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I don't bike, but I'd be lying if I didn't acknowledge that the recently completed Tour of California hadn't captured my attention.
I had a plan for Saturday as the race came through town. I'd been scouting locations and had picked out where I wanted to be. I'd thought about doing the top of the grade coming into town but decided that I'd go out to a western ridge line and catch them all scattered out on the floor of the valley on Santa Rosa Road and hope to catch them again on Lynn Road.
At 2 AM on Saturday, Jon walked into my office with an earache. He's been fighting a cold that we've been sharing for a couple weeks and it had really taken hold in his head. Sarah is the committee chair for our local cub scout pack and they had all kinds of plans for Saturday. The pickup for the food drive was on Saturday morning (and afternoon) and she had to be there. So Jon and I hung out, but he was listless and in more discomfort as the day rolled on. After a trip to the local clinic, an ear infection was found and antibiotics prescribed.
Which leads to a segue... What ever happened to ear drops? For several years of my childhood, I and my sister had occasional ear problems and we always used ear drops. For a while (some years?), I think we kept using the same ear drops. I keep hearing about all the antibiotic resistant forms of infection but whatever happened skipping antibiotics and using old fashioned mechanisms? Ear drops and a cotton ball worked quite well for a time. Making this tour related... are the Amgen's of the world partly at fault? Segue over, we're back on tour...
Saturday evening, I came into my office and watched the ESPN2 update while checking out Ole's coverage (I knew he'd have something). I'd read about the cow bells but his video helped make it more real somehow. I hope they're able to do this again and I get to play a more active role.
I wonder about their plan for weather. It does actually happen, despite the hype. We had the first clouds of a good sized storm rolling in on Saturday during and after the race. The weather last week (warming back toward spring like conditions without being hot) probably played a big part in the large crowds. It's been raining here on and off (mostly on) since just after dawn.
The Tour website was uhh, interesting. I never really did see any video. I think they required the latest version of flash and I'm a bit behind there. It was pretty and useless all at once.
Their RSS feed was completely misguided and I dropped off after day five. Instead of building a list of articles about the tour, it was used as a daily blow by blow commentary. That's not to say that stage based feeds aren't good, but it shouldn't be the one and only feed and certainly shouldn't be the primary news feed. I wonder what the bandwidth hit was once people realized it was a live connection for one to eight hours per day? What are the long term implications of a feed updated every few minutes with hundreds of thousands of subscribers all doing an update every two minutes? Ouch.
Technical nit's aside, it's a very interesting bike race with a huge potential and I hope they keep running it for a long, long time.
The story about the Enzo wreck on PCH early Tuesday morning just keeps getting better and better. Escalating estimates on the speed, a dodgy past, rumors of stolen property, weird marketing tie ins and eBay. What else could you want?
Early stories pegged the speed at the time of the crash somewhere near 120 MPH but it's been drifting higher ever since (I was surprised it was so low). A Malibu Times piece today suggested the speed was well above 150 (but lost track of our mystery friend Dietrich). That's a heck of a lot closer to what I expected.
This piece puts the speed at 162 (do they really make such precise estimates?), delves a bit into Stefan Eriksson's history and discusses some ownership tussles with the Bank of Scotland. The real reason I linked to it was the collision between the story and an advertisement for Atari's new game CrashDay which comes out on Friday. No telling if the ad will still be there, but it made me laugh.
The side show to all of this is the action taken by Howard Dranow. He's selling a hose pulled from the wreckage on eBay (somewhere... I can never find anything there). On Saturday morning about an hour before the cyclists on the Tour of California start coming up the norwegian grade on one side of town, he'll be leading a pack of people down Decker Canyon to the crash site.
I was following around various nutty sea stories on the Intarweb a few days ago when I was distracted into thinking about days gone by. Interesting Places to Live points out something I found depressing.
The worst intersection in Virginia for the year 2000 was at General Booth Boulevard and Dam Neck Road. It was considered a dangerous intersection twenty years ago (with a relatively long record of spectacular accidents) and it doesn't look like anyone has learned with the passing of time.
I've got two stories about this tiny patch of land.
One late evening in late 1995 (before Adam was born but after we'd already dumped my beloved pickup for the family wagon), I turned left onto General Booth from Dam Neck and in the next quarter mile ran over something with both front and back wheels. It was very dark and this was before the place was lit up like a circus (that happened shortly afterward). I pulled over thinking I had just destroyed some part on the bottom of the car. After checking the bottom for damage and finding nothing, I walked back along the brand new pavement for a few hundred feet, sweeping my flashlight to and fro and again, finding nothing. I've seen movies where people get run over and this was more jarring and louder than any movie ever created.
It was one of those small events in life that make an indelible impression. I drove the back roads home, but I was spooked and it took a couple days to shake the feeling that something else would happen soon.
Another time, somewhere around late 1996, I was in line (we now had lines!) to turn left (again) onto General Booth from Dam Neck in the mid afternoon.
Back then, the south end of General Booth was well paved (for the expansion) and more or less in the middle of nowhere. A lot of people seriously bent speed limits coming north (I'm guessing the limit was somewhere around 45 to 50) and 65+ wasn't uncommon at certain times of the day (mostly in the morning, and mostly folks coming from out in the cornfields; it's amazing the effect a well paved and graded road can have on you after averaging nearly sixty across a zig zag route of country roads for thirty miles). They were still in the early stages of ripping down the woods and digging out the neighborhoods that now exist between FTC Dam Neck and General Booth. Much of General Booth was still thickly wooded or newly scraped dirt.
There were also a lot of trucks running around and the truckers could get as carried away as the daily drivers.
When the light changed, the pickup truck in front (a typical mid-eighties light pickup; extended cab, big wheels and a lot of suspension modifications) took off only to meet an untimely demise.
Before reaching the middle of the road, the pickup was struck on the driver side by a fully loaded dump truck coming north. If you've never seen a vehicle fly sideways, it's a terrible sight to behold (I don't remember the sound of the collision, I keep trying to find it and it's not there). I'd smashed the breaks and dumped the clutch as soon as I'd reacted and then time got perceptibly slower (nothin' much else for me to do but watch). For a few seconds, I saw and heard things happen in such a detailed way that numerous fragments are still quite vivid. The pickup flew somewhere close to 200 feet on the first bound, hitting on the right side wheels before beginning a wild sideways tumble down the road that shredded everything. At the same time, the dump truck began a strange hopping, screeching, load spewing dance that followed the rapidly accumulating debris field of the still tumbling pickup. Eventually, all motion and noise stopped, a pall hung in the air and those of us who'd witnessed this violent event tried to get a grip (I can't speak for anyone else, but I was shaking).
Those left in the middle of everything began to organize so I started the car, moved across the road and parked in the emergency lane. The official interrogation was short and to the point. I gave what they already had, I was added to the list and turned loose. The road home was a long and lonely ride that day as I turned things over in my mind and followed the slow, safe and congested route.
That was just one of several fatalities at the intersection that year, something I attributed to everyone learning new patterns (a sleepy stop light had become a major light on a quickly growing thoroughfare over a short period of time).
If there is such a thing as a positive take away, I learned to make sure an intersection was clear before jumping into it.
After taking care of some recycling that needed to be done on Saturday (I've had some old stuff in the garage for a long, long time... it's gone now) Steve and I got back and spent about 30 minutes extracting a bungie cord that was wedged under the drivers seat of the truck. Then Sarah and the boys went off to Magic Mountain to get season passes, leaving me at loose ends.
Not for too long...
I came back in and grabbed some water and a CD and headed out to find Balcom Canyon, top down and just cruisin'. I guess I should have checked a map first. I did wind up coming home via Balcom Canyon Road, but didn't get there initially.
I took a wrong turn at the end of the first section of Grimes Canyon Road and ended up going up (and then back) through the canyon itself. The canyon portion of the ride is short, but can be a blast when you've got it to yourself. Not so on the northern trip. And then just as we hit the flats again, I realized I hadn't seen anyone going the other direction for about a mile, so I turned around and ran to play. I had the road to myself coming south for a good run but just before we hit the best part near the top I ran into slower traffic ahead. As I caught up with a convoy I pulled over at a good spot to take some pictures.
It made a pretty nice place to catch the tiered nature of that part of the canyon and I got some good shots, so up they go. I took some shots down on the lower portion (the X on the left in the image above) and on the top (the X on the right). Sadly, Grimes Canyon is a part of Google's Ventura County blackout area so no decent satellite links (I'd link to TerraServer but I couldn't find a permalink).
None of the moonrise pictures came out particularly well, but that's life.
According to an announcement by the NOAA Climate Prediction Center a few weeks back, the pacific is now in a La Niña condition that is expected to continue for another three to six months. Reading their helpful FAQ, we learn that the Aussie spring and summer (their fall and winter) should be cooler and wetter than usual. I hope they find it useful.
Meanwhile the jet stream has all but deserted California, and even more rarely buffets SoCal based on what I see in the archives. Without it, all the weather coming from the west pretty much routes itself around us. If you look at the archives and poke around last year, you'll find an express train of wind blowing through the state, bringing us all the weather that Oregon and Washington usually get.
In place of last years rains, we're having the mildest winter I can remember in nearly twenty years of living out here. Outside of a little rain the week before Christmas, we've had zero, zip, nada in the weather department. And this week, with Santa Ana winds blowing (as they tend to do during the winter), it's really been crazy. Yesterday, I'd decided that I had to leave work early just to ride home with the top down under the sun before it turned cool, but I'd foolishly put a jacket on. I had to stop on the way home and take it off.
Today we hit another summit in the silly game of pretending it's winter. It hit the mid eighties here during the day and when I left Harley's this evening with Jon (both of us wearing only shorts and a t-shirt) at 8:45 PM it was warm enough that I asked him if we should ride home with the top down. He was pretty excited by the idea, so we did. He really enjoyed the ride, checking out the stars and basically looking upward the whole ride home (first night time ride with the top down, he was entranced). I enjoyed it too, but I also found it a bit disturbing.
We're already dealing with fires in Orange County and Malibu, and it's only February. That's not a positive sign. I haven't heard of any drastic problems in the Sierras or Rockies so we shouldn't have any major water issues. Still, a little rain and weather isn't a bad thing (I'm not asking for an actual season change here!) and we can certainly use just a little bit. Until then, it feels like we're stuck on a perpetual loop of October.
Yes indeed, today is Super Bowl XL, show number forty in an ongoing parade that has helped make football the biggest professional sport in this country. People who don't even like sports (much less football) will attend parties all over the country (and the world), eat and drink and watch hours of endless prattling in between the biggest commercial frenzy of the year.
Somehow, perhaps because it's the first big event of the year, the advertisements have become one of the big selling points for the party. Some people watch only for the commercials, which now have specials to show the best of the previous ads and will have people swarming the Internet for the next few days re-watching the ads and voting for the best and worse in different categories.
For football fans, this is last call unless you are into the arena game (the Pro Bowl is pretty pointless, but I'm sure that it's a nice, mostly relaxing trip to Hawaii for the players and their families).
Here's an interesting tidbit about Detroit. Several stories filed this week have talked about Windsor, Canada being just across the river from Detroit but I don't recall any that talked about the direction. One heads south to get to Canada from Detroit. I wonder if there are any songs about the area that talk about goin' down south to Canada? I'm sure someone has had a go at playing with that kind of 'up is down' humor.
Last summer I learned that many flights from SoCal fly pretty close to Detroit on their way to New York. The flight I was on entered Canadian air space just south of Detroit and returned pretty close to Erie.
As for all the Steeler fans making their way to Michigan, I fail to see why everyone is so surprised. It's only about 200 miles away (probably 300 driving... Google Maps says 284). People make drives like that all the time for all kinds of silly reasons. Steeler fanatics doing so to be near the game? D'oh!
As for the game... Despite the fellas from the Steel City being favored and my wife's family connections (my father in law has been a Steelers fan all his life) I'm pulling for Holmgren, Hasselbeck and company (the Sea Chickens as they are known on one mailing list I read) to win today. Either way, a competitive game would be better than a blow out, just ask any of those advertisers who have purchased obscenely expensive air time in the fourth quarter. Enjoy the festivities for whatever reason makes you happy!
