Sunday morning found me on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia just west of the Roanoke metro area. It’s a great moderate hike to one of the most famous places on the AT. The fame attracts sizable crowds, so I suggested the best times to go to beat the crush. Read the whole story at Two-Heel Drive.
It was the 12th of September in 2001, the day after the 11th, and I was driving to work to fill a newspaper with followups. I lived Alameda County, California, and every day I crossed a minor mountain pass and descended into the wall-to-wall sprawl of Silicon Valley at Fremont, a burb that became a city of 200,000 people. It was the same view I’d seen a hundred mornings before, but this time it was different. As I wondered what could’ve possibly possessed those clowns to fly jetliners into skyscrapers, I didn’t see Silicon Valley’s smog-inducing sea of sameness....
The wilds of capitalism require a lot of skills that hikers take for granted. Among the habits we’ve acquired while walking in the woods: 1. We adapt to the terrain There’s never only one way to climb a mountain, cross a stream or camp out for the night. There’s only the way that makes the most sense right now and further down the trail. How I hiked a trail last week is irrelevant if a 1,400-pound tree is blocking the trail today. 2. We don’t ignore what’s obvious to our senses Hikers have to change our minds when the...
It used to be easy to explain how I earned a living. Just show somebody the daily scandal sheet and point to the headlines, captions, photos of a proper proportion, etc. All that ended a couple summers ago when I left the San Jose Mercury News by the back door for the last time. Today I’m doing something similar yet altogether different. I still write, I still edit, I never stopped blogging (it was easier to kick nicotine). I call my new venture Verb Nerd Industries — the link leads to several pages of shenanigans I’ve been implicated in...
When I’m not noodling with my various blogs, I’m often killing brain cells at these online hangouts: Facebook I was geeky enough to snag facebook.com/thomasmangan before somebody else did. Twitter Twitter was a mildly diverting toy till I discovered a site called Paper.li, which allows you to create an online newspaper from the links posted to Twitter. Now I have four tweets-papers: Tom Mangan Daily: Roundup from all the people I follow on Twitter. Triad Tweets: News & culture links from the Triad region of North Carolina. Hiking & Outdoors Afternoon Update: Cool links for people who like to...
I’ve been a movie junkie as long as I can remember. I recall ripping through the TV section of the Peoria Journal Star every Saturday, looking for hopeful signs on the next week’s movie horizon. I couldn’t have been older than 9 or 10, with tastes appropriate to my years — all I needed in life was two hours of Godzilla eating Tokyo or Washington fending off alien invaders. I watched everything back then — I still remember the first time I saw Slim Pickens riding that A-bomb to his doom in “Doctor Strangelove.” I had no idea it...
Funny how necessity recalibrates your intentions. Back in California I’d do almost anything to avoid long drives to trails — it seemed like a crime against nature to spend more time driving than hiking. The reality, though, was there were so many excellent hiking trails in the Bay Area that I could always find an excuse to pair a long hike with a short drive. On our current end of the country, the situation is almost entirely reversed: it’s crazy to make do with local trails when excellent ones are just a couple hours away. Case in point: Saturday’s...
We moved all the furniture over today and Melissa had the place looking like home in five hours flat. A few images: Entry hallway. Dining room. Office. Bedroom Living room. Fireplace. Hildy says hi. Bathroom. Melissa was in here painting and cleaning every day for the past four weeks; I expect she’ll be sleeping for a week. I’ll gab more about what’s happening in our lives later; just wanted to satisfy the curiosity of anybody who wanted to know what the inside of the place looks like.
Looks like we’ll be setting up housekeeping here in the Triad — we’re in the paperwork phase of acquiring a condo in the burbs west of Winston-Salem. Yeah, there are burbs here. This’ll be the fourth address change in 12 months; we’re hoping it’ll be the last in several years. I’ve always liked the South, though I confess I’ve read none of Faulkner’s novels (did enjoy “All the King’s Men,” a great Southern novel if there ever was one, however). North Carolina has become so prosperous and populous (10th most people in the U.S. now) that it’s unfair to...
| Abide in Clemmons, North Carolina.
| Accompany one wife, one cat.
| Sling nouns, adjectives, interjections at VerbNerd.com
| Blog for fun.
| Hike for exercise.
| Read the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly.
| Watch movies from Netflix.
| Listen to tunes on XM Satellite Radio.
| Drive to the mountains and the sea in my Honda Element.
