It’s OK. I’m morally handicapped.
Sign of the times
Bridge to nowhere
Now and then I wonder whether we ever should have come down out of the trees.
Of course, if we were still up there, a certain subset of the species would probably still be inclined to shout, “Jump! Jump! Jump!” at anyone who was having a rough day.
That’s what was going on at Interstate 40 and Louisiana yesterday, according to the Duke City cops.
A would-be jumper had law enforcement and traffic tied up for the better part of quite some time on Super Bowl Sunday, and apparently not enough of the spectators had been to church yet because their prayers seemed wildly off base.
APD spokesman Simon Drobik told the Albuquerque Journal that efforts to talk the man off the overpass were hindered by drivers shouting “Jump!” and “Kill yourself!” as they motored happily along.
“Any ground that we can take, it just gets taken back immediately when somebody does that,” Drobik said. “It’s very disheartening.”
Well, at least they weren’t shooting at him. Keep hope alive.
Fubo or FUBAR? You make the call!
It’s Super Sunday — unless you’re a cyclocross fan, in which case it’s just another day on the trackless video beach.
I don’t follow racing anymore, but a filthy cyclocross world championships is always worth a look-see, if you can get one.
Alas, it seems the only viewing option for those of us confined to the Land of the Free is a thing called Fubo TV. It got a good review last year from Boy Genius Report. You can sign up for a seven-day free trial, then pay $19.99 for your first month.
But it’s $44.99 per month thereafter and the 80-plus channels seem heavy on the usual ball-and-stick shtick.
One of the reasons we croaked the cable back in the day was that there were a gazillion channels, especially sports channels, that we never watched but got billed for just the same. So, uh, no thank you.
Best of luck to Fubo, especially if it continues to cover cycling, but I’d be happy with a pay-per-view option for the worlds. And I expect a few other cycling fans might like that, too.
This way to the Egress
Today it was the red Steelman’s turn on the trails.
I’d actually planned to ride mostly road, with a bit of dirt for sauce, but wound up riding mostly trail. What can I tell you? I love me some trail.
Especially if it leads away from the “news.” Lord, what P.T. Barnum would think of the fish so eagerly nibbling on the Nunes memo.
Probably drive him right out of the promotions racket. Where’s the sport in it? Putting one over on these rubes is like shooting puppies at the pound.
• Late addendum: Speaking of the circus, cyclocross worlds starts tomorrow with junior men, under-23 women and elite women. Cyclingfans.com has a variety of ways you can watch, if that’s your thing, but I can’t vouch for any of ’em because I haven’t been paying attention to racing lately.
• Even later addendum: CyclingTips has a UCI feed that works for me. Jaysis, what a filthy course. One for a mudder, to be sure.
• Latest addendum: Nope. Only for the lesser events, it seems. The UCI continues to win hearts and minds.
Up in the air
February took a while to get rolling.
Herself was scheduled to jet up to Colorado for a weekend with some gal pals. Being of a frugal nature she had wrangled the cheapest flight possible, which meant we had to be at the Duke City launch pad at 5 a.m., an hour I find abhorrent.
Naturally, when she got up at dark-thirty she learned that her American Airlines flight to Grand Junction via Phoenix had been canceled, and that she had been bumped to a 9:30 departure. Back to bed, if not to sleep.
When next she arose, at 5:40, she found that as she dozed AA had instead booked her on a 6 a.m. Delta flight through Salt Lake City. And had she been at the airport at that moment instead of wandering El Rancho Pendejo in her robe, why, that would have been just swell.
A call to customer service saw her flight shifted yet again, this time to an AA-Mesa tag team that sent her through Dallas-Fort Worth. Yes, to get to Colorado from New Mexico — call it 300 miles as the crow flies from Duke City to Function Junction — you have to visit Arizona, Utah or Texas first.
And thus, through the miracle that is modern air travel, a mere seven hours later, before anyone could say “You could have driven there faster,” which I did, there she was.
My day likewise featured its detours. Hal Walter and I had been planning a podcast that would take a jaundiced view of sport ahead of the Super Bowel, but like Herself we encountered a series of breakdowns, false starts and changes of direction.
When I do audio (rarely) I use the 2009 iMac, which has tons of storage, memory out the wazoo, and the best mic in the house, a Shure SM58 routed through a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 USB interface.
But when I cranked it up I found that Call Recorder wanted an update, and so did Skype, and once I’d made them happy Hal told me that he’d quit using Skype because his crowd was all about the Google Hangouts, Slack and whatnot.
Ay, Chihuahua.
I recalled reading that Jason Snell at Six Colors had spoken well of Zencastr, a service that occasional and undemanding podcasters like us can use to record their local audio at good quality without jumping through all the hoops that an old-school double-ender requires.
So Hal and I both signed up with Zencastr and started rooting around under the hood, banging on this with our stone clubs, and sawing on that with our flint knives, all while hooting dolefully, and before long Hal drifted off into a side project and I said fuck it and went for a ride.
Which turned out to be just the thing for a leaky brain-pan. I found a new-to-me trail that was just barely navigable on a Steelman Eurocross. My reflexes had dulled to a blunt edge that could not hurt me and I rode bits that would have confounded me had I been of sound mind.
If I’d kept going, who knows? I might have wound up in Colorado. And quicker than Herself did, too.
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