2014 Epic Colorado Mountain Ride - Part 1

Introduction

If you’ve been following albertnet awhile, you may recall that I did a road trip with my family a year ago April to visit Boulder, my old hometown.  One goal of that trip was to do an epic ride with my friend Pete.  Alas, the drive out was marred by a massive blizzard that almost did us in, and all the mountain passes were closed throughout my visit.  Pete and I did a 40-mile flat ride among the snowfields but that was it.  I’ve vowed never again to drive to Boulder in the spring, and Pete and I hatched a scheme to do a 2-part, double-epic ride during August, when snow is much less likely.  Last week, we finally pulled it off.

Who is Pete?

The short answer is, Pete is a former professional bike racer whom I met in the 1985 Red Zinger Mini Classic, where—despite his costing me the overall victory—we became friends.  The long answer requires some background.  When I was a teenager my bedroom was an unfinished basement.  It was pretty dark down there, so I could sleep in good and late during the summer, at least in theory.  Unfortunately, Pete would invariably phone me up first thing in the morning.  I didn’t have an answering machine, nor would I pick up, so it became a battle of wills as I tried to fall back asleep while he let the phone ring and ring.  After like twenty minutes of this continuous ringing, I’d finally go upstairs, pick up the phone, and yell, “You bastard!”  He’d laugh, and then we’d go ride.  That tells you pretty much what you need to know about Pete.

Food

My bike pals and I like to send around e-mail race reports, which sometimes end up on our club’s blog.  My race reports—and also my ride reports, since I almost never race—tend to focus on the food.  Why is this?  Well, food and bike racing are tightly intertwined.  Do we eat to ride, or ride to eat?  Both.  Without massive consumption of starchy food, we’d never be able to finish the super-long rides we like to do.  And without the super-long rides, we’d all be too overweight to get around on our skinny-tired, über -light racing bikes, and/or we’d be embarrassed to ride them.

So, yeah, food.  Pete and I ate big the evening before our big ride.  We went to the Gondolier restaurant, a Boulder institution since 1960. In our teens we used to eat there every week because they had a Tues/Wed Spaghetti Special:  all you can eat, brought to the table, for $1.99. I always ate at least five plates, my record being seven.  Here’s what a plate of Gondo pasta looks like:

My wife has pointed out that watching me eat such vast quantities would be a disgusting spectacle if I weren’t so skinny.  How true this is.  The joke would wear thin if I had to pay for my overindulgence.  During this Boulder road trip, I went to Squeeze In, a celebrated diner in Sparks, Nevada.  There was a wait, and I had to stand around because the bench in the waiting area—which would have accommodated at least five cyclists—was filled by this giant tattooed guy and his wife.  The guy was interrogating the hostess about whether this was the place featured on some TV show, and whether his burger would be like on the show, with the cheese oozing out past the bun onto the plate.  (He gestured very precisely to illustrate this.)  The hostess replied, “I’m not sure if the cheese will do that, but if it doesn’t, just send your burger back and have the cook add a few more slices of cheese.  Don’t worry, we’ll do whatever it takes to make you totally stuffed.  We’ll roll you out of here on a damn gurney if that’s what you want.”  (Did she really say this?  Of course not.  But I’ll bet she was thinking it.)

Anyway, at the Gondo I had some garlicky rolls, three plates of pasta, and four slices of my brother’s large everything pizza.  This was definitely less than I used to eat as a teen, but I do have some fat reserves now, and anyway I’d had a big lunch.

Six Dark Thirty

Our ride would be something like 100 miles with over 10,000 feet of climbing.  That might not sound very hard, but Pete’s house in Golden is at about 6,000 feet elevation and we’d be climbing to an elevation of over 11,000 feet, twice, and finishing at around 9,000 feet.  That would give us a net elevation gain of about 3,000 feet.  We figured we’d better get an early start.  I set my alarm, which was a pity because I was crashing in Pete’s basement, which was nice and dark and would have been a great place to sleep in good and late, just to right an old wrong.

My alarm went off, I dragged myself out of bed, and I headed up the stairs, huffing and puffing because my sea-level lungs were ill equipped for the altitude.  There Pete was, slouching on the sofa, flipping me the bird.  He was ticked because his little daughter had climbed into bed with him at 1:30 a.m., following which he hadn’t slept well.  This came on top of several nights of very little sleep due to his occupation.  Of course none of this was my fault, but he could legitimately begrudge me all the sleep I’d been getting during my vacation.

Here we are, early in the ride, at the Red Rocks Amphitheater.  At least, I think that’s where we are in this photo.  To be honest, I know Pete said something about it but I wasn’t paying enough attention.

After Red Rocks we climbed Squaw Pass for like two hours straight.  We’d both had some knee trouble leading up to the ride but for now our knees (and legs) were behaving.  I clicked through the data screens on my bike computer and was thrilled to discover that we’d climbed for over 25 miles, meaning we must surely have broken the ride’s back … right? 

Well, not really.  I mentioned this impressive stat to Pete, who said, very casually, “I guess that means we’ve got about 30 more miles of climbing to go.”  Man, that really took the wind out of my sails.  I could almost hear my resolve hissing out of me, like air from a punctured raft.  Or was that my breathing?  Near the top of the pass we stopped for a breather.

 Pete is trying to smile, but you can see it’s faked.  Look in his eyes:  they tell the real story.  There is definitely suffering there.  You see, he forgot to train for this ride.  His longest ride of the year was 80 miles, his second-longest 50 miles.  And then there’s the sleep deprivation.

I wasn’t doing so hot either.  If you look closely you’ll see fear in my eyes, because I’d already drawn 100 miles worth of breaths in half that distance.

We descended to the Mount Evans visitor center at Echo Lake, which is about halfway up Mount Evans.  If we’d been real men we’d have taken a left and ridden to the summit, which at over 14,000 feet is the highest paved road in North America.  But since we know we aren’t real men—this is made embarrassingly evident by our compact cranksets—we had nothing to prove and stopped at the visitor center for Cokes and to get out of the rain, which had just started up in earnest.

We were in the visitor’s center awhile.  It was pouring rain and I went two rounds in the restroom.  I was tired enough that I found the noise of the high-powered hand dryer almost intolerably oppressive.  In the gift shop were all kinds of bumper stickers, t-shirts, and other stuff saying things like “I made it – Mount Evans, 14000 feet!”  I guess some people consider that making it all the way up there in a car is a pretty big deal.

Out on the porch I saw a middle-aged motorcyclist putting on waterproof rain pants.  To make conversation, I said, “I wish I had some of those.”  She retorted, “You should have brought some.  It rains all the time up here.  Are you from out of town or something?”  I allowed that I’d lived in California for a couple decades, and she snorted, “That’s what the weather report is for.”  I could have pointed out that any weather report that didn’t forecast possible thunderstorms at this altitude would be delusional, so actually the forecast was immaterial.  But that wasn’t the point. 

The point is, bike racer types don’t have saddlebags to carry all that gear, and we’re prepared to suffer accordingly.  I’ve been caught in plenty of rainstorms, and even snowstorms, without sissy waterproof pants.  I could have pointed out that I’m made of better stuff than she, that I don’t need a gasoline engine, and that what she might consider hazardous—e.g., a cold rain—is to me just a nuisance.  “At least your jacket is orange,” she said.  “Yep, it’s pretty visible,” I replied.  “No, that’s not what I meant,” she continued.  “I mean it’s orange like the Denver Broncos.”  Maybe my parents were right all along:  I shouldn’t talk to strangers.

The weather gods, as if to mock this motorcyclist, shone on Pete and me:  the rain stopped at the exact moment we climbed back on our bikes.  We had a sweet descent to Idaho Springs, getting a bit cold and wet before becoming warm and dry again, and then began our second long grind, this time up Berthoud Pass.  As we regained the higher elevations, the sky darkened again and we heard thunder.  We were getting close to the tree line, aka timberline, which (as you can see in this photo) looks a bit like male pattern baldness.

By the way, in addition to energy drink and gels, I ate a lot of Lara bars during this ride.  Not only are they yummy (or did they just seem yummy because I needed them so bad?), they pack more calories for their size and weight than other energy bars.  No, I’m not a weight freak, but when your jersey pockets are overstuffed, and you have like four bars in there, every bit helps.  (I am not sponsored by Lara bars or I’d be forbidden to tout them like this.)

I forgot to wear my Road ID bracelet, which was unfortunate because it seemed like any moment Pete might just ride away from me, leaving me for dead.  So I reminded him that his best protection against being struck by lightning would be to crouch low over his bike and ride right next to me, so I’d be the tallest object around.  People do get struck by lightning up here, so maybe I shouldn’t joke about it, and perhaps I should take the threat more seriously.  But compared to the threat of being run over, how serious is the lightning threat, really?  And what are we supposed to do, skip the ride entirely?  Stay home and ride the trainer?

I was breathing good and hard all the way up the climb, but at least it was that delicious-smelling air that you get before and after a rainstorm.  I was hit by about half a dozen raindrops before we made the summit of Berthoud Pass.  A friendly motorcyclist, who found it in herself not to chide us for our foolish lack of raingear, snapped this photo.

I would like to point out that Pete’s bike doesn’t actually have a giant sheepskin-covered saddle.  That’s just a rock in the background.  It’s also not the case that we deliberately set up the photo so as to be on opposite sides of the Continental Divide, as my wife had thought.  We’re not nearly that clever, especially when our brains are deprived of oxygen.

The point of this next photo is the sky, but it didn’t come out right.  I forgot my camera on this ride and had only my smartphone.  That’s why there are so few action shots:  it’s hard to handle the phone while riding and I’d hate to drop it.

So, yeah, we did finally get really rained on during our descent to Winter Park, but I didn’t mind.  After all, we’d defied the odds all day; we could have just as easily been rained on for hours.  Besides, we knew we’d have a hot shower waiting for us at the end.

Food, revisited

We chilled out in the condo for awhile.  (Actually, we warmed up.)  Outside, it rained steadily up until it was time to walk into town for dinner, at which point the rain stopped.  At a little brewpub Pete knew, we started our feast with nachos, which were terrible because of vulcanized faux-cheese goo, but it didn’t matter because we subsequently hit upon the pure genius of ordering both sliders and burgers. 

For a place with such crappy nachos, the sliders and burgers were delicious.  I ate all my fries and most of Pete’s.  And I broke my vow of temperance (undertaken to prepare for the upcoming Everest Challenge) because beer does such a nice job of relaxing tired muscles.  After all, this had been just a warm-up ride, to get us fit for the real ride two days later.  Visit albertnet again soon, because I’ll be posting that story next.  Here’s a little teaser though:  Pete showed me the Strava-generated Day 2 route on his phone beforehand, saying casually, “I think it’ll actually be a bit less than 170 miles.”

Update:  you can read about the Day 2 ride right here!

Stats and maps

Since I’m not on Strava and you wouldn’t be following me if I were, here are some statistics and a couple maps of our ride.  Most of these stats are from my bike computer, which understates the climbing due to its dependence on barometric pressure measurement, which isn’t very accurate when the weather is spotty. 

• 97.3 miles
• 6:18:40 ride time
• 15.0 mph average speed
• 73 rpm average cadence
• 10,581 feet cumulative elevation gain
• 49.6 miles total climbing
• 7,153 feet cumulative elevation drop
• 39.3 miles total descending

From the Archives - Cleaning the Preschool Yard

Introduction

I have a difficult relationship with volunteer work.  On the one hand, of course I want to be a helpful person.  On the other hand, when I do volunteer my time to an organization, I don’t always perceive that they make the best use of me.  After all, if they don’t, it’s not like they’re wasting their money.  Maybe my help was really needed, maybe it wasn’t—it’s all the same to them.  (My other altruistic behavior, donating blood, entails no such misgivings, since a unit of blood is worth about $5,000.)

