Posts by JackElder
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Ah, you see, I can't stand cricket at all, but love the Tour. It's like an entire sporting season condensed into a three-week time lapse, complete with multiple competitions (overall winner, best sprinter, best climber, best young rider, etc). Like many sports, once you understand what's happening (a lot of what's what in professional cycling is a bit baffling until you understand the rationale) and get an idea of who a few of the players are, you enjoy it a lot more.
-
For new viewers, I definitely recommend having a look at this column in Bicycling magazine, written by Eben Weiss (aka BikeSnobNYC). It has a good take on the whole "drugs in cycling" issue, including this comment:
...just know going in that the athletes you’re watching use drugs. Sure, not all of them do. In fact, plenty of them are probably cleaner than an unworn chamois. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that the drugs are out there somewhere. There may be 197 dirty riders and one clean guy, or there may be 197 clean riders and one dirty guy. Most likely, though, it’s somewhere in between. The only thing we can know for sure is that it’s not 100% either way.
So what do you do with this information? Not follow the Tour because it involves drugs? Nonsense. A few weeks ago, the city of Portland drained an eight-million-gallon reservoir because one man got caught urinating in it. That’s 16 ounces of relatively harmless urine diluted in eight million gallons of perfectly good H2O. Not only is draining a reservoir because of this a gross overreaction but it’s also a shameful waste—especially when you consider all the other harmless yet yucky things that naturally find their way into a large body of water. Do you think frogs leave a reservoir when they have to go the bathroom? I doubt it.
So what does this have to do with the Tour de France? Well, just think of the race like a reservoir: It may be a little dirty, but it can’t really hurt you.
But yeah, you’re drinking pee.
-
It's a great Tour this year. Many of the favourites have unfortunately crashed out - I was personally gutted when Brad Wiggins broke his collarbone, though I'm told he'll be back in form for the Vuelta de Espana in a couple of months.
the crowd, so close to the riders and never touching them
Yeah, you've definitely not been watching for long. Unfortunate interactions with the crowd are a bit of a Tour tradition - there's already been at least one crash this year that I know of when a pedestrian stepped out at the exact wrong moment. Lance Armstrong's famous crash on the climb of Luz Ardiden in the 2003 Tour when someone's souvenir bag got caught on his handlebars bears watching:
Mind you, I've also seen crashes from dogs on the course, photographers' motorbikes, and the French TV car you alluded to. It's a dangerous sport.
-
Serious question about the whole thing of deliberately pricing rental properties to make a (short term) loss - I know this is the whole reason that LAQCs got abused so much, but I think I must be missing something. Say, you have a property which you're renting out, for which you set the rental such that you end up making a net $10,000 loss for the year. I know that you can arrange your affairs so that this loss counts against your tax liability: so on a personal income of $80k, say, you end up paying tax on $70k. Righto? What I don't get it how this is so tempting. Yes, you've got $10k of your income upon which you avoid paying any tax (which you would otherwise have paid at the top tax rate); but you've still lost $10k. At the end of the day, you're more out of pocket than you would have been if you'd broken even on the rental and just paid your full whack of personal tax. The ability to claim back the loss against your tax helps soften the blow, but certainly doesn't eliminate it. So this is where I think I'm missing something, because I can't see how that's a tempting proposition. The only way it makes sense is if you accept that you're going to take a short-term loss for a few years, until you can either raise the rent to the point where you cover the ongoing costs, or sell the place and realise the capital gain.
Seriously, if there's something I'm missing here I'd be interested to find out.
-
Hard News: #NetHui: it's all about you, in reply to Danielle,
Does everyone else pack the cutlery tine-side down, or is that just my paranoia?
In our dishwasher, and with our forks, any forks packed tines-down have a slight chance of dropping down through the bottom of the basket and preventing the bottom spray head from rotating correctly. So we're tines up for forks.
-
Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to Lilith __,
Waiting for Godwin
From the Guardian review of Tim Hilton's memoire, "One More Kilometre and We're In The Showers":
"How fascinating to discover, for instance, that Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot has a cycling connection. One Roger Godeau was a track ace at Paris's Vélodrome d'hiver after the war - this when the Vél d'hiv was still haunted by the fact that it had been used as a transit camp for 12,000 Jews, shamefully rounded up during the occupation by the French police. From that detention, they were transported to Drancy and thence to Auschwitz. In the late 40s, some of the boys who hung around the stadium for a sight of their cycling heroes told Beckett one day: " On attend Godeau." So Beckett perhaps had this melancholy setting, not to mention the shadow of the Holocaust, in mind when he was scripting the lines of Vladimir and Estragon."
-
To briefly drag the topic back to cycleways... two other things that occurred to me as requirements for a proposed Christchurch cycle network. Lighting and littering.
Lighting is vital if you're running cyclepaths away from the main roading network, especially through parks. In winter, you can reasonably expect to be cycling home in the dark. Decent lighting on the cyclepaths is important for safety.
Littering: there's a certain impulse that arises in the mind of a passenger holding an empty bottle of Tui who sees a cyclepath. Broken glass is a fact of life; the cycle network is going to need a dedicated effort to keep it clear of debris and well maintained. Like any civic infrastructure, there's going to have to be a maintenance cost factored in.
-
Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to Lisa Black,
I don’t know of any research on that angle, but I have seen some* that says drivers think cyclists are less vulnerable when wearing a helmet and so they drive closer than they do for a non-helmeted rider.
Dr Ian Walker, Bath University, 2006. And yes, that's the research where he found that wearing a long blonde wig caused drivers to give him the most distance.
-
Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to Lilith __,
I think most accidents occur when motorists simply haven’t seen a cyclist.
Indeed. I often think that the main thing keeping me safe on the roads is the high cost of panelbeating; people have an abstract interest in keeping me alive, but a concrete interest in their paintwork. Even in cases where I've been buzzed or swerved at, the drivers were trying to scare me rather than actually hit me. It's the drivers who don't see me that worry me. So you ride in an assertive, predictable manner, in such a way as to maximise your visibility. For example, it's a good idea to ride at least a metre out from parked cars not just to avoid being doored, but to increase your visibility to other cars further up that might be about to pull out.
-
Field Theory: Gruts, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
That sounds suspiciously urbanly mythological. How reliable was the source?
Not reliable at all, in this case. The original info was from a pamphlet written during the early days of the Gauntlet piercing studio in SF; most people now think that the purported historical contexts for various piercings was made up from whole cloth. There is, for example, little or no historical evidence that Roman soldiers often had pierced nipples (another assertion in the same pamphlet).
Comfort wise, I have to say that commando beats all.
I can't say I've found that. On the occasions when I've had to go commando, I've usually found out the hard way that the crotch seams of men's dress trousers is prone to intimate chafing.