Author: Dan Brekke

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Your Daily Fogey Flashback

As far as musical taste goes, I’m a confirmed fogey. I hear lots of stuff of undetermined recent vintage I like. But unless I hear a new song 98 times or can ask my family expert on such matters (Thom), I don’t know who’s playing, whether they’re a big name or not, or what the heck the lyrics are. Sometimes I catch on to someone, like Kurt Cobain or Elliott Smith (or in a different vein, Susannah McCorkle), well after they’re dead of self-inflicted injuries.

All of which is preamble to a burst of enthusiasm for a daily oldie experience on San Francisco’s KFOG-FM. The station often grates with its insistence on going back to the standards (I just hear “Touch Me” by The Doors for the second time today; KFOG would do itself, its listeners and the memory of Jim Morrison a big favor by losing that track for about 15 years or forever, whichever comes later). But day to day, one of the station’s old standbys continues to surprise and please: 10@10.

The format has been pretty much the same for decades: Each day at 10 a.m. (Pacific time), the station plays a pre-produced selection of 10 songs from a single year chosen probably not at random from the prior 40 years or so (the emphasis is on mid-60s through mid-80s, the prime boomer cum fogey era). The selection of songs isn’t earth-shatteringly original, but it’s usually a couple cuts above what the station’s standard playlist inflicts on the audience.

But the money part of 10@10 comes with the period clips — snatches of news stories, speeches and advertisements — that the producers mix in to the music (I’ve come to assume that the DJ who intros the show, Dave Morey, also has a major part in producing it). It helps a lot to have the framework for the snippets in mind, but at their best, “10@10” is sort of a history mini-lesson. The occasion for holding forth on this show, which I’ve listened to for years without feeling the need to comment, was today’s edition. At a listener’s request, it toured 1968 (among the songs played, The Band’s “Chest Fever,” which ain’t on anyone’s playlist anywhere). The middle of the set was the Chambers Brothers “Time Has Come Today,” which the show used as a vehicle for a news tour of the year from beginning to end. It was extraordinarily well done; if you’re inclined to take my word for that and want to listen, it will be replayed Saturday morning (not sure what time, but I’m guessing sometime around 9 a.m. PT/11 a.m. CT).

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Whiskers

An abbreviated post this morning: Whiskerino. (More formally: the North American Free Beard Agreement Whiskerino 2007). It’s a beard-growing contest or festival (or something), running from now at least through the end of February. Not for me: I last grew a beard during the Carter administration and have never had the impulse to grow it back. I did keep my mustache nearly all the way through the Reagan years. When I shaved it, my younger son looked at me and cried. He’s gotten used to my clean-shaven appearance since then. Whether you intend to compete or not, and I realize some who visit this page are not genetically or hormonally equipped for the contest, I commend the site for its careful attention to detail, if not spelling:

III. BEARD GROWTH

According to Parker Brothers Beyond Balderdash the definition of a whiskerino is “a beard growing contest.” Participation in the North American Free Beard Agreement Whiskerino denotes that the participant will grow a beard. Refusal to grow a beard is not in the spirit of the contest. Note: Testerone levels differ in every male and all levels of growth, regardless of density and coverage, are encouraged. As long as the participant is not shaving the participant is growing a beard.

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Bike Cities

A quick take: How bikes are working in two cities.

From The New York Times: “In Portland, Cultivating a Culture of Two Wheels.” It’s a good take on everything the city has done to integrate bicycles into daily life and how people have responded. The accompanying video version of the story — here — is also worth checking out.

From Der Spiegel (the English version for German-challenged types): “Vive la Vélorution:

Paris Rental Bike Scheme Goes Global.” A fairly detailed story on how Paris’s celebrated free-bike system works (in a nutshell, a big French advertising firm does all the work in return for the fat profit it enjoys from municipally granted billboard rights). The story mentions that the free-bike idea is spreading through Europe and may even be tried in Chicago. Somehow, it’s hard for me to imagine the scheme working here. My take on the Paris system was that it looked well tended and thought out. Few municipal services, even those undertaken with private partnership, seem to work well in the States. I also think that somehow Americans have a penchant for senseless, wanton vandalism that would make it hard to keep the nice urban bikes on the road.

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Franken and Fawkes

Because we’ve given a series of stray donations over the years — all anyone has to do is show up on our doorstep with a bleeding heart and our checkbook starts to twitch sympathetically and also irresponsibly because it has gone so long without being balanced — we get what I’m guessing is more than the usual household share of fundraising pitches in the mail.

Today we got the best letter ever, from some guy running for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota. Highlights include the salutation — “Dear Person I’m Asking for Money” — and this passage:

“When I get to Washington, someone is going to have to explain to me how the federal government can fail to live up to its promise to fully fund education. Someone (possibly the same person) is going to have to explain to me why political appointees are allowed to edit the language of scientific reports. And you can bet I’m going to ask the members of that august body who still don’t believe in global warming some pointed questions. For instance: What’s wrong with you.”

The pitch is for small contributions. The checkbook is twitching.

(Meantime, how about Ron Paul? When I was up in Idaho with my friend Pete a month ago, we saw plenty of hand-stenciled signs around Coeur d’Alene with legends like “Ron Paul Revolution.” I saw homemade Ron Paul signs in Chicago when I was there a couple weeks ago. And during my trips up to the UC-Berkeley campus in the last week or so, there’s evidence of a well-organized Ron Paul sidewalk chalking campaign (I’d have taken a picture but I’m still sans camera). And just today — Guy Fawkes Day — he raised $3.68 at least $4 million. So is he this generation’s Ross Perot or Teddy Roosevelt, the insurgent who upsets the electoral calculus that has held for three of the last four presidential elections? Much too early to tell, but someone out there likes him.

The Guy Fawkes thing is an interesting ploy, too, since Guy Fawkes (the wonderful “V for Vendetta” notwithstanding) wouldn’t appear to be so much an avenging angel of human liberty as someone bent on seeing the Roman Catholic Church and English Catholics restored to their rightful places. This was the same church that was so in love with liberty and free thought that it would soon be putting the screws to Galileo for thinking too much about what he saw in his telescope. Seems to me that Fawkes is as much a symbol of freedom as say, Edmund Ruffin or Nathan Bedford Forrest, a couple of guys who have been celebrated in some parts as true American patriots and defenders of the people’s rights against an overreaching federal government.

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Shop Early, Shop Often

Calendar-1

Your Cycling Holiday Gift Guide (Part I): It’s never too early to start shopping for that special nutty cycling someone — the person who already has every bike-related thingumbob and doo-dad hanging out of drawers and piled in closets. Don’t hang back: the only thing to do is jump in and add to the clutter.

Today’s gift item: The Chicago Bike Racing 2008 Calendar. It features a page for each of our 12 months. And the page for each month features the beautiful cycling photography of chicagobikeracing.com founder Luke Seemann. It costs $17.50; that’s less than $1.50 a month, or the equivalent of one large drip coffee. re: Cycling says: Buy it. Buy it today.

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End of This, Beginning of That

I always have a little pang of loss when we turn the clocks back. The days have been getting shorter for months, of course; it’s dark in the morning; but for me, the fact we’re moving into the dark part of the year finally hits home these first few days after changing the clocks. The light at dusk is just as pretty; but the night starts that much earlier. The good news: the current daylight saving law, under which we go to standard tiime (maybe it should be called winter time) the first Sunday in November and then “spring ahead” the second Sunday in March, means that we’ve only got four months to go before we move the clocks ahead again. (Yes, I concede: if I were a morning person, I’d absolutely love setting the clocks back.)

In the meantime, here’s something to do with the early dark: Go out and look for Comet Holmes. I didn’t hear about it until yesterday, when I saw an item from a space-launch email list to which I subscribe that describes a comet that has suddenly become visible to the unaided (a.k.a. naked) eye. The Sky and Telescope site has an excellent guide on the comet and how to find it (if we were in the back yard together I could show you: “You see Cassiopeia up there, sort of in the northeast? That sort of ‘W’ shape. Good. OK — now go down and a little toward the horizon to that next group of stars; not down to the brightest star — that’s Capella in Auriga; just between the W and that bright one. Look up there by that little group of stars and you’ll see this fuzzy little Q-tip thing that you’re not really sure is there, but it is. Here — look through the binoculars. See? Isn’t that amazing?”) The comet actually has a pretty interesting story. Seen from Earth, it’s usually quite dim, even when its at its closest approach to the sun (that point, called the perihelion, is about twice as far away from the sun as we are). But for some reason, it has a history of “outbursts” — episodes during which it brightens suddenly (not unlike me when I find my lottery ticket has a matching number). Go out and see it.

And if you’re looking for another sky sighting, and you are a morning person, I note that the International Space Station/space shuttle tandem will make five-minute passes over New York City at 5:52 a.m. ET and (two orbits later) over the San Francisco Bay Area at 5:54 a.m. The New York appearance will occur shortly after the vehicles have undocked.

[Comet Holmes update: It looks even brighter tonight. Yesterday, the Boston Globe ran a nice piece on our overnight sensation.]

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Cycling Into and Through French History

Discoveryoffrance

‘The Discovery of France’: Here’s a beautifully written New York Times review of “The Discovery of France,” a history of how the country’s diverse peoples and regions were knitted into one whole. The cycling interest: the author says he rode 14,000 miles on French backroads doing research.

… Written as a “social and geographical history” in which “‘France’ and ‘the French’ would mean something more than Paris and a few powerful individuals,” “The Discovery of France” draws its material not just from the usual array of scholarly sources, but from the author’s own back-road explorations on his bicycle. (“This book,” Robb notes, “is the result of 14,000 miles in the saddle and four years in the library.”) Such an approach is particularly engrossing when one remembers that the very geographical concept of France was still, in the 18th century, very much in flux. “Before the revolution,” it turns out, “the name ‘France’ was often reserved for the small mushroom-shaped province centered on Paris.” What’s more, beyond that relatively small oasis, “France was a land of deserts” — of huge vacant spaces that had still not been accurately mapped in their entirety and that most natives never even tried to explore. (As late as the mid-19th century, it seems, “few people could walk far from their place of birth without getting lost.”) For this reason, Robb devotes some of his most impassioned pages to the adventures of France’s earliest mapmakers: those rare, brave souls who, in the decades leading up to and following the revolution of 1789, risked life and limb to “put half a million obscure hamlets on the map.”

Here’s the Amazon link: “The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, from the Revolution to the First World War.”

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Saturday Notebook

Head-gouge chronicles: Last night, I banged my head into the corner of an open kitchen-cabinet door and took out a little chunk of my bald scalp. It was not a graceful moment, and I did not react gracefully. What’s really frustrating, though, is that I seem to have developed a penchant for gouging my naked head on low doorways, window frames, cabinets, overhanging branches and such like. It happened at my dad’s about 10 days ago when I was hurrying to pack my stuff to leave. It happened to me a month ago, two violent encounters with Berkeley shrubbery, when I was out walking the dog. It happened getting into the shower at a friend’s house in New Jersey about 30 seconds after I looked at the low bar across the stall door and thought to myself, “I’m going to hit my head on that.” I’m not sure why all this is happening now. Maybe I’ve lost my ducking reflex, maybe I’m not paying as close attention to my surroundings as I used to, or maybe I’ve grown two inches without knowing it. All I can say is that I’m kind of tired of walking around with a scab on my head.

Power-shufflers vs. racing elitists: My friend Pete is doing a 50-mile running race today in Portland. Yes. Fifty. Miles. That’s nearly twice as long as a marathon, a distance that neither my brain nor my knees can comprehend. So, Pete’s a confirmed crazy ultra-endurance athlete (the big event he is preparing for: an Ironman-distance triathlon (2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike course, and a marathon run) in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. As a serious student of the science of endurance sports, Pete has more than once commented on a phenomenon that has become firmly established in U.S. marathon running: participation is way, way up, and performance, measured in terms of finishing times, is way, way down. That’s because many among the hordes entering the humongous marathon fields in places like New York and Chicago are training merely to finish the course no matter how long it takes. Just in time for this weekend’s marathons in New York City, Salon is running a piece on the subject: “How Oprah Ruined the Marathon.” Now, in a country beset by obesity, you could argue that any popular physical activity is a great thing and ought to be encouraged. But there are those who say that what’s happening in the big marathons is sapping the athletic purpose and spirit of the races; what they see is a bunch of people who, instead of confronting the intense physical and mental demands of racing, are turning marathons into power-shuffling events — little more than long walks performed in fancy gear at a slightly elevated pace. Far from creating a nation of fit, competitive runners. Me? It’s been a long time since I walked 20 miles in a day, and I’ve never run a distance over 7.5 miles, so I’m not criticizing anyone who’s out there doing it at any speed. I think it’s great people want to get out there and get their heart rates up; but at the same time, there is something lost when the competitive ethic, the drive to perform and improve, is squeezed out. (And here’s a tragic postscript from today’s news: “28-Year-Old Marathoner Dies in Olympic Trials.”

Writeroom-Main-Screen

Scribing sans distraction: Now that I have installed the latest Mac operating system on my aging iBook, I’m trying out an extremely stripped down text editor called WriteRoom. When you launch the program, the entire screen is blacked out; you don’t see your computer desktop at all; so no email notifications or browser windows or docks (in Mac speak) to divert you from your writing task. The text you type appears as green on black, an emulation of ancient word-processing screens. Does the distraction-free environment really make a difference? This is only the second day I’ve used it, and I haven’t written anything I was on deadlne for (as opposed to something “optional” like this here post). But so far, I’d say that having nothing to consider but my brain and the words on the screen is a help.

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Cycling Medals and Loose Screws

Rando500Rando500A

I’m more than willing to concede that I might occasionally have a screw come loose. I always have an ear out for the telltale rattle.

But what does that have to do with the picture above (click for larger images)? We’ll get to that.

What is depicted there, in all its dimly lit, slightly blurred, slow-shutter-speed glory, is a Randonneur 5000 medal. My name is engraved on it, meaning I earned it.

What is it? It’s the reward one gets for completing a series of long bike rides in randonneur mode.

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Friday Notebook

Journey on a divan: Kind of cool, if you’re a cyclist who is reluctant to ever get out of the saddle: a boutique Japanese bicycle company, Scarabike, has produced a couple pieces of novelty furniture for a design show in Tokyo. The Scarabike sofa and footstool are both crafted from Brooks-style leather bike seats. The designboom blog has pictures. (And bonus points for telling me where the phrase “journey on a divan” comes from.)

Alamo (Un) Incorporated: This has nothing to do with cycling except insofar as Alamo, California, is a swell place to ride through on one’s way to the southern approach to Mount Diablo and also insofar as the Alamo (Un) Incorporated blog is the work of Trust But Verify, by far the best place anywhere to catch up on the Floyd Landis case (assuming, of course, that you aren’t Floyd or his lawyers). Anyway, Trustbut is looking for links for this new blog, which considers the debate over incorporating beautiful Alamo. Consider yourself linked.

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