Twitter and the democratization of propaganda.

I love Twitter  (@RyanBleek – although you’ll notice I’m much more of a consumer than a producer). It’s probably the website that I frequent the most. It puts all kinds of interesting information in front of me that I otherwise would have missed.  Yet the efficiency with which Twitter disseminates information has an obvious downside: misinformation is just as easily spread. All it takes, literally, is a click of a button.

Recently the following re-tweet passed through my Twitter feed: “RT Debt increase by presidents: Reagan 186%, Bush 54%, Clinton 41%, Bush II 72%, Obama 23%. Source: Congressional Budget Office.”  There are three major problems with this statement.  The first is that it isn’t clear why we should measure the offensiveness of debt increases in this manner. (“Yes, honey, it’s true that I added $10,000 to the credit card, but you must understand that relative to the debt we already had, this is actually less than the debt we added before.”) Second, it’s just flat-out untrue.  Obama has increased the debt by 38% since he took office. Calculate it for yourself here.  Obviously, at one point in time the figure was at 23%, but that’s far enough back and it is a significant enough difference that it is more deceitful than mistaken to make such an assertion today.

Yet the more interesting way that this tweet is misleading is that it implicitly purports to be making a meaningful comparison, which it definitely is not.  Why?  Because Obama’s increase in the debt has occurred in just 31 months compared to the 96 months for the Bush and Clinton increases. In fact, through August 21 of their third years in office, the national debt increased by 18% under Clinton, 18% under Bush II, and 38% under Obama (I was unable to calculate Bush I and Reagan).  This is a rather obvious (and inarguable) objection to raise to the aforementioned tweet, and that’s what makes it interesting.

If you google the tweet, you will find that it has been re-tweeted and blogged many, many times.  It’s hard to measure precisely how many, but it’s fair to say it’s at least in the thousands.  I don’t believe that all the people who were a party to the tweet’s dissemination were simply too stupid to comprehend why it is a blatantly unfair and misleading comparison to make (setting aside its falsehood).  No, I think they just really, really wanted to believe it was true, and that made them blind to the reasons why they should’ve questioned it.

That’s what I find interesting.  Madison Avenue and campaign managers have long known that if you repeat something often enough it becomes true. It used to be that only a relatively small number of people/organizations had the power to repeat propaganda to massive numbers of people.  Now, it’s just a matter of finding something that a large number of people want to believe is true (Obama increased the debt at a much smaller rate than his evil Republican predecessors), giving them just a hint of a reason to believe it’s true (claiming that your source is the C.B.O.), and then tweeting it out and waiting for it to be re-tweeted (or should I say ‘parroted’). Thereafter, anyone googling the increase of the national debt under previous presidents will be directed to a thousand websites proclaiming the truth of a lie.

Twitter me this.

I’ve always said the Canadians and the French are the two most insecure groups of people on the planet. I’ve decided that I’ll have to add soccer fans to the list. Don’t ever say anything remotely derogatory around a soccer fan.  They won’t hurt you, but you’ll want to kill yourself after listening to them bitch about how you just don’t understand soccer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Also, don’t ever accidentally bump into a soccer fan, because they might fall down and writhe around in pain like you just shot them with a crossbow.  Monkey see, monkey do.

I’m almost halfway through my summer and I’m already horribly dropping the the ball on my summer resolutions, which include: brushing up on my piano skills (but I barely had any to begin with), brushing up on my french, and going to open mics at least twice a month (to those of you in Boston I’ll be at Grandma’s Basement on thursday).  Oh well.

They really ought to give us our grades before they make us register for next year’s classes. I guess I should just chalk that up to the “makes too much sense” law.

My wife is finally on Twitter. Follow her: @tyrableek. Also, seriously, I really wanna eat. If you know someone who needs a wedding or portrait photographer (senior pics, family photos!), then please tell them about my wife.  She’s actually quite good. TyraBleek.com

I’m enjoying being able to read for pleasure again.  I’ve already caught up on my back issues of the New Yorker and have read Into Thin Air,  and The Happiness Project, which was good, but not great.   I’m just about done with The Fountainhead. Next I’ll be reading Predictibly Irrational, Eating the Dinosaur, Born Standing Up, Celebration of Discipline, and something by N.T. Wright. I also hope to re-read Fooled by Randomness. I never re-read books; it was just that good.  I impore you to add it to your summer reading list. You may have heard of the author’s more popular book, The Black Swan, but Fooled by Randomness is the superior book.

