We’re back home. I unpack the laundry — Not clothes. You do not take dirty clothes to someone else’s place to clean, of course. You leave with clothes; you return with laundry. Home, if you’ve ever wondered, is where you do your laundry. — and throw it in the basket or, sometimes, in the washing machine as soon as I arrive home.
The Yankee … she does something. I am usually too fixated to notice. Unload car. Unpack suitcase. Hide suitcase from myself so as to trick the eye that there are no more trips, no more windshields, insulting airport experiences or unusual pillows.
Typically this works. She’s petting the cat, I’m distributing the suitcases, the backpacks and whatever else we have going on. Eventually Allie comes to me, we’ve missed each other, but I want to have these things out of the way. And she’ll camp out in the suitcases if they’re left sitting around for too long.
We’ve been gone a while, but we have someone who is kind enough to spend some time with Allie every day. Check the food and the water and pet her. You’ve never seen a cat crave more from “hoomans” than this one. And so all night last night it was stamp, stomp, meow, head butt, yowl, stamp, stomp.
We don’t have the heart, yet, to tell her we’re leaving again tomorrow. The suitcases, it turns out, didn’t go very far.
At least all of our trips are really great trips!
This is the scene at the Crepe Myrtle Cafe, the local market where we get a lot of healthy food. This is some sort of onion flower:
We get this entire basket of fresh fruits and vegetables every Thursday. Most of them are grown very nearby. The girl that sold them to me today asked if I needed help carrying them to my car. Time to get that hair coloring product, apparently.
I mean, this basket is packed solid and gets hefty after a while, but really. I can handle it. And if I can’t, I’ll be in a commercial for one of those Rascal scooters. Delicious veggies, though:
Finally, got a chance to ride my bike again. Did 28 miles today, working on the backside of the big hill in town. There’s less traffic there, it has two great bends and is nicely shaded in the afternoon. I was timing my speed up it, going up and then down, up and then down. When the time started falling I moved on.
Elsewhere in my ride, I found a new personal best. I’ll have to double check, but I think I might have been speeding:
I believe I could get another mile or so out of that stretch, actually. Something else to shoot for.
FInally, my grandmother is feeling a bit under the weather. We went card shopping. This is the one I did not get:
The inside:
cycling / links / Tuesday — Comments Off on There is no metaphor, or metonymy 5 Jun 12
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.
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 rode a spin bike today with a device that measures wattage, the true indicator of how badly the people in front are punishing you. The more watts you’re putting out the more you’re working.
It seems I can generate enough power to turn a very small turbine. But only for a few moments.
My bike’s computer doesn’t register watts, which is probably good, because I’d start concentrating on my lack of power and do who knows what. Besides, I mean, pedal harder.
So I tried reading up on watts, at least to the point where the formulas kick in. If you get enough formulae elsewhere in your life you really don’t want it in your recreation. So I tried to find things like your typical cycling wattage, just to see how far human physiology — by which I mean someone else’s, not mine — can go. This, like so much of everything, is variable, which is the firma part of the Latin, I guess.
And since I had to look up American Flyer to get the expression right, and since someone made a spoof trailer about the movie:
Which is not especially a spoof since that’s the precise plot of the movie. But, look: Kevin Costner! WIth something under his nose!
We had dinner with our friends Kate and John last night. Pizza. A big table of hungry people devouring smallish sized thin crust pizzas. And then ordering another one. Or maybe two more.
I love this road. Good quality asphalt, a bike lane basically the entire way from beginning to end. It is quiet because the business of this road is down near the other end. Up here, for the time being at least, it is still undeveloped. It is the victory lap of some of my routes. A fair amount of it is downhill.
I did an easy 20-miler this evening. I’m looking forward to longer rides, which will start back next week.
And if you need a bit of inspiration for, well, just about anything, here’s a video destined to go big. Only 250,000 views so far, but that will change. Tune out the music, and wade through the first two-and-a-half minutes. The reward comes soon after that:
Things to read: Local boy is a good speller. Samford and UAB baseball both make the NCAA regionals. Auburn and Alabama did not.
New York City plans to enact a far-reaching ban on the sale of large sodas and other sugary drinks at restaurants, movie theaters and street carts, in the most ambitious effort yet by the Bloomberg administration to combat rising obesity.
The proposed ban would affect virtually the entire menu of popular sugary drinks found in delis, fast-food franchises and even sports arenas, from energy drinks to pre-sweetened iced teas. The sale of any cup or bottle of sweetened drink larger than 16 fluid ounces — about the size of a medium coffee, and smaller than a common soda bottle — would be prohibited under the first-in-the-nation plan, which could take effect as soon as next March.
That’s a sticky slope, friends.
Two years after the oil spill, the fishing is bad down on the Gulf:
The long-term prognosis for the Gulf’s health remains uncertain.
Recent studies have found higher numbers of sick fish close to where BP’s well blew out and genome studies of bait fish in Barataria have identified abnormalities. Meanwhile, vast areas of the cold and dark Gulf seafloor are oiled, scientists say.
And many fishermen are convinced something’s amiss.
[…]
“We was there to work, but couldn’t,” said Lawrence Salvato, 49, as he stopped for lunch on a dock where he moors a shrimp skiff he runs his wife, Lisa. “Usually people are excited and they can’t wait to get out there. This year, there’s no real incentive.”
