Yesterday the high was 78. Today we didn’t hit 58. And the sun was unobscured by clouds for only a few moments all day.
But I did see the season’s first robin:
There were eight of them in the yard, in fact. None of them were on the bird feeder, but they did find some interesting things on the ground.
Fifty-five miles on the bike today. I’d planned to go 40, but much of it was going to be on new roads, which means being lost. Which means extra miles. And that’s how I added so much extra. I missed the baseball game, but listened to it on the ride home. Racing daylight — despite the 55 miles I cut things short because it would be dark and it was turning chilly — I listened to Auburn beat Charleston Southern 13-1. Maybe I should stay away from the park this season. They are 1-3 when I’ve seen them and 6-2 when I am not (or they are on the road).
The nice thing about the ride, aside from the miles, was in tracking down a few historic markers. The first downside was all the backtracking. About 10 or 15 miles were just because of human error. It seems I made a mistake in plotting my map, and so there I was, under a darkening gray sky, no cell signal, up hill both directions and miles and miles to go.
Also I fell. Last week when I tumbled out of my clips I blamed the firefighters. Today I can blame a police officer.
I was at a stop sign, lost. I was trying to figure out which way I wanted to go to make it to my next planned stop. I’d all but flipped a coin and got back on my bike. Look left, right, left and right again. I clip in, look left and realize this car is coming much faster than I’d realized.
I can’t get out of my clips at a dead stop. (I’m not a very good cyclist.)
So I fall over — pow, crash, boom, scrape — onto my hip and forearm.
A truck had pulled up behind me. I lifted my bike off my right leg and unclipped my shoe. I waved to the truck and moved my bike. The oncoming car was a police officer. He saw the whole thing and he stopped. The guy driving the pickup asked if I was OK. I thanked him and sent him on his way. By then the police officer had gotten out of his cruiser and walked over.
“Are you OK sir?”
I’m fine, I said. But while I have you here, I have a question.
And that is one of your less advisable ways to get a police officer’s attention. But I was fine. I scrapped my forearm a bit. It felt like I landed on my hip pretty hard, but it was instantly OK. We chatted for a minute — he was a nice old guy, quick with a laugh. I didn’t realize until the officer left, and I pedaled off in the direction that he pointed, that my wrist was hurting. I guess I landed on that, too.
So I’m icing my wrist.
You know, if that police officer hadn’t been driving by I wouldn’t have fallen over. What civil servant is next?
Things are fine here, weatherwise, but everyone else had it rough. That is one impressive map.
Samford, and a lot schools across the state, closed early. That means more time on the bike for me. I felt defeated by headwinds, probably the latent energy that couldn’t make it up into the storms. There were 10 miles out on familiar roads, one of our base routes, and then 10 brand new miles, mostly uphill. On the first half of the return, downhill through those 10 new miles, I was actually moving slower than the ride out. Headwinds are tough like that. Especially when there aren’t any tailwinds.
So I perfected the art of steering at an angle to aim through crosswinds and tried in vain, like every other cyclist, to make myself as small as possible to keep my cross section low. I hit breezes that would drop me four miles per hour instantly. And this wasn’t really even a windy day.
And since we have the informal Where Were You When You Heard Party in the U.S.A. rule around here:
Hey, it is a catchy tune and I needed something to round out the 11 hours on my iPod. Every five or six rides it rolls back around and I stop and take this picture. I have no idea why, really, but it always seems to come along at a time when I need the break.
A blooming tree nearby:
The church at today’s turnaround point:
That place will show up again on the site next week as part of the new Lee County Historic Markers section of the site.
Caught most of the baseball game — they’d moved up the first pitch to avoid the evening’s rain — Purdue and Auburn see-sawed back and forth, but the Boilermakers held on 9-8 after fighting off a late rally. Auburn stranded eight in the game, which seems a fairly low number for the team so far this year.
Hit the grocery store, bought things, boiled pasta and grilled chicken. I’d intended to make some to leave for tomorrow but, what do you know, it all looked appetizing, it all had to be eaten. Hey, I’d burned several thousand calories today. Headwinds.
Bo Jackson, that Bo Jackson, will ride across Alabama in April, east to west, as a fund raiser for tornado relief.
The man is intense even in promotional videos. I want to ride along. At least for a little bit, if not an entire leg. (I’d prefer the Bessemer to Tuscaloosa day obviously, since we both grew up there.)
If I were able to ride with him the only problem would be figuring out to get ahead of him several times so he can pass me and I can describe the sound. So I can write things like this:
Bo riding a bike is an angry mashing of steel gears. Gritting carbon fiber against melting alumnium. He flings acidic drops of sweat behind him, furious that he has to stop and replace his pedals every 45 minutes or so. He’s riding a Trek because it is built like a tank, but he still grinds them into dust. I bet he could ride the 300 miles in the better part of an afternoon if he catches the red lights right. But since he has to wait so often for wheel rebuilds it stretches this thing out over a week. I bet the turbulence behind him helps clean up the tornado debris on some of those central Alabama roadsides.
And not one man will sneer at him when he coasts into Tuscaloosa, because they know.
I told a friend that I was trying to explain Bo to my lovely bride, who was busy being a little girl in another part of the country during Bo’s prime while we were busy agog at what the man could do. A few years later and superlatives can ring hollow. He suggested the uninitiated watch this:
If I rode with Bo I would not act like a fanboy, but I would ask him about coming home to raise money. And I would ask him about his VOX2 Max. And I’d playfully suggest we sprint to the next road sign, just so I could say I’ve been beaten by the best.
