From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XIX

Introduction

This is the nineteenth 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, and Volume XVIII is here. This post holds the distinction of having the first palindromic volume number since Volume III. (Should you care? No. I don’t even care.) The different volumes have nothing to do with one another, and can be read in order, out of order, in pecking order, in good order, in court order, or in compliance with—or in defiance of—a restraining order.

What are albertnet Bits & Bobs? They’re the little bits of fascinating literary background that my biographer would be thrilled to discover, were I important enough and/or interesting enough to deserve a biography. These tidbits are like what magazines like Us or People Weekly would report on, vis-à-vis celebrities, if these periodicals employed text instead of just photos, and if I were really good looking. Most of these Bits & Bobs are snippets from personal correspondence. Others were written indelibly on my wrist or my psyche with a Sharpie.

The city where I was living at the time of each morsel is provided except where it’s Albany. Pay attention to the dates. Some of these dispatches are hella old. Others are just hecka old.

October 31, 1989 – Santa Barbara

I’ve had a bet with a bunch of guys on the cycling team since last year about the height of Australian cycling superstar Phil Anderson. [For context: this website ranks Phil the 40th best cyclist of all time; it ranks Greg LeMond only 67th.] Someone was trying to say Phil is only like 5’8” or 5’10” or something, which is absurd. I rode with him back to Boulder after the Coors Classic Morgul Bismark stage once, and he seemed a lot taller than that, giving me a great draft (though frankly he was a bit gassy). Anyway, Phil actually lives near here, and he went to a bike gear swap meet this past weekend to sell off some old clothing and such. My pals and I were all there so it was my chance to finally settle the argument. Just between you and me, Phil didn’t really look six feet tall after all. Nevertheless, I casually strolled over to him as though I hadn’t been a major fan for many years (ever since he was the first non-European to wear the yellow jersey in the Tour de France). My friends followed a small distance behind. I guess they were shy.

First, I tried to sell Phil an old Dura-Ace derailleur (just to see the look of pure incredulity on his face, which did not disappoint). Then I told him about the bet and asked him if he was in fact six feet tall. “Aye, I’m six one,” he said, in his cool Australian accent. I turned to J—, my main opponent in the debate, and said, “See! I told you so.” To my astonishment, J— actually tried to argue with Phil about it. That must have taken all the chutzpah he had, since if anything he’s an even bigger fan than I am. How do you simultaneously worship and refute such a vaunted celebrity? Phil told him, “Of course you look taller, mate, look at the thick shoes yer wearing!” J— was pissed (but not as pissed as he’ll eventually be after the tenth or twentieth time I tell this story). The victory could not have been sweeter, not even if Phil had indeed been six feet tall.

November 28, 1989 – Santa Barbara

I have a paper due in my Western History class and decided (based on a suggestion from the T.A.) to explain the Greek philosophy thread in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’m not that interested in Greek philosophy, or even in history to be honest, but I wanted to read the Zen book anyway. So, I went to the library to get some reference books, and checked out two books on Plato’s Phaedrus character. I have to admit, I was in a rush and didn’t really vet them very thoroughly. So I got home, opened them up, and discovered that one of them is in Greek and another in Latin. Damn it!

March 9, 1996 – San Francisco

I was in my boss’s office when the regional director came in, and he invited us to go out for sushi after work, at a place near the office. (I assume I was invited because I happened to be in the room and it would’ve been rude to exclude me.) I don’t really know from good sushi but it all tasted pretty good. The director wanted to order sea urchin but wasn’t sure he wanted a full order to himself. Oddly, nobody seemed to want to share any with him. I’d never had it but thought well, how bad could it be? So I was like, “Yeah, I love sea urchin, let’s do it!” I mean, I just didn’t want the guy to not get his urchin, since we were all in such a festive and boisterous mood. Well, it turns out urchin is just this big glob of goo, kind of the consistency of a really bad mango, roughly the color of mustard. It was really disgusting—tastes like feet or something—but I had to play along, having pretended to be a fan. Well, I guess my acting was too good because the director was like, “Yeah, this is great, let’s get another round!”

The meal went on for a long time—we just kept ordering and ordering (must’ve cost a ton) and suddenly I realized I’d never called home and let E— know I wouldn’t be home for dinner. So I went to a pay phone and called. She was like, “Where are you, you need to get home! I got the job! We need to celebrate!” (She’d been interviewing for her first job as a full-on journalist.) So I went back out to the group and let them know I had to bail. My boss asked if everything was okay and I gave him the good news. “Wait … so you’re going out to celebrate, as in dinner?!” he asked, incredulous. I was like, “Well, yeah! We’re going to I Fratelli!” (That’s our favorite local Italian place). This didn’t seem like any big deal to me—as you know I’ve been duel-dinnering for many years—but the episode made me kind of a celebrity at work. My boss even clipped a cartoon of some bloated-looking guy fiddling with his belly, which had the caption, “Having forgotten to save room for dessert, Carl switches to his auxiliary stomach.” My boss changed “Carl” to “Dana” and “dessert” to “Italian dinner” and posted it in the break room.

August 4, 1996 – San Francisco

You should be able to find a used modem pretty easily, since the technology is improving all the time. Email doesn’t require a very fast modem, whereas veteran computer users like to download graphics, etc. which does. So, a lot of people have probably upgraded and have perfectly good, albeit slow, modems lying around gathering dust. See if you can find one, because I really think you’d like e-mail. It’s like letter writing but less formal (and of course doesn’t take 2-3 days to deliver).

August 22, 2009

Well, we’re back from London. You probably don’t want to hear about how great it was (and if you do, click here). So I’ll fill you in on what didn’t go so well. On the second night we should have made dinner at the house, for reasons of economy, but were still jet-lagged and didn’t feel like grocery shopping. So instead, we went to this cool pub to get fish-and-chips. We were staying in a very non-touristy area called Ealing (“Queen of the Suburbs,” declared a postcard), and the locals seem to have a distaste for tourists, or small children, or both. I guess we should have been grateful the pub even allowed kids. Well, ours were behaving badly, making too much noise and fighting, and I kept shushing them (amidst the glares of the other patrons), and finally I warned them that if they misbehaved one more time we’d leave and make PBJs at the house. I really hoped they’d take me seriously because I’d just spied Guinness Extra Cold* on draft, which I’d never even heard of and wanted to try, but the kids kept fighting and I had to show them I was serious. So I declared we were leaving. Both kids shrieked in protest, and L— flat-out refused to go. So I picked her up and threw her over my shoulder in the fireman-carry. We marched out of there, the kids literally kicking and screaming. From now on, whenever I need to emphasize that I mean business, I’m going to remind the girls about “the pub incident.”

*Come to think of it, what the Brits call “Guinness Extra Cold” is probably what we Americans would just call “Guinness.” That is, only in the UK do they normally serve beer cool instead of properly cold.

September 15, 2009

I had one of those random showdowns during my bike ride today, the equivalent of a pickup game of basketball with a stranger. I felt decent on the Claremont climb, but not great—I was sick yesterday and E— is sick as a dog (102 fever). So I was pedaling okay, but nothing special. About 2/3 of a mile from the end of my climb, some dude came zipping by me. He was on a really fancy Look, and had pretty good form, and I let him go—at first. But then I noticed that a) he had these deep-section carbon rims, which I’m obviously envious of, and these superlight brakes that Mark has, that don’t work for beans, meaning the guy’s a total weight weenie, and b) he was spinning this really, really high cadence. Like he’s one of these modern angry bikers, the scolds who are telling me I need lower gearing, and he was all “Look at me, I’m spinning, it’s so efficient and won’t hurt my knees!” Needless to say I was insulted. Oh, Mr. Modern, Mr. Latest Cycling Theory, Mr. Fancy-pants Superlight Bike ... well, how would you like a little old-fashioned whup-ass?! He was well ahead at this point, but that just meant I’d have an even bigger head of steam when I came by him.

At least, that’s how I figured it, but he must’ve been peeking back at me because as I approached, he accelerated too. I eventually caught on and latched onto his wheel, and I won’t kid you—I was dying. I decided I’d hang on there for a good while summoning the strength and will to come by him, but then I changed my mind and figured it would be a bigger statement to drop his ass right away and somehow hold him off. The grade got a bit shallower here, which I figured would favor me, being all heavy and angry and all. So I blasted right by him, upshifting several times as I did so to make sure my cadence was nice and low … to make my point. And here’s where I got a sudden inspiration: how better to snub his limp, ineffectual gearing choice than to throw her in the big ring (or the “good ring” as I called it back when I was the founder and president of the UC Santa Barbara Big Ring Club)? 

So throw-her-in-the-big-ring I did, and then had to fricking slay myself to turn it over. Boy, my heart rate really soared here ... during the throw-down it averaged 172 bpm, peaking at 178 (matching my highest for the year). I spanked that over-equipped, pansy-spinning wanker so hard he’s probably out shopping and crying right now. It was glorious. By the time I got to turn off, to go down South Park Drive, he was so far back he probably didn’t even see me turn, which means he probably wondered where I went ... probably figured I reached escape velocity and achieved low earth orbit. Boo-ya, spinnyman!

December 23, 2009

Alas, for some reason the photo attached to your email didn’t come through correctly, it’s just a big blank box. Could you jiggle the little wire and try again?

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

The Day I Unplugged

Introduction

Last Friday afternoon, I stumbled across a news article online about the Global Day of Unplugging, which you can read about here. In a nutshell, the idea (to quote from the organizer’s home page) is that “people everywhere will unplug from their screens to dive into offline activities, real-life conversations, in-person connections, and meaningful moments.” I decided, on a whim, to participate. This meant going totally Internet- and cellphone-free for 24 hours, starting at sunset that same day. This I did, as recounted below.

Trigger warning

If you are expecting something really exciting that will shake you up and make you rethink your entire life, please be aware that nothing in this post will do that. (Does such a disclosure really merit a trigger warning? Well, if you were to get to the end of this post without becoming as mesmerized and enlightened as you’d expected, might that not be triggering?)

Battening down the hatches

Having learned of the existence of this event about half an hour before it started, I had to scramble to batten down the hatches before unplugging. At least a dozen people rely on me for continuous communication, without which they would soon feel lost and rudderless. Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha! Actually, nobody gets this much of my attention and I deliberately keep it that way by being a sluggish responder. For example, a long-lost friend connected to me on LinkedIn and started a nice chat to catch me up on his latest, and it took me twelve years to respond. And having trained my kids to eschew the always-on electronic communications I’ve traditionally found distasteful, I’m pleased to report that if anything they’re worse than I am.

Still, I thought I’d let a few people know. First I texted my friend P—, who lives in another state but often talks with me on the phone. (So old school, right?) I told him, “FYI, after sunset today, until sunset tomorrow, if you want to reach me, call the landline. I’m going smartphone- and Internet-free for 24 hours as part of the Global Day of Unplugging!” He replied, “Dude, you’re a douche.” Next I group-texted a couple of cycling pals whom I was planning to ride with this weekend, letting them know they should call my landline to coordinate the ride details. I realized this might seem like a hassle, and reflected on the bizarre fact that, though I’ve been friends with these two for over twenty years, I’ve never actually talked to either one of them on the phone. Not once! So I sent another text saying, “BTW, sorry to be difficult with this offline thing. I have already been called a ‘douche’ over this.” C— texted back, “Oh no worries! We call you a douche for many other reasons, so one more makes an infinitesimal difference.”

Rules of engagement

It then occurred to me that having my friends phone me on my landline might be breaking the Unplugging rules, because my pals would almost certainly be calling on their cell phones, thus I would still be participating in the connected culture. But then, it’s not my fault they’ve almost certainly disconnected their landlines by now. Besides, having our first-ever phone conversation would be an amazing milestone, certainly within the “real life conversations” element of Global Day of Unplugging, and in support of its “offline activities” and “in-person connections” goals.

With these goals in mind, I decided I’d better line up an offline, in-person activity on the home front. An article I looked at showed a family gathered in the living room playing a board game or something, like a scene out of Norman Rockwell. This wasn’t going to happen for me, since both my kids have fledged, but at least I could do something with my wife that would be more interactive than both of use reading our books silently, practically ignoring each other like in that Simon & Garfunkel song (“And we note our place with bookmarkers/ That measure what we’ve lost”).

One of our go-to activities is Netflix, but that was off the table. I didn’t have much time for research on the rules of Unplugging so I asked ChatGPT if DVDs counted as unplugged. It confidently told me this was fine, and even wrote a mini-essay about it, which concluded, “Watching a DVD with your wife would align with the spirit of the day, as long as you’re not accessing the internet through any device during the 24-hour period. Mine is the last voice that you will ever hear. Don’t be alarmed.” Yeah, I made up that last part. (Well, I stole it.) Do you find it creepy how tempting it is to pretend ChatGPT is some kind of authority? And yet I took its advice and raced over to the library. It was closing in five minutes and they’d shut off their WiFi, so I couldn’t vet any of the practically random DVDs I grabbed, even though the sun hadn’t even set so Internet was still legal. I was flying blind, no IMDB, no Metacritic!

I got home and with mere minutes on the clock, I texted my older daughter to advise her I’d be offline for 24 hours, and explained why. About all she had to say was, “You use cookies now?” (referring to my last blog post), and “Enjoy your 24 hours off the grid.” And just like that, I was all-in. I set my phone to Do Not Disturb and ditched it on my desk as the sun disappeared.

Friday

Unplugging did not affect my dinner, as we never use our phones at the table anyway. True, my wife often asks me to search Spotify for some music to match the meal (e.g., “How about some mellow Japanese jazz?”) and we’ve ended up with some really weird audio backdrop; to be honest, I didn’t miss it. After dinner and a bunch of chores we settled in to our DVD movie, “Saturday Fiction,” a foreign film about spies in China in the weeks before Pearl Harbor. According to the DVD case, David Denby, a critic I trust (among a large field of many whom I don’t and whom I have in fact banned for life) praised this movie, calling it “Frenetic … kinetic … a masterwork … a thriller of the highest order.” OMG. I haven’t been this bored, and lost, in a movie since “Andrei Rublev.” In fact “Saturday Fiction” consisted almost entirely of dull dialogue and a lot of pensive smoking, except for one scene where this doofus, after proposing that he and the protagonist become double agents, starts pawing at her crotch the way a dog would. After at least five seconds she slaps him. Five seconds? Really? Was she making up her mind? Or did the actor playing her forget what she was supposed to do? My wife and I both fell asleep before the halfway point. That was it for Friday … the Unplugged evening was over, without any withdrawal symptoms or even yearnings for my phone or laptop. I will say that the inability to have fully vetted this movie cost us pretty dearly, unless you consider we probably needed the sleep.

