Hail, Caesar, we who are about to die (or at least be really miserable) salute you!

So like my daughter, yes, that would be the over-educated one who believes a zombie outbreak is possible, told me a year or so ago about this cool train run called The Canary in the Cave. As I recall, she said it involved running down and then up West Virginia's New River Gorge.

I thought that sounded cool, except for the up part. So as a birthday present she signed me up for it. It was only after I was registered that I learned it was a 25K+ course, as in somewhere past 15.5 miles, with the hill coming near the end.

As if that wasn't extreme enough, thanks to a polar inversion, the temperature is going to be in the 20s when we start.

Now, part of the charm of endurance events is the voluntary misery. But this Saturday morning promises to be off the charts.

The Spousal Unit has already requesed that if I die, I not do so at the bottom of the gorge in order to spare others the ordeal of bringing me up.

I'll try to comply, but if it does come to that, someone could just roll me into the New River.

It's as good a way as I can think of to celebrate birthday #56.

An ethical dilemma

El Cabrero is not one to shy away from deep philosophical issues or ethical dilemmas. Especially if they involve profound questions, such as under what conditions is a person allowed to wear a tee shirt from an endurance event, a topic I've blogged about more than once.

To start with, there is the basic proposition that it is an act of arrogance and hubris to wear a tee shirt for an event before one actually completes it. It's like the same point from Herodotus' Histories where he tells the story of Solon's maxim of calling no one happy until you have seen their last hours.

Then there is the proposition that one does not deserve to wear the tee shirt of a race one began but didn't finish. Once, shortly after having heart surgery, I signed up for a triathlon. The water in Summit Lake was ice cold (to me anyway) and I couldn't breathe and didn't finish. I never wore the shirt.

Circumstances have recently forced me to grapple with another tee shirt dilemma. I was planning on running a 15K trail run this weekend but was stranded by the miseries of air travel. In this case, the Spousal Unit picked up my package thinking I'd be there in time.

I'm thinking that since I probably would have finished it if Delta had gotten me home on the right day, even if it meant crawling across the finish line on bloody stumps, I have the ethical right to wear the shirt, as long as I complete a 15K at some point.

Judges?

PAUL RYAN GETS SCHOOLED ON POVERTY here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

What was I thinking?

A week or two back, I signed up to run a 15 mile trail run tomorrow morning for reasons that now escape me. I have two bad knees, one bad foot, and a nearly dead heart. Plus, I haven't run that far since 2003.

 And the best/worst part is the race starts at 7:30, about two hours before my body wakes up on a good day.

In other words, it should be a day of glorious agony.

I take as my (admittedly flawed) patron saint for this adventure Teddy Roosevelt, who said this:

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory or defeat.

That's my story, anyway, and I'm sticking with it.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE,  WV Gov. Tomblin signed the Future Fund into law.

A CHICKEN FROM HELL, ANYONE? Click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

First steps

I'm feeling pretty grateful at the moment. For the first time in something like three months, I actually jogged first one mile, then two, over the last couple of days.

I'd been having a great running year (for me), including some longish trail runs and a half marathon. I started working on speed, a relative thing, and ran my best miles in 10 years. Then it happened. I came down suddenly with plantar fasciitis, which is the next best thing to having a nail in your heel.

Running was out of the question. Some days, especially in the morning, I could hardly walk. Other forms of exercise, like skipping rope or kicking a heavy bag, were also no-nos reinforced by serious pain.

Some things you just have to wait out. I think yoga helped, especially sun salutations where you hold the downward facing dog for several breaths.

I'm not better yet, but the nail in my heel is now something like a thumbtack. And, while my running may look like walking or even a zombie shuffle to others, I'm glad to have it back.

For those who aren't runners, it's hard to explain, but there really is no substitute. Anything else is just making do until you can do it again.

WHACKADOODLES who want to shut down the government aren't polling too well these days.

IT'S NOT ALL BAD. In some countries, extreme poverty is declining.

THINK ABOUT THIS. "Poverty is more harmful to children than gestational exposure to cocaine," according to a recent study.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

On wanting to quit

El Cabrero has been a terribly inconsistent blogger lately. I think I've been running around too much.

