Listening to Ben Folds Five's Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner (a beautiful record) right this second, and a funny memory surfaces:

I was cycling through Ecuador a few years ago, and I stopped in to a small village near Cotopaxi Volcano to visit a friend who had been stationed there by the Peace Corps. At her suggestion, we hiked up to the plateau at the base of the mountain to have a look around. Apparently, it was a relatively popular destination at times, but was quite deserted when we got up there. Too high (maybe 14,000 ft elevation?) for any serious vegetation to grow, and permanently scarred by the last eruption nearly 100 years ago, the plateau looked like another planet. My light-headedness after our rapid ascent probably added to that feeling of other-worldliness.

After poking around the plateau for about 30 minutes, we ran into a climber - this crazy German dude with long hair and babyshit brown clothing that blended into the landscape enough to make it look like he'd been vomited forth from the ground. We tried to talk to him for a bit, and realized that he probably was insane - it wasn't just a langauge barrier. When we finally managed to convey that we were from the United States, he broke out into a big grin and said, "Ben Folds Five kicks ass!" Seems he'd never actually heard the band, but he'd heard of their record, Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. Messner, as he told us, is a famous mountain climber, and this guy thought that Ben Folds had written a rock opera about his life (note: It's not. At all. I later read an article that said Ben just heard the name somewhere and decided to use it.)

After this exchange, the German dude in the babyshit attire yelped a high-pitched "bye!" and walked on past us at a rapid pace.