A half-blind Outside RUN editor portrays a stammering ultramarathon runner as indomitable intellectual specimen; selective memories ensue
The pandemic of dummies imitating the rhetoric of the learned is nearly universal with the maturation of an entire generation of "pundits" who never spent more than three minutes on any cognitive task
Nicholas Triolo is a senior editor for Outside RUN. He’s also a prolific writer for the same e-publication, with one of his stories, “9 Soundbites from My Failed Attempt to Punk Adam Peterman,” uploaded to RUN mere hours ago.
The first sentence of today’s interview-style piece is promising, as Triolo loads it with a memetic reference to The Big Lebowski. But Triolo then either forgets to pull the trigger or discharges the extended metaphor up his own ass like a fizzling retrofart, meaning that he loses the small fraction of readers who even grokked the haute couture tie-in in the first place.
Triolo characterizes his interview subject, Adam Peterman, as “of the most talented yet humble ultrarunners alive,” asserting that this is “a rare combination to find.” As refreshing as it is to see a senior editor for a distance-running publication admit that talent and humility are rarely paired in the ultra-long-distance world, more intriguing is the words “to find” appended to the phrase “a rare combination.” I don’t suppose Nicholas Triolo the editor handles submissions to RUN from Nicholas Triolo the writer, because that would be lame, but someone in this lengthy information-chain decided that the phrase “a rare combination” required further elaboration.
This was a harbinger of rhetorically unglamorous issues to come, not only with Triolo’s writing, editing, and wrediting but also with his humble subject’s attempt to sound intelligent while explaining how people even smarter than himself use memorization skills to solve a Rubik’s Cube.
I can give Peterman a partial pass on this tapestry of florid bullshit given that he wove it “mid-run” (Triolo and/or Triolo, 2024) and to expect much more from a recent University of Colorado graduate would be not so much irrational as cruel. But I’ve tortured some folks, and I would strongly encourage people who don’t know what “algorithm” means to avoid using “algorithm” in conversation, because abuse of this word and its derivatives is categorically associated with badly failed attempts to conversationally mimic an analytical thinker.
An algorithm is a set of instructions best given to a computer or a wholly autistic or sociopathic human being. Algorithms themselves contain steps, which are determined by the instructions followed at every decision-making point between the algorithm-follower and the solution.
I was in fifth grade in the fall of 1980 at Broken Ground School in Concord, New Hampshire not long after the Rubik’s Cube first reached the United States, with Mr. McGee as my teacher. (Years later, I would begin to appreciate what a remarkably cool name for an elementary school this was.) I had one of these items as soon as they began accumulating in local toy stores; as I had no income stream at the time, I assume it was a gift. Not long after that, I found a pocket-sized paperback at the Bookland on Fort Eddy Road in Concord explaining how to solve a Rubik’s Cube starting from any configuration. Someone else was the financier of this info-dog, too. But I tracked down the book myself.
I haven’t looked at any of the online Rubik’s Cube solutions references available today, but what I recall is needing to memorize at most a dozen or so static visual patterns pertaining to the cube corners (three squares) and non-central row elements (two pieces). Any by “pattern,” I mean that “red-red-blue,” “green-green-red,” etc. all represent the same pattern.
Associated with each pattern was a set of, usually, four steps in which specified faces of the cube were rotated either clockwise or counterclockwise to bring the area of focus on the cube toward monochrome status. (Beware of authors who use cool-sounding words like “monochrome status” when “the same color” works equally well, and be just as wary of poseurs who use italicized French phrases in English essays for any reason.)
Whatever the case, I learned within a couple of weeks, maybe a week, to move any well-lubed Rubik’s Cube from any configuration into the desired one in anywhere from around 50 to 65 seconds, depending on whether the person who handed the “scrambled” cube to me had unwittingly left it a few steps closer to “solved” than perhaps desired.
There was one other kid than1 then enrolled as a student at Broken Ground School (grades four, five, and six at the time) who was almost as quick as I was and who could have taken me down on the right day, as I never knew in those days when I might have to peak for some ad hoc schoolwide contest like this one. I forget who he was, but it was a biological and phenotypical he, and he had to be a fucking nerd, possibly in an Izod Lacoste “alligator shirt” like mine. Someone needs to burn brightly in hell for centuries for producing these shirts, which had to be worn with a genuine bowl haircut, bangs and all.
The point is that solving a Rubik’s Cube requires basic memorization and little else. Anyone who cannot learn to solve one is either lazy, which is fine, or literally not as smart as a fifth-grader was forty-four years ago, which is sad.
It’s fitting that today’s academically processed twentysomethings are fixated on the word “algorithm,” since I think a direct line can be drawn between the almost absent attention spans of younger adults and the phenomenal amount of time these people have spent on social-media sites since they were tweens—ten seconds here, 55 seconds there, two more minutes here, none of this gelling into anything or training the mind to solve problems or even behave in a cognitively linear way.
I’m trying to imagine Zoe Rom, David Roche, or any of the other paid editors and frequent targets of Beck of the Pack barbs successfully wading through one of my 3,000-word manifestos. Even if I wrote an article that was entirely about them and praiseworthy, I don’t think they would be able to remember enough of it after one read-through to pass a basic quiz.
Am I suggesting that these impressively self-congratulatory meta-retards flitting about joggersphere are not to be blamed for being the fucking idiots they are? Perhaps, but there is no reason to damn people with faint condemnation when you can ejaculate it into their faces with frightening force generated from hours of spooge-building “edging”—a skill now being taught in least 58 percent of U.S. public-school fifth-grade classrooms in lieu of math and probably twice that.
Come on. What the actual FUCK?! I quit!