I wanted to ride this morning, but Monday mornings race by and this morning needed to linger a bit. Besides, it had rained and … OK, maybe I didn’t want to ride this morning. I was a bit sore last night, actually, aching in places I haven’t in a good long while. And that’s probably the perfect reason to clip in.
Also I need to find out where the guy in the neon yellow jacket went yesterday. I turned onto one road behind him, met a cyclist heading the other direction and decided to overtake the guy in the loud jacket.
What if the cyclist going the other way turned around? He should see me put this guy between us so he can, naturally, destroy me with ease, I thought.
And then I realized where I was.
I could pace and pass this guy, but I struggle on the next hill and he’ll get me back there. That would be embarrassing.
So I decided to close the distance, but not force the issue. At the next intersection, from about 40 yards back, I watched him turn left. When I made the intersection — going straight — I glanced after him but he was gone. That was impressive. Or he might be missing out there somewhere.
That was yesterday’s 32 mile ride. Today damp asphalt and things to do kept me inside.
Class today. The conversation was led by a group discussing online media. One of the guys was controlling every computer in the room and a low-orbit satellite from his iPad. He was a good choice for this topic and, as usual, it was a great job. I have very sharp students.
I’m also buried in a spreadsheet. And I have a stack of things to grade, a few more phone calls to make. I have plenty of school work to do. So this is brief.
Hopping aboard a bike, former Bogota, Colombia, Mayor Enrique Penalosa took a six-mile ride through the good, the bad and the ugly of Birmingham in advance of today’s Sustainable Smart Cities Conference.
After biking through depopulated portions of Titusville and Elyton, marred with abandoned and burned-out houses and grim housing developments, Penalosa was aghast.
“What I saw today was one of the most depressed areas I have ever seen,” he said.
He suggested that residents in the sparsely populated areas be bought out to make way for a “crazy” project
When a mayor of Bogota is telling you your business …
Romney recalled he was “probably 4 or something like that” the day of the Golden Jubilee, when three-quarters of a million people gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the American automobile.
“My dad had a job being the grandmaster. They painted Woodward Ave. with gold paint,” Romney told a rapt Tea Party audience in the village of Milford Thursday night, reliving a moment of American industrial glory.
The Golden Jubilee described so vividly by Romney was indeed an epic moment in automotive lore. The parade included one of the last public appearances by an elderly Henry Ford.
And it took place June 1, 1946 — fully nine months before Romney was born.
I love false memory stories, and only partly because the earliest memory I can muster (and that’s a good word) is, when I describe it to my mother, something that can’t possibly have happened.
If Romney isn’t cynically pandering with the idea that no one would bother to cross-reference the dates, this is a simple mistake. Of course no mistake on the campaign trail is simple. And this story, which is far more likely Romney’s re-telling of a story he heard in his family his entire life, is probably just a planted memory. Sometimes you can’t win for losing.
So then why are there so many attempts to regulate it? Under the guises of piracy, privacy, pornography, predators, indecency, and security, not to mention censorship, tyranny, and civilization, governments from the U.S. to France to Germany to China to Iran to Canada — as well as the European Union and the United Nations — are trying to exert control over the internet.
Why? Is it not working? Is it presenting some new danger to society? Is it fundamentally operating any differently today than it was five or ten years ago? No, no, and no.
So why are governments so eager to claim authority over it? Why would legacy corporations, industries, and institutions egg them on? Because the net is working better than ever. Because they finally recognize how powerful it is and how disruptive it is to their power.
Jarvis was the president of Advance Internet during much of my time with the company.
Cards and flowers were left and candles were lit at the corner of Dean Road and Samford Ave. tonight in honor of a hero.
Johnny Richmond, affectionately known as Mr. Penny by students at Dean Road Elementary School where he worked for 37 years as a custodian and crossing guard, suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound Monday morning, according to Auburn police. News outlets have backed off earlier reports that Richmond later died from his injuries, and as of 9 p.m. Monday list him as being on life support.
I wrote the next piece, the short, just-in-case bit of copy that you hope never has to run. Right now he’s hanging on. He’s seemingly one of those people that you can’t find anyone that has anything remotely to say about him. This is Mr. Penny:
Jeremy did that interview in 2011, after the community rallied to raise money to send him and his wife to the BCS National Championship game. We live in a great place.
The Sunday feature where we just flip through a few pictures that haven’t otherwise earned our attention this week. (Hey, it’s either this or another long essay on another bike ride. The short version: I did not fall as I did yesterday. My feet felt 80 percent better. I did 32 miles at a 15 mile per pace. It was a terrific afternoon for it.)
I wonder if the bird on the right ever gets picked on by the other birds. “Your beak is SO orange. And your PLUMAGE … ”
The cardinal came back. I slow walked to the end of the patio, about 25 yards from him and I do believe he posed for this. I took one more step out and he flew away:
Crows are incredible birds. They have memories, language, currency and some of them have a better grasp of contemporaneous socioeconomic situations than the political party of which you most disapprove. Crows hold grudges and recognize human faces. They know what boomsticks are, though they sometimes confuse them with broomsticks. And they knew a guy inside the house was taking pictures of them out in the yard. (All but two of the above are true. And I think we’ll soon discover they have a currency.)
This last shot is in the Louise Kreher Forest Ecology Preserve, an outreach program of the Auburn School of Forestry & Wildlife Sciences. We walked around there a bit this evening and I can’t wait to see everything in there explode into more shades of green than crows knew exist. (Crows also have a nearly full, adaptive RGB palette perception, just 17 shades of green short of the technical 16,777,216 different possible colors of truecolor.)
OK, that’s not true. The crows know every shade of green and three the human spectrum doesn’t receive.
Anyway, I’m excited to see every possible bud on every possible tree. Spring is 15 minutes away. I can feel it. I love it:
