Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Monday, December 25, 2006

Christ is Born! Come, let us Adore Him!

As I write this, my family has just finished its Christmas Eve gathering where we exchange gifts and share a meal together. There was a lot of laughter, great big smiles and much love. Gifts were exchanged and shown off for all to appreciate and the adults had a good time enjoying (and being amazed at) the antics of the kids. As I think about it I realize how I have been truly blessed by God through my family.

I realize that for many, Christmas is not this way. For some this a time where family is missed or regretted. For others who have lost loved ones it is a time of grief and sorrow. Still others suffer the sharp pangs of hunger and deprivation and want even though they may live in the richest country in the world. Then there are those who bear the burden of anxiety over bills and money and there are those who wrestle with envy and jealously over what they didn't receive because they count what they have lost.

I pray that your Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are like mine and filled with joy and hope and love. I ask you this night and this next day to pray for those who are less fortunate.

Most of all, pray that you remember what this day represents: God has become man on this day so that maybe we might become God. Recently I was introduced to a story first told by the early church father Athanasius through Brian McLaren's book, "a Generous Orthodoxy." While I usually try to leave the stories of the early church fathers to Gary because he tells them so much better than I do, I hope that you and he won't mind if I share this one as told by Dr. McLaren.

"Once upon a time there was a good and kind King who had a very great kingdom with many cities. In one distant city, some people took advantage of the freedom the King gave them and started doing evil. They profited from their evil and began to fear that the King would interfere and throw them in jail. Eventually these rebels seethed with hatred for the King. They convinced the city that everyone would be better off without the King, and the city declared its independance from the kingdom.

But soon, with everyone doing whatever they wanted, disorder reigned in the city. There was violence, hatred, lying, oppression, murder, rape, slavery and fear. The King thought, 'What do I do? If I take my army and conquer the city by force, the people will fight against me, and I'll have to kill many of them, and the rest will only submit through fear or intimidation and hate me and all I stand for even more. How does that really help them--to either be dead or imprisoned or secretly seething with rage? But if I leave them alone, they'll destroy each other, and it breaks my heart to think of the pain they're causing or experiencing.'

So the King did something very surprising. He took off His robes and dressed in the rags of a homeless wanderer. Incognito, He entered the city and began living in a vacant lot near a garbage dump. He took up a trade--fixing broken pottery and futrniture. Whenever people came to Him, His kindness and goodness and fairness and respect were so striking that they would linger just to be in His presence. They would tell Him their fears and questions and ask His advice. He told them that the rebels had fooled them, and that the true King had a better way to live, which he exemplified and taught. One by one, then two by two, and then by the hundreds, people began to have confidence in Him and live in His way.

Their influence spread to others, and the movement grew and grew until the whole city regretted its rebellion and wanted to return to the kingdom again. But, ashamed of their horrible mistake, they were afraid to approach the King, believing that He would destroy them for their rebellion. But the King-in-disguise told them the Good News: He Himself was the King, and He loved them. He held nothing against them, and He welcomed them back into His kingdom, having accomplished by a gentle, subtle presence what never could have been accomplished through brute force." (a Generous Othrodoxy, pp. 64-65)

Tonight we celebrate the coming of the King dressed as a homeless wanderer. Tonight we celebrate God's coming into this world as Jesus so that He might bring a fallen and rebellious world back into Himself. If there was ever to be a night for hope and joy, I can think of no better one than this.

Peace on Earth and Good Will to All Humankind!

In Him,

Chad

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Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Over the last sixteen weeks I've been leadign this study though John's account of the Gospel. A big part of the narrative are Christ's seven "I am" statements (I am the Bread of Life, I am the Light of the World, I am the Door, I am the Good Shepherd, I am the Life and the Resurrection, I am the True Vine and I am the Way, the Truth and the Life). The other day I was thinking about these ways that Christ identifies Himself to His disciples as a way to help them understand who He was. It occurred to me that while some of these statements are pretty culturally invariant (I am the Light of the World), there are several that are pretty culturally specific. An example would be "I am the Good Shepherd." This statement makes a lot of sense in a culture where there are lots of herd animals but it's not so accessible to those of us who grew up in a urban setting where the only herd animals we might see are the 9-5er's getting into there cars to stream into the city's business core.

So I began to wonder what sorts of I am statements Jesus might have made today. Not really cliche stuff or trivial stuff but things that truly allow us to see some deep part of His being in ways that are relevant to our culture today. I thought that one might have to do with the creative arts; maybe something like, "I am the Patient Sculptor." In the time of Christ in Palestine two thousand years ago I don't think that society was affluent enough to support much in the way of the arts. In the period of the monarchy 800 years earlier though it was and we see God identified with creative expression frequently in the lives of David and Solomon. I wonder if that would be true again today. I wonder what other metaphors He might use?

If you can think of something, let me know by leaving a comment. I'd really like to hear what others have to think.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Well, my semester finally wrapped up at the end of last week and there was good, there was bad and there was, unfortunately, ugly. In the final evaluation, this semester was better than last fall in that I had two classes that had enough students who wanted to learn that they were a lot of fun to teach. To me that's the key thing: do the students want to learn or is school something they endure with much weeping and gnashing of teeth. One of the difficulties at a open access two year college is that far too many of our students are of the second variety. I understand that you'll have unmotivated students at every institution but we seem to have a surprisingly large number of them here. What's more surprising is the number of them that get into their sophomore year in math and science before they hit material hard enough to expose their laziness. Still, it was a better semester and I'm looking forward to having two classes where I continue with some of the same students in the spring.

For the next couple of weeks I'll be trying to unwind and relax some. I've got a number of reading projects I'm undertaking which will be nice. I really like the thought of doing some reading on several different topics each day. I've got a couple of books on chaos theory/non-linear dynamics I'll be reading as part of one project, I have two books on the calendar and measuring time I'll be reading while I travel and I have a couple of theologically oriented projects I'm going to try and get through. Lots of different inputs that I'm really looking forward to. I think the one I'm most curious about is the calendar/time one as I'm looking at creating a colloquium about mankind's quest to measure time. Maybe I can partner with a colleague in the humanities department to examine time from both a scientific and a literary perspective. I wonder who might be interested in partnering with me on a project like that?

The weather here is going to be warm again after an extended cold snap so I'll be doing a lot of riding. With the break giving me more free time, I have a lot more leeway to explore and try new things. Hopefully I can take advantage of that some before I have to go back to work in January. I'll be doing some prep work for the Spring semester as well so that I don't get crushed with too much. The big thing I need to do is rework the online enhancements to my courses.

Anyways, I hope this finds all three fo my readers in good spirits. Here's to warm tailwinds!

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

So last time I was talking about Jesus as the Life and the Resurrection and how I thought that death really got under the Savior's skin. Here are a few more musings about the topic...

As I was talking about these ideas with a colleague of mine we got to talking about the idea of death and Satan. It was here that I had something of a revelation. You see, I had always thought that the great battle was between God and Satan: the Lord of Light vs. the Prince of Darkness. But as I thought about it and as we discussed it, I’m beginning to think that this just isn’t true; God’s great battle isn’t against Satan, it’s against death. Satan doesn’t really war against God, instead the devil wars against humankind. It wasn’t God the Adversary tried to trick in the Garden, it was Adam and Eve. When God shows up, it’s pretty clear that He has power and authority over the Adversary. In fact, anytime we actually see Satan he’s in the lesser position trying to afflict man with something (think Job).

God’s war is against death. The problem is that we humans chose death in the Garden. God said, don’t eat that and we did anyways. My colleague likened it to me telling a houseguest that they can eat or drink anything in the kitchen but thet’d be better off if they stayed away from the stuff under the kitchen sink since the Drano I store there will likely kill them if they drink it. Adam chose to drink the Drano. By doing so, Adam changes the world so that we’re all more susceptible to sin. In other words, because of Adam and Eve’s decision to drink Drano we sort of acquired a taste for the Drano, even thought we know it will kill us. This is what gives Satan a foothold in our souls. He tells us the same lie (he is the Father of Lies after all) that he told Adam and Eve; namely that something that tastes this good won’t actually kill you. Once he gets us to take the first bite he can then tell us that we’re too broken and polluted for God to want to save so we might as well enjoy the Drano before it kills us because that’s really all we’re going to get.

So God has to figure out how to deal with our choice to drink the Drano without removing our free will to make that choice. God’s solution is to become human somehow without having to stop being God. He’s born as an infant to a virgin and after He’s made it to the right age where the people in His society will listen to what He has to say, Jesus, the person of the “Son”, begins to tell those around Him the truth about life and death and Drano and God the Father. This is the only time we see Satan directly war against Him because, I guess, Satan realizes that if God is really fully human then he’ll be tempted by the same things we all are; He’ll have the same taste for Drano we do and He’ll have to face the same choice we do: abstain from the Drano that tastes really, really good but will kill Him or drink the Drano and die. So Satan meets God in the desert and brings along the best tasting types of Drano that he can find and offers it to the Son.

The interesting thing is that the battle here isn’t really against Satan. It’s still against death. Jesus has to choose God’s way (life) or not God’s way (death). This is going to happen over and over again in Jesus’ time on earth. The really ironic thing is that at the end, in the other Garden, the Garden of Gethsemane, he’s got to make the same choice but this time the way He chooses life is to choose to die physically. By doing this He robs death of its power over us (and not just after His death but for all time). He undoes the Fall by dying and defeating death’s hold on all of us. Human beings no longer have to die spiritually because of Adam’s choice and our resulting taste for sin. That doesn’t mean that our taste for Drano is gone or that there aren’t still certain consequences for drinking it (you’re still going to have an upset stomach) but it does offer us a way of dealing with the poison.

