Here’s an instant replay (it’s only a model):
I tried to get my colleague Charles Pelkey to kick off today’s round table with this YouTube clip but he wasn’t having any of it. Something about a wife, two kids and a mortgage. I didn’t get it. Not the two-kids part, anyway.
OK, I’ve done a little research, hollered for help, cursed a whole bunch, sipped a glass or two or three, and finally repaired and optimized my WordPress database, so let’s see if this has sent the censorship gremlins packing.
If for some reason you find yourself unable to comment on one of my brilliant online observations, please fire off a NastyGram® to our retarded IT guy, otherwise known as Your Humble Narrator, to wit, me. But if I were you, I’d spend my time enjoying the Fourth of July weekend instead of hanging around here, waiting to see if I can come up with a fresh way of saying, “This fucking sucks.”
Or, if you’re truly, hopelessly and spectacularly bored, pop on by VeloNews.com at 9 a.m. Mountain time on Friday, when the Boulder-based Journal of Competitive Cycling will be running its second 2010 Tour de France Round Table. It’s set up like one of Charles Pelkey’s live updates, but instead of following a bike race online you get to ask the editors and reporters how we’ll be following a bike race online — to wit, the impending three-week dash around Frogland.
I skipped the first TdF Round Table for reasons that are better left unsaid, but I may chime in tomorrow, because it will be the last chance I get to crack wise for three long weeks.
Squeezed another nice, hot ride in today, this time out to the Air Force Academy and back.
I was thinking about riding out to Palmer Lake and back, which is a 50-mile U-turn, but man — it was hot, windy, dry and dusty, so I called it quits at the AFA’s North Gate and turned around. Good thing, too, ’cause the wind went nuts shortly after I got home. Now I can smell smoke from either the Royal Gorge fire, the Medano blaze or some other seasonal conflagration, and it looks like tornado weather out there.
Meanwhile, some folks will be riding their bicycles around France starting a week from tomorrow, and that means I’ll be working five days a week just like the rest of y’all, assuming you are fortunate enough to enjoy continued employment in this mess they call an economy.
It’s no time to be on the dole, to be sure — not with Senate Repuglicans smugly flipping a neatly manicured, pudgy middle digit to the unemployed. As Steve Benen noted at Political Animal:
“We’ve gone from one erratic senator flipping off a reporter to an entire party caucus flipping off millions of Americans. We’ve gone from a seemingly unstable lawmaker telling a colleague, “Tough sh*t” to the entire Republican conference telling the whole country, ‘Tough sh*t.’
“In the late winter, Jim Bunning was something of a laughing stock. In the early summer, we have an entire Party of Bunnings.”
So true. And so sad. I don’t know how one deals with a completely unprincipled, mendacious opposition with the compassion of a rabid hyena on a gutpile and the smarts of a bag of hammers.
Floyd Landis — yes, that Floyd Landis — got a call-up at the start of yesterday’s 50th edition of the Nevada City Classic. Oooooooooo-kay.
I heard more than a few people booing as I watched via streaming Innertubes video and wondered idly whether they were (a) opposed to a self-confessed dope fiend, cheater and liar getting a call-up; (2) opposed to a self-confessed dope fiend, cheater and liar being there at all, or (iii) opposed to a self-confessed dope fiend, cheater and liar being a rat-fink tweetie-boid stool pigeon and a Friend of Cancer.
The field wasn’t as deep as last year’s, with Big Tex and his sidekicks having a previous engagement, but there was still some muscle there — Bissell’s Ian Boswell and Paul Mach, who went one-two in the finale, and 2005 champ Burke Swindlehurst (Team Give-Blackbottoms).
And Landis was a player, helping reel in what looked to be the race-winning move by Swindlehurst and finishing just off the podium in fourth. Don’t s’pose they dope-tested him or nothin’ afterward to see whether he was getting his testosterone from his balls instead of a bottle these days.
Another scorcher today, with plenty of wind and a big-ass fire to the southwest of us (my man Hal Walter at Hardscrabble Times has a pic).
With 90s in the forecast and a long shift in the Velo-barrel tomorrow I decided to get out early for another of my patented weirdo cyclo-cross rides, a two-hour blend of asphalt, concrete, pulverized-granite paths and moderately technical, powdery single-track that took me into Palmer Park, where the cacti and Indian paintbrush are in bloom.
I love riding a ’cross bike in this park, especially when it’s windy, because you can hide from the breeze in its miniature canyons, where the trails are well screened with foliage this time of year. This is both a blessing and a curse, as it dramatically shortens your line of sight, and the park is popular with a wide variety of outdoorsy types — runners, joggers, dog-walkers, equestrians, bird-watchers, stoners, boners and mountain bikers.
So I’m not exactly rippin’ the trails on my Nobilette, is what I’m saying. Life is already plenty short enough, and if I merely get laid up instead of laid out, well, free-lancers don’t get sick days. “A day of no work is a day of no eating,” said Huai-hai. And as you know, I dearly love to eat.
Still, I did manage to clean one section of trail that has had stymied me for the better part of quite some time. And I almost got a second bit, a rock garden that has defied me for as long as I can remember. I had it dicked but spazzed out just at the end, nearly T-boning a trailside tree.
“Damn it!” I barked, just as a couple grinning mountain bikers appeared, headed in the opposite direction. “Don’t mind me, I’m just trying to kill myself here,” I explained, and off they went, effortlessly navigating the rockpile that tried to feed me to a tree.
Mad Blog Media 