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![Urban Tribes [cover]](http://www.consolationchamps.com/pics/urbantribes.gif)
Today marks the beginning of another Virtual Book Tour. This time around, it’s Ethan Watters’ book, Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment (buy it from Powells.com). I’ll be participating this time, but haven’t yet received the book. Come back on Thursday November 14 to welcome guest blogger Ethan Watters himself as he comments on many of the sources he used for the book. It promises to be at least 4.7x as interesting as anything you may have read here recently.
Lots of folks running these days. Ever since Brooke and I started back in the spring, I’ve noticed a lot of people are either taking up running for the first time, or returning to it. This past week, the NYC Marathon boasted, in addition to many thousands of other runners, the fabulous P.Diddy/Puffy/Puff Daddy/Sean Combs running his first marathon. Hmm…the name of his site makes me wonder if one day he’s going to seek political office.
Now, I see that another world-famous New Yorker (of decidedly more recent residence, to be fair) is running for charity. I found her exhortation “don’t be scared off by the ‘God’ in the organization’s name” sort of funny, though. Why are people scared of God? 🙂
On a related note, I wish I could somehow incorporate my boring (but more frequently updated) running blog into this one without making Consolation Champs even less interesting.
UPDATE: I just saw that Jason Kottke was blogging the marathon in real time, tracking Diddy against blogger Maciej Ceglowski. Sadly, rapper beat blogger, proving again that nice guys finish last.
UPDATE 2: Maciej has posted a fabulously long and interesting account of his marathon experience!
Dateline Hollywood: “Non-hipster denied entrance to ‘Lost in Translation'”
This site is hilarious. It’s like The Onion but without all that serious political satire that makes my head hurt. I especially like the fact that they have a “printer-friendly” and a “printer-antagonistic” version of each article. Somebody at Dateline Hollywood really knows their CSS stuff! (via boingboing)
Almost more impressive than the upcoming 9-disc special edition of The Alien Quadrilogy is the exhaustive (and as of this writing, not yet completed) review over on The Digital Bits.
If you grew up in Canada in the 1960s or 1970s, you will know what I’m talking about. For those who didn’t, Hinterland Who’s Who was a series of one-minute films shown on television between commercials. If I remember right, sometimes we even saw them at school. They were brief introductions to some of Canada’s wildlife species, delivered by a very boring narrator. I’m sure almost every Canadian comedian has spoofed them at some point in his/her life. Well, not only is the Canadian Wildlife Service going to produce new clips, but it’s put up a great web site containing all of the old ones. Those first few notes on the flute always take me back to the days when I thought I’d see ptarmigans and snowy owls and roseate terns just outside my window.