I was wearing this shirt in the Cambridgside mall the other day, which says, “Theologians think it through.”  I noticed a lady staring at it as I was riding up the escalator (she was riding down opposite me). As we passed, she said, “Ehh, that’s not really right, they believe something,” as she pointed to her head.  Lady, from one stranger to another, thanks for setting me straight.

Ryan Bleek

Goodbye Starbucks

Some of my earliest memories as a little kid were of going to watch the Sonics play at the Kingdome.  Apparently, I would sometimes accidently yell, “Go Mariners.”  I’m sure it was adorable.  In 1996 I remember the excitement of watching them reach the NBA finals against Jordan’s Bulls.  It was the first time during my lifetime that a professional Seattle team reached the championship series or game.  I was never a “huge” Sonics fan, but I was definitely a fan.  I would occasionally go to a game, and I would always check the scores in the paper or online to see if they won.

I was surprised how angry I was when the city of Seattle and Howard Schultz announced that they had dropped their lawsuit and settled with the new ownership group, which made the move to Oklahoma City official.  A lot of people in Seattle had a callous attitude toward the Sonics (they had been pretty horrible for the majority of the last dozen or so years) and weren’t sad to see them go.  I did not share this sentiment.  I was quite upset.

Again, I wasn’t fanatical supporter, but when you grow up following a team from the time you could barely walk, when going to games or watching them on tv was a frequent bonding activity with your dad or buddies… it pissed me off.  It wasn’t just that they were leaving, it was the way it all went down.

Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks and longtime resident of Seattle, was the majority owner of the Sonics when the team was sold to a group of buyers out of Oklahoma City.  If, after the sale, Schultz had come out and said, “You know what, I am business man.  That’s it.  I feel no sense of duty whatsoever to the people of Seattle.  I’m in it only for the money, and I don’t care what happens to the team,” I still would have been upset, but I could have respected his honesty.  Instead, he had the audacity to insult everyone’s intelligence and claim that he believed Clay Bennett (the lead buyer from OKC) intended to make a good-faith effort to keep the team in Seattle.  This claim was made despite the fact that everybody knew that OKC coveted an NBA team after having just finished hosting the New Orleans Hornets while that city was being repaired.  Also, other investors from the OKC group were openly telling OKC media that they intended to move the Sonics.

The “good faith” effort that Bennett had promised took the form of an elaborate charade of asking for outrageous amounts of taxpayer money to build a new $500 million dollar arena when he knew perfectly well that such requests were impossible given the city’s and state’s financial picture.  David Stern (Commissioner of the NBA) was Bennett’s willing partner in the whole farce, claiming that joint private/public offer to spend $300 million to renovate the existing Key Arena was just not good enough because the Key was simply too terrible of an arena.  This would have been news to a younger David Stern who had profusely praised the arena.

At some point during all of this, public sentiment turned against Howard Schultz once everyone realized he had gift wrapped the Sonics for the hicks in Oklahoma.  He subsequently filed a cynical lawsuit against Bennett for breach of sale, alleging that Bennett never intended to make a good faith effort to keep the Sonics in Seattle.  No kidding, Howie. The only way Bennett could have been more clear about his intentions was if he had arrived at the press conference announcing the sale in a U-Haul truck.

The crap cherry on this puke pie is that the Zombie Sonics (hat tip: Bill Simmons for that nickname) are set to be a very, very good team for the better part of the next decade (although who knows what kind of havoc free-agency will wreak).  Also, they were moved from a world-class city to the worlds-most-boring town, a place about as memorable as the television show Sidekicks.

Why do I bring this up?  Because as I was trying to fall asleep the other night I realized that I had forgotten Howard Schultz’s role in the sad affair. Perhaps because I had repressed the entire episode.  Anyway, I decided that I won’t drink Starbucks coffee anymore.  Not to send a message.  That would be stupid.  I doubt Shultz will miss my meager money much. Rather, I am giving up Starbucks for my own psychic well-being.  I will not support that man.  Little 3-year-old Ryan is still hurt, and this is his way of calling Howard Schultz a poopface.  I’m not going to be terribly dogmatic about this.  If a friend wants to meet at Starbucks then that’s fine.  I’m not willing to give up my trips to Barnes and Noble where Starbucks is the only option.  But in a world where there are as many coffee options as there are unemployed law students, I intend to refuse to drink Starbucks whenever I can.

