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cycling / photo / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off
28
Jul 21

I told you there were a lot of Olympics around here

Ten years ago I said silly things like, “It isn’t a good ride until you get pelted by insects.”

Today — as I’m trying to wipe one bug away from my eye and get hit on the other cheek by another hard-shelled critter — I say “That was inconsiderate.” And then the last cicadas in town come in for a low-altitude harassment pass …

These days I also say “Twenty-six is a little hard, can we hold it at 23 or 24 miles an hour?”

We were watching the tape-delayed Olympics last night, watching the gymnastics, knowing she was out, knowing something. And in the middle of Simone Biles’ vault The Yankee, herself a Division 1 gymnast, a high school All-American, tensed up during that vault. (My wife’s gymnastics career was ended suddenly by injury, one she still deals with decades later.) She spent the next several minutes talking about what an amazing save that was, and then several more moments about what terrible things could have happened in Tokyo.

And so this little thread cinches it. Gymnasts know what they saw. They alone know what the rest of us missed. That’s good enough for me.

One former US elite gymnast I talked to said that if it was someone other than Simone Biles who had made that same error, they would have certainly blown a knee, at minimum. Another said if it had happened to her instead of Simone, “I probably would have ended up paralyzed.”

— Deanna Hong (@DeannaHong) July 28, 2021

It’s not that she made a silly mistake and landed poorly – her mind & body betrayed her in the air while doing one of the hardest vaults in the world, and it’s only due to her extreme athleticism that she was able to land safely.

— Deanna Hong (@DeannaHong) July 28, 2021

And, also, this:

See, no less a competitor than the great @Dmoceanu — herself an all-around gold medalist from the Goodwill Games, a dual medalist from the 1995 World Championships and a 1996 Olympic gold medalist — knows Simone Biles put down an important, powerful marker for young athletes. https://t.co/jhP1rIvNeK

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) July 28, 2021

A watershed moment occurred in these Olympic Games. The rest is just noise.

cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
26
Jul 21

Welcome to the last week of July

Let’s jump right into the big Monday feature. Mondays are better with pets, after all. So here’s a nice series of Phoebe doing her modeling thing on the stairs.

She looks up, giving you coy.

She looks down, giving you introspection.

And that’s all you get, she says.

Poseidon sometimes jumps on the TV stand. He’ll look at the TV for a moment. He’ll walk around it. Once in a while he stands on his back legs and tries to poke his head over the top. He’s long and tall, but you can only just see part of his face. He’s big and strong enough that it makes you nervous.

But then he uses feline grace and does this.

For whatever reason, he likes bike races. (Yes, this little series is a few weeks old now. I’ve been saving it.) This isn’t the first time that he’s been interested in road racing.

He sits with me to watch them too.

Yes, he’s sitting in my lap and watching the Tour there.

Speaking of bikes …

My front derailleur froze. This is only a problem if you want to swap from the big ring to the little ring. It happened over the winter, probably because I get sweaty during indoor riding and it fused.

I had a springtime tuneup, an annual rite of passage for most road bikes. That required new cables and the purchase and installation of a Fisher-Price replacement derailleur. (It looks like the real thing; it does nothing.) Still didn’t work. Soon after, there was another trip to the shop, where the mechanic tinkered, but ultimately did not fix the problem.

So a third trip to the bike shop, where the mechanic, one of the few who doesn’t actually want to work on things, I’ve decided, fixed it again. After he destroyed the new cable he put on a few weeks ago.

I learned on Saturday’s 30-miler that, after all of this, the front derailleur works precisely a third of the time.

That’s a great way to keep the spirits up on a bike ride.

I need a new bike shop.

The rest of the weekend was normal. There was the routine Chick-fil-A lunch, an evening chat with friends and, of course, the Olympics. My lovely bride is a world-renowned Olympic scholar. We watch a lot of sports. Over the next two weeks here you can pretty much assume that almost every moment not specifically accounted for is sleep, or Olympics.

cycling / movies / running / Thursday / video — Comments Off
22
Jul 21

Now playing

Ran a casual neighborhood 5K today, making two-days in a row of exercise. I wonder how many days it’ll be before I put together two more consecutive days of exercise.

(Update: It was a few, as it turns out.)

Here’s a little video clip of yesterday’s 25-mile bike ride. We’re only three miles in here, which is why I am keeping up with my lovely bride. Putting up mid-summer numbers and can’t hold her wheel. Must be the gears she is using. Surely it isn’t me.