Speaking of running around, today was a case in point. I've had a 15K run planned for some months, although I can't say I was looking forward to it. The race in question is the Poca River Run, which touts itself as West Virginia's oldest road running race.

It is a pretty 9.3 mile course along the river, which today was swollen from recent rain storms, including a fresh one that soaked me on the last few miles. I've gone farther on harder courses. For some reason though, running this one brings out the wimp in me. This year as last I wanted to quit just about as soon as I started. Everything seemed to hurt and go wrong for the first mile or two. It didn't get a whole lot better after that.

My back hurt. My lungs hurt. I had a bad pain in one heel from what turned out to be a hole in my sock. It's the kind of thing you can put up with for a good while but it would have really caused problems on a longer run. There were other aches and pains. But misery morphed into plain old discomfort as the miles ticked away.

I think one of the great gifts of endurance sports is just that. You learn to endure. You learn to watch pain and discomfort the way Buddhists do in vipassana or mindfulness meditation. Like everything else, pain is an impermanent thing. If you watch it, it doesn't usually stay the same. Sometimes it gets worse, sometimes better and sometimes it just migrates somewhere else.

You also learn not to obsess about the whole thing but rather take it one mile at a time. There seems to be some evidence for that thesis anyhow.

That reminds me of the statistics classes I took in graduate school, another endurance feat that I only managed to survive by making my teacher laugh and go off on lengthy tangents. On every test, one question persisted and it gave good advice for working through problems:

Q. How do you eat an elephant?
A. One bite at a time.

JUST ONE MORE LINK. It's about former Massey CEO Don Blankenship's long delayed rendezvous with justice.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Progress as endurance sport

This morning I find myself creaking around as I try to recover from two endurance events. One was a half marathon over mountain trails and the other was the 60 day WV legislative session. I'm not sure which one was more of a challenge.

There were some brutal spots on the trail and there were some really low points in the session, although parts of both were really good.

All this reminds me of an email I got from a friend as we commiserated on a good bill that got away due to the pressure from an unsavory interest group. I now quote it in full:

"Sleezebags always win in the short run. Good thing progress is an endurance sport."

Roger that.

JUST DO IT. Two op-eds recently appeared in the Gazette supporting Medicaid expansion in WV. Here's one that looks at it from a religious perspective and one that looks at it from the standpoint of women's health.

THE 99/1 PERCENT THING. Here's a timely call for tax fairness from a Nobel Prize-winning economist.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Running motivation

Although it has taken an extraordinary amount of self control, I have managed to blog for several days without mentioning zombies. It was more than I could do, however, to refrain from drawing attention to a recent NPR story about a new kind of running event.

Called "Run for Your Lives," it involves a 5K obstacle course whereat runners are chased by by zombies. Or people dressed up as zombies anyway.

It's pretty popular. When the first event was held, 12,000 people showed up. People signing up for the races can choose to be either runner or zombie, although zombie is the more popular role.

Runners are not allowed to shoot zombies in the head or otherwise compromise their craniums, the preferred movie method of dispatching the walking dead. Nor are zombies allowed to eat runners, although they pursue them diligently if clumsily and can pull off special flags from the runners to show they could have caught them.

There's even an ap for it.

If my over-educated zombie obsessed daughter finds out about this, it's going to be on.

SPEAKING OF RUNNING, don't forget the yoga (just do it in a zombie-free area).

FEAR LESS by expressing it more.

A FUNERAL ALTERNATIVE? This NPR story about Zoroastrian funeral customs caught my eye. Apparently a shortage of vultures in India is causing problems. We seem to have quite a few here, however.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Stand back, y'all. I feel the need to rant about an urgent social justice issue, one that came up in a conversation with the Spousal Unit. To wit, tee shirts for endurance events. I'm not talking about 5Ks or 10ks. I'm talking about going a bit farther, say from 15ks to marathons.

Take a look at the shirt pictured above from a trail run this summer and you will understand this gross injustice. First, let me say that the race was great, well organized and all that. I'd do it again. But did you notice the middle of the shirt? The whole 10/4 thing?!

