If there are any Okies in the Tour of California peloton, the Dust Bowl days must be looking pretty damn’ fine to them after three days of soaking rain.

Astana and OUCH might want to think about swapping sponsors, seeing as it’s the boys in blue and yellow who are spending all the time on the deck and in need of medical attention.

Lance Armstrong, uncharacteristically, has sampled the California asphalt a couple of times now — once after T-boning his own photographer’s motorcycle — and today race leader Levi Leipheimer had a brain fart and found himself tumbling along the tarmac after a touch of wheels with Big Tex.

Meanwhile, the VeloNews.com mob is frantically cranking out the online love, slapping up live updates, race reports, photo galleries, video and the occasional pointless comment from Your Humble Narrator, so you should probably be over there instead of here. I don’t make a dime on this thing.

You’ll never catch me riding from Davis to Santa Rosa when it’s pissing down rain. Maybe in a car, if someone in Santa Rosa is buying at a brewpub, but not on a bicycle.

My boys Merrill and Chris got together to chase the AToC around for a few stages this year, but I’ll bet Merrill wishes he’d stayed in New York, where the rain from on high is warmer, mostly generated by supervisors at The New York Times, and doesn’t continue for hours at a stretch.

It was one of those stages you’d like to watch from a lead car, listening to race radio, taking notes and tossing ledes around in your head while you wait to see if the lone breakaway actually makes it all the way to the line. But there are moments on the sideline, too, watching the poor soggy sonofabitch churn past in a spray and counting the seconds until the chase arrives.

Meanwhile, there are some very nervous dope fiends in Sacramento today, wondering how the hell they can quietly and quickly dispose of a one-off, $10,000 time trial bike belonging to a certain Texan without going to the stripey hole for felony theft. That wasn’t some college kid’s single-speed you lifted there, meth-for-brains.

If this year’s Amgen Tour of California is half as lively as the pre-race press conference, it should be big fun indeed. Lance Armstrong and Sunday Times reporter Paul Kimmage hissed at each other like a couple of tomcats, and Juliet Macur of The New York Times got in a few swipes her own bad self, chiding Armstrong for making snarky comments about her reporting after refusing to take her phone calls seeking comment.

Meanwhile, Floyd Landis has already crashed, but is said to be ready to race after a few beers and a couple shots of Black Jack. He will be supported by a water tender from the San Diego fire department.