Tomorrow morning I’ll depart this metropolis that seems to be suffocating under a blanket of toxic haze and head to Minnesota, the Land of 10,000 Lakes. I’m looking forward to hanging with my family, playing with my mom’s cat, and cleaning out my lungs. When I’m in Minnesota, I like to just stand outside and breathe. It doesn’t even hurt!
To celebrate my return, I’m going to link to my favorite Minnesota blogger, James Lileks. Besides his own blog, he’s now in charge of a "hometown" blog at the Minneapolis StarTribune, called buzz.mn, where he writes quirky things about life in Minnesota. Yesterday he had a great little piece about a man who walked backwards from Santa Monica to Istanbul:
As long as we’re talking about famous walkers, let us not forget Plennie Wingo, who walked from Santa Monica to Istanbul. Backwards. He had special glasses
that allowed him to look where he was going, and he intended to be the
first man to walk around the world in reverse. Since no one had walked
around the world at all, you wonder why he added the backwards part.
Maybe he knew that any frontwards walkers would look lame in
comparison, the next backwards walker would just be repeating his feat,
and sideways walkers would never get anywhere because you’d last a day
before the inside of your thighs started whining like overtaxed
powerlines.
Hmmm. ….. a man walking backwards…..to Istanbul. Maybe that’s where the "walking-backwards-man" I saw in Tianjin last month was going…….
