Thursday

cycling / memories / photo / Thursday / video — Comments Off on Tour update: Hors catégorie means beyond cat-egorization
14
Jul 22

Tour update: Hors catégorie means beyond cat-egorization

Poseidon is now very interested in this year’s Tour de France.

It seems Poseidon needs Tadej Pogačar, seen here in the white jersey, to be chasing the overall lead. Pogačar is the two-time defending champion, but yesterday he lost control of this year’s tour in some incredible bike racing. It’s difficult to encapsulate exactly what transpired across the French countryside in a four-minute clip, but here are a few highlights from the now legendary Col du Granon, a hors catégorie, seven-mile climb that goes up 3,474 feet, topping out at almost 8,000 feet above sea level.

The can-do-no-wrong wunderkind was finally hurt yesterday. All those attacks by the Jumbo-Visma super team paid off. It wasn’t quite tectonic, but close enough in road cycling. It took two-and-a-half years for the best riders in the world to exploit a weakness in Pogačar, meaning this was something really special.

That further means that, today, the final day in the Alps, the defending champion had to start chasing. In the photo above Pogačar was attacking his main foe, and current yellow-jersey wearer, Jonas Vingegaard, on Alpe d’Huez.

He could not pull any time back on the Danish Macaulay Culkin lookalike. It is a two-minute and 26-second race at the moment. This has our cat’s attention.

But this is not a new thing for Poseidon. Here he is last year, taking in the first stage of the 2021 Tour.

Maybe he hears the word peloton and thinks he’s going to get pets. Maybe the word bidon is too similar to Poseidon. Perhaps, because of his aggressive nature, he misunderstands the use of the word attack. Or it could be that the best joke is the one from the headline. Maybe he’s hors catégorie.

adventures / history / music / Thursday / video — Comments Off on It’s raining macaroni
7
Jul 22

It’s raining macaroni

A few more clips from last week’s Barenaked Ladies show to pad out the week. Why not? After all, you don’t hear enough bass solos these days.

That led to this. It was never released as a single, never had a video, and “If I had $1,000,000” hit 13 on the Canadian and UK charts and made it into the US Top 40 and, of course, is a live show staple.

Also, my mother-in-law quotes it to me now, which is the best part.

BNL does rap covers and medleys and they come off as ad libbed, but this has been done before. No one puts “Just A Friend” and “Coincidence” together on a whim.

And they closed the show with a few covers. Devo is always a popular choice.

And then there’s Led Zeppelin. It is 53 years old and still rocks.

Whole Lotta Love was off II, their second album, which Led Zeppelin recorded on tour. It went platinum 12 times. That song was about Jimmy Page’s instrumentation and legendary bluesman Willie Dixon‘s lyrics. (He sued. They settled.) And now, 53 years later, bands with four-decade pedigrees of their own, are still covering their efforts.

I wonder if they had any sense of the staying power of this stuff at the time. Page was 25 at the time they recorded Whole Lotta Love, Robert Plant was 21; John Bonham and John Paul Jones were in between. They closed every concert with that for four years. Now, BNL does, too.

Well, except for the encore, which you’ll see tomorrow.

adventures / memories / music / Thursday / video — Comments Off on A patient seeker, musically speaking
30
Jun 22

A patient seeker, musically speaking

Just because I needed to put something here, and because I put up videos yesterday and we’re going to a concert tomorrow, I thought I might as well put up some more videos today. These are from a 2018 Barenaked Ladies show. it was a lot of fun, and tomorrow’s surely will be, as well.

Here’s a bit of Canada Dry, it’s a song full of references about Canada, but it’s really about relationships.

Jim Cuddy from Blue Rodeo and Alan Doyle of Great Big Sea are also on the studio version. They shipped this song as a pre-release to their 2017 record, “Fake Nudes,” which they were supporting on that tour.

A bit of One Week which, at the time of this show was somehow 20 years old.

(I still miss Steven Page.)

In the US, that song topped the Hot 100, Alternative Airplay and Mainstream Top 40 charts. (Internal contradictions were pretty routine in music charts by then, of course.) It peaked at number two on Billboard’s Adult Alternative and Adult Top 40 charts. It only made it to number three in the Canadian charts.

Light Up My Room, also from that 1998 album, Stunt. It’s one of the best songs on the four-times platinum record, along with maybe six or seven other songs.

And now, of course, it has been four more years. How was that concert four years ago? How is all of this 24 years old?

Anyway, we’ll seem them again tomorrow, with Toad the Wet Sprocket and Gin Blossoms. We bought these tickets in 2019 for 2020. Good shows come to those who wait, I guess.

movies / Thursday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on The wizard as a crazy, younger, man
23
Jun 22

The wizard as a crazy, younger, man

Just some quick Twitter stuff to fill your time today. We wrapped up the new Obi-Wan series tonight. The quick review: worth watching. I say that as a person who wants Disney to explore any other part of this universe beyond the Skywalker saga. But it is good and this is might be the one legacy deserving an exception. Ewan McGregor and Alec Guinness always needed a fifth act and here we are.

One nice thing about this being on the app is that the whole catalog is right there. Watching the big dramatic confrontation in the last episode of the miniseries brought me here.

It was the walking Jabba version. And I think that, now, Greedo and Han fired simultaneously. I don’t care about that, not really, but purists do. I only have one strictly held Star Wars belief: the whole series is really only good when Han is on camera. (Much as it pains me to say.)

This could mean he’s forgotten, or he’s sand crazy or he’s lying. The latter doesn’t make a lot of sense based on the rest of Guinness’ arc. He doesn’t seem like he’s less lucid after all of those years in the desert. Similarly, forgetfulness doesn’t make a lot of sense. So I’ll blame the modern writing, here, for not being able to overcome the old Lucas writing.

You could make the same argument as I tried above about the way we’ve seen and thought about Guinness’ Kenobi. But we should also give Lucas’ writing a nod. It’s important to remember how cinematic storytelling can change over 40 years. We didn’t see the whole Kenobi-19-year-old-Skywalker dynamic. Maybe some off-camera things shaped Kenobi’s choices. Maybe I’m giving too much credit to Lucas, but as we know he’s doing a lot of homages here, so why couldn’t that be one?

Hayden caught a lot of grief for his Anakin Skywalker, but if you’re going to create the galaxy’s scariest monster there has to be some rage in there somewhere …

I suppose it is owing to the 1970s vision of the science fiction future in a time long, long ago. But doesn’t it seem odd that Kenobi spent all that time wandering about the Death Star without anyone seeing him? I hate myself for looking this up, but Wikipedia says that

According to Star Wars reference books, the population of the Death Star was 1.7 million military personnel, 400,000 maintenance droids, and 250,000 civilians/ associated contractors and catering staff. The Death Star was defended by thousands of turbolasers, ion cannons and laser cannons, plus a complement of seven to nine thousand TIE fighters, along with tens of thousands of support craft.

… and there’s not a bank of security cameras looking for old guys strolling around in robes?

Which leads us to the big confrontation, and where we stopped the movie, because … the outcome of the Vader-Kenobi confrontation on the Death Star.

Look, it has been 45 years. No one has been working on the Kenobi miniseries that long, but when they wrote the six-episode plot for the series they refreshed their memories of what happened here, and in that last prequel. Between all of that, and this new series, there is room for them to continue working.

So, again, worth watching.

adventures / photo / Switzerland / Thursday / video — Comments Off on The world’s steepest cogwheel
16
Jun 22

The world’s steepest cogwheel

For this extra Thursday post we’re looking back at our trip two weeks ago today. Enjoy the photos (and the two videos!) that tell the tale of this recent, amazing, adventure …

In the last post we went to the top of Mt. Pilatus, a journey which took a bus, and two separate ski lift cars to get to the long, winding stairs that wound around the top and, finally, showed us the summit at 6,949 feet.

When you’re that high up, how do you get down? Well, this is the Golden Round Trip, so you do something a little bit scary and superlative.

You ride in the world’s steepest cogwheel railway. The gradient is, at one point, 48 percent! The steepness was a cost-saving measure from when the railway was built in 1889. The system was a special design because engineers worried the steepness would make the gear teeth jump. Most of the railway, in fact, is that original hardware.

The cars were steam until the 1930s, and these went in over the course of the ’70s. The spare controls are a giveaway. This is all that keeps this descent under control.

New cars are going in right now, and the upgrades will be completed in 2023. As for this day, I like to think that the engineer was a bit nervous about all of this.

This is the track he was peering down. His car travels from 5-7 miles per hour.

The descent takes about half an hour, and I’ve got three minutes of highlights for you here.

And here are two shots of the rock faces from the cogwheel car’s descent.

I must say, I enjoyed that an awful lot more than I thought I would. It was a unique sort of experience, to be sure.

I wonder who’s been up and down the mountain on the cogwheel car the most.

Near the end of that video, you caught a glimpse of a boat coming ashore. That was our next stop, and how we wrapped up the Golden Round Trip — aerial cableways and gondola to summit Mount Pilatus, world’s steepest cogwheel railway and, finally — a beautiful ride on Lake Lucerne, one of Switzerland’s largest lakes.

And here are two views from on the lake.

It’s difficult to believe, and more than a little sad, that our vacation was coming quickly to it’s end. After the boat ride it was back on the bus, and back to Zurich. There was dinner (we had barbecue, hipster-almost-Texas barbecue) and then we got ready for one last day of fun.

But you’ll have to come back tomorrow to find out what we did. (It’ll be worth seeing.)

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