I almost forgot. Here’s a shot of the moonlit alley the Irish are stumbling through this fine solstice evening.
Happy summer solstice
A call-up and a smackdown
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.
We can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight
Meanwhile, from our You Just Can’t Make This Shit Up Department comes this item about British Petroleum’s Tony “I’d Like My Life Back” Hayward pissing off to the southern coast of England to watch his yacht compete in the (wait for it) J.P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race, which circumnavigates the Isle of Wight. It sounds like a Monty Python skit.
On the one hand, it’s almost refreshing to watch a capitalist who really and truly does not give one runny shit about the proles with whom he is condemned to share a planet.
On the other, fuck this guy.
WordPressed
Looks like the comments done went and shut theyselfs off again, dagnabbit. All this new-fangled technology ain’t worth a warm bucket ‘a spit, you ask me. It’s a helluva world when the damn’ software makes the meatware’s decisions without so much as a by-your-leave.
A casual search through the WordPress forums finds many references to this issue, but no solutions. And since VeloNews.com is also a WordPress construct and has many of its own interesting gremlins, I’m not certain that upgrading to v3.0 of the software will solve my problem.
Anyway, the yak factory should be back in business, for recent posts, anyway. When this happens the only way to re-enable comments — which are supposed to be permanently enabled for everyone who has had one previous observation approved by the Sultan of the Sandbox, to wit, Your Humble Narrator — is to go into every post, click the comments-permitted box, save the post, rinse and repeat. Life, short, etc.
Until the next time, then, you may fire at will.
Earth, wind and fire
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.
