"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
From the Versus Stage 1 telecast of the Tour de France:
“The beautiful scenery of Britanny now, remember we’re in Britanny now for three days, that’s what they’ve paid for and that’s we’re gonna get and enjoy here on the Tour de France because these narrow roads constantly twist and turn, the undulations are very, very special here for all of the riders and 43 of them in their first Tour de France.”
Technorati Tags: phil liggett, tour de france, versus
With an exception of one day, our TV service has been off for about eight months. The one day we broke down and turned it back on was Super Bowl Sunday, and that just served as confirmation that 200 channels or whatever it is of satellite television wasn’t anything we were missing. For the most part, anyway. I will admit that it’s a little weird to hear people talking about Colbert or “The Daily Show” and think, wow, we just don’t look at that anymore.
And the other thing I’ve realized is that, the vulgar excess of the Super Bowl aside, TV is very much the way I keep up with the sports I still follow. So: no baseball this year and very little sense of how the season is unfolding beyond sporadic reports that the Cubs are doing well and that that poor, poor pitiful team in Tampa Bay is really having a year.
Tonight, though, we are linked up again to the broadcast world. The reason is the Tour de France, broadcast again on Versus. The first stage was today, and we got reconnected just in time to see the tail end of the first rebroadcast of the day. A Spaniard named Alejandro Valverde won in an oddly configured finishing section–a sharp descent followed by a short sharp climb that kept the usual contingent of crazy sprinters out of the picture. Valverde took the stage with a shocking burst of uphill acceleration in the last 250 meters that blew away a rider who looked like he had the stage in the bag. And besides the wonderful action, I knew the Tour was back when I heard Phil Liggett, back for the umpteenth year of melodrama, mispronouncing the winner’s first name. At various times it seemed to come out not only as Alejandro, but also as Alefandro, Alessandro, and, most weirdly and regularly, Alethandro. Phil, I missed you.
Tomorrow’s stage broadcast starts at 5:30 a.m. here, and we’re having our traditional “first Sunday of the Tour” gathering with some neighbors.
Technorati Tags: phil liggett, tour de france, versus
With an exception of one day, our TV service has been off for about eight months. The one day we broke down and turned it back on was Super Bowl Sunday, and that just served as confirmation that 200 channels or whatever it is of satellite television wasn’t anything we were missing. For the most part, anyway. I will admit that it’s a little weird to hear people talking about Colbert or “The Daily Show” and think, wow, we just don’t look at that anymore.
And the other thing I’ve realized is that, the vulgar excess of the Super Bowl aside, TV is very much the way I keep up with the sports I still follow. So: no baseball this year and very little sense of how the season is unfolding beyond sporadic reports that the Cubs are doing well and that that poor, poor pitiful team in Tampa Bay is really having a year.
Tonight, though, we are linked up again to the broadcast world. The reason is the Tour de France, broadcast again on Versus. The first stage was today, and we got reconnected just in time to see the tail end of the first rebroadcast of the day. A Spaniard named Alejandro Valverde won in an oddly configured finishing section–a sharp descent followed by a short sharp climb that kept the usual contingent of crazy sprinters out of the picture. Valverde took the stage with a shocking burst of uphill acceleration in the last 250 meters that blew away a rider who looked like he had the stage in the bag. And besides the wonderful action, I knew the Tour was back when I heard Phil Liggett, back for the umpteenth year of melodrama, mispronouncing the winner’s first name. At various times it seemed to come out not only as Alejandro, but also as Alefandro, Alessandro, and, most weirdly and regularly, Alethandro. Phil, I missed you. MIthed you, I mean.
Tomorrow’s stage broadcast starts at 5:30 a.m. here, and we’re having our traditional “first Sunday of the Tour” gathering with some neighbors.
Technorati Tags: phil liggett, tour de france, versus
With an exception of one day, our TV service has been off for about eight months. The one day we broke down and turned it back on was Super Bowl Sunday, and that just served as confirmation that 200 channels or whatever it is of satellite television wasn’t anything we were missing. For the most part, anyway. I will admit that it’s a little weird to hear people talking about Colbert or “The Daily Show” and think, wow, we just don’t look at that anymore.
And the other thing I’ve realized is that, the vulgar excess of the Super Bowl aside, TV is very much the way I keep up with the sports I still follow. So: no baseball this year and very little sense of how the season is unfolding beyond sporadic reports that the Cubs are doing well and that that poor, poor pitiful team in Tampa Bay is really having a year.
Tonight, though, we are linked up again to the broadcast world. The reason is the Tour de France, broadcast again on Versus. The first stage was today, and we got reconnected just in time to see the tail end of the first rebroadcast of the day. A Spaniard named Alejandro Valverde won in an oddly configured finishing section–a sharp descent followed by a short sharp climb that kept the usual contingent of crazy sprinters out of the picture. Valverde took the stage with a shocking burst of uphill acceleration in the last 250 meters that blew away a rider who looked like he had the stage in the bag. And besides the wonderful action, I knew the Tour was back when I heard Phil Liggett, back for the umpteenth year of melodrama, mispronouncing the winner’s first name. At various times it seemed to come out not only as Alejandro, but also as Alefandro, Alessandro, and, most weirdly and regularly, Alethandro. Phil, I missed you. MIthed you, I mean.
Tomorrow’s stage broadcast starts at 5:30 a.m. here, and we’re having our traditional “first Sunday of the Tour” gathering with some neighbors.
Technorati Tags: phil liggett, tour de france, versus
Not a great picture, but here it is just because we were there. Monday, Kate’s old boss called to offer us his pair of very good box seats for that night’s game between the Cubs and Giants. It was a nice evening at Phone Company Park if you were partial to the efforts of the Chicago squad. They won 9-2, and the crowd was sparse enough overall and the proportion of Cubs fans was large enough that you might have mistaken which team was playing at home: every time something went right for Chicago, a loud cheer erupted. The Giants fans concentrated their attention and vocalizing on their starting pitcher, Barry Zito. The latest effort from the $17 million a year lefthander featured five walks and five runs in five innings of work. His record at the end of the night: 3-12. The journalist and sports fan in me feels like there’s a great story to be told about how this guy’s career has imploded.
We didn’t go to the second game of the series last night. The Giants won. No connection implied. (In the picture, that’s the Cubs pitcher Ted Lilly at bat and rightfielder Kosuke Fukudome on deck. Oh, and the seats that provided this view? $71.40 a pop, which makes me marvel at the family of five sitting next to us and grateful for Kate’s boss’s generosity.)
Technorati Tags: baseball, chicago, cubs, chicago cubs
Mostly to feed our fantasies, I guess, a few years ago a friend who thought we should travel more sent our names to a travel company called R. Crusoe & Son. Several times a year, we get the R. Crusoe catalogs. Once or twice I’ve perused them seriously–one time they had an off-beat cruise that started in Chicago and went out through the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence to Newfoundland and then on to Greenland. One of the stops on the tour was L’Anse aux Meadows, the single site in North America where physical evidence has turned up of a Viking settlement. Something about that appealed to me. But we’re talking luxury travel here, inviting people to drop five or maybe even six figures on a trip. When the time comes, I’ll get to Newfoundland for a lot less than that.
Sometime in the last few days, we got the latest R. Crusoe catalog. In format, in style, and substance, they look and read like J. Peterman gone into the travel business. Mostly the results are innocuous. A description of an upcoming trip through China includes these highlights: “Enroll in Shaanxi Normal University for a morning discussion with students. Hear their hopes for the future. … Don’t blush when we view the lesser-known Han Dynasty naked warriors. Emperor Jingdi died in 141 B.C., but he left behind earthenware figurines dressed in silk. The clothing didn’t survive, but the troops are exquisite au naturel.” (Italics Crusoe’s, throughout.)
One of the trips in the brochure goes through Southeast Asia. Vietnam, Cambodia, and other places we Americans have left our mark. The pamphlet acknowledges that we’ve got some history in that part of the world, and the tour will visit war sites. But the past is acknowledged in a bland, chatty, empty — insipid — way that makes you wonder whether the purpose of visiting the region is to remember what happened there or forget about it. Here’s the bulk of the description, which I swear is presented in context:
Begin in Hanoi, which blasts any old associations of the Vietnam War. The 21st century city is a rich stew of influences–Asian and French colonial brand-new and Old Quarter. Our investigation goes forward as it should, by the leisurely pace of a rickshaw.
To Ho Chi Minh’s old haunts. Then poke around in the past with a researcher at the Museum of Ethnology. … See the Hanoi Hilton, where downed American pilots spent more time than they would have liked. …
Emperor Gia Long founded Hue as his dynasty’s first capital. He even created his very own Forbidden City, part of the imperial citadel. Have a look before retooling your sense of romance at dusk aboard a private sampan on the Perfume River. Also here: seven tombs for seven emperors. …
Once Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City sizzles. Its War Remnants Museum presents us with an eye-opening version of the “American War.” Passing the U.S. Consulate, experience a flood of memories–the chopper on the roof evacuating the last Americans.
Over cocktails and dinner, an economics professor brings us up to speed on Vietnam.
Burrow underground in the Cu Chi Tunnels, the very ones that helped change Southeast Asian history for good.
Then Cambodia. Somerset Maugham arrived in 1930 on a languid journey. Jackie O dropped by, too. Like them, we see the country’s light and dark sides.
Touch down in Phnom Penh to dabble in local history at the Royal Palace and its Silver Pagoda (featured in Architectural Digest). Treasures collected from across Cambodia await in the National Museum.Cruise the poetic Mekong River at sunset on a private boat.
Those who want a deeper understanding of the unspeakable horror of the Khmer Rouge can take an option drive to the Killing Fields and visit Tuol Sleng Prison.
Consider today’s Cambodia over lunch with a journalist at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. …
Our trip winds down with some options: Enjoy a cruise on Southeast Asia’s largest lake, with a stop to see creations of artists disabled by exploded land mines. Instead, head for the finely-carved temple of Banteay Srei. Or get a view of Angkor on a helicopter ride over the complex. …”
That last “instead” is a stunner. It’s as if the person writing the copy suddenly thought, “Amputees?! Get me out of here, Mr. Wizard!” For eight thousand or ten thousand bucks, depending on whether you’re sharing a room on this 17-day extravaganza, a quick extraction from reality is the least you ought to be able expect.
Technorati Tags: travel
Around the Bay tonight–my part of the Bay, anyway, San Francisco, Berkeley and environs–it looks like we’ve gotten a little break from the smoke. It was cloudy at dusk, and you could actually tell there were clouds in the sky instead of it being a big flat mass of gauze. Out in the Central Valley, and particularly north, in the Sacramento Valley, the smoke is a real issue. The air is so full of particulates–fine, fine ash ejected from the fires burning in every direction–that it’s rated “very unhealthful” to “hazardous” to breathe (for anyone, not just people who have higher health risks because of heart and lung conditions). Hospitals and medical equipment suppliers gave away as many as 2,400 respirator masks in Redding and Chico. The number of fires said to be burning in California tonight: abour 1,200. The National Weather Service says that the mountains in Northern California may have another spate of dry lightning storms over the weekend.
But California being California, we like to share. The image above (click for larger version) is from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fire Detection Program page. The red dots are hot spots detected by NOAA satellites. The gray areas are smoke plumes. Here’s a snippet of the text that goes with the image:
California:
Several large wildfires and numerous smaller wildfires in northern
California continue to emit large amounts of moderately dense to dense
smoke which covers much of California, north of 35N, and extends to the
west over the Pacific Ocean.Central US:
Light smoke remnant from the California fires … can
be seen extending across much of the central United States. States over
which the light smoke can be seen include: central Nevada, northern
Utah, southern Wyoming, northern Colorado, southern Nebraska, most of
Kansas and western Missouri.
Technorati Tags: california, california wildfires, fire
Firefighting agencies say there are over 1,000 wildfires burning in California right now. About 800 of them started last Saturday and Sunday as dry thunderstorms swept over the northern two-thirds of the state. We’re a long way from any fires here. There’s a big one burning about 125 miles north of us, near Clear Lake, and two very large blazes in the mountains that rise up from the Big Sur coast–maybe 150 miles south-southwest of here. Still, the smoke is everywhere. Morning, noon, and evening, the sun shines with a filtered light, and the acrid smell of scorched brush hangs in the air. The picture above is out in front of our house at 7 a.m., after the sun had been up nearly two hours. I’ve been here long enough that I can spin graybeard yarns, but still it’s true: There’s been nothing quite like this here–this pall of smoke that just hangs here day after day–in the 30-some years I’ve lived here.
Technorati Tags: berkeley, california, california wildfires, fire
Just briefly: I flew home from Portland today. As soon as we crossed into California, smoke became visible from the scores or hundreds of fires ignited by lightning over the weekend. I managed to roughly match three images I took from my flight to three satellite images of the same general region shot yesterday by NASA. I’ll try to refine later, but the sight of all the smoke–so much that everything here in the Bay Area reeks of it–was truly stunning.
Technorati Tags: california, fire
In Portland on Monday evening, Pete took me on a favorite walk from his place in northeast Portland, up to Mount Tabor (two or maybe three facts he alleged on our stroll: Mount Tabor is an extinct volcano, and Portland is one of two cities that has an extinct volcano inside its municipal boundaries; the other is Bend, Oregon). Anyway, it was beautiful up there with the late twilight. Lots of people picknicking, walking, taking in the views; we happened upon one group sitting in a meadow, playing guitars and singing. We spotted the two guys above at a west-facing view near the summit. What got our attention was their smoking: they were seriously attending to smoking pipes. Of course, I wanted to capture smoke curling up from their inextinguishable briars. Alas, I couldn’t get an angle on my subjects that wouldn conceal my intentions. This angle was OK, though, especially after I noticed the little dog under the bench. (Below: Mount Hood, seen from the eastern crest of Mount Tabor.)
