Bike w/benefits

Governments should give a tax credit to owners of bicycles, as well as building cycle paths connecting neighbourhoods in a city
(https://twitter.com/6tropics/status/1393262145874321411?s=02)

How Exercise May Help Us Flourish

Physical activity can promote a sense of purpose in life, creating a virtuous cycle that keeps you moving.

Our exercise habits may influence our sense of purpose in life and our sense of purpose may affect how much we exercise, according to an interesting new study of the reciprocal effects of feeling your life has meaning and being often in motion. The study, which involved more than 18,000 middle-aged and older men and women, found that those with the most stalwart sense of purpose at the start were the most likely to become active over time, and vice versa...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/well/move/exercise-mental-health-flourishing.html?smid=em-share

WJ & Karamazov

"James’s rejection of a plan (and a Planner) is like Ivan Karamazov’s. James declares it impossible to accept “a world in which Messrs Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’ utopias should all be outdone and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture.”"

"William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson  https://a.co/bvWELwM

Happy Opening Day!

 Have you heard about Sidd Finch?

 

SI...Plimpton

The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch
He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd's deciding about yoga—and his future in baseball

...a 28-year-old, somewhat eccentric mystic named Hayden (Sidd) Finch. He may well change the course of baseball history. On St. Patrick's Day, to make sure they were not all victims of a crazy hallucination, the Mets brought in a radar gun to measure the speed of Finch's fastball. The model used was a JUGS Supergun II. It looks like a black space gun with a big snout, weighs about five pounds and is usually pointed at the pitcher from behind the catcher. A glass plate in the back of the gun shows the pitch's velocity—accurate, so the manufacturer claims, to within plus or minus 1 mph. The figure at the top of the gauge is 200 mph. The fastest projectile ever measured by the JUGS (which is named after the oldtimer's descriptive—the "jug-handled" curveball) was a Roscoe Tanner serve that registered 153 mph. The highest number that the JUGS had ever turned for a baseball was 103 mph, which it did, curiously, twice on one day, July 11, at the 1978 All-Star game when both Goose Gossage and Nolan Ryan threw the ball at that speed. On March 17, the gun was handled by Stottlemyre. He heard the pop of the ball in Reynolds's mitt and the little squeak of pain from the catcher. Then the astonishing figure 168 appeared on the glass plate. Stottlemyre remembers whistling in amazement, and then he heard Reynolds say, "Don't tell me, Mel, I don't want to know...." (continues)

The answer

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a21531-rd?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker

Douglas Adams' note of writing encouragement

"Writing isn't so bad really when you get through the worry. Forget about the worry, just press on. Don't be embarrassed about the bad bits. Don't strain at them," The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author wrote to himself. "Writing can be good. You attack it, don't let it attack you. You can get pleasure out of it. You can certainly do very well for yourself with it!"

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/22/douglas-adams-note-to-self-reveals-author-found-writing-torture?__twitter_impression=true&s=02

Enlightenment

You could even call it Enlightenment. https://t.co/r2OcszTdND

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) March 19, 2021

"Girls don't like it when a boy gets philosophical, Chuck"

 

"How to Practice" by Ann Patchett

What I had didn't surprise me half as much as how I felt about it.

I started thinking about getting our house in order when Tavia's father died. Tavia, my friend from early childhood (and youth, and middle age, and these years on the downhill slalom), grew up in unit 24-S of the Georgetown condominiums in Nashville. Her father, Kent, had moved there in the seventies, after his divorce, and stayed. Over the years, we had borne witness to every phase of his personal style: Kent as sea captain (navy peacoat, beard, pipe), Kent as the lost child of Studio 54 (purple), Kent as Gordon Gekko (Armani suits, cufflinks, tie bar), Kent as Jane Fonda (tracksuits, matching trainers), Kent as urban cowboy (fifteen pairs of boots, custom-made), and finally, his last iteration, which had, in fact, underlain all previous iterations, Kent as cosmic monk (loose cotton shirts, cotton drawstring pants—he'd put on weight).

Each new stage in his evolution brought a new set of interests: new art, new cooking utensils, new reading material, new bathroom tile. Kent taught drama at a public high school, and, on his schoolteacher's salary, in the years before the Internet, he shopped the world from home—mala prayer beads carved in the shape of miniature human skulls, an assortment of Buddhas to mix in with his wooden statues of saints (Padre Pio in his black cassock, as tall as a five-year-old). He laminated the receipts and letters of authenticity that came with his purchases and filed them away, along with handwritten prayers, in zippered leather pouches... (continues)

“The Last Days of Immanuel Kant,” a Physical Comedy of the Philosophical Life

...The film depicts Kant's famous punctuality by way of his daily stroll through a park lane: a governess times the end of her entrusted children's play, and a foreman the end of his workers' break, according to when the philosopher passes by (followed by Lampe, a dozen steps back, who must carry a parasol whether or not it's needed). Unyielding in his habits, his senses infinitesimally calibrated to register changes of routine, of temperature, and of environment, he's similarly attuned to his own metabolism and the minutiae of his physical state, all with an overarching philosophical principle at stake, the maintenance of health in view of the preservation of life—and the pursuit of his colossal intellectual project, which, in his late seventies, remained in full swing... Ultimately, "The Last Days" is a movie about the body winding down while the mind is fully ablaze... New Yorker