A “Vertigo” moment for the NPS
The National Park Service is like your cool aunt who can never quite get it together. Despite all her great beauty and abilities and the consensus that life just wouldn’t be the same without her, she’s eternally on the edge of a collapse. Lipstick on her teeth, one corner of her deck railing is loose...
What does “Age Against the Machine” mean?
CNN is running a collection of articles about Baby Boomers. They are calling it “Boomers: Age Against the Machine.” We assume it’s a play on the name of the rap metal band Rage Against the Machine, a group that formed in the early 1990s, which is long after most Boomers stopped paying attention to new...
If you love America, go skiing.
Remember after 9/11, when George Bush advised America to go shopping? For the good of the country and the economy. Because purchasing power is power, after all. And power should be exercised. Against the terorists. (Sidebar: You don’t need Don Draper to sell this message; most Americans accepted it intuitively. If your way of...
Olds and altitude sickness. And Viagra.
Ski season is here and with it the risk of altitude sickness. You know the drill: you start in Chicago (elevation 579 feet) or New York (which averages around 30 feet of elevation when it isn’t swamped by a hurricane). You fly a few hours west, rent a car, drive to Summit County and a...
Love your car? Get a bike.
If you love your car, you need to ride a bike. I have a slightly complicated rationale for this position, so you to have to pay slightly more attention than usual for a Recreati story. It begins with Superstorm Sandy and our human need to know the cause of horrible things. If we have...
Our Election Day video
We feel like this dog on Election Day. We want to go outside—let’s say, to take a nice walk—but we have an obligation to do something else. Something we really should do but we’re just so done with it all that we want to crawl under the bed. That said, we’re crawling out from under...
What would “more accountable” parks look like?
If we hated election season anymore, we would advocate for monarchy. We would trade this rancorous debate for no debate. We would replace distortions of political ads for the relative integrity of other ads. For chiropractors and mattress stores. But we aren’t there yet. We still pay grudging attention to what the sides are...
Glamping, now with garbage and vermin
Glamping is proving itself to be an exceedingly plastic notion, applicable to pods, safari tents and now—says this person in the N.Y. Times—a blacked-out apartment 10 floors up a dark stairway above a rubbish-clogged, soon-to-be-black-moldy rat-scape. Hats off to New Yorkers, and all you folks in New Jersey and Delaware. Everyone who was clobbered by...
What happens after the parks reopen?
The first priority now, in the aftermath of Sandy, is to take care of the people who have lost their loved ones, homes and worldly goods. They need food and water and a jump-start. The complicated and interlaced systems that keep the East Coast hive functioning—all that needs to be drained, cleaned and in many...
