I know you are, but what am I?

Hot and sweaty, still wearing my cycling clothes after yesterday's 50-mile ride out to the airport and back, I stopped by Schlotsky's to pick up a couple sandwiches for Turtle's and my lunch.

The kid behind the register asked, "To go?"

I chuckled. "Yeah. I wouldn't want to stink out your other customers."

"That's not what I meant," he said. "I just figured you didn't look like you'd be staying here and eating both of those sandwiches."

"Nicely done!" I said, impressed by his insight. "You're gonna do well."

While I was waiting by the pickup window for my order, I "overheard" a young woman at a nearby table talking to her male companion loudly enough for me to be sure I was meant to hear.

"Look at that guy. He looks ridiculous. I'll bet he's gay."

I ignored her. I mean, let's be realistic: grown men in lycra do look kind of silly and, yes... maybe even... effeminate.

"I mean, I'm sure he's a nice guy and all, but how gay does that look."

Oh goody. At least I was getting the benefit of doubt. I still pretended not to hear.

As the two of them got up to leave, they walked right past me. He was a dull-looking 20-something in a "wife beater" undershirt and baggy jeans. She was about the same age, wearing pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. She was substantially overweight and plodded when she walked.

"So gay lookin'," she muttered under her breath as she passed.

I didn't ignore it this time. I said, mildly, "Look, I know I'm supposed to feel hurt or angry or something, but here's the thing: I'm just too caught up in the irony of it all."

Her response was to laugh disdainfully and waddle off.

I'm pretty sure she had no idea what I'd just said to her.

Taking the bad with the good

On the one hand, we have the disappointing news that 2006 Tour de France winner Floyd Landis is being investigated by UCI, the international governing body for cycling:

LONDON — Tour de France champion Floyd Landis tested positive for high levels of testosterone during the race, his Phonak team said Thursday on its Web site.

The statement came a day after the UCI, cycling's world governing body, said an unidentified rider had failed a drug test during the Tour.

Link (Austin American-Statesman)

The allegations haven't been proven, at this point, but I can't tell you how much this bums me out. Here, I finally thought I'd seen a clean race from a clean rider, and now this. It's... disorienting.

Meanwhile, another rider who's had his share of grief from UCI is also in the news:

Newton, Ia. - Lance Armstrong will dip his famous bicycle tires on both sides of Iowa next year, he pledged to an ecstatic RAGBRAI crowd of thousands Wednesday night.

"So this is RAGBRAI. I wasted all those Julys in France," Armstrong began, humoring the throngs of riders, residents and fans.

"This is my commitment," he said. "Next year, my rear tire is starting in the west and my front tire's ending on the east."

Link (DeMoines Register)

Very cool.

This your brain on Popeye's spicy chicken

More precisely, this is my brain on leftovers: Popeye's spicy chicken, green beans, baked beans, a hard biscuit, and an Oreo (which, in some parts of the world, is also a biscuit). Turtle, at least, attributes last night's dream—an unlikely mishmash of plot elements seemingly stolen from The Core, Get Smart, and Pee Wee's Big Adventure—to the choices I made when I prepared my own dinner last evening.

It all started when two men showed up on the stoop of my Miami-style bungalow. They were wearing suits the same greenish-yellow color that was all the rage at The Limited stores in the mid-'80s, which I think was called "mustard". Under their jackets, they wore t-shirts printed to look like a tie and vest.

They looked like live-action versions of Bert and Ernie, from Sesame Street.

"You have to come with us," Bert said. "Your house is the epicenter."

I glanced down and saw that both men were wearing red leather clogs. This rendered me momentarily incapable of speech, but I took a moment and finally found an appropriate response.

"Huh?"

"Come on," Ernie said, placing an arm around my waist and nudging me toward a battered tow truck that looked like it had been on its last legs since the early '60s. "You don't want to be here when it comes."

"'It'?" I muttered, reluctantly allowing myself to be led to the truck. "What 'it'?"

Ernie smiled the sort of reassuring smile usually reserved for small children and the very senile. "Everything's going to be all right," he said. "Everything's just fine."

"The hell it is," Bert said. "There's a space-time rift [insert dream-ish technical mumbo jumbo here] alignment that's going to cause a softball-sized tunnel all the way through the planet, and it's going to come out through your kitchen."

Ernie rolled his eyes and scowled at Bert, irritated. "You know he's not cleared for that information yet."

"Look, just shut up and get in the truck," Ernie said, not unkindly.

[At this point, some of you may be wondering where Turtle was while all this was going on. She wasn't in the dream, which suggests to me that she has a better agent than I do.]

The next thing I knew, we'd arrived at a checkpoint that looked just like the turnstiled entry gates at Disney World.

"Here you are," Ernie said. "ESCIA headquarters."

"What's ESCIA?" I asked.

"'Extra Secret Central Intelligence Agency'," Ernie said.

"Wait... if it's so extra secret, then why's there a big sign over the entry that says 'ESCIA'?"

"Shaddap," Bert said and slapped me across the back of the head. "Just go."

"Aren't you guys coming?"

"Nope," Ernie said. He pointed to a torpedo dangling from the tow truck's hook. "We have to get that over to research ASAP."

"It's a torpedo," I said.*

"Dang, this guy's good," Ernie said, poking Bert. "Poke, poke, poke."

I walked over to the turnstiles, where I became the charge of a guy who looked just like Francis, Pee Wee Herman's arch nemesis in Pee Wee's Big Adventure. He was wearing a gray suit, white shirt, red tie, and white patent leather shoes.

"C'mon," he said. "Let's get you checked in."

Francis then proceeded to take my thumbprints using an electronic scanner, and then various other combinations of digit prints, including my pinky toes ("The most important ones!"). I was photographed and blood typed. Finally, Francis punched a button and a machine spat out an ID card with my holographic likeness, thumbprints, and transparent window with a drop of my blood all laminated in.

"Here you go," he said. He handed me my ID card and nudged me toward the turnstiles. "But before you go in, I want to share a tip that will help you to assimilate."

"What's that?"

"We all wear suits in the ESCIA, but the way you dress can make you or break you," Francis explained. "Take me, for instance. I've chosen my ensemble to convey a sexually disingenuous image that cuts way down on distractions on the job."

"I bet. But don't you mean 'sexually ambiguous'?"

"I MEANT WHAT I SAID!!" Francis snapped. "Now get in there!"

Next, I was taken to meet my mentor, a veteran agent played by Stephen Dorff. Dorff was wearing a black pinstriped suit, a black shiny shirt open at the collar with no tie, and full-quill ostrich skin boots with silver toe caps. His hair was spikey, and he slouched insouciantly with one hand in his pants pocket and the other holding a cigarette.

He took a slow draw and squinted through the smoke. "So you're the new guy, enh?"

I shrugged and looked at my surroundings. We were in an office building, in a common area that looked quite a bit like the waiting area at an airport gate. Off to one side, there were about a dozen men and women wearing brown suits, doing some sort of slow line dance to the tune of Trio's "Da Da Da".

"Weird," I said.

"Yeah, well don't let 'em fool ya," Dorff said. "They're the ones with the power around here. Those are the office manager moles. There's nothin' goes on that they don't know about."

"I always heard that you shouldn't wear a brown suit to an interview because brown gives an impression of untrustworthiness," I said.

"Shit, I don't know," he said. He paused for a moment to drop his cigarette on the floor, ground it out with the toe of his boot, and ran his fingers through his hair. "I always figured it was because office managers order the coffee service, and coffee's brown."


From there, I don't remember details. There was some business about crawling through ventilation ducts and having to time it so we were only moving when the fans were on, but my alarm clock went off before I had a chance to find out what that was all about.


* I know what prompted this, at least. Last night, I watched an old Peter O'Toole movie called Murphy's War in which O'Toole's character sinks a German U-Boat using a recovered torpedo, which he drops on it from a crane on a barge.

Weekend update

RBENT Ride

Bright and early Saturday morning, a group of us recumbent riders got together for our own little parade. About a dozen of us met up in Richardson and rode down to the head of the White Rock Creek Trail, where we met up with about a dozen more before continuing down the trail to White Rock Lake.

Unlike my usual club rides, this one included a fair share of the sort of slower rider that most people associate with recumbents—which was fine, because motoring along an eight foot wide bike path at much more than our 12-13 mph pace would've been irresponsible. There's just too much bike, roller blade, stroller, and pedestrian traffic on the trail to get up a good head of steam without the risk of hurting someone.

But once we got down to the lake, that was a different story. We split into a faster group and a slower group with the fast group taking to the road and the slower group sticking to the trail. Each wedgie that passed us and each remark like "Oh! Look at the senior citizens!" drew whimpers from my Corsa (or Ba-Cheetah, as some of the group refer to the highracers), but FlyingLAZBoy calmly reined us in until after the first rest stop. And then it was time to "do the demo", charging north along the west side of the lake into a slight headwind at around 20 mph, dropping wedgies like junk mail.

Photo by Paul Brown

After a couple passes like that, we'd gotten the demo out of our systems and made our way back north to the cars, after which we garbaged up on quesadillas and burritos as big as your head. Much fun was had by all (and I didn't fall over).

Out on a limb

Or, more to the point, up on a ladder.

Last weekend, Turtle and I bought a ceiling fan for what we affectionately refer to as the library. All week, it sat in the garage, and all week Turtle—either distracted by her own goings-on or simply displaying monumental patience—didn't harrass me about it.

Yesterday, I decided I was going to put the thing up.

Now, I've never been much of a do-it-yourselfer. I lack the necessary skill, tools, and extra hands necessary to complete most home improvement projects to my exacting standards. I'm also terrified of electrocution and drowning, so I avoid wiring and plumbing tasks like the Black Death.

However, after thinking about the installation process, I reckoned that the trickiest part of putting up the fan was going to be taking down the chandelier that was already hanging where the fan needed to go. At this point, I'll spare you the blow-by-blow of assembling and installing the down rod, blades, light kit, etc. and just say that after 2 1/2 hours of standing on a stepladder, grunting and (at times) cursing, Turtle and I stepped back to admire our new fully functional ceiling fan.

We were both impressed with the fact that it operated with nary a wobble, and that flipping the wall switch didn't start a fire. Probably because I had my fingers properly crossed.

I love a parade

Actually, I don't; but we sure had a doozy last night.

By now, many of you will have heard about the slow-speed chase that wound its way through three north Texas counties yesterday evening, but for the benefit of those who haven't, here's the short of it:

• A 32-year-old man stuck a gun in the face of a customer in the parking lot of a Lowe's in Carrollton.
• He then proceeded to wreck the stolen car, and when a local pulmonologist stopped to see if he was okay, the gunman stole his car
• Next stop: Fairview, TX. Fairview is a very small town with practically nothing in it but farmland and very large, very expensive houses. It's also the northern neighbor of Allen, where Turtle and I live. We ride our bikes there. In Fairview, the gunmen left the doctor's car and hijacked a bright red semi (with trailer) owned by an Allen couple. He kicked out the husband and held the wife at gunpoint, making her drive the truck.
• From there, they headed south through Plano, Dallas, and Oak Cliff before heading west on I-20.
• The police spiked several of the tires, but the truck continued west, riding on the front rims, all the way to Ft. Worth
• After shooting out some more tires, the radiator and (according to one report) the gas tanks, the police finally got the truck stopped. The gunman released the hostage, and the police shot tear gas into the truck cab, forcing the gunman out. So no one got killed.

Link - Dallas Morning News (use BugMeNot to acquire a login/password)

Granted, this sort of thing has become sort of passé since the O.J.-in-a-white-Blazer incident back in '92 or so, and I'm pretty sure the Los Angelenos would tell me this is a daily occurrence there.

What bugged me is that, once the local TV stations started televising the progress of the chase from their helicopters, literally hundreds of people began lining the overpasses along the chase route, all straining to catch a glimpse of the truck. Turtle and I cringed as, at each overpass, people dashed from one rail to the other—oblivious to slow but still-moving traffic—to make sure they didn't miss one second of the spectacle.

What's wrong with people? (The question is rhetorical, for the record.)

Ride Report: Tour de Paris (Texas)

I've done more than a dozen charity rallies over the last couple years. Some have been scenic, others were challenges to my endurance and stubborness, and others just plain miserable. But yesterday's Tour de Paris was a new high point for me, because it was the funnest 62.8 miles I've ever ridden at one swat.

The Foo Family had originally planned on loading up The Grape with bikes and gear and driving up to Paris together. Unfortunately, Turtle came down with a sinus infection that turned into a once-every-fifteen-seconds cough that won't let her sleep, much less do a bike ride. That combined with the predicted triple-digit temperatures led to the decision that I should go on alone.

I woke up at 4am, half an hour before the alarm was set to go off, showered, finished packing my car (not a grape), and hit the road. The drive to Paris took me about 90 minutes, instead of the two hours that Yahoo! Maps had predicted, and I attributed this to the fact that there were few vehicles on the road, except for ones with bikes strapped to them. Unfortunately, there wasn't much of anything along the route and my plan to pick up breakfast as I neared Paris turned out to be a bad one. Clif bars and water for breakfast will get the job done, but Foo prefers to start a long ride with a bit of sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit percolating in his gut.

I arrived with plenty of time to pick up my and Turtle's packets (she might as well have her T-shirt, no?), get my bike set up, and apply sunscreen. I parked next to Safeman9, another BikeJournal.com member, and we had a nice chat while setting up. A friendly bumblebee became intrigued with my black and yellow bike and my black and yellow cycling duds. Too friendly perhaps. As Safeman9 noted, it appeared the little hummer was looking for a date.

The Tour de Paris is a mass start, which means that instead of the longer distances going off first, everyone goes off together. This has always made me a bit nervous, because it means that you spend the first five miles or so just trying to work your way through all the bike path wobblers and slow-paced social riders to find some "clear air" to ride in. On the recumbent, it's even dodgier because I'm just not as agile as I was on my wedgie.

But I got the job done and by about 20 minutes into the ride, I was in the open and cruising along the flats at between 18 and 22 mph. Soon after I hit clear air, I noticed a guy in full Liquigas kit riding with a woman in pigtails and a lot of pink stuff on her bike. Aha! I thought. Allez and Lancenotstrong from BikeJournal.

"Allez! Allez! Allez!" I yelled out, both because that's cyclist for "faster!" and because... well, I was trying to catch their attention. I think my sudden appearance was sort of a rolling non sequitur, because as I pulled up next to them, Allez gave me the sort of look one might reserve for something just scraped off the bottom of one's shoe. Lance, however, clicked on the situation right away.

"Foo man!" he hollered, grinning. We shook hands briefly, peloton style, and I rode on, not wanting to interrupt their conversation any more than I had. But how cool was that? Not even half an hour into the ride, and I'd already met three people I recognized from the BikeJournal forum.

Not long after, a rider called out to me as I was overtaking him. It turned out this was royshiro, a BikeJournal member who had been trying earlier in the week to arrange for a group of us ride together. And so we did, Roy and I, and we had a blast just riding along and chatting. I've rarely had more pleasant company, on or off the bike, and it made for a very enjoyable ride.

By the time we reached the midpoint of our 100K route, the temperature had become noticeably hotter. My computer showed an average speed of 17.7 mph to that point, but we decided that we'd take it easier and conserve energy on the return leg. To punctuate the point, I had a concentration lapse as we were leaving the rest stop and promptly experienced a gravity failure that left me with a dinged knee and some road rash down the length of my shin.

Later, while cleaning that up, I came to understand that hardcore riders don't shave their legs to be more aerodynamic; they shave them because it's easier to clean road rash without all that fur in the way.

At about 9 miles to the finish, we came into some rollers, and I temporarily took my leave of Roy and agreed to meet him back at the parking lot. With the first climbs of any significance coming up, our rhythms were bound to get out of synch and I wanted to maintain as much momentum as I could. When I rolled up to the finish, the LED sign out in front of the high school read "106°", and the cheerleaders were bouncing around like they were at a cool autumn football game. God bless 'em.

I finished the 62.8 miles with a 16.5 mph average. According to my heart rate monitor, my theory that my max heart rate has dropped from 193 to 188 isn't worth the blog it's written on. After the ride, it showed my max for the day was 197. Must've been the heat, because I really couldn't recall any point in the ride during which I'd been working that hard.

After Roy arrived, we went inside to change out of our wet cycling duds and spent some time yukking it up with RBENT's Bob McClure (of yellow plasticard-faired recumbent fame) while cooling down. Roy and I then drove to Ta Molly's, a local Tex-Mex restaurant, where he graciously treated me to lunch using a gift certificate he'd brought with him. No quesadillas ever tasted so good.

After lunch, we said our goodbyes and I headed down the road back toward home. Heading west on highway 82 out of Paris, I passed an entire field parked hub to hub with rusted farm tractors and moved "compact digital camera" a position further up the list of things that I'd like to have once Turtle and I have more money than we know what to do with.

Tour de who?

To all my friends and acquaintances who have ever asked, "So what's up with that Tour de France thing?" I offer the following sublime explanation, courtesy of Bob Roll:

The hierarchy in the peloton has another parallel: "It's basically a penitentiary," says Bob Roll, a former Tour rider and an anchor for OLN TV. "You've got your walking boss, you've got that sneaky little bastard who was in The Longest Yard, you have the honorable veterans, and then the guys who are just doing time, which is most of them. Nobody wants to be anybody's boy, but sometimes you have no choice."

Link (FORTUNE)

If you've ever had even the slightest interest in what all the fuss is about, I highly recommend spending five minutes of your time to read this article. It's colorful and well written, and it's about as clear a capsule explanation of professional cycling (and yes, the free market economy) as I've seen.

Spelling with flickr

That's right: still no inspired amusement or wry anecdotes about postnasal coworkers. But I do have a new toy for you guys to play with.

Some mad scientist has used PHP scripting and random images from flickr to generate words like this one:



It's almost as much fun as composing refrigerator magnet poetry. Try it here

Best of FooMix #2 (sort of)

As I went to grab the next in the series of tapes, I discovered that #2 and #3 had gone missing. I've since looked every place I can think of, but it's probably a case of my having carted them along somewhere without putting them back where they belonged. Given my relative lack of participation in the packing process when we moved to the new house, the tapes could be anywhere, including in one of the boxes in the attic, dubiously-labeled "Foo's Stuff".

Mea culpa.

In the place of #2, I offer the contents of a mix CD I made much more recently, but which nevertheless spans the '60s and '70s, skips the '80s, and in one instance covers something from the '70s in the '90s:

1. Blackfoot - "Train, Train"
2. Bullet - "White Lies, Blue Eyes"
3. Cliff Richard - "Devil Woman"
4. Michael Nesmith - "Cruisin'"
5. Jerry Reed - "Amos Moses"
6. Manfred Mann - "I Came For You"
7. Ohio Express - "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy"
8. Cat Stevens - "Jzero"
9. Bread - "If"
10. Petula Clark - "I Know A Place"
11. Small Faces - "Itchycoo Park"
12. 1910 Fruitgum Company - "1, 2, 3, Red Light"
13. Webb Wilder - "Ain't That A Lotta Love"
14. The Buoys - "Timothy"
15. Focus - "Hocus Pocus"
16. Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs - "Wooley Bully"
17. The Nightcrawlers - "Little Black Egg"
18. The Castaways - "Liar, Liar"
19. The Blues Magoos - "We Ain't Got Nothin' Yet"
20. Desmond Dekker & The Aces - "Israelites"
21. Electric Prunes - "I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night"
22. Left Banke - "Walk Away Renee"
23. Bobby Fuller Four - "I Fought The Law"
    

Best of FooMix - #1 (ca. 1984)

Over on My Big Gobhole That Girl's Gobole Gobhole Girl, Susie put out a plea for '70s and '80s love songs and power ballads. I wasn't much help, since I couldn't remember any, off the top of my head.

What did come out of all that was this notion that it might be interesting revealing to share the track lists from the mix tapes I started making sometime in the mid-'80s and continued through #26. By 1998 (or thereabouts), I had pretty much stopped. I can no longer remember why.

Anyway, here you have it: the track list from the first one.

1. Mountain - "Mississippi Queen"
2. Loverboy - "Teenage Overdose/DOA"
3. Dire Straits - "Espresso Love"
4. XTC - "Senses Working Overtime"
5. The Pretenders - "The Phone Call"
6. The Cars - "Moving In Stereo"
7. J. Giles Band - "Rage In The Cage"
8. Pat Benatar - "Out of Touch"
9. The Go-Gos - "This Town"
10. The Cars - "Shooby Doo/Candy-o"
11. Led Zeppelin - "Immigrant Song"
12. The Babys - "Anytime"
13. Nantucket - "Rug Burn"
14. Rossington Collins Band - "Don't Misunderstand Me"
15. Talk Talk - "Talk Talk"
16. The Romantics - "Rock You Up"
17. Baxter Robertson - "Green Light"
18. Rush - "Distant Early Warning"

Worth continuing? A show of hands, please...