And I will never watch an NBA game again.

Ryan Bleek

Count me out.

I recently started my job as an enumerator with the Census Bureau. My brief employment has done nothing but reinforce the stereotype about the inefficiency of government.

I started my four days of training on April 20th at Brookline High School. You might expect that if you were holding training in a large building, then you might put up signs indicating exactly where in the building people should go. The Census Bureau apparently doesn’t think like that.

After finding my way to where I was supposed to be, we were broken up into groups of about 15. I wasn’t excited to learn that training was going to average nine hours a day for the next four days. This was the week right before finals, and I definitely should have been studying. But at $22.75 an hour, I felt like I needed to take the job so that Tyra and I could catch up on some of our debt this summer.

We settled into our classroom and spent the entire first day filling out paperwork and getting fingerprinted. It was quite boring, but I enjoyed absurdity of one of my fellow trainees. Her name was Beth. (Actually her name was not Beth, but I’ll be using pseudonyms.) We were each given name cards to display on our desks. On the first piece of paperwork that we filled out, Beth announced, “Oh my goodness, I just misspelled my name!” In the first 45 minutes Beth managed to knock her name card on the ground seven times (yes, I was keeping track) before she finally changed desks and I couldn’t observe her anymore.

The highlight of the first day was our taking the oath of office. We stood up, raised our right hands and took the oath, in which we literally swore to uphold and defend the constitution. How does a census enumerator defend the constitution? I don’t know either.

The second day we actually started training as opposed to merely filling out paperwork. Beth continued to amuse. At one point Todd, our trainer, was going over the process of meeting at the end of a day of enumerating. He made the mistake of not speaking literally enough for Beth’s understanding when he said, “so at the end of the day, you’ll need…” Beth followed up by asking, “What do you mean by ‘the end of the day’ when we’ll be working in the evenings?” It’s a figure of speech, Beth.

Later, Todd went over the procedure for procuring mileage reimbursements in the event that we had to drive. Beth interjected, “It doesn’t say anything about bicycle mileage.” No, Beth, it surely doesn’t. It didn’t take long on the second day to figure out why training took four days. Certain trainees (featuring Beth as the most prominent offender) asked endless variations of hypotheticals that we could possibly run into while enumerating. The next couple days were pretty much devoted to such hypotheticals. It felt like a bad 1L class.

Let me toss in a couple more Beth highlights before I move on from training. At one point while Todd was talking, Beth said, loudly enough for all of us to hear, “Ah.” Todd stopped, naturally, and asked Beth if she had a question. She replied, “No, I’m just going ‘Ah.’” Thanks for that, Beth. Later, Beth interrupted Todd, and said, “So if we went to a house and the people weren’t home, but a neighbor was in the lobby…” when Todd interrupted her and said, “Let me just stop you right there, cause I think I know where you’re going and I’m just about to address that.” Beth replied, “Actually, I’m not really headed anywhere.” Then why were you talking, Beth? Finally, in what had to be the comedic summit of the week, Todd was summarizing the training when he started riffing on how absurd some of it was. “Be sure to keep your eyes open while driving. Don’t forget to breathe. If you do choose not to breathe make sure you breath once every, how often, five minutes.” Beth: “Does it really say that?” Wow.

Since the training ended the job itself has been a disappointment. The first week of work was the week that finals started. I told Todd (not only our trainer but our “crew leader” for the duration of the job) that I could only work three days that week, which was still a stretch for me. Three different times he called me that week and asked if I was sure I couldn’t work Saturday (my final was Monday morning).

After only two weeks of work we were informed last week that the work was going faster than they expected and that hours were going to be cut (I only work on Friday this week) and that we were probably almost done. We were told when we were hired that the job was going to last at least eight weeks and that it was expected to average 20 hours a week. I’m so glad I very well might have sacrificed a chance at better grades for this dumb job.

It hasn’t been all bad. After walking home from my second day of work I glanced up and saw a woman dressing in a second floor window. I saw her boobs! Unfortunately, it wasn’t exactly a pleasant sight. I’ll leave it at that.

Ryan Bleek

…and set up shop at the top of Four Seasons.

In 1998 Kid Rock rapped in the hit single ‘Cowboy’ about how he wanted to start an escort service “for all the right reasons.” I remember at the time not knowing exactly what are the right reasons for starting an escort service.  I recently heard the song again and realized that 12 years (wow!) later I still don’t know.

