Zen and the Art of Speedskating

Recently, I made a post called “Speedskating on Enceladus” that was my entry to a contest hosted over at the wonderful blog Last Girl on Earth

Go figure, my eccentric vision of interplanetary sports fun WON!!! (this has been a pretty good year for me, when it comes to winning).

The contest was called “Giving good Lei” and was originally started at the Hawaii based blog Bitchitude.

The rules of the contest stipulate that I need to host the next contest (there is one every month) and the blogger who wins the one held here, then gets to host the next one…

However the readership of this blog is pretty unique in that there are not too many bloggers within it (in the regular commenters, I count under a half-dozen). It seems to be mostly members of the worldwide skate tribe, some friends & family, and a collection of good folks who somehow enjoy the writing/pictures that I post. In many ways its not surprising that the skate crowd has limited “crossover” with the obsessive tech crowd.

To enter the contest, you need to have a blog… because if you win you get to host the next contest. So I am going to contact the second place finisher, The dog’s breakfast, and see if she is interested in hosting it over there… She has a more typical blog-possesing audience, and would get more entries.

Although I am sure this creative bunch could come up with LOTS of unique entries, when we get the next contest organized/started, I will direct you over there.

It’s a beautiful day here in Salt Lake City. It might get up to 70+ degrees, although I should be relaxing and not training, I can hear the bike calling me. So I am resisting the two-wheeled attraction and taking the dog for a long walk.

Here is the view down one of the steep streets that make up the avenues where I live. Although the view doesn’t really strike my Manhattan-born wife too much, and the dog is more interested in what her nose is telling her, every time I walk Lilly I look over this and simply marvel….

Today one can see all the way down the valley to its end around 30 miles distant. The beginnings of the Wasatch range are on the left.

Here are some unique factoids lying within this photo:

When Salt Lake was first designed, the mormon city planners mandated that the main streets be large enough so that a 4 horse team & carriage could make a U-turn. You can see one of these massive 4 lane thoroughfares, 700 east, pointing right down the valley.

If you had magic vision that could see 1,000 times more detail in each pixel, and could see through those mountains on the left, you would see skiers in T-shirts whooping it up in the spring conditions at the resorts.

Also if your magic vision could detect the level of Mormonism in the roughly 1.2 million people you are looking over right now, with Mormons showing up as red, and infidels like myself as blue; what you would see is screaming blue all around you, and extending for about two miles from where your are standing. There would be a thin line of spotty blue along the base of the mountains (the skiers & outdoorsy types living at the mouths of the canyons) then pretty much 80% red for the rest of this field of vision, with the west valley areas to the right just off the picture to the right, glowing radioactively red!!

If your glasses also detected language & ethnicity, the 19% of the city’s population that identifies themselves as Hispanic, would be in a band separating the red & blue areas, and off to the right on the other side of the interstate. There also would be pockets of Native Americans, Tongans, and lots of Samoans visible (those 3 groups add up to 3% of Salt Lake’s population.)

If your magic glasses could also detect relative levels of obesity, according to recent studies, it would pretty much also exactly follow the blue-red divide. The avenues zip code where this picture is taken from, is the skinniest in Utah, whereas the more religious a zip code gets, on average, the chubbier.

Personally, I am currently winning my battle vs off season weight gain! It must be the zip code I live in ; )

More statistics & history can be found on Wikipedia’s Salt Lake City pages.

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