What the hell?!

Sorry, but there is a huge qualitative difference between capering through 4 miles of trails versus slogging through 10, including some evil hills the other guys never saw. The 4 milers should get their own shirt so that those of us dedicated or dumb enough to run 2.5 times farther will not be confused with them.

Just saying.

The only thing worse than that is a a marathon shirt with small print. I mean, jeez, the whole point of a marathon is to be able to brag about it once you've done it. The whole point of a marathon shirt is to brag to every literate person you run across whether you know them or speak to them or not. If the print is so small that you can't even make out the word "marathon," you might as well have stayed on the couch eating potato chips and drinking beer instead of doing the same thing after running really far.

I have spoken.

MORE BAD STUFF about the Ryan budget from Paul Krugman here.

EVEN MORE BAD STUFF about the same from Dean Baker here.

ODE TO (GORILLA) JOY here.

Un-American Europeans

It looks like this weekend's elections in France and Greece threw a monkey wrench into the austerity machine. I wonder whether American politicians will get the message. Here' s more on that from Krugman.

MORE FALLACIES FROM THE ONE PERCENT, specifically about taxes, discussed here.

TRAMPS LIKE US, maybe we were born to run.

ANTS  are badass.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Feeling good is optional

I have always felt that there is a lot to be learned from physical exertion. An example of that occurred to me after I started training for and running (or limping) in races again after knee surgery this summer.

Here is the life lesson I learned: there is absolutely no necessary connection between feeling good and doing OK. By that I mean that one can feel totally miserable and still meet or exceed goals. In one recent 5 mile race, my legs felt like broken dead sticks, my lungs burned and my feet hurt with every step. But I finished a few minutes ahead of my goal (though admittedly way behind most other people).

It would be nice to feel good when you're up against a challenge. It may even have happened to me at some point in the distant past, although I can't recall it. But it's not required. What is required is to keep going.

OPTIMISM, ANYONE? Paul Krugman seems to see sun shining through the economic clouds.

FEEDING THE TROLLS. Here's an op-ed by yours truly on why WV needs an office of minority affairs to address racial disparities.

AN UNFORTUNATE MEME: the welfare queen.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Have knee will travel

After spending the summer with a blown out knee and part of the fall with one recovering from surgery, it is so nice to have a leg back. I can kick again, although I'm still not at 100 percent in that department.

The best part is the ability to run again. But first let's clarify the meaning of that word as there seems to be some confusion there. Often people have told me that they've seen me out there walking. I try to explain that what looks like walking to them is running to me. I maintain that running is subjective: if you think you're running and it feels like you're running, then you are regardless of speed.

I'm hoping now to build up speed to the point where I can hold and maintain a respectable pace for several miles. Yesterday I met a pace goal at a 5K. I hope to keep that pace at a 5 miler in January and then a 10K in February, although that will mean a lot of interval training between then and now. If that happens, who knows? Maybe a half marathon or the Charleston 15 mile distance run in the summer.

It's not that I enjoy such events at the time. I hate them. But it feels pretty good to have just finished one.

THE D-WORD discussed here.

RATS have empathy; why doesn't the 1 percent?

MORE ON THE UPPER BIG BRANCH DEAL here.

BANKING ON COAL. Here's a connection between Wall Street and a warming planet.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Learning to be miserable

This weekend I ran another 5K run with my seven year old grandson. Unlike last time around, this Saturday the weather was wet, cold and raw. The kid in question also has asthma, which made breathing in cold weather painful. Then there were foot problems. He was running in new shoes and complained about foot pain.

While a 3.1 mile jog is a piece of cake for an active adult, it is a long way for a little kid to go. I don't think I ran that far until I was in my teens.

In my efforts to keep him going, I explained that one of the real advantages of distance running was that it teaches you how to be miserable and keep on going. Unfortunately, that is a pretty useful life skill.

He finished the run anyhow.

GETTING MEAN. Here's the latest budget gutting I mean cutting proposal from US House Republicans.

NEEDED: a left.