There's more to come with this (one more installment I think). Thanks for putting up with my ramblings.

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Thursday, November 16, 2006

This semester I’ve been helping to facilitate a Bible study that looks at the question Jesus asks His disciples, “Who do you say I am?” by examining the titles given to or claimed by Jesus in the Gospel account of the John the Evangelist (St. John to some). The idea is to try to get some insight into Christ’s nature and relationship to us by looking at who He is in the Fourth Gospel. Of course, from the title of the series (“Who do you say I am?”) you can probably guess that we are spending a lot of time looking at the 7+1 “I Am” statements Jesus makes. The first seven of these are found in the Gospel spread between the sixth chapter and the fifteenth and involve the divine name associated with a qualifier such as I am the bread of life or I am the light of the world. The eight occurs at Christ’s arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane where He speaks “I am” and those who come to arrest Him fall to the ground.

I’ve studied these various statements several times in the past and have always found them to be highly instructive in helping me shape my understanding of who Christ was and is. The one that I always seemed having the most trouble with was the statement right before Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, “I am the resurrection and the life.” It just always seemed so obvious to me and overshadowed by the miracle/sign that follows it. As I prepared for the study and wrote the daily devotionals that I send out tot he students in the group, I began to see the deeper meaning of the passage.

The part I want to focus on is where it said that Jesus was “deeply moved in His spirit” when He sees Mary and again when He is standing before Lazarus’ tomb. I went and looked at the Greek for the word and found that it was more commonly translated as anger. Jesus isn’t deeply moved, He’s angry. So, I wondered, what was He angry about? As I thought about it I realized that He was angry about death. I realized that here was a God who created the Universe and nowhere does it mention that He created death. Now whether you read the Genesis creation stories literally or not, it is important that death (whether you interpret that as spiritual or physical is a matter of theological choice but I think that we are talking about death in a spiritual sense here) was not part of God’s creation. Death is brought into creation as a consequence of Adam’s choice in the Garden of Eden.

So when Christ encounters death and the pain and suffering it brings in Mary and at the tomb of Lazarus, He takes it kind of personally. All of the life in the creation came to be through Him so I think that anything that passes out of life and, in a sense perhaps, out of creation, has to really get under the Creator's "skin" so to speak. This is really powerful to me because it tells me that Christ not only takes death in a general way personally but He takes my death personally. I sort of see the idea of me dying as something Christ would get angry about, the way a friend gets angry when something wrong or bad is done to a friend.

Anyways, enough for now. I'll post more soon as I continue to work through these thoughts.

Thanks for reading

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

I thought I'd write a brief review of Don Miller's "Searching for God Knows What" to supplement my brief review over at Amazon. In short, this book can be thought of as Miller's apologetic for a relational faith. What's an apologetic? Webster's defines it as a defense by speech or writing whereas the Greek roots of the word mean literally to "speak away from". To me an apologetic is an explain of why someone holds to an opinion or point of view. In "Searching", Don calls out the recent evangelical tendency to treat God and the Bible like some sort of formulaic, self-help book designed to get us into heaven. Instead, he calls us to read Scripture from a relational perspective and thus approach God relationally rather than transactionally.

One of the big metaphors used in the book is that of the "Lifeboat Game." You remember it from school; it was the game where you were in a lifeboat with a certain number of people and the lifeboat couldn't keep that many alive so you had to decide who got to stay and who had to die. Miller contends that we spend a lot of time and energy playing this sort of game in the brokenness of our lives and in the practice of our faith. He goes on to convincingly argue that such a perspective robs us of our humanity and cheapens the faith that we claim to live by. In a sense, the Lifeboat Mentality is exactly the same as Stephan Covey's explanation of "scarcity mentality" where people behave in terms of only their self-interest when they think resources are limited. If we think that God's grace is somehow limited then we have to go around showing that we have more value in His eyes than someone else or some other group.

The book is definitely written from Miller's own evolving theological perspective which I believe makes the book simultaneously both more authentic and more difficult to swallow. In places he states academic discourse as fact and fails to acknowledge the diversity of opinion and practice in things ranging from the authorship of Genesis to the nature of the sacraments (and their number). While I disagree with the perspective from which these statements flow (more or less from a fairly conservative, protestant, reformed perspective), what I found truly beautiful is that the tenor of the writing is much more strongly influenced by the mystical traditions of the Christian faith. Miller doesn't try to explain exactly who it all works but instead appeals to a spiritual response to the inherent truth of what he is writing.

For me, this book will be set beside C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity as an explanation of the Christian faith. Where Lewis is more rational in his discussion, Miller appeals to the desire we all have to be in relationship with the God who made us in both His likelness and image. I really strongly recommend this book to all those who find Christianity appealing but wish there were other voices besides the Christian right in the conversation.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Monday, November 06, 2006

No, this isn't some sort of ghoulish device designed to torture the poor sufferers of frequent urination syndrome or something like that.

It's our new puppy.

We have a new puppy around the house because a student found him on the side of the road up near Brooks and didn't know what to do with him. It turns out that we've been thinking of getting a pair of puppies so we said that we'd watch him for a couple of days until she could decide whether she could taking him home and add him to her "pack." That didn't work out so Murray (that's what we named him...after Murray Gell-Mann...just like Maxwell is named after James Clerk Maxwell and Cooper's named after Leon Cooper...so, we're geeks, what can we say) is back at our place. He's a great puppy. He's sweet and playful and smart. After just a couple of days he's already beginning to figure out some of the house routines.

The only problem is that he's a "pee machine". I've never seen a dog pee like this before. He likes to drink all the time and then he likes to pee all the time. We'll take him out and he'll pee two or three times and then be all rompery. Bring him in and within five minutes he's peed on the floor. Take him out and he pees again and then we do it again. The only way to turn off the faucet is to keep him from drinking but that makes him cry some. We're still working it out. To keep him from peeing all over the room when we're sleeping we crate him and he cries and barks because he wants to be out with the rest of us.

As I get older I find that I have less energy for puppies. They're great and fun and all but boy do they wear me out. Our two older dogs aren't sure how Murray's going to fit into the pack and we don't know how they'll work it out. I expect that given a few days they'll sort things out. If we decide to keep Murray we'll likely get another pup so that he has a playmate and won't bug the two goldens as much. Max is pretty patient and tolerant of him (expect when there's a toy or ball and its possession involved) but Cooper's not so sure. Murray likes to lick the big dogs on the nose but they don't like it too much. He wants to play with them so bad that he can't stand it and they aren't too sure they want to have anything to do with the little whirlwind tearing around the room. Max did teach Murray how roll over on his back and squirm around to get his belly scratched. He even taught him how to make noises which Murray thinks is about as much fun as anything he can imagine.

So anyways, the commercial about the terror of the puppy with a full bladder may be stupid (what the heck is 4-D cleaning power anyways...I'm sure Einstein didn't have industrial strength cleansers as part of the electromagnetic tensor) but we may be investing in gallons of the product before he's all grown up.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Well, in less than a week we American will head to the polls and send a new Congress to Washington and, here in Georgia, elect a Governor. On the national level, the mid-term elections are about a referendum about the present administration's policies and to judge the buzz, things look tight. Actually, they should look this tight. With the approval ratings of both Congress and the adminstration hovering just about the pathetic levels, one would think that the American people would go on one of their "throw the bums out" binges. You're not really seeing that, which I find surprising and troubling all at the same time.

Why aren't we clamouring to send our representatives (who we seem to fairly universally agree are doing a terrible job running the country) packing? One factor is the level of negative campaigning. Everyone paints everyone else as incompetent, corrupt, power hungry evildoers who are hell bent on destroying America and all it stands for. The level of this campaigning has grown so idiodic that most people view the political ads the same way they view the laundry detergent commercials that claim their soap is better than everyone else's. No one really belives the specifics. Just like everyone knows that laundry soap cleans their clothes and that the claims of the advertizers aren't really more true for one soap than another so too do the voters think that most politicians are vaguely dirty and will use their political office for personal gain at some level. Claims that this guy's worse than that guy are pretty much ignored. The other problem is that a lot of people have decided that parties are affiliated with movements. Evangelical Christians will vote Rebuplican because they've identified that party with their faith (incorrectly I feel...but that's for later). Labor Unions will vote for Democrats for basically the same reasons. It doesn't matter that Republicans have done nothing about issues like abortion and Democrats have been some of the biggest supporters of free trade agreements.

To me, I don't really care much. The big issue right now is the War in Iraq and, like I've said many times, I think it's the wrong issue. What we've learned in the last six years is that war is the worst way to solve a problem. I'll bet that a lot of Americans wish we'd listened when Hans Blix said that there weren't a lot of weapons of mass destruction and that sanctions should be given time to work. I'll bet the Iraqi people really wish we had listened. I support the troops and the near impossible situation they are in (how'd you like to have a ringside seat for a civil war Johnny???) but I don't support the policy (I know that's hard to imagine for some: supporting the troops without supporting the policy). We spend $2 billion a week in Iraq. That's more than twice as much as we spend on cancer research in a year and I'll bet cancer research is a lot more important to a lot more Americans than what we did in Iraq last week. But like I said, that's not the big issue to me.

The big issue is to balance the budget. You want to go to war? OK, great. But it's got to cost you something besides someone else's life. If we're going to spend $2 billion fighting terrorism then let's do that. But we should pay our bills as we go. Cut $100 billion out of the budget in other places. Cut seniors benefits. Cut law enforcement grants. Cut transportation funding. Want to give another tax cut or make the ones we have no permanent? OK, show me where you're going to slash that money from the budget. Cut soldier's salaries? Do less to perserve the historical things of this nation? I don't care so much what a candidate's priorities are as long as he or she lays them out for me to consider and he or she promises to work towards balancing the budget in one year. For me, if you do that right now then you get my vote. If you make that you're number one issue and I'll get out and work your campaign. To me this is why it blows my mind that the Evangelicals think the Republicans are their friends. In my expereince, conservative Christians have a strong desire to be fiscally responsible and yet they continue to vote for a party that has betayed that ideal over and over again in the last six years. The last President to balance the budget was a Democrat and a reviled one at that. Congress had a lot to do with that but somehow that's all changed.

I've said it before and I'll say it again to anyone who will listen. If you're a Presidential candidate for the 2008 election and you promise to make balancing the budget your number 1 priority not only will you get my vote but I'll work for your campaign to get you elected. To me, all the rest is window dressing. If we don't get the deficit erased and start paying back the debt, then this country is headed for a financial crisis of unprecidented proportions.

So there it is.

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Monday, October 30, 2006

It was an interesting weekend around these parts for mostly mundane reasons (if that makes any sense). The weather for the weekend got me into one of those contemplative moods and so I thought I'd try to chronicle my thoughts in some fashion.

Friday was the rain event we've been waiting for for about 3 months. It started raining Thursday night and rained almost all the way through Friday, slowly building in intensity until the cold front that had been plowing through the tropical moisture got here. When that happened, the rain got really heavy for about 45 minutes and then everything sort of tapered off with just an occasional cloud burst for the rest of the evening. After the front passed though the wind picked up and on Saturday morning we were treated to one of those days that reminds you that the world is dying at this time of year.

For most of the morning the sky looked like tattered rags being blown across the sky at varying speeds like they were in a race dictated by the whims of the four winds. The gusts tugged the dying leaves reluctantly from the trees and sent them cartwheeling down the street. It really was weather fitting for Hallowe'en.

I wonder if Hallowe'en happens now because it is now that the world really looks like it's dying. In a lot of places the leaves have changed and are being dropped and the reminders that all things must die (even though they actually don't-at least most of them) can be seen everywhere. The trees have flamed-up and are now headed towards their long hibernation wherein they look like skeletons rooted in place while reaching towards the sky. The birds are moving and all the butterflies and bees and the rest are long gone along with the fitful activity and purposeful buzzing. More often now, there is silence broken only by wind and the rustle of the dead leaves.

I wonder if Hallowe'en is so powerful in our psyches because we fear dying a lot more than we fear death. For most, death is either a good place to be or nothing at all but dying, that's another story. Maybe that's why demons and ghosts and ghouls and such are so frightening to us deep down. They aren't dead but they aren't alive either. They seem to be in a constant state of dying and slow decay. There is never any rest for the pain and sorrow and heaviness of existence nor is there any joy or contentment. Just existence in that perpetual state of Fall becoming Winter.

As Saturday wore on the tattered sky showed through some blue and then cleared but the wind kept on through the weekend until today it finally blew itself out. As such, all my riding was indoors on a trainer or exercise bike. Today, which promises to be a nearly perfect day, holds almost no time for riding so I will likely enjoy it in a more pedestrian fashion. Still, if the weather can hold for a bit longer this week, I should get a couple of good rides in even with the Sun going down so much earlier. At least my morning commute in to work can now be done daylight which reduces the risk of getting hit by an unsuspecting motorist.

I have this urge to really unplug; to live by the cycle of the natural light given. I've been reading a new book, "Acquainted with the Night" that talks about night and how we have changed it and I think I miss it. I wish there was true night sometimes. A darkness that forced us to settle down and rest and be more still than we are. Over the weekend, as the weather was settling itself out, I spent a lot of time reading by candlelight and found it very restful. Yet as the week begins, I realize that I'll have little opportunity for that kind of rest. I understand that our ability to carry and create light is a good thing but there are those times...

Anyways, thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Hello there. How's it going? I thought I'd write a post here. I'm not exactly sure why but I have this need to ramble on a bit about a few things that have been bouncing around in my head the last few days.

I've been thinking a lot about the whole God/faith/religion thing a lot lately. Probably that's tied to the fact that I'm back in the gym for my early training workouts which means I spend out 45 minutes on an exercise bike and I read while I'm spinning along. I just finished "Practitioners: Voices Within the Emerging Church" and I'm now reading Don Miller's latest book, "Searching for God knows what." Along with these I've been reading a really challenging book on prayer from the Orthodox (OC)tradition. The Miller book is really stretching me right now. It's amazing how his writing speaks to me. "Blue Like Jazz" was one of those books that I'll probably read every year for a while. To me it seems like Miller's a postmodern Augustine in that he speaks to his reader from within his relationship to God which has been a lot of places. I feel like that. I've always felt like I've been outside the evangelical faith movement even while I was a part of it. I felt like the evangelical god was too small for the God I had met while wandering through the forests of Oregon. Miller's experience is similar and it really helps me to know that I'm not some sort of freak or weirdo. I don't understand all these people who can just sit in a pew and hear some preacher talk about how Christ came so that we could have a bunch of "self-help" ideas.

The OC prayer book has convinced me though that while I see God as so much more than what you hear from so many bad preachers and narrow churches I am nowhere near really accessing that. I understand that God is very relational and not so transactional but I don't seem to be very good at being in that relationship. I seem to be a better husband than I am a Christian. I communicate with my wife a lot more regularly than I do with God. There was a chapter in "Practioners" that talk about a movement in the UK called 24/7 Prayer and all of the sudden I long to be in that kind of community. I want to be able to exist in the "place"/community where I can just pray and not have to organize it all. Reading the book on prayer from the OC tradition I have realized just how shallow my prayer life really is and I long for a lot more. The question is how to carve it out of a busy life. I think that as I finish up some of the commitments I have I'll not replace them and spend that time trying to grow a prayer life.

In something that probably relates, has anyone noticed how bad TV sucks? I've been watching more TV lately to see what's on (and because I've gotten a little too lazy) and so much of what everyone says is good TV really stinks. I watched Studio 60 and saw nothing compelling. It looked like a show by boomers, about boomers in the entertainment industry. Sort of a West Wing meets SNL sort of thing. The story was just banal (I only watched to see Sting play the lute-another boomer thing I suspect) and entirely generationally self-centered. The acting on TV has just gotten terrible (maybe it always was and I'm just now beginning to realize it). And the comnercials...who pays these people who make up the ads? For most of Tuesday night I kept looking at my wife after a commercial and asking, "Was that as stupid as I thought?" She didn't disagree with me once.

I've started back into training. Time in the gym and shorter base mile rides right now. For some reason I feel like this is so much a better use of my time than spending time on anything in pop culture and yet I struggle a bit to get on the bike and actually do it. Still, I like how I feel right now and I'm looking forward to next season. I enjoy going down into the gym and lifting a bit because it's different than just spinning my wheels and I like the feeling of getting rebalanced. I have a yoga/Pilates balance-ball workout I like to do during the base miles period of training. I pulled it out and did it last week and was surprised how little coordination and strength I had on any part of the workout that wasn't directly related to an one-the-bike movement. Tells me that I'm way out of balance nuerologically. Lifting and the yoga stuff should get that sorted out.

Well, I'll stop now before this gets any longer and more boring and more rambling and...well, you get the picture.

Thanks for reading and peace.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, October 13, 2006

As the weekend comes around I thought I'd share a little find with my readers...all three of you. A couple of weeks ago the lovely wife and I were down Macon way to do some general shopping. I decided that I wanted to stop by a package store known for carrying an occasionally good supply of microbrewed nectar to see if I could score some Sam Adams Oktoberfest. Little did I know that much, much more theological things awaited my inspection.

As I looked through the selection I was pleasantly surprised to see a large variety of little known ales and lagers from smaller breweries far and wide. So excited was I that I missed entirely the Sam Adams seasonal I had come looking for. I had looked over most of the stock and even the nice selection of hard ciders they carried when my eye wandered across a couple of six-packs at the bottom of the cooler. I couldn't really believe what I was seeing. The beers were called He'Brew: The Chosen Beer. One was a dark, brown ale (my favorite variety of ale) called "Messiah Bold" while the other was "Genesis Ale". I had to have the darker of the two varieties and as you can see from the picture, it is in excellent humor. After having a few, I can report that they are also in excellent taste.

So, if you are of age and willing to try something humorous and tasty, I recommend these. And, yes, they are Kosher.

L'Chaim!

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

I hope that you can appreciate the sublime irony of this post. I found the following article out at CNN and thought I'd share. If you'd like to get together for a soda sometime or to turn a pedal in fellowship, just drop me an email...

Facing the Faceless

At least we don't have too many laptops at our Wednesday night CoffeeHouse.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Sunday, October 08, 2006

As I enjoy our Fall Break I thought I'd say a few words about my classes as Mid-terms have come and gone.

The class that is most surprising to me is my physical science class. For the last three semesters I have had classes that have really struggled with the material. The weird thing is that I've been teaching using my present syllabus for about six semesters. Previously I had taught the course using a real world issues/solutions approach where the material revolved around considering three or four real world issues (such as global warming and colonization of Mars) and understanding the issues that are involved in finding those solutions. The experience was pretty uneven with the really good students getting a lot out of the class but also doing a lot of the work for the weaker students. So I went to a model based curriculum where we study the content through looking at the modeling process in the context of the scientific method. For the first year the students did really well with the average in the class being about an 80. Since then things have been in a slide with this year's group being the most underachieving. That's not to say that there are good students in the class; there are. It's just that there are some students who, even though this is their second year in college and who have failed classes before, still haven't figured out this isn't high school. Some students are failing the class badly and didn't withdraw by the last day to do that without taking the WF (same as an F in terms of GPA). Others are getting by with a low C/high D on basic intelligence but just don't want to work. Overhearing the conversations in class many of the students put about three times more time into their social lives than they do their academic lives. These students want to be educators. It almost makes me glad I don't have kids.

On the positive side, my engineering physics class looks pretty darn solid in a lot of ways. I've got a good group of students who seem to be truly interested in the material. My boss came in to review me during this class and they made me look great. They were engaged, they asked excellent questions and they were obviously prepared for class so I looked like the greatest teacher ever. I can honestly say I look forward to teaching this group every day. Next week is going to be applications of Newton's 2nd Law which is real nuts and bolts physics. Once we get done with this we go into the really elegant stuff of the two conservation laws but this is really where the foundation for the rest of the year gets laid. From what I'm seeing right now, I'm very, very encouraged.

The last two days have been pretty close to perfect as far as vacation days go. I've enjoyed some college football (specifically my Gators beating LSU) and an occasional strategcally placed nap. The weather Saturday was so perfect that I was both disappointed and relieved that I had taken the bike to the shop for the annual off-season tune-up. Instead of riding I lounged around in the backyard doing some reading and then catching up with my brother who was traveling back home from a trip to Ireland (yeah, some guys have it tough) and had some time to kill in New York. The big thing has been to get some rest and some re-creation so I've been reading about prayer and studying the Gospel of John. Tomorrow we have a trip to a nearby state park planned with the dogs for a little hiking and a picnic before I do my Tech College teaching gig.

Thanks for reading and I hope your week is as good as my weekend has been.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, October 06, 2006

Election season is here. How can I tell? The first sign for me is the increasing number of stupid comments being made by incumbants of the US House of Representatives at kiss and shake gatherings. Wisconsin Representative Frank Lasee suggested that it should be at least legal and maybe mandatory for teachers to carry a little heat in the classroom.

I'll let that sink in for a few minutes.

This guy's a Republican who, if he follows the general trends of his party, thinks most teachers are basically incompetent to teach someone else's children (his are probably in private school somewhere) and yet he thinks we should put loaded firearms in their hands? Don't get me wrong. I think the recent spate of school shootings deplorable but maybe this guy should work on child porn, parenting skills and violence on TV and videogames issues instead of turning algebra class into "High Noon" in Tombstone.

The next sign is the increasing font size found on the Drudge Report. At this rate, by the time election day rolls around Matt Drudge will have one HUGE word for you to click on. Today's headline was about Nanci Pelosi and a comment she made about needing a woman to clean House. Of course, Drudge focused on the inflammatory line but if the substance of her comments is considered there's a lot to recommend them...at least to me. She wants to eliminate the federal deficit (not the debt) which I'm all about. I've been calling for that for the last five years. Want to run a war? Do it but then tell the American people they have to give up something to fund the troops. I love the troop support but what we as a nation are doing is supporting them by loading the young men and women that are fighting on our behalf with a load of debt that they'll spend the rest of their lives paying off. You want to spend $2 bllion a day (the cost of the war) then you gotta cut $2 billion a day out of people's art funding and scholarship money and local police force enhancement grants. On the flip side, if you want to cover every child in the nation with some sort of health care plan then you've got steal that money from another program or you have to raise taxes. I have to balance my budget, our students at Gordon have to pay their bill in full before we allow them to take classes and I think the Federal Gov't should adopt a pay as you go program. She also wants to enact legislation that breaks the link between lobyists and legislators. While I doubt that any legislation she might try to enact will work for very long (money always finds a way to power-it should be the Davies' First Law of Historical Action or something) it at least sends a message.

Anyways, here in Georgia, the Republican Governor is pimp slapping his electoral opponent and, in what may be one of the most amazing, audacious and effective political strategies I've ever seen, mananged to make a martyr out of the person his Democratic challenger beat in the primary after a long and viciously negative campaign. Sonny Purdue, in a single commerical, turned defeated candidate Kathy Cox into a victim of his opponent, Mark Taylor, and a martyr for his campaign. It's about as politcally brilliant a move as I've ever seen. Kind of slimy but politics usually is. The whole sausage metaphor really applies here of course.

Well, I've got a splitting headache so I'll sign off. Hopefully I'll have the post mid-term update sometime this weekend.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Mid-term is bearing down on my students like a runaway semi full of cargo. For some of my students, the semi is loaded with soft, fluffy pillows while for others it is filled with anvils. Big anvils. Big, hard, iron anvils like the ones Wile E. Coyote always seemed to be ordering from the Acme company to squash the Roadrunner with that always seems to boomerrang on him after he fell off the cliff into a batch of cacti and land on his head. These are the anvils in the semi driven by Agent Smith from the Matrix that is headed for some of my students. It's gonna leave a mark.

For my Physical Science class today the anvils come in the form of their mid-term exam. Things haven't really improved much since my last update on this class. One bright spot is two of my students actually came to my office with question indicating they had actually studied the material. There was great rejoicing. Still I expect this to be a massacre (which is more than decimation but less than annihilation...I used to have an instructor in grad school who referred to his tests as annihilation operators; he wasn't too far off in his description). Not enough studying for some students and too much studying at the last minute for others. I expect very few took my in-class advice to study some every day for the week before the test. That having been said, there will be those who are prepared and will do well.

My physics classes went through their first round of exams and they are now smaller. My good early section all made it through pretty unscathed. The interesting thing is that most have B's right now. My later section of algebra-based physics didn't fare so well and I'm now down to 11 out of the original 22 with a couple more that need to drop. The engineering physics class did well, which was to be expected. The biggest obstacle in that class is a bit of laziness where a student will ace one thing and then put the next off for too long and not have enough time to really nail down the ideas and so do poorly. That's something I'll have to fight to break over the course of the year.

I'm off the bike for the next few weeks. The season has finally just caught up with me and I can't go any more. I had hoped to make it through November but all the signs pointed to chronic overtraining so I'm taking 3-4 weeks off to let my body heal. Once I finish with that it'll be back to base training and light weight training to rebalance things before I start into the heavier work.

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Monday, October 02, 2006

As I write this the national news services are reporting the third school shooting in a week; two of which were by men specifically targetting girls. What's happening here? There seems to be no apparent pattern with one attack in Colorado at a fairly affluent suburban school and another at a rural, Amish one room schoolhouse. There's nothing that might tie these attacks together and we may just be looking at a statisically aberrant cluster. On the other hand, I've got to wonder how much of this is driven by the rise of violence in our society on TV and in Videogames. I'm not talking about the normal well-adjusted individual but more about the marginal member of society. Has the increased levels of violence seen begun to erode the boundaries of what is unthinkable in the minds of some? Hard to prove statisitically and so it's hard to counter some sort of First Amendment argument but one has to wonder.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Well, I'm back after the longest month in the history of history. I had hoped to update you on the semester at least once a week and instead I've been struggling to keep my head above water. It's not anything in particular, just a lot of little things: more meetings for Faculty Senate, meeting with students to plan activities and run student skills seminars, lots of early semester grading, etc. I can tell that things are going to slow down just a little bit over the next couple of weeks as a couple of commitments will be winding down and my class sizes will be starting to get a lot smaller.

The first four weeks of classes have been interesting. I have two classes I'm really happy with, one that's half and half and one that's pretty terrible. My engineering physics class is a joy to teach this semester. After a group last year that was less than committed to the level of work required of a student wanting to go to Georgia Tech (I had two good students and they only took the first semester of the course), this group is obviously committed. The other good class is a small group of allied health students taking physics early in the morning. They seems to be sharp and dedicated to doing well. The so-so class is my other physics class for allied health students. The problem is that I seem to have a bunch of preppie kids who think the course is some sort of vacation at Hilton Head or something. My best students seem to be those from other cultures right now. I have abobut four students who come to class dressed in the latest styles and then train-wreck any work I give them. One dude showed up smelling so strongly of alcohol that that I was tempted to tell him to go brush his teeth.

The terrible class is my physical science class. The class average is a 58 and I have 16 of the 29 students who are failing the class. They won't read the material I line out for them, they won't turn wortk in on time and they won't participate actively in the class. The really scary thing is that a lot of these students want to be elementary school teachers. It blows my mind. If they can't get their work in to me on time, what makes them think they'll get their lesson plans and individualized educatioin plans done for their kids when they're teachers.

The physics classes get their first exams this next week. That should clear out the wanna-bes and the brainless preppies. I'm not sure how to thin out the physical science class. The absence policy might do it. I give them three free misses and then each one after that costs them 3% of their final grade. I've already got five students in the penalty phase and a couple more just about ready to start losing ground. My hope is that when they hit about 9 or 10% they'll walk away and withdraw.

Once things thin out the grading load will drop off pretty significantly and the meeting thing should ease up once we finish our reaffirmation process later this month. Hopefully that'll give me more time to ride (that's been pretty spotty of late) and more time to read some of the books I got for my birthday.

Hopefully, I'll update again pretty soon. Thanks for stopping by.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Sunday, August 13, 2006

OK readers, a simple question for you to weigh in on...

