The Giro d’Italia time trial ended in Perugia on Friday. That makes Friday Sir Roland Hanna Day in my book. In his honor:
BTW, Tadej Pogačar won the time trial and strengthened his overall lead, with the race headed toward the mountains. Then he won the mountain stage on Saturday.
I found out it’s okay to drink pickle juice right out of the jar. (For those who aren’t familiar with this, pickle juice as an electrolyte replacement has become a thing in the past few years…though my sister was drinking it nearly 70 years ago.) It will be magically refilled overnight.
Thanks to Rivergirl for the imageA bit of cyclocross to get to Paoli for coffee after the storm. I forgot to pack a chainsaw.First day out on the water. A German Pilsner was waiting on the opposite shore and fueled this return trip. Cottonwoods dead ahead.
So says Chance the Gardener (misunderstood as Chauncey Gardiner) in Jerzy Kosiński’s “Being There”. Chance was played brilliantly by Peter Sellers (nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe) in Hal Ashby’s film adaptation. I recommend both book and movie.
I was invited on a ride today. The forecast (as of yesterday) was for morning thunderstorms. Tim Bucktoo thought we could get a ride in after noon. By this morning the forecast showed a brief window between 10 and 2 without rain. I decided to pass.
By 8 AM it was darker than it was at 5. After a brief deluge it cleared up for a while but rain was back by 2. By then I was ensconced in front of a computer screen watch Giro d’Italia highlights. I like to watch. It is still raining as I write this.
For those whose interest in bike racing only extends to the Tour de France, there are multiple national tours. The biggest are in Italy (going on now), France (in July) and Spain (in the fall). There was a major crash in this spring’s Itzulia [Tour of] Basque Country. In the fourth stage, Remco Evenepoel, Primož Roglič, and Jonas Vingegaard were all forced to abandon due to injury. Wout van Aert was injured in a race in Belgium a week earlier. All of these injuries will have a major influence on this season.
Evenepoel, winner of the 2018 Junior World Championship Road Race, 2022 World Championship Road Race, 2023 World Championship Time Trial, and 2022 Vuelta a España, is out with fractures to clavicle (collarbone, surgically repaired) and scapula (shoulder blade).
Vingegaard, winner of the 2022 and 2023 Tours de France, is out with clavicle (surgically repaired) and rib fractures, as well as a pneumothorax (punctured lung).
Van Aert is a three-time World Cyclocross Champion (and runner-up 4 times), two-time World Road Race and two-time World Time Trial runner-up, silver medalist at the 2021 Olympics, and 2022 Green Jersey winner at the Tour de France. He is out with 7 rib fractures as well as fractures to sternum and clavicle (surgically repaired). While he has never raced the Giro d’Italia (but was planning on it this year), his status for the Tour de France is in doubt. He has won multiple Tour stages while never serving as team leader.
Primož Roglič’s injuries were enough to force him out of the race, but not enough to finish his season. He won the Vuelta a España in 2019-21, Giro d’Italia 2023, and Olympic Time Trial 2021. He is expected to contend in the Tour de France.
Tadej Pogačar, who sat out the Basque tour, is the current leader of the Giro d’Italia. He won the Best Young Rider award at the Vuelta a España in 2019, the same award in the 2020 Tour de France (as well as the King of the Mountains and the Yellow Jersey as overall winner) – which he repeated in 2021. In 2022 he won Best Young Rider at the French tour again while finishing second overall. He was second again in 2023.
Roglič and Pogačar are from Slovenia. American Sepp Kuss, winner of last year’s Vuelta a España, is of Slovenian descent. This makes me want to go ride in Slovenia. Is it the mountains? Something in the water? Inquiring minds want to know.
All of you readers who have broken a collarbone might be wondering about all of this surgery. You probably didn’t have surgery. What’s up with that? There is some controversy over surgical repair of a clavicle. I could go on for pages about this, but I won’t. (And I no longer offer the workshop that covers it.) The short version is that these guys make a living riding bikes and you can get back on a bike faster with surgery than without. To put it more crassly, they get paid a lot of money to ride bikes and the sponsors don’t want to pay them to stay home and recuperate. Surgery is cheaper.
The x-ray on the left is a well-aligned, non-displaced clavicle fracture. (If you zoom in, you can see a dark line in the middle, just above a rib. Look in the same area where the yellow line is in the middle image.) In the middle is a fracture with a large gap. The pointy end is pointing up and in danger of poking through the skin. The x-ray on right is the same fracture after repair. One can generally start moving the arm the day after surgery. This is not to be construed as medical advice to you.
As for “Being There”, you had to be there. Chance’s simplicity (he was raised watching TV and tending a garden, never seeing the outside world) is taken for brilliance by those around him. The clip in which he tells Shirley MacLaine’s character “I like to watch” seems gratuitous without context, so I won’t post it here. It is available on YouTube.
Thirty years ago today (it was a Friday then) I pulled a truck up in front of my new house. I was home. I grew up in a college town. I didn’t really know what that meant until I was in my twenties and many of my friends were just passing through, on their way to the “real world”. Since I grew up here, this seemed pretty real to me.
Folks liked to joke that, if they ever came back to visit, they’d know at least one person in town. I was the guy who would never leave.
At 30 I left. Was this new world any realer? It was California, where everyone is said to be from somewhere else. I think that makes the answer “no”. (Truth be told, my two friends from my brief stint in LA a dozen years before were born in LA and lived there for their entire lives. One lived with his mom off and on until the end.)
After ten years, I’d seen enough. My wife and I had seen the difficulties of raising kids there, through the eyes of others, and decided back here was a better place to raise a child.
We packed all of our stuff. I had to hire two guys to load the truck, as I was dealing with a back injury which had flared up again. We put the car on a trailer behind the U-Haul truck (maybe it was really a Penske) and I headed east while wife and infant flew to Seattle to visit family and wait for the house to be ready.
I drove 2000 miles and did a quick turn around the block to see where I could park the behemoth. By the time I got back, a neighbor was waiting on the front steps, beer in hand, to tell me dinner would be ready in ten minutes. I drank my beer and walked across the street to join them for dinner. Over dinner I was told the unloading crew would arrive at 9 the next morning. I tossed my sleeping bag on my living room floor and went to sleep.
Sure enough, at 9 AM my friends began to show up. I didn’t realize some of them were close enough friends to welcome me back this way. We unloaded, ate, I spent my first night in my bed. During the day I learned that 8 inches of snow had fallen earlier in the week and had just melted the day before I rolled in. I made everyone promise not to tell my wife when she showed up.
Sunday morning my siblings dropped in. My sister even brought shelf paper. They helped me put everything away and get the house set up. On Monday my wife and baby arrived to a house ready and waiting.
I just read an article in the Washington Post about all of the professional demonstrators on college campuses. I went down to campus to look for the HR Department.
They don’t even have an in-person HR anymore. No one would talk to me until I submitted my TikToks. I sent in a sampling: me with a bullhorn, me leading various chants. I thought the “This is what democracy looks like” video would get me in, but it turns out that is passé.
Don’t even think about submitting “Street Fighting Man” as your song video.
I used to use “Draft Dodger Rag” but that never got me a job, either. Unless they bring back the draft, it probably won’t be coming back.
I’ve been applying for these professional demonstrator positions for fifty years now and still haven’t gotten one. I often can’t even get an interview. I went to a Career Counselor to beef up my résumé. She told me I didn’t have enough arrests on my record and my complete lack of felony convictions didn’t help. She did help me choose emoticons and GIFs.
I did finally swing an interview this time. I wore a mask even though it was on Zoom. The interviewer took one look at me and said “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” I responded “Fourteen or fight”. I didn’t get a second interview. I filed an age discrimination lawsuit but haven’t found an attorney who will represent me pro bono.
I could have sworn I posted his before but I can’t find it with WordPress search. Check out the drummer.
I applied to the Raging Grannies. Even they turned me down. I thought ironic humor might work with them. I went with “Love me, I’m a liberal” for my audition tape. Maybe I need new songs. I’ll start listening to stuff from this century.
Maybe a gender discrimination suit will be more successful.
What can an aging demonstrator do? I used to have a job I could fall back on but now I’m on a fixed income. I was hoping to supplement it with demonstrator pay now that all of the leftist organizations have pledged a living wage. Could the media be wrong about this? Gimme an F.
Half-fast Cycling Club 