So Brave, Young, and Handsome

I can't say exactly why the book "Peace Like a River" touched me as much as it did. But it was a really really good read. So when I saw that Leif Enger had another book out, "So Brave, Young, and Handsome," I was very excited.

And then I happened to see news that he'll be speaking at Carleton and doing a book-signing. The really big news, though--it's set in Northfield! Sweet. Amazon's sending it post-haste.

Scarlett Johansson at Carleton?

So these past two days I've suddenly gotten a bunch of traffic from search engines looking for the phrase "Scarlett Johansson Carleton College." It's not surprising that Scarlett or Carleton are mentioned on my blog--I like them both very much. But why were so many people in Minnesota searching for this term?

I asked the Carleton e-mail listserv, and according to one person, she is going to be at Carleton tomorrow in support of Barack Obama.

Um ... can you say totally unfair? Scarlett, Tacoma is where Obama really needs your celebrity endorsement! Visit us here! Make your case!

I'll be watching for some sort of confirmation, which I haven't found yet. Save that she is in St. Paul, MN, tonight.

We got Kerry and St. Paul got Scarlett. Feeling like we got the short end of that stick.

UPDATE: According to someone at the Carleton Bookstore, Scarlett will be Sayles at 1:00 to rally people. Once again .... dang.

UPDATE II: Here's a slideshow of Scarlett at Carleton from the Carleton news page.

I asked a Presidential candidate a question!

Who knew? But I only belated realized (ie, today) that in October of 2001, I asked Bill Richardson a question at Carleton. He was the Carleton convocation speaker, and just a month after 9/11 and during the height of the anthrax mail scare, I asked him what the UN's response would be in the anthrax had indeed come from Iraq (he's a former ambassador to the UN, if you didn't know).

Anyway, somewhere between then and now, I lost the connection between the Presidential candidate and the guy who came to Carleton. That puts me at about 2/14 for seeing this year's crop of Presidential candidates in person. Bill Richardson and my man Barack Obama. I'm still an Obama in '08 guy, but I thought was kind of cool that I got to ask Bill Richardson a question.

Carleton and the Environment

Carleton has long been into worrying about energy and pollution. Apparently they and St. Olaf compete for a week in the spring to see who can save more energy than the other school. Students will camp in the Arb, classes are taught with the windows open and the lights off, they really get into it. Carleton even built a windmill to produce energy (St. Olaf later followed suit).

Their conservation has spread to Reunion weekend. Everything we used to each lunch of dinner with either recyclable or compostable, including our silverware which was called spudware because it was made from potatoes. No foolin'. We used potato cutlery (suprisingly strong, by the way).

So thanks for introducing me to Spudware, Carleton. Your biodegradable cutlery was very fun.

Live from Minnesota

As it happened, my 5 year Carleton reunion conflicted with the opening weekend of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch." I chose the one I'd already bought the ticket for.

Save for the 10:00 hour each night as I fretted about how the show was going, it was good to be back in Minnesota. I've been back something like once a year since I graduated, but this was different because there were so many people I recognized there with me (roughly 270 from the class of 2002, or around 50%).

That said, I did find myself missing T-Town, if for no other reason than it's not crazy humid and hot there. When I arrived late at night, I remember thinking "Yeah, I could see myself living in Minnesota again." That beautiful thought went away around 9:00 the next morning.

Air conditioning! I need air conditioning!

Socialized Bike Rentals

When I was at Carleton, students created "Yellow Bikes" based on ideas from Amsterdam, Portland, OR, and other cities where they refurbished bikes and put them out for general use, cost-free.

As happened elsewhere, the Carleton bikes were in varying degrees of functionality and were frequently death traps waiting to happen. They were too small, the brakes didn't work, the seat was sharp, etc.

Paris seems to have come up with a novel public/private partnership to get around the problem but still provide bikes to its residents. They'll put 20,000 bikes on the street by the end of the year, which can be checked out from one of 1,450 locations. If you check one out, it'll cost you nothing for the first half hour, and each half hour after that it gets more expensive.

Their idea is not only to get people out of cars and taxis, but also some studies have shown that the quickest way around Paris is by bicycle.

It'll be interesting to see how well the whole thing works out. I don't know how effective it would be for Tacoma. Too many hills downtown? Maybe with a gondola going up 11th and 15th ...

The Carleton Mustache Club

Sometime during my tenure at Carleton College--I am going to hestitantly estimate it at my junior year--the Carleton Mustache Club came into being. I was never a member, but many of my friends were, including a particular roommate.

Today they have achieved fame with an article in the Chicago Tribune. You can read more about the club on their official website here. (May I say that I love their t-shirts, by the way.)

If you enjoy Carleton lore, as I am sure you all do, I would say that one of the finest feats of the Mustache Club was to take a black and white picture of themselves with some crazy moustaches and old-time Carleton gear and mount it in the Burton dining hall along with many other pictures from the early 20th Century. I believe it is still there, blending in perfectly with the old pictures. Check it out and you'll see some 2002 alums looking like they graduated in '32.

Go Mustachios! You guys are awesome.

Inherit the Wind

I've been blogging about wind power pretty regularly ever since Carleton installed a wind turbine on their campus. I find turbines fascinating to watch (they're not exactly windmills, as they don't mill anything, but I do think windmill is much better sounding than wind turbine). They also seem to have no downside. Even their biggest problem, that they tend to kill a lot of birds, has been solved by slowing the rotating speed of the blades.

Wind seems to be coming into its own right now. Washington is the 7th biggest state for generating power from wind. And this article in the NYT today pretty effectively argues that industrializing countries like India and China can choose wind and skip the pollution of coal.

I should mention how backward Sen. Kennedy is on the issue. He's opposing the Nantucket Sound wind farm, on the grounds that it hurts his view, I suppose. Both his Republican challengers for the Senate (not like they're likely to win) are in favor of the wind farm and the Democratic candidate for governor is also in favor. He also swept the primary on the Cape and on the Islands. Putting the wind farms at sea is even better than on land: the likelihood of killing birds is much smaller and the wind is much more regular.

(image of the Carleton wind turbine by David Dyer-Bennet, a Carl alum. Click to make it bigger)

Around the Planet

Carleton College (my Minnesota alma mater)has launched an interesting online service called Planet Carleton. Carls--whether alum, student, or faculty--can get their blog's RSS feed onto the site (after a quick review by a staffer) who then adds the feed to their site.

It creates a hodge-podge of information that has no connection between the posts, except that its author is somehow tied to the school. This is one of the great joys of reading the page, of course. It's similar to reading the Top Stories of the Day on the NYT page on the Trib. It's a great way to get news and information that you otherwise probably never would have seen. Or notes about a freshman's new dorm.

This probably isn't that interesting if you're not a Carl. But if you're not, try to find something like it (like The Most E-mailed List on the Times, for example). It's a good way to learn a few new things every day.