WALL STREET. The protests there are picking up steam and spreading beyond Wall Street. Here's a take on it from a participant and here's the latest from CNN.

KOCH BROTHERS. Here's info about more fun and games from the bankrollers of the American right.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

On the road again

Last weekend marked a welcome milestone. A bit shy of four weeks after having arthroscopic knee surgery I ran, sort of, my first post-op 5K. I was really slow but it was nice to be in motion again.

Jogging had been out of the question this summer due to persistent knee pain. Other favorite activities had to stop too, like jumping rope, kicking a bag and sparring. Karate became pretty much impossible towards the end. I tried to make do on a bike but it just wasn't the same.

One thing that made the run more special was the fact that I completed it with my 7 year old grandson, who ran every step of the way. In fact, the little bugger finished ahead of me.

I think I can still take him in karate though.

YOU PROBABLY ALREADY KNEW THIS, but the price of health insurance is going through the roof.

THE MORAL ARC THING. As far as I can tell, the moral arc of the universe swings around randomly (in fact, "moral universe" seems like an oxymoron, but here is an interesting alternative perspective.

WHAT DO YOU SEE? Human perceptions of race vary with perceptions of social status--and vice versa.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Since when was a marathon a sprint?

Even though the world is going to hell in a handbasket, I can't help but pause to note that Kenya's Geoffrey Mutai (birth certificate status unknown) ran the fastest marathon ever in Boston, with a time of 2 hours, two minutes and three seconds, almost a minute faster than the previous record.

It looks like it's only a matter of time before somebody breaks the two hour threshold.

I've done three marathons myself and usually it takes me about a week. Well, it seems like it anyway. I'm not sure I could go 26.2 that fast on a bicycle.

Maybe if it was all downhill...

THE FACTS ON TAXES can be found here.

DENY THIS. Here's something from the Washington Post on politically motivated climate change denial.

WHAT WE'RE MISSING OUT ON: a lot.

GOING FISHING, orangutan style. OK, so they use tools. But do they lie about the once that got away?

URGENT BUCKTOOTH DINOSAUR UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Hamlet, revenge!

Several years ago, my judo teacher died. He was a great guy who volunteered his talents for years after hectic days as a public school administrator.

Although his mobility was impaired toward the end by old injuries, his chokes were sublime. When he sunk one on you, it didn't hurt at all. It felt like you were taking a nice long nap.

I attended his funeral with several of his other students. The thought occurred to us at the time that if this was a Chinese movie, we'd be plotting revenge right now. For the uninitiated, a standard plot in many martial arts movies is avenging the death of a teacher.

Revenge has been the theme of a great deal of literature, not to mention history, but the Elizabethans were really bonkers about it. Revenge plays became a major genre of the the theater during the Golden Age of English theater in the late 1500s and early 1600s (i.e. before the Puritans ruined everything).

The genre of revenge plays was influenced by the Roman writer and philosopher Seneca. In a typical revenge play, someone--often a legitimate ruler or powerful person--is murdered and replaced by another powerful figure. Sometimes the ghost of the slain person will appear to a protagonist and urge them to take vengeance. Then follows a period of intrigue and subterfuge leading up to the final crisis. The protagonists and his accomplices may die before its over.

Sound familiar? Shakespeare hit all these notes in Hamlet but whacked the whole genre in the process. Harold Bloom calls it "Shakespeare's revenge upon revenge tragedy..."

PEACOCKS. Krugman's latest column focuses on the difference between posturing and real solutions to the nation's economic problems.

HEALTH CARE moves from center stage, for now.

TRAMPS LIKE US, baby, we were born to run barefoot. (The story doesn't say where, however.)

COAL. Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo has an interesting post on the EPA's new approach to mining permits.

LANGUAGES. A new view of how languages evolve challenges earlier models. Simplicity seems to help determine which ones spread the farthest.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Cockadoodle don't

Stop the presses! Our economic problems are solved!

Just when you thought it was safe to open a newspaper, what should appear on the cover of yesterday's Charleston Gazette than a story about a group that wants to legalize cockfighting in West Virginia and ultimately in all the states.

According to a spokesman for the group, "It's only illegal now because of the puritan sense of a few people who don't find it an appropriate sport."

