Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

There are basically three stories here

Spent the day sweating. I was in my office, and so it was only a low-grade sweat. Nevertheless, the 10 or so feet of elevation difference from the ground floor to the second floor is important in terms of the sun. That extra .2 degrees is a real nudge on the ol’ Endothermic Me Meter. I think we got up to 98 degrees today. I find I could do more of the things I need to do outside if I could get outside. It was a productive time inside, though.

I devoted the day to steps that will bring my online class into a real-world classroom. I have taught nine sections of it online, and feel confident in saying this one works well as an online class. Not all courses do, but that’s OK. The university is leaping into more online spaces. We wanted to put the class about digital media back in the classroom.

All of the material is there. It is a well designed class. (One of my colleagues built this class and she has been very kind and generous of her time and thoughts and resources and I’m just trying to do it well and make the smallest changes necessary from time to time, just for relevance. I like the class, and when I compliment it, I am complimenting her work. She certainly deserves the acknowledgement.) But I have to bring online order into a real world chaos. Or vice versa. This is how that’s going.

I have printed out a general calendar to keep track of the happenings in the course. I started by highlighting the days of the class, marking the beginning of the term, the final, and dates it will meet. I counted the weeks. I printed another calendar, one for last spring, so I could write out the proper sequence of events. This rough draft calendar helps to visualize all of the moving parts. I did this because it occurred to me, just last night, how much of the class will shake out in the classroom. I’ll take elements from the online version that would feel vestigial in a classroom and turn them into big talking points. We also have prepped lectures, reading materials, and several long videos we’ll watch over the semester. The elaborate, messy, and ultimately redundant calendar system helped me bring it all into order today. Now all I have to do in that class is make sure all of the assignment dates on Canvas make sense. (While it is an in-person class we are also encouraged to use Canvas.) I have to consider the finalized version of the module setup in Canvas. And I have to update the lectures. That’s all I have to do.

I also made a spreadsheet for the lectures, so that I might keep track of my progress with them over the course of the term. I prepped up the first lecture today, too. Fourteen more weeks of that to go.

For my other classes, I have to finish polishing one class. I made a To Do list today and that class only has three items on the list. My final class has one item. It says: Everything.

So I am caught up on everything except work, which is where I am behind.

In the evening, I went outside, just to cool down. It helped.

Let me tell you what I did last night. We watched Sunday’s stage of the Tour de France Femmes, completing the nine-day event. No surprises there, but some nice racing and the strongest rider won. My lovely bride announced she was going upstairs, which meant it was time for me to do the dishes. We had spaghetti, which was tasty, and I had a frying pan, the great big pot, and various complementary things to clean. I cleaned them with varying degrees of success. I stepped outside to retrieve the garbage can which, having fulfilled its weekly chore, deserved a happy return to the normal resting place.

Then I pulled out one of those new tape measures I bought this weekend. You have to put a little thought into what the first task will be. A stereo needs a great first song, the first movie you call up needs to be worthwhile, and tools need a meaningful first effort. And so I measured the parts of a fly rod that my father-in-law left with us on his recent visit. And, now, every time I pull out that tape measure I’ll think of that.

And probably also this. That’s a silly thing. Tape measures don’t need nostalgic firsts.

Anyway, he left this rod here and it needed to be safely stored and tonight was the night I was determined to find which bin in the basement had all of my old poster tubes. It took some doing, but I did. And wouldn’t you know it? Each one was about two inches too short.

I figured I would make do. Brought them upstairs, set about making do and found he’d also left the actual tube in which fly rods are stored. Excuse me, the fly rod carrier. And give fly fishers this: they have a strong accessory game. Inside the tub was a little cloth roll that held the actual parts of the rod. Once filled, you slide that into the tube, then put on the classy aluminum cap. The carrier is a rich dark green and the cap looks bronze and the whole thing looks like it should be in The Study.

I left this one in our library.

Some magic happened in the basement. I discovered a computer monitor I’d forgotten I had. (Haven’t we all been there? Forgetting high end computer equipment for years at a time? I know I have. How many monitors do I have? If I knew that I wouldn’t be rediscovering them, now, would I? Also, three, if you don’t count the laptop monitor.) I can do something with this, I thought. And I’ll only need to find an HDMI cable. Wouldn’t you know it, right there, in that same bin, there was an HDMI cable. These things could have stayed there, but they are meant to be used, and so they would come upstairs. But that was only the beginning! I found a few empty storage bins, and now I have started a stack of empty storage bins. And this is the beginning of reorganizing that corner of the basement. One of those empty bins just had bubble wrap in it from the last move. Couldn’t throw that away, so it stayed there. But now I wanted an empty bin. I also wanted the bubble wrap, so I set about looking for somewhere to put it and, wouldn’t you know it, at the center of the wads of bubble wrap was a plastic bag. So I laid out the bubble wrap. Then I flattened the bubble wrap.

