Uniquely unUnique

Life up in the country

Camilla and I have taken to riding bikes together recently, which is all good and fun, as long as we keep it nice and mellow.  My baby has a tendency to get turrets as she goes uphill, directed at the hill.  And if we go too long, I start feeling those jabs in my ears.  Beyond the hiccup of many hills and hours vs. an hour and streamside, we have lovely rides and continue to see tons of wildlife.  Like two Bald Eagles flying along the Delaware River.  Always a sweet sight. 

And surprisingly, a Black Mink (why can I only say minx when telling someone this?). The first thing I thought of was:  'ohh my, that'd be a nice scrunchie.'   We also watched a Beaver making the trek across the entire river to grab some dinner. 

Dang, by the end of the summer I could have an entirely new wardrobe.

On the cycling front-
I just watched Bobby Lea crush the Omnium at T-town tonight.  I have to say, I'm really proud of him making the Olympic team, and I also really hope Friedman does too.  Both are stand up guys and former teammates of mine (at PSU).  In a sea full of legit douchebags that is road racing, it is always a pleasure to see them and watch them work their magic.

My epic month of racing is about to begin, starting tomorrow with my first track race, followed by some silly qualifier race for Mt. Snow.  I do love the competition and excitment of these big races (Mt. Snow, Windham, etc) but my god they've become a complete rip off.  Somehow our regional series manages 300-500 riders per race, low entry fees and really good payouts, sans USAC; yet national caliber races charge literally twice as much with absolutely no reward beyond 'doing a big race.'

Anyway, I'm still doing two of those bastards in the coming weeks (two a year ain't so bad) PLUS! the fabulous visitPa.com Stage Race and Festival next weekend.  Phew boy, thats really the only event each and every year that I really look forward to.

 

We will be including more fun stuff this year like bike polo, a trials course (hopefully) and possibly/maybe a top secret dual slalom.  Of course, this weekend being Indy Day, Harrisburg is having fireworks all three nights, which can be watched from the ridge above the farm.

So i can assure you, if you don't make it to the Stage Race, you're weekend fun factor will only be a mere fraction of ours. 

How I'm voting

But with this powerful rebuttal, I might very well change my mind

Big Bro

We are in the midst of a super-saturated information-based world.  Of course you are the judge and jury about what 'information' is good, bad, spun, false, clever, engaging or completely useless.  But from the crazy blog infested electro-swamp emerges some very interesting graphical concepts of organizing relationships and networks of non-spatial information.
Like this Map of the Political Blogosphere
and
the TextArc graph, showing the relationships of words and phrases in the book Alice and Wonderland (seen at moma's Design and the Elastic mind).
Another very cool looking showcase was this live-feed world map of telephone calls coming out of New York.  It was much cooler on the live screen, streaming through hours of the day, clearly illustrating which cities around the world were communicating with New Yorkers.

Even the simple Google trends and technorati's blog rating system are pretty cool, and clearly show the power (for better or worse) of the interwebs connectedness.

So we've got that going for us, which is nice.

Summer time leaves me with little to blog and lots to play.

I'm up in Narrowsburg now, chilling pond-side.  This place has more deer and animal life--on a 2 hour ride on Wednesday i spotted nearly 30 deer, a bear helping itself to a front-yard bird feeder, and a bunch of turkeys.  I'm amazed at how plentiful turkeys are now, I don't think I saw one turkey in my first 10 years growing up in the middle of the woods.

We're staying at this rented house, which has a somewhat unfortunate recent history.  I even found a box of .45/70 shells.  The dude's wife stays in an adjacent house here. She is super sweet and cool, and I can't imagine how awful all that turmoil was.

My cycling form has come around, thank god.  Hell, last sunday at the Stoopid 50, I broke the brake lever off my handlebar as I greeted a tree very early on. Duct taped it back on and spent 2 hours chasing.  It worked-both the tape and the chasing, luckily.

But now I can't seem to recover.

I'm looking to buy a used burley or BOB trailer. do you have one?

Fair and Balanced at giving us more reasons not to watch this network.

Plastic on my mind

Recently I have been reading 'Cradle to Cradle' which questions our collective behavior of creating objects that have one purpose in their lifespan before being discarded, forever unusable in a giant garbage heap, somewhere else.  The book is simultaneously depressing (reading how much toxic stuff we wear/eat/breath/pretend we recycle) and inspiring, as its authors are committed to stopping our unsustainable ways by thinking out of the box by using natural systems as their inspiration.  God, just writing that part 'using natural systems' as a way of saying 'aren't you guys so clever' feels so ridiculous, because we all know damn well the Earth works way better than we want to realize, and honestly, our time of divide-and-conquer the natural world is long gone.  We certainly are in an era of realizing just how much material matter we make is affecting our health and well being, which is really all we have, right?

Great, and I'm all signed up to learn how to make more shit.

Then, last night I watched all 12 of the VBS series on the great Gyre of plastic garbage that is swirling in the North Pacific.  it was like watching an hour of a real Debbie Downer.

It is completely ridiculous that we get a plastic bag for every little thing our hands could carry, or that packaging could last infinitely longer than the product it carried.  All this stuff, all this behavior has really just become complacency on our part.  Of course each of us knows better, but hell that guy got a bag for each of his dozen eggs or a watermellon or the one apple he got for lunch at Whole Foods and put in that stupid clear plastic bag, so why would I do any differently?  Because we're a bunch of sheep who strive at every pass to live with more luxury in the moment, regardless of where or how these luxuries came to us or where their going.

Its not just about stupid plastic food bags, but just all the junk in general that we use for seconds or minutes and then discard or maybe if possible, recycled.  Very, very few products are made to have a second life, let alone be a part of a cycle.  Basically everything we use is providing a tool or service to use before its real destination:  the dump.  Sure you use your plastic grocery bag twice, but it still is goes to the dump, instead of your compost.

All in all, this is good motivation to guide my future studies.  I could spend the rest of my days bitching about how much we use and protesting and whining, but honestly, I expect to be part of the movement that will abandoned the currency of today and reconfigure how we create and use.  Its a huge ship to steer onto a new course, but don't you see how its necessary?

Holy heat wave
I think my form is coming around finally. That fat bastard sure has been elusive, but came on the hottest day of racing I've ever done. No cramps. Just one auger when my sweaty hand slipped off the bar, thankfully no one was around to see that embarrassing crash.  Steadily I moved along into 3rd, which is a handsome spot for me this season.

Tonight is the first Super Tuesday track night over at T-Town, and its a keirin night!  Something about track racing makes me really nervous: a combination of honest-to-goodness excitement for the intensity of a 5 minute race and the potential for the ugliness of the first track night.

Still off grid

Not dead, rather tucked away in deep, deep North Eastern PA at a vacation house, sans innernet or cellphone coverage.  Just us, a snapping turtle, one garter snake, an eel, songbirds, and occasional deer browsing by.
A few thoughts-
1.  I love that Contador wins the Giro after coming off the beach, not being prepared for the race.  A big 'F-U' to the TdF.
2.  There's a whole lot of land (no pun intended) for sale up near Narrowsburg, NY.
3.  Whether or not you're supposed to pick up lonely fawns or not-they sure do scream loudly when you do.
4.  I'm 3/6 on DNFs already this year-a banner showing!
5.  Burt Hoovis is my innernet friend. He chat with me all the time (usually when i'm not online, even):

• burt: glory hole worker
    male bukkake target
  8:43 PM Hairy bear hole reamer outer
• burt: fag
    homo
  11:40 AM       pillow biter
        nancy boy
   me: cum dumpster
       burt: that's a good one
  11:42 AM me: you should be familiar with it
• 
  
  8:14 PM burt: fag
        homo

6.  I was doing loops in Prospect Park (Brooklyn) on Memorial day weekend, and its pretty striking how diverse that place is.  A park like that brings in an amazing cross section of America.  Hell, just the little kids I almost ran over spanned most every ethnic group you could imagine.  My favorite sightings: chubby Hasidic guy wearing a full pin striped business outfit, minus the suit coat and big furry hat-out for a jog around the park.  Something you're guaranteed to see: a bench or two of Islander guys in full cycling gear with pretty fancy bikes-never ever riding, just sitting and chatting. 

Thats the sorta training I could get into.