Again Abt

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Remember my mention the other day of Sam Abt? Read on.

These favorable comments recall the day back in 1993 when Armstrong, then 21 and in his first Tour de France, was relaxing out of uniform before a stage. Because of his youth and inexperience, his Motorola team had him withdraw about halfway through the race, and he had rejoined his teammates just before they reached the finale in Paris, at a party in a Tex-Mex restaurant in Montparnasse.

Armstrong mused about Miguel Indurain, the Spaniard who was winning the third of his five successive Tours. “Indurain,” he said, “I admire him as much as a person as a bike rider.

“He’s a lord – gracious, generous, cool, always in control. He’s the kind of guy I’d like to grow up to be.”

No doubt about it, in the judgment of the French and everyone else, he has.

What I did on my summer vacation

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What I did on my summer vacation

After two travel-intensive vacations in June, I took the past week off work and just hung around. Here is what I did:

  • Watched the Tour de France[1]
  • Rode my bike in the bosque[2]
  • Took Nora out for our very first driving practice[3]
  • Rode in the Sunshine Spin fund-raising bike ride for the Lance Armstrong Foundation
  • Watched the Tour de France
  • Watched the Tour de France (“Armstrong is down!” “It looks like Ullrich and Hamilton are waiting!” “Armstrong attacks!”)
  • Rode my bike in the neighborhood
  • Took Nora driving
  • Rode my bike in the bosque
  • Went thrift store shopping with Lissa. Found a nice Hawaiian shirt and my first silk shirt.
  • Watched the Tour de France (“It looks like Hamilton will be able to stay away!”)
  • Rode bikes in the bosque with Lissa
  • Updated my libxml tutorial
  • Rode real fast in the bosque with Jaime et. al. (“Richard attacks!” “Fleck can’t go with him!”
  • Watched the Tour de France (“Ullrich is down!”)
  • Rode my bike in the neighborhood, finding a lovely new east-west route up through the heights.
  • Spent hours wandering Lowes hardware and appliance store with Lissa[4]
  • Ate lots of pasta
  • Saw Pirates of the Caribbean with Lissa (“Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me.”)
  • Rode my bike in the bosque for a very very long time
  • Went shopping at Costco with Lissa[4]

[1] Mom and Dad have cable. Watching the Tour has become a family thing
[2] “Bosque” is a Spanish word that translates as “forest” or “woods”. We use it here to describe the riparian woods along the Rio Grande. There is an excellent paved bicycle trail that runs about 20 miles from the Albuquerque metro area’s north edge to its south.
[3] Nora just finished drivers’ ed and has her provisional permit. It has been decided that Dad’s temperament is best suited to the complex demands of driving practice.
[4] OK, these prolly sound like odd places to go on a vacation outing. But such is our marriage that Lissa and I love to go do simple things like that together. Shopping at Costco or wandering the aisles of a hardware store, done properly, can be a gas.

Sam Abt

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There is Velonews and Cyclingnews.com, and the Daily Peleton. And then there is Sam Abt. He notices the little things:

For some who drop out of the race, it is welcome relief after two weeks of riding at a punishing pace, often in blistering temperatures.
For others, who are left trailing so
badly that they are picked up by the Tour’s “broom wagon,” it is downright humiliation. Pierrick Fedrigo, a 24-year-old Frenchman who rides with the Credit Agricole team, held his head in his hands and tried to hide from the roadside spectators when he was collected by the dreaded broom wagon on Sunday.

“When you start your first Tour, that’s the only thing you really worry about,” said Fedrigo referring to a symbol of failure in the eyes of riders – and some unforgiving spectators.

“When I got inside it was worse than I had imagined. I could see people looking in through the windows and all I wanted to do was hide.”

Red Rio

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With the silvery minnow on the knife’s edge, rain wet the Rio Grande through Albuquerque this week, turning it a muddy reddish and making it look a little less anemic than usual. I rode yesterday across a couple of different bridges where the bike paths give a view of the river, just to see it flow. The thunderstorms have been building afternoons the past few days, and the runoff must be making the little fish happy.

Down through the bosque, the ravages of last month’s bosque fires are not as bad as I expected. Like most wildfires, they hopped around, mixed patches of black and green (well brown, really, it’s a drought).

Crews were out repaiting the levee, which was torn up by the fire trucks. It was always sandy to begin with, lots of soft patches, and apparently it’s in pretty bad shape now.

I stopped to talk to two city open space rangers, who were doing crosswalk duty for the heavy equipment working on the levee and seemed happy for the chance to talk to relieve their boredom. They said rews will begin marking the cottonwoods soon, figuring out which ones can survive and which need to be taken down. It’s going to be a lot of work. Nature used to do this all for us with the big spring floods, but Cochiti Dam ended that back in 1973. Now if anything’s going to be cleared out, it’s going to require fossile fuels and human muscle. Or, come to think of it, wildfire.

Tomorrow morning Lissa and I are going back down. Saturday was my first visit since the fire, and she hasn’t been yet, so it’ll be nice to take a nice slow pass and a careful look.

A Minor Angel

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Seemingly within moments* of sending a note to the docs list itemizing holes in our GNOME 2.4 documentation, Chee Bin HOH arrived with updated docs for the modemlights applet, adding that he’s looking for more to do. Have I mentioned that I love free software?

* OK, it really was 45 hours, but it seemed quick.

Schwinn, the Domestique and survival

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I was having a hard time understanding how to think about today’s Sunshine Spin, a bike ride to raise money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation for Cancer Survivorship.

The organizers had set up two courses – a flat, pleasant 22 miles along the riverside trail, or a 50-plus miler that burned up our long Tramway climb into the foothills. I’d been planning on doing the long one. I’m in great shape, and I really wanted to burn it up, kinda see what I had.

It was about the bike.

And then I got sick two weeks ago, and when I finally got back on the bike I felt flat and weak and I figured there was no way I was gonna hammer up a big climb with the macho boys all around me. So I switched to the short ride. My friends Nancy and Charlie were going to do the short one pulling their three-year-old daughter Katie on a third wheel, and I figured it’d be fun to join ’em.

I got to the start late, right as the “peleton” was leaving, so I humped up through the group looking for Nancy and Charlie. I was hammering trying to get to the front of the bunch, looking for them, somehow missed them, doubled back and eventually we hooked up.

At the turnaround, Charlie started talking to a guy riding this beautiful old Schwinn beach cruiser. The guy was big and bulky, had a cast on his arm from some recent mishap, but he looked happy.

On the ride back, we picked up a fourth for our little caravan, Mark, who was riding a beautiful old restored Centurion. Mark and I took turns pulling into the headwind for Charlie, who was pulling Katie, while Nancy hung at the back and kept Katie amused.

I don’t think about cancer very often any more. Lissa and Dad are both nearly 15 years out now, and it’s just a distant and painful memory. But there was a moment during the ride, when I was hammering up through the bunch looking for Nancy and Charlie, that I stopped thinking about the bike and thought instead about what this whole thing is about. I choked up for a minute, because surviving cancer is about something really important. It’s about not being dead, which is simple and straightforward, but it’s about bonus time that is all good. We don’t need to think about it all the time, but it’s good to think about it now and then.

They’ve stopped talking about Lance Armstrong the cancer survivor lately. It’s all about the bike again. In a sense, that’s what you’d expect, it’s healthy. But let’s never forget what that boy stands for, OK?

Back at the finish, we sat around on the lawn in the shade of a big tree for a while. The guy on the beach cruiser was there, grinning, and Charlie and Katie rolled in the grass.

Later in the afternoon, everbody got back together at the park for drawings for a bunch of swag. Barbara, the organizer, called bib numbers and if we were there, prize action ensued. There were bike tires and Harley Davidson beer glasses and water bottles and all manner of goods donated by the event’s sponsors. I won a helmet and explained to Barbara that it was destined for the head of my cancer survivor wife.

The guy on the old beach cruiser came up to collect a prize – I wish I remembered what – and Barbara pointed out that he is a cancer survivor, one year out. So now I understand the grin, and the fealty to a beautiful old Schwinn beach cruiser and the way he didn’t seem to care about the discomfort of riding with a big cast on his arm. This guy is on bonus time.

Jaime had to leave, so he stuck his bib number and one of his friends’ into my hand. One of Jaime’s numbers won a CO2 tire pump goober, and the other won a $15 gift certificate to Manny’s, a local coffee shop.

When I called Jaime, he was jazzed about the pump, but didn’t really care about Manny’s. So I’m giving it to Dad, the cancer survivor, and I’ll take him and Mom there for breakfast.

It’s not about the bike. That’s just a way to get there.

Le Tour

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FInally felt good on the bike today, first time in two weeks after my brush with bronchitis or whatever the hell it was I had. Rode for an hour and a half, including a spell with racer-boy Juan, one of those accidental buddy rides that are such a pleasure.

