Odds and Ends: The 2011 Face of .CS.

Every year around this time I give my blog a little face lift. I mix up the color palate, swap the images and dump/add some sidebar gadgets. This year Blogger has rolled out some pretty sweet features that make it easy to customize things the site is looking pretty slick already.

It's still under construction but it already feels like a breath of fresh air and it's got me excited to start posting again. That's right, it's 2011 kids and I'm back on the blogsphere! I've got some pretty sweet adventures lined up for this year so stay tuned for anther year of great posts.

Just to give you some teasers:

• My first Brazilian Jiujitsu tournaments
• My 4th training trip to the mountains of N.C.
• My first race in a Cat3 field
• My first road race(s) against pros
• Races in DC, Baltimore, Philly, NYC, VA
• Maybe some travel races as far as Chicago, WI, and Boston.
• More MTB races
• More XC races?
• New Bikes?
• Race wheels?
• A national championship race?

Oh man, it's going to be a great year!

Odds And Ends: The Cyclist's Cigarette

Just a few nights ago my roommates and I were watching TV and discussing how rampant and blatant product placement had become in TV shows. Then yesterday a coworker sent me this ad from back in the days when cyclists thought smoking helped "open up the lungs" -- a clear illustration of how long advertising has been pervasive in american media.

And hilarious.

Also, though it's a little hard to tell, the rider who is finishing 3rd in the upper right-hand panel in the green jersey is Dr. K. And lest he complain that I make fun of his age too much I should point out he was only racing as a junior at this point (hence the full head of hair).

I'm pretty sure this comic is also from the same era when they used cocaine as a performance enhancing drug. Now professional cyclists just use it for fun. Or to paraphrase one local rider

"Tom Boonen is my pick for the Flanders [Spring Classic]. There are white lines on the course. He'll find 'em"

Boonen bashing aside, I was intrigued about the rider in the ad and was able to find a little info on him at this 6-day racing history site. If you're not familiar with 6 day races (historically, they were exactly what the name implies) here is a little background.

William Cecil Yates was born in Erath County, Texas in May 8, 1912. He moved with his family to the Southside of Chicago and got interested in sports as a teenager. He played varsity football at his high school and quickly got enamored in bicycle racing and the six-day racing scene. He showed great promise and was selected to go to New York City for their six-day bicycle race partnered with Mike Rodak in 1932. Cecil was 19 years old. He won his first six-day race in Vancouver, British Columbia in October 1934, partnered with the Californian racer Eddie Testa.

Cecil was known as a speedster. He could turn on the jets during a jam and have the field chasing him around the track. He was a crowd pleaser for the sporting fans. When Cecil Yates was racing the patrons knew that there would be lots of action on the track.

Cecil was a regular six-day racer in the sports most lucrative venues; Chicago (13 races), New York City (11 races) and San Francisco (4 races). In total Cecil Yates raced in 17 North American cities. He raced in Canada five times and won 3 six-day races. Cecil had two favorite partners both from the Chicago area, the transplanted Canadian Jules Audy and the stalwart Jerry Rodman. Cecil raced with Rodman and Audy 8 times each. In total Cecil raced with 28 six-day racing partners.

In the Historical Classification of Six-Day Racers (Jacq van Reijendam, 2007, Breda NL), Cecil Yates sits in 58th place out of over 4000 six-day racers in the past 108 years. Cecil won 16 six-day races and had an amazing podium placing average of 55%. His professional six-day racing career covered 17 years from 1932-1949. He raced in 56 six-day races. Cecil died in 1987 at the age of 74 years old in Buckeye, Maricopa County, Arizona. He is survived by daughter Geneil Yates Smith.

Arnold Devlin

Thunder Bay Cycling Club

Just a little Friday fun. O's opening day is today so I'll be heading to that in a bit. I'm racing MTB tomorrow morning and a few people are racing Cherry Blossom in DC on Sunday. Good luck to all.

Peace,

a

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Odds And Ends: Zoom Into Carbon

<br /><b>Zoom into a Carbon Fiber</b><br /><i>Uploaded by Weird_Weird_Science. - Discover more science and tech videos.</i>

Wow, very cool. Grabbed this from Bernard's DailyMile page. Helps me trust carbon a little more!

