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

Sunday, December 16, 2007

As you may have seen, the Director's Cut of Blade Runner is coming out soon and watching the ads got me thinking. I want to create two sets of DVDs, both of which would have as part of the set Blade Runner. One set would be a man vs. machine themed set. On one end might be the Terminator movies and the Matrix Trilogy would be on the other end. In the middle might be Blade Runner and I, Robot. The other set would be a sort of Dark Visions of the Future sort of thing with Soylent Green, Blade Runner and that sort of thing. I'm looking for suggestions for either of these two series. If you know of anything, leave me a comment. I'm looking for mostly mainstream American movies but I'll consider looking into getting good foreign films or Anime films.

Thanks for your help.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, December 14, 2007

The Mitchell Report is out. I was amazed during the run up to it's release that most of the major media outlets were poo-pooing the report saying that it wouldn't name any real names, that it would amount to a slap on the wrist, that it wouldn't make any real recommendations, etc., etc., etc.

Well.

It looks like the former senator, with a little help from federal prosecutors and good fortune, wrecked the image of baseball in a way that is so definitive that even the "bury-my-head-in-the-sand" deniers have had to take notice. He laid the blame on everyone and was specific about it; players, clubhouse personnel, management, the players union, you name it. He exposed the culture of doping and cheating. He made tough recommendations that really sounded good coming from a guy who is known to love the game as to how to clean the sport up.

I have to wonder though if he didn't learn just a little bit from how badly cycling has handled it's doping problem. Would the report have been as strong in terms of laying out blame and recommending recourse had we not had to watch cycling try to slowly kill itself over the last 20 years? If you look at it, the problems are basically the same with the exception of EPO. There's an organized sort of underground network of distributors and enablers (Belgian mafia anyone???). The athletes are all vigorously denying involvement by saying they've never tested positive. The owners/sponsors are acting like victims when it's known that they supplied both the pressure to perform and the financial resources to obtain the products. Even the fans share some blame by expecting virtuosio performances and near athletic invincibility on a regular basis.

Baseball is corrupt. Just like cycling is. Just like American football and European futbol (the latest cycling scandal also found evidence on over 100 soccer players in Europe but that information has been repressed for the sake of national interest...their time is coming). Big money sports whether it be the fake amateur levels like college football and the Olympics or the professional leagues like the NFL, the NBA and MLB on this side of the pond and World Cup soccer and basketball as well as international cycling are rotten to the very core.

In my mind, however, only cycling is trying to find a way out of the morass. Of all the big money sports, only cycling has unannounced blood testing and mandatory two-year suspensions. Donald Fehr in his press conference yesterday basically said that the MLB Players Union would fight any attempt at blood testing. His COO routinely let players know when they were going to be tested. The NFL bans players for only a month for a performance enhancing substance positive test and the team forfeits nothing. Some teams in cycling have been so visionary as to see that even this sort of program will not stop the cheaters and the pressures to cheat. Slipstream, CSC and High Road (formerly T-Mobile) have all gone to a stronger system designed to catch abnormalities in blood and urine markers over the course of the entire year with regular testing. This serves to insulate the riders from pressure and lab error. The Grand Tours are going to require "blood passports" of all riders. No one, and I mean no one, is doing as much as cycling is to deal with doping. I don't know if it will work but I do think that several teams are on the right track.

Now if the other leagues will follow suit with allowing blood testing by outside independent agencies, requiring long-term blood marker tracking and having harsh penalties for cheaters and the teams that enable them then maybe we'll get somewhere.

For now, I hope that baseball gets the crap knocked out of it in the court of public opinion. That's the only thing that'll get the culture to change. It's the only thing that is forcing cycling out of the darkness. However, if baseball is going to be following cycling's lead, it'll take another huge scandal about ten years from now and the loss of some major network broadcasting contracts (leaving MLB on VS maybe???) to really force some change.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, December 07, 2007

Here at Gordon we're in finals week and I've given and graded my final exams for my two introductory physics classes. One of the big things that a lot of people don't realize about education is how important it is to assess every aspect of you students' learning but also how hard it can be to do. When I took physics as an undergrad, the emphasis was on assessing whether a student could solve a variety of problems with the assumption that to solve those problems a student had to have a good grasp of the conceptual material the the problem was related to. In the twenty or so years between my first physics class and now, that has been found to be a woefully inaccurate assumption. Work by Hestenes at Arizona State, Mazur at Harvard and Hake at Indiana have shown that just because a student can solve a problem, it doesn't mean the student knows much about the physics. In fact, in the physics courses that cater to the pre-med and other allied health students what a problem solving exam might show is only that the student is able to pattern match the test questions to previously worked examples. I know that when I taught these courses at the University of Florida as a graduate student, it was pretty apparent that the pre-med students focused on memorizing solutions and didn't have much conceptual understanding.

For that reason, not long after I started teaching as a career I began to test my students' conceptual understanding. Not only do I test the final understanding but I test the students' "previous knowledge state"; which is a fancy way of saying how much to they know walking in the door about the conceptual framework of Newtonian physics. A lot of really, really good research has been done on this by groups at the University of Washington, Dickinson College, Tufts University and the University of Oregon. (There are many others who are doing good work as well.) What they have shown is that students come into a physics class with a very robust picture of how the physical world works that is almost entirely wrong (Aristotelian actually). A lot of my class is built around getting the students to change how they think about the world as well as teaching them a structured problem-solving methodology.

All of this is to get the point that my physics students did great this semester. One why to measure performance is to compare how a student does on an assessment instrument (in my case a conceptual test) that is given both at the beginning and at the end of the class. The most common way to analyze the data is to calculate a "gain value" by looking at how much their score on the exam improved divided by the maximum it could have improved. Hake's research at Indiana of over 10,000 students showed that students taught in a standard lecture/lab format course had average learning gains of around 22% (how much did you pay for that course?). His data showed that students who were taught in some form of non-traditional format that emphasized interactive engagement in some way had average learning gains of around 60%. Interestingly enough, hake's research showed that there seemed to be a ceiling for the gain scores of about 70-72%.

Well, my engineering physics course (calculus-based introductory physics) showed an average learning gain of 79% and my allied health related course (algebra-based intro physics) had learning gains of 67%. Needless to say, I am really, really pleased with these numbers. Additionally, all but one of the students who started the calc-based course finished and two-thirds of the algebra-based students finished; both numbers being well above the national average much less the average for two-year colleges. I feel really good about the numbers and the classes.

I really can't take too much credit for the success as I'm using curricula developed by folks a hell of a lot smarter than me and I have had outstanding, hardworking, deeply engaged students this semester. For the methods I use to work, the students not only have to buy into the unconventional methods I use but they also have to put a lot of energy into the methods as they are pretty time intensive. Not all students do that but these ones sure did. I can certainly go into the Christmas break with a good feeling of a job well done by all involved.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Well, December is upon us and in cycling terms that means it's time to move from 10-12 hour training weeks and the like to something more serious. So far, pretty much everything has been base miles and adaptation workouts in the gym. With the exception of the weekly "pain train" rides, my ride intensities have been very much in the base mile zone. I rode a pedestrian 1000 miles with almost no real intensity. The progression has been good though. As I've written before, I feel like I've got some power on the flats. At yesterday's 77 mile ride I really felt like I had what I wanted for the rotating double paceline intervals we did being able to help sustain the 27-29 mph pace. It was really cool to be rotating through with five other guys at that speed. Once we got to the big climbs, I got popped off the back and sat up as I didn't have the climbing power I needed to hang on. What that means is that I need to lose about 10 lbs and develop a little more leg strength and I think I'll be able to hang with the strongest of the non-Cat I/II riders.

So, there are a couple a changes to the training. First, I move to actual strength training in the gym. This is going to suck because it means that I get to be sore for the next two weeks. The second thing is to start to really put in some solid intervals efforts on the TT bike. Finally, my training times have got to increase by 10% per week until I'm at about 20 hours per week. Fortunately, finals week is here and I should be able to get a goodly amount of training time into my schedule. I have to head out to Salt Lake for the holidays but I think I can get a bunch of training in out there with a gym that's right up the road from my Dad's place. The nice thing is that there will be a little altitude training involved there as I'll be at about 5000 ft. That'll really help my January training quite a bit. The only problem is that there won't be any group rides but maybe I can get a good hard hour in every couple of days with some spin training.

Finally, my last goal (beyond the obvious ones) for this month is to return to a disciplined reading routine. I'd like to do at least an hour a day each day. I have about 10 books I'd really like to get read by the end of the year ranging from a book on spiritual theology and a discussion of the 24-7 prayer movement to a biography of Thomas Young and the "Darwin on Trial" book that a colleague wants me to read and give an opinion on. Add to that the new lectures on Ben Franklin and by N.T. Wright I've recently downloaded from iTunesU and I have a lot of intellectual work to do. Fortunately it'll be mentally stimulating, spiritually challenging and, occasionally, emotionally nurturing. It's not that the work I do at the College isn't many of those things but it's also a lot more draining. The reading and considering the ideas of others allows me to rest while remaining active and keeping my thinking fresh.

Well, with all that I have on my plate, I'd better get to it.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Just a short rant here.

The lastest set of Hyundai Christmas commercials just fries my hinder. I want to go beat an ad executive. I want to flog someone at Hyundai for greenlighting the ads. I want to chastize the networks who sold the time. I might even want to berate and speak sharply to the actors who participated in this atrocity. OK, maybe atrocity is too strong a word better reserved for ethnic cleansing and Lou Dobbs' political speeches/editorial posts but the ads are an affront in my mind.

I understand that not everyone wants to celebrate Christmas. There are those who would rather think of the season in terms of some non-Christian framework and I have no problem with them doing that. Never-the-less, I don't know anyone who generally thinks it' a good idea to associate this time of year, when we're all trying our best to think good thoughts, focus on our and others better nature and give the idea of peace and good will more than a passing glance, with stupidity.

Yet, in my eyes, that's what Hyundai's "Duh" ad campaign does. It's just offensive to me. Downright offensive. Car commercials are annoying anyways with their, "If you really loved that special someone, you'd drop $30,000 on a big shiny example of conspicuous consumption," but this goes that extra mile towards abject crassness. I get the point, "Buying a Hyundai is so obviously the right choice that you'd be dumb not to do it," but that's not the message a company should associate with this time of year. If you want to do it around New Years' Day or following while people are striving to do the better thing, OK; but don't dress folks up in some parody of a church choir and have them mock traditional carols by singing them with the single word, "Duh."

Hyundai, if any of your execs are reading this (and Lord knows they should be-it being the fount of wisdom that it is) know one thing. I'm going to be looking at buying a car in the the not too distant future. Your vehicles were on the "to be considered list". I'll now not be doing business with your company. I no longer care that you've been building factories here in the south bringing much need jobs to a region hit hard by the loss of manufacturing jobs to overseas outsourcing. All I'm going to remember is your stupid ad campaign and it's absolute tastelessness.

That is all, you may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Well, today turned out to be a super active day, which is a good thing. It also seems to continue a pattern in the winter months of combining riding and hiking which I think I could really get to like.

The day started with the usual weekly excursion with the Pain Train. We're slowly building up our distance and today was the first metric century. We did roads I was mostly familiar with though one section I hadn't done in the direction we did it. That section, which includes four leg burner climbs (followed by breakneck descents-steriod rollers I call them), was definitely easier the way we went today. Things were mostly flat with a couple a big climb sections. I definitely felt better than last week and while I still can't climb with the best riders in the group, I certainly did better. I also got a couple of chances to practice my time trialing skills with the group gapping me after a pee stop and someone later letting a gap open up during the attack zone. I had no problem holding a 170+ heart rate for long stretches and there was a good climbing section where I sat at 181 for a good 2 minutes, dropped to 172 to recover and then did it again. For the first time in a while I actually seemed to be sort of enjoying the suffering which was very cool. I really do seem to need these group rides to get me to train hard.

After the ride I came home, did a few things and then went on a hiking date with my wife at a local state park. While we don't have spectacular colors here, what fall color we do have was certainly on display on the trail today. It really was lovely. We took the two puppies on the hike and they discovered that they are trial dogs. Made the hike a little more vigorous than I wanted but that was OK. This is the second time I've done the bike-n-hike combo and I have to say that I like it. I think I spent four hours today doing something that really got my heart rate up and I'm guessing I burned about 3000 extra calories. I probably should have eaten and drank a bit more on the hike but other than that it was really great. I think we're planning on another jaunt in a couple of weeks, weather permitting.

The next week looks pretty promising on the training front. While I hesitate to say that I'll have a great training block because it always seems like something spoils it when I do, the schedule and the weather are looking good. Finding that I seem to be coming into some form is helping as well. Nothing is harder than a long training ride where you can tell that your legs just don't care anymore. We'll be travelling to LA for the holiday so I'll get the added bonus of some not quite so familiar roads to spur my training.

I hope your weekend has gotten off to as good a start as mine has. Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Over the last couple of months there has been a steady trickle of news about Major League Baseball players and NFL players that have been found to be using steriods and/or human growth hormones. When I hear the national media (drunken slobbery hacks that they are) talk about these offenses they sort of downplay them as minor violations or they say that the relative leagues are taking "appropriate measures" to punish the offenders.

My response to this is: what a load of crap!

if these guys were participants in an olympic sport governed by WADA they'd have gotten a two year vacation without pay. Shawn Merriman would still be cooling his heals at home. Richard Seymour's career would be over. About half of the pro baseball players would be looking at stocking groceries at the SaveMart. Just having their names associated with these fake doctors (or at least dentists with suspended medical licenses) and "anti-aging" clinics would be enough to get them removed from their teams and suspended from competition.

I'm sick of the double standard. Either reveal that most of the big money sports are about as credible as pro-wrestling or clean it up. If you look at the number and types of injuries in pro football, it's pretty clear that steriod and HGH use are rampant. Muscle tears on simple tackles are almost always a result of more muscle mass than can be sustained. Why do college seniors need a month or more to prepare for the NFL Combine? Why do they have separate "pro days?" It allows you to plan your drug enhanced proformance peak for the exact conditions without having to hide your injections for two or three days.

And don't even get me started on the NBA.

I love sports. I hate cheating. I want to believe in something in sports as inspiring but I don't. Every time I see an incredible play in an NFL game I think...drugs...

At least in cycling there's still the purity of suffering.

I have to go now; my glass is half empty.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Ouch!

The attack zone last wwek was low rollers. This week is was a 4 mile long, hard stairstep climb. Once again I spiked the heart rate over 185 a couple of times. What doesn't kill me...

I didn't feel that good going down to Tarmac and when we began our ride south and east of the city I spent the first 10 miles feeling like I might puke. After that things settled down a bit as the route flattened out quite a bit and we got into a rhythm pushing the big ring around. I took a couple of pulls at the front. I probably shouldn't have as I was feeling yucky but I just can't draft other guys all day. I felt like I had some power on the flats which was good but not so much once we got to the hills at mile 35. That's OK, the hill power will come later in the training season.

So, the rest of the day will likely consist of sleep and rest. My wife has a real whopper of a cold and I'm doing everything I can to not get it. Either today's ride will crash my immune system and I'll succumb or it'll burn this thing out. Some rest will help though.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Thursday, November 08, 2007

From: NFL Coaches Association

To: Don Shula and Loudmouth Sports Media Pundits

Re: SHUT UP!!!

Dear Sirs, Madams and Scuzzy, Whiskey-Soaked Media Hacks,

While we, the collected head football coaches of the teams of the No Fun League (otherwise known as the National Football League), understand your desire to express yourselves on all topics related to our great game, it has come to our attention that you occasionally feel the need to talk about the New England Patriots, our estranged colleague Bill Belichek and the validity of a possible 19-0 season for the aforementioned two entities. Please cease and desist this practice at once. We mean it. Right now. Don't write, say or unintelligibly mumble another word.

To date, your unrestrained questioning of the accomplishments of the team and their coach has led to unmitigated suffering on the part of us, our players, our fans and our lame, fuzzy mascots. As has been noted by the United Nations Council on Human Rights Abuses, the Patriots and their recent winning streak has caused misery only surpassed in the history of sports by that game the Incas used to play where they kicked a human head around in an attempt not to be the next team sacrificed to the angry gods at the next solar eclipse. And it's all your fault.

Your continued need to raise issues about the team seems only lead them to want to grind the rest of us into powder with which they will chalk their field. While Coach Shula has certainly earned the right to comment on the state of the game today, his words have only been a cause for grave concern on our behalf (in other words, they may well lead us to our graves). In response to the coach's criticism of the team, one Patriots linebacker has indicated that he will answer said aspersions by playing harder. We can only view this with alarm and abject fear. Our ticket sellers have begun reporting that the crowd at the sales line window looks more like medieval mob coming to cheer on an execution than a group of loyal fans gathering to cheer on their team.

So, for the love of God, stop. Please. We're begging you. We'll ship you all the liquor you need to drown the voices in your heads if you'll just agree to put down your pens and step away from your microphones. Failing that, we can't held responsible if five or six steroid crazed practice squad players were to find your home on Google maps and decide to help you with your next column or fake interview.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Well, it sounds like more bad news from Salt Lake. While we're still waiting for the test results to come back to confirm the initial diagnosis, it looks like my Dad suffered a heart attack sometime late last week that has done damage to the heart muscle. In a way I've been worrying about this since my Mom died. Everyone has heard of the case where a person followed a spouse in death within a few months. Well, this is an old wives' tale that actually has some basis behind it fr4om what I understand. Due to the stress of losing a loved one and adjust to a new life, it is more common for the widow or widower to suffer from heart attacks and strokes and the general population.

I'm not sure if this is what happened with my Dad but I do know that he's been under a good deal of stress of late. Not so much from my Mom's death (maybe) but from having to deal with his in-laws who haven't exactly handled it all very well. I've been fearful that something might happen to him now that he's alone with no one to check up on him. Fortunately my brother checked in on him and he complained of shortness of breath, nausea and chest pains. Chris talked him into going to calling the nurse line and that got him sent to a doctor's office. I'm very thankful that this wasn't the massive heart attack I've sort of feared he would suffer. He's smoked for the last 50 years and weighs about 150 lbs more than he should.

The results are due back tomorrow and I'll check in on him then to find out the results and to see how he's doing. I have to say this raised a lot of issues for me. I really don't like that he's out there all by himself with no one to check in on him. I keep wondering if I should think about looking for a job out there and moving in with him. I'm not sure I want to live in Salt Lake but I'm torn about how to handle this. Maybe I should build something onto my house here to care for him or build a "father-in-law's" place here. I'm pretty sure he wouldn't move down here if we asked him to but I'm wondering about it.

Anyways, please keep Hank in your prayers if that's the sort of thing you do.

Thanks and thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Saturday, November 03, 2007

OK...so today was the first Peach Peleton ride. The Peach Peleton rides are supposed to be Saturday long, steady distance (LSD) rides where a group of us from around the region sort of spin through central Georgia at around 18 or 19 miles an hour and build our base. After Christmas the rides get longer and harder as we move into "Tempo" miles. My usual preparation for the PP rides is to not eat the night before and on the morning. I drink a little extra caffeine to promote fat burning and then I ride for three hours at around 70-75% of my max heart rate. Given that this was the first one, I was looking forward to spinning and chatting with some guys I haven't seen in a long time.

We've got a pretty diverse group with a few 50+ triathletes (that seem to actually know how to ride in a group), a few of us 40ish psuedogeezers, several 30 somethings and finally a 17 year old who rides for the US Junior National Team (he spent two weeks in Europe late in the summer). A couple of guys are Cat 1/2 and the rest of us are strong Cat 4s so it's an interesting and fun mix. When things get a little faster after the year turns the goal for us slower older guys is to try and hang on to the fast guys' wheels when the attack zones start.

So I head down to Tarmac (my name for Macon) this morning looking forward to a great ride and as we gathered in the parking lot, Chad, the ride organizer, says that the plan has changed. Uh-oh, I think. Did he say there would be an attack zone? Oh no. I haven't eaten for this. Maybe they'll take it easy until then but I have my doubts. When people say attack zone it has a way of energizing things. Still, the weather was perfect and I was looking forward to my first group ride in about six months.

My fears were well founded. What was supposed to be an 18.5 mph ride ended up being a 20.5 mph ride. I spiked my heart rate to over 185 several times on hills. There was one time when the HR monitor read 194. Given that I'm 41 that's way over what my max should be. By the attack zone I was cooked and starving and so I sat up. Still there were some of the hardest hills on the route and I had to slog up those. Yikes!

Still, I had a great time and it was great to see the guys again. Best of all, no dizziness. Now I'll spend the most of the upcoming week recovering so that I can do it again next Saturday.

Thanks for Reading

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, November 02, 2007

Ok, so I'm not usually into the whole celebrity news thing. I could care less what ET or the TMZ or People or whatever are saying. Usually I make fun of the celeb rags that sit next to the National Enquirer in the grocery store as a way to amuse the check out girls and embarrass my wife (try it some time...it's really fun). However, a fellow cyclist brought me a piece of news that has stained my brain and made me wish I had some "thought bleach" so that I could sort of scrub the image out of my head:

Lance and Ashley Olsen???????? Making out in a restaurant?????


EEEEEEWWWWWWWW!!!


On a related note, biologists at Case Western Reserve University have announced that they have genetically engineered mice to be the Lance Armstrongs of their species. They can run for six hours straight with a lower heart rate and no lactic acid build-up. There's no news wether the mice have been turning the TV to old episodes of "Two of a Kind" or "So Little Time" or listening to old Sheryl Crow tunes.

Now you're the one who needs brain bleach....

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Thursday, November 01, 2007

As I mentioned earlier I've been reading a great book on ancient Christian hospitality and the reviving of its practice today titled, Making Room. As I was reading while riding the exercise bike today (in prep for some weight work) I got to thinking about our new freshmen students here. One of the points that the author of the book makes over and over is that hospitality was traditionally directed as those who could be thought of as "aliens and strangers"; those marginalized or forgotten about by a community or society. The practice of such hospitality is supposed to minister to their needs of course but to do it in a way that creates a more equal standing between the giver and the recipient as well as respecting and honoring that person.

Yesterday the Dean of the Faculty held a forum that, from what I've been able to gather (I was unable to attend due to a committee meeting ironically focused on creating a First Year Experience course here), focused on why our students are doing so badly. He related that the one class he's teaching will have only a 40% success rate. Several other professors at the forum chimed in that this is their common experience as well.

As I was reading the book it occurred to me to wonder if our students are really aliens and strangers of a sort. We assume that since they've been to twelve or thirteen years of public schooling that they should be members of our community but the truth is that high school is so completely different that college in terms of work and expectations and culture and all the rest that new freshmen oftentimes don't have a clue about what lies ahead of them.

So what I'm wondering about is what does hospitality to this group look like from a Christian perspective? What would Chrysostom have said about meeting the needs of this group of aliens and strangers? What would Wesley have advised? How does a college create a culture of hospitality that welcomes strangers into its community while maintaining the standards and norms of the community?

I see a lot of issues in this topic and this consideration of what hospitality means. I see questions about how prepared the students are to enter the community. I see considerations related to a sort of intellectual poverty rather than a financial meagerness. I see it being very hard to change the culture of the school as a whole but I'm wondering what sorts of things I can do.

It's an interesting and powerful thing to consider.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Here's an idea I think is really cool but that has absolutely no chance of ever being implemented even a little bit. If you’re not a person who follows cycling you’ll likely find this blog a bit mind-numbing and uninteresting (even more than it usually is) but I have to get this out there in print so that I can say that it was my idea first.

As you may know, cycling as a professional sport is in some serious doo-doo (that’s the technical term). Between the doping scandals, the arguing between governing bodies and event promoters and the general bullheadedness of European “intelligencia” when sticking to a position it looks as if the sport over in Europe is teetering on collapse, explosion, implosion or some combination of the three (I’m guessing all three with some serious intestinal distress thrown in for good measure…I mean, one look at Dick Pound’s face…yes, that’s the real name of the head of the World Anti-Doping Association or WADA…and you can’t help but think of intestinal distress). Now some might look at this as a disaster of unmitigated proportions. Others see it as a welcome end of years of old, washed up European aristocrats and their posturing. Me? I see it as an opportunity of the sport of cycling to move to America for a fresh start and really big burritos.

How’s that going to happen? Well, we’ve already got a couple of the best races in the world already with the Tour of California and the Tour of Georgia and a couple more stage races that have a chance of stepping up to that level with the Tours of Missouri and Utah. What is needed now is a really big event. Something so audacious that even Texas will go, “Damn!” Fortunately, someone has an idea for this: The Tour of America. Now, at first glance the idea is pretty dumb actually. It’s a thirty day stage race patterned after the Tour de France with stages that are too long, transfers between stages that are too complicated and implementation strategies that are too vague. Given that doping in Europe is primarily caused by too much racing at too high a level for too long in things like the aforementioned Tour de France this is a receipe for more of the same with less viewer interest. So let's really shake up how we think about stage racing. Here’s how we do that by starting with the Tour of America; 30 stages plus a prologue, no rest days (stay with me, you’ll see why), large payout purses and lots of variability and strategy.

First, enough of this only having 9 riders on a team. Each team gets to have 15 riders who will participate in the race. Each team must start at least 60% of its riders up to a maximum of nine. This means that each day, some of your riders will not ride the stage (which leads to built in rest days-on average there will be about 9 of them). The strategy comes in on which riders ride which stages. The team directors don't have to tell anyone until thirty minutes before the stage starts at sign in. It'd give Phil and paul something interesting to talk about for the first few hours of the race when there's not much going on.

Second, stop timing every single stage. We all know how sprint stages are going to turn out in general terms. We also all know that the sprinters will crumble and die in the mountains. Let’s create some stages that are only worth points (like in an omnium race), some that are only timed (no sprint points are awarded) and some that both have points and are timed. Riders who wish to compete for the points jerseys (sprinter and mountain) must compete in all stages with those points and riders who wish to compete for the overall win must ride all stages that are timed. The team’s strategy will determine the rest. All stages will have big monetary payouts so there’ll be a lot of incentive for teams to try to win stages.

What’s good about this second point? The GC guys no longer have to ride in abject error that their race will come to an end because one overzealous idiot takes a corner too fast or unclips from his pedal at the wrong time. If they race the stage for fitness they can tail off the back in the last couple of kilometers and let the sprinters duel it out. That’s all we, the spectators, really want to see anyways. No more one stage tours for guys like Leipheimer or Valverde. The sprinters no longer have to worry about elimination in the mountains. We know that their going to get dropped and when they’re eliminated because they finish outside the time cut the makes the later sprints all the less exciting. Too many times the best sprinter's jersey doesn't go to the best sprinter. This fixes that. No sprint points for the hardest montain stages so the sprinters can take the day off and recover.

Third, there should be four time trials: three individual and one team. The individual TTs should be the short 10 km prologue that starts in a big city like Chicago on a famous boulevard, a medium one hour ITT (40-50 km flat or 20 km uphill) and a long two hour sufferfest designed to reward laots of raw power (80-90 km). No points on these, just time. The Team TT will happen really early (stage four or five) and you can ride as many guys as you want. You still take the time on the fifth guy but the course is really long, maybe 100-120 km. Make it really, really cool: pan flat, wide, straight roads, all the best technology allowed. Everyone has to race in the prologue.

Fourth, if the stage is called a mountain stage it has to end on an uphill finish and it only gets timed. I hate these stages where someone takes a big risk and makes the big effort to get away on a climb only to be caught on a descent by a group of five chasers because they have better aerodynamics. Mountain stages should have uphill finishes and some of them should be really, really hard. Brasstown Bald hard. Mt. Washington in Vermont (or wherever) hard. If there isn’t a 20% section on the final climb or the climb isn’t relentlessly long the stage should finish elsewhere.

Five or six jerseys: Yellow for GC, Red for sprinters, White for young rider, Blue for Mountains, Iron Grey for the MVD (Most Valuable Domestique) and Purple for most aggressive. Maybe a jersey for the pervious stage winner; something polka dotted I think; maybe a jersey for some sort of combination rider category for the most consistent rider for the all-arounders. The MVD and all-arounder jersey might be based on a combination of how many stages the rider started and the average placing the rider finished at.

Anyways, these are some of my ideas but not all of them. Let me know what you think and if you want to add anything. Maybe we can come up with something to send to the Tour of America dude that’ll make his idea really workable.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Monday, October 29, 2007

Hello there. It's been a while since I last blogged. I can't exactly explain why but it seems that some sort combination of busyness, personal turmoil, laziness and a search for something worthwhile to say has played a part in this. I mean, with all the bloggage available out there, why would anyone read my rather pedestrain ramblings?

News Flash:

By the way...this is what I just said to my wife:

Me: "USA is showing the Jewish version of Pirates of the Caribbean" (after an ad during L & O: CI)

Her: "What??? What do you mean?"

Wait for it...

Wait...

Wait...

Me: "It's the uncut version"

I'm here all week...be sure to tip your wait staff.

OK, back to what I was saying. Anyway, I'm not sure exactly what I might say now that I'm back exactly but I feel like I'd like to say a few things.

So what's going on here? A few things. I've started back into my training. I hate early season training in some ways. Boring. Slow. Monotonous. It's not so bad when you have someone to ride with but not many people around here feel like putting in 90 minutes of spinning at 18 mph. Podcasts help but... Hopefully I'll avoid the vertigo that seemed to plague me at this time last year and kept me from doing the training I really wanted to do.

I'm reading about monasticism and ancient Christian hospitality lately. Really challenging stuff. It makes me question a lot fo things about my super comfortable life. I talk about being willing to accept suffering on the bike but not so much in other areas in a lot of ways. So I'm thinking a lot about what my comfortable middle class lifestyle means. How does it bring me closer to God? How does it square with the Gospel that recognizes and respects and reaches out to the marginalized in our society? Heavy stuff.

Anyways, I'll be back soon.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Sunday, September 02, 2007

Written for my mother's memorial service:

I have been asked to say a eulogy, literally a good word, for my Mom. This is usually where a friend, relative or pastor talks about the admirable qualities of a life departed to those who know the person, both the good and the bad, at least as well as the speaker does. Many of you have known my Mom longer than I have and better than I do, so I won't presume to speak of things related to some lofty goal like who she was as a person or what her life might mean on some grand scale. I'll leave that to those of you much wiser than I. Instead, I want to talk about what my Mom meant to me, what I learned from her and how our relationship made me who I am and who I want to be. That's something I think I can talk about with some authenticity and something that I think celebrates the life we remember today.

Perhaps the first thing I should talk about is the strong cord of perseverence my Mom wove into the fabric of my character. As a boy I didn't always like that she emphasized that I follow through on my goals and commitments to the degree she did, yet as a man so much of who I am can be traced to that lesson repeatedly expressed in many different ways. Without it I can assure you that I wouldn't have achieved have of what I have. I doubt that I would have finished college after a disappointing freshman year, much less finished a course of study in a demanding field. I would have left graduate school after one semester for a job in computer programming without the tenacity she forged into my outlook by her words and life. While the research I did was certainly esoteric, her name could have been added to those papers which shared the new knowledge I discovered with all humankind. At every difficult crossroads of my life when there seemed to be an easier path that might have led me away from my dreams, the endurance she taught me enabled me to stay the course. It is not surprising then my the verse of Scripture that means the most to me is Hebrews 12:1-2: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everthing that hinders...and run the race marked out for us with endurance. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the originator and completer of our faith..."

The second thing I learned from my Mom was to live life from my heart. As you all know, my Mom was a very passionate person. She loved my brother and me passionately. She loved her parents and husband passionately. She loved her freinds passionately. As everyone who was close to my Mom knew, her passion for what she loved sometimes led to conflict, but that same passion never let you forget her love for you. To be honest, I think my Mom was uncomfortable with her passion sometimes. She always seemed to want to ask me for a rational persepective; a logical approach. Probably she did that with some of you as well. While she sought to have me live with my mind, her passion taught me to live with my heart; something I have always endeavored, though not always succeeded, to do. There are times when that confounded her but I think she always understood the reasons behind what I did. She knew that once my heart had decided something it was useless to argue with my head. She could have fought those battles and sometimes did, but usually she let me follow the things I was passionate about and celebrated with me in my accomplishments and in the fullness of my life.

The final thing I wnat to share is something that I've come to realize over the last week in remembering my Mom and her life. What I've remembered is how much she loved to dance. As a kid I was often embarassed to dance with her when she asked me to. Believe it or not, I was a kind of shy and sensitive boy who and I was very self-conscious of how I looked when I would try to dance. I'm pretty sure she wished I would have danced with her more often but she was kind enought to give me the space to be who I was. As I've grown older I've sort of learned to dance; both with myself and with others. There's a real joy to it; becoming motion in tune with rhythm and emotion. It's a very liberating thing.

Over the course of the last year or so, in the process of trying to learn to be in a relationship with God that is as much about my heart as my head, I learned about an an idea that describes the Trinity. The early Christian writers used the term perichoresis to describe how the three persons of a single God could be in relationship with one another. The word literally means "circle dance" and is used in this context to describe the eternal dance of indwelling love between the Father, the Son and the Spirit. Some theologians have said that there was a time when humankind participated in this dance. They say that through the sacrifice of the Son and the work of the indwelling Spirit we can again hear this music and join in the dance.

I pray and hope that my Mom has found Someone to dance with. Someone who loves as completely and as passionately as she does. And I pray that there will come a time out of time when I will join in that wonderful dance with her.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

The drought here is moving from severe to extreme. My lawn is slowly but surely turning to dust. The wildfires 250 miles to our south send us smoke once a week as the wind blows in from the southeast. The weather hasn't been brutally hot but there hasn't been any rain to speak of for two weeks now and things look like there won't be any for at least another week. We're behind over 10 inches for this year on top of the 10 inches from last year.

The weather makes for great riding right now. Morning temps in the mid-60's to start and never above 78 by noon. I've been doing 40-50 mile rides eahc day while listening to various podcasts (my new form of crack).

The bad news is the dust and the ants. Petting the dogs is to create cloads of stuff that used to be in my yard. With the dryness, the ants have started coming inside the ants looking for food and water. Each day we seem to have some infestation of Argentine ants to fight back.

The local weather dudes say that we need a tropical storm to move through the region slowly to help the situation now. The problem is hoping for this sort of thing is that you really want to be careful what you pray for. The National Weather Service is saying that we'll have another active hurricane season. Who knows whether Saharan dust will impede formation this year like it did last year but if not I think there could be a lot more destruction than drought relief.

So, I'll be praying for rain but not for the big storms or the thunderstorms with lightning that can spark the types of wildfires that have consumed so much forest down south.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Well, the news from Floyd Landis' arbitration hearing is bad for everyone involved. Bad for USADA/WADA because there are all sorts of violations in the handling of the samples at the French lab who did the testing. But, to be honest, worse for Landis. I won't go into all the details because I think NBC Sports seems to be doing a pretty good job of this but basically former Tour winner Greg LeMond dropped a huge bombshell on the proceedings. It turns out that Greg was abused as a child and had revealed this to Floyd in a call Floyd had made to him shortly after the initial test results were revealed. Last night, LeMond received a phone call from someone identifying himself as LeMond's uncle who basically threatened to reveal LeMond's secret. When LeMond backtraced the number, it turns out it came from Landis' (now former) business manager. Bad day for the business manager and bad day for Floyd. Really bad day for Floyd.

First, I have to say that I commend LeMond for his courage. He could have run and hidden under a rock to keep his secret but instead he decided that he wouldn't be blackmailed. I haven't always liked Greg's comments and what to me sounds like the whining of a former champion seeing his glory fade but to me he stepped up and became something greater than a Tour champion. He became a champion for all those who have suffered from sexual abuse or exploitation as children. He became a shining example of what can be done if a person stands up and says that they won't live in silence and shame anymore. I imagine that it's been a bad 24 hours for LeMond but he alone has stood above the pettiness of all this. I don't know if he can step beyond this venue onto a larger stage but I hope he will offer hope to thousands (maybe millions) of those affected by sexual abuse.

Second, I'm not totally sure what to think about Floyd. I can't believe that he would have told something so personal to his business manager. One of the things revealed today were some pretty vindictive emails written by Floyd to a chat room threatening to expose things about LeMond. If this is what he meant, I have really just lost all respect for Floyd. Reading thte accounts of the hearing I've become more and more convinced that the lab screwed up and that Floyd's positive results are unreliable to say the least. I'm less incined to believe that there was malice involved here; just incompetence (at least initially on the part of the lab). However, with the revelations today about the people Landis has surrounded themselves with and with the way he has handled what LeMond has confided in him, I pretty sure I don't want to think of Floyd as a champion anymore. He may have won the competition but I won't view him as a champion. I know that there have been many athletes who have been not very nice people but to me (and probably only to me) this goes beyond being an ass or a jerk and moves into areas indicating a fundamental lack of character.

I think I'll stop now and see if any more information comes out about this before I go off on some kind of rant.

Bad day for cycling...

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

I was watching a little TV tonight and saw a commercial for A&W and one of the things the commercial implied was that and A&W root beer float was a part of the fabric of American culture. I found this to be really interesting. As I thought of it I realized that while I may not agreed with the statement, when I think of what summer was for me as a kid, A&W root beer floats were a big part of that image. I didn't have them all the time but in Medford, were I grew up, there would be a stretch were things got really hot; 110+ degrees hot. Sometime during that stretch we'd end up at an A&W and the taste of the amazingly creamy root beer in the ice cold glass mug was just...perfect. Sometimes I'd add the ice cream but usually the root beer that was cold enough to have ice crystals was enough.

So, to me, A&W root beer was just a part of summer as I was growing up. As the chain slowly died it was almost as if it was a metaphor for my childhood passing into adolescence and then young adulthood. Now that Yum! Food/Pepsi owns A&W I wonder if they'll bring back the root beer the way it used to be of if they'll put out some corporately sterilized version they'll claim is the same. How will the metaphor proceed?

So, the question I have for you is what thing symbolizes summer in your mind? What thing reminds you of summer? What taste or smell or place or thing?

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Today is the first day I have completely off. I had a bunch of stuff planned for the day in terms of trying to be productive: a long ride, some cleaning, fixing a flat tire on the car, etc. To be honest, other than the long ride, I haven't done any of it. I realize that I'm pretty tired and mentally exhausted in some ways. So what should have been a productive day has turned into a rest day from all the stuff that has to get done. There's not really anything that won't wait until later tonight or tomorrow.

The ride today was really nice. I took yesterday off due to some physical apathy that was probably due to my mental state so I think my body was ready to get out on the bike for a longer ride. I went out and did about 70 miles and listened to a lot of podcast material. The route I chose was one I hadn't exactly done in the past. I've done all the pieces and parts of the ride but this was a really nice route. About halfway along the route there was a covered bridge that I got some pictures of and I'll post here after I've sized them down to something a little more managable. The weather was perfect with temps in the mid-60's rising into the mid-70's.

I expect that I'll have more enthusiasm to get things done tomorrow as long as I get some rest and do some things to stimulate my mind without taxing it too much. What I really wish is that Versus would actually show the Giro. Their is a broadcast that is a webcast but I can't record that and watch it when I get back from my morning ride and it's hard to get really excited looking at a grainy, choppy webcast in a 4x4 window.

Anyways, for the next couple of weeks, I have some really unstructured free time to ride, do some around the house chores and work in my garden. That is, of course, assuming that something doesn't crop up that needs my attention at the College.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, May 11, 2007

So the Giro de italia kicks off tomorrow. Last year's champion is not starting because he's a doper (regardless of what he might say about just intending to dope) and several other riders are being held out because of the increasingly long shadow of Operation Puerto. Their are still several interesting riders coming to the start line but one has to wonder whether the race will be as exciting as it might have been. I have to say that it seems to me like the Italians are ahead of everyone else regarding keeping questionable riders out but I have to say I wish they had invited Team Chipotle-Slipstream as a wild card. Jonathon Vaughter's young squad has been so far ahead of the curve on keeping its riders clean that I think they should be rewarded somehow. I can't really blame the Giro organizers for inviting the local Pro Contentental teams but maybe they should have thrown out the Tinkoff team just for having the termidity of submitting Tyler Hamilton's name on their first start list.

Now, for my completely worthless predictions.

The contenders are the usual suspects for this race: Simoni, Cunego, Garzelli, and Salvodelli. Add to those the dark horse contenders of Di Luca, Popovitch and Rasmussen. Here's how I see it: I'm still not convinced Cunego is the real deal and that he won a few years back clean. Maybe he did but he had no previous results and just seemed too good. Simoni's getting a bit long in the tooth but if you take out the dopers in last year's Giro, he wins the thing. Definitely podium for Gilberto but I think he'll get stabbed in the back by his young teammate and we'll get to listen to him whine for a couple of months. With this he'll sew up the title of "Cycling Crybaby of the Millenium". Garzelli was Pantini's protege and there's a cloud there. He's never really ridden at the top level since leaving Marco's side (and possibly pharmacist). Top ten for sure and maybe top five but I'm doubious. Looking at the dark horses you've got to like how Di Luca's riding but he's not a pure climber and this Giro is all uphill at the end. Popo is good in this race but he's been preparing to support the now departed Ivan basso and I wonder if he can shift gears in time.

I think Salvodelli has to be the favorite if his allergies can be controlled. He's got to want to show Discovery that they made a big mistake letting him go. He time trials better than Simoni and I think Astana is built more like Disco and CSC with an all for one attitude. One of the problems the crop up on the italian teams is a certain level of discord that may have been exciting at one time in cycling but is now a recipe for losing a grand tour. One final thoght regarding Simoni is that he was thrid up the Brasstown Bald climb in Georgia behind two guys who weren't even prepping for the Giro. Now maybe he was holding back and just sort of testing his form, but I was less than impressed with that performance and his fifth place finish in the uphill time trial here.

So, read and then proceed to ignore.

Overall: (1) Salvodelli, (2) Simoni, (3) Di Luca, (4) Popovitch, (5) Cunego, (6) Garzelli, (7) Rasmussen, (8) Belohvosciks, (9) Caucchioli, (10) Voeckler

Points: (1) McEwen, (2) Petacchi, (3) Bettini, (4) Haedo, (5) Hushovd

Mountains: (1) Simoni, (2) Rasmussen, (3) Arekeev

Given the tendancy of the Giro organizers to put together courses and finishes that are dangerous, I expect crashes to take out a couple of big names before the finish. I expect Bettini to win a stage or two and I expect Di Luca to win a stage early and to wear the Maglia Rosa for a while but I see Salvodelli grabbing the jersey in a time trial and clinging to the lead on the penultimate stage.

Hopefully it'll be interesting.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

School's mostly done for the time being (though I keep wondering why I have all of these meetings if school's done until summer semester) and I've started to settle into a more regular ride routine-something between 40 and 45 miles per day with one longer excursion per week and a couple of shorter recovery rides.

Yesterday I did something I haven't done in a long time; I rode on the dirt. It's been maybe 6 months since I went out to Dauset Trails and rode the Stumpjumper. I love this bike. It was my first bike that was truly a competition level machine. I hadn't intended to buy something that high end when I went in but Nate and my wife sort of convinced me that I didn't want to buy a bike I would spend a bunch of money having to upgrade later. They were so right. When Nate built the bike up in 2002 it was the lightest MTB they had built up to that point at Bike Tech and it really was the perfect MTB for me. It was light and stiff with a great front shcok at the time and it handles great for me. When I have the right tires on it, there's little I can't handle terrainwise as long as there's not too much mud. I've won a lot of races on the bike and a couple of championships.

Beyond that, it is just a really pretty bike to look at. The triangles are still there (which is getting harder and harder to see on MTBs) and the lines are really clean. The tube manipulation processes where just starting to make their way into the mass production bikes and the Stump has a bunch but it's all really subtle.

So why haven't I ridden it more? Time mostly. For me to get to the trail, I have to drive 35 minutes out and 35 minutes back. That's an hour I could put on a road bike since I can leave straight from home. Add to the time the fact that we are a one car family and the scheduling juggling that has to take place, it gets hard to get out to the trail. So with school done and a bit more free time there's a chance to get out. With unseasonably warm weather and higher winds from the tropical storm that's not really a tropical storm that's sitting off the coast, it seemed good to head out.

The bike was pretty good, though I found that I can probably use a little shock maintainance. Even with that and a serious deterioration of my skills I was still able to turn a couple of laps that were faster than I expected. I never felt like I was going all that fast and I felt like a baubbled a lot of things but I still turned a lap that I've generally ridden in 75 minutes in 79 so I guess it wasn't too bad. I'm not ready to race or anything, but I didn't leave the trial feeling like a dork or that I should sell the Stump so that's good.

I'm looking forward riding out there a little more often.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Everyone has "Lottery Dreams." YOu know the ones. They start out with thinking, "If I won the lottery I would..." The dreams get interesting once the person gets past the, "I'd pay off all my bills and travel to...," part and the, "and I'd buy a ... for my parents," bits and such. I was thinking about what I'd do the other day it I hit it big in a Megaball drawing or something.

One of the things I've always wished I could do was start a commune for all of my friends. My wife and I will sometimes speak of a particularly dear friend by saying that we'd definitley invite them to The Commune. There'd be lots of land and everyone would have their own house that we'd provide. We'd get together and hang out for Friday afternoon dinner parties and discuss current events and history and science and philosophy. Kelly Kinkaid would be there and so would Dave Cushman. Jim Landes and Mike Ody would be too. My wife would invite Shaun Chavis. Our friends John and Jennifer from Kansas (now in Oregon) would be invited. My brother Chris and his family would be asked to come. There are more than that I'm sure (please don't be offended if you're left out, I probably just need more time to think of your name than I have at the moment).

As I was thinking about this on a recovery ride the other day I realized that the Lottery Dream was incomplete; the Commune would need a purpose, a way to give back to the world that really made a difference. Otherwise it's just another yuppie, gated community that turns its back on the world in fear or disgust or both. As I thouhgt of it I realized that we should build a school for kids that emphasized all the right things about education. We'd go with a Montessori model I think and the members of the Commune could teach or work there if they wanted. Their kids could go there to get a really first rate education that emphasized both the classical and the modern. Tuition would be free and we'd invite kids from the town to join us. Maybe we'd educate the kids of the college professors and K-12 educators for free. We'd ask the parents to chip in a certain amount of time every week or we'd have to charge an outrageously high tuition rate. The school could be in old houses and new buildings on rural land. We could throw the standards out the window and get back to teaching our kids to explore and discover and to not lose the sense of wonder about the world or the ideas of great men like the Bard or the Reverend. They could write about whatever big ideas they had and read about those of others who have gone before them. They could learn Greek and Latin and maybe one or two other languages all from the time that they start in first grade or even Kindergarden.

They'd see respect from the adults and they'd learn to be respectful by beign treated with respect. They'd learn to work hard and succeed and they'd learn to learn from their failures. They'd learn to define themselves from within instead of taking their queues from the world around them who wants them to be all things to all people and hates them when they're not. They'd learn to love and how to be loved.

I told you it was a lottery dream; now here, drink this Kool-Aid.

Thanks for Reading

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Well, there were no April showers here in the Peach State and it looks like May will continue the same trend. The high temp yesterday was a near record breaking 88 degrees and today's high will be 92. What happened to spring? We have about a week of it in early late March and then some early April storms put an end to that and brought another shot of cold temps. As we've slowly fought those off, we had another week or so and now it's summer (though the humidity isn't as bad). Where are the 75-80 degree days we usually have? Riding in this weather should be lots of fun. Usually I have a little time to acclimate to the heat but not so much this year.

Now that I'm into finals week, I have a little more time to ride consistently. The temptation is to go out and ride a whole bunch of miles. The problem is that I don't really think I have the base to lay down a 1300 or 1400 mile month. So what I'll try to do is ride some an average of 40 miles a day for the next week and see how I feel. If I feel good, I'll up it some. Another problem is that I'm getting tired of riding the same roads. I know that I have it pretty good here in the rural south with decent raods that are lightly travelled but after seven 12,000 mile years, there's the sense that I've seen it all before. I have about 4 or 5 good forty mile loops, meaning I don't have to do some sort of weird cobbling otgether of various small segments with lots of strange turns and backtracking. I also have another 4 fifty mile loops and even a couple of nice metric centruy routes. The problem is that I've done them all so many times that there's little novelty to them. Maybe next week, I'll steal the car and drive down to Warm Springs, park and ride the roads down there. The hard part with doing that though is the idea of spending two hours in the car to ride a similar time ont he bike. Another option is some mountain biking if I feel like making the drive out and back.

In any case, these aren't really terrible problems to have and I'm sure I'll find a way to endure.

Thanks for Reading

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Thursday, April 26, 2007

This is always an interesting part of the year in academia. As things wind down in terms of the academic year and students are closing this chapter of their lives there's cause for celebration for some, frustration over unfulfilled expectations for others and the transition from the old to the new.

In some ways this is the best time of year. For me personally, I have had the satisfaction of receiving messages from a few former students who are graduating from their four year institutions and getting ready to move on to the next phase of their lives. That's a really gratifying part of my career; seeing students that I helped prepare go on to achieve their goals and start to change the world for the better. In addition, I get to enjoy seeing the students who are finishing up here get excited about moving to the next school and the next challenge. Sometimes they're scared about the future but I have enough perspective and I know them well enough to know that they'll do well at their transfer institutions as long as they don't forget the lessons they learned here about hard work and focusing on academic priorities.

For many though this is a very stressful part of the year. Some students are trying very hard to salvage a year that held a lot of promise but hasn't turned out as well as they had hoped. There's a lot of pressure on them to climb out of some hole or another they've dug for themselves. For others they're trying to deal with the disappointment and grief that comes from failed dreams. They came here hoping to do well and they know that for whatever reason they have failed to achieve that goal. Some will spend time coming to terms with this failure and will earn and grow from it. We'll see those students again in the future after they've cleaned up their mess and reorganized their priorities. Others are still in denial or have given up hope. These are the students who have stopped coming to class and have become problems in the dorms and apartment complexes around town. It's sad to see them flail about thinking that they have nothing left to lose when they have so much to lose from their short-sightedness.

Finally, this is a time for transition. Already we are preparing for the first New Student Orientations here for next fall's incoming students. Just after my final grades are turned in with the triumph and frustration they will represent, I'll see a batch of new students with hopes and dreams and expectations. So many of these will not line up with reality. I wish there was some way we could get some graduating students to encapsulate their experiences in a way that could be communicated to our new, incoming students. The problem is that every time we try, it seems that the students we select want to talk about where the best parties are and who to take and who not to take for classes based on what's easy instead of what's being learned. Sometimes it seem like those who end up in our student leadership positions don't understand the responsibility they have to represent the College and its mission. For some reason, the sophomores that see this don't volunteer to speak and the one's who don't want to recruit as many new students to their limited way of seeing and thinking as possible.

As further evidence of the yearly transition taking place, as we are concluding this year's business on the Faculty Senate I'm in the process of getting my Cabinet together for next year. As one one set of issues in resolved for the time being, there are new issues beginning to become visible on the horizon. Will the College really grow at the rate some are suggesting; from 3500 to 8500 in the next 5-10 years? If it does, how will we manage the growth from a physical plant perspective (classrooms, housing, dining facilities, local community support, etc.)? How will we insure that the faculty will have a strong voice during this period of rapid change? How will we insure that students have continued access to high quality instruction and relevant student activities? How will we create a strong sense of what our College is? Will we become a McCollege with little to distinguish us from 100's or even thousands of similar institutions? Will we become another Atlanta Metro area commodity that is consumed and forgotten like yesterday's Big Mac or will we be able to become something that is considered a resource, an opportunity and a treasure by those with whom we interact?

In this time of endings and transitions, I find my mind turning to these sorts of questions.

Thanks for Reading.

Labels: School, Students, Transitions

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Well, we now have clear and irrefutable proof that the system that is supposed to ensure fair and impartial testing of athletes in olympic sports and the world and national level is broken.

A little background.

Last year Floyd Landis tested postive at the Tour de France (which he won) for an elevated testosterone to epitestosterone level in one of his urine samples. In a cross check, the lab that ran the test said it found traces of synthetic testosterone int he urine and Landis was suspended. Landis appealed showing clear evidence that the lab may have mishandled his samples and definitely did not follow protocol in dealing with the samples and in releasing the results. His claim is that the lab can't establish a cler chain of custody nor can it say the sample was even his due to mislabaling errors. From what I've been able to determine, the lab also violated protocol by having the same technician analyze both the initial sample and the cross check sample.

From what I can tell, Landis has a case and his appeal is a worthy one. The problem that became clear fairly quickly is that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and its American counterpart (USADA) weren't really interested in looking at the evidence that Landis' legal team presented. It seemed that he was guilty and all the rest was legal speak. After a lot of fighting Landis got certain evidence admitted that was pretty damning for the French lab involved. At an arbitration trial however, it was decided to test all of his other samples for synthetic testosterone. This is a clear violation of an athlete's rights as it is only permissable to retest if the first test came back positive. The arbitration panel didn't say whether the results would be admissible at the appeal hearing, leaving that legal sticky wicket for another day. Landis' team said that if such tests were to be performed that they should be performed at a different lab than the French one that first did the tests due to conflict of interest. They recommended a lab in Los Angeles which has a proven track record of being the best at this particular test. For a variety of reasons WADA refused to do this.

Well, the results became public today. The bad part is that they weren't supposed to. The results were supposed to be confidential but someone leaked them to L'Equippe, a French sporting newspaper with strong ties to the Tour and WADA. No one knows exactly who did the leaking but it doesn't matter. In addition, one of the conditions of the test is that Landis' own experts were to be on hand to supervise the testing of the samples to make sure that protocols were fallowed along with representatives of the lab and USADA. Landis' experts were barred from parts of the testing procedures in clear violation with the arbitration panel's decision. So know one on Landis' side of the case knows exactly how the tests were done and they have only the lab's and USADA's word that the tests were done correctly. The worst part is that the urine is destroyed by the tests so now Landis can't have any independant testing done.

What does this say to me as a cyclist? Things are rotten in France and in WADA and in USADA. Why should you care? These are the organizations that test all athletes in all sports to see if they're clean. I'm a strong supporter to strong drug policies but I don't trust any of these organizations anymore. Floyd Landis may or may not have drugged. The problem is that the lab and WADA through their incompetence has made that impossible to determine. Who says there isn't some anti-American bias among lab techs in the French lab. The anti-Armstrong bias in the French lab was well documented and the animus towards American riders surely carried over. I'm certain that the French were tired of seeing American riders take home all their best trophies. That year along LAndis won the prestigious Paris-Nice, Levi Leipheimer won the third more important stage race in France, the Dauphine, and Landis won the Tour.

It's time for Landis and all cyclists to sue the hell out of WADA and the French lab in a court of the European Union. Of course, I'm not sure it will do any good as the Europeans seem to have their own concept of justice.

Thanks for Reading

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Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Several readers of my Facebook account to which this blog is imported have inquired about my Mom's health over the last few days so I thought I'd write up an update and a few other thoughts.

For those who don't read about my life over on my Facebook profile let me bring you up to speed. About two weeks ago my Mom coughed up blood a couple of times over the course of an evening and a morning. As she is suffering from COPD (basically a combination of emphasema and chronic bronchitis) she decided it would be a good idea to see her pulminologist to make sure this wasn't a problem. The doctor, having a sense of what might be going on I think, took an X-Ray and found a large mass in her left lung. What followed was basically a week's worth of tests and biopsies to determine the exact nature of the tumor and its location. Initially, the news was pretty dire I guess: large cell tumor iint he upper lobe of her left lung right on top of a major pulminary artery. The location of the tumor seemed to make it inoperable and the type of tumor made it a poor candidate for chemotherapy as did my Mom's COPD. The treatment was going to be radiation to try and shrink the tumor but the survival rate past one year was pretty low (40% I think).

As she was being tatooed in prep for her radiation treatments, the supervising oncologist came in and told her and my Dad that things might be a lot better than he had hoped. From the latest PET scans, it looked like the cancer might not have invaded the major pulminary artery and they might be able to take part of her lung and get the tumor. So she was scheduled into surgery on Friday. The doctor told her and my Dad that it was 50/50. She was scheduled to go in at 7:30 am and the doctor said that if he was done by 9 am it was bad news-the cancer had invaded the artery and they couldn't remove it.

I spoke with both my parents on Thursday night and I could tell that my Mom had a real peace about everything. On Friday morning I kept checking my phone here at work and as the hours ticked by with no message on the voicemail I began to get excited. At 2 pm my time (12 or so Salt Lake time) I called my brother and got word that the doctor hadn't come out to see them with bad news. My Mom was still in surgery. The surgeon ended up having to remove her entire left lung as he kept finding cancerous cells all through its tissue. Fortunately, he didn't find any in either of the lymph nodes associated with the lung which was fantastic news. Right now the physicians are all cautiously optimistic that they got everything.

While I haven't talked to my Mom as she was in ICU until late last night, the word from my Dad is that she's doing very well. They have her sitting up and doing a variety of breathing exercises to make sure her one remaining lung is strong enough to provide all the air she needs. Apparently she's begun taking in small amounts of solid food which is very good indication that she's on the road to recovery.

To everyone who has been praying for her, my Mom and I say thank you. I think knowing that there were so many praying for her helped her to find the peace that the apostle Paul talks about that "passes all understanding."

For me personally this has been an interesting time. When my Mom initially called me to tell me the news, I could tell what it was going to be from the moment she spoke. I could hear it in her voice. Like many who have been given the diagnosis of cancer, she couldn't tell me the news bluntly, as if she was afraid that by telling me how bad it might be, she might make it worse for herself. My wife and I had gone through this ten years ago when her father was given the news that his cancer had metastisized. Her parents had called to try to tell us and they couldn't just come out and say it and we were left with the impression that things weren't as bad as they were. This time, I sort of assumed the worst, especially as my Mom talked about radiation. They never told me about the chances but from the sound of my Mom's voice I knew that they weren't very good.

To be honest, I had been waiting for that phone call for twenty years. My parents have both smoked since their years in high school and that was fifty years ago. I know the some of the science and most of the statistics related to smoking and cancer. I knew that it was a matter of time before there was a phone call. The funny thing was that it came just like you might expect in the movies: late at night just as I was falling asleep after a long day during a long week. After we hung up I just sort of sat there and let it all wash over me. I wasn't really sad or angry or anxious but sort of resigned. I had prepared myself for twenty years for this one phone call and had played all of the scenarios out in my mind. Of the ones I had imagined, this was pretty benign. I was still able to talk to the affected parent; there hadn't been a stroke or massive heart attack that stole them away nor was the diagnosis a "two weeks to get your affairs in order" kind of thing. That may still happen but it hadn't happened that night. I began to think of how I would try to spend some time with her as soon as my school responsibilities allowed. The only thing I got really frustrated about was my work situation. If I taught at a K-12 school, I could have the school find me a sub and I could go out for the surgery to be there to support my Mom and my family. If I was at a larger 4-yr institution with other physicists then they could have covered my classes for me. However, like most of my colleagues at 2-yr colleges, I am the only one qualified to teach my subject and we must meet so traveling out to SLC was problematic to say the least.

So I did what I could over the phone and that was good. My brother lives in town there so he was able to help out a lot and I really appreciate what he did. We're still trying to figure out how to get out to SLC over the summer to see my Mom and everyone else but for right now I'm very thankful that things have turned out so well to this point.

Thanks for Reading

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Friday, April 13, 2007

As the "War in Iraq" drags on and more people who are either in leadership roles or who have loud voices begin to question the war, a sadly expected debate has begun to occur.

For many people of a particularly conservative nature the arguments about remaining in Iraq become less and less about achieving a specific set of objectives and more and more about this sort of amorphous idea of "supporting the troops". Many of these folks equate supporting our continued military presence in Iraq to supporting the men and women who put themselves in harm's way. In their minds, if you don't support our military actions then you don't support the troops who undertake them.

For those who wonder if we still, as a nation, live in the shadow of the Vietnam conflict, this should clear that up right away. Back in the early 70's, many who opposed the Vietnam War also disparaged the troops. It was only after a time of national reflection on the war and the counting of the cost of that confusion that we realized, as a nation, that the young men who fought there were upholding their commitments to this nation and our national anger about the war had been misdirected at them. In the 80's, we as a nation decided in sort of a collective sort of way (probably subtly led and encouraged by Ronald Reagan and his administration) that we would no longer subject our troops, our fellow citizens, to such abuse. This, in my opinion, was and continues to be a very good thing.

The problem now is that there are those who wish to bring up the same arguments against those who don't support our military action: if you oppose the war, you must be like those nuts in the 70's who didn't support the troops and you don't support the troops. I find such an argument pathetic. No where has there been the mass reviling of our troops, even though they have committed some pretty atrocious acts. Our troops still enjoy broad support from those on both sides of the issue.

To those who question whether those who don't support the war support the troops I only have one thing to say: Knock it off! Don't use some emotional knee-jerk tactic to deflect criticism of the war or how it's been executed. There are good reasons for our military to be in Iraq; start explaining them clearly and stop impugning the patriotism of those who demand those explanations or who don't accept them at face value. What you're doing is once again entangling our men and women in the military in a political issue just like the war protesters of the 70's did. It was wrong then and its wrong now.

Thanks for reading.

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Wednesday, April 11, 2007

More about doping and pro cycling...isn't that why you read this blog?

So, former Tour de France winner (1996) and current CSC team manager/owner/sporting director Bjarne Riis was recently accused by a former teammate (from the time when he rode for the T-Mobile team with Jan Ullrich) of using performance enhancing substances during his years as a rider. When Riis was asked about the accusations he didn't deny them but instead told folks to stop digging around in the past. In some quarters he has been pilloried for this stance but I have to stand up and say "Bravo". After my last post about Jan fessing up, why would I do this?

You have to understand that when Riis won the Tour in '96 the use of EPO was beginning to run rampant (the same is true for Ullrich when he won the '97 Tour). Only two years later the Tour would be rocked by what was then the biggest doping scandal in the history of sports when the Festina team was found to be carrying EPO in the team car. It seems pretty clear to me that just about everyone was doping. Several ex-cyclists have written or spoken about the atmosphere at the time that held that if a cyclist were truly professional they were expected to dope as a matter of course. Riis (and Ullrich I believe) were products of this culture and they acted accordingly. There are reports that Miguel Indurian quit the sport after a famous falling out with his team director because he refused to take EPO after losing the '96 Tour to Riis. Big Mig, it was whispered, was not "professional".

After Riis retired at the end of the '97 season he spent a couple years out of the sport and then returned in 2000 as the sporting director of a new team. His goal was to do things differently and he signed the American company, CSC, as the title sponsor and enticed French cycling icon Laurent Jalabert to join the team. Jaja had just left the ONCE team (which would become Liberty Siguros) because of a falling out with his sporting director Manolo Saiz (who was later caught red-handed by the Operation Puetro investigators holding bags of blood attributed to several of his riders). One might speculate that this falling out had to do with Jaja's level of "professionalism".

Riis, I think wanted to build a team atmosphere that was free of performance enhancers and built on trust betweent he riders and the directors (which is why Jaja ended up riding for him). Actually, I think he has done exactly that. CSC has been among the best teams in the world and from all indications, it's riders have ridden clean. The one exception may have been Tyler Hamilton and he left the team in a really unexpected move that may have had a lot to do with Riis' insistence that he work only with team doctors rather than a doctor in Spain that seemed a little shady.

So what I think Riis is saying is, "Yeah, I doped. Things were different then and not in a good way. Right now I'm working hard to change things and move our sport out of a culture where doping is encouraged and/or required. I'd much rather talk about the best way to do that than to discuss what's in the past that can't be changed." Truth be told, I think Riis is a great guy to do that. He's seen the underbelly of the sport. I'll bet that when he looks at his yellow jerseys he feels a sense of regret that he didn't win them clean. I'll bet he would like the riders under his supervision to avoid the dilemma that he faced and the compromises he ended up making. He's implimented some of the best anti-doping practices for his team and has been one of the strongest advocates of a DNA testing procedure to determine a rider's innocence or guilt when the time to prove that comes.

Sometimes it takes a person who has been downt he wrong rode to understand what it takes to keep from going there. I sincerely hope that's the case with Bjarne.

As always, thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

This blog is for those of you who don't get enough cycling coverage already...

So Big Jan Ullrich is on the sauce...his own sauce. DNA tests have matched him up with nine bags of blood keep by a Spanish doctor he denied having any involvement with. His lawyers now say that just because he had his blood at a doctor's office it doesn't mean he was going to put it back in his body the day before a big race to boost the oxygen carrying capacity of his blood to give him a big performance gain.

Riiiigghhhttttt! (Say it in your Dr. Evil voice for best effect.)

A guy just keeps nine bags of red blood cells at a doctor's office in a country he doesn't even live in just in case he happens to be stricken with rampant hemophilia while on a Barcelona bender? I understand Der Kaiser's lawyer is also selling beachfront property in Berlin for those who might be in the market.

Jan doesn't read this blog (though he should) but I'm going to give him a piece of advice anyway: Jan, follow the lead of David Miller and come clean. Co-operate with the cycling authorities. You don't have a lot to lose and you might actually be remembered as something other than a huge cheat. Tell your lawyer to shut up and man up to Sam Waterston in some television interview Law and Order style. He'll have some hottie ADA there to back him up and to provide some eye candy and you can have a heartfelt breakdown and blame it on cycling culture and Pevenage and the Belgian cycling mafia and the East German sports machine and all the rest and say that you wish you were half the man Jens Voight was. You can agree to give up the labs and the doctors you worked with in exchange for Waterston "taking the needle off the table" and spend the rest of your life in a self-imposed purgatory. Maybe even you can go around to German high schools and tell aspiring German cyclists to just say no to drugs and doping and to race locally for the fun of it. You can tell them how you were led down the path to perdition in the world of pro cycling where the drugs flowed like water in an underground river: treacherous and cold. You can tell them about a world were winning is everything and fairness is not getting caught.

A least, that's what I think you should do.

Thanks for Reading.

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Tuesday, April 03, 2007

I'm a geek. This is something I'm rather proud of at times. I'm a bike geek, a weather geek, a physics geek and, most of all, an astronomy geek. One of the geekier things I do is look for extraterrestrial life or at least help the Seti Institute do it. I've been a part of the Seti@Home project off and on since its inception. When I taught in Kansas, I had most of the computers at the college I worked at crunching away through the night when there were no studnets around. When I moved to Georgia, the policies were a lot more restrictive so I sort of let it go. I'm a geek but I like to be an employed geek so that was that.

Things have changed here over the last few years and I was finally givven some administrator rights to the computers in my physics lab and to my desktop machine. On a whim I decided to see if I could download the Seti@Home client and run things here. Lo and behold, I was able to! So for the last six months or so I've been crunching merrily away and this last weekend passed the 1,000,000 credit mark. Very cool to do my little bit. The great thing is that it doesn't take too much work on my part and the computers get to crunch all the numbers they want, which I know makes them very happy. The best part is that their not boring integers they're getting to crunch but high precision real numbers handled with floating point operations. Very tasty.

Of course, what I'd love to do is build a processing farm with several of the rumored to be coming eight processor Intel Macs but I doubt that'll happen anytime real soon.

Anyways, that having been said, I'd just like to also point out how great it is to be a Florida Gator. Another National Championship for the Orange and Blue boys. Pretty awesome accomplishments and I get to tease all my students who are UGA fans. We beat them in everything related to a big sport this year so that's been cool. Who knows, maybe the baseball team will get inspired and wim the College World Series.

Thanks for Reading.

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Monday, April 02, 2007

Well, it was a pretty good weekend. I finally, after many attempts, got my 100 mile ride in for the month. I've been stopped by screws, weather and darkness but Saturday everything worked out. I got decent weather with a moderate wind that help out a lot over the last 25 miles into home. I was able to do the ride in under 5 hours which is good for a solo effort at this point. Last night when I tried to do a trainer ride, my legs weren't too much into that but that's to be expected. All in all, last week was a really solid training week and I finally can see some form off in the distance.

Yesterday we finally got some rain to knock some of the pollen down but the air mass that's still in place is super humid so we've had fog today. I guess there was a big accident involving a couple of semis out at the interstate because of the conditions.

This week is going to be very busy with work and church activities leaving me with only Tuesday evening to get errands done. The nice thing is that things should ease off after Easter and once that happens it'll be just a couple of weeks until finals and some well-earned rest for both me and my students.

Thanks for Reading.

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Friday, March 30, 2007

"Only want to see you gagging in the Yellow Haze...Yellow Haze, Yellow Haze...Yellow Haze, Yellow Haze...Yellow Haze, Yellow Haze...Only want to see you gagging in the Yellow Haze."-The Artist formerly known as Prince

It's spring here in the Peach State and with that comes pine pollen. Lots of pine pollen. Buckets and buckets and buckets of pine pollen. The pollen count measured in Atlanta is hovering right around 6000 right now which is somewhere between extremely high to astronomically outrageous depending on whose scale you're using. Everything is covered in this sort of yellow dust stuff. Washing your car is an exercise in futility as is trying to sweep off your porch.

Yesterday I rode a nice 40 mile hill interval route and when I got home it looked like I'd been trying to eat Cheetos with the insides of my elbows and the back of my knees. I looked at the face in the mirror at home and I was jaundiced and my lips were completely yellow.

Plant sperm is great if you're a plant I suppose but I'm not a plant. My sinuses and other respiratory bits and pieces don't seem to want to be impregnated in a planty sort of way so breathing has been interesting.

Hopefully we'll get some rain this weekend to knock some of this stuff out of the air but right now we just have moderate winds to blow all the stuff around and get it into and through ever nook and cranny imaginable.

Thanks for Reading.

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Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Finally, a ride worth posting about. Just the day after I spend a post to whine about my poor cycling form I go out and lay down a great ride. I managed to do 42 miles at a pace of 22.6 mph solo. Even better, I managed to do it with an average heart rate of 160 bpm which is well below my lactate threshold. I'll probably ride like crap today (my legs hurt pretty badly after the ride yesterday and this morning) but that's because I did some hill sprints and big gear intervals as part of the ride for power training. Maybe I'll take it easy today and then if I can go do some hill intervals tomorrow. I have to spend most of the morning and early afternoon in a meeting about our new elementary education program here at the College so I expect that I'll probably be frustrated enough to need to blow of some steam doing climbing repeats on Hog Mountain. The question will be whether I do the four mile loop the easy way with a short power climb and then a 1 mile rhythm climb, the hard way with the 1.5 mile rhythm climb that has a real kick at the end or a longer six mile loop with a stairstep climb that's about 2 miles long that has a hard bit at the beginning and then a really, really steep 20+% quarter mile long hard bit at the end. Maybe I'll mix it up depending on how I feel.

Thanks for Reading

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Tuesday, March 27, 2007

This last weekend was a long one. We got word on Thursday that one of the Lovely Wife's sisters was leaving her husband for some pretty good reasons. We had planned to go and visit a friend in Birmingham but quickly changed plans to head to LA to help with the late night packing and moving. It was a stressful time as you might imagine but everyhting seems to have been accomplished with as little drama as possible.

I managed to get a couple of good rides in and am now near 1000 for the month. My strength still isn't anywhere I need it to be and I'm beginning to think I won't be doing much racing this month. Between battling scheduling issues and some vertigo which seems to come and go randomly, I feel like I've been struggling to get into some kind of shape. I went in for a physical and neither the doctor nor the blood tests indicated that anything was wrong but I'm still not sure. Hopefully some of this stuff will clear up over the next few weeks.

Classes continue along fairly well. It's great having four dedicated groups of students who really seem to want to learn. It makes my job a lot easier. I've arrived at that time of the year where I have to decide what my focus is going to be. I'll be chair of our Faculty Senate next year so that's pretty much locked in. What I'm trying to figure out is how much student study skills stuff I'd like to do. I think I'd liek to do the same summer seminar I did last year through community ed but I'm not sure about doing an on-campus thing. I don't get paid and I got almost no response last year. The student services division says that they want to support such activities but then they didn't last year. I think I'd rather spend the time promoting the Christian group I'm the faculty advisor for. Maybe when I'm not doing faculty governance things I can take that time and energy and try to do something to get student services moving int he right direction.

Thanks for reading

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Thursday, March 22, 2007

OK...so apparently not everything was broken. I call home today to see if my lovely wife would like to do lunch and what do I find out? The city is digging up our driveway. I'm not entirely certain why but it doesn't look like it's to fix whatever is leaking into the median between the sidewalk and the road in front of our house. Do you know what breeds in sitting water with a slick, oily sheen (I mean, besides boxing promoters and horror film producers)? Mosquitoes. Malaria carrying, encephalitis inducing, blood sucking, buzzing-in-your-ear annoying mosquitoes. So not only do we have to deal with rambling boxing promoters, raging horror film producers and blood thirsty, carnivorous insects, we can't escape them and we can't invite any of our friends over to enjoy the scenery. Maybe I can get lucky and get some film of the insectile pterodactyls sucking the black bile blood of some mutated boxer who was about to chop off the head of a surgically altered pro-wrestling bimbo. If so, I'll post something here to let you know about it. That is assuming, of course, that the city waterworks guys don't dig to China, discover gold under my sidewalk or, worst of all, discovery my secret underground lair.

Thanks for Reading.

Labels: blood, boxing, holes, horror films, insects

The Physicist   Link Me    |