When you're hot, you're hot

I received this from Turtle a while back. Since she's not using it, I will.

YOU KNOW YOU ARE IN TEXAS IN SUMMER [May - October] WHEN...

• The birds have to use potholders to pull worms out of the ground.
• The trees are whistling for the dogs.
• The best parking place is determined by shade instead of distance.
• Hot water now comes out of both taps.
• You can make sun tea instantly.
• You learn that a seat belt buckle makes a pretty good branding iron!
• The temperature drops below 95 and you feel a little chilly.
• You discover that in July it only takes 2 fingers to steer your car.
• You discover that you can get sunburned through your car window.
• You actually burn your hand opening the car door.
• You break into a sweat the instant you step outside at 7:30 a.m.
• Your biggest bicycle wreck fear is, "What if I get knocked out and end up lying on the pavement and cook to death?"
• You realize that asphalt has a liquid state.
• The potatoes cook underground, so all you have to do is pull one out and add butter, salt and pepper.
• Farmers are feeding their chickens crushed ice to keep them from laying boiled eggs.
• The cows are giving evaporated milk.

Ah, what a place to call home. God Bless the State of TEXAS!!

Turtle adds...

• You take out an equity loan to pay the AC bill.

The karmic bog roll

During yesterday's afternoon commute, I noticed in my rearview mirror a black Murano making multiple aggressive lane changes, and I prepared myself. Ommmmmm, I thought, imagining myself on my back patio, wearing shorts and sandals, drinking a cold Shiner Bock.

Sure enough, it came my turn, and as the Murano elbowed past to cut me off and brake hard to avoid hitting the car that was ahead of me, I noted with some smugness that the driver was as I had predicted: a crisply dressed Joe Cool with a flashy watch and a cell phone grafted to his left wrist.

Ommmm... The beer in my mind's eye mouth was cold and refreshing, and I wriggled my imaginary toes, noting that the nails needed trimming again.

And then I saw it: stuck to the rear suspension of Joe Cool's Murano was a plastic shopping bag, flapping in the breeze like a length of toilet tissue trailing from a Bruno Magli dress loafer. Karmic balance was restored, and I laughed out loud, quite happy to trade a few feet of pavement for a tasty helping of irony.

Random misfire

I was out riding my Corsa (a.k.a., "the rolling lounge chair") after work, when I rounded a bend to see half a dozen barely-teen boys making their way down the center of the street. Two were walking; the other four were on two BMX bikes. One of them must have heard the buzz of my rear hub and turned to look.

"[incestuous offspring]!" he yelled to his buddies. "Look at this [canine son]!"

I blushingly admit that I cut quite a dashing figure in my black lycra shorts, Canari-yellow sleeveless jersey, and red headband flapping Rambo-esque from beneath the back of my helmet, but I'm reasonably convinced he was reacting to the bike.

"Catch up with him!" one of the boys yelled, and I could see in my helmet mirror that one of the bike riders had stood up and was pedaling like mad.

Rotsa ruck. I was doing 15 mph when I passed them and 20 by the time I heard one of them (faintly) yell "Holy [excrement]! Look at 'im go!"

Don't mess with the bull, young man. You'll get the horns.*


* Fairly blatant toilet-paper-on-a-shoe reference. Anyone?

Mental housecleaning

• Why do we say we're "losing our temper" when what we've actually lost is our patience. I typically know exactly where my temper is, and (to my chagrin) it's far too often on public display.
• Why is it that, when it comes to crossing a speed bump or pulling in to a parking garage, some of the prissiest people are the drivers of SUVs and pickup trucks? They creep over these smallish obstacles as if picking their way through a mine field. Ironically, the guys driving those ground-hugging riced-out street racers blast over the same obstacles without a second thought.
• I'm apparently heading into another of my spells where I can't get a decent night's sleep. Last night, I became desperate enough that I actually gave that beach visualization relaxation exercise another try. I managed not to step on any jellyfish or food packaging waste, and things were going along all right until I looked out to sea for the glowing orb.
  
  Fortunately, I spotted the tsunami in time to get to safer ground.
  
• A little something I swiped from The Gobhole Girl:

  Ten Top Trivia Tips about FooRider!

  1. FooRider will often rub up against people to lay his scent and mark his territory. It's a fair cop, but society's to blame.
     
  2. Banging your head against FooRider uses 150 calories an hour. But I wouldn't recommend it.
     
  3. FooRider cannot be detected by infrared cameras! 'Cause I'm such a cool guy.
     
  4. The most dangerous form of FooRider is the bicycle. I'm especially treacherous on wet pavement.
     
  5. In 1982 Time Magazine named FooRider its 'Man of the Year'. Only because everyone else was glued to the sofa watching MTV.
     
  6. If a snake is born with two heads, the heads will fight over who gets FooRider. This is not common occurrence, fortunately.
     
  7. FooRider can't sweat. Untrue. Ask my wife (or anyone who's ever drafted off me).
     
  8. The military salute is a motion that evolved from medieval times, when knights in armour raised their visors to reveal FooRider. It's actually more likely they were keeping an eye out for seagulls.
     
  9. Three seagulls flying overhead are a warning that FooRider is near! Seagulls... buzzards. Tomayto... tomahto.
     
  10. FooRider has only one weakness - the colour yellow! LiveStrong!
      

  I am interested in - do tell me aboutherhimitthem
• For a month now, we've been under watering restrictions due to the severe drought that's planted itself on Texas like a sumo wrestler's butt on a cafeteria chair. Which is to say "widespread and immovable".
  
  Once a week, on trash day, we're allowed to run our sprinklers for just long enough to keep our sickly yellowish-green lawns from spontaneously bursting into flame; and yet most mornings when I head out at the crack of dawn to embark upon my morning commute, the guy across the street has his system going full blast. The only theory I've been able to come up with to explain why the city hasn't come around and put a lock on his water meter is that he must have incriminating photographs of someone important at the North Texas Municipal Water District rubbing... elbows with Paris "The Ubiquitous Bimbo" Hilton.
  
  Or something.
  

Freitag

Auto-tagged by Tink:

Here are the instructions:
1. Choose a search engine (e.g. Google).
2. Pick 5 random blogfriends.
3. Think of a word or phrase that describes each friend (or use their blog name).
4. Do an image search of that word or phrase.

(I was feeling guilty about bandwidth theft, so I've only linked to the images, instead of embedding them on this page.)

Turtle (blog)

Tink (blog)

Susie (blog)

Gwynne (blog)

Eric (blog)

Wellness training

I attended a brown bag lunch thingy about stress management and personal wellness at work today. My hope was that there would be something in the program about how to cope with the annoyances that come from working in cubicles, but that sort of useful material was studiously avoided. Instead, there was a lot of perfectly good information about how to manage deadlines, how to let it go when someone is too preoccupied to say "good morning", etc.

Pointers that would be useful in a work environment that's not as dysfunctional and organizationally abstract as ours is.

As a parting gift, the speaker turned on a white noise machine that made sounds like ocean surf and sea birds. She told us to close our eyes and then led us through a visualization exercise in which we were walking down the beach in our bare feet, alone, completely at peace.

So there I was, walking down the beach, watching the waves—and I stepped on a stranded jellyfish. I muttered a curse, hopping around while rubbing my foot and trying to remember if dead washed-up jellyfish can sting, before losing my balance and falling face first in the sand.

"Now sit down in the sand. Wiggle your toes..."

Spitting salty grit, I sat up and started rooting my feet around in the sand. I promptly cut the ball of my foot on a half-buried Pringles top.

"...and look out across the water to the horizon. You see a warm glimmer of light, and as you watch it comes closer, closer... but you're not afraid."

What the...

"The glowing orb approaches you, and as it hovers over your ankles, you feel warmth."

Probably the blood spurting from my foot.

"Slowly, the orb makes its way up your legs toward—"

Whoa. Hold up, there. This was starting to sound just a little too much like some weird-ass Philip José Farmer novel.

That's when my visualization took a detour. I walked off the beach to my car, unloaded my bike, and rode away—leaving my stress, a dead jellyfish, and a bloody Pringles top behind.

Pop quiz

Since people insist on testing my patience, I didn't want to be left out. Or bored.

You Are 52% Cynical

Yes, you are cynical, but more than anything, you're a realist. You see what's screwed up in the world, but you also take time to remember what's right.

How Cynical Are You?

You Are 24% Sociopath

From time to time, you may be a bit troubled and a bit too charming for your own good. It's likely that you're not a sociopath... just quite smart and a bit out of the mainstream!

Are You A Sociopath?

Arms race

This year, for the first time, I've been following the Race Across America (RAAM)—a 3000-mile ultra-endurance bicycle race that starts in Oceanside, California, and ends in Atlantic City, New Jersey. I won't go into how that works, but if you're interested in some details, go check out RAAM 101.

So why the sudden interest? Well, at first it was because I caught wind that Jim Kern would be making his first solo attempt (as in "3000 miles, one set of legs, and nearly no sleep") on a Bacchetta recumbent bike. Things got more interesting when I learned that there was also a two-man recumbent team (Volae Wolf Pack), that a couple people from the BikeJournal.com forums would be riding on the Cyclonauts four-man team, and that a woman I know from the local cycling club would be riding as part of the JDRF four-person tandem team.

What I didn't expect was that I'd find myself rooting for the RC-Enjo Vorarlberg six-man handcycle team from Austria. At first, the notion of cranking a handcycle not much different than Turtle's through the desert, through the mountains, through the howling prairie winds—all day and all night—was quite enough to impress the hell out of me.

It wasn't enough for the RCV team, though. While Jim Kern succumbed to pulmonary edema and had to withdraw, while the Cyclonauts struggled with bad luck and mechanical problems, and while Team JDRF and the Wolf Pack fought to keep up, the Austrian handcycle team continued to crank right along. According to the official statistics, they have maintained an average of 12.77, as of their check-in to time station 44, in Circleville, OH.

Using just their arms.

Just think about that for a moment. Most of us have to sit down and rest if we have to pull the starter cord on our lawnmowers more than a few times.

Ride Report: Tour d'Italia (Italy, TX)

For a couple years, I've been hearing that Lone Star Cyclists' annual Tour d'Italia is one of the best-organized, most fun rides around, so Turtle and I were really looking forward to a day of small-town charm and scenery. Unfortunately, after 39 straight days without a drop of rain, the weather forecast for the day of the rally called for 60% chance of strong thunderstorms for the entire weekend. Turtle decided that although she wouldn't melt in the rain, she didn't want to risk the possibility of having to drive home in a downpour with our bikes exposed to the wind and rain.

So we went to plan B. Turtle would give this one a miss, and I would go ahead and give it a shot—but only if I could somehow manage to fit my bike inside my car.

After some experimentation, I discovered that, by removing the seat from my bike and sliding the passenger seat of my Civic foward a bit, I was able to fit the Corsa and all my crap in like a jigsaw puzzle and it would be protected from the elements.

On the way to Italy, the sky began to brighten. The sun peeked out from behind the clouds a couple times, and I thought of how disappointed Turtle would be if the weather turned out to be crying wolf (as it likes to do, in Texas) and she missed a sunny ride. But not to worry, because by the time I arrived at the high school for the start of the ride, it was sullen storm clouds as far as the eye could see.

But still no rain.

I was running late, so I ended up having to park a couple hundred yards from the registration area. By the time I'd walked there from my car, walked back to my car, assembled my bike, rode to the start, remembered that I'd forgotten to pin my bib number on my seat back, rode back to the car, rode back to the start—well, I didn't get to start with the main group.

And it had started to spit, but not much.

I headed out onto the route all by myself and decided that since I wasn't really going to be part of the group, I might as well hammer. Which, of course, meant that I caught up with all the really slow riders who had left a bit earlier. The promotional materials for Tour d'Italia claimed that all the routes but the 62-miler were flat, except for one good climb. Judging from the number of people I saw littering the rolling hills along the route, I wasn't the only one whose idea of "flat" differed from that of the ride organizers. Oh, there was nothing really vicious, but I was having a tough time keeping any momentum because of all the people who couldn't go on and simply stepped off their bikes to stand in the middle of the road while they sipped water and caught their breath.

I've never seen anything like it, especially in light of the fact that the route was out and back. There were riders coming the opposite direction, as well, with motorists driving down the middle of the road to avoid the idiot cyclists who refuse to keep to the side. I just want to scream at these people, because not only are they taking their own lives in their hands, but they're creating a lasting impression (read: "resentment") in the minds of drivers who will subsequently try to crush me under their wheels, despite every attempt I might personally make to follow the laws and be considerate of my fellow vehicles.

But I digress.

By a couple miles out, it had started to rain lightly, but I pressed on. By five miles, it was raining harder, and the pavement had changed from rough blacktop to worn, smooth blacktop that was collecting water into nice little puddles. By seven miles, riders coming from the opposite direction were urging everyone to turn around. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what they were saying. Some of it was lost in the rumbling of thunder.

I turned around and hammered back the way I'd come, sometimes as briskly as 32 mph down the rollers. In fact, I hammered right out from under the rain and on to dry pavement. I wavered but held to my decision all the way back to the car, where I disassembled my bike and had just placed the last piece of the packing puzzle when the sky opened up and poured cats and dogs and buckets of frogs.

15 miles with a 15.3 mph rolling average, and I didn't even get far enough into the ride to be able to tell you how the rest stops were. As I drove home in the rain, I took some comfort in the thought that my lawn would be getting a good watering, but as fate would have it, none of the storms ever made it as far north as our place.

Ah well. At least the T-shirts are kind of cool.

Ride Report: Collin Classic (McKinney, TX)

After last year's ride and the long stretches of large-aggregate chip seal I had to endure, I seriously considered giving this year's Collin Classic a miss. In fact, I had some serious doubt that it would survive the well-published complaints from participants, in the wake of last year's event. Not enough food and drink variety at the rest stops, some said. Others were enraged that they didn't get a t-shirt, despite the organizer's clear statement that only the first 1500 to sign up would be guaranteed shirts. Too hot. Too many hills.

Bleat. Whimper. Moan. We cyclists have become really spoiled—but that's another topic.

The point is that the organizer, instead of wasting energy getting defensive, really put in a lot of work addressing all concerns, whether reasonable or not. It showed, and I think it's safe to say that the Collin Classic has reclaimed its place as one of the premier rides in the area.

My ride

Turtle was signed up for the 22-mile route, and since I serve as her "pit crew" when she does a ride, I was still futzing around, waiting while she made her final preparations. But not to worry. One of the improvements for this year's rally was the more organized staging for the start. I was doing the 55-mile route, but because I didn't want to mass start on the recumbent amid tightly-packed upright bikes, I made my way to the rear of the 75-mile staging and went off with that group.

Picking my way through the pack. I get some strange looks on this thing. (photo courtesy of bicycle-stuff.com)

The first few miles were slow-paced, because we'd be warned there would be a number of turns. Traffic control was excellent, so even with the turns the pack started to space out pretty quickly. My only issue with this was that I kept getting hung up behind slower DF riders so that when we got into some rollers, I couldn't carry any momentum and had to work harder climbing.

I skipped the first rest stop, which came at about 8 miles (and made for a longish wait for the second one). With some much-needed breathing room, I was able to pick up the pace a bit and was soon rolling along at about 20mph. Before long, I caught up with a couple recumbent riders. Not long after that, we picked up a fourth, and we rode together in a little pack, chatting and getting a kick out of the DF riders' comments. The pack fell apart when we were climbing a steep hill, and a rider in front of me threw his chain. He panic stopped, which forced me to panic stop without time to downshift to my granny ring, which meant I had no chance of getting started again on the hill. So I walked it. Meanwhile, one of the other 'bent riders—a diabetic—took the opportunity stop and check his blood sugar. I didn't see any of them again until much farther down the road.

Once I got going again, I just rode my ride, looking around at the scenery, and trying to find a good compromise between passing as many DF riders on the hills as I could and saving my strength by keeping my average heart rate low. I ended up with an average of 84% maxHR and a maximum of 91% maxHR, but considering the heat (which indexed at 105 °F) and the amount of climbing I did, that seems pretty good.

It's certainly better than last year, when the heat nearly destroyed me and I dragged across the finish in my granny ring behind some 300-pounder on a mountain bike.

I didn't eat along the way, wanting the 2350 calories I burned to count toward the 10 pounds I've been trying (and failing) to lose since I started road cycling a year and a half ago. I did stop briefly at each stop after the first for a couple cups of PowerAde and some ice chips, which I loaded into my helmet vents to help keep my head cool.

You know what they say: "Cooler heads prevail."

And so it went. I had a great, challenging ride topped off at the finish with some bottled water and some soft tacos from Chipotle. The Corsa was a joy to ride out on the flats, and even with the climbing, I finished with a 16.6mph rolling average. That's close on the pace I've ridden hot, hilly routes in the past; however, while I don't feel like I left much out on the course, it didn't kick my butt and leave me wrecked for a couple days, as others have.

Yesterday was a good day.

Evil as an art form

My grandfather, when he was alive, was an avid observer of world events. He'd sit in his recliner, smoking a cigar, grunting or harrumphing occasionally, and take it all in.

The rule was that no one was allowed to talk to him during the evening news, except during commercials. Eventually, Wheel of Fortune would come on, and Grandpa would reach down to the side of his chair and flip the lever to drop the foot rest with a loud thunk. He'd then lean forward with his hands on his knees, sigh deeply and shake his head.

"I don't know what the world's coming to," he'd say, summing up all that he'd seen.

Maybe it's just a normal part of growing older, but I increasingly find this phrase running through my head when I look at the things going on around me. There are times, like this morning, when I even say it out loud.

I was reading today's offerings from Reuters, and this one caught me like a drop kick under the ribs:

April belongs to serial sex killer John Wayne Gacy, convicted of killing 33 young men and boys, while May is for Jeffrey Dahmer, who ate 17 men. June features Satanic worshiper and murderer Richard Ramirez.

The grisly 2007 Serial Killer Calendar produced by a Maine businessman depicts some of the world's most notorious murderers painted by "the vampire of Paris," Frenchman Nico Claux who himself served 7 years for murder.

Purple Inc., the Bangor, Maine-based company that produced and distributes the calendar in specialty retailers and the Internet, said initial response has been so strong that the company is planning a sequel and a line of posters.

"A lot of people are titillated by serial killers," said Lana Wachniak, a sociology professor and associate dean of Kennesaw State University in Georgia.

Link (Reuters)

"A lot of people are titillated by serial killers."

Now there's a thought to keep you awake at night and never ever let your children (or pets) out of your sight.

Look. I'm not as devout as I would like, don't read the Bible like I should, and am in general a very flawed creation. I admit it. But isn't this "titillation" just the sort of thing that's meant by "glamor of evil" when we renew our baptismal vows?

Do you reject the glamor of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin?

Yes... and just to get off on the right foot, not only will I not be purchasing a serial killer calendar, but I won't even post a link to the company's web site. Frankly, I don't want my blog showing up in their referrer list.

The case is frequently made that each generation looks at the one succeeding it, shakes its collective head, and concludes that the world is going to hell in a handbasket—and that this is normal. Elvis (anagram: "evils". Hmm.) was evil in the eyes of my grandparents. KISS were evil in the eyes of my parents. Marilyn Manson is... well, he's certainly a sick little puppy. Just a matter of perspective.

But is it? Is it really? Bring me the 19^th century script for a musical comedy about the life and times of Jack the Ripper, and maybe I'll concede the point.

For now, though, it really feels to me like the "glamor of evil" is alive, well, and gaining ground.

Random Thursday

My well of inspiration seems to be suffering a drought of its own, so borrowing the Random Thursday concept from Eric, I offer the following misfires:

• I was listening to the radio on my way to work this morning, and the host was discussing one of Google's little in jokes with the news guy. You know: type in "failure", click "I'm feeling lucky", and up pops Dubya's bio at www.whitehouse.gov.
  
  I find this sort of joke a bit tiresome, but more because this sort of thing is just so 20^th century than because of an unswerving allegiance to President Bush.
  
  What I did find interesting was the news guy's observation about Bush's bio page. At the bottom, there's a link to the same bio En Español. Not Vietnamese, not French, and not whatever it is that the friendly guy at the corner 7-11 speaks. "Why just Spanish?", he wondered.
  
  "Because," I said to no one in particular, "the Vietnamese, Koreans, Pakistanis... all those folks bust their butts to learn English from pretty much the first moment after they step off the [metaphorical] boat."


• This month's search terms:
  
  c++ program for parking garage Technology is not a toy. Our parking garage doesn't have anything fancier than a card reader for opening the gate, and the blasted thing only works half the time. Adding computer logic to the mix could only end in sorrow.
  
  it's five o clock and just to keep our jobs, gotta find my way to the whistle , sounds of the morning, in my brain, while another day goes down the drain, Could you be more specific?
  
  finger goat colon coworker Could you be less specific? Or just go away?


• This morning, as I was heading out the door, Turtle warned me that she'd heard on the radio that there was a big wreck on the northbound side of my primary route to work. I thanked her for the information and promptly dragged it to my mental Recycle Bin (for you Mac users, that's the file deletion limbo where Windows accumulates all the deleted files for a second deletion when you're really, really, really sure you don't need it any more), because I was headed south.
  
  And yet, as I approached the location where the accident was reported to be, my progress was blocked by four entire lanes of bumper-to-bumper morons who, at the first sign of flashing lights, had slowed to a crawl in the perverse hope that they might catch a glimpse of someone's brains and teeth scattered across the road on the other side of the concrete barrier.
  
  Call me detached, but I figure that unless I'm in a position to help, the victims' situation is significantly less my business than getting to work is. If you want gore, go rent Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In the meantime, eyes forward and full speed ahead.

Pachyderm in the pipes?

That's what we residents of Lower Cubeville have been treated to since about Thursday of last week, when the ductwork above us began thumping (all. day. long.) like it had something large and claustrophobic in it. Something that wanted out.

Or maybe tennis shoes in a dryer.

Starting yesterday, the maintenance guys began gathering. Walkie-talkies blaring unintelligibly, tool belts and trousers riding low (too low), they held a colloquium on the matter.

"SURE IS MAKIN' A RACKET," one shouted over the radio/badge of honor on his hip.

"YEP," another clarified.

"I THINK I KNOW WHAT IT IS," said a third, "BUT Y'ALL WON'T LIKE IT."

"WHAT?" asked the second.

"I SAID 'I THINK I KNOW WHA—'"

"NO," interrupted the third. "I MEAN 'WHAT IS IT?'"

"OH!"

...

"SO WHAT IS IT?"

"WELL," said the third, "I THINK THERE'S SOMETHIN' THUMPIN' IN THE DUCTWORK."

That was yesterday. Today, I feel like Bill Murray's character in Groundhog Day.

These caricatures characters must be paid by the hour. I'm pretty sure if I had a stepladder and a length of 2x4, I could have propped the section of duct that's flexing by now.

And there would be peace in Lower Cubeville.

I hear dead people

The Mona Lisa's smile may always remain a mystery, but it is now possible to hear what her voice would have sounded like, thanks to a Japanese acoustics expert.

Dr Matsumi Suzuki, who generally uses his skills to help with criminal investigations, measured the face and hands of Leonardo da Vinci's famous 16th century portrait to estimate her height and create a model of her skull.

"Once we have that, we can create a voice very similar to that of the person concerned," Suzuki told Reuters in an interview at his Tokyo office last week. "We have recreated the voices of a lot of famous people that were very close to the real thing and have been used in film dubbing."

Link (Reuters)

I'll admit to being a bit skeptical about how well this actually works, but it appeals to the same part of me that is alternately skeptical toward and fascinated by the various technologies depicted on TV shows like Bones and the 31 flavors of CSI.

It appeals to the part of me that wonders, while reading Mark Twain, what extra dimension his true voice might have added to his wit. When I read the Lincoln's Gettysburg address, I wonder... did he have a deep, authoritative voice like I always imagine? Or did he sound like Wally Cox?

Obviously, Suzuki would be unable to ascertain from bone structure such things the subject's regional accent, whether he whistled through his teeth when he pronounced the letter 's', and if she had an annoying nervous giggle; but it sure would be interesting to see if analysis of the cartoon version of The Tick pointed to Patrick Warburton.

Rolling along, singing a song

It's not called Singer-poor for nothing...

Out of Singapore's 20,000 taxis on the road, Jeffrey Tan's is arguably the most memorable.

Having put a hi-tech karaoke machine in his cab, customers are all together too happy to keep the metre running on their journeys with Tan.

Link (video)

Now that's what I'm talkin' about! We had some darned fine drivers during our cruise, but if this guy had been around instead of Moms Mabley the voodoo priestess, I'd have flagged him down quicker than you could say, "Hi... I'm Johnny Cash."