Book’s 75% in the bag. Hot cha cha.

Why is the electronically added sound of a bleep so much louder than the rest of the soundtrack? My wife watches a lot of random trash on TV for no reason while she’s doing other stuff, and even when I can’t hear anything else, the sound of bleeping bleepedy bleeps cuts through the house like a sharp knife.

It makes the program more jarring, which likely the intention. It doesn’t make it any edgier, though, and no one watches a program because it has a lot of bleeped-out swearing. All it does is jangle my nerves down the hall as I try and get something productive done.

and normally, find dream conversations dumb. But last night after I was up way too late tinkering with the U.S.S. Mariner, I had a long and involved dream about the site being entirely in French. I took high school French and remember little, but on waking, I looked up what little fragments I remember from the dream and it looks like I managed to dream in correct French.

I have no idea what that means, but the possibility that there’s a hidden ocean of languages in my head disturbs and intrigues me. Could I go to Germany, hit my head with a mallet, and suddenly go back to being barely conversationally fluent, which was the height of my fluency gained from a year of brutal college German courses?

Water on Mars found. And lots of it. The European Space Agency has some good stuff too.

Also, there’s a 10th planet in the solar system, larger than Pluto. Space.com, elsewhere.

Water on Mars is a profound and important discovery. The existence of water’s long been suspected. In particular, the ESA may have found a frozen sea buried deep in the crust, and it’s thought there are large reserves of water buried in the poles. This discovery — persistent standing frozen water on the surface means we’re almost certain to find evidence that there has been life on Mars, and with standing water, chances skyrocket that we’re going to find life hanging around Mars right now, chilling. So to speak.

I know too much about the Seattle Mariners. One of the things in-depth knowledge does, though, is teach you that you shouldn’t really trust anything you read. Because when you read something like this in an ESPN.com article on overpaid players:

2. Bret Boone (2B, Twins, $9,000,000)
We would have had more sympathy for Boone when he was released by the Mariners if he weren’t blowing his nose with piles of C-notes. Boone, the highest-paid second baseman in baseball — by $1.5 million — was hitting .234 with seven homers and 34 RBI when Seattle let him go. When the Twins picked him up (Seattle is still picking up his paycheck), Minnesota GM Terry Ryan said, “This is a high-reward, low-risk situation. I don’t think there’s any downside.” Ah, but there is: Just playing Boone is a downside. He’s hitting and slugging below the Mendoza line for the Twins.

Boone was traded, not released. The Twins traded for him (and the M’s are paying for much of his remaining salary) offering the ever-popular PTBNL. It’s not that important to the point, but for a writer to make repeated references to something that didn’t happen…

It’s a transaction. It’s soooo easy to look up. And if ESPN and whoever edited this can’t get a fact — a fact in the first line of the paragraph — right, how seriously should I take their football coverage (for instance), where I wouldn’t catch those kind of errors?

Every once in a while, I hear about some co-worker of mine who I knew or worked with, and found to be bad at their jobs — often, really bad, to the point where I felt they should have pursued other work, like underwater salvage diver — gets hired somewhere for some massive amount of money. Sometimes they’re great interviewees, and some people do well by hopping from job to job, but more than anything else, it’s a demonstration that the world is not a meritocracy, and we are all not rewarded according to our efforts.

And it’s not just that. It’s also that I know people who do good work, but who might not be good in interviews, or who aren’t good at finding and going after jobs, who would be better at those jobs. It’s unjust. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

My last post raises the question — who is the greatest athlete, and why isn’t Lance it?

First off, I agree with those who’d argue that it’s too hard to define those criteria. And yet, depending on what you set the standard at, Armstrong’s often a fine candidate.

If greatest athlete means the greatest achiever at any athletic event, Armstrong’s seven wins in the Tour de France stand with any other athlete, ever.

If greatest athlete means the most well-rounded (as Bayless argues) then you start getting into the requirements: should they really have to be able to hit a ball, and sprint, but be exempt from endurance and the sheer metal strength of suffering that a biker endures? Why is it okay that some of the two-sport guys Bayless cites weren’t so good at other sports (Jordan and baseball is notably overlooked) while Armstrong’s early history as a triathlete — and a good one, even if he did excel at one of the three legs) is slighted? Why is it counted against Armstrong that he’s not so good at baseball — though it’s never been something he was dedicated to — but it’s not counted against Deion Sanders that he can’t ride a bike over a mountain pass, over and over — because he never tried?

The thing is: set the standard first, and see who makes it. Don’t move the definitions around, adding and subtracting as you see fit, sometimes stooping to fix evidence to fit your own ill-informed beliefs about who should and shouldn’t be in.

