More Advice From an AI Skeptithusiast

Dear AI Skeptithusiast,

I’m just curious: are you enthusiastic enough about GenAI to pay for it? I think we have a weakness for spending a lot of time on stuff if it’s free, without registering the attentional cost. So how much do you pay for AI chatbot access, and how much would you be willing to pay if Big AI decided to jack up the price?

Erica A, Madison, WI

Dear Erica,

This is where my wariness of getting sucked into the online realm collides with my utter cheapness. The two forces are utterly complementary. At work I use AI whenever necessary but that’s on my employer’s dime; in my personal life, I let my usage be reined in by the limitations of free accounts. That is, I don’t pay for anything, and to the extent these AI chatbots get stingier, so will my use of them. If free GenAI accounts were all-you-can-eat, I’d need to implement other safeguards to avoid spending too much time with the technology. For now, its providers are keeping me honest.

I don’t expect everyone to adopt this approach, of course, because it takes some work. For example, in researching my blog posts I use Claude a fair bit, to where I run the risk of getting cut off. With that in mind, when I wanted feedback on whether the phrase “keeping me honest” works in the context you see above, I flipped over to Gemini to save on Claude tokens. And for my blog cover art, I currently favor ChatGPT but am well aware I only get like three tries to get the picture before the chatbot cuts me off. The picture above was started by ChatGPT, which in three tries couldn’t get the cheerleader’s neck right, and then locked me out, so I fed the picture to Gemini which fixed it. It’s like a little game … something you, Erica, may quite legitimately have no patience for, in which case I entreat you to bring that same impatience to your use of a paid GenAI!

Dear AI Skeptithusiast,

In my experience, early adopters of technology can waste a lot of time and/or energy working out its kinks. Sure, I’m intrigued by getting some help drafting documents, and having this amazing search engine that’s super easy to use, but GenAI is only going to get better and easier, right? Since it’s obviously not going away, why rush into it?

Sam Taylor, Mill Valley, CA

Dear Sam,

Of course AI is getting better at all kinds of things, particularly coding and agentic stuff. That said, its ability to write is, by contrast, barely improving (if at all), because that’s not an industry priority, and—in the words of Claude itself (not that I couldn’t have written this, but because I like to watch the AI fall on its sword)—“Code has tests, mathematics has answers, software can be executed, proofs can be checked, and agents either complete a task or fail to—but great prose can be ambiguous, abrasive, funny, incomplete, emotionally strange or deliberately indirect. You can build a clean reward signal for ‘did this code pass the test suite.’ You can’t easily build one for ‘is this sentence alive.’”

Asked why AI prose so often reads as flat, Claude offered a candid diagnosis. It suggested that “a model trained to be clear, safe, helpful and comprehensive can easily become the kind of writer who explains everything twice,” and that as AI evolves, writing quality “could plateau or even regress on some axes (distinctiveness, risk-taking) while improving on others (coherence, factual accuracy, following a long brief, editing).” The AI didn’t admit to its writing being pedantic, but I find it so often is.

(Claude provided the above guidance with a caveat: “Since your post will use direct quotes, it’s worth pasting them from our conversation rather than retyping them, so they match word for word.” For a platform that famously cannibalizes humans’ writing across the Internet, doesn’t Claude seem kind of defensive about me accidentally putting words in its mouth? How cheeky!)

It’s not only Claude that alludes to limitations of AI’s writing, and it’s not only in the realm of prose that AI falls short of a human possessing actual intelligence. Gemini, after stridently challenging me to a poetry-off a while back,  conceded defeat gracefully, lauding my “sophisticated tone” and noting that its poem, by contrast, “felt a bit like a student trying to please a teacher.” So as far as AI helping you write, now is as good a time as ever to try it out, but a good case could be made for simply not bothering at all, ever, other than running stuff by it as you write (e.g. “‘straightaway’ can be one word, right?”).

Regarding the other part of your inquiry—using AI for its natural language search capabilities—I think by not using it now, you’re missing out on the best experience AI is ever going to offer, and it’s actually going to decline. Think about this: do you remember when Google search really worked well and wasn’t so influenced by well-funded companies that bent the rules to show up higher in the results? I’m talking about SEO, content marketing, and paid search. They’ve really taken everyone a step backward.

A fun example: when I published my blog post “Everything You Wanted to Know About Getting A Vasectomy - But Were Afraid To Ask,” I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it became the number one hit when you googled “California vasectomy law.” It held that position for well over a year. And then the big law firms got smart, figured out how to swing the search engine toward their sites, and now my post doesn’t show up in the first ten pages of hits. Obviously this is partly due to how old the post is—but then, it’s also timeless. Meanwhile, my post “Spelling Focus - Is It ‘Kindergartner’ or ‘Kindergartener’?” is currently the number one hit when you google “is it kindergartener or kindergartner?” And that post is from eight years ago! The difference? Nobody is paying big money to grab that top spot, given the non-commercial nature of my linguistic investigation.

My wife has a landscape design business, and although she has a great website, she doesn’t do any kind of SEO or marketing efforts to drive traffic to it. It exists simply to be a web presence, so she can put the URL on her business card and brochure, and people referring business can send prospective customers there. She never expected people to stumble on her site or find it through Google. And yet, she’s starting to get leads, and they’re all from GenAI chatbots. The reason is that a potential customer who has a dialogue with a bot is getting more authentic guidance then he or she would from search, because with current GenAI there’s no SEO, content marketing, paid search, etc. skewing the results. So as of now, AI is actually delivering all the goodness that Google used to, when the Internet was still a largely open, uncommercialized community instead of a giant attention marketplace, with its relentless panoply of digital ads, algorithmic bait, and socio-political rabble-rousing.

Could this AI experience last? I asked Claude if there are any signs that AI chatbots could be influenced down the road by businesses clever enough, and sufficiently well-funded, to upset the balance again. Claude replied that not only could this happen, but it already is, and fast:

A whole “GEO” (generative engine optimization) industry has sprung up in the last year or two, specifically to get businesses cited and recommended inside AI answers — and it’s not fringe anymore. GEO is the practice of structuring content, brand entity signals, and technical infrastructure so that generative AI engines cite, quote, recommend, or otherwise surface a brand when users ask questions, and there are dozens of agencies already selling this as a retainer service, with search interest for GEO tooling up several orders of magnitude year over year and Fortune 500 brands budgeting for AI visibility as its own line item separate from SEO.

I had to drill down a bit on what “technical infrastructure” means in the context of GEO. It pertains to allowing AI crawlers in (many sites don’t, by default) and embedding non-human-readable “structured data” and curated markdown indices to basically spoon-feed AI engines, among other things. Needless to say my wife’s website doesn’t do any of this, just like I can’t be bothered to buy SEO to bring traffic to this blog. All of which is to say: if you want to experience authentic, unbiased advice from an AI chatbot, you better move quick!

Dear AI Skeptithusiast,

I have Gemini on my Android phone, though I don’t remember ever asking for it. I hadn’t originally minded this—I mean, it’s useful and all—but then a week ago I started getting this “Daily Brief.” Every morning I get an alert and when I tap it, Gemini gives me a to-do list and reminds me of all this stuff I have coming up in my day and my week. It’s creepy! Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if it were just my calendar, but it’s evidently reading my chat history and even my email as well. I never configured all this, and I never told Google it was okay to mine my stuff! Is this the  beginning of the end?

Danny D, El Cerrito, CA

Dear Danny,

I definitely hear you there … I got that same feature pushed to my phone. My Gemini Daily Brief is telling me “sign this document” and “attend this film festival” and “your cousin’s birthday is Friday” and “prep for your coaching season” and even “weave Oakland vernacular into your writing project.” I wouldn’t say the hairs stood up on my neck when I saw this, but that’s only because my neck hairs aren’t that long.

This last bit about the vernacular was especially weird … it went on to say, “Your recent research into local Oakland slang and tone nuances lays a rich foundation for authentic dialogue.” I did have some vague recollection of this research, but obviously I wasn’t remembering it as well as Gemini. Turns out it was referring to my having queried it about whether “OE8” would be widely understood to mean “Olde English 800,” a decidedly non-epicurean malt liquor. (The context wasn’t a blog post, though, but for a party invitation I’d emailed out.)

We should actually be glad for this Daily Brief, because it’s like a canary in a coal mine: it draws our attention to what Google was already doing. This is a Gemini feature, not specific to the Daily Brief, and was configured (possibly by accident) when you enabled the Google Workspace Extension in Gemini. This Extension bridges Gemini to your personal, private Google data (reading your inbox, checking your schedule, scanning your personal Google Drive).

There are two ways to stop Gemini from running automatic background scans of your email. One is to disable the Gemini Workspace Extension altogether, so it can’t read your email at all. The other is to disable the Daily Brief. This second tweak tells Gemini to leave your email alone unless you ask it (during a chat) to chase something down for you. Myself, I’m turning off the Workspace Extension; I never ask Gemini to go into my email (and if I ever decide I want to, I can turn the Extension back on, and it’ll then have access to my current and past email). Here’s what to do: click the little gear icon in the lower left of your Gemini screen, then select “Personal Intelligence.” From there, you can either toggle off Daily Brief, or click “Connected Apps” and then toggle off Google Workspace.

Incidentally, this could be one of those scenarios where you increase your own privacy by reigning in this feature while simultaneously benefitting from other people accepting it as-is. I myself maintain Inbox Zero so I’m really good about responding to emails, but so many people I email seem completely swamped and are unresponsive. Honestly, I kind of like the idea of the Daily Brief alerts hassling my book club members for me, for example, when I’ve emailed them the ballot to choose the next book and nobody has responded.

Dear AI Skeptithusiast,

My sister says Gemini should be off-limits for family arguments because it doesn’t have enough context. I say it’s totally fine, if it’s just helping me articulate my position better. What do you think?

Tommy Z, Frisco, TX

Dear Tommy,

Your sister is right. GenAI could never have enough context to act as a legitimate mediator, since it only gets your backstory. Meanwhile, it has a “sycophantic bias,” which is how researchers describe its tendency to tailor its responses to the user—agreeing with their opinions, validating mistaken beliefs, or offering unearned praise—rather than providing objective truth or critical pushback. (Details here and here.) Look  closely at your last chat. Perhaps you wrote something like, “As the baby boomer brother, why do I constantly feel like my generation X sister is gaslighting me?” and perhaps it replied, “As the Baby Boomer brother, your gut instinct is right on the money: you feel like you are being gaslighted because your sister is actively rewriting reality to dodge accountability for her poor behavior. When she leaves you standing in the lurch, arrives late without a text, or fails to communicate, she doesn’t just make a mistake—she alters the narrative so that you become the problem.” So now you feel all high and mighty and send that transcript to your sister.

The only  trouble is, Gemini is working from its generalized training data on what gaslighting typically looks like, which may have little to do with what’s actually going on between you and your sister. Was she twenty minutes late this one time, or chronically? Did she “fail” to text because she was driving, and then didn’t fall all over herself apologizing because you don’t even have a job and just play video games all day anyway, meaning your time is essentially worthless? Had she just driven fifty miles from Fort Worth, through terrible traffic, to fetch you for your parents’ anniversary dinner because you lost your driver’s license? Did you share these important details with Gemini? If not, would it be any less legitimate for your sister to reply, “I asked my Magic 8-Ball if my big brother is a dipshit and it said, ‘It is decidedly so’”?

An AI Skeptithusiast is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask an AI Skeptithusiast,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
• Ask an AI Skeptithusiast

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Ask an AI Skeptithusiast

Dear AI Skeptithusiast,

I get the “skeptic” part of your name since AI is bound to take over and enslave us one day, but why are you enthusiastic? Honestly, I’m pretty efficient with good old fashioned Google, and don’t need a bot to do my writing for me.

Sally A, Columbia, MO

Dear Sally,

I find that GenAI goes far beyond what a search engine can do. It enables you to take on research tasks very quickly, whether for work or just for fun, that would be really onerous otherwise. Since you’re from the Show-Me State, I’ll give you an example. I become aware somewhat recently of the “Bechdel test,” which was contrived by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel, and consists of three simple criteria for measuring female representation in film: 1) Does the movie have at least two named female characters, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something other than a man? (It’s surprising how many works fail.) Intrigued, I realized I could very easily see how my tastes align with this. I’d already listed twenty of my favorite movies in these pages, and it took me all of thirty seconds to upload them to Claude with the prompt, “Please analyze the following titles in terms of whether they pass the Bechdel test and, if so, is it by a wide margin or just barely?” I didn’t have to suggest how Claude could determine this; it found a crowdsourced database at bechdeltest.com for several of them, and then did its own separate research for the more obscure ones, and flagged these latter conclusions as “lower confidence.” A couple examples of its output:

The Housemaid (2010, Im Sang-soo) — Passes, confirmed 3/3, with “several scenes” noted by the database. Eun-yi, the wife Hae-ra, and her scheming mother Mi-hee talk directly to one another about the pregnancy, the household, and their maneuvering—not just filtered through the husband.

The Wedding Plan — Likely passes, though the whole premise (finding a groom) makes “about something other than a man” a close call in places — much of the female ensemble’s talk is literally about the wedding/matchmaking. 

(In case you’re interested, 14 out of 20 of my movie picks easily passed the Bechdel test, and a couple others were too close to call.)

As you can imagine, this just-for-fun exercise would have been a lot of work without AI, to the point it probably wouldn’t be worth the trouble. For an example of a more utilitarian task, consider a way in which AI helps me with this blog. I have a Gemini Notebook into which I’ve loaded all my Bits & Bobs posts. Bits & Bobs are snippets from old letters and email (pre-albertnet), and when I’m writing a new volume of them, I have to comb my archives for useable passages. When I find something I like, I have to make sure I haven’t already used it, which used to be very tricky. (As the devoted albertnet reader already knows, “The different volumes of Bits & Bobs are not organized chronologically, thematically, spatially, or in fact at all.”) Pre-AI, I had to rely on memory, or skim through a continually growing blog archive, to know if a snippet had already been included. Not anymore—I just run it by the Notebook chatbot. (For example, “Have I blogged before about acne?” turned up “Milton as a zit“ and “the Natalie Portman whitehead,” but not the “pimple-tunnel episode,” which I thus included in my last Bits & Bobs post.) As a bonus, every single Bits & Bobs snippet (and there are hundreds at this point) has a date tag on it, so I could very easily ask AI to assemble them all in chronological order, thus “writing” my autobiography for me (in my own words, of course). What search engine could achieve that?

Dear AI Skeptithusiast,

When it comes to AI I say “burn it down!” I want nothing to do with it. It’s replacing human thought, effort, and learning. I made my daughter promise not to use ChatGPT to write her college papers but she told me recently, “I held out as long as I could, but the temptation is just too strong.” Why am I paying her tuition so she can outsource her “learning” to a bot? How can you be in any way bullish about this technology?

Anneke R, San Luis Obispo, CA

Dear Anneke,

First of all, I completely agree with you that having an AI write a school paper for you is a terrible use case; in fact I’ve blogged at length, here and here, about how writing for yourself sharpens your intellect and results in a better product as well. But these are arguments for not abusing AI, which is what your daughter is doing. That’s a “her” problem, not a platform problem. Believe me, I’m plenty vexed at how so many teens—and adults—are using modern technology, and not just AI. Look at how many are glued to their smartphones 24x7, doomscrolling until they’re depressed, or playing stupid games. But do you yourself use a smartphone? If so, you’ve already learned how to reconcile use vs. abuse when it comes to technology … so why are you so hesitant to extend this to AI? You and your daughter can choose to take advantage of its capabilities without falling prey to its weaknesses. (I’ve even highlighted what I think are the five most important AI “DON’Ts,” in this handy post.) In short, when it comes to AI and your frustration with it, don’t bite off your nose to spite your daughter’s face!

Dear Skeptithusiast,

Microsoft came out recently with its “Humanist AI Code of Conduct“ and I have to say I’m fairly impressed. It lists several important guardrails for AI, such as: human control comes first; AI must have absolute constraints nobody can override; and, it needs to be transparent in its “thinking.” Of course this is only a start. What would you say is the biggest gap in this Code?

Shawn P, Columbus, OH

Dear Shawn,

To me, the biggest gap is that it doesn’t address economic displacement—the loss of jobs due to AI. (Neither do the similar self-imposed guidelines created by OpenAI, Google, and Meta.) Part of how platforms get away with sidestepping this is by citing the lack of consensus about how many jobs AI can really automate, and the disparity between how many have been automated vs. how many could. But this isn’t very fair, as far as I’m concerned. First off, companies are very wary of hiring right now—perhaps waiting to see how much AI can reduce their need for new employees—which is hurting the job market. Second, lots of companies, whether or not they’ve reached “true AI maturity,” are laying off huge numbers of employees based in many cases on the mere promise of increased efficiency. Here are some recent mass layoffs:

• Marc Benioff, head of Salesforce, announced that AI enabled Salesforce to cut support headcount from about 9,000 down to roughly 5,000
• Block (née Square) cut more than 4,000 jobs — nearly 40% of its workforce — and its CEO, Jack Dorsey, tied this directly to AI
• SAP is cutting 8,000 job cuts (via a combination of layoffs and voluntary severance) in what their leader, Christian Klein, describes as a “generational restructuring around AI”
• HP has announced plans to cut 4,000–6,000 jobs by 2028, explicitly tied to AI adoption

Whether or not AI fulfills its promise, those laid off won’t necessarily get their jobs back.

What really interests me is this question: why do we all take it for granted that, when AI increases employee efficiency, all the benefit should accrue to the company (i.e., its profits), and no benefit to the employees? Instead of making our jobs easier, AI makes them go away, or at least raises the bar for keeping them. The climate created by these mass layoffs makes modern corporate America a big drag: we employees are made to feel expendable, if not downright unwanted, even as our companies prosper. And during this white-hot explosion of tech innovation, the tech sector is a like graveyard of lost jobs. Why should this be?

I’m reminded of what we learned in school about the original industrial revolution. Machines destroyed the value of a lot of skilled work, and the new industrial giants concentrated workers—many of them children—into factories and mines where they faced 12–16 hour days, dangerous machinery, no safety standards, and wages set entirely by employers, who had massive, unconstrained leverage. Only when collective organizing led to government legislation did we finally get, in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the 40-hour workweek and overtime pay. Aren’t you glad we have it?

But increasingly, we’re headed back in the direction of that dark time, 88 years ago, when the 60- to 80-hour workweek was standard, despite (and partly because of) industrialization making manufacturing far more efficient. And we just shrug about it. People could have passively accepted it back then, too, chalking it up to market forces. Back then, talk of a 40-hour workweek might have initially seemed like a fantasy—and yet they made it happen. So why not try again, and maybe turn the massively increased efficiency of AI into a 35-hour workweek, made mandatory for any company who adopts AI? This is a modest reduction, nothing like what we achieved last time we found ourselves here. And when I say “we” I mean the people and the government we elect. Obviously the world can’t expect the voluntary “codes of conduct” devised by giant corporations like Microsoft and Google to reign in AI’s plundering of our workforce. That’s letting the fox guard the henhouse.

Dear AI Skeptithusiast,

You’ve argued before that I shouldn’t use AI as a substitute for a human if I just need somebody to talk to. But if my conversations with an AI chatbot make me feel better, isn’t this a victimless crime? Why shouldn’t I be “allowed” to do this?

—Name and location withheld

Dear Withheld,

Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that the benefit that you get from chatting with a bot is ongoing, sustainable, and somehow capable of filling any sense of void in your life. That’s fine, but what about other people? The bot certainly isn’t going to feel better after your chat—it’s nothing but computer code and energy—but every minute it takes up your time is a minute you could have spent making another human also feel better. If everyone relied on bots for interaction, human relationships would just collapse. Obviously not everyone would or will opt out of human contact, but the trend is already disturbing. And by the way, this thought experiment aside, don’t kid yourself this kind of synthetic dialogue actually works long term. As documented by an MIT study, recounted here, chatting with AI instead of humans actually increases one’s loneliness over time.

Meanwhile, when you chat with a bot, doesn’t that automatically turn your thoughts inward, to yourself? How could that not happen, when you can’t ask the AI about its day, or its life, or its home, or its hobbies, or its health, or its fears? It doesn’t have any of these things, it has only its training data which cannot ever amount to a personality, a life, or a soul. So the natural topic is always you, which is bound to lead to some unhealthy habits. Admit it: isn’t part of the appeal that the chatbot is non-judgmental, doesn’t contradict you, and lets you always be the focus, in just the way your friends don’t? And doesn’t that seem a bit indulgent, a bit wrong? Could it be that real friends, who challenge you, help keep you honest, help keep you in the world, and help keep you from becoming self-absorbed, are worth the struggle?

At best, I would categorize a long, putatively deep conversation with an AI chatbot as a guilty pleasure. And I have an idea of how you can improve on it. For listening support from a real human, that’s free, you can try out 7 Cups. It’s a chat platform connecting people with trained “listeners,” who won’t provide advice like an AI would, but also aren’t likely to hallucinate. (I know this platform because I myself am a listener, though I confess I haven’t logged in lately … this post is reminding me to do that.) Meanwhile, if you want to get better at listening to others, you could go through the brief training and become a 7 Cups listener yourself. Obviously this would be an experiment, but then so is AI. And if you find that 7 Cups is no substitute for the validation and ersatz companionship you get from an AI chatbot, you could pledge to offset your AI hours with listening hours on 7 Cups. Call it an AI Offset! (Does that sound too hokey? Am I actually Doogie Howser? Whatever … I’m just spitballing here.)

An AI Skeptithusiast is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask an AI Skeptithusiast,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
• More Advice From an AI Skeptithusiast

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2026 Vuelta a España Stage 20

Introduction

Pro cycling has become pretty boring over the last couple of years due to the dominance of a few key riders, especially Tadej Pogacar. But this Vuelta got really exciting when Pogacar crashed out. The second most dominant stage racer of our era, Jonas Vingegaard, didn’t start, still getting over injuries sustained in the Tour de France. So this race has been oddly exciting, and we head into today’s queen stage with only 1:37 separating race leader Enric Mas (Movistar Team) from Primoz Roglic (Red Bull - Bora - Hansgrohe). And today is by far the hardest of the entire Vuelta, with three Category 1 climbs and then, at the finish, the only “Especial” (e.g., Hors Catégorie) climb on offer this year. So buckle up, caffeinate, and let’s go!

Vuelta a España Stage 20 – La Calahorra to Collado Del Alguacil

As I join the action, the riders have just over 60 kilometers left and are nearing the summit of the Category 1 climb to Puerto De El Purche. Why is it not “Del Purche”? Two reasons. First, “El Purche” is a formal name so it doesn’t get contracted. Second, “Del Purche” would make Americans think of “Del Taco,” which is distracting.

A breakaway has eight minutes on the red jersey group, and my cat is yowling pitifully for her breakfast. Wout van Aert (Team Visma - Lease a Bike) goes for the KOM points and—yikes, it’s super close!—barely takes them ahead of Pau Miquel (Bahrain Victorious).

Back in the main bunch, Richard Carapaz (EF Education - Easypost) attacks! He’s sitting fourth on GC, and would obviously love to take enough time out of Felix Gall (Decathlon CMA CGM Team) to overtake him in the GC and finish on the podium. But Carapaz is pulled back in the time I took to type that.

So this is interesting: the overall leader in the KOM, Santiago Buitrago (Bahrain Victorious) didn’t make the breakaway. So he can’t contest any of the KOM points, and if Van Aert were to take all of them (I know, big “if”) he could end up winning that competition. Imagine losing your polka-dot jersey on the last day, and to a big guy like Wout (or “Woof” in my wife’s approximation, the one time she talked about pro cycling). So when Miquel contested that last KOM, it wasn’t for himself, it was to deprive Van Aert of maximum points, to defend Buitrago’s overall lead.

Now (like ten minutes later, as I had to make pour-over coffee and pet my weird old cat so she’d eat), Van Aert takes the intermediate sprint to seal his victory in the points competition for this Vuelta.

The breakaway is now nearing the penultimate climb, the Puerto de El Duque. One interesting development that they’re recapping now is that earlier in the race Sepp Kuss (Team Visma - Lease a Bike) attacked the red jersey group and now has about two minutes. If he goes really well on the final two climbs—perhaps with Van Aert dropping back to help him—he could move well into the top ten overall (he started today in 11th), possibly all the way up to fifth. This would be a nice feat after his heartbreaking loss in Stage 20 of this year’s Tour de France, when he seemed to be cruising to victory but crashed twice on the final descent.

Amost nine minutes later, the GC group hits the climb. Red Bull - Bora – Hansgrohe masses on the front for Roglic.

It’s odd, there’s apparently some chase group between the leaders and the red jersey group, but we’re not getting any footage. And I haven’t seen Kuss a single time, he’s just apparently floating out there somewhere, now 2:30 ahead of the red jersey group. And that group is seriously depleted so who knows how much time Kuss has on the rest of the top ten. Perhaps a bunch of cameramen and motorcycle  drivers got laid off. Maybe their management thought AI could do this, perhaps with simulated footage. I’m picturing some unpaid intern feeding prompts into a GenAI chatbot: “Create video footage of Sepp Kuss pedaling up the Puerto de El Duque by himself, visibly suffering but eyes forward, focused. And don’t give him giant pecs.”

The breakaway has fractured, with three leaders now: Mikel Landa (Soudal Quick-Step), who heroically bridged up to this breakaway; Tobias Johannessen (Uno-X Mobility); and Ramses DeBruyne (Alpecin-Premier Tech). If the situation doesn’t change, they’ll take all (or at least most) of the KOM points and Van Aert’s KOM aspirations are scuttled. Which is fine. A guy that big shouldn’t take the KOM; that would turn the competition into a bit of a joke—more a variation on the points competition than a reward for actual climbers.

Carapaz attacks again!

Kind of an odd attack: instead of being set up by his teammate, Carapaz seems unaware of him. In fact, what is his teammate even doing there? It looks like he’s signing some sort of receipt being held by that motorcyclist. There is so much more to this sport than meets the eye.

Gall easily handles the attack. It really doesn’t look like Carapaz has the legs to take two minutes out of him today.

Dang, this red jersey group is down to just five riders: the top four overall plus Carapaz’s teammate Juan Felipe Rodriguez, or “JF-Rod” as nobody calls him—yet. (You read it here first!)

Oh my, now Carapaz is starting to go off the back and Gall is right with him, probably figuring he has no reason to try to hang with the top three and just needs to “keep his enemy closer,” as the saying goes. But the rest of this group doesn’t seem to have much incentive to drop them.

Now the red jersey group is just totally chilling as the GC leaders eye each other. Bruno Armirail (Team Visma - Lease a Bike) is able to catch up to them.

Carapaz attacks again (he does this so much, I’m not bothering with an exclamation point, much less a photo) and the three others react. Armirail is dropped again, at least for now. They scoop up some rando from the breakaway and then Carapaz attacks again. The commentators just called this “cat and mouse,” which is a predictable utterance but honestly not that apropos. Sure, a cat will play with a mouse, especially once it’s wounded, but Carapaz isn’t playing, not really. He’d much rather kill these guys than keep them alive to play with them. It’s a matter of intent. Also, unlike a cat and a mouse, they are of the same species. It’s only Pogacar who isn’t, and he’s not here.

One of Mas’s henchmen, Ivan Romeo, has dropped back from the breakaway to help his leader. Note that when we’re looking for a synonym for “teammate” we can say “henchmen” but not “minion.” I think the “Despicable Me” movies have pretty much  ruined “minion” for a good while as we now picture silly little yellow goggly-eyed dudes. Kind of how Disney’s “Fantasia” ruined a beautiful piece of classical music, Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours,” by associating it with an animated dancing hippo.

So as it stands, this leading trio has almost ten minutes on the red jersey sextet. (“Huh huh … he said ‘sex.’”) About half a minute back is Miquel; then there’s a chase group another minute behind and who cares who’s in it; and then about three minutes behind that we (reportedly) have Van Aert and Kuss working together. (Still no footage of them.) So if Kuss keeps riding this well, he’ll leap to fifth overall on GC, and if he goes really well I suppose it’s possible he could catch these leaders. Their gap is 4:28 but it’s a really long climb, 11 kilometers left.

Dang, Gall misses his feed!

It’s pretty scary missing your feed, especially when you know you need the calories. In my last collegiate national championship road race, the person assigned to our Berkeley team’s feeds somehow flaked entirely. Fortunately, my brother was on the sideline with a cooler of bottles, supporting his Cal Poly team. I yelled, “Give me a bottle!” and—he didn’t! He was more loyal to his damn college than his own brother! Later he actually defended this position! Fortunately the laps weren’t that long, and the next time through I literally ripped a bottle right out of my brother’s hand. I’m still fuming over that episode, 36 years later. (This interlude brought to you by Gatorade … is it in you?)

Another breakaway rider has dropped back, Finn Fisher-Black (Red Bull - Bora - Hansgrohe), to help Roglic.

It’s getting interesting: James Shaw (EF Education - Easypost ) has also dropped back from the breakaway, to drive tempo in the red jersey group—not to set Carapaz up for an attack, but just to keep Kuss from taking too much time and displacing Carapaz in the overall.

And finally we get some footage—or perhaps it’s a deepfake?—of the Kuss group. They’ve caught a bunch of breakaway orphans, including Jorgen Nordhagen, another of Kuss’s thugs.

In the breakaway, Landa attacks! He looks great!

He instantly opens a giant gap. Dang, Johannessen is way off the back. And DeBruyne … he’s nowhere, he’s gone, he’s a cipher, a shadow, a ghost, a nonentity, a wraith, a lack. Nobody will remember that he was even here today.

Landa is flying but Johannessen hasn’t given up. They both seem puzzled: Landa looks back, as if wondering “where did he go?” and Johannessen is scratching his head (well, the back of his neck since he’s wearing a helmet) as if wondering, “What just happened?”

So, Kuss started today just over six minutes behind Carapaz; now he’s about 5:30 ahead on the road with around five kilometers to go. It’s just possible he could get enough time to move into fourth overall … it will have something to do with how much the GC battle for first heats up. If Gall or Roglic makes a huge attack and Carapaz can hang, that would surely help the Ecuadorian … unless he’s too fried from his ceaseless attacks. I’ll bet he’s regretting those now.

Mas has two teammates in this group now, setting tempo on the front. Maybe they’re starting to worry about Kuss, too. I’ll bet Carapaz is silently cheering them on, and Roglic is thinking, “You bastards.”

Now Red Bull - Bora - Honsgrohe is setting tempo for Roglic and he’s still thinking, “You bastards.”

Wow, Fisher-Black completely detonates and goes out the back as if shot from a cannon.

With just over three kilometers to go, Landa is looking completely solid. Unless he randomly cracks, he’s got the stage win. He’s climbing in the drops like a boss.

It appears Van Aert has finally blown. So Kuss just has Nordhagen pacing him. Kuss looked like he was struggling just a bit, a few minutes ago, when Van Aert was drilling it on the front of the group. The gap to the red jersey group is dropping a bit now. It appears Kuss will have to settle for fifth overall, but hey—jumping six places in one stage is still pretty impressive.

The GC group overtakes Van Aert. He just watches them go by, being a true gentleman. Had he grown up on the mean streets, he’d probably be crashing Carapaz right now.

Kuss hands his bottle to Nordhagen—“Here, you take this, it’s too heavy.”

PeacockTV (or “the cock” in common parlance) blocks screen grabs so I have to snap photos of the screen with my phone, which is why they’re so blurry and awful. So as an experiment, in post-production, I had ChatGPT sharpen up the above photo for me:

Gosh, it did a great job, except it just guessed about who is handing up the bottle and gave him a generic face. That’s not going to do; at least with the blurry photo you were free to imagine it’s Sepp Kuss, and there wasn’t obvious tampering with the photo, which of course causes an unpleasant feeling of deception. So much for that.

Romeo is doing a kickass job for Mas.

Landa is clearly suffering. He’s pretty old, like 36, and has raced professionally for 15 years. How many gymnasts can still achieve glory at that age? Most NFL players are in wheelchairs by then.

Gall attacks the GC group!

Roglic absolutely can’t respond, nor can Carapaz. I doubt Gall can take enough time to overtake Roglic on GC; he needs 1:24. But with Carapaz and Roglic isolated and not going that well, they could start to lose more time to Kuss.

Look at this, Mas is having a hard time closing the gap!

Landa is closing in on the finish line. I think he’s got this, mainly because he’s on a Specialized bike. They practically pedal themselves. (Note: I was not compensated in any way for saying this. Also, that Gatorade thing above? Pure malarkey.)

I’ve never seen a team car so closely following a rider. I reckon his team director is in his ear saying, “Go faster or we’ll run your ass over!”

Landa has the win. As he crosses the line it really looks like he’s suffering too much even to savor the victory. It fact this looks more like a gallstone being passed. Does it hurt as much to pass Gall? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Landa pioneers a new victory salute: the “I can’t bear to watch.” This would be a dangerous salute at the end of a sprint stage.

Johannessen is weaving as he makes his way over the line for second place.

Gall is solo … Mas can’t hang with him (but doesn’t need to, either).

Behind, among random breakaway stragglers, Kuss is going all-out, trying to grow that gap over Carapaz.

We don’t have any splits between Kuss and Carapaz, there just aren’t enough camera bikes. Which begs a question: how much does even Carapaz know? He’s just in no-man’s land, no idea how far ahead Kuss is, just grinding out whatever pace he can, hoping for the best.

Now Nordhagen paces Kuss to the line and he’s either cheering him on or bawling him out, I can’t tell which—just a lot of gesticulations.

And now Gall crosses the line. He didn’t attack early enough to change his GC prospects, which is almost as regrettable as his dorky sunglasess.

Not everyone appreciates my harsh sartorial judgments. A cycling friend told me once, “Nothing looks dorky when you win.” Okay, first of all, that’s completely untrue (anyone can look like a dork), and second, Gall didn’t win. But he did cement his podium spot for the overall.

Mas crosses the line about twenty seconds behind Gall. It appears that the chin strap on his helmet has spontaneously failed and he must hold his helmet on. Either that or this is a gesture of some kind, perhaps related to the facepalm? Indicating general disbelief at how hard this stage was?

Just over half a minute passes and now Roglic crosses the line. He limited his losses to Gall today and held on to his second place overall, which isn’t bad since a) he had a bad crash in training not so long ago, and b) he’s even older than Landa. He looks relieved: not just at successfully defending second overall, but that his children are still far too young to be thinking of putting him in a home.

Carapaz comes in all by his lonesome, hanging on to fourth overall but looking pretty blown.

They’re interviewing Landa.

INTERVIEWER: It’s been eleven years since you won a stage of the Vuelta, and we’d frankly given up on you.

LANDA: I feel happy, this was something I was looking for for a long time, finally I win again. It’s fortunate, it’s been really hot, today was my last chance.

INTERVIEWER: You just went two entire sentences without thanking your team. I’m pretty sure you’ll get cancelled for this.

LANDA: Oh no. This just went from being my best day ever to probably the worst. Could we start the interview over?

INTERVIEWER: Sorry, there’s no time for that.

LANDA: Could I claim dementia?

INTERVIEWER: It’s worth a shot, but the way you played the tactics today, that’s not going to be very credible. I recommend you dismiss this entire interview as a deepfake.

LANDA: Ooh, that’s good!

Here is the stage result.

And here is the new GC.

I guess they haven’t figured out tenth place yet ... riders are still trickling in. The way the peloton exploded today, it could be a while.

Now they’re interviewing Enric Mas.

INTERVIEWER: You seem to now have this Vuelta in the bag. Where are you gonna go after tomorrow’s stage?

MAS: I was just counting the kilometers and my feeling was super, so super good, I won because the team did everything for me.

INTERVIEWIER: I was baiting you, hoping you’d reflexively say “I’m going to Disneyland!” But you’re clearly a consummate professional, mentioning your team more or less instantly. You can live another day, scorn free, in the public eye. Well done.

Full confession: I was so displeased with the blurry photo of Mas, I had ChapGPT clean it up, and while I was at it I made some other adjustments. You’re going to have to get used to this kind of thing ... GenAI isn’t going away.

Well, unless something truly unusual happens in tomorrow’s final stage—and I for one will not be up early enough to see it—that’s all for this year’s Vuelta a España. Check back in a month because, unless I forget, I’ll cover the Paris-Tours classic. Thanks for reading, and I’d like to take this moment to thank all my teammates for making this coverage possible.

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXXII

Introduction

This is the thirty-second installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, Volume XXVI is here, Volume XXVII is here, Volume XXVIII is here, Volume XXIX is here, Volume XXX is here, and Volume XXXI is here.

What are Bits & Bobs? They’re short essays and other missives I wrote ages ago, usually taken from letters to friends and family. I wrote these long before I had a blog and (in the case of this week’s batch) even before I had email. When writing them I tried to be all literary and highbrow, whether or not I had any faith my words would even be read. In that sense these letters were a whole lot like albertnet…

The different volumes of Bits & Bobs are not organized chronologically, thematically, spatially, or in fact at all. You can read these in numerical, alphabetical, sequential, or temporal order, or according to your religious, philosophical, ontological, or spiritual ideals. Are some volumes better than others? I have no idea … I only wrote and compiled them.

Note: albertnet makes no warranty as to the quality, utility, readability, or applicability of these Bits & Bobs. By reading, skimming, scrolling, or gazing upon this post you agree to be bound by the albertnet Privacy Policy, which exists entirely to protect you, but not from every threat. You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless the author of this post from any feelings you may have of inadequacy, superiority, awe, or ennui arising from the consumption of this material. If you are a bot, kill yourself immediately. If you plan to read this post aloud, please do so in a firm, authoritative, but friendly voice, and if you sing it, feel free to dance along—but no twerking, for god’s sake.

Today’s Bits & Bobs are in chronological order, and all happen to have been written when I was a Berkeley student.

July 28, 1990

A couple weeks back, a bunch of B—’s Santa Barbara friends came up to visit for the weekend, and we went to this San Francisco bar, the Savoy Tivoli. Everyone was ordering cocktails. I’d never had a cocktail in my life and didn’t even know their names. I felt tongue-tied and almost panicked. Fortunately I had the presence of mind to note what the person before me ordered, and parroted “gin and tonic” as my order. It felt weird to hear this phrase come out of my mouth—like a lie, almost. I mean, I didn’t even know what a gin and tonic was, so to suggest that I actually wanted one was somehow fundamentally untrue. The drink went down easily enough, but I had no idea what it had cost, and you know how broke I always am, so it was the only drink I ordered all evening. (That ended up being a good thing because the entire rest of our party got completely clocked, and it fell to me to be the designated driver.) It was pretty funny: Fat Head started hitting on this girl in our group he didn’t know, somebody’s friend, and he thought her name was Connie but he wasn’t sure, so he was kind of introducing this “H” sound into it, like “CHonnie,” so that if he had the name wrong she’d think he was saying “Honey.” (I wouldn’t have put this together at the time; he explained the strategy the next day.) Well, the girl’s name was actually Alicia and she didn’t buy his BS for a second. So anyhow, B— and I have noted how soft and wormlike guys can tend to get when they’re overly smitten by a girl, and we are perennially on our guard against that. So now when one of us is talking about some fly chick we’re into, we refer to her as “CHonnie,” as a way to downplay our interest, kind of like saying “what’s-her-name.” As a linguistic innovation, it’s right up there with “Hector.”

Speaking of trying to maintain our dignity in the face of beautiful, terrifying girls, B— and I try to balance things out by turning the love interest into a foil for our own joking around. For example, B—’s “friend” M— came to visit, and I knew she wasn’t just a friend, he totally pined for her as he’d described in great detail prior, without even remembering to refer to her as “Chonnie.” Yeah: that smitten. As I was introduced I said, “It’s so nice to meet you M—. Gosh, B— has told me so much about you.” But I made sure to get her name slightly wrong, as a little inside joke to B—. And then when B— left us alone for a few minutes, while he finished styling himself out before they left, I took M— aside and spoke to her in a hushed tone: “Sorry if B— sort of embarrasses you when you go out tonight. I keep promising I’ll take him out clothes shopping so he won’t look like such a dork, but I haven’t gotten around to it. He’s cool though, I mean seriously, except when . . . well, sometimes he acts kind of cheesy. He can’t help it. But you guys will have fun, trust me.” I delighted in wondering how M— would recount this little pre-apology to B— later. Ideally, they’d share a laugh over my “clothes shopping” comment, since B— dresses better than anyone I know, and I shop at Ross Dress for Less. [Note: you can read here how, not long after, B— turned the tables on me. –Ed.]

June 20, 1991

Seems I’m finally getting some acne, after having been mostly spared as a teenager. (Who knows, maybe I’m finally hitting puberty.) But I don’t get a lot of zits all over my face, like a lot of other people. I get one, and only one, except that it only seems like just one, but really it’s like five—four of which are beneath the skin, right underneath the visible one, burrowing deep into my face. Only one makes it to the surface at a time. So it gets good and ripe, whitehead and all, and I go to pop it and the seed comes right out, springing clear of the skin of my face in a valiant attempt to reach the bathroom mirror, sometimes even making a distinct “poip” noise, but to my horror there’s still something there. And that next one lures me into a false sense that it’s ripe, and I invariably try to finish it off, and the whole thing gets red and bloated and really sore. This has happened twice now, once on my forehead where my hair kind of covered it up, and again right near my mouth. I cannot convey to you how pissed off this gets me. Near my mouth, I resisted the impulse to pop the zit, but then when it finally went away, the zit beneath it dropped right down the little pimple-tunnel into exactly the same place as the first. So much self restraint is required here that I’m not sure I can take it. At least it’s not as bad as that forehead one: that one had so much zit-puss behind it I could feel a raised section on my forehead the diameter of a quarter. And you know what the worst of it is? None of my zits has ever been as bad as the ones I see every day, on all kinds of people. On the way to a haircut in the San Francisco Castro district the other day, I was taking Muni, which is this really scummy subway, and I saw this old guy with about seven or eight huge warts on his nose. It was so hideous I could only look for about a second at a time. I got to thinking, what would happen to me if my nose began to grow warts like those? First, this would destroy my social life, as nobody would be willing to subject himself to the heinous sight of me. I would honorably remove myself from people’s sight and become a hermit. I’d only venture out via shitty big-city subways where everybody’s too busy rushing around everywhere to notice me, except for maybe some college kid who thinks he can boost his own self-image (tarnished by a towering whitehead zit, perhaps) by noting the physical deformities of people like me.

September 10, 1991 - Berkeley

I’ve finally mostly got my health back after that heinous, endless strep throat business. There’s just one symptom remaining: I can’t open my jaws more than like a centimeter, because of the residual swelling. So I’m eating a bit slower lately. A friend had me over for lunch at her sorority house and all we had to choose from was roast beef sandwich or salad (which, as you know, is ideal for rabbits and chicks, but not guys like us). So I’m there dipping this roast beef sandwich in the “au jus” and kind of smashing it into my lips and sucking it through the narrow gap between my upper and lower teeth. My parents would be shocked at such table manners. For a moment I worried that the sorority sisters were grossed out, but then quickly grasped that nobody was paying any attention to me. I mean, why would they? I need to get over myself.

I had some totally heinous nightmares when I was sick, dude. The last one I had, maybe a week ago, was that I was with my family at this weird place, sort of a cross between a hotel and a museum, and there was this exhibit on the top floor where you would walk through and see the corpses of all these people who went crazy (some sort of mass hysteria) and killed themselves with scalpels. So I went through and all these people had sliced themselves to ribbons and a few of them weren’t even dead yet. Yow!

Today I was riding my bike through campus (a highly illegal activity, for some reason) when I saw The Most Intensely Beautiful Woman in the World. Have I told you about her? She was in one of my English classes last semester. She makes the second most beautiful girl in the world (her friend, actually, who sat with her) look plain. I’m serious, if you saw her you would instantly reorganize your hierarchy of most attractive females in the world, with her at the top. I’ve never even seen a picture of a model who’s as attractive. At the final exam last semester I arrived a bit early, to make sure I had all the time I needed, and she came and sat right next to me. It was a huge lecture hall, still mostly empty, so there was no need for this; I’m certain she was just messing with me because she’s probably caught me sneaking looks at her. So the lecture hall filled up and then the exam started and for like twenty minutes I couldn’t even think. She’s that fly. I should have waited after the exam and gone up to her and said something really suave like, “Insofar as you totally distracted me just now, and my grade in this class will probably suffer, can you at least tell me your name?” Anyhow, when I saw her again today I almost passed out. I’m lucky I didn’t crash my bike. Damn.

October 1, 1991

Some of my friends are older and have already graduated, and since I’m in my senior year, I’m starting to worry (just a little) about joining the workforce and what that will be like. Here is my composite of what my friends’ stories suggest: the “real job” is distinct from a “summer job” mainly by the level of decorum. Even if you mainly sit in an office talking on the phone all day, you have to wear a necktie. Why the tie? Beats me. Maybe it’s like a collar and leash, to remind you of your submission to your employer. And then you have to drive incredible distances on the highway to get to work, which sucks because of traffic, and then when the traffic finally clears up and you want to make up time so you’re not late to work, you see a highway patrol car and have to slow down again, cussing and moaning about how you’re going to be late now and why doesn’t that cop get the hell out of here and let you be, and then you get to work and whenever the bossman comes around you have to speed up your work, and why doesn’t that jerk get the hell out of here and let you be, and then you drive home and bitch about the traffic, and about the cop, and then you drink a beer and figure out a way to fill in the time before you go to bed, wake up the next morning, and do the whole thing over again. On the weekends, exhausted, you need to get away so you do a trip somewhere, and drive along the freeway and cuss and moan when you see a cop cruiser, and then hang out at a beach and go to a few bars and visit old friends from college and then have to part ways and drive back across the highway and get ready to begin another five-day grind. Man, I can’t wait.

November 5, 1991 - Berkeley

I’m taking this Native American literature course and it’s pretty rad. First we read lots of trickster tales, which bear an interesting resemblance to the African American Brer Rabbit tales. The Native American trickster is usually a rabbit or at least rabbit-ish. The really weird part is how often these stories mention his penis—either its being extraordinarily long, or detachable, or getting badly injured. This is one of the benefits of being an English major: I can regale my roommates with what I’m learning, and they’re actually interested. It doesn’t wash the other way. E— can’t really talk about Political Science because everyone (including he himself) knows that’s pretty boring. M— is getting a PhD in Mechanical Engineering which I suppose I’d find interesting except how could he possibly dumb it down enough for me? The other guy, J—, is majoring in Forestry, and maybe that could be interesting if described by a bright guy, but J— is just a dumbass. When challenged about having the easiest major there is, he replied, “Dude, there’s a lotta trees!” (I didn’t make that up, he really said that.) In contrast, when I recount a tale of the Trickster sending his incredibly long penis across a river to achieve sexual congress with the daughter of another tribe’s chief, I have my roommates’ full attention.

I’m reading this hella dope book called Fools Crow now. I didn’t grasp the point of the title at first because I thought it was “fool’s crow,” like some fool had a pet crow or something, like maybe he’d have been a falconer if he wasn’t such a fool. But it’s actually a verb phrase, “fools Crow,” as in he fooled the Crow tribe. Turns out the Native Americans in the protagonist’s tribe (and probably others) had this convention of giving you a really lame name when you’re young—the protagonist’s was “White Man’s Dog,” i.e., very derogatory—and then if you do something impressive, like using cunning to kill the Crow chief, you get a cool new name honoring your achievement, hence “Fools Crow.” I have been trying to turn this into a new tradition for my roommates and me, giving each other lame names based on our lack of achievement, e.g., Wets the Bed or Chases Bimbos. This didn’t take hold, but then I happened to mention that White Man’s Dog called his wife “nothing-woman.” That immediately stuck, and has become something we invariably call one another (e.g., “Stop leaving your wet towel on the floor, nothing-woman!”) and is also a way to refer to one another’s girlfriends (e.g., “So are we riding this weekend or is your nothing-woman dragging you off somewhere?”).

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