Monthly Archives: May 2015

A Big Milestone

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It seems appropriate that the ride that put me over 5000 miles was a slog. There are days like that, days you find yourself a long way from home and you’re not sure where the energy will come from to get you there. I’d fought a fierce headwind on Wednesday, and Thursday I was still feeling the effort. Man, I hate headwinds.

The traffic lights along Homestead were no help either as I plodded along, but since I had little momentum it was less annoying to lose it. Instead I waited, not winded (I was too tired to burn enough energy to require heavy breathing), and when the light changed in my favor I saddled up and with a moan I pushed ahead.

I catch myself moaning fairly often, in fact, especially when I discover myself in too tall of a gear when I pull out from a light. It’s not so much a moan of pain as it is a super-slo-mo version of a tennis player’s grunt, releasing from the diaphragm as one makes an effort. Only in my case the effort is stretched over a long period of time. “Uh-h-h-h” I sound like Frankenstein’s Monster as depicted in an old B-movie.

5000 miles. That’s a lot in 13 months; not bad at all for a gray-bearded somewhat-overweight dude. (This spring I entertained the idea of crossing that magical line before my bike’s first birthday, but April didn’t go too well, mileage-wise, and May wasn’t great either.) Next week I’ll cross another, perhaps more meaningful milestone: 100 miles for each year I’ve been on this planet. And I should be able to get the next 5000 before another year passes. (Although I won’t be getting many miles in June.)

You might think, with all that riding, that my legs would be really buff by now, but that’s relative. I still have skinny legs. They’re just a heck of a lot more muscular than they used to be.

I still have the newbie glow about my alternate lifestyle, that enthusiasm that makes commuting by bike more fun, not just cheaper and less frustrating and environmentally friendlier and healthier. This might be annoying to the people around me; I mention my bike fairly often in conversation and I’m a regular poster on Apple’s bike-to-work mailing list. The local bike shop knows my face, but they don’t see it as often as they used to. Gradually I’m getting more self-sufficient.

Toward that end, I’ll be taking a class on bike maintenance in July. I’ll be getting 18 hours of instruction by a trained expert while I work on my own bike from the inside out. I’m really looking forward to it. It’s run by a shop in town called Good Karma Bikes, a non-profit outfit dedicated to making the world a better place by providing transportation to people who can’t afford cars and by hiring emancipated foster kids and others who need a good start in life.

I’ve learned a lot since my last bike-milestone post, things like “always give the crossing guards a friendly wave and sometimes they’ll let you pass before stopping traffic,” but really there’s one lesson that stands out above all the others. I mentioned it in a post not long ago, but it bears repeating:

Just keep pedaling.

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Remembering a Great

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Watching sports silently, I just saw an ad for the Preakness Stakes, the second jewel in the triple crown of horse racing.

It got me to thinking about a horse I knew as a kid. Secretariat won the Kentucky Derby in record time, and the buzz began. This was one ridiculously fast horse. I really wasn’t aware of how special that was at the time.

But the three races of the triple crown are different. A horse great at one distance may not do so well at another. The Preakness is a sprint, while the Belmont is a grind. The races favor different horses.

Unless that horse is Secretariat. Forty years and a bit later, Secretariat still holds the records for all three races. I remember watching those races on TV, the first time I ever gave a hang about horse racing, and I remember a horse flying around the course, leaving the pack far behind. In the Belmont, only four other horses even bothered to run against him. The track did not accept “show” bets. One horse kept up for a while, but the tremendous machine put down the fastest 1.5 miles in history of the sport and won by 31 lengths.

It appeared, to a kid watching, almost effortless. The horse just flew, while the rest of the field slogged along somewhere behind. The way he ran, it was like he was barely touching the ground.

I’m not sure, but I think the Belmont was his last race. There was nothing left to prove, an no track wants a race where the outcome is not in doubt. Secretariat broke the game. Nobody asked the horse if he wanted to keep running. Of course, they never asked if he wanted to run in the first place. But, man, that kid could fly. I have to think he enjoyed it.

A few years later I saw a “where are they now” feature and Secretariat was mentioned. I saw a clip of the majestic chestnut romping around in a field, a beautiful horse, still sleek, still fast, still carrying the love of speed, running just because he could. That’s a good retirement.

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Better Feet and the Conquest of the Galaxy

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There’s an ad going around right now, for a car of all things, that features a woman who does not have the feet she was born with. It’s a cool ad, non-sequitur notwithstanding, but there’s a message there that maybe the car company didn’t intend.

The message is this: for certain well-defined purposes, we can build better feet than the ones we were born with.

We haven’t come close to matching the versatility of the human foot, and in my lifetime we probably won’t reproduce the feel of my toes wrestling with those of my sweetie, but if you want to sprint 100 meters there’s nothing like having springs for feet. People without human-born feet aren’t allowed in our races anymore.

So while the car company is trying to tie us to their brand through the undeniable awesomeness of this woman, there is another message, possibly more germane to their product: We can build some amazing shit these days. Technology that transforms lives.

It’s only a matter of time before folks start asking to have their weaker flesh-feet replaced with a socket that can accommodate a wide variety of specialized appendages. Once we develop muscle replacements that can be controlled by our nervous systems, things get crazier. And more powerful. There’s no reason to think that won’t happen in the moderately-near future.

Which leads, if you’re willing to follow me, to the Fermi Paradox. Fermi asked, “if there are so many stars, and presumably so many planets, where are all the civilizations?” The assumption is that any technological civilization will eventually send ships out to the stars, and even if it takes 10,000 years to get to the next place, that over a couple million years you can fill up a galaxy. It’s that exponential thing. And with millions of starters, one at least ought to succeed.

The ability to create a person who is powered by a nuclear reactor or solar cells, who can endure the hardships of empty space, makes that conundrum all the more perplexing. Better feet, better lungs, better heart. They’re all just machines serving our brains. We can give them galactic lifespans.

So the brains have to be the weak link, right? A car is just a way to get your brain to another location. Rocket feet are the same thing, but way cooler.

There’s an event that the Science Fiction crowd calls ‘The Singularity’. It’s the point at which we silly humans build something that surpasses us. It might be through genetic engineering, it might be though cybernetics, or whatever. Usually it’s presented as a scary thing; hell, nobody wants to become obsolete. But maybe better really is better.

But if it could happen here, doesn’t it stand to reason that it has happened a million times before? So where are those guys?

I have theories, but none I’m terribly convinced by. Either we are really unusual to reach the point of making custom feet, or there’s something ahead we’re really not going to like. Statistics favors the latter, but there’s a lot we don’t know. Meanwhile, let’s just keep on making things better.

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Ted Cruz and the WWE

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So in case you’ve missed it, Senator Ted Cruz has done another batshit-crazy move. He’s asked the United States military to assure him that they do not intend to invade Texas.

Texas. You know, the state that is in fact already one of the United. We have, according to this amusing rebuttal, fifteen military bases in Texas. What would an invasion even do?

So Ted Cruz, Canadian, Ivy-League educated, has once more done something embarrassing and nonsensical. Can he really be that stupid? Is he really incapable of seeing how utterly ridiculous he looks?

“He’s just conveying the concerns of his constituents,” you might say, to cover for him. But is that leadership? Would he also petition the White House to turn off the tornado machines if some nutjob in the panhandle started quacking that the windmills in Kansas were actually giant fans aimed at Texas? Or would he choose instead to maybe not give credence to the whacked-out, nut-assed ravings of an imbecile? Or if I can ask another way, how many imbeciles does it take to get Cruz to embarrass himself?

What Cruz did is terrible governance. He undermined the very institution he is a part of. But… I don’t think governing is why Ted Cruz is in Washington. He has seen the future of politics and he’s jumped on board with gusto.

Ted Cruz is not a leader, he’s a showman. He’s not in Washington to make America better, he’s there to sell tickets. (Rhymes with: collect campaign contributions.) He sees politics for what it has become: the WWE.

Hm… thinking about this a little more, selling tickets is one part of what WWE does, but mostly what they do is make money for their corporate sponsors. In this way Cruz is exactly like a character in the WWE. Cruz’s corporate sponsors are companies who profit from the legislation he passes. Our government is all about the corporate sponsors these days.

And the product the WWE sells is characters. Heroes, heels, stereotypes, and fleeting characters representing America’s enemies, who rise and fall with the each new bogeyman who threatens the American way of life.

I know, I know, there has always been an element of this in politics. But Ted Cruz the politician is so far removed from anything you would expect given his history, that I have to wonder if Senator Ted Cruz is a wholesale invention, a six-year stand-up act on the nation’s biggest stage. Seriously, is there any other explanation for someone with more than five brain cells to rub together to act the way he does?

Perhaps in fact he is brilliant. Perhaps he has identified a group of people who love the WWE, who recognize the emotional manipulation but steadfastly refuse to acknowledge it. And for those people he has become Superpolitician, crusading against the Philistines in Washington, a lonely voice in a tempest of corruption. He does it well. Andy Kauffman would be proud.

Although, if Senator Cruz is the wave of the future, and other completely fabricated personas take up residence in Washington to pit staged fights with pre-dertemined outcomes, C-Span could get a lot more interesting.

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What Next, Billy?

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I just read that Bill Simmons and ESPN are parting ways. Grantland, the property Bill built with ESPN’s money, stays with ESPN.

I don’t expect that many of the regular readers here much care about this event, and that’s probably healthy. But Simmons is a talented writer, good enough that he created a space for himself and built an audience that trusts him. He simply loves sports, and every word he writes reinforces that. He is so good he even makes pro basketball sound interesting.

He writes as a fan, not as a journalist. He talks about those terrible gut-punch losses that fans of a team remember for generations, and when you read his words you remember your own gut-punch moments and you feel connected to something larger. He writes about the love of the guys wearing the right uniforms. He writes about being a father and about beloved dogs. He’ll take his daughter to a hockey game, but the scene in the stands at an NFL game… no way.

After a few years at ESPN he created Grantland, self-described as a sports and pop-culture site. He assembled a range of writers and critics unified by talent, and pretty much nothing else. Television, perhaps, is the one thing that binds them, with a gambling outlier. And music. And movies. And cetera.

As a fan, Bill called the commissioner of the NFL a lying sack of shit. ESPN gives the NFL a lot of money each year for the right to broadcast some of the games. This creates tension. ESPN has to choose: Do they give voice to the knee-jerk fan, or do they respect the hand that feeds them? I was not in the room, and I could be totally wrong, but I suspect money was secondary in the negotiations for the new contract between Simmons and ESPN. Simmons wants tenure. He wants an immunity from the consequences of what he says that ESPN simply cannot give.

No doubt Simmons will create a new megaphone to shout through. No doubt he will attract some of the best young writers out there to balance his histrionics. I’ll be tuning in. But he’ll also be more exposed to the consequences of his fan-jerks than he has been in a long time. It’s going to be interesting to see how this pans out. But he’s a passionate and eloquent writer, so on principle alone I’m behind him.

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Urban Safety Tip

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If you walk or run alone in an urban area, consider taking a large dog with you. Studies have shown that criminals are 93% less likely to attack someone carrying a big bag of poop.

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Flubbergasted

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adj. How you feel when you step on the scale and discover that you’ve gained two pounds in the last 24 hours.

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