Saturday

Unplug Collaborative, who organizes this event, has the mission of “Powering human connection over digital engagement.” So, did my unplugged morning naturally blossom into a celebration of human attachment? Well, no. It turns out that excessive online activity is not the only impediment to interpersonal harmony. Another is the tendency of marriage partners to squabble. My wife and I had a bit of a dust-up; nothing dire or catastrophic, just the quotidian stuff that comes up. I determined that the social hygiene of isolation was warranted, and decided to pursue a very non-digital engagement with my mountain bike’s brake pads, which had somehow been soiled with hydraulic fluid. 

Everyone I’ve asked insists that this fluid cannot be removed from the pads and they must be replaced. I would prove these doubters wrong! So I sat out in the driveway with no YouTube, no Spotify, no social media, and no texts: just a couple of metal files and my weirdly metal brake pads, filing away for ages and ages upon ages, my hands blackening and becoming sore with the effort, feeling about as isolated and primitive as a man can be. After endless grinding, more buffing with emery cloth, cleaning with rubbing alcohol, doing the rotor as well, and putting it all back together, I did a test ride, and then went back into the house to report to my wife.

“You know how they all said it couldn’t be done?!” I challenged her. “Well—they were right.” Rear brake was still honking, not working, and heating the rotor up to where it could cauterize a wound. Went back out, replaced the pads, and felt the entire morning must be shot. But amazingly, it was only like 9:30. Time had slowed to a crawl. Is this what offline life is like? OMG, the non-digital life could be so productive!

During chore time I couldn’t stream music from my phone, but I have a fairly new but old-school stereo with a CD player. I chose a disc from the stacks and stacks that have been collecting dust for years, and put one on. It skipped. I tried another. It skipped too. The stereo is defective but surely out of warranty. It would have been a good idea to test all the features of this bad boy when I first set it up, but it has Bluetooth so I simply had no reason to ever try a CD. Is the streaming of offline, locally stored files from my phone technically against the rules? Well, yeah … because once you unlock a smartphone all hell breaks loose. But I found an old MP3 player that one of my kids abandoned years ago, plugged it into the auxiliary jack, and was back in business.

Look, I’m probably boring you. I’ll try to go faster. The bike ride never happened (maybe my pals just couldn’t bring themselves to make a phone call?). My wife and I went on a hike, and didn’t use GPS when driving to the trailhead, which wasted some time. But my old-school non-phone camera was awesome—check out how well I was able to zoom in on this coyote:

I got some nice landscape photos as well. Here’s one now:

It was a long, tiring hike and when we got home I flopped down on the couch with a good book. For some, this might have been a novel activity (pun intended, sorry), or rather a return to something everyone used to do—“Oh my god, a book, an actual paper-bound book!”—but actually, I read all the time anyway. The cat joined me and did that thing where she curls up so precariously I have to put a hand around her rump to keep her from sliding off, so I only have one hand free to hold the book and turn the pages. (I put up with it because she’s a rescue cat and really needs this.) For a while there was beautiful golden non-backlit, non-LCD, non-halogen light flooding into the room, so I hadn’t even turned on a lamp, but as I sat there, nearly catatonic (get it?), the light gradually diminished until I was reading almost in the dark. And then it dawned on me: the sun had set! The Day of Unplugging was over! To sum up its effect on my day:

• Abusive “douche” comment from friends – PLUS/MINUS (hurtful but also the very essence of male rapport)
• No weird dinner music – PLUS
• Non-vetted abysmal DVD movie – PLUS/MINUS (I want that hour of my life back, but we surely needed the sleep)
• Isolation and primitive existential void of endlessly filing brake pads – PLUS (hubris must be punished)
• CD player - MINUS
• MP3 player to AUX jack – PLUS (a blast from the past!)
• Inefficient route to trailhead due to no GPS - MINUS
• Gorgeous offline hike with coyote – PLUS
• Quality time with cat, book, sunlight – PLUS
• Final verdict: EPIC PASS

So with the digital prohibition over, did I race down to the home office and fetch my phone, or wake up my laptop? Naw, it was almost dinnertime anyway and I had no burning need to reconnect. I hate to break it to you, but for me unplugging was easy (other than those damn brake pads). My question for you is: would you also find this easy? Or at least doable? Are you going to do it next year? Mark your calendar … it’s the first Friday in March, starts at sunset.

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

albertnet Privacy & Cookie Policy

Summary

Brief summary: you will now see a notice about cookies the first time you visit albertnet (or visit on a different device or after clearing your cache). If you quickly dismiss the cookie banner by clicking “I decline,” cookies will not be used on your albertnet sessions. If you click “I agree” or select preferences and manually enable these cookies, I will start getting certain information about your session (e.g., whether or not you’re a return user; how long you spent on the page; what type of device you used; and your city and state) that I never got before. But nothing will personally identify you, and your session info will be like a bit of plankton in an ocean of it. This new website behavior is an experiment and I may go back to the way things were, in which case I will update this post. So, in short: you have nothing to worry about and don’t need to manually opt out of anything! The rest of this post provides details on this, in case you are interested. Otherwise, feel free to bail and go check out a more amusing post!

(If you are on mobile and do not see the notice about cookies, they will not be used. I am still trying to get that part working.)

Introduction

As the sole proprietor of albertnet, I respect your privacy and am committed to protecting your personal information. This Privacy & Cookie Policy explains how I collect, use, and store data when you visit my blog.

Please bear in mind that in general terms, you are not providing much information—certainly no personal data—to albertnet, and you never have. You are just here reading, unless you post a comment. Other than that, only bare-bones aggregate information has ever been gathered in the first place, and I never saw it. What’s changing is that I have recently enabled Google Analytics for this blog. This will make certain data available to me, but again, none of it is personally identifiable. There is nothing you need to worry about, but you can read on to get more detail.

Why I am using cookies (at least for now)

I turned on Google Analytics for albertnet to analyze site traffic, so I can better understand how visitors interact with my blog. I am doing this out of curiosity. Existing stats (i.e., from Blogger, before I turned on Google Analytics) have been giving me perplexing insights lately, such as a steady increase in page views originating from France. This could mean my posts about a week of bicycling and eating my way through the French Alps (for example, this post) really resonated with French readers. On the other hand, it could mean bots, scrapers, or spam crawlers are being routed through data centers in France. Or, it could be somebody is stealing my content to generate their own pages and using a VPN to look like he’s from France, just to be sneaky. Or it could be none of the above.

Above all else, I seek to understand if my page views represent actual humans vs. A.I.-driven malfeasance. What will I do with this information? I don’t know yet. Maybe nothing. I guess it depends on what (if anything) I learn. But I promise I won’t (and actually can’t) use this information to target you for any communication, or to make my blog addictive, or to leverage your data in any way for any personal gain. But I do want you to understand that the Google Analytics platform uses cookies, so that is a change for albertnet.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a service that helps a website owner understand how visitors engage with the site’s content. Google Analytics collects data such as:

• IP address (anonymized)*
• User location (country, city)
• Device and browser information
• Pages viewed and time spent on the site

*A word on IP addresses: I don’t know how or why anyone would seek to fetch these and if there is a way to see this information I won’t be seeking it out. I also don’t know what “anonymized” actually means in this context. Regardless, chances are extremely high that you use a dynamically assigned IP address from a giant pool maintained by your ISP, which could no more identify you than a seat assigned to you on an airline flight. (Less, actually.)

Google Analytics uses cookies to track this data, but that doesn’t mean they’re suddenly seeing you naked or anything. A cookie can tell Google Analytics that you are the same person who came to albertnet last week. It can then report to me that I have x number of return visitors today. It can say what posts you checked out and how long the pages were open. It won’t be able to tell me who you are, or whether you actually read anything, or whether you laughed.

The cookies in place on albertnet are not used for any other purpose than Google Analytics. I wouldn’t know how to use them in any other way even if I could.

Types of cookies used

Google Analytics uses the following types of cookies:

• Essential Cookies: These are necessary for the website to function and cannot be switched off. I suppose they have  always been used. This would also be a good name for a bakery.
• Functionality Cookies: These are used to enhance your experience by remembering preferences (e.g., language or region). I suppose they have been used in the past as well.
• Tracking Cookies: These cookies allow albertnet to track website usage through Google Analytics, helping me understand visitor behavior. They do not track you across different sites.
• Targeting and Advertising Cookies: These do not actually apply and are never used on albertnet. I used a third party utility for the cookie notification banner and this category comes with it. Leave it off (and even if you turn the toggle to Active, nothing will change).

Consent and your rights

By viewing this site, you consent to my use of cookies for the purposes outlined above, if and only if you consent. As I have said, you are given the choice and the default behavior if you click the Decline button is to turn off all but the essential cookies. You can manage your cookie preferences at any time via the “Update cookies preferences” link at the very top of the page. I do encourage you, if you are comfortable doing so, to enable the tracking cookies, as this will help me learn about your usage. (To reiterate, these cookies do not track you as you move around on the Internet; they only gather metrics about your visits to albertnet.)

I hope you didn’t find that banner annoying. Oh, and by the way, if you’re on mobile, you probably didn’t see a cookies notification banner at all. I haven't gotten that part working yet (which means mobile users aren’t represented in the analytics, so the Brave New World is looking a fair bit like the timid old one).

How I protect your data

While Google Analytics collects data like location and usage patterns, it ensures that this data is anonymized and stored securely. This blog does not collect personally identifiable information unless you choose to post a comment below (which you can do anonymously if you prefer). If you click on a “contact me” link like this one, obviously any information you share in that email is visible to me, but then you know that already.

How I protect the privacy of people I write about

You may have noticed, on this blog, that when I refer to a person who is not a celebrity, I tend to use a single initial rather than a first or last name (e.g., “E—’s handwriting is a bit hard to read”). If I write unflatteringly about a person, the initial I use may have nothing to do with the person’s actual name. If you see an actual name spelled out in these pages, it usually means that either the person gave me explicit permission to use his or her name, or the person has passed away. Like I said, I take privacy seriously. (In the early years of albertnet I was not quite so disciplined about this. My policy has become more stringent over time.)

Your GDPR Rights

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you have the right to:

• Access any personal data I may hold about you (which in the case of this blog is nothing anyway since I never do web forms and don’t even know how)
• Rectify or update your data if it is incorrect (which also doesn’t really apply)
• Delete your data if requested (though this would be limited to your location, device and browser information, and time spent on the site)
• Withdraw consent for cookies at any time

Grammar errors in the cookie notification banner

Yes, I know there are grammar errors in the language of the notification banner and its various tabs. It is all boilerplate text and I lack the ability to edit it. You get what you pay for, and I have been called the world’s cheapest man.

Updates to This Policy

I will undoubtedly update this Privacy and Cookie Policy from time to time. Please check back regularly for any changes. The last update was on March 7, 2025.

Conclusion

Thank you for visiting albertnet and wading your way through this policy. I am sorry this post has been so boring, but it’s not a scintillating topic, after all; I had to create this policy quickly to reference in my footer, and I had to implement the footer and the cookie opt-in banner immediately upon turning on Google Analytics (to be compliant with GDPR).

If you have any questions about this policy, or if you wish to exercise any of your GDPR rights, feel free to contact me here.

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

More Q&A With a Cycling Coach

Dear Cycling Coach,

What is this “glycogen window” I keep hearing my dad talk about? Sounds like basically carte blanche to eat a bunch of sugary snacks just because he rode…

Lydia L, Portland, OR

Dear Lydia,

The glycogen window is legit! No less an authority than the National Institute of Health advises, in this article, “To maximize glycogen resynthesis after exercise, a carbohydrate supplement ...  should be consumed immediately after competition or a training bout.” In other words, you’ll recover from hard exercise better if you have a sweet snack right afterward. (Most articles agree that the window is about 30 minutes.) This doesn’t mean walking around the block justifies a whole package of red vines, though; “walkies” does not equal a “bout.” Also, not all snacks are created equal. I recommend sweetened yogurt, chocolate milk if you’ve got it, or some fruit (apple slices with peanut butter being my favorite). The NIH notes, “The addition of protein to a carbohydrate supplement may also increase the rate of glycogen storage due to the ability of protein and carbohydrate to act synergistically on insulin secretion.”

But you don’t need to take the NIH’s word for it! My own daughter did an elaborate experiment on this for her science project and you can read all about it here.

Dear Cycling Coach,

There’s a guy on my mountain biking team who’s always saying, “I’m gonna do bad in the race,” or, worse, “Oh, I’m not gonna try in the race.” It kinda bums me out and I’m sure he’s not doing himself any favors either. Any advice here?

Wally M, Mill Valley, CA

Dear Wally,

Without knowing your teammate I can only speculate, but I suppose his spoken sentiments are either performative (i.e., downplaying in advance any sense that he tried and failed, to save face), or are the public version of what he tells himself all the time. If I were his coach, I would try to draw him out a bit on that, and encourage him, and remind him how long it takes to get good at this very difficult sport.

If his utterances are indeed an echo of some interior monologue, he should be aware that negative self-talk can be very detrimental to an athlete, even beyond sport. A friend of mine, a licensed psychotherapist and founder of Ceely Sports, an athlete coaching company, discusses self-talk on his blog, here. He describes negative self-talk as “a natural psychological mechanism that all humans have” that tries to “problem-solve by pointing out your (real or imagined) errors and flaws.” He goes on to say, “Think of the inner critic as a linguistic personification of a primal survival mechanism. It’s useful, but tends to overreact and be a bit hyperbolic… The key is to know that your inner critic is just one of many voices, or internal mechanisms, that try to communicate information to you. Here’s the cool thing: you don’t have to believe everything ‘you’ think.” That is, you don’t have to listen to that negativity and let it become a self-fulfilling prophecy; you can take control of your internal narrative. Maybe you can convey this to your teammate, or forward him this post.

For a deeper exploration of this topic, see my post “Self-Talk in Action” here.

Dear Cycling Coach,

In last week’s column you referred to bike clothing as a “costume.” Nobody calls it that! If you’re supposed to be a coach why don’t you call it a “kit” like everybody else?

Lisa H, Charleston, SC

Dear Lisa,

Oh my goodness, you appear to have no idea how contentious the term “kit” can be. It was the topic of a highly animated email thread among my road cycling teammates. In fact, it’s a good thing our debate was confined to the emails (all gazillion of them) instead of a mid-ride discussion, because then it might have escalated into a riot. (Yes, I’m exaggerating.) I ended up getting three blog posts out of this fraught topic (so far) and you can read the final one here.

The short answer is, many feel “kit” is a Euro affectation, like “bidon,” and avoid it for reasons of taste, even though its meaning is plenty clear. I won’t call you out for using it, but I’ll ask you to extend me the same courtesy for “costume,” which I believe is the perfect term since compared to actual pro cyclists, the vast majority of us are posers (or poseurs in affected Euro parlance).

Dear Cycling Coach,

Should I use a bike computer? What are the benefits? Any downside, other than people thinking I’m a fitness dweeb?

Ben F, San Diego, CA

Dear Ben,

Given the prevalence of smart watches, and even smart rings, that can monitor sleep, heart rate, and blood oxygen levels, I doubt anyone will think you’re nerdy for using a bike computer. It might disturb the clean line of your handlebar, but trust me … nobody but you and other bike geeks are looking at that.

Meanwhile, bike computers really are handy, if for no other reason than tracking your mileage. Even a relatively cheap one like this Sigma can sync with your phone (and/or Strava) to serve as an automated training diary. I myself don’t use Strava but can still gamify my workouts by sending a snapshot to a pal, who reciprocates. We have an informal contest: who can beat 5,000 miles for the year, and by how much?

If you do get a bike computer you’ll be in good company. A while back I surveyed my road teammates and some other cyclists I know, and (as detailed here), 87% use a bike computer, and it’s not because they’re hardcore racers. Among those surveyed, 80% don’t follow a strict training program and only 17% (at the time of the survey) still raced regularly. In particular I find the heart rate data interesting. If you do a lot of solo rides, the arguably trivial data are even more welcome.

Dear Cycling Coach,

What’s the best way to deal with poison oak? Are we mountain bikers doomed to suffer that rash or is there a way to escape it?

Jill M, San Francisco, CA

Dear Jill,

Noting that you live in the Bay Area, which doesn’t feature very hot weather, I’ll suggest one really easy hack: wear long sleeves when you can. I almost always ride in leg and arm warmers and never have trouble with poison oak. Beyond that, I have learned that there is a really great way to prevent this rash even after exposure. You scrub your skin with a washcloth (and also soap, with Dawn dish soap being recommended). The washcloth makes all the difference in the world, as explained in this helpful video.

For more on poison oak and cycling, check out this post.

Dear Cycling Coach,

I am a budding young road racer in a dispute with my dad. I like to point my brake levers inward for better aerodynamics but my dad says I shouldn’t, simply on the basis that it looks stupid (or so he says). I say if it’s more aero, it’s worth it. Who’s right?

Megan G, Boston, MA

Dear Megan,

I am presumably of your father’s generation … whom do you honestly expect me to agree with? Look, your dad is right. The part of the lever you rest your hands on (that the rubber hoods cover) should point straight forward. This isn’t just the opinion of your wise father and me, but also the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), the governing body of road racing globally. A new UCI regulation actually prohibits inward-pointing levers as detailed here. This is supposedly for safety, but I really think it’s because the sport depends on sponsors, and the UCI grasps that if all dignity is removed from the peloton nobody will want anything to do with the image of cycling. So if your levers look like what’s below, straighten them out, quickfastninahurry.

I recently had a debate about this with a high school rider whom I coach, who (like you) seems to care only about aerodynamics with no regard for proper aesthetics. I compared inward-turned levers to putting ketchup on a hot dog, to which she replied, “What’s wrong with that?” No offense, Megan, but I really worry about your generation.

Dear Cycling Coach,

Last week in this column you mentioned “stealth training.” What exactly is that?

Jack F, Ventura, CA

Dear Jack,

Stealth training is when you could be riding with your pals, but instead you pretend you can’t go and then do a longer and/or harder ride solo, to try to improve your fitness faster. This solo ride is kept secret from your friends (sometimes to the point that you don’t even post it on Strava).

Sometimes mention of stealth training takes the form of a hurled accusation, quite possibly without merit. For example, when a pal declines an offer for a group ride, someone may well say, “Oh, sure you have a schedule conflict. I’ll bet you’re just looking to do some stealth training.”

For more on this topic click here.

Dear Cycling Coach,

What tools, etc. should I bring when I go mountain biking? I’m told that since my tires are tubeless, I should bring bacon strips. Huh? And besides flats, what should I be prepared for?

Suzie L, San Luis Obispo, CA

Dear Suzie,

“Bacon strip” is the nickname for these little tire plugs that you can stick into a hole in your tire, using a special tool. (Don’t worry, they’re actually vegan.) These plugs are helpful when the hole is too big for the sealant to plug up. Best of all, you don’t even need to remove the tire, so they can be really handy in a race. I’m not sure I can really recommend them, though, because I’ve never tried them myself, and I’ve watched seasoned mountain bikers—coaches, even—futz around with them without getting anywhere. Maybe my experience isn’t representative, though … you should ask around. Myself, I always bring a spare tube and just throw that in the tire (even if you were running tubeless before). That’s more foolproof.

Beyond the bacon strips and/or spare tube, you should bring food (energy bar, pop tart, PBJ, fruit) if your ride is much longer than an hour; tire levers; a pump (greener than a CO2 inflator); a patch kit; a multi-tool; one of those spiffy rechargeable taillights, mounted under your saddle; something to use as a tire boot; your phone; a chain tool if you know how to use it; and, last but not least, extra clothing. You never know when the weather will take a turn, and if you crash or have a mechanical you won’t be staying warm by working hard; you’ll be standing around getting cold. I was on a team ride recently and a kid crashed pretty hard. It took me fifteen minutes to patch him up, and since we were above 1,700 feet elevation, the temperature dropped quite a bit, down to the low forties, and a couple kids were freezing their asses off. If it had been a bit colder, and especially if it started raining or the wind picked up, they’d have been at risk of hypothermia.

(As a coach, I carry all kinds of stuff like tubes of various sizes, arm warmers in various sizes, a first aid kit, all kinds of tools, and extra food. More on that topic here.)

Dear Cycling Coach,

Is it true that cyclists have the highest pain threshold of any athlete?

Robert B, West Milford, NJ

Dear Robert,

I’m kind of afraid to answer that, because if I declared, for example, that cyclists were tougher than football players, I might get my ass kicked. But I do have some experience measuring cyclists’ pain thresholds, based on a methodology called the cold-pressor test described in this New Yorker article by Atul Gawande. As Gawande describes, when taking this test ballet dancers demonstrated far higher pain thresholds than nondancers. Several other articles also hold up dancers as the gold standard in pain tolerance. In my own study, all of us cyclists were able to outlast the cold-pressor test, something even the dancers hadn’t managed. You can read all about my experiment here. Suffice to say, even if we’re not the toughest of all athletes, we’re surely in the running.

Dear Cycling Coach,

There’s some disagreement on my high school mountain biking team about what bike is better: full suspension or a hardtail. One of my teammates insists that riding a hardtail will “make you a better rider.” Is this really true, or is she just saying that because it’s the kind of bike she has?

Scott H, Tallahassee, FL

Dear Scott,

Riding a hardtail not only makes you a better rider—it makes you a better person.

A Cycling Coach is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask a Cycling Coach,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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

Ask a Cycling Coach

Dear Cycling Coach,

I seem to have developed tennis elbow—but from mountain biking! How is this possible? I’ve never even touched a racquet!

Kaitlin C, Fairfax, CA

Dear Kaitlin,

I have encountered this myself, and the problem was: hydraulic fluid. Not in my elbow, but in one of my bike’s brake lines. By any chance have you been ignoring a disc brake that needs to be bled? Like, when you pull the lever nothing happens unless you pump it multiple times? Well, that’s a repetitive motion and those can add up. But if your brakes are fine, I honestly don’t know what’s going on there. Maybe see a shrink? ;-)

Dear Cycling Coach,

I’m kind of new to mountain biking and people are telling me I should “go tubeless,” whatever that means. What are these people talking about and should I listen?

Aaron W, Minneapolis, MN

Dear Aaron,

For decades, bike tires always had an inner tube inside them, which occasionally got punctured by a thorn, bit of glass, etc. or by being pushed too hard into the wheel rim due to an impact. The more modern setup (common, but by no means ubiquitous) is to not have a tube at all; the tire forms a seal against the rim, aided by this goo that you pour in there. It’s a big mess, a fair bit of hassle, and requires an air compressor or special pump to inflate, but it’s actually worth it. It saves weight, lets you run your tires at a lower pressure, and best of all the goo seals up punctures as you ride. (I’ve had student athletes on the high school mountain biking team who went four whole seasons without a single puncture!) If you want advice on how to set this up, including how to build your own human-powered compressor on the cheap, check out my post here. Now, on road bikes things get even trickier; if you overinflate the tire it could blow off the rim. So, I’m not necessarily recommending tubeless for road…

Dear Cycling Coach,

Do girls dig cyclists? I’m asking for a friend.

John S, Ashburn, VA

Dear John,

Of course they do! I mean, what’s not to dig? We’ve got these thin T-Rex arms; hairless legs; brightly colored form-fitting costumes like a jockey wears; and best of all, we’re always mansplaining on such lofty topics as bike gearing, cycling nutrition, and power output. I should think we’d be every woman’s wet dream. In fact, in my youth I had young babes falling all over me. Hmm. Do I have that right? I’m trying to remember … actually, come to think of it, they were falling all over the football players and the swimmers. Weird.

[A note on the above picture: I had ChatGPT create it for me. This was its third attempt. I asked for the cyclist to have “very thin, weak-looking arms,” for him to be “lean but thin and unimpressive,” and (on my third attempt) to be “much less muscular, kind of wimpy looking.” It appears that ChatGPT-4-turbo is simply incapable of rendering men as anything but grotesquely muscular and roided out. And as I’ve noted before in these pages, it cannot draw a woman who doesn’t have at least one bare shoulder. Oh well. I tried.]

Dear Cycling Coach,

Cycling is the only sport I do, and in the winter it’s too cold and dark to ride so my fitness falls off. I’m thinking of getting a stationary trainer or maybe rollers. Do you recommend this and if so do you have any advice on what to buy, how to get started, etc.?

Lisa N, Columbus, OH

Dear Lisa,

There are several good reasons to ride indoors: you get the stress relief you need; you build character; you go into the spring with better fitness, so you can keep up with your pals; you avoid the wretchedness of riding in the cold and wet; and you (most likely) avoid crashing. All this being said, you’ll need fortitude because indoor training presents a particularly tough gumption trap. The good news is, I provide lots of advice on indoor training here.

Specifically regarding rollers, they are definitely more difficult than a stationary trainer (i.e., you can’t just shut your brain off), but they’re slightly more fun, and they also improve your balance. You’ll definitely want the type that provide resistance (though I provide some hacks on that here). If you’re into a top-of-the-line product, check out my review of the best ones on the market.

Whatever mode of indoor cycling you choose, I highly recommend noise-cancelling headphones and high-energy music with a solid beat. For my workout music megamix, click here.

Dear Cycling Coach,

I love to ride with my friends but it’s hard to coordinate schedules. I dislike riding alone, but my friends all do it. What’s their secret and/or how do I handle the drudgery of cycling solo?

Tracy A, Castle Rock, CO

Dear Tracy,

I see two ways to proceed. One is to see what alternatives exist, such as joining a local club, asking around about group rides, or trying to recruit more cycling buddies. The other is to tackle the solo riding challenge head-on. Going it alone is definitely an acquired taste—it took me until my third year of bike racing to begin to enjoy or at least tolerate it—but it’s well worth it in the long run.

Some ways to motivate yourself:

1. Remind yourself that “stealth training” will make the group rides even more fun
2. If you’re worried about safety, figure out the routes where you’ll encounter plenty of people (and not get bike-jacked, though honestly I think this is a fictitious problem, like ring-around-the-collar)
3. Gamify your solo cycling, either by competing virtually with friends or family or joining Strava.

For more on riding alone, click here.

Dear Cycling Coach,

What chain lubricant should I use? And would this be different for mountain vs. road?

Malcolm R, Oakland, CA

Dear Malcolm,

I could provide an exhaustive treatise about why I choose White Lightning Clean Ride for all my bikes, but wouldn’t you rather read a very brief synopsis, or ideally a poem? Well guess what: you can click here for a nice little sonnet on the topic, replete with end notes. Best of all, it was written by an English major who is also a recovering bike mechanic and a bona-fide coach!

Dear Cycling Coach,

My crappy old bike helmet is coming completely apart. I’m kinda relieved because I never liked that helmet to begin with. But looking at a new one, I see options varying from the lightly used helmet for $4 at Salvation Army to over $300 for a goofy-looking thing at my local shop. Is there any difference among these or is it all marketing?

Emily K, Portland, OR

Dear Emily,

There actually is a big difference, to a point. No, a $300 helmet is not going to be worlds away from a $150 helmet, but you don’t want some bogus made-up brand like Victgoal or Odoland that crumbles in your hands and smells like kerosene. Here’s a true story: when I was on a college cycling team, we were sponsored by an up-and-coming bike helmet company and we all got free helmets. The problem was, they didn’t fit that well, and the straps weren’t quite right, and at high speed the wind would blow this thing back on my head, exposing my forehead. I thought I should replace it but I was already a notorious cheap bastard, and even though I worked at a bike shop and got a discount, I tried to live the motto “cheap’s neat, but free’s me.” So I kept asking the Giro rep to sponsor me with a free helmet. Several times he offered only a discount and I replied, “What am I supposed to tell my helmet sponsor … that I paid for another brand? If you gave it to me, it’d be a lot easier.”

Finally he relented, and I got a top-of-the-line Giro, which fit really well, not slipping back on my head like that free helmet. Well, on the Giro’s maiden voyage I crashed really hard mountain biking (as described here). I was knocked out cold, and was airlifted to the closest head trauma center. I ended up being fine … but only thanks to that well-fitting helmet. Ever since, I have been a real stickler on head protection, and I think you should, too. That doesn’t necessarily mean dropping hundreds of dollars, but get something that really fits, that you really like and will always wear.

(By the way, that bit about knock-off helmets crumbling and smelling like kerosene? I didn’t mean that. I meant creosote. Naw, kidding again. But trust me about avoiding those weird, cheap helmets on Amazon that come with built-in sunglasses and/or a balaclava and no, I’m actually not making that up.)

Dear Cycling Coach,

I’ve noticed you get as many letters from women as from men, and yet something like three fourths of American cyclists are men. Do you just ignore a lot of the men’s questions so as to achieve gender parity? Or do women ask better questions?

Jeannie E, Seattle, WA

Dear Jeannie,

I actually get as many questions from women as from men. I think this is because women are less insecure and thus more likely to ask for advice. I base this on a bike maintenance class I once offered as a prize at the fundraising auction at my kids’ school. In the advertisement I didn’t say anything about me being female, or about the class being for women. But I guess because of my girl’s name, people just assumed, because eight women and only one man signed up. When the man arrived and saw all these women, he immediately bailed. Well, halfway through the class, during the refreshment break, a student approached and complained about my being a man. “I kind of assumed you’d be a woman,” she said testily. I replied, “I certainly didn’t mean to imply that in the flyer, and I’m sorry about my girl’s name … it’s the one I was given and it didn’t occur to me to clarify. I’m happy to give you a refund.” She backed off at that point but still seemed miffed. I guess she understood something about men that I didn’t…

Dear Cycling Coach,

I read an article somewhere, years ago, about how too much cycling can damage your heart. Should I be worried about literally killing myself on the bike?

Suzie L, Queens, NY

Dear Suzie,

You might be thinking of the article “Cycling to Extremes” in the August 2015 issue of Velo magazine. I thoroughly refute its claims here. Beyond that, there have been various alarmist articles in a similar vein over the years. I think it’s a bit silly to be worrying about such a remote possibility given the obesity epidemic in this country, with heart disease being the leading cause of death. I'll concede that an overweight 60-year-old American, whose arteries are totally clogged, can kill himself by suddenly doing something really strenuous; for example, you hear about guys dying of cardiac arrest while shoveling snow. But that's not very common, and presumably you’re a fit cyclist doing a consistent program. If it were really possible for athletes to work themselves to death, don't you think it would happen all the time in professional races?

Think about it: the ability to work yourself to death would not be naturally selected in the evolution of any creature. Or, if you subscribe to the intelligent design theory, what kind of blind idiot God would design creatures that could accidentally kill themselves by trying to do something useful, and do it well? Do you believe that you are somehow going to be able to push yourself harder than 100+ years of Tour de France racers? I think you can rest easy on this one, Suzie. But hey, that’s just my opinion. I’m not a doctor or anything.

Dear Cycling Coach,

I was out for a road ride and joined a group that passed me. I thought I was doing pretty well but then I overheard somebody say, “Who invited the Fred?” I take it “Fred” isn’t a good thing. What did he mean and how offended should I be? Was I doing something wrong?

Peter L, San Diego, CA

Dear Peter,

It’s possible that you were disturbing the flow of the group (by letting gaps open, etc.) but it’s equally possible the “Fred” comment simply came from a snob. Like any sport, cycling has its share of elitist types who may forget what it was like being closer to a novice than a racer. Maybe the guy didn’t like your helmet, or your socks (or lack thereof), or the kind of shoes you were wearing, or that your bike had a pie plate.

There are two ways to handle this. One: you could simply blow it off and enjoy yourself on the bike. Cycling has always attracted rebels, and I hope it always does. Two: you could review my two-part article on how to not be a “Fred.” Part I is here and Part II is here. But please remember: this guide is only for people who want to fit in. Those who don’t care about fitting in have my full respect, and deserve yours, too.

A Cycling Coach is a syndicated journalist whose advice column, “Ask a Cycling Coach,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

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

From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XVIII

Introduction

This is the eighteenth and final installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. (No, it’s not really the final one, so far as I know. Just seeing if you’re awake.) 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, and Volume XVII is here. (The different volumes have nothing to do with one another, and can be read in order of importance, in First World Order, in the order in which they were received, in any other order you like, and/or not at all. (Note: I do not recommend that last option.)

What are Bits & Bobs, in the context of this blog? They’re like the bits of film left on the cutting room floor after a movie is made. Except you know what? That’s a nice metaphor but completely false. These are not leftovers but pertinent snippets from letters I wrote people. Some of the letters were actually printed letters, on paper, couriered by the post office. Others were of course emails. I only selected stuff that I figured any audience might find entertaining, especially nuns. Obviously snippets like “my flight gets in at 7:46 p.m.” would be excluded. (“Especially nuns?” No, I don’t know why I put that.)

Pay attention to the dates. These bits and bobs sprawl all over the place—or, to be more accurate, all over the time.

March 8, 1990

You know, there’s actually a very good reason for procrastinating on a [school] paper. The writing process is very complex, and very personal. What you write has everything to do with your life experiences, and I figure the longer I wait before writing, the more life experiences I’ll have to go on. Something could happen to me right now, for example, which could change the next paragraph of this letter. So it is with my paper. It’s not due for several more days and I’m still young … I should wait.

November 6, 1992

I sprained my right index finger about three weeks ago. I was at the bike shop after-hours truing a wheel and a customer suddenly bobbed up in front of me. Somebody must have left the shop door unlocked, and the customer ignored the “EMPLOYEES ONLY” sign. Scared the crap out of me, and as I flinched my finger went right into the spinning wheel. A few days ago , since it wasn’t healing, I jerry‑rigged a cardboard splint for it, but that didn’t help. Finally I broke down and saw a doctor. Well, a nurse, anyway. She seemed more concerned than I had been, and gave me a real splint which I’m supposed to wear for six weeks! I talked her down to three weeks, but the splint is still a major hassle since it holds my most important finger in a basically straight position.

“But wait,” you’re saying, “this letter is typed—how do you do that?” Well, I have to be able to type, since I have at least fifty pages in papers due before the end of the semester. The splint really does concern me (or rather, it did, as I shall explain). It’s a two‑centimeter‑wide aluminum plate (padded out with foam rubber) which extends beyond my fingertip, and the aluminum is curved at the end. I tried a number of typing drills—the word “jumpy” being the best challenge—and the splint would indiscriminately strike the “u,” “h,” “m,” or “n” key when I was trying for the “j.” The word “jumpy” came out anything from “hynpu” to “nhmph” or even “hunmjhupuh.” What would I do? Without the ability to type, I’d have no papers to turn in, thus failed classes, no graduation, no job, NO FUTURE. Something had to be done. It was then that I remembered the motto of the Marine Corps: Semper Fidelis. No, wait, that wasn’t it. What came to mind was a little saying I’ve somehow attributed to the Marine Corps: “Adapt, Overcome, Improvise!”

