Wednesday

adventures / cycling / friends / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Wednesday, right? Right? Right.
22
Jul 20

Wednesday, right? Right? Right.

Just two Zoom calls today, which make something like 45 for the week. One was a big meeting where my task is to be a listener, and to make sure my microphone is muted. On the underside of that meeting is a Slack channel subtext, where my duty is to make the occasional bad joke.

I’m the right person for it.

My second call was after lunch, and for the life of me I thought it was set for next week. So calendar reminders saved me today. I’m still holding strong on days of the week, but I have to make direct efforts to keep the proper dates in mind. But the calendar reminded me that today was the day. This is an important tidbit for you to know!

I got to have a chat with an old friend about pedagogy and Zoom sessions, architecture and video. We are so meta! We might also back ourselves into some sort of project together. Who knows? That’d be fun.

He’s returning from sabbatical this term, so welcome back to him.

We went for a bike ride this evening. We went out easy and then I turned it up once.

This happens a lot. I say, I am going to ride in her pocket and not go out and do something silly. It was very humid and we agreed that our goal was to drink all the water on the ride. And then we got to a place where there was one of the sorts of short punchy hills I can get over pretty well and I created a gap. So we go on like that for a while, until she decides to drop me, which she does promptly.

I began ducking into curves and grinding through rollers and eventually I caught her wheel again. She let me pull for a while before coming around the left and settled into a high cadence. She dropped me for real. I was having a good ride, but she was enjoying a better one. Somehow, near the end, she caught me again. She’d taken a detour for fun and still found it in her catch back on as she doubled back. After a gentle two-mile ascent I got her wheel again.

She passed me, one last time, on the final hard 1,200 meters she was

I think she has a motor in her bicycle.

I’m riding in a hard gear and everything!

(That’s not a bad picture for shooting blind and trying to stay upright. But when you crop a tire it looks like a flat, which is a bad omen I’m always hoping to avoid.)

books / cycling / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on ‘And the chain tension in harmony with the correct gear’
15
Jul 20

‘And the chain tension in harmony with the correct gear’

Today, on the bicycle, I had an interesting ride. It was one of those days where I really understood gearing, anticipating shifts in all of the right places. It wasn’t la volupté, the voluptuousness, by any means. I seldom get that spare moment Jean Bobet described:

Its magic lies in its unexpectedness, its value in its rarity … It is more than a sensation because one’s emotions are involved as well as one’s actions.

The voluptuous pleasure that cycling can give you is delicate, intimate and ephemeral. It arrives, it takes hold of you, sweeps you up and then leaves you again. It is for you alone. It is a combination of speed and ease, force and grace. It is pure happiness.

I didn’t have that, but I was really in tune, understanding, anticipating, the shifting today. I really had it down in a fine and intimate way. One click here, push over the roller and two pops there. It was one of those days where I really understood it, until I completely and immediately forgot it all. One of those days.

(I really need a haircut.)

Probably it means I have been riding those particular roads too much recently. Indeed, as we see by today’s installment of the irregular feature of Barns by Bike:

As I am sure I’ve written here before, this road was also on the first bike route we rode here. We see it a lot. Do you ever wonder what’s inside people’s barns? You have time on a bike to think about such things.

Anyway, some roads are like that. Everyone has their regular routines. You have to work to escape them sometimes. You see la volupté a lot less frequently. Far too little, in fact. But it’s one of the reasons you keep going out there. Just one of them.

cycling / photo / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Just some Wednesday stuff
8
Jul 20

Just some Wednesday stuff

We went for a bike ride today, which was nice. It was bright and sunny and that was nice. It was warm. It was hot, but not ridiculously, oppressively hot, which was nice. We rode over to campus to go up and down one of the hills over and over. And I won the day’s hill set, which was nice.

Here I am at the bottom after my last hill repeat and waiting on The Yankee to finish her last two rounds.

The actual hill disappears and wraps up to the right. So it doesn’t look like the biggest hill in the world, because its not, nor does it need to be. We’re just doing two minutes of consistent climbing right now. Also, to be fair, I only won because she pulled off to set up a camera shot and somehow that let me get well ahead of the game.

Across from our hill repeats there is a smaller hill — a nice single roller, really. It’s on a road that splits the softball and baseball fields from the tennis courts and the football field parking lots. After a softball game there last year I saw three guys fly over that hill on their bikes and thought, I can do that. So now when I am over there, I do that.

And today I went over it at in my next-to-hardest gear with ease and at a respectable speed. Well, I thought. Because my inner-monologue often features sentences without subjects or verbs and only interjections. So I went back around again, through a parking lot time trial segment, hanging a right and then weaving through some road construction barrels and then working back into the hard end of the cassette right away, turning left and hitting that roller one more time, in my smallest gear. And then I stood up. And I went over the hill.

I went over the hill slightly slower than I had just the time before. I could see it on the Garmin, right there in front of me.

And there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

The next hill after that was the first one on our way back to the house and it was the hardest hill on the route. Maybe we should do repeats on that one. (Let’s not. No one tell her that I even mentioned that.) Then you weave through the rest of the campus and the little side roads that get you back to where you want to be. It’s an easy ride because the hills you dread are out of the way. Sure there are some repeats in your legs, and those always feel and seem so slow, because I’m slow, but the rest of up and downs after that have some real flow.