If anyone can shed some light as to what are either, or both, the right and wrong reasons for starting an escort service, I would love it if you would share.  If there is someone out there who used to run an escort service, until one day you sat down after a long day of escort servicing and thought to yourself, “This is just not fulfilling.  What am I doing with my life?  Should I go back to school?  Did I start my escort service for all the wrong reasons?”, then you are exactly the person I want to hear from.

Also, if you are currently still running an escort service and fear that you are in it for the wrong reasons, then you might want to contact Kid Rock.  As far as I know he never got around to starting an escort service for all the right reasons, and he might be interested in purchasing yours.  Although, I don’t know to what extent ‘starting’ and escort service versus merely ‘owning’ one plays into Mr. Rock’s escort service ethos. If the purchasing instead of starting is a minor point to Kid Rock, then I would suggest the latter, if only because of the dismal statistics on the success of new businesses.  It seems like buying an established escort service carries substantially less risk than trying to start one from scratch.  Plus, although I’m not familiar with the capital investments that starting an escort service might entail (std testing? lingerie? beds? makeup?) I would guess that there start up costs that could be avoided by acquiring an established escort service.

In a related point, in Nevada, where prostitution is legal, can the owner of the escort service take depreciation deductions on the call girls?  I mean, they’re definitely wasting assets with a known useful life. (biting my tongue very hard to keep from making an allocation-of-basis joke) If the escort service pays for implants, is that a regular expense or a capital investment? If the escort pays for them herself, can she write that off, or is there too much of a personal consumption element? If I was my tax professor I would have had that as one of the hypotheticals on my exam.

I suppose that’s why I’ll never be a tax professor.  I’ll also never be the owner of an escort service, if only because I could never tell if I was in it for the right reasons.

Ryan

P.S. You should hire my wife to do your wedding/engagement photos/senior pictures/portraits/photo booth, because I really like to eat.  See her at TyraBleek.com

Ryan Bleek is Tired

I love to write.  I don’t know why I completely stopped doing it last August 31st. Actually, that isn’t exactly true. I do know: I stopped writing because I never felt like I had anything to say. But why did that happen?

There’s an old saying about law school: the first year they scare you to death, the second year they work you to death, and the third year they bore you to death.  It’s been true for me this year (my second); I’ve been very, very busy.  Between two semester’s worth of moot court, Legal Follies, a clinic (minor thought it may be), classes, and a wife, I need an extended break.  Too bad we’re just about to get into finals, which will be the busiest time of all.

And yet this is all an excuse.  We should make time for the things we like to do.  So here I am.

Check out TyraBleek.com

I’m usually quite competitive, but I was quite content to lose in my last round of Albers moot court.  I was ready to be done. What I wasn’t ok with was my strange stuttering problem I encountered during the oral argument.  I have relatively extensive public speaking experience, and I’ve never had such a problem before.  I sure hope it was an isolated incident.

Speaking of moot court, I’d like to announce my formal retirement from competitive moot court.  I’ve done enough. I’d like to retire while I’m not on top.

I’ve applied to work for the census bureau this spring/summer to go door-to-door trying to get answers from those that failed to fill out their forms correctly (or at all).  If I tell you this piece of information in person, there’s no need to recount the Hannibal Lecter line about his eating a census taker. I’m familiar.

But I’m sure she learned her lesson!

Thank you.

So very much has happened since I last wrote here. I am now a married man.  Crazy.  Our honeymoon was quite fun.  We went to Cabo.  The only bad part about it was the heat.  It was over a 100 degrees with very high humidity pretty much the whole time we were there.  We stayed mostly indoors, but we managed to fit in some fun activities such as parasailing, snorkeling, and riding four wheelers on the beach.  I hope to go back someday when its not so hot.

My wife had major surgery a couple weeks ago.  I spent several nights in the hospital with her.  I really wish that the hippocratic oath (“Above all, do no harm.”) applied to hospital staff in addition to the doctors.  Then the nurses would have been forbidden by their oath to give me that godforsaken “bed.” My back is still recovering.

