Jeez, what’s with the rain? Has God decided He’s had enough of these filthy, shaven-legged dope fiends flogging 16-pound bikes around His pretty globe? Stage nine of the Giro looked like a triathlon that required participants to swim with their bikes, and stage two of the Amgen Tour was not much drier. Guys were hitting the California asphalt like discarded bidons, and it will be a miracle if the peloton remains intact going into stage three.

I was running the live updates at VeloNews.com and it was a real picnic with no TV and a satellite phone that got hooked up about as often as a nursing-home dick. I nearly typed “Burma!” at one point. It was that bad.

My phone would ring and I’d hear something like, “Yack ninck fzzt Cav’ byinng yoicks Hincapie honk poot squeet Lance.” Shee-yit. As delivery systems go it lacked a certain something. If a guy is gonna deliver a pizza they generally give him the fuckin’ pizza before sending him out the door.

But that’s the way it goes when Captain Video is grounded by evil weather and the reporter at the scene is careening around Northern California in a SRAM neutral-service Volvo, trying to ID riders in the ditch while shouting into an expensive and useless communications device. “Can you hear me now? How about now? Now?”

But we got it done, kinda, sorta, and we get to do it all over again tomorrow. You’re welcome. Right now I’m doing a glass of wine. That I can handle.

Saturday’s stage of the Giro d’Italia looked like a cyclo-cross designed by the Batley Townswomen’s Guild with an assist from Timothy Leary and the Marquis de Sade. Angelo Zomegnan must have a deep-pockets coin-laundry sponsor. And I bet the mechanics were cursing late into the night as they washed, lubed and repaired mud-caked machinery, guzzling vino rosso.

Today brings stage 1 of the Amgen Tour of California. No prologue this year — instead we have a road stage from Nevada City to Sacramento. The VeloNews mob is all over California, seeing as Texus Maximus is there (eyeballs! eyeballs! eyeballs!) while the Giro makes do with Charles Pelkey and Andrew Hood. Something seems awry there, but what do I know? I am merely a lowly scribe, and a part-timer at that.

But I know which race I’d rather be watching it. And I’m watching it right now, with Italian commentary.

• Late update: Whew, that was one long day in the barrel. Thanks to all the VeloNews.com live-update followers who didn’t call me a retard (I had my critics, and justifiably). In my own defense, I will say only that stage 1 of the 2010 Amgen Tour of California was not exactly the most exciting bike race I’ve ever watched, except for that bell lap, when a whole bunch of guys decided to fall over en masse. Tom Boonen looked like he’d been run through an industrial meat grinder afterward. Cav’ won after J.J. Haedo went into slow-mo a few meters short of the line. Imagine my surprise.