Earlier this week, a member of the group who identified himself only as "Chicken" dressed in a similar costume and handed out fliers in Charleston.

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that bill to pass, although stranger things have certainly happened. However, in the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit that we have several free range roosters on Goat Rope Farm and that they occasionally have a dust-up. Usually it ends with one running off, which is the rooster equivalent of the ju jitsu tap out.

A friend of mine and fellow goat herder sent me a hilarious email yesterday with a number of great potential bumper sticker slogans about the topic, most of which involve a synonym for rooster (hint: think NRA). Since this is a G rated blog, I'll quote a different one from his selection:

My president is Andrew Jackson.

WHAT THEY SAID. I'm down with this NY Times editorial on the need for more stimulus.

PEOPLE POWER kept the public option in health insurance reform alive, says economist Dean Baker.

MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL is the subject of this editorial from USA Today. Thanks to Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo for pointing this out.

"GRAND THEFT JESUS." I wish I would have come up with that phrase to describe the conservative attempt to rewrite the Bible. Here's more on that developing story.

TRAMPS LIKE US, maybe we really were born to run.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Tragedy or action movie?

Antigoneby Frederic Leighton, 1882. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

It seems to El Cabrero that the kinds of stories a culture tells itself shapes the way the people within it view the world. US residents, alas, have been fed a bit overmuch on a diet of action movies and french (freedom?) fries.

In action movies, there are definite good guys and bad guys with little or no ambiguity. The good guys usually win (in the US version anyway) and the bad guys lose and there's a happy ending.

Real life, however, is often more like a Greek tragedy than an action movie. There may be some better or worse characters, but it often involves clashes of rights and wrongs--and there will be some casualties by the time it's over.

Sophocles Antigone is a case in point. Antigone is a daughter of Oedipus. Her brother was slain outside the gates of Thebes for trying to overthrow the ruler Creon. Creon decrees that his body is to be left unburied. For ancient Greeks and other Mediterranean cultures, not being buried was considered to be worse than dying.

Antigone is torn between duties to the state--Creon, after all, was a legitimate ruler and her brother had no claim to power--and those to her conscience, her family and the gods. She can't keep all of them happy. In an act that some have described as world literature's first instance of civil disobedience, she buries her brother but must face the consequences by being buried alive under orders from Creon.

The ruler Creon suffers in turn. His beloved son Haemon was betrothed to Antigone and kills himself when he finds that she is dead. Creon's wife Eurydice likewise kills herself on learning of the death of her son, cursing Creon with her last breath. In the end, Creon is disgraced and despised by all Greece for his arrogance.

(I never said Greek tragedies weren't a downer. The same, however, could be said about much of real life.)

Former President George Bush was all about action movies--smoking the bad guys out of their holes. That worked out pretty well, huh? But people use the action movie frame across the political spectrum.

Occasionally the gods may give us an action movie type fight--a struggle with little or no ambiguity. Such fights are rare and precious. Much more often, however, we live in the realm of the tragic.

OH GOOD, HE SAID, WITH IRONY. Here's an item on coal to liquids and some of the problems that go with it.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. Blair Mountain in Logan County WV, the site of a 1921 historic battle between coal companies and miners fighting for the right to organize, has been added to the National Register of Historic Places.

SPEAKING OF GOAT ROPES, here's something to think about regarding Iraq.

SHELTER FROM THE STORM? Maybe not. Six million American families may face losing their homes through foreclosure in the next three years.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, the NY Times reported yesterday that things are getting so bad that some banks are walking away from houses they foreclosed.

RUNNING AND EVOLUTION. There is a connection.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: TRAGIC

Well...

Note: I'm not sure what this picture is doing here.

I've said this before and will say it again: if I was the president-elect of the United States (God forbid!), my first act would be to demand a recount. The actual person in question, however, seems to be of a different mind, so here's wishing him and us all the best.

It is the policy of this blog to stay out of the election business and instead focus on issues. Having said that, the changed political landscape means that some things may be possible that haven't been before.

