24 thoughts on “Tour de Past”

  2. One by drivetrain and disc brakes on a carbon frame. I get it, except the carbon frame, when the first hilly stage is 182 kilometers long.

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    1. I have a 1x drivetrain, but it’s a seven-speed, on a steel Voodoo Wazoo cyclocross bike with mismatched rim brakes (Avid Tri-Align and Dia-Compe 986).

      Incidentally, it being the kickoff to Le Tour and the Froth of July Natural Holiday Week, I rode an American frameset today (red Steelman Eurocross) whilst wearing my yellow jersey (Old Guys Who Get Fat Etc.). We saw a shitload of bunnies, a handful of quail, and one skinny buck mule deer with velvet on his antlers.

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  3. It isn’t July without Phil Ligett, Damn still miss
    Paul Sherwin. However, spent $4.99 to get it on Peacock. Forgot how bad, truly bad NBC sports can be. But it’s nice not to see WWE, Nascar, Baseball, and poker but skinny dudes going like bats out of hell.

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  4. Momma Yates is proud of her boys today and perhaps buying rounds at the “Ole Wooden Spoke” tavern.

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    1. Yuppers. Well done by the twins.

      I wonder what Le Tour’s Stateside market penetration is like these days. Zippo in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, barring a couple of the usual explainers for readers who couldn’t care less. No actual coverage of the stage. Looks like NBC has a mortal lock on that action.

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      1. We sort of had stage one on in the background. Wasn’t even paying attention as to whether it was actually stage one or a prologue. But it was on Saturday morning, kind of the normal time. But stage two aired at 2 AM this morning, even though stage three came on around six.??

        And according to the television guidance manual, we’re getting it on the USA network?

        It does look like we get every stage, but no idea what the tape delay situation is. And it appears to have the normal NBC desk jockeys. So I can’t really see a use case for subscribing to Peacock.

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      2. Yeah, I can’t tell who streams what anymore. Seems I spend more time these days trying to remember where my shows are than I do actually watching them.

        Meanwhile, wheelman John Neugent says Chris Horner is crushing it with Tour talk over at the YouTubes. I haven’t watched any of his stuff because I’m basically kind of over bike racing, but if John likes it, it’s gotta be good.

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      1. Add an extra top tube and his bike looks like my Rivendell. But it will alas never log the kind of miles the fearless Canadian did. I’ll bet he could pull a mean wheelie based on the photo. I’m one however who is not nostalgic about canvas packs or tents which early on in life I had plenty of experience with.

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      2. Most manly. Not a stitch of Lycra on him anywhere, either. Grant Petersen would be s’proud.

        And yeah, his bike does look like a Rivendell. Maybe an Atlantis, or Appaloosa, with a Nitto RBW51 rack up front and a Nitto Big Back Rack behind, plus Sackville bags front and rear.

        Some classics never go out of style.

        However, who misses canvas tents or rucksacks? Not me, Skeeter. Or those crappy external-aluminum-frame nylon garbage bags that passed for backpacks in the Seventies? I occasionally hitchhiked with one; more often, lacking a car, I used it to fetch groceries home or grimy hippie duds to the coin laundry.

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        1. I had one of the cool aluminum frame ecology backpacks with the green stripes and the ecology symbol on the flap. I recall stumbling, bashing and cussing with it in Denali Park once. I didn’t take me long to figure out that my buddy’s big giant Lowe Expedition internal frame pack went through brush and Alders a lot better.

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        2. I have a Gregory Stout 45 that I need to be using. I look at it the same way I do the Subie. If sumpin’ won’t fit in the sumbitch I probably don’t need it.

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        3. When I was a kid, my mom would send me out the door on snowy wintry days with thin pair of socks, and then a bread bag pulled up over them, then a second pair of socks, and then my winter boots, which, apparently were not Gore-Tex, since it was still 20 or 30 years before Gore-Tex would be invented.

          Flash forward, 30 years, and I’m stationed in Korea, and for 30 bucks, I can get a counterfeit pair of Gore-Tex Hi-Tecs. Then one day, a troop gets too close to the triple standard concertina wire, rips a boot in half, and we discover that their “Gore-Tex” was just a Ziploc bag sewn into the liner

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          1. Ziploc bag? Wow that’s a lot of extra cost. A simple bread bag would have sufficed. Amateur entrepreneurs obviously. But good ole capitalism at work. Sell em a label and they’ll buy it.

            I’ve tried plastic bags under my socks in the cold weather, but that is bad news for my feet. I then just have really cold wet feet. But air-tight boots do work. As my rickety 2-story soap box will recall that I’ve preached, the military bunny boots, the white ones made by Bata, work very well when the temps drop far enough that Mr. Fahrenheit are Mr. Celsius equal.

      3. //So he bought a bicycle,” said Scott Gillies, curator at the Ingersoll Cheese and Agricultural Museum.//

        Cheese and Agriculture? So many questions about where they get their funding.

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          1. Just thinking about the Python crew getting together at a London pub somewhere and talking about creating a skit for it is funny to think about.

  5. Super moon tomorrow. 14% bigger, 25% brighter, tastes great less filling.

    Aphelion later in the week. We’re still slowing down for a few more days until the sun’s gravity pulls us back in.

    And then Friday the moon and Saturn have a near miss. Not really, they’re no where near each other, it just looks that way.

    Oh, you meant bikety bikety tour? Not our tour thru the cosmos?

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