Re Michael Moore’s difficulties with Disney: we’ve been had
Frying Pan
And for my birthday, I got a new frying pan.
Tour de Diabetes
Some friends at work are putting together a group to ride the Tour de Cure next month, a fundraiser for diabetes research and treatment. If you’d like to contribute, they make it easy.
Cinco de Mayo
Years ago, we were visiting my friend David in Oxnard and we headed downtown for Mexican food. Oxnard is one of those Southern California towns where Latin American immigrations has created its own dominant culture, and Mexican food in downtown Oxnard back then was really Mexican food, a string of restaurants in a neighborhood dominated by immigrants.
Before we went, David offered this warning: there will be Mariachi musicians, but they only warm up. They never play.
As we sat down to eat, a Mariachi walked in to the restaurant with his guitar, sliding into a booth by the door. He was resplendent, green with white piping down the side of his pants and that magnificent hat. He plucked a bit at his guitar and chatted with the waitresses. Then another, with a trumpet, blowing quiet and low. It was like this during the whole meal, with the players drifting in and out, picking out a few bars, chatting. When we left, they were standing out by a car on the street.
They only warmed up. They never played.
Tuesday Night Crits
The first Tuesday Night Crit was this evening. Bill the Bike Man blocks off the streets in a business park up near my work, a half mile circuit with wide turns and good pavement.
It’s a fast course, flat with three real turns and one long gentle bend. I raced the C race, which is the only spot they’ve got for beginners, and pretty much got dropped on the first lap. But I still hammered pretty well, and turned in a respectable 22.8 mph for 20 laps, which is a personal best, almost a mile an hour faster than the last crit I rode.
Lissa’s verdict is that I’m getting sucked in. Guess she’s right, but whatever. It sure is fun riding a bike fast.
“Keep out of mischief, unless you enjoy it.”
Hank Stuever pricks the pomposity of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner:
Drew Barrymore rushed in past the line with her escorts just before midnight, staying just long enough to enchant a few more people with talk of a documentary she’s making about getting young people to vote. (A documentary! Genius. That should solve it.)
Sunscreen in the Morning
All slathered up with sunscreen this morning, I launched a bike ride back through the seasons – from a warm morning that felt like summer but was really just spring, up east through town to the mountains, circling ’round the back to the road that winds up to the ski lifts. From green trees leafed out in the valley, to the first signs of spring in the low parts of the high country, to deciduous trees up high waiting for their turn.
The ski lifts are long shut down, but there still was snow in the shadows on the north facing slopes – gritty, filthy snow, barely deserving the name, but snow nevertheless. I was overdressed when I left – long tights and two shirts – but was glad when I made the turn and began riding back down, hands hard on the brakes and chilled in the wind of the descent.
It’s my birthday this week, and it is becoming my custom to celebrate by riding my age. Forty five miles right now didn’t seem like much of a challenge, so I added a mountain and some extra distance to this year’s effort to make it feel like a deserving birthday ride. It was worthy.
I love the smell of sunscreen in the morning. It smells like … summer.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
So here’s part of what I’ve been so busy with:
World War II was raging when, shrouded in secrecy, the U.S. government built a pair of chemical plants on a barren plain along a bend in the Columbia River in Washington state.
“B-Plant” and “T-Plant” were identical copies, spaced far enough apart that a Japanese bomber could not destroy both plants on a single bombing run.
Their job – to process the plutonium for America’s first atom bombs.
Sixty years later, the witches’ brew of radioactive waste from those plants is at the center of a bitter dispute between the Department of Energy and the state of New Mexico. The question is whether some of it can be disposed of in New Mexico.
Read the full story and the sidebar.
The Frying Pan
I had a dream last night. I do not remember anything, except that there was some sort of horrible dishwashing accident, and our small frying pan was ruined.
Closing Out a Hard Month
I was explaining blogging once to Dad, that it was sort of like a diary but on line for the whole world (or any subset that’s interested) to read, and he asked, “Do you tell the truth?” Well, no. He has a point. There’s some discomfort levels I just can’t get past in a forum as public as this, so I certainly don’t tell the whole truth. Hopefully enough to get by.
So I’ve not been all here this month because it’s been brutal and exhausting and I’m very, very tired. So let’s talk about the iris and the anniversary:
