I am going to do this race. My goal is to use the 30K to qualify for the Escarpment Trail Run.

PRETZEL CITY SPORTS: "Well, there’s the beauty of the Double Trouble because you control the amount of stimulation your little ticker can handle since YOU DECIDE WHICH RACE YOU’RE DOING DURING THE RACE ITSELF. Started the 30k but end up “flatter” than roadkill on I-95; finish in the 15k! Complete the 1st loop feeling as giddy as a 16-year-old that got to 3rd base for the first time; do 30! You’ll state a preference & everyone will start together but, distance-wise, feel free to remain as undecided as PeeWee Herman’s sexual preference. Only exceptions? People doing the 1st loop in more than 2 hrs MUST finish in the 15k so we can get home in time to watch the tape of the Eagles Super Bowl Parade for the 16th weekend in a row. We start taking down the markings at 2 hours into the race so, if you go on, you have an equal chance of ending up at the finish line or the King of Prussia Mall. WARNING: YOU RACE AT YOUR OWN RISK & ARE SOLEY RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR WELFARE AT ALL TIMES! Get hurt? Keep crawling; our volunteers can’t even carry a tune; how can they carry you? Get lost? Won’t happen unless you can’t even find Waldo in the Grambling U. Marching Band! We’re all adults here and if you can get yourself onto the trail, you can get yourself off of it as well."

The Air Gains Weight: "Consider a pound of feathers on a scale opposite a pound of lead. In a vacuum, the scale is balanced, but this is not true when air is present. It will push up on the feathers, just as water pushes up on a floating object. Because the feathers are more 'buoyant' in air than lead, the scale will tip towards the metal."

Hey, so the old joke to test how stupid a person might be is incorrect, a pound of feathers does weigh less if it is not in a vacuum!! Another sign that everything I know may be wrong.

The New York Times > Magazine > Watching TV Makes You Smarter: "For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ''24,'' you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ''24,'' you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all."

This is great! I knew this was happening to us - especially considering this season's Deadwood episodes. I have found myself driven to watch each episode two or even three times in order to pick-up on all the inferences and levels of meaning in the dialogue, the gestures, and images of the show. The scripting has reached a new high, combining often near-Shakespearian language with all seven of George Carlin's dirty words. The result is an intellectual gutter slang hybrid that is more powerful than either extreme. I find myself having favorite lines from each show. From this week's episode, I particularly like the line by Charlie Utter while provoking Mr. Wolcott, "I see you have that big knife and hid somewhere on your persons, you probably got some sort of pussified shootin' instrument." That line exemplifies the combination of educated linguistics with gutter slang.