One of the things that hooked me as a bicycle racing fan was the elegance with which the peleton responded during the 1995 Tour de France to the death of Fabio Casartelli. Casartelli hit a cement post along the side of the road on a wicked high-speed descent in the Pyrenees.
The next day the boys on the bikes, led by a young Casartelli teammate called Lance Armstrong, rode together in silence, choosing not to contest the day, allowing Casartelli’s teammates to the front at each of the bonus sprints so they could collect the prize money for Casartelli’s widow.
I was reminded of that today by this. It’s the boys from Cofidis crossing the finish line as one in today’s stage in Paris-Nice, a hot little stage race slowed by the death of Cofidis rider Andrei Kivilev, who crashed out yesterday. He died after a night in the hospital of a freakish head injury (the sort that would not have killed him, it is being said, had he been wearing a helmet). The riders did not race today, riding the stage together in quiet tribute to the popular Kazakh bike racer.
Surreal
5:45 p.m. in the newsroom, with our network down – bedlam on deadline. Unsure when the geeks would get it fixed, we were starting to improvise with floppy disks, reconfiguring stuff as we went. High tension.
Into the midst of this came a barbershop quartet, singing birthday greetings to our copy desk chief. It was surreal.
Our Man in Havana
Dave Mason sent me a note when I said I’d been reading Grahama Greene, saying I read too much science, and he was glad to see I’d been reading some fiction. Thing is, I picked it up from the library because I thought I’d been reading too much science, and thought I should read some fiction.
Dad suggested the book to me years ago with a chuckle over the amusing premise – a guy in the ’50s recruited to spy for the British in Cuba, makes up his “agents”, makes up his reports. He’s a vacuum cleaner salesman, and to tart up his reports, he sketches by hand the pieces of the latest vacuum cleaner model, adding a human for scale to make it look like some giant evil Cuban war machine.
It’s a dark and funny book, but the best bits were unexpected – the touching relationship between Wormold and his daughter, Milly, the bittersweet joy of being the father of a teenage girl, the darting in and out of her world, trying to know it while one still can:
He couldn’t afford the time not to love. It was as if he had come with her a little way on a journey that she would finish alone. The separating years approached them both, like a station down the line, all gain for her and all loss for him.
why
I have too many blogs already – Advogato, the Nuke Beat, my ABQJournal musings. Starting another seems a bit of overkill. They all have their roots elsewhere – a pre-existing publisher in the case of the Journal and Advogato, which provides a built-in audience. There’s comfort in that. The Nuke Beat’s just a hare-brained experiment, which may or may not work. But they all have something in common, which is me. There are times when, writing for one or another, I feel uncomfortable. Too much free software ranting is prolly a bad idea on the Journal blog, and I’ve never been entirely comfortable bragging about my incredibly smart and talented daughter on Advogato.
That’s why I decided to consolidate things here. By no longer hiding behind the skirts of an existing publisher, I lose built-in audiences, but that seems fine. I’ll still do the other blogs when my whim suits their audience (and in the case of ABQJournal, I get paid for that, which still amazes me). But if Tim Berners-Lee’s original idea of the web as a medium for both reading and writing has any meaning at all, this is it, so my Inkstain web site must reflect that.