Juan, like me, left late for his ride, trading away the cool of the morning for the Tour on telly. So we had a grand chat about the big race as we rolled very hard and very fast (for me at least) along the riverside trail. Juan kept doing a fake German accent, immitating Ullrich, something about streudel. For the first time since my sickness I was able to push the tempo and drive my heart rate up without collapsing. But I’m still coughing, and the streudel schtick didn’t help.

Juan, who lives just down the street from me, also showed me a new route back into town. It rolls up through the industrial neighborhood south of downtown, past the old rail yard and the beautiful but very battered engine shop. By the time we hit the hill back up into our neighborhood, we had hooked up with two more spandex-clad idiots who were out riding in the heat of the day because they stayed in early to watch Le Tour. At least tomorrow OLN isn’t broadcasting the stage live in the states, which means we can all go out and ride first thing like a good cyclist should.

Don’t Bogart that Joint, My Friend

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So there’s this one story I never heard, where Lowell George is with the Mothers and Frank hears “Willin'” and tells him he should start a band. I don’t know if I believe it. Lowell tells it different:

Russ Titelman was starting a publishing company and he asked me if I wanted to co-publish the tune (“Willin'”) with him and see what he could do with it. So I recorded it and went on the road the same day with The Mothers and was gone for about five weeks I guess. Then I came back and nothing happened, but somehow a demo of the tape got out and it was the rage of the Troubadour. People like Linda Ronstadt heard it and The Sunshine Company. All these people heard the tune and cut it. Then we did “Truck Stop Girl” at some sessions, and Clarence White covered that, and I thought he did a fantastic job. And so from some of those demos we got signed to Warner Brothers and went and did the first album.

And there’s this other story where Jimmy Carl Black – he’s the drummer for the Mothers – makes a wise-ass comment about the size of Lowell’s feet, and that’s where the name of the band came from or something. Dunno. I still don’t get the spelling. “Feat”?

But the whole point of this is different, about the way the word “bogart” has crept into the English language.

From the new 11th Edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary:

bogart ? \BOH-gart\ ? verb
1: bully, intimidate
*2: to use or consume without sharing

Example sentence:
“[The dog] lay dazed on her side on the kitchen floor, bogarting a bone, dozens more scattered around her like some dog play set she’d grown bored with.” (Douglas Bauer, The Boston Globe, July 25, 2001)

The word comes to common English by way of the movies, the way Humphrey Bogart’s tough-guy characters would hang a cigarette off their lip and smoke it down until you winced thinking the guy is gonna burn himself. But he never did. He was too cool.

Dopers adopted it for the guy who hung onto the joint rather than passing it around, and now it’s in the friggin’ Boston Globe. How quickly postmodern language moves. Which brings us full circle to Lowell George and Warner Brothers.

When they repackaged “Waiting for Columbus” on CD – “SPECIALLY-PRICED 2-LP SET ON 1 COMPACT DISC” – they had to cut something:

The tracks “Don’t Bogart That Joint” and “A Apolitical Blues” which appear on the double album and cassette have been omitted so as to facilitate a single specially-priced compact disc.

Bastards.

Roll, another one, just like the other one
Cause this ones burned about, to the end
So come on and be a real friend.

Don’t Bogart that joint my friend, pass it over to me….

See, I knew I could get there eventually. Just took a little wigglin’.

Googlejuice

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Reader Michael Hudson points out that my July 5 post about owning Bowie Poag is now the top-ranked Google result when one searches for information on the life and times of the inestimable Mr. Poag. Noted Mr. Hudson:

You may recall that post was about how something else I had written topped the Bowie Poag rankings. One wonders how this one will fare.

I’ll reiterate that it’s Zach Beane’s Bowie Poag time line that deserves the real Google Juice here, and y’all should read it and link to it as often as you can, because it’s really funny.

GNOME 2.4 Diaries

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If I was truly a leet haxor I would know how to properly spell “leat hacksor”, but at the very least I now know how to do a module release. Mikael Hallendal is otherwise occupied, and Shaun realized last night we really need to do a release of Yelp, what with Shaun having done a metric buttload of work on it that deserves testing. So after whining a bit in an unsuccessful attempt to get someone else to do a release, I found Mark Mc’s guide to how to do a release, poked Jeff Waugh a few times on the tricky bits, and did it. I am 1337. Or something.

The most amazing bit? I actually had an account already on widget. And I actually remembered my password.