Tag: Tour de France

Paris, ho!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Well, that was … interesting. Fabian Cancellara kicked much ass without a DieHard up his seat tube (and the UCI checked, just to make sure) and Big Tex just missed the podium in a performance that has his fanboys tugging frantically upon themselves and squeaking about No. 8.

The Champs-Élysées is a long ways off yet, fellas. Put the mouse back in its house, zip up and chill out until the guy has more than five seconds under his belt and you have more than five inches under yours. That’s 8.9km down, 3,633.1km to go, is what I’m saying.

As is traditional, the VeloNews.com donkey had a couple of hitches in its gitalong on this first day of the 2010 Tour. But the virtual muleskinners are beating the poor dumb sonofabitch with a really big digital stick and it’s bound to get the idea sooner or later. Paris is thataway. Yaaah!

I took a break in mid-shift for an early Fourth of July celebration with Herself, the Mom-in-Law, Sis and Bro-in-Law, and The Dude and Doris. We ate catered vittles and drank French wine at midday. Next thing you know we’ll be dancing on Sunday.

One thing I won’t be doing on Sunday is working. That’s reserved for a long-ass bike ride. I even have a stars-and-stripes jersey suitable for the occasion, presented to me by USA Cycling for being an Official National Champion Pain In the Velo-Ass or something along those lines.

And if I can find a titanium-and-carbon-fiber shoehorn, I might even squeeze into it.

A happy Fourth to you and yours.

Hand me the Bravo Foxtrot Hotel

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

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.

Good for what ales you

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
That's kind of a funny-lookin' beer there, son. All pink an' stuff. That from San Francisco or sumpin'?
That's kind of a funny-lookin' beer there, son. All pink an' stuff. That from San Francisco or sumpin'?

The Fourth of July and that little three-week jaunt around Frogland are nearly upon us, and strong drink is a must, if only to endure the faux patriotic blather from both right and left and the endless keening of LANCE LANCE LANCE from the cretins in the media. This last is certain to be especially irksome since Big Tex has announced (via Twitter, of course) that the 2010 edition will be his final Tour.

But back to important stuff, like booze. We’ve been deep into the rosés for a while now here at Dog Central, and since I don’t recall whether I passed along Eric Asimov’s paean to this oft-derided beverage and am too lazy to search the site for it, I’ll chuck in a link to his June 6 Wines of the Times column.

But the Fourth means beer to the average Yank — and so does the Tour, to the average Belgian — so here’s a link to Asimov’s latest Beers of the Times column, which takes up the American pale ale.

I was surprised to see the Flying Dog Doggie Style Classic Pale Ale take top honors from his tasting panel. I used to drink it in some quantity come summertime, in part because of its Ralph Steadman label, but lost interest after encountering hoppier beers, like Lagunitas IPA. Even the much-lighter Mirror Pond Pale Ale (a summertime fave of mine) seems a step up from Doggie Style. But it’s been a while, so maybe it’s time to revisit an old friend.

Asimov’s fondness for Dale’s Pale Ale continues to mystify. Maybe I just got a bad 12-pack that one time, when I was camping in a place that forbade glass, but I’ve come to believe that the best thing about Dale’s is that after you’re done drinking it, you can shoot at the cans.

A long, hot summer

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments
The Front Strange, as seen while southbound from the AFA's North Gate.
The Front Strange, as seen while southbound from the AFA's North Gate.

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.

Ciao, Giro; forza, Dogs

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

The Giro d’Italia is finally in the record books, and now we have a month of relatively light lifting before the Tour de France kicks off in Rotterdam.

The finale, a 15km time trial in Verona, was something of a snoozer, since Ivan Basso could have pretty much run the course with his bike slung over one shoulder and still won the overall. But I got paid for watching it and posting news and information about it, so I have nothing to complain about.

Meanwhile, this just in from the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic: Bill “McBeef” Baughman finished 41st in Geezers 55-64 with a time of 3:03:45, trailed by Michael “Dr. Schenkenstein” Schenk, who crossed 63rd in 3:22:39. The Bride of Dr. Schenkenstein, Susan, took 24th in Geezerettes 45-54, finishing in 3:40:30.

Chapeau to all the Mad Dogs who made it to Silverton. I didn’t even make it out of the yard yesterday.