He said he made about $10,000 in seafood sales last year compared to $75,000 in 2009. He said his family made do with a $40,000 interim payment they got from BP. Fishermen who haven’t settled legally yet with BP over damages continue to survive on periodic payments from a $20 billion trust fund set up by BP.
“We’re afraid,” Salvato said. “A lot of people are getting out of fishing. They’re afraid.”
“We are no longer a newspaper company,” Sun-Times Media Holdings LLC Editor-in-chief Jim Kirk said in a memo to staff. “We are a technology company that happens to publish a newspaper. We deliver content. And we will deliver content on many platforms and in ways that we haven’t yet fully considered.”
We rode around the city yesterday morning. The Yankee was doing another brick, a training exercise designed to simulate an upcoming duathlon. She swam and biked. I don’t swim in laps, so I waited until she was done and followed her around town.
It was warm, but still morning, so the air was filled with this crisp feeling of not-too-warm which, really, is just the way we internalize the I-hope-it-doesn’t-get-too-hot feeling.
We rode the city’s bypass and then cruised around the outside of the airport, by a new church that is going up and then that long, last, slow, supple hill before home. Just as we pulled into the neighborhood I reached this on my odometer:
That’s for the season. I’m a few hundred miles behind where I want to be. But I’ll catch up.
Sunday afternoon I got out for an afternoon, heat of the day ride.
“Couldn’t you have ridden later?” my lovely bride asked. I think she was concerned about my health and well being in the way that people that care about you have. It was sweet, but halting. Is this really sensible?
Well, yes. Because, you see, I was gassed the other day when I went out for a ride on the first real warm day of the season. And that shouldn’t be happening to me. There are plenty of times when I don’t have the legs or the form or the fitness. I’ll accept those shortcomings as physiology or just the bad day of a bad cyclist. But I live in heat and humidity. This stuff shouldn’t bother me like it did that day, and so, yes, I will ride in the heat, because that can be overcome.
Also I drink a lot of fluids.
So I rode in 96-degree temperatures on Sunday, and I was pleased with that. When the mercury really spikes, I’ll be riding then, too. But you have to survive the 90s first.
My gloves, as of today, now have 2,100 miles on them:
I wonder what the lifespan of gloves should be. These feel like they are getting up there in age.
Watched Austin City Limits tonight. Usually, when I catch it, I’ll have it on as background noise to feel good about my thin appreciation of the arts. “Musicians I’m not entirely familiar with!” Sometimes, though, you get good pop tunes. And sometimes there’s a bit of international flavor:
Flogging Molly played the second set. Their second or third song they started like this: “This next song celebrates the life of over 100,000 Irish people shipped to Barbados as slaves. Let’s dance in their honor.”
Well, yeah, naturally.
I trimmed the hedges today. Some of them. It was the high point of the day’s heat, and so naturally I was outside sculpting away and fussing with garbage bags full of leaf leavings. I trimmed and cleaned a dozen. That’s not half the property.
The back and the side will just have to wait. There’s only so much you can feel like doing in one day.
A few doors down someone had their lawn guys hard at work. They wrapped up whatever they were doing as I struggled along, thinking, I’d hire someone to do it, but there are no artisan hedge trimmers in town.
And you need an artist for this job. We’re not doing sculptures, mind you, but there’s a lot going on. On one side they have to stay below a retaining wall. In the flower bed they have to be kept just so, seeing that they don’t dominate the roses and hydrangeas. The flowering shrubs need to be worked in such a way as to leave the flowers still showing vibrantly.
The two bushes that frame the garage present special problems. One is over a perennial flower bed and trying to remove clipped leaves from the ground there would be madness. The other one needs an extra curve to accommodate the side mirror of the car as it enters and exits the garage. The two shrubs that stand sentry at the end of the drive need to be kept close, allowing for a good turning radius. One of those is swallowing up the mailbox. I’d let it grow over and frame the thing, but I doubt the nice lady who delivers our bills and junk mail would approve. There are another series of shrubs that conceal all the utility boxes, and that sits on the property line. I want to help my neighbor, but not cut back his shrubs so much that he dislikes my efforts.
And that doesn’t get us around the side where someone, at some point, thought “You know, shrubs of varying sizes. That’s what this long wall needs.”
I’d like to meet that person. I’d like to shake their hand and tell them how wrong they were about that.
Anyone watch Sherlock? I finished the second series last night and I’m trying to figure out the big season-ending cliffhanger. Want to help? Here’s the entire final segment, including the brilliant work of Andrew Scott who treats Moriarty like a manic personality with great results:
The Guardian is writing about it, quoting the writer that everyone is missing a big clue. They are writing quite a bit about it. There are hundreds of fan theories.
Someone taped a thoughtful six minute video detailing the Holmes conspiracy:
That’s not the only one of those such videos, by the way, but that one is particular well thought out. The truck with the garbage bags is key. I’ve watched this scene three or four times now — it is especially tense and moving — and the last of it in slow motion a bit too. That truck seems almost like a continuity error, though.
Time warp: Old Auburn football pictures from The Anniston Star can be found here. There are lots of great images form the 70s, 80s and early 90s in there.