What is the capital of...oops, no...different bit.

Actually, what, in your humble opinion, is the most transcendant piece of rock guitar music ever created? What semi-lengthy bit of playing carries you beyond the pale of this world to a place where all things soar?

Tell me for I must know and I must hear.

You have your mission.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Saturday, August 12, 2006

Well, the pre-week is over and the semester is about to begin. In a lot of ways, this week was a lot like a stage race prologue in that it has set the themes and served to focus the participants on the task at hand. Monday was meeting day. Lots of meetings. We started off with a joint faculty/staff meeting that was pretty insightful. usually, these things are where service pins and bland announcements are made but something must have gotten into the President's mind because he was full of news and plans and explanations and that sort of thing. Very newsy. We undergo "reaffirmation of our accreditation" this year so there was a good bit of discussion about that as well which is always interesting because there's this underlying tension caused by the small amount of uncertainty of passing the process. It's very, very unlikely that we won't get reaffirmed but the very thought that someone can come in and tell us we're not doing our jobs is enough to send a lot of academics to grumbling like curmudgeons without their morning coffee. After that was a faculty meeting that was fairly innocuous and a division meeting where we elect faculty reps to the various committees on campus and the Division Chair runs through a list of do's and don'ts. Since all of our division's faculty returned this year that went pretty smoothly.

Tuesday through Thursday were new student oreintation and registration days. I had another meeting or two and each day I had to give the "They're not in college anymore" talk to the parents in the morning. Afternoons were given over to trying to get schedules for students with more excuses than preparation. We did have a few students who looked to be fairly sharp that were at the tail end of the process for various reasons. The thing that struck me this year about all this is how many of the students didn't seem to have any traction in getting things figured out. We call this "Academic Literacy" and it's a big part fo our new Quality Enhancement Plan that we need to have for reaffirmation. I was talking with the wife at lunch one day and she said something that really struck me. She works at the local K-12 district doing the information system things that need to be done for students to go to school in today's information age. She told me that one young lady had had her schedule changed three times in a week. This led to a discussion about the registration process in high school and I learned that students write down what courses they'd like to take and a schedule sort of magically appears in the weeks (or in the case of this year, months) that follow. The student really has no idea how any of that happens. The high school does this because one of the big accountability measurements is academic progress/graduation rate and they're not about to leave that to a 14-18 year old (poor numbers have funding consequences).

When the student gets to us we expect them to have some sort of clue as to how the college environment works but given the high school environment it is very unlikely that many of them will really have much to go on. We assume that they know the difference between classes, courses and sections as well as the difference between their instructor, advisor and counselor; all of which have somewhat different definitions than they did in high school. It's gotten me wondering what other assumptions we make at the college level that might have been valid 20 years ago when there wasn't No Child Left Behind, Adequate Yearly Progress and Social Promotion but aren't so valid now. My wife used the analogy of the jungle to describe this. There is a law in the jungle of "Higher Education" and all of us professor types learned it through survival of the fittest and the sharpest. Most of us had a head start from strong college-prep programs in high school that were really just for the top students in the school. We know the laws and we understand them. The problem is that when you drop the city-boy into the jungle, there's a good chance that he'll end up as food. Not because he isn't sharp enough or strong enough to make it, he just doesn't know to avoid the snake with the spinning, hypnotic eyes. So, I think I'm going to spend a lot of time this year trying to figure out OUR assumptions (I have a pretty good idea of what the student's assumptions are) and see if maybe I can add something to the discussions when it comes to our QEP.

The final day, Friday, was another faculty meeting where we've taken up the thorny issue that our pre site visit evaluation brought up-Area C. Here in Georgia we have a common "Core" curriculum that all 35 public institutions have agreed to follow. I think it's very cool because transfer is really easy. One of the areas in the Core is Area C-Humanities. The student takes two classes that along with a year of english comp is supposed to make up a student's general education exposure to the areas of the humanities. Our present Area C allows a student to select from a fairly broad list of courses including literature, the various appreciations, philosophy, language and speech. The accreditation agency pointed out that a student could take only what they refer to as "skills" courses such as public speaking and introductory langauge courses to satisfy the requirements and thus not have to take any actually humanities courses. while I don't like it much, I have to agree with them. So the discussion has begun on how to fix this problem. The question is whether or not we are going to require that the students take one literature course. I'd like to see something broader that includes philosophy and the appreciations but I have a feeling that the Humanities Division will push for he lit only option. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I think I have a lot of listening to do to understand the issues.

This weekend will be spent finishing up some planning as well as lab rewrites as we get ready for Monday and the new class of 2006. I'll see mostly sophomores that day but many of them still need to be taught a little bit about college lavel work and my physics classes will likely be the place where that will happen.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Sunday, August 06, 2006

So, this was the last weekend of complete freedom before the pre-events for the semester begins (more on that later) and as is my custom, I decided to go out with a big ride. For me that meant throwing down a buck five through the roads of North Central Georgia on another killer heat day. I got out by 8 am and chose to go southwest through Thomaston down to Talbotton, the first home of Georgia’s Supreme Court which wasn’t actually established until 1845 (that’s why you read this…interesting, little known facts thrown in for no clearly established reason). I got to ride on my most favoritely named road, “Po’ Biddy Road” which offers a somewhat easier passage over the Potato Creek and Flint River. My usual route over those two waterways usually involves much climbing through the trailouts of the Appalachian Range. Today, I wanted something a bit easier and less trafficked. Talbotton is a place with a lot of history but not much is happening there now. It’s quite sad really to see a once proud town with it’s grand Southern courthouse reduced to little more than an afterthought and mired in poverty. From there I turned north and headed through Woodland towards Manchester (are you following this on Google Maps?) and the Pine Mountain ridgeline. This is the place to go if you want real climbing intervals around here. There are 10% grades that are a couple of miles long but I had planned to avoid those as I was riding alone on a hot day. Still you’ve got to climb the ridgeline to come from the south to go to the north and Manchester was a good, low place to do it.

I guess the climbing bug bit me though as I made my way up the ridge because I made a dumb decision. I had planned to ride into one of my favorite places in Georgia, Warm Springs, to refill my bottles and take a breather. As I got near the top of the ridge there was a sign that said Hwy. 190 turn left. Now I know Ga 190 as the road that runs through Franklin D Roosevelt State Park. I’ve ridden the western portion of the highway many times on climbing expeditions. This was the eastern end of the highway and for some odd reason I decided it would be cool to do that half so I could say I had ridden the whole thing. Very bad idea. As hard as the climbing on the western side is the east end is worse. The climbs aren’t as long maybe but they’re a bunch steeper. My easiest gear was a 42/23 instead of the normal 42/25 or 39/25 I usually ride through the park so that made things just that much worse. I suffered up the climbs just as the heat was beginning to build. The long, fast decent into Warm Springs from the highest point of the ridge was little comfort to my cooked legs. I do love the descent. It’s one of those where there’s a big truck bailout above the town right next to the turn off to the entrance to FDR’s Little White House (there’s another thing you could Google, if you were so inclined). There are a couple of sections but the screamer bit is about two miles long at 10% or so and you can easily hit 45 mph coasting. That’s usually what I do since I never feel very confident trying to pedal while going that fast as I end up spinning my legs out.

I took the break in Warm Springs at the 100 km/62 mile mark and I’m sure the young Indian-American girl who waited on me was a bit non-plussed when I came into the BP. She tried her best to be friendly and non-chalant but I’m guessing she doesn’t see too many guys waddling around in cycling shoes (I use Look pedals so they have cleats that stick way down) and garishly colored lyrca and spandex. I was wearing my new Team Cycling Max kit with its greens and blues and while not as loud as my old Aaron’s Corporate Furnishings kit’s color scheme, the patterning on the jersey is pretty wild. I got a lot of looks from the people pulling into the gas station on their way to church too. One lady, as is common, kept trying to look at my while also trying to conduct her business with the girl inside the food mart. Good times.

Anyways, the rest of the ride was uneventful other that just trying to survive to the end. The crushing journey on 190 had really fried my legs and finishing the ride was difficult into a slight headwind that was really annoying after 30 miles. To finish, I had to resort to the old Mountain Dew trick at mile ninety. It worked; cooling my body, providing some quickly digestible sugars (more digestible I guess than the Gatorade I had bought in Warm Springs) and, most importantly, a huge boost of caffeine which got me going and kept me going the last fifteen miles or so. The rest of the day has been spent resting and watching sporting events. How about that Tiger Woods? Eleven majors and fifty PGA wins before his thirty-first birthday. Looking at him next to a couple of other golfers over the last couple of days really shows how much bigger and more powerful he is. Tonight, I’ll watch a little of the Hall of Fame pre-season game to see the Raiders. It doesn’t matter much but I like the idea of seeing Art Shell coach on the day after John Madden is inducted. Makes me wish for the old glory days when I would watch every game and root for the silver and black before anyone ever thought of the freakshow stuff. I was a kid in the seventies and grew up hating the Steelers and the “Immaculate Reception”. Newer Raiders fans talk about Tom Brady’s fumble (yes, it was a fumble, don’t argue with me about this) but I remember that game in 1972. Yes, I was only six but I remember it; that and the Steelers always beating the Raiders in the AFC Championship Game. Not that I’m bitter.

Tomorrow starts the time back at the job. I think I’m going to write a blog entry once a week (at least) about the semester like it’s a stage race with 16 stages and a prologue. Tomorrow, the prologue starts with us faculty coming back and going to various and sundry meetings and registering those students who waited until the very last minute to try and get a few classes. As Faculty Senate Chair-Elect, I’ll have a few more meetings than in years past. I’ll also try to put on the finishing touches for my class materials for the first few weeks and avoid the idea of returning to the classroom. It’ll be interesting this year as the freshman class had to pass a standardized test to graduate. I’ll be interested to see if the frosh class does better than the last couple have. I'll keep you posted about the standings, the performances (good and bad) as well as any doping scandals (I'm sure we'll have a few of those). So that I don't get Dooced I'll make sure that I keep the derogatory stuff to a minimum and completely anonymous.

Well, until next time, thanks for reading and keep the rubber side down.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, July 28, 2006

Sorry about my extended absence from the blogosphere but I decided to unplug for a bit. The combination of coming to the end of a hard training block, the Tour's conclusion and the wrapping up of Summer semester has left me in a sort of downish kind of state; a bit of the summer doldrums. I was pumped a bit by Floyd's win and my own ability to lay down a good training set but I needed a break. One thing I had going for me was a psuedo-vacation planned for next week. The lovely wife had a set of classes up in north Atlanta and I was going to go and hibernate and goof off and ride my bike in the mountains.

Over the week, this has all unraveled. First is Floyd testing positive (which if you haven't seen or heard about merans you're even more unplugged than me). I'm sick about it. I hope that the B sample comes back negative but even Floyd doesn't expect that. He's going to try and prove his innocence and I'll give him a chance but the whole affair has completely shaken my belief in professional cycling and it's fairness. There are voices that say that they all dope and I'm beginning to really believe them. I wonder if all the Americans in Girona have their "connections" and maybe that was disrupted. Who knows. I don't even want to think about it anymore. If I could get ahold of the pros I might just bang a few heads together and drag them to a Georgia Cup race where a bunch of us poor slobs are grinding it out in 100 degree heat for little more than some Applebee's gift certificates and some bragging rights and campfire stories. I'd show them what they are betraying. It's not their sport. It's ours and they are dragging it down into the slime of big money desperation and loathing. I want Floyd and Basso and Ullrich and all the others to look in the eyes of some Master's class rider who's just spent three hours out dying on the tarmac of a Georgia steambath and see the love he has for the sport and the honor he finds in the competition. Maybe these guys are too far gone in their delusion to see it but they were supposed to be our heroes and they have failed us. They have betrayed the beauty of our sport if they have cheated when we have struggled through the pain and suffering to cross a finish line with few sponsors and only wives and relativves cheering us on. The punishment for this type of cheating should be more than a ban from the sport but to have to attend local racing events and to drive the wheel trucks and hand water up to the riders in the feed zones and to stand in the heat keeping an intersection clear. They should have to see the beauty of the competition in it's pure form and understand what they have really sullied. Tyler should have to spend the rest of his life watching others do what he once did but then took for granted. And if they all do it then we'd have a lot more volunteers. Let's throw out the teams and the multimillion dollar contracts and let the beauty be found in the grassroots racing found in office park criteriums, backroad road races and industrial tract time trials.

OK, enough of that.

The other bummer is that my wife's class got rescheduled. She doesn't have any vacation right now so we're stuck here at home for the next week and I'm bummed. Getting out of Dodge would have been nice for a few days. Oh well, I'll try to enjoy what I can here and save up my dollars for a Columbus Day trip or something.

I'll try to write more soon but until then, have a great weekend.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, July 21, 2006

Well, I've had a little more than 24 hours to absorb and process Floyd's most excellent adventure. I've waited to post to really get my head around what he did on stage 17 of the tour. I struggled to try to comprehend it even as I celebrated his phoenix-like rise from the ashes of his previous defeat.

I remember a race a couple years back when another guy and I took off from the first click. It was a pretty flat course with just a couple of climbs. He rolled off and I decided that I'd go because I knew a lot of the guys were a lot stronger than I was. I figured a few others might bridge up and we'd make a race of it. We stayed clear for 30 miles before a strong group made it up to us and I managed to hang with them for another 30 before my legs blew and I ended up finishing seventh. It was a cool feeling being in the break and taking the KoM points in the race. It was cool that the other guy in the original break (a Cat 2 master's racer) called me a super strong rider and I felt great even though I didn't win. I've always tried to race that way. Sure I'd like to win but more than that I always want to make it a real race where everyone haas to work and suffer and give what they have. I'm not the kind of guy who likes to sit in and wait for the field sprint or try to make the final climb and then do something. I always want to force the pace and make the selection; even when it's not in my best interest to do so. To me, it honors the competition.

So, in a way I really understand what Floyd was doing. Win or lose, he was going to make the race and force a selection. If he wasn't going to win the race, he was going to have a hand in deciding who did. I really admire that. I see a lot of racers who race for a pack finish when they know they can't sprint worth a damn just so that they can say they didn't get dropped. I'd rather blow up a race and get tailed off the back than sit in. I think that's been Levi's mentality this year as well. What's so amazing is that Floyd's huge gamble paid off. It never would have worked in a one-day race or a week long stage race but he knew the other guys were tired. He gambled that they couldn't keep up the pace he wanted to set and that they'd let him go. They gambled that he'd still be tired from the previous day. He won, they lost. I remember how cooked I felt at the end of my 60 mile breakaway effort and how I limped in for my finish. I remember what it felt like when my strength left me and I still had 20 miles of rollers to get through on a 95 degree day. I remember the sheer exhaustion and fatigue I felt in the final seven miles whent he road just went up and down constantly and I was caught and dropped by two guys to put an end to my hopes for a top five finish. To tell you the truth though, I remember how alive I felt after I got off the bike and the other guys stopped by to tell me how impressed they were by my effort and my courage. Half the field didn't even finish and I had not just survived but had made the race. I even got mentioned in a couple of the on-line team journals posted by riders in the race. Of course, no one knew my name, but there was admiration for "the guy in the New Zealand Standard jersey".

Watching Floyd power through the finish line with a fist pump that reminded me of another epic ride in the Alps inspired me. As I was cooling down from a hard intervals ride on the rollers I was reminded of why I suffer and why I toil. His anger and triumph and overcoming his failure of the day before reminded me what was good about sport and what was good about cycling. For a few hours on Thursday morning I didn't think about doping or Jan Ullrich and his contract with T-Mobile or the fall of Discovery or anything like that. I thought about the power of the human spirit and the strength of the human will to overcome the obstacles of mountains and heat and yesterday's disappointments. I thought about the searing heat of Floyd's passion to win a race and how all of the rest of the world melted before it.

I wish I could bottle that somehow.

I met with a student who is trying to decide whether to come back to school yesterday. He's a good kid with a good heart who should be able to do well at college. He has the brains and the ability but he has no passion. He doesn't really, deeply desire anything and so school has been a disappointment for him and he wonders what he should do. How do you teach that kind of passion? He doesn't need to be Floyd or Lance or Dave Zabriskie who've come back from more crashes and setbacks than I have or can even imagine to reach the highest places in their sport. He just needs a little bit of the passion that brought them back right now. How do I take that passion and get him to have it? He knows my life and sees my passion for cycling and for my faith and for my profession and for my wife but they are things that reside in some other world for him. He's come and watched me race and seen me push through broken bones. He's eaten in my home and listened to me talk about our God for more than two years and he is still just a passenger. I can see him standing there on the other side of some great divide with a quizzical look on his face wondering what's going on across the divide. He see it and wonders about it and had no comprehension of it beyond a vague understanding that there's something missing in his life. I wish I could teach this guy and others to stop sleepwalking through their lives and to live passionately; to take the risk of losing something in order to gain so much more.

I'd like to work this into my first day class introduction but I don't know how a group of postmodern, cynical students will respond. In a way, I don't care. I have to be authentic to who I am and to what I believe. But I wonder if this world and this culture has taught them to be dismissive of such passion because they've been hurt too many times in the past by those who were supposed to care and then abandoned them or left them by the side of the road on their way to somewhere else. On the other hand maybe they need to see passion realized in a way that is positive and affirming, loyal and sacrificial. I've always thought it is interesting that we call Christ's final days in Jerusalem His passion. His passion for His children led Him to the Cross and with it He redeemed the world. Too often I think I shy away from showing my passion because I don't want to go to the Cross myself. I don't want to die to my own needs so that I can live in such a way that my passion burns away the dross of the world around me. I struggle because I'm afraid of the hurt and rejection I might feel when really I need to live passionately with, in and for my God because He wants to live passionately with, in and for me. He will not reject my passion; even though my students might. He will understand it even when they don't.

Anyways, I've rambled on enough. Floyd was awesome and I'm inspired by him. I hope he wins tomorrow. For the first time I'm not being the mathematician, as they say in Europe, and trying to figure the odds of who's going to win tomorrow. I want Floyd to win. I want him to put a Lance-style beat down on the other guys. I want to see him step up to that podium tomorrow in the Yellow Jersey and show the world that passion is stronger than failure and disappointment and broken hips and all the rest. I want a picture of his fierceness to hang in my office and over my bike to remind me that I only get one shot at doing this.

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Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Today I find myself cranky and out of sorts. Much of this can be traced to a lack of sleep and a too ambitious training schedule. I'd like to blame it on a variety of stupid things I find in the world around me but, to be honest, those things are always there. They're just annoying me a lot more today. Still, that isn't going to stop me from a bit of ranting:

(1) The Middle East. We only care about the Middle East for two reasons: oil and Israel. We are responsible for the spot of bother we find in both right now. If we didn't buy the crap Syria and Iran suck out of the ground, Hezbollah would be a bunch of camel traders trying to fight a war with swords and Soviet era AK-47's. Instead, the Western world buys too much oil from corrupt regimes who then use it to buy advanced military hardware for their favorite extremists to hassle the very people who buy their oil with. The sooner we park our SUV's, turn down the AC/heating and decide to live lives that don't demand drive-thru crap food that's only vaguely distinguishable from the above mentioned sludge at 2 am, the sooner we can put these terror groups out of business. Terror is funded with oil. Turn off the faucet and the oil revenues dry up and the camel traders go back to killing each other over their wives. Rather than trying to control their culture to ensure our supply of oil, why don't we change our culture so that we can eliminate our need for them. George Bush may be a "Democracy Evangelist" but I think the better approach is to stop funding the despots with our desire for cheap, polluting energy. Listen to me, I sound like some sort of tree-hugger. I'm not as much as all that; I just hate that we may get dragged into a stupid mess because of our addiction to Detroit's need to make mioney by selling huge slabs of stupid metal.

(2) African-American Moms. Did my "They're Not in College Anymore" talk to the parents today. There were about five big African-American ladies who wanted to know how to get to look at their kids grades and harrass faculty members. Here I am teaching college skills classes and I don't see a single black kid and then I have to listen to "helicopter parents" try to figure out how to bully their kids into success. HELLO!!!! I can't tell you the number of times I've seen these young African-American men who come here and who don't give a damn about their education but are here because Big Momma has pushed them into it and who then yells at them for not doing well. The whole thing is a cultural and sociological disaster. I'm even more frustrated by my seeming inability to communicate with the culture in any meaningful way. I don't know what I'm missing but I know that I am missing something really fundamental to how all this works. How do I explain that if Jr. doesn't have a real work ethic by now, calling and getting his grades and abusing him over them isn't going to cause him to develop them? How do I explain that if he decides that there's more value in playing hoops, getting stoned or chasing girls for easy sex it's because there's been a real breakdown in how the parents see the way the world works? There's got to be a better way.

(3)The Weather: When did the cooling mechanism break? I got up this morning at 6 am to 75 gegree temps at 100% relative humidity and it's just gotten worse. I rode early a few days back and had sweat pouring down my face while traveling at 20 mph with a medium level heart rate. I made the mistake of riding outside in the heat again and my legs were toast yesterday. I should have known summer was going to be bad when winter was so mild. I'm sick of riding inside but there aren't any other options right now.

(4) The Tour. I'm just sick for Floyd who lost nine minutes today. I'm guessing (ok, more than guessing giving Martin Dugard's blog comments from Floyd's press conference) that Floyd has gotten the respitory infection that's been going around and that forced Boonen to abandon. I don't know if Floyd will abandon now but I won't be too surprised given the hip situation. The unpredictable nature of this Tour continues and I'm worried about what it says when the two top riders are Spanish. Will there be more doping charges? Will Fuentes come out and reveal who he's treated that's still riding in the peleton (a claim he's already made) and we'll end up with a result like last year's Vuelta where the winner is named after the race because of a failed drug test of drug allegations? I hope not. I like Sastre a lot. I've liked him for a long time (since 2002) and have wanted to see him do well. Carlos, I know you're not reading this but just in case, if you're a doper, please drop out of the Tour right now and admit it. Do it for us, your fans. Pereiro, the same goes for you too. If you were involved in the doping ring with the Hamilton version of Phonak and have continued your involvement in the dark side of the sport, give it up. Don't drag down the Yellow Jersey.

OK, that's enough for now. I have to go and try and get students a schedule for Fall semester. We've got 250 of them and no College Algebra or Quantitative Skills courses. This should be fun. Lots of fun. Climbing the Galibier with cement water bottles fun.

I need a nap...and milk and cookies...and a foot massage...and a vacation a long ways away from Barnesville...and a million dollars (tax free, of course)...and other things I can't mention...

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Saturday, July 15, 2006

I've been working on the trial run of my "Student Skills Seminars" for Fall semester. I'm teaching an extended set of the seminars for our community ed department this month to get a sense of how the classes will be received, to iron out the kinks and to figure out pacing for the hopefully bigger crowds out of the residence halls in the Fall. A couple of notes have occured to me:

(1) My first session was basically made up of white females; about half of which cam eof their own accord and the other half being coerced by their parents in some fashion. The group that needs these the most, at least according to our internal statistics, are the black males. I'm hoping the Note Taking session has a more diverse population but we'll see.

(2) Most high school students really don't understand anything about the college model of education. The looks on the faces of the students when I laid out the ratrionale for the 3 to 1 rule was really interesting. The Algebra II/College Algebra illustration I used really opened their eyes. As did my comments about college assessment and the fact that teachers generally don't suffer serious consequences when a student in their class fails. You could see that the mental calculus of how to succeed really had to be refigured.

(3) All of this stuff seems so obvious to me now, but looking back on my freshman experience I wish someone had told me all about this stuff before I got to school. The biggest thing is to move from a passive learning, "I'm not really all that responsible" mind-set to an active learning, "I'm responsible for doing well" paradigm.

(4) I wish I had a residential week type of experience for his. There's so much info to get to them in a ten hour format. The Geek hooked me up with some really interesting college success materials and I'm only going to touch on about a third of that material; almost all of it focused on techniques and habits for success and almost none of it on personal exploration and understanding. I could easily do ten hours on that alone. Hopefully, I can expand this next year through our community ed division and do some sort of week-long experience involving the residence halls and community building exercises. There's just so much to teach that can help students to be successful. What I wonder is whether the people taking advantage of it are students that most likely would have been successful anyways and all I'm doing is smoothing the transition for them. That's not a bad thing, but I'd hoped to have a bigger impact.

In other news; at the Tour the predicted break happened though I did get the wrong names. Voigt got his stage win and Pereiro is in Yellow as Landis decided to let the jersey go for now. In all likelihood, Pereiro is going to pay for his efforts out front tomorrow and may lose some time on the run into Gap. There are two catagory 2 climbs in the last half of the race and I think Pereiro's legs will be toast b the second one and he'll go off the back. In the past, I wouldn't have said that because I think the in race recovery "techniques" (i.e.-use of testosterone patches, human growth hormone and tiny amounts of EPO) would have allowed him to maintain his form on a medium hard stage. I think the biggest effect of the Feuntes bust in Operation Puerto is that the supplier for the Spanish part of the peleton is gone and the networks to set up those sorts of programs aren't rebuilt overnight. If he loses a minute-thirty Landis is back in Yellow assuming a break doesn't overtake the mark.

It was interesting the Discovery didn't put a man in the break but Hincapie and Popo were likely fried from their efforts yesterday and Azevedo is now their GC guy (if they actually have one). I still think Ruberia's sick as well so they took it easy today. I think tomorrow's going to have another break and it won't be allowed to run as far because the stage is too tough for many of the guys that are a long ways behind and the one's who aren't might be a little too dangerous. Normally I would say that this is a good stage for a guy like Flecha but he may be riding for Menchov now so thye may want to keep him fresh for the stages in the Alps. I could see this being a stage for a good all-arounder like Hincapie, Egoi Martinez, Moncoutie, Astarloza, O'Grady, Vandevelde or Casar. There are others that this stage would be perfect for but they're riding for their team leaders with GC hopes. I think if any of the sprinters get into a break, it'll get chased down pretty quickly at this point as McEwen seems to be nervous about his lead in the Green Jersey race. Simoni, Cunego and the like will likely wait for the higher mountain stages to try to get a win but this stage might work well for a decent climber who can sprint and who doesn't threaten De La Feunte in the KoM competition. I like Hincapie and Cunego for this stage but we'll see if they get into the right break.

For me for the rest of today: the rollers and a long nap.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, July 14, 2006

This happens when I watch the Tour. I see a stage like today's and I get inspired. Someone does something remarkable on a day that border's on inhuman nad I run out and jump on my bike and decide to do the same sort of thing. It usually builds slowly as I see things that challenge my imagination as an athlete. Today at the Tour it was hot. I mean scorching. It was 92 degrees at the finish ambient air temperature and 115 on the road and Popovitch gets into a break and powers it to a four minute advantage. He refurses to give in and bends an exhausted peleton to his will. The bunch was fried from chasing George Hincapie everytime he got into a break; which was just abobut every break. When George finally wore out, Popo went with Freire and two others and the break stuck for reasons so bizarre as to be perfectly Touresque: McEwen attacked to try and chase down Freire during a piss break and made the rest of the peleton mad so they decided not to work with his team. Popo attacked four times in the last ten kilometers before he finally broke his fellow escapees and rode to victory on the day after the the post-Discovery era officially began at the Tour.

So, I decided to ride from here to Macon today. The air temperature here was 96 degrees and I was going to hammer out 60 miles. Not exactly the 130 miles the Tour riders did but it was just me and not me and 162 of my buddies. I rode strong for 40 miles at 22 mph and then I felt the distinctly peculiar cooking sensation of my legs frying out and poof it was gone. I cut my ride short by 10 miles and limped in after having been on the road for two hours and twenty minutes. It was epic but it was also draining. When we drove around town the temperature there was over 105 degrees whihc meant the road temp/heat index was around 120 degrees. I've been hydrating since 3:00 pm and I still feel thirsty. It was a three and half pound ride meaning if I burned the number of Calories I burned on this ride six days a week, I'd lose three and half pounds each week if I ate only 2400 Calories a day. Of course, that doesn't count the water weight I lost.