Here are some things from my wish list (they've been frequent topics here for the last two years):

*The Employee Free Choice Act, which makes it easier and safer for workers to join unions, could be the most significant piece of social legislation in decades. Once the freedom to organize without fear of retaliation is restored, a lot of other problems facing working families would take care of themselves.

*Expanding access to health care. Need I say more?

*Enacting a meaningful and targeted economic stimulus package that includes aid to states and help for those hardest hit by the recession.

*Investing in infrastructure, education, green jobs and clean energy.

*Getting serious about dealing with climate change.

*Making access to higher education more affordable.

*Acting to reduce and ultimately eliminate extreme poverty.

While we're at it, ending the war in Iraq and a saner approach to international affairs and conflicts might not hurt either.

In general, the more I learn about the current state of the nation and the world, the more I'm convinced that we have a relatively small window of opportunity to get our act together if the future is going to be even marginally tolerable.

SNARKY WEST VIRGINIA COMMENTS. Every so often, some extremely wealthy groups or individuals attempt to purchase certain state products. I'm referring to things like the supreme court, the attorney general's office, the legislature and other such commodities.

El Cabrero is utterly heartbroken to find that the state and national Chamber Pot of Commerce was not able to close the deal despite have spent lots of out of state money. I need to pause to compose myself...

OK, I'm back.

MASSEY TRIAL TO BEGIN. Widows of miners who died in the Aracoma mine fire in 2006 could get their day in court soon.

MUSHROOMS AND CLIMATE CHANGE. Who would have thought there would be a connection?

CIVILIAN CASUALTIES in Afghanistan are mounting.

WHERE THE RUNNER HITS THE ROAD. Do joggers have road rage issues? (That's a new one for this long timer.)

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: INDETERMINATE

MYTH MAKING

Gustave Dore's illustration of Little Red Riding Hood, courtesy of wikipedia.

The nature of myth is the theme at Goat Rope these days, although you'll also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Maybe you've noticed that many myths and folktales follow a sort of pattern. In a typical Appalachian Jack tale, the eponymous hero leaves home to seek his fortune. He finds out about or runs right smack dab into some problem. Along the way, he is tested by a stranger and does the right thing. The stranger then gives Jack some help along the way. He then beats the haint (or king or giant or dragon or witch or whatever), gets the girl and then goes home.

Lots of tales are different but there is usually a pattern.

The Russian scholar Vladimir Propp (1895-1970) collected and traced the patterns in Russian folktales. He found that most were built around a quest pattern and contained certain elements or functions--31 to be exact--and a certain number of stock characters (he came up with seven, including typically the good guy, the bad guy, and the girl). What makes tales vary from each other is more the sequence of elements or functions than differences about characters.

A similar schema could easily explain most of the movies I've seen...

One approach to myth that sees people as basically wired to come up with patterns and narratives is called structuralism. The best known structuralist theorist was Claude Levi-Strauss, who aside from some fieldwork in Brazil was mostly an armchair anthropologist.

Levi-Strauss is as far as I can tell almost impossible to read, but here's the Goat Rope version: people are wired to classify things, often into binary pairs of opposites like night/day, raw/cooked, living/dead, etc. Every society does it, although each does it differently.

The elements of such a system only make sense in the context of the system itself, like a letter only makes sense as part of the alphabet or a playing card only makes sense as part of a full deck or a pawn as part of a chess set. The parts are only understandable as pieces of the whole. One function of myth is to mediate between the pairs of binary oppositions.

Note: I'm probably not getting that right, but what do you expect from a goat herder?

Of all the theories of myth discussed in this series, I find structuralism to be among the most intriguing, although it's as impossible to prove as it is to read. I do think we're wired to think in binary terms even when we shouldn't and we seem pre-packaged for story and metaphor as well.

MORE ON IRAQ. Here's more on the cost, human and financial. Here's a local op-ed on the Iraq mess by Carli Mareneck. And here's coverage on the unraveling of the surge.

NEW PROGRESSIVE BLOG. Check out The Wonk Room.

COAL AND HEALTH. Here's more on the WVU study of health in coal counties.

YES, VIRGINIA, there is a runner's high.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED