My secret endurance bicycle racing obsession

Last week, Jill Homer's blog linked to this little article posted in the New York Times, and it got me pondering my secret obsession with endurance bicycle racing. I suppose now I've posted it on the interwebs, it's not so secret...(insert forehead slapping sound). It started shortly after I got back into bicycling, specifically, transportation cycling. Funny that I would latch onto racing when what I was engaging in was about as similar to endurance racing as apples are to oranges: they're both fruits but they taste and look nothing alike. Despite this, I was hooked after I read Kent Peterson's account of the grueling Great Divide Race. I've been following the Iditarod Trail Invitational, the Arrowhead 135 and the Great Divide Race ever since. When those races are on, I'm checking the leader boards and trail updates several times a day, and I often find myself drifting off thinking about who is where, what they're seeing and experiencing and what it would be like to do it myself. These are self supported races: there's no "support team". There's no sport network covering these races, there's no multi-million dollar endorsements, no professional video crews, no screaming fans, no prize money, just dedicated people pitting themselves against the trail and nature with their wits and their velocipedes to get them across the finish line. It's compelling and inspiring and I encourage all my readership to check it out. Many of the riders write about their accounts, my favorites of course being the aforementioned Kent Peterson and the lovely and talented Jill Homer. I just purchased a copy of Jill's new book and I look forward to reading it. I'll post my review here.

"Dry land is not a myth"

Yes, you can laugh (if you even got the joke) about the title of this blog entry, but all the global warming naysayers can eat a big fat slice of humble pie . Why? Keep reading:

The year 2008 was the ninth warmest year since instrumental temperature measurements began in 1880, NASA reported on Tuesday. (KRWB)

So, are all those scientists and engineers working at NASA wrong? Maybe you think the politicians know better than the scientists... Yeah, I thought not.

--Sent from my cell phone--

MS OBS

My friend Tara just started her blog and she's off to an AMAZING start: her first two articles deserve a much wider audience so I'm hoping to give her a little boost.

Today's article is entitled Microsoft OBS, read it and have a good laugh: I did! Someday I hope I write as well as Tara does.

High Transparency

While looking through my Twitter feed yesterday, I noticed an article posted by the Marin IJ about food safety. It's something I've talked about before HERE and HERE. According to the IJ, most of the counties surrounding mine have their food safety inspections posted on-line, but not Marin... not until now.

You can click HERE and be taken to the search site. If you want to do a general search (for instance, in just one town), you can fill in that field and click the search button. Interesting info: I looked up one of my favorite restaurants (Boca Steak in Novato) and was surprised to see it's had some minor critical violations. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised because I've had several friends who've worked in the restaurant business and I know all about things like the 5 second rule...