The Weekender | January 17th-19th

The Weekender

The Weekender is your guide and open thread for the weekend, presented by the fine folks at Viva The Matadors. Things to quote, read, look, watch, and listen to for the weekend. Let's do this.

Hello. Let's cap this totally awesome week with a good, old fashioned, The Weekender. This week, we quote the Teddy Roosevelt speech, The Man in the Arena, being lost at sea and a college football player losing his life because of a helmet-to-helmet hit, touring New York City and one of my favorite bands, The O's.

Quote

This has nothing to do with anything, but I’ve always loved this quote from Theodore Roosevelt from the Citizens in Republic speech and termed The Man in the Arena (via TheodoreRoosevelt).

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

I tend to think about this quote when I talk about players and I sit on my couch not being able to do what they can do.

Read

This was just a fantastic read from the New York Times about being lost at sea (via NY Times). I can think of many terrifying things in this world, but being in the middle of the ocean with nothing around me is near the top of my list. I read while on the elliptical for half an hour and I didn’t really want it to stop:

Anthony Sosinski still seems shaken as well. For all his happy-go-lucky charm, his love of life, something changed for him on July 24. The last time he and I talked about it, we were sitting in the wheelhouse of the Anna Mary, which was tied up at the Town Dock. "More than anything, I think about it when I’m out there working," he explained. "It was the whole feeling of helplessness. Something was torn out of me, and that part doesn’t just show back up."

For Montauk as a community, the ocean remains a blessing and a curse. It is the lifeblood of the town, the essence of its economic livelihood, the reason the tourists keep coming back. But it is also a constant threat. In September, a 24-year-old Montauk commercial fisherman named Donald Alversa was killed on a fishing trip on a dragger off the coast of North Carolina. Alversa grew up in Montauk — he went to school with Sosinski’s older daughter — and Sosinski and Aldridge attended his wake.

One other good read, is from SB Nation regarding a football player losing his life after a helmet-to-helmet hit (via SB Nation). This is not uplifting, but it’s really worth your time. I was sad reading it.

Look

New York City is one of those places that I don’t think you really understand unless you live there and actually participate in life for a while. I've never been there, so I can't say I understand New York. I’ve read about it, but I can’t say that I really understand the neighborhoods or the boroughs that litter the city. My wife really wants to go to New York City and I understand that, although I’m not much of a city dweller.

Since we’ve already linked to the NY Times once, why not do this again and get two of your twenty permitted visits without having to pay for a subscription over with in the middle of the month. I very much enjoyed this photo essay from a guy that walked around the island of Manhattan in the month of August (via NY Times). It’s not so much the landmarks, but the city and the people that’s neat.

Watch

I have plenty of time lapse videos of mountains and clouds and things like that, but no time lapse of of a city. I know that we're totally averse to any sort of change, but just go with me on this one.

So here we go, you've already taken a photo tour of New York City, so let's do this time lapse style.

A New York City Time-Lapse Film from Chris Wiegand on Vimeo.

Listen

The O's are one of my favorite things to listen to. I pretty much kick everyone's rear by letting them know how much I like listening to them, and I continually say, "Hey, you've got to check out this local band, they're The O's."