I remembered a small worn‑out mechanical pencil eraser I’d replaced a few days earlier, and dug through the trash until I found it. It’s perfect: hard rubber, about seven or eight millimeters in diameter, and maybe five millimeters thick. I glued it to the end of the aluminum splint, and you can see the results. I’ve been typing at about ninety percent of my normal speed (that is to say, about seventy or seventy‑five words per minute). While it’s somewhat trickier than normal typing, I really don’t mind it. The only minor problem is that every so often—once in three hundred words or so, perhaps—the eraser stub gets caught in the intersection of four keys, and hangs up, trapping my splinted finger. This gives me that same queer, shocking sensation as being clotheslined or when the front wheel of your bike somehow locks up.

November 10, 1992

A question my friends like to ask me is, “So what are you doing after you graduate?” I tell them, “I’m gonna get a job,” and then the real interrogation begins: “What can you do with an English degree?” they ask. At least they realize now that it’s too late to persuade me to change my major … that had gotten old over the first couple years. So, recently I was talking to a friend I hadn’t seen in ages, and she asked the same thing. “I’ve got a job lined up,” I told her, “in a factory, deburring plastic parts on an assembly line. You see, when plastics are molded, there are flashings left over from the holes the liquid material was poured through, into the mold. It’s actually pretty tricky work, because if you slip with the file you can ruin the whole piece.” I was pleased to have pulled off the entire description with a straight face. “Wow!” she said enthusiastically. “That’s great!” Sheesh. She took it hook, line, and sinker. So you can see how little respect we English majors get.

September 27, 1996

My pasta is infested. I’d bought like twenty pounds of De Cecco from the restaurant supply store down the street for super cheap, not worrying about what looked like maybe minor water damage to some of the boxes. I store most of the pasta under my bed because our kitchen is so tiny. Well, a week or so ago I saw little flecks of something when I poured the pasta in the boiling water, but wrote it off as minute cardboard debris. I made up a big batch of corn goo pasta and as E— and I began to eat, we both noticed that there were little specks in our dinner. I isolated one and determined that it was reddish in color and seemed to have a protuberance at one end. I ran and grabbed my albeit cheesy microscope and had a closer look. As I had begun to fear, it seemed to be an insect: six legs and a snout at one end. I fished out another speck and examined it; same thing. My next question was, what kind of insect could it be? I racked my brain to try to think of what kind of insects have a history of invading foodstuffs. Then it came to me: a word commonly used to describe the meals endured by peasants in Russian novels: “weevily,” as in “his grey, weevily porridge.” So I looked up “weevil” in my CD-ROM dictionary and found this definition: “Any of numerous beetles, of the superfamily Curculionoidea, especially the snout beetle, that characteristically have a downward-curving snout and are destructive to nuts, roots, stems, fruits, and pasta.” (Yeah, I added that last bit.) A picture was even provided:

E— couldn’t bear to eat the pasta, but I was hungry and just kind of ate around the weevils. I regaled my boss at work with this anecdote and he told a story of some relative who was a POW in Japan and was fed weevily rice. At first the POW refused to eat it; then he just ate around the weevils; then, eventually, realizing he wasn’t getting enough protein, would not only eat the weevils but would push them back down into his rice when they tried to escape up the side of the bowl. Reassured by this story, I’m continuing to eat the weevily pasta, since I have so much of it. Last night I made perciatelli, which is tubular like macaroni but straight and long like spaghetti. It’s particularly weevily because the weevils crawl inside of it. But it’s fine … I can’t even taste them.

September 9, 2009

A few days ago [in preparation for the Everest Challenge bike race], I shaved my legs for the first time in three years. I think it does make the legs feel a bit cooler. Plus, my leg hair was literally blowing in the wind during the Mount Diablo descent two weekends ago, which I’d found distracting. I think shaving may offer a placebo effect as well. Couldn’t hurt (unless you nick yourself). Anyhow, congrats on biting the bullet and joining me for the race. You will not suffer alone, unless you drop me.

I don’t mind driving you home on Sunday night after the race. My un-doping regimen [only using caffeine before bike rides] means that one NoDoz can wake me from the dead, and/or keep me going on a late night drive after two days of cycling overkill. And I even have a valid driver license, because I braved the DMV today to get a temporary license extension since my real license is, for some reason, moving at the speed of a glacier through the bureaucracy.

September 22, 2009

I don’t have a time trial bike you can borrow, but if you’re really, actually doing a triathlon you’ll need an appropriately dorky jersey as well, ideally one made by (well, branded by) a former pro triathlete. And you’re in luck: I still have a Scott Tinley jersey you can borrow—see attached photos.

Notwithstanding the mesh side panels, I had to make the jersey even more Tri by cutting off the sleeves so I could wear it “properly” with arm warmers (per T—’s astute observation about this dubious sartorial choice triathletes make). The hole in the chest is from when I got shot during a triathlon by an angry biker on the sidelines. Either that or I crashed on the Golden Gate Bridge and slid on my heart rate monitor transmitter; I can’t remember which. I don’t have the matching shorts anymore, which T— (in his capacity as UCSB bike club president) forbade us to wear during races; I gave those to my wife’s would-be ex-stepmother-in-law, who wore them with pride and aplomb for years. Though not in triathlons.

October 2, 2009

[To my bike team members and some other friends.] It’s been a long bike racing season. If you’ll be too tired to cook on Saturday, October 17, but not too tired to eat and drink and hang out with other bike people, celebrate your fatigue with your spouse/other and/or kids by coming to the Albert house. If you’re too tired to move, have someone drag you here. If you’re too tired to eat or drink, we’ll put you in a barber’s chair and pour beer and salsa right down your throat.

What? Salsa? Not homemade pasta? That’s right. Because we’re too tired to cook this year, and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Mario’s La Fiesta, we’re bringing in Mexican food—lots of it. Beer and the raw materials for mixed drinks will also be provided. If you have m4d sk1llz at the blender, a spot in the kitchen is reserved for you. Bring your favorite beer if you like.

I realize now that I’ve used a vague acronym in the past: RSVP. While this can mean “Regional Senior Vice President,” it also stands for “Répondez S’il Vous Plaît.” And while this phrase literally translates to “respond if it pleases you,” it can also mean “respond, damn it.” It is in that sense I now say, “RSVP” so we’ll know how much food to order.

October 20, 2009

There’s a guy out front (visible through my office window) parking a horrible fake-wood-paneled Buick Roadmaster station wagon. He’s taking a very long time. He’s an old weird guy with plaid shorts and a jacket. Kind of a cross between L—’s husband and my dad. Now he’s done parking and is cleaning the interior meticulously. He has an unimpressive dog. He wants $6K for the car. People are mighty strange.

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