Idi Amin and Mr. Magoo

So am I going hiking? It would seem so. On Tuesday I went to a slide show at a nearby REI by this potential CDT yo-yo guy Mr. Magoo (real name Francis Tapon, hikeyourownhike.com.) He turned out pretty cool and we ended up shooting trail-bull in the Krispy Kreme parking lot til around midnight. Saturday I went to a development economics conference at UC Davis that made me think economics is OK, but then I watched Jeremiah Johnson on TV so I wanted to live in the mountains and get chased by grizzlies and hatchet-wielding foes for a living. So at the moment I could be said to be excited about both hiking and school. (Although tomorrow I could easily resume my rotation amongst the four possibilities: +/+, +/-, -/-, and -/+.) Hiking just northbound and coming back to school in time for fall semester (August 27) is a possibility, but seems less awesome than a yo-yo.

I also saw The Last King of Scotland and finished reading Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life. I didn't enjoy Scotland nearly as much as I'd hoped; I thought it was patronizing and manipulative towards Africans, but maybe that's just because I had that idea in my head when I went to see it because a friend had just told me that's what he thought. Shadow was good, not great.

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