So, Discovery showed some powerful pride (one of the greatest motivators there is) on a day made for a break. Tomorrow? More of the same I think. There will be another break. For McEwen, the bigger the better. The same is true for Phonak if all the riders are an hour down or so. That means a break will go it it has the right riders so maybe Chris Horner will get a chance tomorrow to do a little something for himself. Others I expect to see would be Carlos De Cruz, Thomas Voeckler, and David Millar might give it another go after his efforts to get in a break today. If Discovery stays aggressive then Hincapie or Rubiera might make the break as well, though I'm thinking Chechu might be sick given his early departure from the front group on the Tourmalet.

We'll see how it goes. Tomorrow's a rest day...thank goodness.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Tomorrow will be epic. Absolutely, completely, mind shatteringly epic. OLN is planning a stunning five hours of live coverage because things are going to be so epic. This is going to be one of those stages Tour historians talk about for years. Five climbs with 63 km (about 50 miles) of climbing that will be twice as steep as your average interstate off-ramp and the finish line is less than two miles from the top of the last one. Add to that the possibility of strong thunderstorms during the stage that will likely change the face of the race entirely and I think we'll find out who came to race tomorrow.

What I don't think we'll really learn is who's going to win. There are no truly dominant riders (yet) at this Tour and I really think we'll see huge swings in the times. Floyd may gain five minutes today only to lose four of it on L'Alp d'Huez. Klodi may crack on the Peyresourde only to crush all comers in the last individual time trial. But, what's going to happen tomorrow?

Gonchar's a goner and he'll likely detatch from the train somewhere on the most storied climb in the Tour, the Tourmalet. T-Mobile's going to struggle to control things tomorrow I think. A lot of commentators are pronouncing the team dominant but I think what we saw was a couple of teams holding their cards close to the vest on a stage that wasn't going to decide much of anything. I see Discovery and CSC making some noise on the early climbs. I might try yanking T-Mobile's chain if I'm Bruyneel just like a lot of teams did him when he was dominating with Lance. I see lots of attacks. I see Floyd sitting behind the T-Mobile train grinning like the cat who got the bird. Or maybe that's grimacing. I'm never sure with Floyd. I see Rasmussen going for the Spotty Jersey. I see Mercado going with him...for a while...but not too long. I see lots of orange shirt. I see lots of drunk, dumbass orange shirts. I see them weeping. I see Iban Mayo and the orange boys wilting on the slopes where the riders in 1910 hissed "Assassins!" at the Tour organizers as they suffered up goat tracks and hiking trials. I see my eyes falling out of my head as I ride the trainer during the stage to the taunting of Chris and Bob again. Steady state hill intervals. I see tired people. I see a guy in white and yellow and green raising his arms. No, I don't see some incarnation of the Green Lantern. I see a big ear and a smile/grimmace. It's good that I see these things now because I won't see them tomorrow. My eyes will be rolling around on the floor being batted around by one of the six stray cats we're trying to find homes for while Bob Roll make fun of my fat, hairy butt and threatens me with a bizzarre combination or sardines, duct tape and Vasoline. That's an ugly thought for 7:30 in the morning.

Arrrggghhhh.

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Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Tonight was supposed to be the night I left for Nationals. I was going to ride the Master's TT and see if I could improve on my performance from two years ago. That was the plan after winning the state championship and then Tundra. But things don't always work out the way you want them to.

I think I really underestimated the mental strain of comng back from the crash. I was able to push through the recovery and train hard to a point but it all fell apart over the last couple of months. The crash at Dauset started the decline and the reinjury at Helen sealed it but what really got to me was that I wanted to come back too much. I trained too much last October when I should have rested after winning at state and I left up after winning at Tundra and gained too much weight back. Mostly, I got tired of chasing the same old goals day after day after day with little change in my routine and no coaching input outside of myself. As I got tired there was no one there to keep me charged up.

So tonight I sit here at home and I'm thinking about next year and what that might entail. I need to make sure I take my three weeks to a month off in October and not rush back to ride a fast century in November. I need to spin and spin and spin through November and December and not worry too much about glass trophies in the cruelest of months. I need to practice my handling and upgrade some equipment and remember my love for riding.

One thing I should add though; I'm alive. A year ago that was centimeters from not being the case. That I can still pedal a bike or eat solid food or remember the alphabet or breath is all very miraculous to me and I can't begin to express how thankful I am to be able to wake up each morning with my wife and pet me dogs and think about where I might decide to ride that day. I was reading that a high school teacher was killed out west recently while riding. He'd been riding and racing hard and had had an accident a few months back and decided to hang up his cleats. He wanted to go to Nationals once to have that experience. He was hit on July 1st and died over the weekend. That nearly happened to me but for some reason didn't. My prayers go out to the family of Pat Courant and to his students and friends and fellow cyclists.

I rode outside for the first time in a week today after a bevy of trainer rides. It felt really, really good to get out there. I cooked my legs a bit with 55 miles in the Sun but it was good to ride without a lot of pressure to prepare for a race. I was good to suffer not to get better but just to enjoy the sensation. For the next day or so I'm busy but I'll ride a long one on Wednesday and really drink it in. I'll do a epic out at Dauset or somewhere this week and just enjoy the flow of everything.

The Tour resumes tomorrow after the rest day. I write a bit more about Floyd and how he's tougher than any human being alive. The stage is a really, really, really flat one into Bordeaux where the sprinters always reign. I see that no break tomorrow will make it to the end as it's the last day for the sprinters to shine. I see Credit Agricole and Lampre and Rabobank holding it together for their sprinters. I see the World Champion sitting in as he recovers from the disappointment of a half a dozen frustrated sprints. I see McEwen being unstoppable again.

McEwen
Freire
Hushovd
Bennati
Eisel

Talk with you tomorrow.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Saturday, July 08, 2006

So, you shouldn't really trust my predictions too much on the Tour. Sure I had some of the names but, wow, was I wrong about a lot of it. Not a great day for American cycling in the Tour and a pretty bad day for the Discovery Team. George and Salvodelli both lost over 2 minutes on Honchar and while he won't be a real big factor in the high mountians, the loss of over a minute to Landis, Evans and Kloden can't be overestimated.

Julich crashed out as well so Sastre is definitely the team leader. Even Zabriskie did badly (for him). The biggest disappointment has got to be Leipheimer who saw his chances of stepping up on the podium and even finishing in the top five disappear today. The questionis whether it's a bad day or if he's cooked for the Tour by going too hard in the Dauphine. We'll see in a couple of days on stage ten. If he can come back, maybe he'll try to shoot for the KOM jersey or maybe a stage win since he'll be allowed to go in a break at this point. Both the team leaders for Gerolsteiner did poorly with the youngsters Lang and Fothen now seeming like the team leaders.

Honchar was on form for sure and Rogers looked good too and both should do excellent work for T-Mobile's leader Andreas Kloden. Won't it be ironic if T-Mobile finally wins again and does it without Ullrich. If you take out the TT specialists and youngsters (who aren't likely to hold up over an entire three week effort and will have a really bad day or two in the mountians), here's what the overall looks like:

Landis
Kloden 50"
Karpets 52"
Evans 52"
Menchov 1'00"
Moreau 1'07"
Salvodelli 1'10"
Lang 1'22"
Sastre 1'27"
Hincapie 1'30"

Floyd is likley to be frustrated by his two flats on the ride which may have cost him between 30 and 45 seconds but I don't think he would have beat Honchar in today's stage. The interesting thing is while there was no Lance-like beating of the big contenders, Floyd did open up a gap on the rest of the pack; all of whom are within 40 seconds of each other. Kloden's got the best team but is he back to his 2004 form ? Even if he's not, T-Mobile's got a lot of cards to play. It looks like they did bring the best team to support Ullrich. The down side is that they've only got seven guys and a lot of those were selected to ride a strong tempo. Other than Guerini, I don't see many of them being able to stay with Kloden over the Soudet on Wednesday. If I'm Bruyneel, I use my line up of better climbers to push the pace there and see if I can isolate Kloden, Menchov and Sastre.

Tomorrow's back to the sprinters but none of them are fighting for yellow. Maybe the Quick-Step team will be able to set Boonen up a little better now that they don't have to protect the jersey. Of course, now that the overall's a bit more settled there may be a break of guys way down on the overall allowed to get up the road. McEwen's team would definitely like that though Credit Agricole and Lampre would have a real interest in bringing it back together for their sprinters Hushovd and Bennati. Voigt took it really easy today as did Rabobank's Weening and Disco's Noval. there's a Cat 3 climb 75 km into the stage so Pineau and/or Wegmann might try to get into the break as well. The thing about breaks though is that it's a crap shoot in a way. If you jump with the wrong guys, your break attempt gets pulled back. If you jump too often, you cook your legs or are on the limit and can't get go when the right break goes (I have some personal experience with this).

On the other hand, the way this Tour is going, any one of the favorites could crash and be out tomorrow or just end up behind a split between 5 and 10 km to go and lose a minute. This is the Tour. The other thing we may see that hasn't been seen in years is riders gaining and losing lots of time on various stages. That used to be how things went in the days before in-ear radios and in-car TVs and on-bike GPS chips. A lot of commentators have been disparaging about these trends because they say that it takes all of the tactics out of the race. That may be true to a degree but it's been a long time that we've had a race as wide open as this one and we may see it become a lot more dependent on the ups and downs of the riders. That having been said, T-Mobile is in a really good place right now.

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