Kelly and I are off to Barcelona, Spain today! SDF->ATL->BCN. We’ll arrive 11AM local time tomorrow. Barcelona is the cultural capital of Spain – imagine the Montreal of Spain – as the predominant language of Barcelona isn’t Spanish, it’s Catalan. It’s a fairly old city with a Barri Gotic (Gothic Neighborhood) that dates back to the Roman era. Winding streets and open-air markets galore.

Gaudi’s magnum opus, The Sagrada Familia

Barcelona at it’s center is an old town with great ancient architecture, and (as seen above) great modern architecture. It’s a cultural wonderland with plenty of delicious food and sights to see. We will also be present for the Festival of the Mercè – Barcelona’s annual fall kick-off. Kelly has also arranged that we will run the Cursa de la Mercè, a 10k (6 mile) road race through the center of town. Other runs of note include the correfoc (fire run) which appears during the Festival de la Mercè and is a parade of incendiary insanity. Devils and dragons parade through the streets shoot fire over the parade participants. Yeah – that’s awesome.

Tapas at Cal Pep

Did I mention the food??? Tapas are a big draw in Barcelona, and Cal Pep is the place to go (see above). Also, there are a number of delicious chocolate bars and being right next to the Mediterranean, the seafood is ridiculously fresh.

We’ll be walking quite a bit, likely biking and maybe taking a train or two! So, expect photos and daily travelogues – Wifi is pretty all-round there in the city center of Barca. We’ve been putting together a Google Spreadsheet of Things to Do Around Barca. Plenty of links and such in there if you want to dive in.

Listening to National Public Radio during my drive this morning (as I normally do) I heard the last installment of a series running on the Morning Edition program – the audio diary of a young dentist in Iraq detailing his daily struggle to live in Iraq.

The previous 4 installments ranged from the jubilation of Iraq’s win in the Asian Cup Football tournament to his feeling over his parent’s insistence that he leave Iraq – and them – for a country where being a doctor will not get you killed.

The final chapter was aired this morning – Iraqi Dentist Learns of Torture, Death of Friend. A good friend of his is abducted and ransomed. $70,000 is the fee, which is negotiated down to $20,000. Not a paltry sum by any means, and one that must be scrounged from neighbors and family members. The ransom is paid – an unthinkable action if it were to happen in the United States – and after a week or more of waiting to hear from the kidnappers… his friend is dumped in a local market, beheaded, tortured and broken.

Just imagine for a moment living in such a world. A world where doctors live in fear and grown men are snatched from the streets by gangs of men. NPR reported that 650 Iraqis in August alone were killed in Baghdad in this manner.

In the end, the dentist attempts to leave Iraq for Jordan, but upon landing in Amman, he is denied asylum and is put on a plane back to Iraq, where he is forced into hiding, where he remains today.

All of this serves to remind me that despite my own personal struggles – I am blessed in comparison – and it strikes me like a hammer every time I think of it.

Keeping with the previous two posts about quiet flight, I bring you the OpenSky Aircraft Project – the best anime-inspired jet-powered personal sailplane project I could find on the Internet.

You can find a couple of test-flight videos on the YouTube:

June 2006

September 2006

But I think the most compelling video is this one: How to Make OpenAircraft M01, a compilation of hundreds of photos of the design, prototyping and testing. It’s a QuickTime file, so you can load it and hit pause and use your arrow keys to flip between the frames. Awesome stuff!

OpenSky @ Wikipedia

From the article Solar plane en route to everlasting flight:

For the first time a solar-powered plane has flown through two consecutive nights, UK defence research company QinetiQ claims. In a secretive weekend mission, their craft Zephyr took off from a US military base in New Mexico and landed 54 hours later.

Check the handlaunch!

Simpler, lighter, more efficient. Exciting stuff. Soon I think we’ll see one of these things fly ’round the world, following the sun, perhaps… but then again, maybe not!

Team Holey Calamity represent!

Back at the end of August, Power Creative hosted it’s first-annual Cornhole tournament to benefit the Light the Night Walk for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. We raised some $2000+ dollars for the cause – thanks to the 40+ two-man teams that signed up. A bracket-style tournament thus ensued with 13 different cornhole sets set up on Power’s campus. Fried chicken and sweet tea was served and we had a good old time.