While my wife was in surgery I went upstairs to get a coffee.  When I got in the elevator to go back down I got in after a woman and her two sons. She asked me what floor I was going to. I answered her as I glanced at the panel and saw that she had already pushed my floor. After several seconds had passed, she said, “you’re welcome.” (I had not said “thank you”) I thought she was talking to me, but it seemed preposterous and I thought I must be mistaken, so I said nothing. A few more seconds passed until she said, “Rude ass.”  I very nearly had a Larry David style meltdown. Only the presence of her young sons stopped me.  What kind of crazy person gets offended when a stranger doesn’t say “thank you” for offering to push the button for their floor!!?

I had my first on-campus interview with a law firm on friday.  It didn’t go bad, it didn’t go well, it just went… super fast. I felt like we never got to talk about anything of substance.  She only asked two or three questions about me.  Hopefully I helped my case by starting every answer with, “Well, chief, . . .”

I’ve been staying in a motel for the last few days ($$$!) because my lease doesn’t start till the first.  (Yes, I thought about staying with a friend, but the only ones I felt comfortable asking were all in the exact same boat and staying with other friends). Anyway, I’ve left the “Do Not Disturb” door hanger on my door, cause I’ve got too much crap in my room and I don’t really need it cleaned anyway.  This apparently has blown the minds of the maid staff, because yesterday they knocked on my door FOUR SEPARATE TIMES to ask if I needed housekeeping. Does the door hanger mean nothing to them?  I called the front desk to request a “Seriously, Do Not Effing Disturb” door hanger, but they were all out.

I sent out roughly seventeen (acually, not roughly, I know specifically that it was seventeen. Don’t know why I said that) resumes to Seattle law firms a couple weeks ago.   When I called one of the firms to follow up with them, they told me that white people need not apply.  OK, they didn’t say those exact words, but “we’re only considering candidates for our minority fellowship” means precisely the same thing as “whites need not apply.”  I know all of the perfectly well-intentioned rationales for affirmative action, but well-intentioned discrimination based on race is still discrimination based on race. (Nevermind that affirmative action is counterproductive.)  After I made the phone call, I had to get on wikipedia to see whether Martin Luther King’s famous line, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” ended with “except in certain contexts, such as in hiring or college admissions, where being judged by the color or their skin will benefit them. ”  The line does not end that way, so I spent the rest of the day confused.

School starts tomorrow.  I am excited.

Community Counts.

I don’t know why I haven’t been writing here at all this summer.

The other day I was working out at the Young Men’s Christian Association.  I normally shower when I get home (let’s pause here so you can picture me in the shower) (pausing), but this day I was going somewhere right after my workout, so I showered at the Young Men’s Christian Association.  I was disappointed to find that they had community showers.  Normally I love building community, but just not when I all soaped up.  (Pausing). I was hoping I could quickly shower before any other guys decided they wanted to join me.  I was not so lucky.  One guy came to rinse off before he jumped in the pool.  Thankfully he kept his shorts on.  Another guy came into to use the swim trunks dryer conveniently located across from the shower head I was using.  We prudently avoided eye contact.  I quickly finished and got dressed.  As I was leaving the locker room there was a kid who rushed into the locker room to relieve himself.  I heard him open and close a stall and say, “shoot, that’s a shower.”  Oops.  It turns out that the Young Men’s Christian Association doesn’t have community showers, they just have community rinse-0ff-real-quick-in-your-swim-trunks-before-you-get-in-the-pool showers.  I’m sure that those men who got the chance to see me in my entirety were wondering why I didn’t use the private shower stalls.  Fellas, you’re welcome.

I’m getting married August 1st, which is a saturday.  We don’t leave for our honeymoon (Cabo!) till monday.  My family wanted to know if I wanted to get lunch with them on Sunday before they leave town.  I told them that was fine as long as they don’t look at me funny.  The day after your wedding night is perhaps the only time that everyone in the room knows for a certainty that you had sex the previous night.

My alter-ego on twitter (@EvilShaq) was mentioned in a news story here.

Do not hire “College Pro Painters” in Spokane.  First, I’m pretty sure that the phrase “College Pro” is an oxymoron.  Second, they promised me a job and then never bothered to return my phone calls or emails when I got here. Thanks, guys.

If you want to by my girlfriends sweet bike, see here

Because you probably didn’t know.

A Gentle Pinch.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written here.  Law school finals will have that sort of impact.  What’s new? Well,

I’m in Spokane now, and waiting to start my new job painting houses.  I never saw myself as a painter.  I can’t wait to go back to school.

The first question everyone asks me is, “How did finals go?”  I surely don’t know.  I felt crappy about Civ Pro, good about Contracts, and ambivalent towards both Property and Con Law.  Are these feelings accurate proxies for my actual grades? Doubtful.

My Con Law final was almost exactly a month ago.  It seems way way way way farther back than that.

After having endured 1^st-year law school finals, when I hear people complain about the study load for undergrad finals, in my head I am laughing at them. Comparing undergrad finals to 1^st-year law school finals is like comparing a gentle pinch on the cheek to gang rape.

I screwed up the writing competition.  And I don’t want to talk about it.

I still can’t figure out why the airlines have to give the stupid safety announcements before every single flight.  I wonder if there was once a plane crash where the medical examiner determined that one of the passengers survived the initial crash, but then didn’t know whether he should exit the burning plane or to stay and die a fiery death, and so the official cause of death was ruled as: “Not knowing to exit the raging inferno through one of the obvious exit doors.”  Then the subsequent lawsuits caused the ridiculous announcements.

I’m getting married August 1^st. Yes, this summer.  It is a small, family-only wedding.  I’m sorry if you were planning on coming to my wedding.  I’ll accept gifts in lieu of attendance.

After the writing competition ended, I had one day to pack up and clean my apartment before catching my 8 a.m. flight the next day.  Naturally,  my effort extended late into the night (actually, early into the morning of my flight).  At one o’clock in the a.m., my roommate complained about my not having started packing earlier because he really wanted to sleep that night.  I’m assuming he accidently thought I had a time machine and could go back and remedy the situation.

When you encounter a stranger in Barnes & Noble and you learn that they are a student, it’s not necessary to tell them that, “the economy is in really bad shape” and “it’s tough to find a job in this market.”  I think even dead people know this.

The Marathon is the Message.

For all of my non-Boston friends, today is Marathon Monday, which is a special day in Boston.  The Boston Marathon is the world’s oldest marathon and arguably the most prestigious.  Twenty-five thousand people will run the course today, while many more converge on the city to cheer them on.

Today is a special day for me, too.  This will be my 29th consecutive Boston Marathon that I’ll not be running in.  I’m very proud of this streak. I’m also the world-record holder for how quickly a person dismisses the very idea of running 26 effing miles.  (Thank you).  The choice of how to commemorate the Battle of Marathon is a deeply private and personal choice.  Someday I’ll have to have The Talk with my kids about how they want to commemorate the Battle of Marathon.  For me, the answer is not to run 26 effing miles; the answer is to eat a french-toast bagel and drink coffee and blog at Panera.  We all make our choices.

This isn’t to suggest that I’m completely dismissive of Marathon Monday.  I appreciate not having to go to school.  And I appreciate my one chance all year to tell non-retarded adults that “it’s an honor just to participate.” Except I’m not sure how much I even believe that.

When a person cuts off his own arm to save his life, that is impressive.  When a person cuts a off his own arm just because he can, it somehow loses its impressiveness.  The extraordinarity of an act is often inextricably linked to it’s purpose.  When Pheidippides ran 26 miles from Marathon to Athens, he did so because he had an important message to deliver to the Greek assembly: “We were victorious!” (Or so the legend goes.) If Pheidippides had run the 26 miles on his day off, just to say he could, then we would never have heard of a marathon.  The marathon was the message.

Perhaps, then, the truest way to commemorate Battle of Marathon is to send each other text messages saying, “We have won!” (It depends on which wikipedia page you believe.)  Instead, people run 26 effing miles. Like I said, we all make our choices.

The other thing I don’t understand about marathons is all of the fundraising that goes along with it.  I get that people have worthy causes that they want to raise money for, I just don’t get how that goes along with running a marathon.   If you come to me and ask me to give money to save the spotted owl (screw you, Mr. Unspotted Owl, you filthy, slutty excuse for an owl. You can fend for yourself. I’ll see you burn in hell before I give you dime.), my answer isn’t going to change if you tell me that you’ll run 26 effing miles if I give.

BTW, who are these people that are making everyone run 26 effing miles before they’ll give.  These are (mostly) worthy causes! I propose that next year, all the people that collected pledges for the marathon refuse to run, and then try and collect the money for their charities.  That way we can identify the sadistic creeps whose generosity is contingent on making people run 26 effing miles.  I’m really not sure that we want such people’s money.

If anyone is reading this after having completed the marathon: Congratulations, it’s an honor just to participate.