(No, this isn’t real. But let’s be honest–this is how we all feel.)

(Sorry for the profanity. Hope your children didn’t see this and burn their innocent little retinas.)

1. The current economic crises has left me searching for words
2. I just ran the Twin Cities Marathon

Let’s focus for a moment on the more positive item from above.

This was my second marathon in as many years. My first was the 2007 Chicago Marathon, where we ran through 95 degree heat until the race was “officially” canceled (I still finished). This year was the opposite–50 degrees and rain for the first half of the race. While I wouldn’t mind skipping the rain, this was actually pretty decent weather for running. It was easy to stay cool and hydrated.

My goal for the race was 4 hours. I was on pace all the way through mile 20, at which point I had a bit of a blowout. I felt some pains that I’ve never felt in 10 years of running and made the judgement call to walk a bit (in hopes of preventing catastrophic knee damage). I came across the finish line at 4:11:03.

The good news : my legs have mostly recovered.

The bad news : since I haven’t yet achieved my goal time, I’ll have to run another!

This simple slide show explains it nicely. This has been circulating the interwebs for awhile (hat tip to TWG for sharing it with me) but it’s still brutally funny. Funny but true.

You will probably have to view in full screen mode to read it. Or click through and download as a PDF. Enjoy!

You don’t need a science degree to understand that this is not sustainable.

I’ve noticed a strange trend in the public dialogue (particularly in the U.S.) about sustainability. Most people take the fact that living sustainably is difficult in our society and use that to discredit the very premise that sustainability is important or a legitimate concern.

In short, we’ve all got our heads in the sand and we’re proud of it!

Take, for example, gasoline prices. Burning gasonline is a highly unsustainable activity. Not only are we running out of oil, but the contribution to CO2 levels in the atmosphere is accelerating global climate change. In other words, we should probably find a way to burn less gas. In spite of this, politicians are scheming for ways to drive down prices and thereby encourage burning more gas. Huh?

It’s never going to be easy to convert our high-energy lifestyle to a low-energy mode. It’s never going to be cheap. But we had better start now while we still have a little bit of capital left to spend! (Oh wait, I think we just lost that this week as well.)

Screenshot from jcrew.com, Sept 22 2008

I thought this was a little strange, so I did some research. Yawah is a software company that does dynamic image resizing–great for customers like J.Crew.

Evidently, the web firm hired for jcrew.com got a little sloppy and either used an unlicensed copy or forgot to turn off the watermark feature. Either way, I’m giving them a big wag of the finger for releasing sloppy code into production.

Shame shame.

SustainLane is a new website that uses contributions submitted by citizens around the country to rank cities on 16 attributes of sustainability. By these measures, Milwaukee ranks #12. This is an improvement from #16 two years ago.

Given the empahsis on sustainability in the city and at the state level, I would expect this ranking to improve year over year. We might not catch Portland, but I bet we could make the top 10 in the next decade.

For reference, here are the current rankings for 2008:

1. Portland, OR
2. San Francisco, CA
3. Seattle, WA
4. Chicago, IL
5. New York, NY
6. Boston, MA
7. Minneapolis, MN
8. Philadelphia, PA
9. Oakland, CA
10. Baltimore, MD

On Milwaukee!

In September 2008, Republicans lost their claim that deregulation is good. The test results are in and they're conclusive.