Wired has a very entertaining story about two guys trying to drive from New York to LA in under 32 hours: The Pedal-to-the-Metal, Totally Illegal, Cross-Country Sprint for Glory
The gear is all bought and loaded. Twenty packs of Nat Sherman Classic Light cigarettes, check. Breath mints, check. Glucose and guarana, Visine and riboflavin, Gatorade and Red Bull, mail-order porta-pissoir bags of quick-hardening gel, check.
Randolph highway patrol sunglasses, 20-gallon reserve fuel tank, Tasco 8 x 40 binoculars fitted with a Kenyon KS-2 gyro stabilizer, military spec Steiner 7 x 50 binoculars, Hummer H1-style bumper-mounted L-3 Raytheon NightDriver thermal camera and LCD dashboard screens, front-and-rear-mounted sensors for a Valentine One radar/laser detector, flush bumper-mount Blinder M40 laser jammers, redundant Garmin StreetPilot 2650 GPS units, preprogrammed Uniden police radio scanners, ceiling-mount Uniden CB radio with high-gain whip antenna. Check. Check. Check.
It’s the exact opposite of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas*, but still proof that a well-equipped car can be the start of a cool story.
* The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab.
Someone has finally created a blog that is uncannily about all the things that I’m all about:
Stuff White People Like
Two interesting articles are quoted in Bruce Sterling’s blog:
Literary Censor and Armed Terrorist
New York, NY, January 28, 2008—Kemal Kerincsiz, the lawyer who tried to prosecute Orhan Pamuk, Hrant Dink, Elif Shafak, and several other writers for “insulting Turkishness,” has been arrested with 32 others following an investigation into a weapons cache discovered in Istanbul last year.
That investigation uncovered evidence of active plots to assassinate Pamuk, three politicians, and a prominent journalist and to stage a series of bombings in the coming year, according to reports appearing in the Turkish Press. One source, CNN Turk, has reported that Kerincsiz and twelve others have been charged with inciting people to armed revolt.
The Ergenekon Gang: It’s Turkey’s Susurluk Scandal All Over Again
“The investigation has found that the gang is linked to a clandestine phenomenon referred to as the “deep state” in Turkey that stages attacks using “behind-the-scene” paramilitary organizations such as Ergenekon to foment public opinion according its own political agenda. Ergenekon is the title of a legend that describes how Turks came into existence.
“This particular gang is suspected of involvement in a number of political attacks on individuals and institutions, including the murder of ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. At least eight of the suspects are retired from the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK).
“The suspects, who include retired military generals, journalists and underground bosses, have not yet been charged and are still under interrogation, but the police found a list of people the gang had planned to assassinate, including pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) deputies Ahmet Türk, Leyla Zana and Sebahat Tuncel; Diyarbakır Mayor Osman Baydemir; Nobel Prize-winning author Pamuk; and journalist Fehmi Koru, who is also a regular columnist for Today’s Zaman.
Pamuk was their next target
From http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/02/11/prison.boss/index.html, we have The Greatest Headline in the Entire History of Journalism:
Ex-Florida prison boss: Drunken orgies tainted system
The surprising thing about today wasn’t that I beat my Manhattan half-marathon time from two weeks ago by two minutes, but that I even ran. I have a minor muscle strain behind my left knee. I stayed out a little too late last night, had cocktail and food poisoning and woke up at 6 AM for the race feeling like death itself. I hit the lattes and Gatorade until I felt normal around mile 6. I started to bonk around mile 8. By mile 11, my legs were going, “WALK WALK WALK.” I kept at it, mostly to get it over with.
The course itself was a bizarre cloverleaf pattern where you constantly double backed over parts you covered earlier or run down long straightaways and then back up the other side. It was like running an MC Escher print.
What’s scaring me is that I don’t have much time to go before the Marathon and the half-Marathons feel like this.
Sarah Silverman delivers the news to Jimmy Kimmel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnVJZkDuVBM