You’d think having three flat tires would be the most frustrating part of your day.
You’d be wrong.
cycling
18
Aug 11
Your average Thursday
Another day of fun and joy, and concerted attempts to maximize my time in the air conditioning. Not sure why, the heat index only made it up to 94 today. That’s a break around here at this time of year.
In a related story: It is August in the Deep South.
So I read and cleaned out inboxes and things like that. Took a trip to the local bike shop where The Yankee had to buy a new tire and tubes. I had to buy new tubes. Your paranoia grows incrementally with each additional ride you take without a spare.
Later in the day I stuffed my little bike bag full of the all-important things, CO2 cartridges, the extra tubes and so on, and hit the road for a brisk ride. It was the evening, it looked overcast and I was chasing the daylight. I got in 20 miles, dodging and weaving around traffic that has suddenly become a lot more dense (the college kids are back) and less accepting of cyclists (the college kids are back?). This could turn into a long lament about traffic and space and all of that, but it is a tired argument. I’m just going to make a custom jersey that says something like “You should move” and have an arrow pointing to the left.
Learned the power of the head shake this evening, though. I was stuck at an intersection and as the light was about to change I tried to clip back into my pedals. Just as I did this, leaning to the left, a car decided being behind me wasn’t as good as being beside me. I glanced back just far enough to see the hood and shook my head as I pedaled in front of him for the next 300 yards. Felt very European. That’ll show him!
I did some research, but it is far from over, meaning there are a lot of open tabs and windows on my computer.
I did this for fun. The Daily Show had a good run at class warfare tonight,
So I looked up some stats. I picked 1980 at (almost) random. The percentage of U.S. households with:
Clothes washer: 73
Dishwasher: 38
Refrigerator: ~100;
Black and white television: 43
Color television: 88
That was in 1980. I picked the year since some insist on comparing President Obama with President Carter. Also, because of Lou Gannon‘s biography on President Reagan. In it, he noted that 4,414 individual tax returns with adjusted gross income of more than $1,000,000. In 1987 there were 34,944 such returns. During that time, Cannon observed, there was a huge increase in the purchase of small appliances and durable goods.
Critics of the new prosperity managed to remain unimpressed by the longest sustained economic recovery since World War II and the steady advance of American living standards. They viewed the Reagan years as an enshrinement of American avarice, epitomized by the “greed is healthy” speech of convicted Wall Street financier Ivan Boesky. Throughout most of the Reagan presidency the complaints of these critics were drowned out by the clamor of the marketplace.
A quarter of a century later, in 2005, these were the same categories, in percentages:
Clothes washer: 82.6, up nine percent
Dishwasher: 58.3, up 20 percent
Refrigerator: ~100, steady
Television: 99.8 percent
Cable TV: 79.1 percent, black and white is no longer listed
More than two TVs:at 42.9 percent
That’s U.S. Department of Energy data, used in a Heritage Foundation report, which also points out that 88.7 percent of American homes have a microwave and 84 percent have air conditioning?
What does it mean? You can decide that on your own. Should it reshape my position? Probably not. It should, however, make one realize that wealth, poverty, success, comfort and pain are relative. After all, the U.S. poverty line for a family of one is defined at $10,890. That income would put you in the 86th percentile on a global comparison according to Global Rich List. It is also longitudinal, and dovetails with class expectations: a very basic middle class lifestyle today would make you look like a king in your great-grandparents era.
Possessions aint everything*, as the poet William Payne wrote, which brings us back to money for groceries and bills and pills. And that circular argument is where we’ve been politically for years. It’s almost enough to make the unassuming sort wonder why right-thinking people would ever get in that business**.
* Air conditioning, I maintain, is pretty stinkin’ vital.
** But you know better.
17
Aug 11
Put the lime in the coconut
If you ever want to get an education, post something just slightly wrong on the Internet. I noticed these Persian limes at the grocery store this evening and put the picture on Facebook, writing something silly like “Persian limes, from Mexico.”
My dear friend Kelly, who is not a horticulturist, but did stay at a Holiday Inn Express near some lime trees once, wrote “Persian limes are just a kind of lime. You know what makes them Persian limes? They aren’t Key Limes.”
One thing led to another and now I have to know all about this particular citrus. Wikipedia tells me they are also called Tahiti limes. Great, another geography-challenged fruit.
They were developed in California. I feel duped.
Kelly, as always, was right though: they aren’t key limes. Wikipedia, and I’ll take their word, says Persian limes are less acidic than key limes and don’t have the bitterness central to key lime’s unique flavor.
We bought the store’s entire inventory of groceries. It was us and the poor gentleman behind us at the checkout line who had to make do with the crumbs we left in the back corner near the dairy section. You’ll be happy to know that we remembered to save the earth this trip and took our canvas bags. (We sometimes forget. Once they made it into the car but not into the store.) The kindly man who bagged our purchase up managed to completely load them up. If we’d chosen plastic there’d be 14,000 bags floating around on the kitchen floor just now.
Those bags, too, have a purpose. We keep a small supply on a hook in the mud room, but eventually it swells out to something you have to bob and weave around, less you take a glancing blow from the big tumor of plastic. You only need so many of the things for storage and secondary disposal.
Really I want to take a competitor’s save the earth bags into our grocery store and see what they do. Would they sack the groceries up without complaint? Would they glare? Would there be a conference? Their big on conferences there. Would they signal in the manager, they are ever-present like you see in the movies set in casinos when the hero makes too much money and the suits get involved. They are much, much, nicer than all of that, but it is remarkable how quickly a manager will swoop in.
Alabama Adventure may be for sale again. This is an amusement park and water park combo near where I grew up. I remember, just after my senior year of high school Larry Langford, who was mayor of Fairfield, a suburb of Birmingham, pitched his plan for VisionLand to a room full of high school kids. It was his dry run. He announced the project publicly a few days later. All the nearby towns, he said, would chip in land and money for land and they were going to build this incredible park. It would start a bit small and grow every year. Langford got the land, got the money, got a lot more money from the state legislature and built his park. He even had a statue inside.
He’d go on to being on the county commission and then the mayor of Birmingham, despite still living in Fairfield. And now he’s in jail.
But the park has struggled since not long after it was created. The current owner is the third owner. It was the second owner, after the park went bankrupt (the $65 million project went for just $6 million), that changed the name from VisionLand to Visionland, and finally to Alabama Adventure.
The entire Wikipedia entry is a sad collection of grand ideas that never came to fruition for one reason or another. The place has earned a bad reputation in some respects, but there’s a lot of that going around that area, too. The best part of the place, to me, was that you could spend a day at a real theme park and not have to drive all the way back home from Atlanta smelling like stale water. Home was minutes away!
I had a few dates at the park, and one company picnic. On a separate occasion I took some nice pictures there. Some of those photographs went into my portfolio which helped me get other freelance work. Here’s one of them that just happened to be floating around in some dusty corner of the site. It isn’t the best one, but I loved the water bucket obstacle course part of the water park:
I scanned that eight years or more ago, which is why it is so small. I’ll dig up the original at some point and do it a bit more justice. (Don’t bet on it.)
I enjoyed the lazy river, and never caught any problem worse than standing in the place where the fireworks debris falls. You never think about that, when you’re watching fireworks, but the cardboard and the embers have to land somewhere. Don’t let it land on you.
In my freshman year literature class I wrote a comparative essay on Machiavelli’s Prince and Larry Langford. I’m sure the paper was dreadful, though I somehow recall getting an A on it. Don’t ask me why I kept that memory. Thinking back on it, though, I’m intrigued by how different parts now apply to Langford’s tale. Some of it was all wrong in the beginning, but he grew into the treatise’s notion of idealism (he was vainly spurring on a campaign to bid for the 2020 Olympics in Birmingham when his political realm fell down around him) and then it all turned into a sad, sad parody, as some considered The Prince.
Sometime after the second owner of the theme park came along they removed Langford’s statue. It was the preface to Langford’s version of Machiavelli’s Mandrake*.
Who comes here for obvious references to 16th century Italian comedies? You can raise your hand. It is OK. You’re among friends.
I trimmed the bushes today. Well, one bush. It was so hot that I’d broken into a sweat by the time I’d gotten the extension cord untangled.
So, one prickly shrub, scoop up the trimmings and remember that old saw about discretion being the better part of pruning.
When The Yankee came home she didn’t even notice the trimming. Subtlety is an art form, friends.
We rode our bikes this evening. Or I did. She tried, but had a flat close to home. We are out of tubes, so we’ll have a stock-up trip to the bike shop tomorrow. I got in 19 miles and was not pleased with any of it, really. Seems 10 days off is too many. Now I must recover my legs again.
But I cruised down a road I’ve never been on before, so that was a nice treat. Well, I’ve gone the other way, the uphill side, of that road before. Today I got to see how the road should be attacked: from its highest point.
16
Aug 11
The conflicting nature of the maple leaf
Maples turn early, the most skittish of the green leaves. But they don’t have to go this fast. Mid-August? This far south?
I enjoy the fall, but I also enjoy my summer, and so the transition is sometimes more welcome than others. This year, I’d be fine with more summer, really. In another six or seven weeks the rest of that leaf’s pals will start to yellow just a tinge. And then they’ll start to fall somewhere late in October. By November I’ll be raking and waiting for spring, which comes in for an early, sporadic start in February. And that’s not so bad; summer will be around again shortly thereafter. But that’s next summer. And I’d be happy for this summer to last a while. There’s more swimming to do, more sleeping to enjoy, more summer sunsets to appreciate. All those long summer evenings will fade away faster than I’d like.
But this is nothing to be melancholy about. Except for the raking. I hate the raking. If I typed about it more the inside of my thumb would develop a blister just out of habit.
I have delicate thumbs.
Fine day today. Twenty miles on the bike, painful as ever. I’ve developed this unwelcome system of getting my legs back and then skipping town for several days or being otherwise occupied for a week and thus whatever tiny gains I’ve made have all disappeared. So the 20 miles today, which felt barely like a ride in June, can sap me today. It’ll probably get worse before it gets better.
And by better I mean the temperature. We had two days a while back that were unseasonably cool and it felt like you could ride forever. August temperature has something to do with the rest of this, and while I’ll miss the summer, I won’t miss the constant 115-degree heat index days.
Changed a lot about my dissertation today. A lot. We’ve been mulling this over for a while and today I finally shifted directions, which I’d been dreading, but after the fact it feels like the right choice. So, while I’m trying to not be tedious about it here, this move feels very positive.
And if you are actually interested in that, don’t worry, there’s plenty of time to be tedious about it later.
Wrote an open letter today:
(W)e’re going to need to see that video a few dozen more times.
Despite everything else that swirled around the season, the narrative of those guys in blue is one of our best tales. It would have been compelling if it were just another team, but the entire story was so gratifying to think of Kodi Burns becoming the archetype of an Auburn man in a jersey, Cameron Newton discovering his redemption and an unsung defense living up to their potential. An undefeated season is always a great story, but the chilling story behind Zac Etheridge’s comeback, Wes Byrum being his implacable self and Mike Dyer taking Bo’s torch to threaten the entire conference lives on.
We could discuss each player and how their contributions and subplots filled such a tremendous narrative. But to put it simply, this team is a joy to watch.
Nothing earth-shattering about it. That’s just a great production and it is worth seeing again. Got a lot of nice comments at the bottom of the piece. It also earned a reply from the people that run the thing. Now we’ll have to see if they take my advice. (I give them unsolicited advice. I am batting .500 with them.)
So, if you’re in Auburn during the fall, I have a new Sunday tradition. “Several students, fans, and alumni have volunteered to help with the clean up.”
I’ve rolled the corner plenty of times, and haven’t done it in several years, though I always take guests who come to town for the games. For a long time it has felt more like a family and college kid event, but given the strain the trees have faced — the stupid fires, the intelligence-challenged drunk driver and, now, the guy who’s going to jail — I’ve been content to have had my share. I threw a roll after the SEC championship last year, when it just seemed so unbelievable that no one noticed the cold. And I threw a roll after the BCS win last January, when it seemed so cold that it was unbelievable those guys above had won a championship in the desert:
That’s enough. That’s more than I could ask for.
The city and the university have contracted out the cleaning to a firm from Montgomery. And the university, in questioning if the trees will last the year, has taken what is being interpreted as a “roll ’em if you got ’em” approach. The experts’ belief is that the toilet paper isn’t the problem, but the trees are more susceptible to the cleanup. That used to be done by a high water pressure system, but now it will be done by hand.
And this needs to be the next great tradition. So several of the locals have been plotting this out. We figure a Sunday-after-church cleanup could be as good as a pre-game tailgate. So we’ll see you at Toomer’s on Saturdays and Sundays.
Two more weeks until the opening game of the season. That’s not a bad part of fall, either. So maybe I don’t mind that maple leaf so much after all.
7
Aug 11
Not much stuff, precious few things
Normally I add photos to the Sunday slot as filler. These are things I haven’t shared elsewhere through the week. But, this week, I have none. The feature has this week fallen to the binge-purge nature of my shutterbuggery.
And so there’s this. We’re waiting on the magical coupler to appear. We ordered it yesterday in our attempt to cheaply fix the washing machine. After consulting Google and YouTube I discovered that this is a repair I can do myself. It takes less than an hour and should cost about $20 for the coupler.
Well. I disassembled the washer to find that, yes, the coupler was broken. We ventured out into the world to find that, no, there is not a coupler to be found. We returned home and ordered one on Amazon for $.50 cents. And now I am waiting for it to arrive. In the meantime, the laundry room is flaunting its disarray, and if ever there was a room that needed structure, that’s the one.
Rode 26.9 miles on the bike this evening. It was a very sluggish experience, having lost my legs yet again, and exhausted them yesterday afternoon. I did meet one of my silly goals, however. On the next-to-last road on the route I was passed by a golf cart. And then, soon after, a pickup. The truck had to slow a bit for the golf cart, and there was a young kid in the back seat of the cart who’d waved. So I decided I would make a pace with them. And I did so, ultimately passing the pickup truck.
I also passed the cart for about two-hundredths of a second, but had to yield the way to a tricky little spot in the road. It was my one nice sprint of the day, surely never to be repeated.
I started working on a presentation today, which is to say I began reading things on which I will discuss on Thursday. The topic? The future of journalism. How can you go wrong? This is the level of punditry that is easily forgettable if you guess wrong. Should you guess right, however, someone might say “That guy in that presentation at that one hotel at the conference in — where was it? Minneapolis? Burbank? Yeah, I think that was it, Baltimore — was right. Wow!”
In reality there are plenty of ways to go wrong. But there are also lots of places to make wise, wry observations. Some of these are very obvious. Some are pure guesses grounded in wishes. I want a holodeck on which I can watch the news. Who wouldn’t? Others are already here and happening. Robot reporters? Complete video packages produced on my phone? None of these things would make sense to Edward Murrow, and yet they are among us here today.
I’ve done the math. A woman retiring from a newsroom today in her mid-60s started working around 1964 or so. Think of all that’s changed in the interim. And the young students who are just starting out today in their early 20s? What will they have the opportunity to work with in 2050? What a great topic for a presentation.
I’ll be in none of those cities, by the way, but perhaps my prognostication will be closer to the mark. More on that later, I guess.
