“In the mail” is a bit redundant, don’t you think?
Not at all, dear interlocutor. You can receive envelopes in many ways. Someone can hand you an envelope. You could fashion one out of your own paper, or even purchase some. I have a small box in my desk at the office.
OK, fine. You received a curious envelope in the mail.
Yes I did. It had a certain texture.
Texture?
Not like a golf ball, which has that dimpled surface for aerodynamic properties, but the opposite of that.
Surely it has some purpose, this round skid plate design. Surely I am meant to stand on it, securely, squarely, confidently, while I’m opening the rest of my correspondence.
Sure, plus, it makes it stand out.
You’re right! I felt it right away.
And we’re talking about it.
Yes, we are.
So job done.
I didn’t tell you who it was from though, did I?
And that’s just how exciting today was. Emails, a few conversations about future to do lists, watching people watch the World Cup. Laughing at people. I also wrote a letter and sent that off. No fancy envelope, though.
I got in a little bike ride this evening, if nothing else to see how my knee would feel doing its part after I aggravated it in last night’s run. Stairs felt the same. Walking didn’t hurt. Getting up and down to clean a few things around the house felt as it always does. But maybe, I figured, the repetition of riding 25 miles would tell me something different. So I tapped out 25 easy miles. No pain. Lots of gain.
By my count, I’ll have the opportunity to ride nine or 10 more times before the end of the year.
If that holds up, and I hold up, I just might set a new personal best for milage in a year.
It’s time to check in on Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming. This is an incredible descriptive bit about General Charles Lee. You could look at this in a few ways. How many different ways to you need to describe a person? You could note how this is about personality, and not about his physical description. You’re right about that, the physical part shows up elsewhere. Begging the further question, how tightly can you pack in facts about a man? (And, not pictured, this goes on for a bit, as it is our introduction to his trotting into Charleston in 1776.) But I have a different question.
How much time did Atkinson put in the simple, thorough, act of pulling together this description.
It’s always thick. It’s never burdensome. I love how the man writes.
I am 340 pages into this 564-page first installment of his American Revolution trilogy. (No word on when the second book is due out.) There’s something new to learn everywhere, here. And, even then, you know you’re not getting everything. Something to think about over the next two hundred pages.
Waiting in the wings, the latest installment of just about the only fiction I read.
Do you have a case of the Mondays? Well, we’ve got a solution to that: the workweek is 20 percent over! You’ve built momentum! You’re going to spend Tuesday around the water cooler exchanging voting booth stories, anyway. And Wednesday doesn’t matter because you’ll be thinking, all day, about how you can wrap up your week on Thursday. And then Friday, well, that’s Friday, plus you need to devote a few minutes to how you’re planning to burn the rest of your vacation time before the end of the year because you didn’t use it all, again, because This work-life balance thing is a nice concept, but who has the time? Did you see how this week flew by?
So we’ve got that going for us.
And if that isn’t enough, we have our regular weekly feature, the most popular and talked about feature from this site, and this corner of the web, if not the western world’s entire Internet, the Monday check in with the kitties.
I have to carry my phone around at all times on the off chance that I catch one of them doing something quirky or, even better, some way to get the rare composition that features both of them. This is my tether to the modern world, and that’s the story I’m sticking with, but, sometimes, the photos are worth it.
Poseidon has had enough of this week already. And if you think you’ve had a Monday, he made this decision on Saturday night.
Phoebe spent part of the weekend helping me read.
Which gives us a an easy transition.
I used the extra hour Saturday night to finish Andrew Ritchie‘s 1988 biography, Major Taylor: The Extraordinary Career of a Champion Bicycle Racer. Major Taylor was a turn-of-the-century bike racer, and was regarded as the fastest man in the world. The thousands that came to see him race in the U.S., Europe and Australia understood speed with a different perspective than you do, perhaps, it was a time before people knew what an airplane was, or understood what cars would become. Taylor, his bike, and his rivals, were the high performance machines of their day. And also, of course, he was the victim of the racism of the time. Despite those challenges, Ritchie has him well regarded by fans, hailed as a hero abroad, and on par with, or easily superior to, everyone who got on a bike opposite him. The term world champion was perhaps a bit looser back then compared to what you might see from the official UCI World Championships today, but he established seven world records, and beat all the prime racers, all of ’em, the world had to offer. Mayor Taylor was a world champion, and that was his place in the world as a young man, and in a time when George Dixon (Canada) was the only other world champion of any sport (boxing). Taylor was an almost singular star.
