Another cyclist cat blog!

Apparently my internet pal Salim has, unbeknownst to me, a cat blog about his cat
Sprout

Salim is a like minded cyclist who lived in San Francisco while I lived all the way across the bay in Oakland/Emeryville, somehow we never met, despite planning on meeting for rides for at least a couple years.



I found this through the miracle of technorati and sitemeter which can tell you who links to your webpage and how people see your website, how they arrived to your webpage and from where on the web and geographically. Very neat tools. Seems like I have had visitors from India, Austria, Taiwan and some country named Canada...

Seal v Cat

Please note the simularity between Wink256 and the elephant seal mother from a recent trip to california and Mr. the hut.

Blogging from bed!

It is possible, now that I am finally among the oughties, off the dialup and on the high speed wireless beaming e-net, I may update regularly and efficiently.
Or maybe I will just ride my bike.

Helmet Wars

Welp, the internet is a horror show of the irrelevant and seems to empower doing particularly embarrassing things to pets. Here is the latest.
(thanks to boing boing for all of these links)
Clicking on the picture will give you the original sources:




Wow. I previously linked to other pet insults here and here .

I don't even like pets all that much (except of course for mosca and elenas four cats that barely tolerate my presence, whom I all love unconditionally even when I may carry scars to my grave) and I would never be that insulting on purpose. I did gift my brothers sweet, insane, and dearly missed white boxer some dog bootiesso she could walk on the snow without hurting her sensitive feet. The results were unintentionally hilarious as she did some sort of doggie foot boogie shake as she tried to scrape them off her feet simultaneously. I am sure these things are great for some dogs, but I suspect they were almost completely useless for Shelly, the dog in question.

Movie Review
Hell on Wheels
Hollentour in the native german

A really nice documentary following the 2003 Tour de France in the form of hardluck T-mobile uber sprinter Eric Zabel and roomate, friend and domestique Rolf Aldag. The footage and interviews are well done. As it is not a blow by blow of the tour, the director, Pepe Danquart, can focus on the scenery and the superhuman feats and suffering that make the Tour the biggest spectacle in the world.

The movie is mostly in german, with at least some french, english, spanish and dutch playing a part. Polyhglots beware, as far as I could tell the english subtitles were permanent features. The less fluent among us probably will be thankful.

My only criticism is the bordering on unlistenable eurosynth music punctuating the movie. I think it is music like this, the bizarre matching tatoos that pro cyclist roomates seem to have and the love of the mullet (see Tom Boonen, Vladimir Karpets or the voluptious horror of Laurent Brochard below), that keeps cycling inaccessable to most of the american public.


Anyway...As with all good movies, it is really a love story between two men, either Zabel and Aldag, or maybe the soigner and Zabel, or the whole T-mobile team and their temporarily lost son Ulrich.

Cycling fans will remember the 2003 tour as the only time that Armstrong looked mortal since he beat cancer, punctuated by Botrero's horrific crash, Ulrichs return to form wearing celest instead of pink, Armstrong's comeback from a small crash and a super bonk, and the arrival of Vinokorov as a tour contender. This movie glosses over the main drama and really focuses on the story of these two "everymen" and their fears, goals and inability to win a stage.

While it it is not quite up to the level of A sunday in hell, the best cycling movie ever, it certainly is a gripping documentary that should interest the non-fan and perhaps encourage Lancipoo bandwagoneers to become more interested in cycling as a whole. Netflix and Amazon have it if your local video store does not.

Kitty litter makes me very very angry

Ok back to cats briefly. Here is a nice synopses of some recent research showing that cat shit controls every aspect of our lives!!! Triffids have nothing on them. I knew I never should have lived with cats. Crap crap crap crap crap, oh no, I said crap, now I am infected with rage!!!! I think I was thirty before I emptied a litter box. Lo, what a horrible stinky brain parasite inducing mistake that was.

At least we are not rats

Yuk!

Some small changes on the blog

I finally changed the template on the blog and added some links to some blogs I read. Bikes and baseball only thus far. Check em out. I don't think I am going to add hundreds of blog links, just the ones I read regularly. I highly recommend Kent Peterson's blog and his website, he is a good friend and hero of mine, no car forever, rides insane distances on single speed bikes and is a good writer and a nice guy to boot.

All the baseball links are more or less sabermetrically based. If you don't know what that means, try reading baseball musings regularly, if you really are interested great, if you do not care at all, Bronx Banter has some genuinely good writing,mostly on the yankees and W116th st is rarely about baseball anymore, but it was mostly baseball when I started reading it.

Other changes, I am going to see about making billions of dollars off my readers using microrevenue streams like amazon associates links and the like. Mostly I am going to test em out. If I link to a page on amazon, I get a small cut of any purchase you make from following that link, I am curious about how successful that is. I will usually only link when I give a review of a book or movie or something. I will let you know how much money I bring in off my 3 regular readers. I may try having small google ads or some such on my blog as well, I will see how they work too. If you hate the idea, let me know, but I am curious if I can offset my 99 buck a year website hosting fee somewhat by passively advertising on my blog. I am not looking to get rich, its just that, well, Tarik needs some Charlie Poole I am pretty sure amazon pays you in amazon scrip, but there are worse things to sell your soul to the company store for.

Lemmie know what you think.

A return to normalcy

The knee is better, some snow is falling from the sky and I have been on my bike 4 times this week. Two MTB rides and two commutey efforts.

As I type this at some ungodly insomniacs hour I hear the telltale scraping of the plows for the first time this winter. A very good sign as there has been no appreciable precipitation since thanksgiving. The higher peaks here in los alamos got a bit more of a dusting, so maybe there will be a cold base for future storms to save the skiing. Last year at this time there was probably a 4 foot base on the mountain, and XC skiing lasted from early december to mid-april. I don't think there has been more than an inch or so on the hill this year at any one time.

In mosca news; I visited her and her keepers this week. She seems to be doing well, if a bit cranky. She swiped at me twice as I grabbed her tail, playfully I thought, but alas, she puts up with very little when she no longer depends on you for food.

Mosca did put a scare into me on christmas eve by having a fairly impressive seisure mere hours before the rightful owners returned home, but she soldiered on apparently no worse for the wear and is back in the caring hands of Susan and Paul.

Mosca showing her amazing ability to appear as an orange square when placed on an orange grid:

knee hurt

More explanations needed, please. Somehow, without running, biking or other significant exercise for more than two weeks, I hurt my knee good. Some sort of pateller meniscus IT band syndrome hurty deal. How is this possible? I was looking forward to resuming some hefty bike commuting upon my triumphant return to living in los alamos, especially as winter seems to have skipped the high NM country this year, but I seem to have pulled my kneebone while sleeping or watching a movie or something. Walking is OK, stairs and biking is not so OK. It is getting better after 4 days, but still not so fun. Maybe going to california and eating meat repeatedly had something to do with it? Between delicious roasts, bacon, lot of burgers, meat chili and other delicious byproducts, I probably ate more meat in 10 days in california than i had in the previous two months. Maybe a return to the pinkwaterian theory of, "Don't eat meat, its bad for your feet!" or knees or whatever.

Anyhoo, I either did it carrying bags in the airport wearing birkenstocks, or perhaps trying to do a set of 10 half squats. Feh. Bah. Phhtt. Core strengthening comes back to haunt me again.

In honor of Mosca, slayer of hummingbirds, eater of hummingbird heads,
here is a nice picture of a hummingbird I took at the getty museum

Click for big.

Long time no post

Yep, I have moved on from the mosca house and then took a bit of a holiday in southern california. I plan on shifting the blog slightly from mosca-centric to more bikey, outdoorsy and other catsy. So hopefully this will make the blog a bit more broadly interesting at the risk of offending the die hard moscalites. I promise to add photos of mosca as often as I visit her.

Happy new year, photos from the trip are imminent.