cycling / photo / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on I told you there were a lot of Olympics around here
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.

And, also, this:

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

baseball / Tuesday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Recycling a Twitter thread
27
Jul 21

Recycling a Twitter thread

I pulled all of this together right after Cleveland announced their new team name. I like these montages and appreciate the work that goes into these rollouts. In this case they’re doing nothing less than staking out their new identity in front of a multinational audience. It’s no small thing, and worthy of a bit of study.

(And if you think this is nerdy, ask me about the breakdown I used to do with the more effective Super Bowl spots as a classroom exercise.)

Anyway, I let this sit and breathe for a few days. I watched the video again and was pleased with my off-the-cuff impressions. And since I don’t have anything good for you here, please enjoy the new Cleveland Guardians video.

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and did you know that Phoebe and Poseidon have an Instagram account? Phoebe and Poe have an Instagram account.

cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Welcome to the last week of July
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.

Friday / IU / site / Twitter / video — Comments Off on A fresh new front page look, and lots of video here
23
Jul 21

A fresh new front page look, and lots of video here

There’s a new look to the front page of the website. You’re going to want to check that out. It’s another small little reminder of our trip to Washington State last month. These images will stay in place for two or three weeks, so be sure to visit the front page early and often. For now, just click the image below and you’ll be on your way in another tab.

There are seven nice images there. Did you see them all? Did you count? Make sure you saw all seven.

One of them is, admittedly, a bit of a miss. That’ll teach me!

A thing we do here every few weeks is look at some of the things I’ve thrown on a work account. I need a special banner or a cute name for this, but, for now, it’s just another place I can show off a bit of cool research that people are done. Also, it pads out this post.

That’ll do for now. Check out the front page! And come back Monday; we’ll check in on the kitties.

cycling / movies / running / Thursday / video — Comments Off on Now playing
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.

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