I did not iron the bubble wrap. That’d be ridiculous. Also, it would melt.

Wouldn’t it?

Hang on.

Yeah, bubble wrap melts under the iron. Don’t do that.

So I smoothed it out with my hands, and then I folded it over. Then I stuffed the smoothed out, folded over bubble wrap into that bag and put the bag in a cabinet, where it will sit until we need to wrap something, or someone else needs bubble wrap, or I think of a better use for that cabinet.

This is momentum. Because before and after the bubble wrap diversion I found the three empty bins, I was able to re-sort a few things on shelves and I’ll remember none of this the next time the mood strikes, in four months.

Also, I changed the air filter.

Back upstairs, I cleaned the rando cabinet. Our refrigerator sits inside the wall, basically, and there are two cabinets above the fridge — one of them is famously for Poseidon) — and then there’s a vertical cabinet that holds a lot of cookbooks, but may soon get re-purposed. And below that there’s the cabinet that is the junk drawer of cabinets. It holds our flashlights, 1/64ths of the North American supply of batteries, some tools, some cat treats, and so on. It is the so on that’s the problem. I want one of those new tape measures to stay in that cabinet, with those tools. These are the basics. Two screwdriver sets, a cheaper hammer, some stuff that came with furniture, etc. They live there so we don’t have to fumble about the garage for a small indoors project. And so you can see where all of this is going. Everything is getting reorganized. Well, it is one day. Last night a handful of things that had landed in there for no reason got thrown away. I prioritized the cabinet based on assumed frequency of need. Most important things going on the top shelf and descending from there. It was not done to the degree of my recent linen closet re-organization, but I was able to find three percent more shelf space, and the tape measure or the cat snacks won’t fall out the next time we open the door.

And, thus, I am caught up on everything except work, which is where I am behind. But I have a growing awareness of that behindedness, and also some time to remedy the situation. Not much, so I must step into the task with some alacrity, but time.

I have all of the material in place for two of my three classes. I’ll probably need to add a bit more to the third class. I also need to sort some things out. That scheduling is important and busy work and, experience has shown me, one prone to overthinking. Fortunately, I never do anything of the sort. But I might start! I might step into overthinking with some alacrity.

That’s how I usually do it. The overthinking, I mean.

I also find myself in the healthy activity of dreaming about things I’d like to do. Things I want to do when the weather breaks. When there’s less to do. When I’m not busy. When I have six days in a row of not doing other things when it isn’t almost 100 degrees. But there will always be obligations and obstacles. I am thinking about the things I’ll do after my next travel trip, things I want to do on the site, but should in no way start now because, see above.

And this, friends, is how you find yourself looking into the etymology of “marcescent.” Probably Latin, but definitely also proto-Italian, or Lithuanian. Possibly Ukranian. Could be Greek. As for the word itself, look it up.

I read somewhere recently that a person should have five hobbies. This hipster think piece of Instagram-quality was implying you’d be more well-rounded, or you could keep them fresh — a new task for every night of the week! — or these things could be seasonal. So I invite you to count the things that are your active hobbies. This does not include work, sleep, family responsibilities, etc.

How many did you get?

Can you see your way into finding the time to adding that third or fourth or fifth hobby? Pretty tricky, right? I would say I have four and practice at three of them. I wonder where the fourth or fifth hobby would go. In this line of reasoning it is something like “At least one of your hobbies takes up too much of your time and gets in the way of other hobbies.”

Well, OK, I do read a lot. Got me there.

I’d like to do more with the website, which has been a state of catch-up since May. But I’m caught up. Now school work time is here. No hard feelings; work must be done. It is happy work, generally speaking.

Can’t ride less. I need to ride more! Fulfilling that hobby’s true ambition would get in the way of other hobbies. Also, there are things I need to build. Critically, there are things I need to finish building. The story of me can’t be the half-finished guy, or the ha-fin-gu, if you will.

That loosely covers the present hobbies, without digressing into their ROI, and says nothing about adding another.

Maybe it was a TikTok-quality piece. Typing this out it doesn’t seem to rise to the caliber of rigor and taste that an Instagram-quality piece would demand. It has the necessary saccharine vibes and FOMO necessary, but challenging you to pick up hobbies that TikTok element of lemmings to it. Who cares how many hobbies you have? Have one. Have 14. Be as good or as bad at them as you like. Pour exactly the right amount of time and money into it as you require. Get out of them exactly what you need.

I had a brief chat with the linguist and author Gretchen McCulloch recently when she was talking about what she called “the great joys” in realizing that she can just go learn to do a new thing once in a while. Take a weekly class for a bit, meet new people, and get, as she called it “medium proficient” at the thing.

This made me smile. I often tell students one of the perks of my job is staying in touch with former students (the one that choose to do so) because it is gratifying to see them develop interests of their own, not what the state or their parents or this curriculum insisted on. So now I have former students who are running for local office, one just received a prominent national AI innovation award (when he isn’t lawyering), softball, travel volleyball tournaments, wandering abroad, hiking close to home, and of course they spend their time with family, have side hustles, or just try new things. I talk about one former student in particular in class too, because it’s not all about curriculum. You want that Paper in college, but my point is always that there’s much, much more to it than that. This of course applies to the rest of life, too. I’m writing about those people and the rest of you and myself, too.

What do we want to do with our time? It’s not a selfish question.

I diverged at some great length into a great deal of text about Type 1 and Type 2 fun. After I deleted that I spent some time writing three more paragraphs about it, that time it was grounded in the idea of how you might find an additional hobby. There are plenty of opportunity and this should be easy, is what I was saying. First you have to define what you want — learn a process, gain a product, make more friends, try the thing that has always astounded you? You can work on these questions for a while.

I’m beginning to see, just now, where my days go.

Speaking of reading and learning new things, we return now to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second installment in his Revolutionary War trilogy. It’s excellent. Highly recommended.

From time to time I look up the people he’s writing about. No way in the world you’ve ever come across this young man’s name. And it stands out well enough that we should be able to find him online despite the mists of time.

By the time young Barnardous Swartout Jr. played his part in the largest drama of his life at the ripe old age of 16, at least one branch of his family had been in the colonies for four generations. His great-grandfather made the trip over from the Netherlands sometime before 1660. They’d all lived and died in New York, as did Barnardous. The 2nd New York regiment was a part of the invasion of Canada, at Valcour Island, and participated in the battle of Saratoga and Monmouth, which is where we meet him. They were also at Yorktown. How many of those Swartout was at remains beyond me at the moment. We do know he survived the war. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow. I wonder if he knew of Washington Irving’s tale, which was published just four years before he died. I wonder if Sleepy Hollow itself had strong feelings about it at the time.

Barnardus was married the same year as this battle. He and his wife, Mary, had 13 children, at least 11 of which survived into adulthood. He becomes a merchant, and apparently a successful one. He was also a local tax collector, and otherwise paid close attention to politics. He had farmland on the Hudson. If you’ve ever driven over the Cuomo or Tappane Zee bridges you’ve looked down upon his land, some 300+ acres of what he knew as woods, orchards, pastures and meadows. He becomes the sort of local fixture that when other property is written about in the newspapers of the day his place is mentioned as a fixed point. He was also a charter member of The Society of the Cincinnati. He had a two-floor home, multiple barns, and good livestock when he died in 1824.

If you click around enough you can see some of his descendants beginning to move around. I looked at the grandchildren he might have known, mathematically at least. One, was a housewife in Brooklyn, who died at 71. Another stayed in Sleepy Hollow. One served in the navy and two in the army, one of whom died of an illness during the Civil War. Two of his grandchildren survived into the 20th century. (There’s one man, Steuben Jr., that did not know his grandfather, Barnardus, but did live long enough to read about the horrors of World War I.) Some lived in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa. Some had large families themselves; others, perhaps did not. Maybe having that many brothers and sisters was enough. (Online record caveats also apply.) They were Masons, Quakers, they had spiritual epitaphs, they were American. If there had only been a reference in here to a canal this man’s family would have been a complete reference to early white U.S. history.

That family name is also still in New York. Hopefully they’re in good order.

cycling / errands / memories / Monday / overwriting / photo — No comments
10
Aug 26

Weekend summaries, never as satisfying as the real thing

A midday storm is an inescapable display of power that changes a day’s entire attitude. When the winds and thunder roll in and the rain pecks at the walls and windows, that’s a thrill, a romance, a terror, a cozy companion, he wrote after careful proofreading.

That time just after the storm has passed needs a name for its sadness.

And it is. This was on Saturday afternoon, when there was no immediate need for melancholy. After an hour or so the sun was brilliant and drying everything out, as if nothing had happened and we were back to a wonderfully hot, now humid, summer day. The sort that is observed nicely from indoors, because let’s be honest about the need to be outside. And that little storm was fun, but the part that follows seldom ever is.

Anyway, we’ve had several nice summer rains of late, and they have been immensely helpful. Presently, 100 percent of our county is rated as “abnormally dry” on the drought monitor. Only 9.8 percent of it is in the moderate drought category. Most of the county has been in a drought since last October. Three months ago it was of the “severe” variety.

This is the second moderate drought we’ve experienced in three years here. In 2024, we got some rain one night in November which broke the longest consecutive-days drought in 130 years of local record keeping. It’d been two months since anything fell out of the sky. Even then, when even the people that pay close attention to these things began to get squirmy, it wasn’t like the 2002 drought, when people were having to change their habits. “My lawn! My car!” When the veggies shrivel or you’re asked to take shorter showers, that’s when people notice. If we’re emerging from a drought right now, a slow-motion, year-long effort, I don’t think it’ll figure into most people’s thinking. Certainly not the neighbors, with the sprinklers.

But if we’re emerging from a drought, it could be a lot worse. Look out west. Look at Europe. Look around.

And if you don’t look too carefully you might think that I caught this maple leaf, midflight, and with a drop of rain on it.

If, that is, you overlook the spiderweb, which I’ve obviously been doing.

Everything grows well out back. Morning sun and afternoon shade and look at the Brown-eyed Susan. It is about to break containment.

Right next to it, the honeysuckle, which we had to cut way back in the spring of last year to replace the trellis upon which it depends. I had no problem with that. Honeysuckle takes your attacks on its free will and laughs in the face of your determinism. I need to prune it more, because it has grown wild and woolly once more. Add it to the list of things I need to do when it isn’t 98 degrees outside, which is the case as of this writing.

There are so many things on that list, and I made one slight in-road yesterday. I visited Harbor Freight, my first every visit, and picked up yard bags — cheapest I could find, and yes I did an extensive price comparison because I have the internet available for my every thought.

I also had a list of other things I wanted to pick up, a note on my phone, complete with names, prices and aisles. To say I have been preparing for this trip for sometime is overstating it, the previous two sentences notwithstanding. And then I got there and —

I’d like to leave the previous shopper a note of encouragement. The important thing is that you almost tried.

Completing the job of landing the cart in the corral would have taken an additional nine steps and a sophisticated heel pivot — I know because I did it for you — but you almost did the thing that society requests of you.

It calls to mind times when I would go to the IGA in wherever it was we lived last. Someone was always leaving carts out. Mind you, I don’t cruise the parking lot looking to solve this problem, but if it’s there I will fix your shortcomings, sure. And I’ll feel good about myself, as I did the times at that IGA when I moved the carts from the handicapped parking spaces into the corral that was mounted right next to the handicapped parking spaces. The grocery store kids were taking a smoke break on the stoop and laughed at that, and, eye contact being a fate-worse-than-death in that part of the world, I gave them a look, in turn.

I don’t miss anything about that place. Well, the 9:30 sunsets in the summer were nice. They also had good multi-use paths. Seven years, those are the two things I miss.

Anyway, I purchased the lawn bags. Probably should have picked up more — but how much of that do you want to do at a time? I also picked up two corner clamps. You really need four, but they only had the two. I decided to wait on some other items on my list, but I did indulge myself by picking up two cheap tape measures. One will live upstairs. One will live downstairs. This plan accomplishes two goals, keeping the good tape measure from wandering all over the house for weeks at a time, and keeps me from having to go to the garage to fetch the good one when I need to determine the empty space on that wall over there. At $4 a pop, these two new ones will pay for themselves somewhere around 2029.

The tape measures were in one of those blister packages though, the sort that involves great risk of bodily harm to free the thing you now own. The easiest way to free the tape measure was by unscrewing the little belt clip from the back. The easiest way to do this was to pierce the blister package with the tip of a pointy Phillips screw driver. Then you unscrew it. Then you wiggle the screw out of place. The tape itself is now free of the packaging, but you must now dig out the little silver belt clip. And here it helps if you pretend like you are a 19th century battlefield surgeon trying to find a bullet, and then dig the thing out in a grotesque way for moviegoers.

Then you have to reassemble it. Now, this is a tiny screw on a cheap tape measure from Harbor Freight. You must take care with this, pretending like you are the first 21st century surgeon to use a sonic scalpel to remove a three-micron imperfection on a patient’s iris. Then you have to test the tape measure, because who knows what secondary role that screw had. Does the tape come out of the case? Yes. Does the lock lock the tape? Yes, also it has a satisfying click. Does the tape retract when you unlock the lock? Yes. Do you do all of this for the second tape measure? Yes. Does the cat look at you like he is wondering if you’ve completely lost your mind? Yes. Do you know where these two tape measures are going to be stored when they aren’t in use? Absolutely not.

Well, another day for that, then.

I am the type of bike rider that can ride the same road a lot. Some people get bored. I suppose some people find the repetition meditative. Me, I’m usually too close to hypoxia to worry about meditating. I am also the type of bike rider that likes to ride new roads, or revisit the rarely ridden roads. But, what I’ve really learned about myself is that I’m the type of bike rider who, once there is an idea in place, absolutely must do that ride.

Saturday evening I had the idea of doing some hill repeats. It’s all very flat here and I haven’t ridden a real hill in several years now and I was never good at it and it’s hot and I am not riding enough and so this was a good idea.

I recalled this road, which I’ve been up three times perhaps, and down twice. It has a hill. It’s gradual. It is also quiet, and part of it is, as you can see, nicely shaded.

People do hill repeats to get stronger — or, like me, to say they’ve done them. There’s a method to the madness of going up the same hill over and over. Probably more than one. I just decided to go up the hill, and figured I’d do it several times. And so I soft-pedaled my way to that hill, an easy 17 minute ride with no exertion. And then I went up that hill. It tops out, then goes up a bit more, and does that a few times before the road forms a T-intersection with the nearest highway. If you saw the hill in profile it looks a bit like a molar. The climb isn’t hard or long, but what I know about hill repeats is that you want the concerted effort and then the repetition. What I want out of the hill repeat is to be able to turn around safely. And this road does all of those things. So I rode the road, and figured, “I’ll do 10.” And then later I said to myself, “It really is hot out here.” And then I said, “I’ll do five.” And then I said, “I think that’s five.” And then I took the long way home, turning left at that highway instead of turning around, letting the road pull me past the veteran’s cemetery and back into town, feeling the asphalt bend to my right between the gas station and the biker bar. Apparently they have good pub grub, though I have only seen the “biker’s welcome” sign on the wall, and they wouldn’t turn me away, but I think they mean motorcyclists. The little side road I was on after that falls downhill, usually I’m on this bit of infrastructure in the opposite direction. I turn left and and then left again, past the town lake, and into downtown. I timed the red light, singular, just right. Make the right past bike shop and opposite the old fire ring, and then the left for home.

At that point I am 3.5 miles from home, I have been out for about 90 minutes, drank three bottles of water, had enough of the heat and the little hills. I am counting, in my mind, the little rises between my bike and my neighborhood. I estimated three. There were four. After the second I started thinking of the alternate ways home, because I didn’t want that last hill. At the four-way stop I could go left and then right and go up a hill on bad chip-and-seal and then do the reverse side of this climb. I could turn right and go down a hill and then up two actual hills before the final incline and … no, straight ahead was the easiest way to get there and I was just done with the heat. When I got home I was right on the edge of shivering, which is one of those early heat exhaustion symptoms. Or the sweat wasn’t evaporating because I was no longer in the wind and perspiration could finally do its cooling job.

Inside, then, more water, this time with electrolytes. Shower.

There’s a very, very small wound in the next photo, and I’m just telling you now. It’s hardly the worst thing in the world, but it is a part of the story and now you’ve been warned.

I’ve bled on a bicycle in several different ways. Crashes. Hailstorm. Whacked by a limb too far out into the road.

Some 10-plus years ago I cut myself so badly I had to turn around, go home and bandage myself up. The little rubber cover on my handlebar hood had disappeared and it hadn’t yet been replaced. Beneath that hood is a screw that holds all of the stuff in the shifter-brake area together. I reached up to adjust and grabbed the screw and sliced my pinky. It was at the beginning of the ride, and so I went back out, gauze and tape and Band-aids and such. I could follow the blood trail back out. I still have the scar.

Anyway, and here it comes, as I was getting ready to shower I noticed I nicked the ring finger on my left hand. No idea how.

It’s fine. Didn’t bleed. I’ll keep it clean and it’ll heal itself because I believe in first aid. But it’s right in that spot where the finger touches the middle finger and it’ll be a reminder, for a few days, that I have no idea how that happened.

My lovely bride, meanwhile, did an aqua bike == a swim and ride race — and she finished second. Podium and proud! We did the proper sort of celebration: Chinese for dinner, and basked with ice cream from the local creamery.

The teens running the place closed as we were there. Removed the garbage bags, shut the windows, took away the umbrellas, turned off the monitors and figured “These two are the upstanding sort who won’t cause us any problem. They’ll probably be home and in bed before 10, anyway.”

And they were right about that.

Well, I had a lot of other things I was going to talk about, but I have to save something for the rest of the week. Besides, I have written now almost 2,300 words and said absolutely nothing. You deserve a break.

cycling / Friday / Instagram / photo / video — No comments
07
Aug 26

Alien plants have landed

I got in some good work today. For about three hours and change I worked on straightening out one of my fall courses. I have the first six weeks of lecture notes all set up. Everything is organized through mid-November. Then it got confusing, because I got blurry-eyed. It happens. I’m surprised I was able to keep it together that much.

It isn’t the material. The material is fine, but rather the organizational part. All of those dates, all of those moving parts.

I did realize that one of my better lectures lines up nicely an important part of the football schedule this year, so there’s that.

After a time, I took a break for lunch, which was my first mistake. Lunch was good. We sat around and talked about this and that, as people do. Then we decided on the thises and delayed the thats. We moved some furniture around. We sat and had a little read. I called my mother for a chat, as people do. And, somehow, that was the day.

Oh, and I checked a few of the growing things in the backyard, where some things are having a great year.

Especially the weeds. As in not here yesterday, embarrassing large today, and pulled this evening. So I pulled a few weeds — I need to get more yard bags, and so I can’t too invested in that.

Besides, I just went to look at the things that were a-blooming.

The things we want to bloom, anyway. I can hear my old teacher, and all of my old friends who studied horticulture even now “a weed is anything undesirable. A rose could be undesirable if you don’t want it where it is growing.”

Well, I don’t know for certain what this is. Stonecrop, I think. And I’m not sure if it has grown in this spot before. Or if we want it there. Good thing I don’t have those yard bags, right?

I’ve said that a lot in the last month or so, which goes a long way to explaining all weeds which must now be addressed. Well, soon, anyway.

This evening watched today’s stage of the Tour de France Femmes. We watch a lot of sports, of course, and more than our share of bike races, as you might imagine. At the risk of testing your patience, this stage had what became one of the greatest climbs in mathematical history. (That phrase has never been written on the web.) Here’s the highlight version.

Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney, who has previously won the Tour, attacked on the lower stages of Mount Ventoux, one of the sport’s most iconic climbs. This is the first time women have raced up Ventoux in the tour — how you say … patriarcat. The two women in the lead group with her were Demi Vollering and Marlen_Reusser, two of the most accomplished riders in the modern peloton, and they found themselves locked in their own tactical battle behind. As they all progressed up the mountain Vollering and Reusser botched their own responses to the attacking Niewiadoma-Phinney, who stormed up at such a blistering pace that it changed the circumstances for Vollering and Reusser two or three times as they made their way up.

Usually, the circumstance and the interpersonal dynamics of a bike race, and how each determines the other, are what I found most interesting, but Niewiadoma-Phinney’s metrics are what matters here.

In men’s cycling, the greatest road racer of all time, Tadej Pogačar, recorded a 6.98 w/kg performance for 40 minutes on his 2024 rampage up Plateau de Beille. That’s considered the best climb ever, in terms of the data. Here’s one estimate of her data today.

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This is all about how much power the ride can generate relative to their mass, which is how the datapoints are equalized among different people. Niewiadoma-Phinney’s averaged that sort of output for 55 minutes, so 37 percent longer than Pogacar did. And, she was pointed into a headwind for most of the climb.

Also, Taylor Phinney — Niewiadoma-Phinney’s husband, my all-time favorite rider and now on the comeback trail to become an Olympian once again — said her number was actually “more like 5.6” w/kg.

It’s an astounding thing. An awesome thing, in the truest sense: that ride should fill one with some awe. And she did it in the big race on the biggest climb on the hardest day. Most of us can’t produce power like that under ideal circumstances. Certainly we can’t hold it for long. Guaranteed a lot of people will be trying this weekend, but a lot of people are going to realize, very quickly, you cannot match one of the greatest rides of all time.

books / history / photo / Thursday — No comments
06
Aug 26

You know, those kinds of days

You know how, some days, you get a lot of work done? Yesterday wasn’t one of those days. You know how, though, on some days, you get some stuff done and you figure it’ll pay off later on? Maybe yesterday was one of those days. You know how, some days, you just wind up cleaning things instead of doing work. Yesterday was one of those days.

You know how, sometimes, you think “I am going to do this chore tomorrow,” and you go to bed feeling enthusiastic about it, almost already patting yourself on the back for the work you’re going to do tomorrow, but then you don’t really feel the same way about that the next day?

Just me? OK then.

Yesterday I cleaned my desk, which was threatening to encircle and collapse upon me. A few small things got thrown away. Momentum builders, I thought, with a handful of short runs to toss things into a garbage can. Also, I had some cords and cables which have been vexxing me. Vexxing me, I say. I am vexxed. Two Xs. Or, I have been. Now some of them are out of site, and I am merely vexed.

Also, I cleaned my phone off, which desperately needed some attention, moving some videos to an external drive gave me almost 40 GB of space back. Now my phone feels lighter, somehow?

While those files were transferring, and while I was moving cables, I cleaned beneath part of my desk, too. Beneath my desk is a tennis ball, which I bat around with the cats occasionally, and a stool I made in a 7th grade shop class. I wonder if any of my old classmates still have theirs.

We also had some weather, which turned into threats of threatening weather, which turned into another realization that we’ve done terrible damage to our weather forecasting abilities in the last 20 months. Meanwhile, we had our first generator test yesterday. It fired up and ran for five minutes and then turned itself off, exactly as intended. You can hear it in the house. It isn’t overbearing, but you know it is running. Given the number of lawn mowers and leaf blowers we have around us, it’ll blend in soon enough.

By the time all of that was done, and I was ready to work, it was time to knock off for the day. So I did. Tomorrow, then, I thought to myself, feeling enthusiastic about it, almost already patting myself on the back for work I’ll be doing tomorrow. Tomorrow was today. Those pats were unearned.

I had a meeting scheduled this morning, my first official work thing of the new school year, but it was canceled and will be rescheduled for September. I like how this is starting off.

Anyway, let’s return to the site’s most popular weekly feature, the regular check in with the kitties.

Despite the cleaning, I can never get ride of this box. It has been claimed by the management of this domicile. (Though we do need to hang the cool thing that is inside the box. Let me add that back to the list …)

There’s a ledge on our stairs, and I love it when the cats remember it is there. This week it has been a spot for Phoebe.

Last night my lovely bride moved an empty laundry basket, just so it wouldn’t be underfoot. This simple effort stirred Poseidon and brought him across the room to inspect the procedure. The baskets are his, I guess. Especially when they have laundry in them.

Those towels were fresh out of the dryer, so you can understand. (As I write this he is sitting in my closet, on a pile of clothes. They, too, were clean before he found them. I found this out because I was doing laundry at the time.) So he likes clothes.

But he also enjoys his private time, in his cabinet above the refrigerator.

And, yes, I leave a cabinet empty for the cat. I also put a blanket in there so he could be cozy. He sits there, happy as can be, of his own choice or if we are trying to keep him away from dinner.

So the cats are doing just fine, as you can tell. Except Phoebe needs a belly rub right now. I’ll do that, and pat myself on the back, feeling enthusiastic about the effort.

We return to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. It is such a terrific book and I can’t encourage you enough to get this if you haven’t already. I am into 1778 now and am trying to decide if I want to read more and faster, because it is such a nice read, or if I want to slow down because I’m through the halfway point and I’d like to delay the inevitable end. It’s the kind of book.

Anyway, the Carlisle Peace Commission has landed, and the British are packing up to leave Philadelphia and this one little tidbit gets back to that idea of public sentiment, which, somewhere in 1777, shifted rather demonstrably. And go figure. War at home, difficulties on the domestic economic front, the occasional story or propaganda about a slaughter here or a massacre there. By the time these guys showed up, the only real peace overtures that Lord North and King George offered in the revolution) everyone had picked a side. You were almost certainly a patriot ready for independence or you were strictly a loyalist and, at this point, you might be considering Canada, the islands, or the jolly ol’ isle as a better alternative. Opinions and jaws were set.

In part that’s why the British were leaving Philadelphia. There are a lot of tactical considerations, but everyone that knew what they were looking at and could see it clearly seems to have realized there were difficult days ahead for the redcoats. So it was back to New York. Several thousand loyalists and deserters would take the trek, too. The women and children by see, the rest overland. It was a huge logistical move.

Let’s look at some of the people involved here. Joseph Reed was born into a family of means. He studied law. He becomes a founding father, a soldier, an aide-de-camp to Washington. At one point he was accused of treason in the press. He was also big into Pennsylvania politics, of course. (Those two things are not related.) He was due to be returned to the congress, but his health betrayed him. He died at just 43 years old.

William Henry Drayton gives us that amazing quote. He was a founding father from South Carolina, not to be confused with the later Congressman William Drayton (no Henry as a middle name) who would have been a toddler toddler at the time of the Peace Commission. (The Draytons were cousins.) William Henry Drayton, an ambitious rice plantation owner of South Carolina was a big voice in the lowcountry politics of his time. He gets overlooked a lot, but he was one of the people who thought Independence Day should be marked with fireworks. He also commanded a frigate, served as a judge, wrote part of Carolina’s 1778 constitution and was in the Continental Congress from 1778 until his death the next year at just 37 years old. He was a polemicist, a bomb thrower, and a big, loud, quarrelsome part of that body, which might help explain the attitude that came with that message to Carlisle.

Carlisle is Frederick Howard, the 5th Earl of Carlisle. He ran that particular effort, which found itself ill-informed, ill-timed, and ultimately critical of how the British government was handling this whole thing. And here we can get into the dangerous waters of trying to understand the many attitudes of people who’ve come long before us. But let us just stay general enough and say that King George and his prime minister, Lord North, had their critics at home. While the king was more or less insulated from that, it did exist in some considerable sort of which. For our purposes, it was loud enough to be remembered 250 years later. The British opposition saw France gearing up and worried about the French allies, Spain. The problem with a big empire and a big government is a lot of voices and a lot of needs and a lot of people pulling in different directions and what is a king to do? Well, we’ll send these three guys to try to patch things up.

Dear reader, I hope this does not come as a surprise to you, but they were unsuccessful in those efforts. This reconciliation offering was somewhat comparable to where the colonies started the process, but on this side of the ocean that was now off the table.

Howard was a British statesman, diplomat and author. When this little job failed, he wasn’t blamed, though he thought. In fact, he was made the viceroyalty of Ireland, but that might not have been the most plum assignment given larger global events. William Eden was there, too, a high ranking cabinet member, a member of parliament, a spymaster. Joining them was Commodore George Johnstone, a naval officer who had also served during the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War. He was a politician, a member of parliament, a director of the East India Company, and he’d previously been the governor of West Florida from 1763 until 1767. It was Johnstone who was rumored to be offering bribes. Despite these three men, and the British Royal Navy behind them, and the rumors of bribes and whatever else, they could not succeed. They appealed to Congress, but were rebuffed. They appealed to the people, with no more luck.

Some historians point out the value in what the Carlisle Commission was bringing to the peace table, while others have focused on the idea that turning the Congress turning them away was the last obstacle to realizing the American project, even if, as others have argued, Howard, Eden and Johnstone had very little chance of success, as they seemed to think themselves. Perhaps, as some have argued, they were sent, and arrived, too late, to have any real material impact. Soon after, the British efforts in North America ground to a halt for months and the revolutionaries had to interpret that as best they can, perhaps they were leaving, distracted, or done.

Or perhaps, as Andrey Kuchkovskiy wrote in studying the commissioners themselves:

The Carlisle Peace Commission suffered from poor timing and a lack of political and military support. While the public supported their efforts, the officials initially did not, and by the end of their time in the colonies, even the commissioners expressed doubt about achieving peace. Additionally, the expansion of the war after France allied with
the Americans dramatically undercut the commissioners’ efforts. Had the commissioners remained in the colonies to pursue peace, or potentially renewed their conciliatory efforts with a new commission, they could have arguably achieved a possible agreement …

They arrived in the early summer, they departed in early fall. The French were sailing for Boston. The war would continue.

And so does this book. It’s terrific!

friends / memories / site / Wednesday — No comments
05
Aug 26

Happy Birthday to the website

Two things started within 367 days of one another. On August 4, 2003, while reading a lot of Salam Pax (who may work for UNICEF now?) and Raywat Deonandan (who is definitely at the University of Toronto) and a local guy named Terry Oglesby and a few of the newfangled political blogs, I started a blog myself. It was going to be bad, I knew it was going to be bad. I thought it might get better. (And 23 years later the jury is still out.) But you know what? I had free time and no money and I needed a cheap hobby.

On August 6, 2004, some friends at work, most notably Brian McAlister, (now at Advance Local) convinced me to drop a few bucks on an actual URL because I had free time and just a few bucks.

Spending money is always tough, but I was sick of temporary sites and pop-ups and losing control of what my three visitors saw when they remembered to visit. I knew what I wanted, somewhere I could put some things from time to time, and some place I could play with coding from time to time, some place without ads.

But we must back up. A college buddy of mine, Stephen Kiser (now an economist and professor), sold me a line about how if I learned some HTML I’d add $10,000 to my salary. I was in undergrad and believed him because he was a bit older than me and seemed like he knew what he was talking about. So I spent a summer in college teaching myself how to code, and found that there was something about the process that was satisfying. I never got great at it, but I never wanted to be a computer scientist or a backend developer anyway. I was this other thing. I was the person who could write both HTML and AP Style. There was exactly no one else like that around when I graduated college. In everything else in his life, Kiser might have been right, but I’m still waiting on that extra cash. Though, writing in, or dabbling in, code figured into every job I had in those early years.

Here’s a screen grab of what the site looked like in 2006 (just the second or third version of the site).

I like sharp, clean design. I was trying to write that with as little code as possible, just for the challenge of it. I was editing the photos by hand, and in probably the hardest way possible in 2006. Because I always got bored with images — that hasn’t changed — I would regularly update them.

The general way I display the site has changed. I have the front page, of course, with all of the buttons, and most everything else I put through here, or just store on a hidden page deep within the recesses. The traffic has changed, a little. That first August I had 3,670 visits. Now I get about 200,000 a month, for some reason. Some of that is bots and various bits of code, sure, but there are a lot of people in there. May of this year was the biggest month of the site’s history, and what people saw the most that month was one of the cats being silly. Perhaps later this year the 10 millionth visitor will swing through. I wonder what will bring them in. There’s only 22 years of the things that interest me that might catch their eye.

This has been, and remains, a hobby — a place to ramble on about whatever has caught my interest, a place to memorialize photographs and other files, and the occasional thing I am fortunate enough to post elsewhere. While websites have taken a hit in popularity because of the dopamine that sits inside the walled gardens of social media, I didn’t start this to try to attract crowds. Still, it amuses me that, so far this month, folks from Belgium, Great Britain, Japan, and Canada have been on the site. Germany, Brazil, India, and other nations, too. One person, each, from Andorra, Anguilla, Bahamas, Iceland, Maldives, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe have been here. And you, wherever you are at. I’m glad you’re visiting what is, ultimately, a semi-casual, personal site.

I don’t know why you’ve come here, but I am grateful that you came back. I hope you’ll come back again.

Tomorrow, we’ll be checking in on the kitties, I’ll ramble on about school work, fret over this and that, and more.

Thanks for being a part of this.