Wednesday, August 31st, 2005
I just donated to the American Red Cross Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund. You can too right here. Don’t be stingy, you may need their help some day.
Archive for August, 2005
Wednesday, August 31st, 2005
Reuters: U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu told reporters she had heard at least 50 to 100 people were dead in New Orleans.
A million people fled the New Orleans area before Katrina arrived. But former Mayor Sidney Barthelemy estimated 80,000 were trapped in the flooded city and urged President Bush to send more troops.
“We have to send the army to stop this or we will lose New Orleans and we will lose 80,000 people,” Barthelemy told CNN.
Wednesday, August 31st, 2005
WWL CBS Channel 4 in New Orleans has live TV coverage on their website here. It’s really amazing to see what they have to deal with.
Wednesday, August 31st, 2005
Keith Olbermann does not believe Lance Armstrong. Why not? Because Armstrong lied about honoring an actor strike and chose to get paid instead.
This is not a piece of pro-union dogma here. This is not a question of a guy crossing a picket line. This is a millionaire, being given a pass to work by a union full of guys making $7,000 a year, saying no, he wouldn’t do it — and then going and doing it anyway. Even greed and self-interest here was acceptable — but a pretense of self-sacrifice followed by greed, was not.
And that’s what Lance Armstrong did.
So does this prove that Armstrong doped in 1999? No. But the problem is, when you are an asshole, people stop giving you the benefit of the doubt and people stop cutting you any slack.
Working in the cycling industry, I hear lots of stories about professional cyclists. What they are like to work with and how they do business. I have to say that I have never heard one single positive thing about Lance Armstrong from people in the industry in my nearly 20 years. Armstrong is a super talent on the bike and he has been great in taking care of himself financially. But off the bike he is a sure fire jerk and it’s no surprise that those chickens are finally coming home to roost.
Tuesday, August 30th, 2005
There is going to be a certain amount of buzz in the press regarding the war in Iraq and how it relates to the disaster unfolding in New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast. Not to state that President Bush should be off the hook for the decisions he made to send National Guard troops overseas when they are clearly going to be needed here at home and his decision to divert money for levees in New Orleans towards the war.
However, the fact is that New Orleans is living on borrowed time. Between the inevitable total destruction by a category 5 hurricane strike that was apparently avoided at the last moment, the subsidence of the city due to all the Mississippi sand and silt being directed out to sea instead of being deposited on the land around the river during floods, and the fact that the entire Mississippi could divert down the Atchafalaya River at any moment means that we could see the end of New Orleans in our lifetime anyway.
Conservatives like to say that human kind can’t control nature when it comes to issues like global climate change. This will certainly be bourn out when nature takes action to eliminate the city of New Orleans from the face of the earth. We are only seeing a preview of the kind of destruction that will result.
Tuesday, August 30th, 2005
Eaten at the State Fair last night:
1 Corn Dog
1 Pork Sandwich
1 Scotch Egg (hardboiled egg and sausage with breaded shell)
1 bag Mini Doughnuts
1 bucket of Sweet Martha’s Chocolate Chip Cookies
3 Cokes
2 glasses of milk (one 2% and one chocolate)
1 Cinnamon roll
1 Deep fried Twinkie
1 Cheese curds
I have eaten a hell of a lot more in years past but I had all day to eat it. My wife and I have been making the after 6pm trip to the State Fair for the past three years and that’s the way to go as far as I am concerned. You don’t have to put up with the heat of the day, parking is a breeze and it’s not too crowded.
I even got on the Chris Krok show last night at the AM 1500 booth. We were arguing about whether or not it was kosher to wear socks with sandals. I took the position that it was not. It was probably the most inane 10 minutes of radio in the history of the station.
Tuesday, August 30th, 2005
Collapse Phonak?
CyclingNews.com reports that all three of team Phonak’s top riders are searching for new teams for the 2006 season. Santiago Botero, Floyd Landis and Oscar Pereiro all have clauses in their contract that allows them to leave before the end of the season based on the state of the team’s sponsorship. The team’s principal sponsor, Phonak Hearing Systems is considering the withdrawal of their sponsorship.
It’s hard to see much positive value that Phonak has received from sponsoring a professional cycling team with four of their riders coming up with positive drug tests over the last two years.
Friday, August 26th, 2005
Thursday track night.
Red is heart rate, blue is speed.
With over a month passing since my last visit to the velodrome I knew that I was not going to feel 100%, but I ended up feeling better than I thought I was going to. MP and I went up together, it’s always better to race with a team mate. Plus that drive sucks alone.
A 10 lap scratch race started off the festivities. MP tried to start some action but everyone was just sitting on for the first few laps. A break of 3 riders got away towards the end of the race and nothing was happening to bring them back before the final lap so I took off with 3 laps to go to try and bring back the break. I got close but ran out of laps and steam before I could get up to the leaders and wound up in 4th place.
The kerin was next. The field was divided into two heats and I was set to race in the first heat. Top three in each heat qualified for the final kerin. I was feeling good and was well placed in 3rd spot for the final sprint. I thought it was in the bag and stopped sprinting for the line with about 20 meters to go. Just like a rookie. Another rider came blasting by me with about 5 meters to go and took 3rd ahead of me. Now, I can’t say that he would not have passed me even if I was riding full sprint, but there is no reason that I should have made it so easy to come around me. It’s frustrating to just hand a race away. So I got to watch the final kerin race instead of participating in it. Oh well.
Missing the kerin final meant that I had a fairly long time to wait before the final race of the night, the 50 lap points race. By the time we lined up for the start my legs were feeling pretty heavy. Never-the-less, MP and I had decided upon a strategy to attack the field right after the first points sprint. We were a bit far back in the field after the sprint and had to work our way up to the front but we made a good move and got a gap on the rest of the field. Another rider came with us and I was feeling good that we had the right combination to put some distance between us and the pack. I put everything into the attack and was hoping that we would stay away but the pack was motivated to bring us back and within two laps we were back in the field. At that point I was totally gassed and could only ride around in the field for the rest of the race. There was a split in the field and MP made the split but I was worthless. It’s a gamble to risk everything on a move like that but sometimes you have to try to force things to happen rather than sit back and wait for the right move to appear.
206 on the heartrate monitor tonight. I don’t know how that can be…
Friday, August 26th, 2005
Tyler Hamilton on Mt. Washington last weekend. No more Phonak kit or Cervelo frame.
Apparently he was on some 12 pound Parlee Cycles bike that was custom painted for the Tyler Hamilton Foundation.
Friday, August 26th, 2005
Sheesh. And they call liberals pessimists. Check out optimistic Peggy Noonan in her latest WSJ rambling:
The federal government is doing something right now that is exactly the opposite of what it should be doing. It is forgetting to think dark. It is forgetting to imagine the unimaginable.
Wow Peggy! What are they forgetting? Port security? Airline freight screening? Funding to local emergency services? What is it?
Right now the federal government is considering closing or consolidating hundreds of military bases throughout the U.S…The Pentagon says this huge and historic base-closing plan will save $50 billion over the next two decades. They may be right. But it’s a bad plan anyway, a bad idea, and exactly the wrong thing to do in terms of future and highly possible needs.
Base closing? You have a problem with base closing? Bases that the military says it does not need? $50 billion savings that could be spent on actual anti-terror measures?
Imagine they’re planning that on the same day in the not-so-distant future, they will set off nuclear suitcase bombs in six American cities, including Washington, which will take the heaviest hit. Hundreds of thousands may die; millions will be endangered. Lines will go down, and to make it worse the terrorists will at the same time execute the cyberattack of all cyberattacks, causing massive communications failure and confusion. There will be no electricity; switching and generating stations will also have been targeted. There will be no word from Washington; the extent of the national damage will be as unknown as the extent of local damage is clear. Daily living will become very difficult, and for months–food shortages, fuel shortages.
Let’s make it worse. On top of all that, on the day of the suitcase nukings, a half dozen designated cells will rise up and assassinate national, state and local leaders. There will be chaos, disorder, widespread want; law-enforcement personnel, or what remains of them, will be overwhelmed and outmatched.
And your solution is what? The U.S. Army is going to pour out of their bases and do what? In your scenario, the only thing I envision the army doing is to start blasting away at terrified survivors. No thanks.
Impossibly grim? No, just grim. Novelistic? Sure. But if you’d been a novelist on Sept. 10, 2001, and dreamed up a plot in which two huge skyscrapers were leveled, the Pentagon was hit, and the wife of the solicitor general of the United States was desperately phoning him from a commercial jet that had been turned into a missile, you would have been writing something wild and improbable that nonetheless happened a day later.
Unless you were Tom Clancy in which case, with a few creative edits, you would have already written this novel in 1994.
And all this of course is just one scenario. The madman who runs North Korea could launch a missile attack on the United States tomorrow, etc. There are limitless possibilities for terrible trouble.
And you want us to plan for all these possibilities and have the military bases ready to address each one? Just let your dark imagination run wild and then let’s plan for the worst case scenario you can dream up? Ummm…who in the hell is going to pay for all of this? Are you going to give back your tax cut?
This of course is pure guessing on my part. I can’t prove it with data. My gut says that when things turn dark, we will need all the help we can get.
That’s a good one. Pure guessing…your gut says…sounds reasonable to me to piss away $50 billion.
President Bush and Congress are to review and either accept or reject the final Pentagon/commission plan in November. They should reject it. Leave it where it is. Think dark.
So let’s spend our tax dollars on what the military does not need while not funding the anti-terror measures that we do need. Got any other hair brained ideas Peggy?
