Rode part of something called Savage Revenge today. Oh it was delightfully horrible. Burned my quads, started a good sweat, stretched my lungs. Got up to the highest part of the midpoint and realized I didn’t have time to go through the entire thing, but I rode far enough to realize this might be a little more than I wanted today.

Beth Newell knows about Savage Revenge. She gave herself a do-over. There should be a metaphor for that:

don’t judge me. i wanted to school SAVAGE REVENGE. and five minutes into the new round, i was already 3 minutes behind. i finished a just little bit off the leader board…..in 1 hour 39 minutes, slightly behind the record of 0 hours 55 minutes.

My friend Will Collier writes about an entry for Worst Reporting of the Year:

David G. Savage of the Los Angeles Times’ Washington Bureau took a deep left turn into flyover country last week, churning out an appallingly inaccurate article on former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. Siegelman was convicted on felony bribery charges in 2006 (after being voted out of office in 2003). Siegelman, whose prior appeals had been largely denied (two minor counts were thrown out by the Eleventh Circuit while the major bribery convictions remained intact), appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. SCOTUS declined to hear that appeal on Monday. Siegelman, who served nine months of a seven-year prison term before being released on bond in 2008 pending appeals, will now go back to federal court in Alabama for re-sentencing.

Much of Savage’s article should be downright amusing to those familiar with either Siegelman or Alabama. In attempting to explain the strange creatures from this mysterious hinterland to his La-La Land readership, Savage presents this:

Siegelman was the rare Democrat who could win in Alabama. He had also won election as Alabama’s secretary of state, attorney general, and lieutenant governor. But his career ended when Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys charged him with corruption.

That’s one way to put it, if you either don’t know a thing about the political history of Alabama or are anxious to put a pro-Siegelman spin on the whole affair. While all of Alabama’s statewide offices did flip — by significant margins — to the GOP in the 2010 elections, prior to that year “Dirty Don” was far from being a “rare” Democratic officeholder.

How far? The state legislature had been majority Democrat for an astonishing 136 consecutive years prior to 2010.

The reporting actually gets worse throughout the piece. (Update: days later the piece’s many inaccuracies would not be corrected only. This is shoddy or deliberate.)

Want to see Venus go across the sun? The Internet can do that. Wired has links. So does NASA. It was cloudy here. Wikipedia:

Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena. They occur in a pattern that generally repeats every 243 years, with pairs of transits eight years apart separated by long gaps of 121.5 years and 105.5 years. The periodicity is a reflection of the fact that the orbital periods of Earth and Venus are close to 8:13 and 243:395 commensurabilities.

We watched it on a Netbook, which was something that at least made sense to people in the 2004 transit. What will they watch it on during the next passage, in the year 2117?

If you like reading comments, which is something for all of you masochists in the crowd, you might appreciate the ones added to John Archibald’s column today. He writes:

I’ve heard the questions all day.

Why are people protesting the new printing schedule at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, but not at the Birmingham News and other affected cities?

I hear that it is because we are too far right, or that we are too far left. I’ve heard that we are only interested in black people, and that we hate black people. I have heard we have outlived our usefulness, and that we don’t dig hard enough.

[…]

But if you want to look at why New Orleans protests and why all these other cities don’t, look at the nature of the cities.

New Orleans has identity and pride. Birmingham has division and hostility.

We can’t get together to “save” anything, because we can’t agree that anything is worth saving.

The comments are perhaps some of the more cogent — from almost every perspective– on the subject of Alabama’s shifting media landscape.

I keep my personal inbox as something of an electronic do list. There’s always a lot to do, of course, but I try to keep the size of that one low. You write me, I write you back. Here are some interesting things to read, or some research to consider, I’ll email myself the links until I can work through it. Important errands and tasks, that’s an email.

I had 11 in my inbox tonight when I somehow managed to delete them all. Every last one gone down into the memory hole of trash folders and cross-tabbed folders.

I spent the better part of an hour trying to remember the subject of all of those emails. Some of them came to mind more easily than others. Finally I dug through the cobwebs of both my brain and the trash folder to find them all.

When I finished my lovely bride said “There’s an undo button at the top of the page.”

I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there for some.