Wait a minute… CORNHOLE?!

For those of you who don’t know what this is… it’s essentially horseshoes with beanbags (filled with corn). You throw at a hole in a 2′ wide, 4′ long board with a hole in it, 27′ away. Three points in the hole, one point on the board. It’s a tailgating/NASCAR thing. I had long eschewed it, but it’s a simple game to learn, hard to master. Like bocce!

l to r: Me, tossin’; Jackson Cooper and Jennifer Zink; The Winners! Andy Stillwagon and Glenn Goodman

I partnered up with Charlie “Chadillionaire” Dillon and thus was formed team “Holey Calamity” (from Handsome Boy Modeling Schools’ So… How’s your girl? album). I even fashioned my own cornhole set (from these printable cornhole plans!) with our team logo (see shirts above). We’d only played cornhole once or twice before, but we managed to take 2nd in the tournament! It was great fun and I’m looking forward to it again next year for sure.

Photos: 2007.08.30 – Cornhole at Work Gallery

Our friends, Chuck and Danna Pearsall, have welcomed their second child, Anna Catherine Pearsall, into this world yesterday at 12:45 PM. 7lbs, 19″ long. Congratulations, Pearsalls! May this childe be as lovely as the first.

I do love a good bike-ride (as mentioned earlier), and Kelly and I have been more active on two wheels lately. In fact (we are now entering what literaturists call an “aside“) I competed in my first-ever triathlon (swim, bike, run) at E. P. Tom Sawyer Park (view the results), and it was great “fun” – mostly because I’ve never swum or biked competitively before, and I enjoy doing both.

In any case (he said, leaving the aside), Kelly and I have been riding in Mayor Jerry’s Healthy Hometown Hike and Bike twice a year for the last couple of years. The Hike and Bike now has the honor of being the “the largest non-competitive community bike ride in the United States with some 3,000+ riders. This past weekend, we rode the 2007 Labor Day edition of this ride, and as per usual it was a casual affair involved cyclists of literally every stripe.

The Mayor has done a great job making Louisville a more “bike-friendly” place over the past few years – with events like the Hike and Bike and with laws that put bike lanes into all road projects. Louisville is also blessed to have an active and avid cycling community with one of the “most progressive cycling clubs in the MidWest” leading the charge. In short, cycling’s outlook in Louisville is pretty bright.

If there is one sour thing I have noticed with my increasing (but still fairly minor) involvement in cycling is this: rage and hostility between cyclists and drivers. And mostly from cyclists to drivers!

Perhaps it’s to be expected. Cyclists on the road are smaller, slower, largely defenseless and generally misunderstood. It’s natural that they’d bristle at a perceived wrong – and they’d be right to be defensive. After all there have been some celebrated incidents of late – one involving a death on the Second Street bridge and another with pizza mogul “Papa John” Schnatter being hospitalized in a road-rage incident. Both of those and many other incidents are borne out of one thing: ignorance.

It’s all too easy to get bent out of shape when someone cuts you off or passes by too closely. It very well could be your life if you are the one on the bike. But too many times have I seen an inappropriate response by a cyclist to a driver – and by inappropriate I mean “an action that will not serve the cyclist in the end”. This could be, but is not limited to: flipping someone the bird, yelling at them or calling the cops. Those are things that I’ve never witnessed, though. I have witnessed other actions that I still think are inappropriate, which I lump into the following statement: “generally being a self-righteous ass”. No, that isn’t going to help cycling. In fact, it will only further the stereotype that riders on tricked-out bikes in skin-tight gear that are hollering in the passenger window of a car about traffic laws are holier-than-thou aristocrats that believe they are endowed with some sort of civic blessing.

But, like I said, it’s reasonable to understand someone to be defensive to the point of cruelty when riding a bike. It’s maybe 200 pounds of bike and rider versus 3000 lbs of car and driver. The cyclist is the loser, always. To that end, cyclists are very aware of their rights – it’s the only defense they’ve got out there. Many (though certainly not all) drivers see cyclists as a nuisance and will give them little quarter on the road. These are the ones that require care. And by “care” I do not mean a tongue-lashing or a rude gesture. Flaunting your knowledge of traffic laws never got anyone anywhere in a relationship – and before you get a chance to think “what does dating have to do with the road?”, I’ll tell you it’s everything. Every little “hello” wave and every little “Good morning” you give to someone on the road betters the relationship between that driver and cyclists in general. Every angry confrontation at the stoplight does neither any good.

Cycling is headed in the right direction here in Louisville, headed by a cycling-friendly government and the interest of a number of great and impassioned cyclists. Don’t take a step backwards by being a self-righteous jerk. It’s a big world filled with a lot of people who don’t know cycling as well as you do, and in the end you’ll make more friends with honey than vinegar any day. I know this because I like the cyclists who are friendly and dislike those who aren’t – and I am a cyclist.

The late 1970s were an interesting time for alternative methods of flight. The day before I was born, August 17th, 1978, the first trans-Atlantic flight by balloon was completed. One year earlier in 1977, Paul MacCready had won the Kremer Prize by creating the first-ever human-powered airplane, the Gossamer Condor.

Two years later in 1979, MacCready would make aeronautical history with the Gossamer Albatross by crossing the English Channel. The achievement was substantial, but not in the same direction as previous achievements of “bigger, higher, faster”, but “lighter, more efficient, stronger”. MacCready studied the flight of birds and was himself a sailplane champion, and this informed his designs. In an age of fighter jets and big airliners, he showed that flight could still be a very personal achievement.

NPR Obituary w/ pilot of the Gossamer Albatross

Paul B. MacCready @ Wikipedia

Excellent short bio @ MIT, with video

Kelly shot me a text message today that said it all:

i has a blog

She’s been kicking around the idea of doing an Ironman Triathlon for a while now – and she was a volunteer for the Louisville Ironman that was held last weekend. She’s been really struggling with whether she should do it or not, especially after working the medical tent and seeing what people look like after some 16 hours of physical exertion. It’s pretty intense! But, oddly at the same time the Ironman is very, very seductive.

I wandered down to the finish line on Sunday and it was extremely exciting and worse still – inspiring! Families cheering on their athletes, people breaking down into tears upon finishing, people collapsing into the arms of the legion of volunteers. I’ve been to marathons before and have completed a half-marathon, but I’ve never, ever seen anything on this level of commitment before. And now, it would seem, Kelly is leaning towards doing it… and that scares me a little.

Kelly and I have done “sprint” triathlons- .5 mile swim, 14 mile bike, 3 mile run – and those are OK. We both finish in under 2 hours. But an Ironman is something completely different. 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike and a full marathon – 26 miles! The time cutoff is about 17 hours. That’s longer than most people are awake on any given day.

Kelly’s other option is to do a half-Ironman distance, which I personally think is a better choice, given her relatively short experience with triathlons – but you know you can’t keep Kelly down when it comes to being healthy. It’s a special kind of crazy, I think.

Whatever her decision, you can track Kelly’s progress here: Wanna Tri Some?

Last weekend my soaring club, the Louisville Area Soaring Society, held a contest – the 2007 Mid-American Soaring Championship. Normally it’s held in Lexington (as has been so for the past 30-plus years), but they’ve had some issues with their flying field and we stepped in to give them a hand this year.

The Mid-Am (as it is known) is also part of a “series” of soaring events located around the Ohio Valley – called the Ohio Valley Soaring Series, in which model sailplane pilots from all over the midwest travel to different cities and compete to become the OVSS champ, and win a new radio or plane donated by a sponsor.

The Mid-Am was the only contest out of the 8 or 9 held that wasn’t “man-on-man” style. This is widely considered to be the gold standard of flying competition, in that each pilot is flying in the same conditions as the other pilots he/she is scored against. The “old” way, known as “open winch”, allowed pilots to wait for good conditions to launch. Man-on-man forces everyone to fly in the same air – good or bad. Soaring is a very competitive hobby and while it might seem like a simple thing, this has a big impact on drawing people to a contest.

I flew Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I did pretty well each day (by my standards) and placed 3rd on Friday and Saturday, but ran into some bad luck on Sunday. All in all a good weekend. As happy as I was about my performance, it makes me happy just putting on an event like that.

Read more here: 2007 Mid-Am Champs in the books! @ LouisvilleSoaring.org