I am wearing this shirt today, because where else can I wear a triathlon shirt? It would seem the only place to do it is at another triathlon. Otherwise, this is just a t-shirt with too many weird things going on.

Plus, if you take the time to read it, you might notice the date on the back of the shirt, which indicates this race was last weekend. This might, I thought, look impressive to people preparing for this weekend’s triathlon.

“This guy is doing two in a row? He’s a monster!”

Or some such.

One person did notice, a race referee. We agreed last weekend’s race needed more shade. When the guy in stripes — and the triathlon refs wear stripes — says you need more shade, you need more shade.

This shirt is a “technical shirt” which means … as I look at the tag … it is 100 percent polyester. So that period of fashion was no event horizon after all. This is important to learn.

We are in neighboring Columbus, preparing for tomorrow’s race. And by preparing I mean signing in, discovering one Italian restaurant is closed, waiting for 10 minutes at another despite counting nine open tables, getting to our hotel, getting a room, changing rooms and finally settling in for a quiet, early evening.

I saw this sign today:

Sound advice: Trust in the Lord and, for your prosaic braking needs, call Midas.

Anyway, the finish of tomorrow morning’s race will be streamed online. Check it out, if you’re interested. We should be coming across around 8:30 Eastern.

Things to read … no matter your timezone.

Here are three stories on Malaysian Flight 17 worth your time:

AIDS conference says 100 researchers may have been on flight MH17

This Is What The Victims Of Flight 17 Did For AIDS Research

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 And The Future Of The Conflict In Ukraine

That last link discusses a wide swath of policy issues.

Here’s a story overcome by MH17 coverage: Islamic extremists kill 270 in attack on a gas field in central Syria, report says

Now we’re just piling onto Detroit. But the piece is worth a read. If You Don’t Pay Your Bills, You Don’t Get Stuff

Maybe you saw this one: Police: Fla. father beats accused child abuser

He is nice and knocked out on the floor for you,” the father told the 911 dispatcher. “I drug him out to the living room.”

[…]

The father has not been charged with any crime.

“Dad was acting like a dad. I don’t see anything we should charge the dad with,” Daytona Beach Police Chief Mike Chitwood said.

Closer to home:

Jobless rate up in Birmingham, but unchanged in Alabama

Shakalaka, Huntsville’s new all-ages extreme trampoline park, ‘turns you into a kid again’

Updated USGS earthquake risk areas include Alabama, Mississippi

When you can’t fall asleep, a potential new feature sharing the material I find when I’m wide awake too late in the evening. Our first entry is this intriguing Coke promo:

And then I stumbled across this truly impressive piece on football Hall of Famer Y.A. Tittle. It is human and intimate and vulnerable and it doesn’t seem the least bit exploitative. It is tremendous story telling:

On a December morning, he’s sitting in his usual spot on his couch, flipping through a photo album. His breathing is labored. There is fluid in his lungs. Waistline aside, Tittle doesn’t look much different now than he did in his playing days: bald head, high cheekbones, blue eyes that glow from deep sockets, ears that have yet to be grown into. His skin is raw and flaky, and when he scratches a patch on his head, a familiar line of blood sometimes trickles down. He shares his large house with his full-time helper, a saint of a woman named Anna. His daughter, Dianne de Laet, sits nearest him, leaning in as he touches each yellowed picture.

“That’s at Marshall High School!” Y.A. says, pointing to a shot of himself in a football uniform worn long ago, long sleeves and a leather helmet. That takes Y.A. back to his tiny hometown of Marshall, Texas, near the Louisiana border. Friday nights in the town square, where “I’d neck with a girl, if I was lucky.” Brown pig sandwiches at Neely’s barbecue. And football, always football. In 1943, he says, Marshall High traveled 200 miles to play Waco, ranked second in the state. The Mavericks pulled off the upset, and on the couch he recites the beginning of the newspaper story: “From the piney woods of East Texas came the challenging roar of the Marshall Mavericks, led by a tall, lanky redhead with a magical name: Yelberton Abraham Tittle.”

He is slightly embarrassed as he utters his full name. As a teenager he reduced it to initials, and it later became legend. Remembering his Texas days seems to bring a youthful spirit out of him, which is why Dianne gave him this album today. But then he flips to a photo of himself during his college days at Louisiana State, and something slips. “Where did you get these pictures?” he says to Dianne. “I haven’t seen them.”

It was good enough to read twice.

And now, truly late into the evening, I should be sleeping, but I’m looking for stories by or about one of my favorite writers, Willie Morris. Here’s a 1982 profile that appeared in a newspaper. It is hard to imagine so much time being spent on a story today, but the read is worth it.

Here are the first three paragraphs to a Texas Monthly profile on Morris that make you want a subscription to Texas Monthly (which would be a good subscription to hold):

Everybody thought they knew him. Few truly did. Willie Weaks Morris was a man of many parts. Some did not mesh with the others. The private Willie Morris—the brooder, the loner, the man who could lose himself in sleep because wakefulness was too painful, the man who called his telephone an instrument of torture and hid it in the refrigerator to muffle its rings, the man who at bottom was as stubborn as any mule William Faulkner ever owned, the man who became known, in plain ugly language, as the town drunk—well, that contentious and complex fellow is a Willie Morris his adoring public never met. You haven’t read about that fellow either.

No way to rhyme that private, haunted, sometimes terribly difficult soul with the public Willie Morris of legend: the glad-hander and shoulder hugger, the good ol’ boy from Mississippi, the incomparable raconteur of the Texas saloon or the New York salon, the literary star whose reputation soared at the daily paper of the University of Texas and later at the Texas Observer. In Austin he learned the skills that made him not only near-perfect in matching writer to subject but also so adroit an editor that writers felt chagrin that they hadn’t written it that way.

Willie’s emotions were as primitive and as changeable as the weather. He was the worst I ever saw at hiding his true feelings; he had little talent for the duplicities or wicked dirkings of office politics—a trait that ultimately cost him the job he once loved above all. We drank together, laughed together, cried together, worked as editor to writer and friend to friend. We had a foolish drunken fistfight in 1972 over which of us owned the affections of a certain fickle woman; it turned out that neither of us did. I thank such gods as be that we were fast friends when Willie Morris died suddenly on August 2, 1999, or otherwise I could not have borne it. I will miss the man so long as I have breath.

That’s before the essay even begins.

And today, from Weird Al:

Don’t forget! You can see the finish of tomorrow morning’s race thanks to the nice people at WRBL. We should be coming across around 8:30 Eastern.