Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The power of pussy


















Just a little taste of what we are in for on Saturday...
Yes it's another pussy run, the details of which are:

SH3 shopping trip #1517, July 3rd 2010; 4:30 p.m.
Hares: (and we're guessing here) Crackwurst, After Ours, Only a Yolk, Meals on Wheels
Menstirections: at those light thingies near Ko Yo take a rest, then go up the new Yala road for 3.5k and try to aim the car along the track on the left into the quarry.

Sunday's (July 4th 2010: 4:00 for 4:15) HH3 run is a significantly more male affair, although those of other genders are very welcome. The hare is Kai Jeow and the run site can be reached:

From Hatyai: Take the old Songkhla road to the Nam Noi traffic lights and turn right. Go about 12k and turn right just before the big tree, then follow signs/paper for about 1.5k to the run site.

From Songkhla: Take the old Yala road for 16k and turn right. Go about 3.5k and turn left just after the big tree, then follow signs/paper for about 1.5k to the run site.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

A little something for Winge and Minge (Are they secretly German by any chance?)


From the World Hash Space website (worldhashspace.com):

Hey Dok!

I have a serious fear of shiggy. Here it is Summer and I am reluctant to follow the trail. You see, when I was in Germany, following a hash trail was like following a fairytale path through easy woods trails, down narrow village streets and across flower strewn hills and dales. The biggest fear I had was drinking too much of the good German beer and having a hangover the next day. Now, I am in the tropics. These crazy people run through swamps and shiggy beyond my imagination. I have seen snakes slithering off to the side of the trail, crocks eyeing me along waterways and hear strange noises as we pound through growth where it can become dark and foreboding. I don't want to give up hashing, but G'! what can I do?
Scared of Things that Go Snap in the Bush

Dear Snap Bush,
Tough up you whining, whimpy excuse for a hasher! Why do you think the founding members of our little sport brought alcohol into the picture? Liquid courage is all you need. I prescribe 48 ounces before you negotiate every trail. You may still fear the unknown bite or snap at your heels, but you won't give a shit!

I do understand your nostalgia about hashing in Germany, having spent a few years doing just that, however one has to hash where one lives, so you must do the best you can with your resources. As a more serious recommendation, I suggest the following:

* Stay with the pack. If something happens to you on trail, you have someone to help or send for help.

* Wear protection. The tropics has mosquitos that can carry your your can of beer (and carry diseases), so make sure you wear a good repellant. If in the Americas, you also need to wear a blocking agent for any poisonous plants that affect you, such as poison ivy.

* Keep your shots up to date for your area. No need to get Yellow Fever if there is a perfectly good immunization for it.

I also have a bit of advice for the hares:

* Don't be jerks. Just because you can run a trail through the jungle past man-eating crocodiles, does not mean you have to. I remember practicing a trail in Southeast Florida when I was attacked by a mother alligator on her nest. Needless to say, I routed the final trail around that area.

* Clear trail if possible, but if not, find another route. If the trail is so thick that it becomes impossible to watch out for dangers, you are going too far in your pursuit of shiggy. That is why they make machetes and sling blades! If it is good enough for Stray Dog (GT) and Patchwork Quilt (founder of InterAmericas Hash) to get out there and clear a little trail for the pack, you are no better, hare.

* Avoid dangerous water crossings. If the water is not clear and there is a good chance for poisonous snakes or alligators, then find an alternate route. Don't be stupid.

Remember the hash is about having fun, not losing an foot to a crock or dying of snake bite. Let's make those trails enjoyable, not death traps.
Hare Doktor

Friday, June 25, 2010

The looooongest run of the year



It's midsummer again so this week's SH3 run is the longest run of the year or it will be when you add in the Full Moon H3 run which, if reports are correct will make up the third leg of the run for those who still have the will or energy after the first two legs.

Misdirections are:
Songkhla Hash House Harriers run #1516, Saturday June 26th 2010, 4:30 p.m.
Hares: Sex Sprinter and Buk Toy.
Run site: Prem's place (Ko Yo intersection, left, 0.8k turn left and go about 1k).

The actual run site (technically the C site) will be slightly above the Home of Faith on the road going up the hill but the hares request that you park at the house itself and walk up to the run site unless you are A) the beer truck, or B) intending to camp out at the top of the hill (D site) after the full moon run.

The long run itself will actually start from an undisclosed A site and there will be a B site which will provide light refreshments and will also be the starting point for a medium run. The hares will provide transport from the C site to the A and B site and probably from the C to the D site and back if you want to come to the full moon on-after but don't want to do the run and don't want to camp out afterwards.

If you are intending to do the full moon run then don't forget your handlight and if you are going to camp out at the top of the hill then bring a tent etc. Beer is being sponsored by SH3, HH3 and the full moon Hash but the beer truck will be around as usual to dispense cash-beer if you can't wait for the freebies. Food is up to you, i.e. as usual so don't feel shy about bringing along some food to share after one or both runs.

HH3 are running on Sunday and the run site is near the True Moves tower on the New Hatyai road (From the Ko Yo intersection take the old Hatyai road for 8k and look for a sign on the left). Off T is the hare so Winge and Minge (you know who you are!) should be in good voice. The starting time is somewhere between 4:00 and 4:30 p.m.
On! On!

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

And while we're in a buying mood....














As most of you will know, Schmuckme Witherspoon, a.k.a. Bruce Roseman has departed for the promised land. No, he's not snuffed it, he's just decided to take up residence in Jerusalem! Since this was not a planned departure, he has left a number of items here in Songkhla to be disposed of, most of which will be donated to needy children, orphans and distressed bar girls. But he has asked me to try to sell 3 items with a fourth chucked in as a bonus for the lucky buyer.
The items are:

1.A Fantasia brand 26 inch LCD, HD, Television, and....
2.A Fantasia DVD, VCD MP3 player. Both purchased about 6 months ago. As new, with all leads remote etc. Original price: 13600 Baht: Asking price: 8000 Baht
3.A walnut and Leather office chair. Also about 6 months old. Asking price: 2000 Baht
4.Bonus item: A 1.6 litre Vacuum kettle. As new with lead. FREE to anyone buying the other three items !

Pictures of the items above. Viewing by appointment at AUA Songkhla (down Platha Road from the Pavilion Hotel next to the beach) or give me a call on 081 9691227.
It's all in a good cause: Schmuckme assures me that the proceeds will go towards buying a push-bike so that he can get to the Holyland H3 run every week!
Egg

Get with the newest craze!

Hula hoops from Meals on Wheels: B100.

Hula hoop lessons from KY: Priceless.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Run like normal people



Want a change of pace from swamps and stream beds and thorns and terrain fit only for mountain goats? The 16th annual Hat Yai Nature Run is your chance to see how ordinary runners do it. It's on Sunday, August 8th, and they offer half marathon (21.1km), quarter marathon (10.5km), and "fun" run (4km) categories. Shirts for everyone and a medal if you finish.

Details and online rego here. And look who's coming (runner #020):



Addendum: Forgot to mention, it's early in the morning, so you can still make it to HH3 in the afternoon. Beaver & Handjob are both signed on -- anyone else?

Friday, June 18, 2010

Fat boyz'r gonna gitcha


Is it that time already?
It doesn't seem more than five years ago that we were all wading through klongs with our cans of Red Donkey held aloft lest they should pollute the environment, then getting thoroughly pissed as Dung Beetle and Conebrain brought us the original fat boys run.
Which is correct 'cos it was actually only four years; and a bit; and it's only a couple of years since we did it all again on a hill when the net result was much the same: general hilarity, drunkeness and relief that we had all survived the experience.
But the time has rolled around again and the fat boys ultimate revenge run (#1515) will take place this Saturday (June 19th: 4:30 p.m.) and hare, Dung Beetle has issued us the following invitation:

for the ultimate revenge run
from kohyor intersection travel 1 km toward songklha
take hard left before yellow "city limits slow down sign" opposite big bike shop
soi is marked as Tanakon
travel to end of cement, turn left
travel to end of soi, turn right
go 100 mtrs park up opposite big house
get drunk
cheers DB

Seems like we should all accept! (Beaver, it's you we're talking to!)

Sunday's HH3 unfat boys run will be from the Or Bor Tor office in Pru Toh (From the Ko Yo intersection take the old Hatyai road for 10k and turn right at the Nam Noi traffic lights, then go about 4k and turn right at the hash sign and follow the road for about 500 meters to the run site on the left.) No news on the identity of the hares, but the starting time now appears to have officially slipped to 4:30 so arriving at 4:15 seems advisable as they are likely to start early!

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Run #1514

Here it is in semi-3D. The short run was the loop on the left. The lower righthand corner was notably shortcut by Nosin (we expect that), Only a Yolk (poor show), and Egghead (utterly shocking).

Special thanks to Knob Goblin for telling the girls that Temporary's excellent lamb stew was actually dog. This assured that there were seconds left for those of us who knew better. (Of course it might really have been dog . . . ?)

Thursday, June 10, 2010

The longest day

So what's really the longest day of the year in Songkhla? This has been a matter of debate for several years now among the SH3 brain trust. Conventional wisdom says it should be the summer solstice, when the overhead sun reaches its northernmost point. Except does that hold true in the tropics?

Evidently, yes. Here, from a genuine pointy-headed astrophysicist on physicsforum.com:

Calculate the length-of-day ( LD ) by

cos(LD/2) = - tan(declination) tan(latitude)

LD is in degrees that can be converted to hours, min, sec

For locations north of EQUATOR the longest day of the year coincides with the summer solstice.

Don't believe it? Check it for yourself here. (To help you: the coordinates of Yardstick's house, our own equivalent of the Greenwich Royal Observatory, are N 07 12.062 E 100 35.784.) What you'll find is that this year, June 21, 22, and 23 tie for longest, at least when rounded to the nearest minute, at 12 hours and 33 minutes each.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Get it while it's hot!

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Saturday, June 5, 2010

Run #1513















Why don't y'all fffffffffffff....

Yup; it was f.
A combination of a wedding, a family altercation about the wisdom of driving over a broken drain on the suggested alternative route to the run site, and a bit of relief on the part of the hare that he could abandon what had always been a bit of a problematic run in favor of the unknown.

So here it is the run that almost never was. Yardo's Garmin measured it at 6k but a recount suggests it was nearer to 5.5k after discounting the F's and X's.
Lots of nice country back there though.... watch this space!

Minor change in today's misdirections

For anyone who takes any notice of these things, you will probably detect that today's runsite is now about 2k closer to the old Yala road than anticipated. The full misd's now read:

From the Kao Saeng intersection take the old Yala road for 17.5k and turn right. Go 600 meters and turn right for a further 200 meters. Run site on the right in the quarry.
So here's a little test of your powers of deduction about why.
Select one answer from the following.
a. The villagers in the village half way down the track have set up a marquee across the road to hold a wedding party.
b. Only a Yolk refused to drive the Egg-up such a long way down a dirt road and dumped the signs, paper etc off at the first convenient bit of flat land after turning off the OYR.
c. The hare got cold feet about his run and panicked, deciding to set a completely unrecce'd run from a different runsite instead of the flat, boring one he had planned from the old one.
d. There is no change in the run site. It's just moved location owing to a macro-tectonic-shift.
e. a. and b. above.
f. a. b. and c. above.
g. The hare got the directons wrong again!!!!!
A free beer to the first person to give the right answer before 5:00 p.m. today.

Happy? You must be getting old!

Ignorance is bliss?

Happiness may come with age, study says

It is inevitable. The muscles weaken. Hearing and vision fade. We get wrinkled and stooped. We can’t run, or even walk, as fast as we used to. We have aches and pains in parts of our bodies we never even noticed before. We get old.

It sounds miserable, but apparently it is not. A large Gallup poll has found that by almost any measure, people get happier as they get older, and researchers are not sure why.

“It could be that there are environmental changes,” said Arthur A. Stone, the lead author of a new study based on the survey, “or it could be psychological changes about the way we view the world, or it could even be biological — for example brain chemistry or endocrine changes.”

The telephone survey, carried out in 2008, covered more than 340,000 people nationwide, ages 18 to 85, asking various questions about age and sex, current events, personal finances, health and other matters.

The survey also asked about “global well-being” by having each person rank overall life satisfaction on a 10-point scale, an assessment many people may make from time to time, if not in a strictly formalized way.

Finally, there were six yes-or-no questions: Did you experience the following feelings during a large part of the day yesterday: enjoyment, happiness, stress, worry, anger, sadness. The answers, the researchers say, reveal “hedonic well-being,” a person’s immediate experience of those psychological states, unencumbered by revised memories or subjective judgments that the query about general life satisfaction might have evoked.

The results, published online May 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were good news for old people, and for those who are getting old. On the global measure, people start out at age 18 feeling pretty good about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to throw curve balls. They feel worse and worse until they hit 50. At that point, there is a sharp reversal, and people keep getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18.

In measuring immediate well-being — yesterday’s emotional state — the researchers found that stress declines from age 22 onward, reaching its lowest point at 85. Worry stays fairly steady until 50, then sharply drops off. Anger decreases steadily from 18 on, and sadness rises to a peak at 50, declines to 73, then rises slightly again to 85. Enjoyment and happiness have similar curves: they both decrease gradually until we hit 50, rise steadily for the next 25 years, and then decline very slightly at the end, but they never again reach the low point of our early 50s.

Other experts were impressed with the work. Andrew J. Oswald, a professor of psychology at Warwick Business School in England, who has published several studies on human happiness, called the findings important and, in some ways, heartening. “It’s a very encouraging fact that we can expect to be happier in our early 80s than we were in our 20s,” he said. “And it’s not being driven predominantly by things that happen in life. It’s something very deep and quite human that seems to be driving this.”

Dr. Stone, who is a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, said that the findings raised questions that needed more study. “These results say there are distinctive patterns here,” he said, “and it’s worth some research effort to try to figure out what’s going on. Why at age 50 does something seem to start to change?”

The study was not designed to figure out which factors make people happy, and the poll’s health questions were not specific enough to draw any conclusions about the effect of disease or disability on happiness in old age. But the researchers did look at four possibilities: the sex of the interviewee, whether the person had a partner, whether there were children at home and employment status. “These are four reasonable candidates,” Dr. Stone said, “but they don’t make much difference.”

Thursday, June 3, 2010

The facts - just the facts!

This week's SH3 factoids are:

Songkhla Hash House Harriers run #1513; Saturday, June 5th 2010, 4:30 p.m.
Hare: Egghead
Misdirections: From the Kao Saeng intersection take the old Yala road for 17.5k and turn right for 2.8k to the run site.
(Anyone coming from Hatyai should take the old Songkhla road to the Nam Noi traffic lights and turn right. Go about 12k to the big tree then carry on straight ahead (keeping the tree on your left) for a further 3.5k to Wat Kun Tong. Turn right onto the old Yala road and go 1.5k then turn right and go 2.8k to the run site.)

Sunday's (June 6th, 4:00 p.m.) HH3 run is a joint run with Union Hash and will also be an egg concoction. Misdirections are:
From Hatyai: Take the old Songkhla road to the Nam Noi traffic lights and turn right. Go about 12k to just before the big tree then turn right and go straight ahead for 800m to the run site next to the football pitch.
From Songkhla: From the Kao Saeng intersection take the old Yala road for 16k and turn right for 3.5k. Turn left just after the big tree and go straight ahead for 800 meters to the run site next to the football pitch.