It’s a great shame that he’s only nominally known by modern audiences. There are bike clubs across this country bearing his name, today, and his adopted hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts celebrates him and there’s a velodrome in his hometown of Indianapolis named in his honor, but he doesn’t seem to enjoy the household, iconic name status many early superlative athletes have. You’ll say, “He was a cyclist,” but consider: he was a star at the peak of the cycling boom in this country, when college basketball was an infant, the NBA was decades away, football looked more like rugby and baseball was just exiting its juvenile delinquent stage. Bike racing was a spectacle and he was the most famous athlete in the world. Thousands would come see him. People paid to watch him do practice laps. It was a phenomenon. He was a phenomenon.
He retired in his early 30s, had some failed business dealings trying to cash in on the early days of automobile innovation, and then a series of other failures. And we’ll let Ritchie share the next few paragraphs.
Ritchie interviewed Taylor’s daughter, an elderly woman by then. The family had fallen apart in a sad way, but this is an amazing bit of character study. It’s clear she’s spent a lot of time thinking of how to explain her late estranged father. Reading this, I am equally interested in what she had to say, but also in the art of Ritchie’s interview with her.
After he and his wife separated, she moved away with their daughter. He left Massachusetts, a proud, determined man. He’d lived there for 25 years, but had to sell his large house. So he was trying, hat-in-hand, to sell his autobiography. (Ritchie, while even-handed and, at times glowing, about Major Taylor, is fairly critical of his autobiography.) He took a room at a YMCA in Chicago, stayed there for a time, had a heart attack in 1932 and died just a few months later, close to penniless and essentially alone.
I noticed that Ritchie stopped updating his WordPress site in 2014. There is another famous Andrew Ritchie in the cycling world, and so I did a bit more searching to see what had become of him, until I found this memorial, of sorts. He’d had heart trouble for years, and some financial difficulties of his own. But this is the part I want to remember.
On the night of Thursday 12th August (2021) he went out into the Cornish countryside to observe the Perseid meteor shower: probably his last moments were spent gazing at the heavens.
Sometimes it is important for the innocuous assumption to stick.
Also, I started Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming. Atkinson has won three Pulitzers and a few shelves full of other prominent literary and historical awards over the course of his prolific career. His trilogy on World War II was an incredible experience. I expect the same for this series. Volume one came out in 2020, no idea when the next ones are out, but I’m through the 30-page prologue, and I’m hooked.
I love when Atkinson writes like this.
That’s four paragraphs on two pages and it paints a rich portrait of, in this case, what was unknown. I bet it took weeks to pull those facts together, shape them into this order and edit them to that level of concision and in his typical narrative style.
I have 530 more pages of this to enjoy here.
It was an amazing day, yesterday. Here we are, November, and 67 degrees. You could do a lot of things with an opportunity like that. I, of course, went for a bike ride.
This was a lovely 32-miler. Maybe I can get one or two more in this week, before the weather turns. Already I’ve been outdoors longer this year than last, so I have that going for me. The question is how many more open-road miles I can add because, soon, all of my miles will be trainer miles. That yields to the more pressing question will become how close I can get to setting a new personal best in annual mileage.
So come back for that! And other things! Like books! And music! And come back tomorrow tomorrow! I’ll write about a run and election day fun!
I have no content filler for November. I should really work on that.
Visited the grocery store last night, for the third time in as many days. I had to pick up a few birthday cards. If you stand there, muttering, long enough, you can find a card that isn’t outrageously priced. That’s what I learned last night. Took some time to learn that lesson.
Also strolled by the produce section, and thought I’d pick up a few different varieties. An economist inspired me.
As we enter the season of #appletwitter, allow me to remind you of my personal apple tier list from last season. What will this season hold? Will Honeycrisp move up to "S" tier? Will Cosmic Crisp be as good as it once was? Stay tuned! 🍎 🍏 https://t.co/tjn9KI8spFpic.twitter.com/4e05EAL6Ib
So, for today’s lunch, I present you with the Autumn Glory.
I can tell you this about my first Autumn Glory. It was surprisingly juicy. It holds a mild, even sweetness. The label at the store, and what I’ve found online, said I’d find hints of cinnamon and caramel. But my palette might not be sophisticated enough — or perhaps my peanut butter sandwich overwhelmed it — and no cinnamon or caramel notes were detected.
It had an odd skin texture, almost rubbery. But the apple was surprisingly consistent all the way down to the core.
I suspect I will eat an autumn glory apple again, if for no other reason than I purchased two of them.
I’m finally making real progress in Andrew Ritchie’s biography of Major Taylor. This is when the champion cyclist was traveling and racing around the world — an exhausting proposition at the beginning of the 20th century, I’m sure.
I worked my way through his peak racing years, his retirement, return and final retirement. This is where biographies get tough, particularly in Taylor’s case. He fell into obscurity and some sort of financial difficulty. There’s two decades to work through. Two decades after you’ve been either the toast, or target of racist hatred, depending on where he was. What happens in those years?
I guess we’ll find out in the next few nights. There’s another book to get to, after all. There’s always another book.
We can quickly work the two most recent CDs from the Re-Listening Project. One is hardly obscure … Stone Temple Pilots “Purple,” was their second record. Scott Weiland had quickly hit his stride and was stepping away from the grunge prototype. Seattle was still in there, but this was STP as they should be. “Purple” debuted at number one, was six-times platinum in the United States, three-times platinum in Canada, two-times in Australia and also in New Zealand. It was, in fact, one of the best selling albums of the 1990s.
This record is also one of the ways I know I had too much free time in my freshman year of college. We realized that each of the evenly-numbered tracks were huge, or going to be. (The odd number songs are all pedestrian, at best.) Indeed, we were right. I have a recollection of exactly where I was standing in our place when this epiphany set in.
Track 2 was “Vasoline,” track 4 was “Interstate Love Song” track 6 and track 8 were “Pretty Penny” and “Big Empty,” respectively. The first two topped the Mainstream Rock chart and hit number two on the Alternative Airplay chart. “Pretty Penny” somehow stalled out at number 12, “Big Empty” got to the third spot. Track 10 was never released as a single, but it has its moments.
The best song on the record, then as now, is the hidden track … and it’s number 12. And this, weirdly, isn’t even performed by a member of the band, but by a Seattle musician named Richard Peterson.
Somehow, learning it isn’t one of the STP guys changes my impression of the whole thing. (So … thanks … world wide web …) But it also deepens the hilarity. (So thanks, world wide web!)
Scott: “The guy is a kind of autistic savant who has this bizarre obsession with Johnny Mathis. He follows him around on tour when he’s in the north west, and he collects money on the street to fund his own recordings. We kept playing this song on tour before we went out, and it seemed fitting to put it on the end of the album.” (Melody Maker – 6/4/94)
Scott: “No one would be able to write a song like that for us. We had it played before our live shows.” (Sub-Line Magazine Germany – 8/1/94)
That song wasn’t on the Japanese edition of the disc, and they lost out. (They had, for whatever reason, a David Bowie cover.)
The fun of the Re-Listening Project to me, aside from the occasional flash of some place or time or activity associated with a song, is the mystery of what’s going to play next. I am putting these in my disc changer in order, but I don’t read the disc first. So that beat between one and the next is kind of fun. Do I remember what’s next? Am I going to like the first track? How much of this am I going to skip over? What poorly constructed paragraphs am I going to write about this? Does this hold up? Do I still like it? Did I ever like it?
The answers, this time, were “Not this time. Nope. A lot of it. Not much. Not at all. In no way. And, finally, not really, no.
There was just something weird going on in 1995 that let 311 rise to major airplay. I bought this — or picked it up in a giveaway stack, I don’t recall — on the strength of the single and have pretty much regretted it ever since. The record hit number 12 on the Billboard 200, and topped the Heatseekers Albums
chart and “Down” found it’s way atop Modern Rock Tracks, and the blue album sold three million copies, so I’m not kicking anybody here. And, the band is still doing it. They’ve released 13 studio records over the years, so good for them. But, man, this whole record is one riff, off-key harmonies and somehow a bunch of white dudes from Omaha put a little ska and reggae together with two chords and decided to rap and … we … accepted that?
This was not quite two years before Dre unleashed Eminem, so that explains a lot, or so I have convinced myself.
This is the only song that sounds different than the rest of the record, and they could only keep that uniqueness for 52 seconds.
OK, this one is a little different from the rest, too. But you can’t hear it without thinking, “Guys from Omaha. Yep.” And you can get that sentence out exactly twice before that same lick comes back.
It’s the whole album, and it never gets played, and this is why. Though they are still touring, music venues, Hard Rock hotels, festivals, cruises, so this works for some people. But it’s never worked for me.
Back to work today. Catching up on meetings and the things I couldn’t do while working from home last week. Some things are virtual, some things you just need to be there. Fortunately, everyone has been understanding and most gracious with my absence last week. Family comes first, and that’s a nice perk.
I’ve worked places where that wasn’t the case.
I’d say this has been a great chance to slow down, except that everything seems to have sped up. But on Friday The Yankee’s mom came to town to see about her daughter and help out. That was a big morale boost. And this weekend she worked through those early days of surgical recovery. She’s also a week-on from the big crash, and so, on balance, she’s starting to move better.
On Sunday afternoon we all even took a walk.
When I got to the office I saw that the Poplars Building, which we’ve been documenting in this space since August, is now all gone.
They took that second half in a week. But you should see all the rubble that’s out of our view there. Maybe we can take a look at that this week.
Also, the leaves have started turning. Something about them seems off this year. Subdued somehow. Maybe I just caught it in poor light at the wrong time of day, and early in the turn.
There will be a few more days of opportunity to poorly demonstrate the leaf turn. I’m sure I’ll try.
I started, oh, almost two weeks ago now, reading Andrew Ritchie‘s Major Taylor: The Extraordinary Career of a Champion Bicycle Racer. I’m about 20 percent of the way through it now, but the beginning sets the stage. Late-19th century, a young black man rides a bicycle as well as anyone at the peak of American interest in cycling, both as a pastime, but also the sport.
“The fastest humans on earth.” Crazy, but it’s worth reminding ourselves to think in those terms.
Taylor was from Indianapolis, he’d moved with a mentor/employer to Massachusetts, and he’d signed with the League of American Wheelmen, the sport’s governing body of the time. He was 17 or 18 here.
Within the next year he’d be a world champion, and a world record holder.
He was, in fact, the first African-American world champion, of any sport. He died nearly penniless. He’s been all but forgotten outside of his adopted Worcester, Massachusetts, and some vibrant-and-growing cycling groups. Major Taylor will have a renaissance, you can just put your ear to the wind and feel it coming, on your left. His is an intriguing story.
books / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Rocket ship emoji 19 Sep 22
The hill of truth. It isn’t much of a hill, and what little there is is basically behind the photographer at this point, but for some reason getting over and around that curve tell you a lot about a ride.
Of course it was two-thirds of the way through my Saturday morning ride. All of its truths had been laid bare already. It was a slow start, as rides often are, and the burst off the first little roller wasn’t as sharp or as long as it usually is. The sprint I’ve been tinkering with, one long straight road that takes you from one neighbor to another, I didn’t even try. And then she ran off and left me.
I only saw her again after one of the turnaround points. And that is what happens when you have no legs on a 30-mile ride. You get dropped.
I can enjoy it. This was the biggest mileage week for me in the last few months. Not a lot, but plenty for the moment.
Maybe I can find more miles this week, or the week after.
Let’s do the weekly check-in with the kitties. They’re both doing great, thanks for asking. Phoebe spent a bit of time last night hanging out in the entertainment center for some reason.
Poseidon was more than happy to take a nap in the fuzzy blanket. When they cover their eyes like this I assume they are embarrassed about something going on around them. The only question is, by whom?
Probably his sister.
Finished the Thomas Cahill book, this evening. The barbarians invaded Rome. It all slipped away, slowly, then suddenly. Eventually literacy gained a foothold in Ireland. And then came Patrick, Columcille, and Colombanus.
It’s a light popular reading. So there’s not a lot of depth, but if you were looking for an entry-point into an important period of Irish history, this is a reasonable start. The book ends with this downer.
There are almost 8 billion of us now, last time I counted, so that at least gives us plenty of permutations and possibilities. And, if that somehow doesn’t work, there are always emojis.
