This is where we ball up all the loose ends of the week and shove them in a drawer, which we’ll open in six months looking for something else and say, “Oh. Remember this?”

  • A guy was arrested this week for surfing off a beach…in Chicago. The perp isn’t quite in our age demographic—Rex Flodstrom is 40—but we want to tip our bibbed neoprene hood to him anyway. We wish you well, Rex, and we hope the police return your confiscated surf board. Maybe try Duluth for your next safari? Cops there are cool.
  • The New York Times ran a nice profile of Jon Turk (65) and his partner Erik Boomer, our picks for the Nat Geo Adventurers of the Year, which includes this description of sheer cliffs on the northeast coast of Ellesmere Island: “You’re seeing ice collide into other chunks of ice,” Turk said, “or collide into the rock and tilt and smear and just get shoved up into the air — 10, 20, 30 feet into the air. That’s why we were scared. If you’re caught in the middle of that in a 13-foot kayak, there’s nothing you can do to not be dead.”
  • Mumbai has a marathon, and a lot of older people run in it, including 76-year-old Zend Merwan, who crossed the finish line with a wooden stick and caretaker as support. Normally, we’d say a person who needs a caretaker to finish probably shouldn’t have started, but Merwan is a special case: he’s been suffering with Parkinson disease for the last 10 years. You expect this to end with a quote in which he explains that it’s always been a desire of his—something on his bucket list—and now he can scratch it off. Not this time: “I definitely want to participate next year. I was so happy everyone was clapping for me.” What price glory?
  • The Canadian Paediatric Society wants legislation that would require helmets for skiers and snowboarders. The agency said helmets reduce the risk of head injury by 35 percent. Current estimates are that slightly more than half of all skiers and boarders wear helmets. The CPS singles out the importance of helmets for children and teens—and they should, given their youthful risk-taking—but it seems that more and more of them get a helmet when they start and don’t hesitate to wear them as they get older. Our take is that older people—many of whom grew up without head protection—are the harder sell. Nova Scotia is about to make it easier for everyone to don a brain bucket: effective November 2012, any skier or boarder without a helmet will be fined $250.
  • Fructose is routinely  identified as a villain, the Voldemort of consumables, the dark source of our obesity crisis. Not so, says Outside Magazine’s informative story, which says it can be a performance superfuel. Sedentary types should steer clear, if they could, but they can’t. And they won’t. So that is a problem. But if you’re engaged in extended physical activity, you’ll  have “calories available to you more quickly if you drink or eat carbo­hydrates containing fructose.” Even the frequently reviled high-fructose corn syrup is deemed an acceptable fuel for athletes.

Photo of corn beef hash by Richard Kaszeta via Wikimedia Commons.