And there’s a lesson in there somewhere, too.

Hey, did you see this yesterday? That interview played right into my hands, timing-wise, didn’t it?

What’s not to love about this? And, sure, this is a 43-minute video, but it’s a tight recap and all the action is in the first 28 minutes.

Plus it features a finish between two of the great Classics riders of the modern age and what else do you have going on tonight, anyway?

Bloomington / history / journalism / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on New month, old paper
1
Jul 20

New month, old paper

Here’s video from dinner the other night, because I uploaded it and never shared it. And because we needed something colorful here.

Doesn’t hurt that it was quite tasty, either.

Anyway, not much here right now, so we go back, back, back in time. This is 105 years ago, 1915. Let us see what was going on around here.

Newspaper design was not going on, that is for sure. This is a four-page rag, and it was a slow week in a sleepy town and we’re going to get into all of the news and, this time, ignore the society pages altogether. I am inclined to think there was the editor, the typesetter and, otherwise, the old Evening World was a slim operation. There’s not a lot of unique local stuff to see. Let’s see what there is to see, though.

Do not go fast. Charley Stevens, who doesn’t pop up in a lot of search engines today, is warning you. You’re supposed to do 10 miles per hour, and no more. Ten miles to the hour, excuse me. Town squares are fascinating features. It looked exactly like this in 1915. It looked nothing like this in 1915.

This is the editor of the other paper in town. And this is a big description about an out-of-town trip. And this has to be an inside joke or something. Also, this is on the front page.

No one was in trouble. Grover Lazelle messed around got a triple-double. It was a good day.

This seems impressive. Remember, it was four years before Dwight Eisenhower’s transcontinental Army movement. His caravan covered 3,242 miles through 11 states in 62 days, an average of 52 miles per day, going from Maryland to California. Ol’ Willie Curry did the hardest part coming the other direction.

Ike lost two days in Nebraska. Curry apparently lost two tires over the whole trip.

There’s a big block of text about the fireworks you couldn’t buy anymore, and an editorial bit about the stuff you can buy. Some stories, it seems, never change. But to get SAFE AND SANE you had to be unsafe and insane, right?

Someone surely looked at the mangled hand of some kid the year or two before and said, “Y’all. This is insane.” Then there was legislation, and the marketplace kicked in to high gear. And, sure, stuff got safer, and more refined over time, thank goodness, but some of the stuff you couldn’t use anymore, by 1915, even, sounds kind of awesome? And terrifying?

Finally, this news update is brought to you by this advertisement. You figure Mr. Man, sitting there at his desk, let his eyes drift over the society mentions and saw that and thought, “You know, I haven’t had any look keeping the books all week … ” It’s easy to think he put two and two together there, but, you know.

It went on for two more paragraphs, but given what we know of the digestive habits of the time, surely this is all anyone need read. Sentanel, despite the unfortunate spelling, stayed an operating concern until at least the 1930s, but you don’t see much of it after that. I guess their job was done.

And so is mine, for now. Tomorrow … I’ll have something or other for you here. You’ll see!

hobby / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Pictures of small fossilized creatures
24
Jun 20

Pictures of small fossilized creatures

Here are more marine animals turned to stone by time. I picked these up off the shore of a lake and now that they’ve been documented here for no reason I will return them whence they came. It’s important that these things go back to the wild. They’re destined to roam free, stepped on and kicked and maybe picked up and marveled at by children of all ages.

And, also, to take up a good day’s worth of space here on this humble little website. And maybe on social media. There’s always a need for content over there.

Check out these articulations. I believe these, at least some of these anyway, are comatulida, which is an order of crinoids.

Those layers, I just learned, are called synostosis.

Even on the broken ones, I like the ridges. These things have so much character.

If you squinted just right, and I put some greenery and fake foliage on the paper I might be able to trick you into thinking these were castle towers or something. Maybe you’d think I got them from a train set.

Donut or Cheerio?

OK, that’s a Cheerio. This is definitely a donut.

So there’s three types of the common crinoid fossils things in my experience — and the third one is relatively new to me. There’s the one that’s got dirt or mud or fossilized sediment inside. The more desirable version are the ones that are still hollow, like our friends above which resemble tasty treats. Through that axial canal runs, which ran through all the stem segments of the living organism, you would find the nerves and the digestive system that sent nutrients along the body.

Most of these look like they might be cyclocyclicus or pentagonacyclicus, according to this 1968 study I’ve suddenly found myself reading. And the new type, to me, are the ones with the specific shapes through the columnal feature. Like these.

Let’s take a closer look. This one is a floricyclus.

I just found something called The Fossil Forum and two things are clear. The little samples I find are relatively modest and, second, I can’t be sucked in my something called The Fossile Forum.

That 1968 paper — Classification and nomenclature of fossil crinoids based on studies of dissociated parts of their columns by Raymond C. Moore and Russell M. Jeffords — has almost 30 pages full of photos. I don’t see this one there, and it’s not even especially rare.

I’ve seen it’s kind in similarly vague and casual photographs like this one before, so it’s nothing new.

Please remember, dear expert reader who finds this at some point in the future, this is obviously and quite clearly not my field. I’d love to be corrected, however, on any of these errors, big or small.

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