Graphic Comparison

The Discovery Channel has a really cool infographic on their web site, entitled Why Running Shoes Do More Harm than Good.

Here’s some of what it covers:

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Megapodic Movie Hobbits

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy was being shown over the weekend on Encore TV. It is always a good watch, but I was reminded yet again of one of the sillier things Peter Jackson did with the movie.

He put extra-large fake feet on the hobbits.

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Colorful Characters: Sam Snead

I imagine most of you have heard about Sam Snead. He was a golfer who won 82 times on the PGA tour between 1936 and 1965, with seven of those being major championships. Back in 2000, Golf Digest ranked him the 3rd greatest golfer of all time.

He also made a lot of his backcountry origins, including learning to play golf barefooted.

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Well, Well, Wellington

In Wellington, New Zealand, Primary Sport Wellington is “the organisation responsible for overseeing sport for its 64 member primary schools within Wellington City.” Their Interzone Athletics is held every year, and they just had one a few days ago.

The interesting thing is that they don’t have any sort of artificial footwear rules, so the kids run in what they want to. And for many of them, that means bare feet.

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Let Me Fix That For You

I happened across the following advertisement for Vibram Five-Fingers:

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Staying In Circulation

Over the past couple of days I’ve managed to drive for about 12 hours. And as anybody over the age of 40 knows, just sitting there not moving really allows the blood to pool in your legs and feet.

Various articles, such as this one from eHow suggest “wearing shoes which slip on and off and are easy to remove if you notice swelling.”

Of course, if you drive barefoot, you’re one step ahead of the game.

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Is Barefoot Fashion Back?

Here’s an article in the Orange County Register: Hey fashionistas: barefoot is back. The author, Cindy McNatt, give us a photo of a barefoot Jean Shrimpton in the 1960s and Kate Moss from recently (both are models, for those who don’t know).

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Statehouse Sneakers

I wrote before, in Use it . . . and then lose it, about how the Ohio Statehouse (that’s the State Capitol Building) worked to create a shoe rule after I was stopped by a state trooper while barefoot there. But they screwed up their rulemaking procedure, as I talked about in Back to the Ohio Statehouse. So they went back to square one, I lobbied them in person, and you folks wrote letters.

It appeared that they’d given up. I attended I think 3 of their quarterly meetings in a row, but eventually stopped. And that’s when they sneaked in the rule again, last month.

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A 1940s Kids’ Museum

Here’s a good example of how kids still went completely barefoot not all that long ago. This is from an article in the April 9, 1945 issue of Life Magazine about a traveling nature museum in Alabama.

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Rock the House

Yesterday’s blog entry talked about my hike south of Rock House in Hocking Hills. After I got back to where I had parked in the Rock House parking lot, I visited the Rock House too.

Remember how, in Cantwell Can’t Very Well the map at the park totally misplace the trails? Well, the map at Rock House, while better, is still a bit off.

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Cooler Air, Warmer Ground, Wetter Water

I’ve mentioned before that this is a great time of year to acclimate to cooler temperatures. One reason for this is that it takes the ground a lot longer to cool off than the air. Our lows the past couple of days have been down around 25° and the highs have been in the 40s.

That means that on barefoot hikes the ground, which hasn’t had a chance to cool off much yet, will allow easy hiking while the air temperatures are cool.

I had a chance to get to Hocking Hills yesterday.

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Free-Range Bare Feet

There’s an interesting movement out there called “Free-Range Kids”. It’s based on a book with the same name, by Lenore Skenazy.

The basic idea is that we are over-coddling our kids by not letting them go out on their own and explore, that we hover over them with horrible, unjustified concerns about their safety. Yet, my generation grew up riding our bicycles everywhere and given the freedom to explore and learn. (And it’s not like things are less safe these days, either.)

What prompts this entry is an incident in which a police officer brought a kid back home for being barefoot.

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The Germs Have Eyes

Yes, they do. They all have little teeny tiny eyes that they use to look at you before they decide to infect you. And if they see that you have bare feet, they say to themselves, “I got one!” They then race each other to see who can be first in infect.

Of course, that’s silly.

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OSHA. Oh, Sure.

Barefooters will sometimes be told by store employees that they have to wear shoes because “OSHA requires it.” OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and it only applies to employees, not customers.

And even then, there is no specific rule that says that even store employees need to wear shoes (though of course the business itself might require them).

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Colorful Characters: Judge Parker Fulton

This is from the March 15, 1954 issue of Life Magazine:

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