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Odds And Ends: Nice Job Google

Nice Job Google. I pretty happy with you for finally pushing out biking directions for Google Maps but this little gem made my Friday morning.

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Odds and Ends: Buzz Is OK

Google's Buzz is an unsightly conglomeration of social networking platforms with a user interface that looks like an alpha release from the 90s. Their decision to  automatically connect you to your top 40 contacts was a fiasco and the company's first big blunder. Nonetheless connecting everyone to their contacts did produce instant social networks which can have awesome results. I was about to turn Buzz off when the following conversation happened which bought it a couple more months of use. We're all such bad people.

Feb 26 AV: Just convinced a girl I'm going to mars because I'm astronomer. I feel like Barney Stinson. #HIMYM

Feb 26 CB: I convinced a girl (erin where are you?) on my kickball team after our first game that I was the drummer for the plain white tees. (I chose that band because our uni's were white)

Feb 26 MM: Dating myself a bit but I convinced girls in college I was a stunt/body double for Eminem and was in most of his videos. Bleach blond hair and blue eyes made it pretty easy. The cups of Natty ICE in the girls' hands helped too.

Feb 26 AV: You had bleach blonde hair?

Feb 26 JK: My sister convinced some fools in college she was Osama bin Laden's daughter and she was in the USA hiding.

Feb 26 AV: That's TERRIBLE. While we're on the subject I once convinced a girl you can tell an orange is ripe by rolling it. I didn't tell her what to look for, just that you should roll it. She would do this in public. I also convinced a different girl that the chinese invented the question mark.

Feb 26 CB: Invented the question mark? Are you Dr. Evil's father?!

Feb 26 AV: I'll admit it's not original but it still worked. It was better because we were in the Asian wing of the Art Institute in Chicago.

Feb 26 MM: You can tell if an egg is hard boiled by spinning it.

Feb 26 EA: i'm michael jackson.

Feb 26 JH: You can tell if an egg is hard boiled by throwing it at a wall.

Feb 27 MM: Throw anything at a wall. If it sticks, it's done.

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Odds And Ends: My Favorite Tweets

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Hi Spring!

Kinda bummed you showed up on my rest week. But still, I wouldn't kick you out of my bed.

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Odds and Ends: YOU can stream the SOTW AT WORK!

So, I'm real excited about this update to my blog layout. There are some people who really dig the SOTW but most people read this blog at work and can't watch the YouTube videos I post.

Problem solved kids.

I added a widget on the sidebar that allows you to stream the Song Of The Week via the sidebar from a website I use called Grooveshark. Let me know if this is still blocked at your work but I think I'm going to stick with this since it's much easier than find/formatting a YouTube video each week.

I threw some tracks up there from Pheonix's acclaimed 2009 release Wolfgang Amadeus Pheonix as a test to kick off the year.

Thanks for Reading

Odds and Ends: More Blog Updates

Hi everyone. Welcome to 2010. I'm continuing to keep this blog nice and pretty by updating the look periodically to reflect what's going on with me and my friends. I made 3 changes to the blog today:

• Updated the header banner
• Updated the "welcome" text (aka quotes below the banner)
• I added links on the sidebar where you can see a gallery of previous banners and a webpage with the previous quotes

It's just a little change but I think goes a long way to keep things fresh and set the tone of the blog. I've been having tons of fun creating all the new content and I've gotten positive feedback from everyone.

Thanks for reading.

Odds and Ends: This Actally Exists

So this might not be the most appropriate forum for posting this but I hope all my readers have the pop culture background to appreciate how bizzare and insane this is. From Wikipedia:

Tinted Windows is the eponymous debut album of the American upergroup, Tinted Windows. Tinted Windows was formed in New York and consists of guitarist James Iha, previously of The Smashing Pumpkins and A Perfect Circle, singer Taylor Hanson of Hanson, bassist Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne and Ivy, and Cheap Trick's Bun E. Carlos.

What?

It's like the feeling you get when you found out that the Traveling Wilburys existed ... but underwhelming.

Anyway, I've gotten lots of good feedback about the new blog look and I'm having fun tinkering with it. Thanks to Dr. K for the current banner pic.

Overall my readership is slowly but steadily growing. I currently have 13 people who subscribe to the RSS feed (see link at top right). Also, the blog shout outs seem to popular: The post about Fozzy bear's blog got 69 hits!

Thanks for reading!

Odds and Ends: My Favorite Albums Of The Decade (Part I)

These are not the best albums of the decade. They are not the most significant or the most popular. They don't have the best singles. These are my favorite albums.

These are the albums that I loved. These are the albums I would put on repeat at school or at work. There are slbums where I still know every word. These albums are the soundtrack to the last decade of my life. There are glaring oversights and omissions in terms of the pop music catalog of the last 10 years but I make no apologies. These are the albums I love.

The only rules are that each artist can appear only once and the album must have been released between 2000 and 2009. Calling this Part I is perhaps a little ambitious but I think at worst I can follow with a post listing the runner's up. Here are my 1st 4 chosen simply because I felt like writing about them:

Is This It – The Strokes (2001)

My freshman year of college I had my head buried in Led Zepplin and The Clash. I can't say I was hip to anything beyond “Hey Ya”. The Strokes brought me back. Weaving simple melodies into tight garage rock structures I was drawn in by the familiar sound. As I was running around drinking cheap beer and chasing girls their lyrics about NYC night life and the ridiculousness of 20-something romance became the soundtrack to my freshman year of college. "Last Nite" is still the only song in the world that can make me head bang.

A Grand Don't Come For Free – The Streets (2004)

From the first horn blasts of A Grand Don't Come For Free I knew I had found something important. For the rest of college I listened to it incessantly. None of my friends could stand it but I didn't care. Here, finally, was someone rapping about things I cared about – being lonely, awkward dates, drunken nights as a nobody in mediocre clubs, getting dumped. I was addicted to Mike Skinner's London confessional. When I visited London in 2008 I put this album on as soon as I got on the the Tube and I knew exactly where I was.

Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards Disc II (Bawlers) – Tom Waits (2006)

If I could make any type of music I would make music with a huge vibrant electronic sound like MGMT, LCD Soundsystem or Passion Pit. But realistically any music I will every try to make will sound like a poor imitation of this album. Tender and slow, dark and rootsy, these ballads uniformly eschew both hopefulness and self-pity in favor of resignation to the mercy of life's hardships. Sometimes I sing along, usually I drink a few beers. I put these songs on when I'm feeling lonely but Waits hits the mood so dead on I never feel alone.

Feed The Animals – GirlTalk (2008)

The first time I heard these tracks my jaw dropped. Steams of the tightest flows in rap history over waves of dense samples from a pop music hit parade of the last 40 years were coming at me faster then I could sort them out. This was a frankenstein of pop music on crack played back at warp speed. It was 54 minutes of non-stop hooks. Within an hour I had bought the album online as well as a physical copy. I don't think I listened to another album for 3 months.

Odds and Ends: New Blog Look

This blog was starting to look like a memorial site for Geocities ; the recently defunct stronghold of garish web design and broken links. So I got a new template, tooled around with the CSS a little, fixed the annoying twitter password prompt, and got rid of some clutter on the sidebar. I also updated the header image and will hopefully do that every now and again - a la Google.

Anyway, here is my new look for 2010. Hoping to bring you lots of good stuff in year to come!

Happy Holidays,

a

Odds and Ends: Typical Pre-Ride Conversation

I know a lot of runners read this blog and I just want to clarify something - this is exactly what cycling is like. I have personally overheard or said every part of this conversation.

Hope everyone is having a good holiday season. Thanks for reading.

Odds and Ends: Hipsters discussing Cyclocross

Odds and Ends: Fall Foliage

On Monday I went for a walk to grab some lunch in the Homewood neighborhood. Right behind my office there is a stream that is the same stream that parallels University Parkway along the trail we warm up on during Tuesday night track. There's a nice little stretch of woods back there and I stopped to snap a few pictures. They came out pretty well considering that I was using my iPhone.

That's all.

Nothing about training, racing, fighting drinking or anything else. Just enjoying the change of the seasons and wanted to share.

Odds and Ends: 12 Best Halloween Posts From TextsFromLastNight

Cholesterol, obesity, drug use, free climbing - all these are things that reduce your life expectancy. And while it may be more of a correlation than a cause I'm pretty sure that if anything you text ends up on TextsFromLastNight there's a better-than-average chance you're going to wind up dead in a gutter. Or at least in detox.

That being said, I love reading 'em. Here are the dozen best texts I found from the Halloween weekend:

• (513): You tried to wear your Jesus costume into Family Christian stores and say it was a book signing.
  
  
• (919): Calvin and Hobbes are double-teaming a butterfly. They're in the bathroom, and drawing a crowd.
  
  
• (708): she asked if she could keep her bee antennas on during her mugshot. i love halloween.
  
  
• (954): you kept slapshing your drinks on people saying the power of christ compels you.
  
  
• (252): I had sex with billy mayes last night. HE KEPT IN CHARACTER THE WHOLE TIME.
  
  
• (570): A homeless guy asked you to feel your boobs, you accepted in exchange for his broom to go with your witch costume..... that's when I cut you off
  
  
• (571): Ended up passed out drunk in the neighbors lawn, still in costume. Neighbors thought I was a lawn decoration. Ten points for best Halloween ever.
  
  
• (614): Did you see the soccer ref give that girl the red card as she was being kicked out of the party?
  
  
• (516): I didn't black out, the guy in the Men In Black costume erased my memory
  
  
• (617): The only thing I have to prove last night happened is a fireman's hat full of puke.
  
  
• (914): I just hemmed my dress for halloween, never felt more like a man
  
  
• (425): Oh. Im drinking alone in a banana costume. Every time youre feeling down, i want you to think of me right now and know that your life is better than mine.

And to keep things loosely related to sports here are two more I found. I'm assuming one was from the NYC marathon:

• (917): just stared at ed norton's ass for 26 miles. if there was ever an incentive to run a marathon, that was it. my life is perfect.
  
  
• (419): i went to throw her on my bed and threw her straight in to my bike

And another one for Dr. K, Jum and Mel:

• (224): U of I kids don't fist pump to Sweet Caroline. Get me the fuck out of here.

And just a few more to get you through the workday:

• 425): You wanted to speak to the manager of mcdonalds as to why a "bag of cheeseburgers" isn't a menu option.
  
  
• (215): The guy I was getting with last night took off his purity ring mid-sex and threw it across the room.
  
  
• (813): you tried to do a keg stand and ended up flipping over it and onto the table
  
  
• (786): I told her at least we still had each other. That's when she started crying.
• (315): i fell off the bed in the middle of it, and he yelled "5 second rule" and kept fucking me. i think im in love

Thanks for reading. Enjoy the nice fall weather!

Odds and Ends: IT'S DECORATIVE GOURD SEASON, MOTHERFUCKERS.

Yesterday Claire sent me a hilarious tweet with a link to this article in McSweeney's. Btw, that's not AZ Claire formerly of Baltimore but my semi-pro MTB friend up in Wisconsin. This is the Claire who is also a good friends with Geo and dating Matt (who used to be Geo's roommate). I also saw that Elf posted this to FB this morning (yes, 90% of my friends have blogs -- I'll update the Blogroll next week).

I was going to post this as a fun TGIF post but since I'm worried this won't be hot anymore by then - you get it on hump day. Enjoy.

_____

IT'S DECORATIVE
GOURD SEASON, MOTHERFUCKERS.

BY COLIN NISSAN

- - - -

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I'm about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it's gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There's a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

I may even throw some multi-colored leaves into the mix, all haphazard like a crisp October breeze just blew through and fucked that shit up. Then I'm going to get to work on making a beautiful fucking gourd necklace for myself. People are going to be like, "Aren't those gourds straining your neck?" And I'm just going to thread another gourd onto my necklace without breaking their gaze and quietly reply, "It's fall, fuckfaces. You're either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you're not."

