The Smell of the Peleton

Posted by on

Saw a delightful piece earlier this week in Velonews about the Centrum Ronde van Vlaanderen, a Belgian cycling museum. The author, Jed Schneider, a young American racing in Belgium this season, described with some delight and relish and difficulty of explaining bike racing to those unfamiliar with the sport. He tipped his hat to John Nash and game theory (when was the last time you saw Nash on your sports page) and the power of the draft. And the smell:

So, yes, bicycle racing is an experience. I don’t know how much the average European knows about the intricacies of racing strategy. But, when your car gets pulled over by a motorcycle cop and a group of 200 racers comes screaming by your car lined out one-by-one so fast all you see is blurred color and hear the breath, and humming of wheels, and smell the repugnant odor of riders “on-form,” at the same time praying that your Mercedes comes out with no dents and a drivers side mirror; well I bet that is an experience.

I realized I’d read something of his earlier in the year, a vivid explanation of the problems of being far back in the peleton when it slows down for a tight turn. I loved it, and kept repeating my explanation to riding buddies as we’d go through the left-right-soft-S curve along the bike path under the freeway.

I tracked down his email address and wrote him a note saying how much I appreciated the piece. He wrote back, saying when he was in town in the fall we must go riding. Turns out he’s from here. Nancy, one of my bike riding buddies, remembered him from when he was a teen tyke winning the mountain bike races. Small word.

We definitely must ride.

hippopotami

Posted by on

How cool is this:

Sinvula said hippopotami were not a threat to students as the mammals do not like the shallow, swampy waters across which the students have to paddle each day.

Just once I’d like to use the word “hippopotami” for real. I’d die a happy man.

free stuff

Posted by on

Lissa water the iris

That’s a blue bowling ball on the left, a thrift store finial for Lissa’s free stuff sign post.

She’s been on a garden thinning tear, and as she trims cactus or thins the iris bed, she puts out a sign that says “Free Cactus” or “Free Iris” beneath the bowling ball and sets the plants out on cardboard flats by the curb.

They go. They go fast.

She’s been doing this for years, and we now see our distinctive purple iris all over the neighborhood. This year she’s been seriously whacking back the cactus, and she’s become sort of a Lissa Cactusseed for the neighborhood. As I pulled in last night, a guy from up the street followed me up the driveway, his back of groceries in one hand and a flat of prickly pear paddles in the other. “So you just stick these in the ground?” he asked. “Yup,” I said. “Just stick that bottom end in and they’ll grow like crazy.”

I hadn’t met him, but Lissa recognized him. He lives a block up, the guy who last year had this perfectly charming fountain made of a euphonium (or was it a baritone?). Seems the perfect home for our cactus.

Howlin’ Wolf

Posted by on

Today being Howlin’ Wolf’s birthday, I am led to remember the first album of my youth that doesn’t embarass me now. It was The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions, which my friend Roger Innes had. We’d sit up in his living room and play it. I knew who Clapton was, but I remember Roger having to explain who this Wolf guy was. It was one of those albums where a bunch of the British blues rockers got together with their
genuine blues heroes and made respectful noise, and it was a revelation for this little white boy from the suburbs of L.A. It would be too rhetorically effusive to say it changed my life, so I won’t, but I still love that kind of noise today.

Meet Me In St. Louis

Posted by on

Packing this evening, going through my traditional list-making before a trip (toothbrush? deodorant?). We’re leaving Saturday morning for St. Louis, to visit Lissa’s uncle, Bill.

It’ll be the second time we’ve made the drive out there, and I’m really looking forward to the trip. Last time was 10 years ago, during the early stages of the great flood of ’93. It’ll be great to see Bill. He’s Lissa’s best connection to her family past. He reminds her so much of her mother.

It’ll also be good to have a week together with Nora and Lissa, without the usual distractions. No IM. No GNOME. No work. No blogs.

And now we have a digital camera. Travelogue on our return!

Yow

Posted by on

So in Emacs, the text editor I use for most of my routine writing at home, I have a menu item that gives me a random Zippy the Pinhead quote:

Dehydrated EGGS are STREWN across ROULETTE TABLES..

Microsoft Word can’t do that.

Lesser Prairie-chicken

Posted by on

I did not know before today that New Mexico’s eastern plains are home to the Lesser Prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus), a rare and troubled bird. Historically, it lived across a great swath of what is now Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Nebraska as well as my home state. No more. As you can see here, its range is now limited to a few much smaller patches.

I know all this because I received in the mail a survey from the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish regarding my views on the Lesser Prairie-chicken and the efforts underway to save its sorry ass. The survey assured me I was scientifically selected, and that my views were important. I take my survey-responding responsibilities seriously. I filled it out.

upgrade hell

Posted by on

I spent a good number of hours this weekend in Windows upgrade hell.

Nora’s computer, running Windows 98, was having difficulties, and I figured a first reasonable step before spending money on it was a clean operating system install. I picked up a Windows XP upgrade disc at CompUSA and set to work Sunday afternoon.

I’m not geek enough to know whether the difficulty lay in the CD drive, or the hard disk, but when the install aborted partway through, I was screwed. I kept getting errors as the install routine copied files from the CD to the install directory. In other words, it had removed the old OS, but hadn’t yet installed the new OS. Luckily I was geek enough to have the BIOS boot off the CD, giving me something marginally more useful than a large beige paperweight. The errors were mystifying – it would, in seemingly random fashion, be unable to copy some small number of files from the install directory to the CD. But since the install was failing, there was no way I could figure out to manually get in, find the necessary files and put them in the right spot to fix it.

After hours of trying, I finally succeeded seemingly by chance – the only file it failed on was apparently unimportant enough that it was able to complete the install, and I was then able to track down a copy of the file, put it in the right place, and the thing seems to work now.

Windows XP, despite my GNU/GNOME/Linux preferences, is a very nice operating system. But I wonder how people without a geek in the house survive the ordeal I went through trying to get it installed.