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Ski team, tour club, movie nights--
'Gopnik' trauma on an electric train
The Greenland receiver falls down,
gets patched up,
and still doesn't work right;
I left Russia on the solstice via Naushki.
(They say these gaps in the rails are necessary because without them each summer the whole trans-siberian would expand miles and miles--and break).
Rapidly freezing Angara in Irkutsk
In the near future, small advances in biotechnology have left the developed world with a veritable cure-all: for every person born, a genetic double is produced. The clone is pushed into a vegetative state shortly after birth, fed steroids to grow along with their living twin, and subsequently 'harvested' for spare parts should any harm befall the original.
Need a new kidney? Bone marrow? Poke out your eye? Your clone, sleeping peacefully in a futuristic-looking tank not far away, will gladly part with his.
Then some disgruntled bio-ethicists or something come into the situation. They break into a top-secret facility, karate-chop all the incompetent guards, and press big square buttons in a dark room as all sorts of alarms go off.
The next day, all the clones wake up.
All over the world, greenish, scary-looking, long-haired, steroid-strong zombies are flooding every city on earth. Some of them are missing eyes, arms, legs, parts of their head---that's a zombie movie
Two weeks travel home via Mongolia and Japan, way cheap and I swoop by Suzuko, Miko, Martin and Jimmy Bramante. Pretty consistent bum camera. Also taken in by a Mongolian family I met on the train, kid was on the mongolian nat'l 'ball hockey' team, vindicated again for learning Russian.
the last straw was the wildly unfair financial aid, I dropped out of Dartmouth. .
loss of credit, social life, treehouse:
It's something I'd been thinking about on and off for a long time--mostly in Greenland in conversation with Jon Skinner or on long skis when my ipod died. here's a string of slimy truths I'd like to disgorge:
From: Ian McKay [mailto:ism@MIT.EDU] Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2010 5:01 PM To: Suzanne K. B. Fraser Subject: RE: Your Dartmouth Scholarship Fund--SECOND request for thank you letter
Seattle two more weeks
'Weather Vane' David and I and our festivus pole in the front yard
I want a commuter bike that doesn't need greasing, can be left outside indefinitely, and will never eat anyone's jeans. There are already drive-shaft bikes and belt-bikes, but they each have their own distinctive problems--energy loss in the drive shaft, wear problems with the belts etc....
My idea would be a 'piston drive' bike. No chain rings--just a kinked pedal crank so that a piston could be fitted right on the cranks on each side, connecting right to a similarly kinked axle on the rear wheel. The pistons would have to be 90 degrees out of phase and the shifter (or ratio-er) would have to be right in the hub. I'm sure that it would have it's own set of distinctive problems--but I bet it could be made maintenance-free, durable, non jeans-eating, and strange-looking. Perfect for the hipster market