Carving orange pumpkins sounds like a pretty fitting way to ring in the season. You know what else does? Performing a all-gourd reenactment of an episode of Different Strokes—specifically the one when Arnold and Dudley experience a disturbing brush with sexual molestation. Well, this shit just got real, didn't it? Felonies and gourds have one very important commonality: they're both extremely fucking real. Sorry if that's upsetting, but I'm not doing you any favors by shielding you from this anymore.

The next thing I'm going to do is carve one of the longer gourds into a perfect replica of the Mayflower as a shout-out to our Pilgrim forefathers. Then I'm going to do lines of blow off its hull with a hooker. Why? Because it's not summer, it's not winter, and it's not spring. Grab a calendar and pull your fucking heads out of your asses; it's fall, fuckers.

Have you ever been in an Italian deli with salamis hanging from their ceiling? Well then you're going to fucking love my house. Just look where you're walking or you'll get KO'd by the gauntlet of misshapen, zucchini-descendant bastards swinging from above. And when you do, you're going to hear a very loud, very stereotypical Italian laugh coming from me. Consider yourself warned.

For now, all I plan to do is to throw on a flannel shirt, some tattered overalls, and a floppy fucking hat and stand in the middle of a cornfield for a few days. The first crow that tries to land on me is going to get his avian ass bitch-slapped all the way back to summer.

Welcome to autumn, fuckheads!

_____

Thanks for reading!

Odds and Ends: Alyssa Doesn't Get My Jokes

... or maybe I just don't get her's. Alyssa seems to have misunderstood my post yesterday or I missed her sarcasm. In cycling lingo "29 and single" means you ride a 29" single-speed mountain bike. Not that you are necessarily 29 y/o and lonely - though I'll admit there is a correlation.
On a somewhat unrelated note I found this is a mousepad I found at cafe press. It really should be a shirt because WTF buys mouse pads? But I only endorse this image because the pedal is clearly a SPD clipless pedal thus the shirt is supporting single speed riding (most likely commuting or on the track because a MTB would have eggbeaters) and not fixies. Not that I have anything against fixsters as a whole (as long as they know what their doing). It's just that I'm all about performance:

Every time I see a fixster riding around a $2,000 set of trispoke aero HED3s wheels on a $500 frame I want to pull over, hit him (not that I wouldn't hit a chick - it's always a dude), take the wheels to build a proper TT bike so I can embarrass myself at yet another discipline of cycling, and slap this sicker on their top tube.


Unless of course they already have a TTMBL where the sticker would go.

Then I just wouldn't stop hitting them.

Thanks for reading. Have a good weekend.

Odds and Ends: Hi, My Name Is Charley Wigelius

From Velonews regarding the last-minute doping suspension of Thomas Dekker:

The 24-year-old Dekker, who was slated to arrive in Monaco on Wednesday for Saturday's opening stage of the Tour [de France], will be replaced on the Silence-Lotto roster by British rider Charley Wigelius.

Charley Wigelius, who in addition to having the most British name in the world probably rides this bike:

Odds and Ends - Krispy Kreme Bacon Cheeseburgers

I've been way busy at work this week but my college roommate Brian Burke came to the rescue and sent me an article so silly I had to share. Since TWSS threw down a combined 250M+ of hurting at the Bostons Marathon this Monday there has been a lot of talk about who is going to eat what gloriously unhealthy "recovery food". Much to Melissa's chagrin I'm sure. There's been plenty of cheese fries, pizza, ice cream and mac and cheese eaten this week. Actually, come to think of it maybe it's just been Claire eating all that stuff now that she's off her "diet". It reminds me of the 2 Liter bottle of soda Ptak used to chug after XC state like it was sweet campaign.

But none of this culinary low-brow decadence has anything on this. Behold:

Yes, those are cheeseburgers served on Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. They were served at the Google cafeteria in NYC to celebrate the birthday of the head of the cafeteria staff.

So, would you eat one?

I would. But that's because I work out enough to burn through almost anything I throw in my system. Additionally, I believe 1L of water and an apple balance out the negative non-calorie effects of almost any food (fat, cholesterol, etc.) - though this could provide an upper limit to that "rule".

Well, would you eat it? And if you were one, would you eat yourself?

Discuss.