I did a short phone interview the other day with a reporter who wrote this article.

Meh.

Finished reading E. E. Cummings' memoir The Enormous Room about his time in a French prison during World War I. I'd never read anything but his poems. This was quite a good piece of writing, and you can find it from Dover for only three bucks. It's got a good bit of french in it, so if you are like me and only know a few french words, keep a dictionary nearby.

It is available to be read electronically at the awesome Gutenberg Project.

I'd be happy to pass my copy on to anyone who would like it.

This is perhaps my favorite passage:

Lily was a German girl, who looked unbelievably old, wore white, or once
white dresses, had a sort of drawling scream in her throat besides a
thick deadly cough, and floundered leanly under the eyes of men. Upon the
skinny neck of Lily a face had been set for all the world to look upon
and be afraid. The face itself was made of flesh green and almost
putrescent. In each cheek a bloody spot. Which was not rouge, but the
flower which consumption plants in the cheek of its favourite. A face
vulgar and vast and heavy-featured, about which a smile was always
flopping uselessly. Occasionally Lily grinned, showing several
monstrously decayed and perfectly yellow teeth, which teeth usually were
smoking a cigarette. Her bluish hands were very interestingly dead; the
fingers were nervous, they lived in cringing bags of freckled skin, they
might almost be alive.

She was perhaps eighteen years old.

The beautiful final paragraph is more cummings-like than the rest of the book:

The tall, impossibly tall, incomparably tall, city shoulderingly upward
into hard sunlight leaned a little through the octaves of its parallel
edges, leaningly strode upward into firm hard snowy sunlight; the noises
of America nearingly throbbed with smokes and hurrying dots which are men
and which are women and which are things new and curious and hard and
strange and vibrant and immense, lifting with a great ondulous stride
firmly into immortal sunlight....

I'm having fun making these animations.

2009 is effectively over, so I thought I'd check out my riding data and do some comparisons.

This year I rode 7004.52 km, more than any other year ever, and 999.91 km more than my previous record, set in 2007.

This year was especially good for riding. In addition to most km, I also set km records in every month except March, July, September and December. I also rode longer rides this year - check out these histograms from the last three years:

Highlights this year were certainly the Mt. Baker Hillclimb, and all of the riding I did with the UW Husky Cycling Team.

For 2010, I must do at least one 200 km ride. I should try to get that done before the end of June. Why not?

Hollywood Beach in Oxnard, California, on Christmas Eve, 2009.

I watched a lot of films this year. In particular, I watched a lot of Bergman and Kurosawa films in an attempt to see "all" of them. So there are a few in my favorites of 2009.

• It Rains on Our Love (1946)
  A possibly hard-to-find early Bergman film with good characters and story.
• Music In Darkness (1948)
  Another uncommon, early Bergman film. Mai Zetterling is memorably adorable in this.
• Miss Mend (1926)
  A four-hour silent thriller from the USSR? Yes!
• Baby Face (1933)
  Barbara Stanwyck is truly awesome in this.
• Heroes for Sale (1933)
  Quite possibly my favorite film of the year. Great story, great acting by Loretta Young and Aline MacMahon.
• The Quiet Duel (1949)
  My favorite Kurosawa this year.
• Johnny Got His Gun (1971)
  An excellent, powerful film.
• Man on Wire (2008)
  An excellent documentation of one of the greatest events of all time.
• The Women (1939)
  A terrific all-woman cast.
• A Thousand Clowns (1965)
  Excellent film about the big compromise required to live in the world. Jason Robards is great as the guy trying to stay true to himself. Barbara Harris is awesome as a woman awakening to a better way of viewing her existence. Great acting and writing all around, excellent cinematography, editing, use of music. Terrific.

Some time ago, I wrote this bit about a proof I had wanted to see for a long time, and my disappointment when I saw "it".

I don't know if that inspired them or not, but today I discovered that two fellows added this sequence to the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, with a link to my page.

I thought it amusing.

I also discovered that googling "worst proof ever" brings up my page as the first hit. Ha!

A three frame animation from Ingmar Bergman's early film, Prison.

For more of the same idea, go here.