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4
Jun 12

Burned lots of watts, ate lots of pizza

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.

But, res firma mitescere nescit, and all that.

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.

They were good.

cycling / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
30
May 12

A video to watch and links to read

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 tries to cut down on soft drinks:

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.”

Meanwhile, up in Chicago:

“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.”

The times, they have already changed.

Auburn / cycling / football / history / iPhone / music / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
29
May 12

More hodges to podge over

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:

Watch Mumford & Sons / Flogging Molly on PBS. See more from Austin City Limits.

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:

Watch Sherlock: The Reichenbach Fall on PBS. See more from Masterpiece.

Good stuff, no?

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.

adventures / cycling / photo / weekend — Comments Off
27
May 12

Catching up

The weekly post where we slap together a bunch of pictures that didn’t get featured elsewhere among the many treasures of the Internet and show them off with banal commentary for cheap content.

Component kit? Takes the wind out of your sails for deviled eggs a bit, doesn’t it?

I was going to write a lengthy essay about the humble push broom, but decided against it. You’re welcome.

The Fox Theatre marquee in Atlanta. We were there Tuesday to see Jersey Boys. (Great show.)

But does it light up? Why, yes, it does.

Roadside flowers in the heat of a late spring day. I was out wilting, they were thriving. Somewhere around Beauregard, Ala.

I am obliged to put up Allie pictures every so often, or she wakes me up in the middle of the night. We’ve reached an arrangement about this sort of thing.

I hid under this tree for a moment of shade on my bike ride today. It was circled by old cement benches. I bet they don’t get used very often any more, though.

She lived 98 years and, now, I bet almost everyone she knew and loved is gone. Unsurprisingly the Internet knows nothing about her. What is known of the place she’s buried has survived largely based on oral histories, so she might be a complete mystery at this point. But there’s that little lamb, still.

I broke my helmet — thankfully not while I was in it. Guess I need a new one.

Auburn / cycling / football / memories / Twitter / video / weekend — Comments Off
26
May 12

A podge of hodges

I want to tell you that my family is full of good cooks. My mother, when we were young could invent dishes out of random extra things that would make your mouth water. When she has the proper ingredients she’s quite incredible. She may not have a green thumb, but if you grow something and put it in her kitchen she well make you one of the better meals you’ve had in a good long while.

One of my grandmothers is also a good cook. My grandparents raised a large garden that was essentially subsistence farming. Only, when I was young, I got tired of all those vegetables of course. Now I’d love to see that farm back in action for some creamed corn and various other things we pulled out of the ground.

My other grandmother is not a bad cook, either. People disagree on this, but I think she’s a fine cook. But that could be the grandmother, oldest-grandchild thing. (I’m her favorite. Just ask.)

All of this leads me to one of those curious things in life that we never think about until it is forced upon us. What if something you’ve always eaten is not so very good? For instance, God bless the fine cooks in my family, but they will bake a turkey dry as a dusty road at Thanksgiving.

I never knew what turkey was supposed to taste like until The Yankee cooked one the first fall we dated. Sometime after that her father was telling the story of how, as a boy, he didn’t know what a hamburger was supposed to be like. His mother burned them and then cooked them some more. It took eating at a friend’s to learn what he’d been missing.

It is a good tale, and the full version of that story is great, but that seemed silly to me until I considered the turkey example of my own culinary experiences.

Similar to my family’s apparent hatred of delicate turkey meat, there’s also a big bias against pork chops. I’m not sure what it is, maybe my grandmothers thought you needed to cook them at lunch and again at dinner, just to be sure any germs were dead. Perhaps we distracted them too much in the kitchen. Could have been anything, but even as a kid I knew that my lovely, saintly, giving and patient grandmothers respective pork chops didn’t taste good. I think I was in my mid-20s before I had a good one.

All of the above to say, if you’re not grilling your pork chops, friend, your missing out.

Had a too-hot ride yesterday. Last weekend we reversed a route we occasionally take and I found it grueling in the sense that I wanted to do it again. I thought I could easily improve my time on the trip. Only it was much, much warmer and I found myself questioning the wisdom of all of this within about 10 miles.

I struggled through it though, happy to see a gas station about four miles from home. I stopped for a drink, and this must be regular enough now that they don’t even think twice about bikes being walked into the store.

They have a picnic area to one side of the story and a porch swing on the other side. I sat in the swing for a few minutes to have a drink and top off my bottles. I was only four miles from home, but this was the first truly hot riding of the year.

A man walked out of the store and playfully chastised me for stopping. He had the easy, friendly face that makes you think you’ve seen him before. Maybe you’re supposed to know that guy.

“You aren’t supposed to be taking a break,” he said.

“No” I smiled, “but it is warm out here.”

“Yes it is. You’ll fall out!”

The heat index was about 95 at the time. It was not a strain to believe it, either.

So I came home, dropped the last few miles I had in mind because, as I came up the big hill I realized there were no cars behind me. I could move to the center and then duck into the neighborhood without a problem. And that thought made me so happy I leaned on my handlebars and took the 90 degree turn.

It was only 18 miles, but it was hot. But still, I thought, 18 miles.

And then I read this:

Tamae Watanabe, 73, beat her own age record for an Everest climb by a woman set 10 years ago. She also recovered from an accident in 2005 in which she broke her back and feared she would never climb again.

“It was much more difficult for me this time,” Watanabe told reporters Friday after returning to Nepal’s capital, Katmandu, from the mountain. “I felt I was weaker and had less power. This time it was certainly different. I felt that I had gotten old.”

She reached Everest’s summit from the Tibetan side on May 19, at the age of 73 years and 180 days.

That was properly deflating.

Things here are just fine. We’ve finally had to shut the windows and turn the air conditioning on. We’re to the point of the season where you have to start thinking strategically about when you want to do things like, work in the yard, heavy exertion or breathing.

Grilled tonight, watched the second game of the 2010 Auburn football season on DVD. I received the complete championship season as a Christmas gift and they’re becoming regular summer weekend viewing. I hope the Tigers win.

I thought I should take notes to see if and how and when the announcers started trying to talk differently about Cam Newton. So far, after two games against lesser opponents (sorry, State fans) they’ve been properly deferential. The in-game tone may not change, but if you’ll think back the commentary overall got very nasty.

It is great to see this team play though, and as I said tonight, to do so without having to worry about the outcome. There were a few points that season where they were almost defeated. There were moments when you just thought it was all going to come undone because that’s just the way of it. But, knowing they kept it together and defeated everyone, knowing they survived the biggest smear job this side of the classic 1960s Bryant-Butts piece, the feel of it is altogether different.

Watching Cam Newton play in retrospect, I wrote on Twitter, is like knowing the end to the world’s best sonnet.

What I’m saying is that the guy was like poetry. He was pure, violent, graceful poetry. Pure, violent, graceful, championship poetry.

One of the things I have to do this weekend is eat an entire watermelon. We’ll be out of space in the fridge, otherwise. It is ridiculously good, the first of the season and seedless — despite the presence of seeds. I ate a big portion of it last night and the middle of it today.

Still plenty left, if anyone is interested.