adventures / cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on I was breathless, she was tranquilo — a bike story
28
Jun 22

I was breathless, she was tranquilo — a bike story

I like riding from behind. First, the pace is your own. Second, you don’t have to worry about bumping anyone directly in front of you. So it is never a bad thing when there’s a little space created between my front wheel and my lovely bride. But I also like riding out front, because that gives her something to chase.

So it was the best of both worlds today, which almost makes it the worst.

Let me explain. I’d attacked her twice, springing ahead early, twice. First, because I can play traffic cop at a key intersection. I get to a downhill T-intersection and can tell her to go through or stop. It’s a little helpful because when we take that turn at the stop sign you go immediately uphill. No momentum. But she’s finally learning to accept that I have a healthy respect for empty roads and she will go into the intersection when I wave her on. Advantage: momentum!

I have to start at a dead start, but better one of us than both. And, besides, I’ll catch her near the top of that little hill.

We take another turn, and go over some rollers and then turn right into another neighborhood. I am tied for third on that segment on Strava, just three seconds off the leader. There are two datapoints in that sentence which make no sense in the way I ride, but I had a good turn one day a month or two back and now I’m interested in attacking this particular road when we take that route. (Recently I equaled my best. This also doesn’t make a lot of sense.) So I attacked that again, today, and found myself four seconds off my best time.

But about a mile later, The Yankee went by me. It wasn’t an attack, she just outpaced me. I reached down to grab a sip of water, put the bottle back in the bidon cage, looked up and she was down the road.

This photo is merely a recreation. I did not have time to take pictures today.

She did this on the big galloping rollers. All of those comes down to legs. Some days I’m stronger there. Often, she’s powering away from me. Today, I could tell that I wasn’t making a lot of cuts into her advantage. And then she perhaps got a break in the traffic that I didn’t at an intersection, and she was gone.

All of this time, I was riding hard. With abandon. I did not have to worry about the pace of anyone in front of me, because the road was empty. Hands on hoods, hands in the drops. Legs alive and burning. Lungs dead and burning.

It was one of the faster rides of the year, I think. It was one of the better, harder, rides I’ve had in a while. I don’t know if I could get more out of my bike, but for two hills where I lagged a bit.

I got to the house and she was sitting on the back porch, all casual like. She asked me if I was OK. I was fine. My bike felt like it was floating over bumps. One of the tracking apps said I hit 49.9 miles per hour.

She had already put her bike inside.

So she’s recovered from her crash 10 days ago. The rest of us are just chasing.

books / Monday / photo / Twitter — Comments Off on Two cats and a book
27
Jun 22

Two cats and a book

It has been three weeks since we featured the most popular part of the blog — hey, we’ve been busy. But now we can catch up with the kitties. They’re both doing well, thank you.

Phoebe has been having a lot of cabinet meetings of late.

I’m sure there are many important policy decisions are made in those meetings. Where to map, what to scratch, how to stretch.

Probably the cabinets are a part of her routine to try to create distance between her and Poseidon, seen here showing of his regular charming nuisance.

No breakfast is safe from this guy. Mine certainly wasn’t yesterday.

Can’t say he didn’t warn us. Here he is, warning us.

“YOUR BREAKFAST IS NOT SAFE!” — Poseidon, probably.

I don’t know when I wrote the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written, but it occurred to me early this morning that this is a thing we should chart. I wrote this.

The book is News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.

It is a good book. It is, unequivocally, an important book. It was when it was released in 2011, and remains so today. But these little problems are compounding. Maybe it is a function of the editing process when they created the Kindle version.

Look, I’m not an expert in this area. Far from it. The first error, I knew a tiny bit about the man involved. The second was revealed as a chronological inconsistency one page, and a few paragraphs, apart. The third is an obvious error. The fourth I found because now I’m googling every name and publication in this book. I’m enjoying the book and learning a great deal. It’s just slowing me down, from the continued learning, is all.

Of course, I’m also picking up tidbits here and there about the people and their work that weren’t included in the book. When the world wide web is your footnote database …

I don’t know if this is the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written (Not by a longshot. — ed.) but it is somewhere on that list.

Come to think of it, let’s never chart the nerdiest things we’ve written. Never, ever.

adventures / Friday / photo / running — Comments Off on Moving into the weekend
24
Jun 22

Moving into the weekend

Two pictures of moving about. This one from a run!

And this one from a walk!

So it is a light end to a few busy weeks here. Next week might be light, too, who really knows? It’s the pace of summertime, and I hope yours is off to a lovely start.

Come back Monday, we’ll get a long overdue update on the kitties!

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.

books / Indiana / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Pick up some books
22
Jun 22

Pick up some books

And how was your summer solstice? The day was 14 hours, 55 minutes and 28 seconds here. And there’s always that guy who just can’t wait to point out that the days are doing nothing but getting shorter until December.

Around here? We hate that guy.

But we love the long days. If you stepped outside last night at 10:19 and looked west, moments before nautical twilight, it looked like this.

No camera tricks, no Photoshop treatments. That’s just the view after 10 p.m. in June.

If I ever say anything here is better than that, I am, in fact, making a secret, coded cry for help.

Since we talked about books last, I have recently finished you might be interested in. First was The Last of the Doughboys by Wall Street Journal reporter Richard Rubin.

In the earliest days of the 21st century Rubin started interviewing the surviving military veterans from World War I, all of them centenarians. He wraps his interviews around rich context about the Tin Pan Alley music of the era, and his own tours of France and a general historical overview.

Those stories are as uniques as the men and women’s experiences. Some of them colorful and sharp as they were in 1918. Some of the details had become foggy over the course of their long lives, as you might expect.

Some parts of the book are about some of the other parts of their lives. None of the people Rubin interviewed were a part of this experience, but that was up to chance and good fortune as much as anything.

I knew this particular story, but it is always surprising to think about it in the full context.

The crux of the book are those interviews, though, and memorializing those last veterans’ experiences. Rubin, in fact, had the chance to meet the last American survivor of the Great War. All of that is in the book. It’s a worthwhile read.

Now this one, Longitude by Dava Sobel. This book was a surprise hit, even for the author. She saw it go through 29 hardcover printings, translated into more than 20 languages and become a national and international bestseller. The 10th anniversary edition includes a pretty special foreword by Neil Armstrong.

Granted, the idea of a book about longitude seems like an important one. But it also seems like a daunting tome. How do you write an interesting book about invisible lines on a map? Sobel is about to show you. First, just enough of the technical to explain what she’s talking about, and why this is all so important.

And so now you know why this had been a problem for generations, and why the search for a solution was so important. As the book gets into that it quickly becomes obvious, even to land-lubbers, how most of the success of those pre-longitudinal sailors was about luck with skill. How anyone got to where they wanted to go before their supplies ran out is a mystery.

Then, we meet the people.

For whatever reason, when I opened the book I expected this to be a dense read, but, to Sobel’s great credit, it’s just about the most approachable text you can imagine. Give this a read, you’ll be pleased and surprised.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →