A long, proud tradition of cheating

July is coming, and you know what that means? Fireworks?  No.  Barbeque?  Hell no!  Le tour de France!  Oh, for those who don't sprechen el français, THE Tour OF France.  Yes, I know, most of you do expect a bit of a language lesson in my posts.  Yes, this Saturday the Tour kicks off again, this time in the Netherlands, I believe.  There or maybe Detroit.  I can't keep it straight.  


Anyway, once again the press is filled with news about the latest cheating rumor in the professional peloton.  No, not blood doping, or even it's lesser known (and less effective) alternative, saliva doping.  Not testosterone creams, lotions, suppositories or mints.  Not even HGH.  Nope, the latest approach for the cheating cyclist is to put a drill motor in your bike that pedals it for you.  I am not kidding.  This is what people are claiming.  Seriously.  


Cue the whining, complaining and arguing in the cycling blogosphere, but are we really surprised?  Cyclists will cheat, especially in the tour.  The work is so demanding and the rewards are too enticing.  The penalties just won't suffice.  Short of automatic amputation of both legs at the knee upon suspicion of doping.  Now that would make things interesting.  


Personally, I'm just impressed at the level of sophistication that dopers have achieved.  High tech motors and batteries more powerful for their size than anything a major automobile or laptop manufacturer has been able to produce?  Nice work.  To give perspective on how far they've come, let me introduce you to Hippolyte Aucouturier:

Two time winner or Paris-Roubaix, winner of five stages of the Tour (back when they were really hard, you know, 300 miles or so, on single speed bikes, with wooden wheels, and no support).  But, what Hippolyte (H-dog to his friends) is perhaps best remembered for, besides looking like a villain from a silent movie, was his part in the 1904 Tour.  


In a year plagued by cheating, Hippo took the cake by cheating in a most brazen, creative, and unusual manner.  Sure, some of his competitors simply rode to the train station and hopped a ride for 50 or 60 miles of the stage, and others had gangs attack their competitors, but such pedestrian cheating was well beneath ol' Hippoly.  No, he simply had a cork mouthpiece he clenched in his teeth.  Which was connected to a wire.  Which was connected to a car.  Yep, he was pulled up a mountain by his teeth.  The amazing thing is, that was less painful than riding up it using, you know, your legs.  


So, yes, maybe at some point, someone will use a mechanical motor to cheat in a bike race.  But so what?  It's just the next logical step in a long, proud tradition.  And at least you don't risk having your front teeth ripped out by a 1903 Model A.  

Anti-American Sentiments

Look, I'm not trying to be unpatriotic or a jerk (okay, I probably am trying to be a jerk, it is pretty typical for me), but I really hope the U.S. never wins the World Cup.

Oh, for my American readers, the World Cup is a soccer tournament played every four years among all the nations of the world.  Kind of like the World Series, except with the entire world having a chance to win, not just New York.  Fine, and Boston.

Anyway, I hope the U.S. does well this year, even advancing well into the knockout rounds, but I really don't want us to win it all.  Thankfully, I don't think there is much chance of that happening anyway.  But, seriously, the U.S. winning the world cup would be like the Bora-Bora Buccaneers winning the Stanley Cup.

Sure, they'd enjoy it for about a day, then they'd move on to the next important news item.  Like a 12 year-old who is stuck in a weather balloon but isn't actually but his parents just said he was so they could get a television show... are you FUCKING kidding me that that actually happened?  What the fuck is wrong with people?  And we all just kind of accept that this is now acceptable behavior.  Not only for our fellow man, but for our news sources too.  If I call CNN and say I accidentally flushed my daughter down the toilet would they, with no other verification and despite the fact that such an occurrence goes against all logic and sense, proceed to televise 4 hours of the sewer outlet downstream waiting for a baby to pop out?  Probably.

Anyway, yeah, back to the World Cup, I will spend the next week rooting for North Korea until they are statistically eliminated by being beaten 12-0 by Brazil, then I'm thinking of throwing my support behind Ivory Coast.  Or maybe the Bora Bora Buccaneers.

A Crack Commando Unit

In honor of the upcoming A*Team movie (nice work Hollywood, only 20 years late), I've created an answer for all your sleepless nights trying to decide which cast member best represents your personality.

A*Team personality quiz:

Pick the Answer that best describes yourself.

1) I am:

A) Older, smart, and have lots o' gray hair.
B) Large, black and intimidating.
C) A woman

2) I enjoy:

A) Solving problems, helping the helpless, cigars
B) Being filled with men
C) Being helpless

3) My idea of the perfect saturday night is:

A) Having a plan come together
B) Jumping off dirt ramps and smashing into things
C) Being helpless

YOUR RESULTS......

Mostly "A"s :
Congratulations, you're Hannibal.  Um, what do you want, a medal?  Oh, you do?  Alright, I'll see what I can do.

Mostly "B"s:
Congratulations, you're the van.  Enjoy the brief increase in resale value you're going to enjoy following this remake, then be prepared to be stored in a barn next to a hillbilly's General Lee replicar.

Mostly "C"s:
We apologize, you appear to be a woman.  In the A*Team universe you register slightly above a cat and well below a helicopter in importance.  Sit back and hope a man comes along to help.


Hope that lets you rest a bit easier.  And, just for the record, Shaquille O'Neal would have made a kickass B.A. Baracus.  Bringing a bit of that Shaq-Fu magic back to the silver screen.

Slings and Sharrows

In the face of an ever increasing incidence of cars deciding to show their love for bicycles by smashing into them, my fine city has jumped into action.  Putting aside the typical issues of a large bureaucracy attempting a difficult solution to a complicated problem, they've implemented a corrective course of action.  They're painting sharrows.  About 50 of them.  On one stretch of road.  For those of you who don't regularly read cyclist activist blogs, a sharrow is this:

Yep, it's a "clever" name for what is more technically (and accurately, you know, in english) known as a "share the road arrow," or to most drivers, "crap on the road."  So I guess it was "Sharrow" or "Croad."

Look, I'm not against these, they don't do much harm besides mucking up the nice aesthetics of pure blacktop.  Hell, if the city wants to paint a continuous strip of advice on the road saying:

"Don't run over people.  If you're drunk, please don't drive.  If you're an asshole, consider just doing us all a favor and removing yourself to somewhere you'll blend in.  Like New Jersey"

I'm fine with that.  I don't know if it's the best use of tax monies, but according to our government it does provide an incredible boost to the economy.  Because, as Adam Smith postulated, the basis for all economic growth rests on the financial success of roadwork painting crews.  But I digress (yes, I know this entire post, and really the whole blog is a digression, smart guy).

My real problem is the insipid name.  Sharrow.  It sounds like a weapon a Care Bear would use.  To fight, well, what the hell do Care Bears fight?  Selfish children?  I mean, it kind of sounds right, until you drop out the adjective: "Care Bears fight children....with sharrows".  Hmmm, maybe they fight something less controversial.  Like cancer? 

It sounds better, sure, "Care bears fight cancer", but frankly, looking at one of them, I want something a little more badass fighting cancer.  Like Voltron.  I mean, the bear is asleep.  Asleep!  Cancer's not sleeping, oh no!  No, in my world, Care Bears fight nasal congestion.  With sharrows.  And our roads are covered in Croads.  And all is well... oh, and Voltron is going to kick the living shit out of cancer.

Synthetic Life: About as exciting as synthetic piano.

For those of you who turn to this blog for all your world news, there was a breakthrough last week in the realm of synthetic life.  J. Craig Venter of the J. Craig Venter Institute, located in J. Craig Venter, Illinois, successfully synthesized DNA and inserted it into a bacterium, creating an organism with no "parent."  People, especially nerdy people, are very excited about this.  But no one thinks about this poor bacterium.  Brought into this world all alone, no parents, no relatives, no siblings.  Destined to be frozen and sent to a museum.  But, given what it would be doing if it wasn't this famous little life form, i.e. living in the respiration tract of a goat or cow like it's bacterial donors, maybe it's life isn't so bad.

I know, lots of nerds are all atwitter about this, but seriously, creating an organism that is closely related to bacteria that live in the respiratory tracts of ruminates and the genital tract of primates just doesn't do it for me.  After spending 15 years and over $40,000,000, they've created an organism that, well, lives in a petri dish... and replicates... oh, and it's blue.  That's about all there is to say about it.

This work has led to talk of producing strains of engineered life that will feed on carbon dioxide and produce bio-fuels.  Yep, still not all that excited.  Sorry, but until they come up with a large blob-like organism that lives under your sink and eats garbage and excretes... hmm, let's say cake, I'm just not that excited.  But when they do make the cake pooping blobster, I'm totally getting two.  One for home use, and one to sell poo cakes to Japan.  They've got a very unusual relationship with poo.