Not much today, but I did want to share one little passage from this book. Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres wrote an important book. The blurb on the cover, “We’ve needed this book for a long time.” from the journalist and LBJ press secretary and journalist Bill Moyers seems apt. And if we needed the book when it was published in 2011 there’s no less of a need for it today.
The text has a few small problems — every book does if you pick at it long enough, and this is late night, few-pages-at-a-time reading for me — but there are so many lessons to learn.
So I was reading a bit about Jose Martí, a pioneer of social justice journalism — think Ida B. Wells. You have to agree with Gonzalez and Torres, his “dispatches should long ago have accorded him a special place among America’s nineteenth-century newsmen.”
The problem, as Gonzalez and Torres see it, is that Martí’s work was in Spanish so he often gets overlooked by English readers and historians. But, almost everything he wrote seems evocative. He was also a revolutionary in his native Cuba, but I think of him as a writer. And, based on a conversation with a colleague, I learned there are at least six books of his works that are translated into English.
So I guess I’ll have to buy some of those.
Why not? Nine other books I purchased just arrived this weekend — free shipping! — after all.
It might be a problem.
(But it isn’t a problem. I can not read whenever I want.)
We saw two deer, in fact. Who knows how many more were just out of sight, watching us.
We also spotted three rabbits and two squirrels.
The highlight was surely the stray cat that came into our back yard. Poseidon noticed it, and was most emphatic that the interloper be removed. After a time The Yankee went out to check on the cat, and decided it looked like one posted on the local Next Door community. She called the number. We kept the kitty — spooked but healthy and hungry — in our yard until they arrived.
They were nice people. The woman is desperate to find their pet. Last weekend they drove 80 miles one-way to see if a cat was theirs. It was not their cat, but they adopted it anyway. So they are nice and passionate people, and perhaps cat thieves. Who can tell with these things?
And then they … wouldn’t leave. So they were nice, passionate, perhaps cat thieves who did not pick up on the social cues. Who can tell with these things? But they’d come over from a few miles away and it was a break from yard work or research or whatever they were doing. They also offered to take this other cat.
So definitely cat thieves, then.
Somewhere during all of this our neighbors came out to visit and we found ourselves having a party in the side yard.
None of this sounds like much, but they stayed on the porch for a good long while, and it was otherwise a evening, so take this elderberry and be happy with it.
If that’s not enough, congratulate me on completing the Cozumel diving social media project. Since March, I have been uploading daily clips of our diving to Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Tens of people, perhaps, have seen them. But if you missed all of that somehow, just click the Twitter link and you can see them all threaded together.
Or revisit with me those videos in the longer form on YouTube, where dozens of people have watched. I edited them each day of the dives.
I photo my thumb accidentally took while idly fiddling with my phone and watching the news and waiting for The Next Thing of the Day.
Two points if you can figure that out. I know what it is, but I’ll be impressed if anyone here can take two points off of my hands.
The Next Thing of the Day proved easy and uneventful. Started on time, ended on time, everything in the middle was assuredly a smash hit. A Tuesday to be remembered! If you could make the normal Tuesday stand out somehow or another.
Two points if you can figure that out, too.
In my idle chatter I mentioned I had a tube going on my bike. I took it off and found just the tiniest little hole seeping air. I was tempted to slap some super glue on it and experiment, but, in another sign of my own maturity and wisdom, decided this was not a profitable experiment.
You can wrap a tube in a dollar bill to finish a ride in a pinch. (Two points if you get it right on the first try!) But I was already at the house, and not in that pinch. If you’re lucky, though, the currency can hold up for weeks. I can also buy another inner tube and just be done with it. We have a small stack for just such an occasion. I went to the room where we keep stacks of things and found that we have one spare inner tube.
This does not a stack make.
Opened the little box, pulled out the tube, prepared it for installation and …
So I had to put my spare on my back wheel. The spare is the one you carry with you, not the one from the room where we keep stacks of things. That means I don’t have a spare to carry on the bike. So tomorrow’s ride will feature a new back tire, and one with a tiny pinhole on the wall. I should throw a dollar bill in there, too. Juuuust in case.
I always carry a few bucks on the bike. (Two points to me for being prepared.) You never know when a ride goes farther, or takes longer, and you want to stop at a store for water or extra fuel. And, also, for emergency tire patching.
The setup is this … and this is similar to something that I explained here last week, but also different.
We ride bikes through a nearby neighborhood and the other end of that neighborhood ends with a T-intersection. We turn right, which is immediately into a little hill. It’d be fine if you just rode over it, but it’s just stiff enough to be unpleasant from a complete stop — as in an intersection. So when we go that way, which is often, I jump on up ahead so I can be the Stop or Go signal for my lovely bride. If the timing works out, she can just take the right turn and keep up a little momentum. And somewhere just after that hill I can catch back up to her because I have no momentum. But just after that hill we take another turn and work through another neighborhood, and there’s a particular road there where I had one good day and now I try to hit it with zeal every time. I am three seconds off the Strava segment leader. It’s a short sprint and I’m sure I’m only on the leaderboard because no one really rides that road, or rides it hard, anyway.
But now I do, because of that one good day, and so I attacked it again yesterday. I have come to realize that my average time is only three or four seconds off my best time on that segment. It’s short, and that, of course, means that even my fastest time wasn’t that fast there, but nevertheless. We get to that right hand turn and I do what I can for about 35 seconds.
I do both of those things each time we go out this way, now. And yesterday, just like last week, The Yankee passed me about a mile later. Last time I was taking a sip of water and she rode away from me. This time, she just put in one little turn of speed … and it took 10 miles for me to catch her again.
So here’s a photo from our Monday morning bike ride.
Did you know the Gin Blossoms had a Grammy nomination in 1997? Did you know they lost to the Beatles?
Had you forgotten that the Beatles were somehow still releasing music three decades after the band broke up? There’s been good money in nostalgia since the invention of surviving media, I think.
Anyway, this was that song for the Gin Blossoms. They were the feature act in a show with Toad the Wet Sprocket and Barenaked Ladies, a concert we caught last Friday night.
That record sold five million copies and stayed on the charts for three years. And all the old fans — we weren’t the youngest people there, but we might have been close? — still sing along.
Jesse Valenzuela remains the band’s true weapon. Here’s his standard solo on the Doug Hopkins hit.
Robin Wilson makes a joke
This one was an initial release on the Empire Records soundtrack in 1995.
Anyway, “Til I Hear It from You” was re-released as a single the next year. Billboard hailed it as “the closest thing to a perfect pop song to hit radio in recent memory.”
The soundtrack, by the way, is holding up better than the movie.
It’s a coming-of-age movie and most of those don’t age well after the desired audience ages. No one was interested in Gen X at the time anyway, so that film was destined to flop, which it did. (It doesn’t hurt that it isn’t any good.) It does have a minor following for two lines of dialog but is otherwise not as good as the soundtrack, which was fronted by that Gin Blossoms tune. At Variety, Ken Eisner famously wrote Empire Records was “a soundtrack in search of a movie,”
Anyway, that song was number one in Canada, and in the top 10 on virtually every American chart. It is frozen in amber.
adventures / cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on I was breathless, she was tranquilo — a bike story 28 Jun 22
I like riding from behind. First, the pace is your own. Second, you don’t have to worry about bumping anyone directly in front of you. So it is never a bad thing when there’s a little space created between my front wheel and my lovely bride. But I also like riding out front, because that gives her something to chase.
So it was the best of both worlds today, which almost makes it the worst.
Let me explain. I’d attacked her twice, springing ahead early, twice. First, because I can play traffic cop at a key intersection. I get to a downhill T-intersection and can tell her to go through or stop. It’s a little helpful because when we take that turn at the stop sign you go immediately uphill. No momentum. But she’s finally learning to accept that I have a healthy respect for empty roads and she will go into the intersection when I wave her on. Advantage: momentum!
I have to start at a dead start, but better one of us than both. And, besides, I’ll catch her near the top of that little hill.
We take another turn, and go over some rollers and then turn right into another neighborhood. I am tied for third on that segment on Strava, just three seconds off the leader. There are two datapoints in that sentence which make no sense in the way I ride, but I had a good turn one day a month or two back and now I’m interested in attacking this particular road when we take that route. (Recently I equaled my best. This also doesn’t make a lot of sense.) So I attacked that again, today, and found myself four seconds off my best time.
But about a mile later, The Yankee went by me. It wasn’t an attack, she just outpaced me. I reached down to grab a sip of water, put the bottle back in the bidon cage, looked up and she was down the road.
This photo is merely a recreation. I did not have time to take pictures today.
She did this on the big galloping rollers. All of those comes down to legs. Some days I’m stronger there. Often, she’s powering away from me. Today, I could tell that I wasn’t making a lot of cuts into her advantage. And then she perhaps got a break in the traffic that I didn’t at an intersection, and she was gone.
All of this time, I was riding hard. With abandon. I did not have to worry about the pace of anyone in front of me, because the road was empty. Hands on hoods, hands in the drops. Legs alive and burning. Lungs dead and burning.
It was one of the faster rides of the year, I think. It was one of the better, harder, rides I’ve had in a while. I don’t know if I could get more out of my bike, but for two hills where I lagged a bit.
I got to the house and she was sitting on the back porch, all casual like. She asked me if I was OK. I was fine. My bike felt like it was floating over bumps. One of the tracking apps said I hit 49.9 miles per hour.
She had already put her bike inside.
So she’s recovered from her crash 10 days ago. The rest of us are just chasing.