If you do that, if you work to come up with a way to measure the strength of accomplishment across sports, Armstrong’s name will start coming up over and over for many of the definitions. I don’t care if you want to say that he “shouldn’t even be in the conversation” — that only means you’re not worth talking to.

I’m always annoyed when people write things they have no knowledge of and make certain conclusions. Skip Bayless does this today at ESPN.com. He argues that Lance Armstrong, who won his 7th Tour de France, is not all that great. He’s making a case that Armstrong’s not the best all-around athelete ever (which, just to start, I’d agree with), and that he’s not the “greatest performer” (which is… well, that’s so subjective as to be meaningless) but his actual points are so bizarre and ill-informed they defy belief.

“And he doesn’t qualify for greatest performer because his sport doesn’t have the equivalent of last-second shots or throws or catches, of two-outs-in-the-ninth swings or of final-hole putts. The pressure through 21 Tour stages is constant, but rarely if ever acute.”

It’s true that bike racing is much longer, but to say that it’s not acute… what? Just for Lance, the attacks and the counter-attacks, the constant attempts to isolate and break him in the mountains — were those such a cakewalk?

But is he a greater clutch performer than Jordan or Ali or Montana or Nicklaus? When has Armstrong ever been tested under huge-moment fire the way those greats were? No, he doesn’t belong in the same argument with them.

Has Bayless seriously not watched the last seven Tours? I mean really, I’ve seen Lance do things under incredible pressure that I didn’t think were possible. It’s worn, but he is the Jordan of bike racing, a rider who faced with a climb or a time trial or fierce attacks rises above his competition and tears them up.

In dismissing the reflexes required to ride like Armstrong, Bayless writes

Yes, some hand-eye and body control are required to steer a bike at high speeds through traffic or crashes or around curves.

I don’t even know what to say here. “Yes, some speed is needed to win the Olympic gold medal in the 100-yard sprint.” “Yes, champion decathletes have to be somewhat strong.”

Yet Armstrong hasn’t had to battle the quality or depth of competition in his sport that baseball, basketball or football greats have risen above in theirs.

Uh, unlike baseball or football, bicycling’s a worldwide sport. The greatest champions — even the guys to win the Tour de France — come from all over the world. The depth of competition is far, far greater than either of those.

How can he not know that?

And within endurance sports, Armstrong has this advantage over, say, marathon runners. He’s riding a perfect piece of equipment that virtually assures he will have a perfectly efficient “stride,” even when he’s exhausted. His bicycle also keeps his joints from absorbing the shock the pavement inflicts on distance runners.

First, no, it doesn’t. Bicyclists have crappy technique. And… I don’t know if Bayless is riding cruisers with shocks or something, but the bikes people race transmit a huge amount of the shock and bumps of the roads to the rider… and over twenty-plus stages of massive distance.

But he is not the greatest all-around athlete or clutch performer. That’s no knock on him and no attempt to rain on his reign. That’s just honest perspective.

The conclusion’s not so bad, all things considered, but it’s not “just honest perspective”. It’s ridiculous ignorance on public display.

I watched Breaker Morant this weekend. It’s a good movie. The IMDB summary —

During the Boer War, three Australian lieutenants are on trial for shooting Boer prisoners. Though they acted under orders, they are being used as scapegoats by the General Staff, who hopes to distance themselves from the irregular practices of the war. The trial does not progress as smoothly as expected by the General Staff, as the defence puts up a strong fight in the courtroom.

That touches one of the foundation blocks of my whole worldview, that the little guy gets screwed and you should side with the powerless and the poor against those who exploit them. For instance, when I was a kid, I had a paper route for the Seattle Times. For those of you who didn’t have to do this (and these days, I think it’s increasingly adults with much larger routes), here’s how that worked when I did it:

• You’re assigned a route of n customers
• The Times delivers your “draw” to a central location (“The Shack” which I hear was replaced by block delivery to the paperperson)
• At the end of the month, you go collecting door-to-door
• You pay a guy from the Times for total papers they sold to you, and keep the difference

And all the routes in my neighborhood were handled by teenage boys, often low-teens because you could get the job before you could work at Subway or the video store (oohhh, there was a plum job…). Every afternoon, it was an hour or more of unassisted labor on bike and foot, in Seattle weather, for what worked out to be under minimum wage.

Everyone screwed you. I had a customer on my route, Mr. Larson, who was a substitute teacher, and whenever he’d go on vacation, he’d screw me by deducting days * the cover price from his monthly $8.50. So a ten day vacation, he’d clip nine weekdays at 25c + a Sunday at $1 … even though for the month, he didn’t pay (26 * .25) + (4 * $1) = $10.50. And it wasn’t as if he ever tipped me, either, to make up for screwing me every chance he got. Hey, if you happen to read this, Larson, you owe me some money.

There were other customers who were totally dicks about paying their $8.50. They’d force you to come back over and over, and you don’t get paid for collecting, so at some point you have to decide you’ll get them the next month, or you cancel their subscription.

Here’s where the Times comes in. You couldn’t cancel someone’s subscription without a huge hassle. And if you canceled someone for non-payment and they complained they didn’t want to cancel, and you hadn’t come by, the Times would turn them back on — increasing your draw — and the area supervisor guy would chew you out. So the Times would force you to keep on late/non-paying customers to keep their paid circulation up, and because they didn’t have to collect from those people. And miss a delivery while things are confused as you try and shut them off and they claim they’re still customers, and the Times will fine you $1/missed paper. When you’re clearing $60/month if you’re lucky, that’s a big deal.

And take the draw. Say your draw’s off by one. Someone cancelled and the Times didn’t lower your draw. Now you pay 20c/day out of pocket for that extra paper, and getting it fixed could take many phone calls over days, and it’s not as if the Times would go back once they figured it out and make sure they credited for you for 20c/day * number of days it took you to get it fixed.

Or, to go back to Mr. Larson. Lord forbid you try and get the area supervisor to help you out with that guy. Some customer rips you off for $1 every month or so? That’s not worth their time.

So we trudged these routes, trying to figure out where it was best to get off our ratty BMX bikes and walk the coul-de-sac or string of houses, in the drizzle and the rain and the summer sun, and some of the people we delivered the papers to were trying to screw us, and the paper itself was definately trying to screw us… teenagers, making sub-minimum wage.

This is the way of the world, and it sucks. The management at a car dealership might set sales incentives and commission schedules that encourage their staff to jack up the prices and really twist arms for the sale, but if someone investigates, they’ll look aghast when they find out about those renegades, and take appropriate action immediately by firing them.

Or… there’s a million other examples. Bank fees that disproportionately are incurred by the poor who can least afford them. The prison torture by U.S. forces in Iraq and worldwide, gets blamed on bad apples when there’s a ever-increasing mountain of evidence that it’s part of a larger policy (and, as in some Gitmo cases, directly endorsed by Rumsfeld for high-priority prisoners). Companies that manage to keep their employees just under 40 hours a week so they can turn them onto public health care problems instead of expenses…

I know it’s sort of strange for me, a notoriously antisocial guy, to be a rabid populist on a lot of issues, but yeah. When you stop being able to identify with the little man, something of your humanity dies.

And “Breaker Morant” is a good movie.

205 miles, one day — piece of cake. Random points:

• Got off to a late start. 520’s closure and the subsequent traffic jams cost us an hour on our start time.
• Headwinds or sidewinds almost the whole way. Owww. 5-10 mph is a lot.
• Colder. It was overcast for much of the route and a little chilly on the bike.
• Average speed on-bike was 16.5. Last year it was 17.3. Considering the headwinds, that’s not so bad.
• Didn’t think about baseball, or the Mariners, or my book deadline at all.
• Stuck in my head (because I don’t wear headphones for safety reasons): “Theologians” by Wilco, a couple of Sage Francis verses, that “Hank!” Starbucks commercial (which is a great commercial).

I felt much, much better finishing than I did last year. That’s interesting because I trained a lot less in terms of miles (and difficulty) this year. Last year two weeks ahead of the STP I did a 150m climb up a mountain pass. This year I did a 100m course of proportionally lighter difficulty.

I think the big keys to the ride were the new bike (Habanero Cycles woooo!), my hyper-vigilant dedication to eating and drinking (which cost me off-bike time, if you know what I mean), and a new riding style which is greatly aided by a nice bike computer:
– continue to apply strength powering up hills: don’t grind up them slowly, but attack! attack! attack! Only grind when required
– high cadence: keep the pedals turning at least 60rpm at all times, and try to stay at 80 or above

Yet it’s strange to think that last year, even on a much worse bike, I was doing more difficult rides and training a lot harder only to find the ride itself a lot tougher. It’s times like these that I wonder how much use a coach would be in trying to target workouts for peak performance. I feel like I lucked into a sweet spot.

Afterwards, my wife drove me home (couldn’t find a decent hotel in Portland) and I slept for 12 hours, woke up, watched the M’s game while eating pizza and drinking Anchor Steam, then slept some more, and then woke up and went to work.

Almost weirder, to me: the day-of damage was really in my hands and my butt (well, obviously). Next-day soreness wasn’t much in my legs but more in the secondary muscle groups: my sides, my neck, my shoulders, my arms. Monday soreness was down, but the legs are more sore today… though that might be a relative perception issue.

I might hit RSVP next.