When I tested the post a picture of The Yankee on a bike ride was in the rotating header, and this video was below. That’s a lot of fun.

Anyway, I’d make the whole site look like that, but then it’d just be a blog about her riding bikes. That’d be fun, too. But I also include random things like …

What do we think about this? I only remember that the first movie had something to do with a seasoning, and it was a mess, and there were giant worms. This movie has the spice, the drama and, maybe there are worms.

It seems overly dramatic, for a trailer. These are art forms of their own, of course. If trailers are art, then they have to evolve. (Go watch a trailer from any movie you liked from the 1980s, for example. Go watch the first Star Wars trailer.) And, sometimes, I suppose, they have to respond to external events.

Does a trailer of a long-anticipated, and presumably corrective, relaunch have to go over the top? Does it have to after the year we’ve had? Or are we just imagining that?

What’s left in the movie, after a trailer like that?

It’s probably a 16 hour movie. Which I would have thought was fine, but then I watched, over three sittings, the Zack Snyder Justice League cut. Here’s the official trailer for that.

Feels more like a comic book than a movie, doesn’t it? I’m not sure which is better for it.

Just a few weeks ago someone over at Mental Floss compiled the list of the best 25 movie trailers of all time. This is how you know it’s an art. There’s a notion of subjectivity there, but it’s inescapable to think that the movie itself, viewed either before the trailer or after, doesn’t have some influence on such things.

Go on over there and see what’s number one. But! Before you do, toss out three names. What do you think you’ll see as number one. Pick a strong one, pick a thoughtful one. Pick a cliched one.

Were you right? I bet you were.

Still haven’t seen that movie.

Tomorrow, we’re going to wrap this week up in tidy fashion. Things will look nice and fresh when you come back. So come back!

And bring me your best movie trailer ideas, too.

cycling / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
19
Jul 21

I made a Latin joke

I had a 27-mile ride on Saturday. It was not my best bike ride, he said for about 60th time this year, but it was a fine ride otherwise. This one, meanwhile, is cruising along in fine form. I think she’s lapping me here.

We celebrated with the traditional Saturday Chick-fil-A takeout and then had a chat with friends. We also watched the final two stages of the Tour de France, completing the race as we do every year, singing Joe Dassin’s Les Champs-Elysees.

I also went for a run. Nice and slow. Any slower and I’d be walking. Somehow, I’m told, being slow makes me faster. Which might be the case if you were running slowly deliberately. At the moment I’m running slowly as a matter of function. It’s the status slow, you might say.

It’s Monday, and that means it is time to check on the cats! It’s the week’s most anticipated and widely viewed feature, and don’t think I haven’t noticed.

Phoebe would like you to know she was framed.

Framed!

No one has ever caught her doing anything she isn’t supposed to do, because Phoebe is a good girl. No one has ever caught her out on the ledge where she doesn’t belong …

It does look cozy out there. I always wonder why it was carpeted. Every day I wonder.

Poseidon is hanging out in his tunnel and is playing up his big ham tendencies.

It takes a lot out of him, being a ham. Here he is asleep. Under a blanket. On a pillow.

That cat. Et quod ad somnum.

cycling / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
14
Jul 21

Life in slower motion

We set out for a bike ride this evening. Nothing serious, just a quick hour through an hour’s worth of neighborhoods. About seven of them, I’d say. Then again, not every stretch of road runs through a tightly grouped neighborhood. I bet if you went door-to-door along today’s route not everyone would think they lived in a neighborhood. They’d wonder why a person in a helmet and funny clothes was knocking on their door. Asking about their neighbors. And sweating all over the place.

I’ve had to swap inner tubes in a few front yards. You get self conscious of that quite quickly. It’s probably the funny clothes.

Anyway, a nice little ride. I was slow, because that is my lot lately. The only solution to that is more riding. The Yankee was faster. There’s a turnaround on the route, and she made it there first, slowed, turned and was coming back the other direction.

I don’t think she was going especially fast, or trying overly hard, she just was fast. Maybe it’s the bike or the gearing, but probably it’s just she’s good at this. Also I’m not riding especially comfortably just now. If I thought about it too much I’d convince myself someone has been tinkering with my bike setup. Which always feels precarious, anyway. I’m like the princess and the pea over here. Change the tires, use different bottles, I can feel it.

And if you’re going this slow you have plenty of time to notice!