Thoughts on marathon training?

A poem by my late colleague Kenneth Koch, "You Want a Social Life, with Friends," courtesy of Josh Glenn:

You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What's true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn't time enough, my friends--
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends--
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day's end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.

"A fleshy, oddity-filled occupational subcategory"

I can't remember now where I first read about it, but Jeff Johnson's Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life in Ink was an impulse buy that didn't quite pan out for me - it is a good book, in its way, but not in my way, which I would have seen if I had looked at a page or two instead of someone else's description. I was expecting something truly gonzo and demented, with lots of grotesque details, but in fact it is more like something you would read in the New Yorker! More on Anthony Bourdain/David Sedaris lines, much less like Ken Bruen/Bukowski/etc. than I had hoped for....

Anyway, there was one chapter that I really did like - avert your eyes if you are squeamish about medical curiosities - these are my favorite three sentences, only the rest of the chapter is then mere elaboration rather than wonderfully grotesque piling-on of further examples - the chapter on oddities:

I'm not talking about the countless skin tags, warts, and missing toenails, or even the more exotic yellow, scale-encrusted dimple of an old bullet wound, or a gnarly third-world surgical scar. Boils, lesions, psoriasis, eczema, folliculitis, active volcano acne, blisters, whatever. These are nothing.

I'm talking about black sponges growing off the skin, flippers, stumps, spines that warped to accommodate a third kidney, hairy purple square-foot patches of alien flesh, a secondary anus.

On laziness

At the Science Times, Adele Conover profiles Anna Dornhaus:

Dr. Dornhaus is breaking new ground in her studies of whether the efficiency of ant society, based on a division of labor among ant specialists, is important to their success. To do that, she said, “I briefly anesthetized 1,200 ants, one by one, and painted them using a single wire-size brush, with model airplane paint — Rally Green, Racing Red, Daytona Yellow.”

After recording their behavior with two video cameras aiming down on an insect-size stage, she analyzed 300 hours of videotape of the ants in action. She discovered behavior more worthy of Aesop’s grasshopper than the proverbial industrious ants.

“The specialists aren’t necessarily good at their jobs,” she said. “And the other ants don’t seem to recognize their lack of ability.”

Dr. Dornhaus found that fast ants took one to five minutes to perform a task — collecting a piece of food, fetching a sand-grain stone to build a wall, transporting a brood item — while slow ants took more than an hour, and sometimes two. And she discovered that about 50 percent of the other ants do not do any work at all. In fact, small colonies may sometimes rely on a single hyperactive overachiever.

Why do some worker ants lean on their shovels and let the rest of the workers do all the work? “It’s like students living together — you’ll always find one will have a lower threshold for doing the washing up and will end up always doing it all,” she said.

Mongol 482

"I, Pencil"! (Courtesy of Brent.)