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.

A good week for science

Ok, UC and partners won the lab contract. Given the constraints, this was the best possible outcome. This is not an overwhelming victory for science, but it is much better than the alternative. The lab will change for sure, for science in america's sake, I hope it is a good change.

Also the Monkeys won in the second monkey trial in Pennsylvania. Yeah monkeys. Almost as good as cows, really, maybe better, as monkeys can help the disabled, and cows, to my knowledge, can not, at least not until someone elects me as god.

Unfortunately this issue will not die anytime soon as Americans as a whole have no concept of the dangers of creeping fundamentalism. Hopefully this will keep religion out of science classes, but I am not confident non-monkey derived people will stop until they have neutered the curiousity of american children.

A sad note, this ruling also kills the case for introducing the the flying spaghetti monster into classrooms. If the non-monkey derived people won, I was really hoping that the FSM would also win and be forced to be taught alongside whatever the hell non-monkey derived people think science is.

Ok, enough of that lest I become a drooling reactionary, more bike and cat minutia promised in the months ahead, including new cats, with more than 5 fingers per paw even!

Changes
Check your National news, or the santa fe papers, at noon today (12/21) I find out come mid 2006, if I work for the MAN or the dirty hippies...

The fact that the UC regents could be considered the hippies is emblematic of larger problems in this country. Still, here is hoping for Hate man to ocassionally yell in the ear of my future bosses.

Una Pregunta


Why, when buying 6 dollar bottles of Austrailian Shirazy wine, do they come with real corks, when I have bought two 15+ dollar shirazes (which were worth it) with screw tops...

Bike Bike Cat

Here is a pic of the nice snowcapped mtns yesterday. My bike is leaning against a dead pinon tree which makes up about a quarter of the trees. The rest are junipers.



The velodrome is not all that funded yet, but the BMX track is. See here. Still on target for my bike plan of leaving work at noon, hitting the bmx track for a few laps as warm up, then hitting the velodrome for the evening races and then scurrying over to the minor league ball park for post race baseball, hotdogs and beers.


And lastly here is mosca drinking away happily:

Done Bike Rid

I did a real bike ride today. Not a commute to lunch, but the kind where you get on your bike and ride off road and crash because the trail is loose because you are running 28mm tires and your brake levers point down afterwards and then your wrist hurts a bit, but you keep riding and explore 1 new trail and 1 new road and you are sore as crap as you have not ridden in 2 weeks (even counting the lunch commutes), but otherwise you are still feeling endorphins 10 hours later. It was 35 degrees and windy at noon, but it may have been 40 plus when I left a few hours later. So it was a great ride, especially when the cold wind died. Woooooo!

After you pass the peacock flock and the goats and the first wash, yet before you get to the apple ranch and the second wash, the road looks about as good as it can get:




But then it gets better as you get to the single track. Last I rode it, it was buffed and hard and smooth as can be due to it being the end of the rainy season. This time it was a quite a bit loose as it has been really dry and the trail sees a fair bit of bike, run, walk and pooping equestrian use. Say what you want about MTB being winged locust etc., at least we do not SHIT in the middle of the trail. How is this OK trail etiquette wise? Huh? Get your act together horsey people. No one likes seing big heaping turds in the MIDDLE of the trail. Also, stop riding your horses on steep loose stuff, you WRECK the trail far more than any cyclist could ever do. Sheesh. Even the cows are not that bad and they shit on the side of the trails, and do not voluntarily go up or down insanely steep stuff. Cows, yes! horses, no! Plus your horses are stupider than cows. I don't care how pretty you think they are. I hope that the next horse person I see on the trail is a huge rancher with a big black cowboy hat who speaks spanish better than english, cause if I see a 12 year girl with curly blond hair and braces riding her show pony, shitting on the trail, and riding down the steep pitches turning the twisty single track into a landslide, I may loose it.

Uh, anyway, what was I getting at? Oh yes. The trail. I think this is nice beat in cow track on BLM land, so it is square profile singletrack on sandstone, a bit sketchy on the fixie when you get close to the edge, but pretty damn good:



Click on the above for big pics, they are quite nice I think.

Somehow I missed getting the snowcapped mountains with a hard snow line at 10K feet or so. Pretty nice backdrop to some riding.

That is a barbie head on the handlebars. She was rescued from the Truck Route in Los Alamos last summer. She used to have a road find flowered barrette keeping her hair managable, but, alas, it fell off during a time trial in august, so now I am hoping she grows dreads:



i think that is it.
Remember, up with cows!

Cold continues

I think the final tally on yesterday was high of 22 low of 5 or some such nastiness. Sure it is no Colorado, but the rio grande was frozen this AM. This is a pretty good sized rio grande, not the wimpy over-extended-by-irrigation rio grande that trickles through albuquerque. Pretty cool. I will try to get some pics tomorrow if it is still froze.

Here is the nice roof insulation, like snow, but not:


compare to the old looking roof here:

Cold as a Cold Thing

No entries for a while. The family descended for thanksgiving, it was cold and it actually snowed briefly. Just enough to make everything looklike it had been powdered with sugar. Thanksgiving was great and went smoothly. Then, it got a bit colder, and then this week it got very cold. High of 30 or so, low of 10 or 7 or 12, or something cold. Mosca and I are curled up on a warm spot on the floor trying to avoid freezing to death.

The roof is covered with a thick layer of insulation now, which is great. The house seems noticably warmer, except that it is 10 degrees out in the AM and everything is cold and ice is falling from the sky. Rather than letting cold air in, all the windows suck heat from you when you pass by, much like you get a chill when you pass the physical embodiment of pure evil. Best solution is lying in the middle of the floor where the warm spots are and not moving. Cats are very useful for showing you where these spots are, as that is where they lie. I feel a bit guilty pushing mosca to the cold part of the room so i can lie on the warm bricks, but she is covered in fur and I am not, or at least mostly not. The very fact that I am the people and she is the cat should be justification enough, as the cat should be used to such injustices, what with their insulting lack of opposable thumbs and inability to open the fridge and the like.

Must get back to the floor again.

In bike news, I have not touched mine, any of em, in over a week and they may actually for real build a velodrome in Albuquerque, this time with some vague promises of the Philly USPRO Championship abandoning Wachovia Bank pouring enough money in to create a world cup worthy indoor velodrome. I will believe it when I see it, but this would be an amazing boon for track racing in the US. As ABQ is at 5500 feet or so, there might actually be a flood of hour record seeking tiny skinny men descending on NM.

Pics soon.