool kids have, for years, been streaming rather than purchasing music, and though I’ve long had a Spotify subscription that I occasionally used to find tracks that popped to mind, I’d long listened primarily to the overly large collection of music I actually owned – much of it dating back to ripping MP3s of my now-retired CD collection back in the later 90’s and early 00’s – rather than stuff from the cloud.

With the launch of Apple Music, however, I’ve been listening to streaming music first and foremost. And though it’s occasionally led me to repeat plays of some rather suspect choices (no, seriously, “Trap Queen” is an excellent song!), it’s also allowed me to wander through a bunch of choices – some of which I’d even owned – that I might otherwise have ignored or missed.

Today, I spent six hours and seventeen minutes straight listening to John William’s soundtracks for all three original Star Wars films, sequentially. And, holy crap, is that some awesome music.

I mean, sure, it’s basically Holst repurposed, with a Wagnerian leitmotif structure and a liberal pulling from E. W. Korngold. But, seriously, that’s some compelling, magical stuff.

In particular, and in a way that you rarely hear in scores recorded one-off with a studio orchestra, the London Symphony is so amazingly tight, in tune and synchronized across articulation and volume. Above it all floats Maurice Murphy’s principal trumpet – alternatively soaring majestically and cutting incisively. It’s everything an amateur classical trumpeter might aspire to be.

If you haven’t listened to those scores – and, ideally, to all of them one after another – take advantage of the power of streaming music to do so. If that doesn’t make you fired up to vacuum, sort files or clean your bathroom, nothing will.