When I wrote the story below, about cleaning up the playground at my kid’s co-op preschool, I was a bit bitter because our daughter’s application for the next year had been turned down.  The school was oversubscribed, with a long wait list, etc., and technically my daughter’s birthday was just outside their (seemingly arbitrary) cutoff.  That story has a happy ending—the school ended up bending the rules and accepting my daughter for the next year—but I didn’t know this at the time.  So I wrote this tale while in a cranky mood, which probably improved it.  (The tale, not the mood.)

Cleaning the Preschool Yard – April 23, 2008

Last Saturday we had to clean up the preschool yard again.  I was feeling incredibly fatigued to start with, unnaturally so.  I even passed out for ten minutes in the car when we got to the preschool, from this crushing fatigue just sopping the life out of me, and then when I joined my wife in the yard she’d snagged the push-broom.  Dang it!  That’s supposed to be my job!

Using that broom is the only thing I feel qualified to do at that playground:  sweeping sand back into the giant ground-level sandboxes.  The yard looks really nice when the sand is all flush with that spongy ground surface, but I wish they’d install a lip there to keep the non-sandbox areas from being invaded by great dunes between clean-ups. 

I guess there’s technically one more job I feel qualified to do, which is extracting dead leaves from the sandboxes, but I hate that job.  The scritch-scritch of the rake is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. And it’s a fool’s errand, trying to get the leaves out, because most of them are these tiny things like the crispy onions that lousy restaurants put on salads, and there are thousands of them, podlike, floating continually down from the trees, making me want to not only cut down the trees, but to fund the design of a sophisticated herbicide that could eradicate that species of tree from the planet.

So I wandered over to the water play station, which is this crazy tri-sink apparatus.  Surveying it, I was reminded how much I like this preschool, even though it’s expensive and they rejected my daughter for next year.  Some part of me can’t shake the thought that they’d have bent the rules for Lindsay if they liked her more.  This is irrational, but there it is.

So, yeah, this playground sink thing is a tribute to the school, having obviously been built by a very, very smart parent, not just a skilled plumber but somebody who understands how to educate a child.  A physics professor couldn’t have devised a better way to demonstrate the water table effect to children.  There are all kinds of valves to open and close, and sprayers, and tubes that feed water, via gravity, to other sinks, and it’s just a masterpiece except that it’s in this play yard with all this sand, and the less sophisticated students (probably the boys, frankly) evidently think there’s nothing more fun to do with this engineering marvel than to fill it full of sand. 

What is it with boys and sand?  When at a playground, my daughters play sophisticated games of psychological and social intrigue, their favorite being Incarceration, where they pretend they’re in a prison  and have to orchestrate daring escapes.  And what do little boys do?  Dump sand all over the slide, in the sinks, in the playhouse, everywhere, ad infinitum.  I’ve watched this play out at playground after playground.  It doesn’t usually bother me, except when it’s here, because every time I clean this sink, I am removing massive amounts of sand from it.

This time was particularly bad, as the plumbing was completely clogged.  I decided to drain the standing water from the sink manually so I could sweep the bulk of the sand out before tackling the plumbing itself.  To make the sink-draining process less tedious, I tried to teach Lindsay and Alexa about siphoning.  With each unavoidable mouthful of filthy water I got starting and re-starting the siphon, I consoled myself that at least I wasn’t siphoning gasoline.  The scumbags who steal gas out of our car, right in front of our house, have that to deal with; once there was a pile of vomit next to the hose the dude left behind.  Of course, when we’re paying through the nose to live where we do, it’s not actually all that comforting to think that gas theft is going on in our community.

Anyway, my kids were reasonably attentive with the siphon lesson, until they both realized that instead of listening to me, they could dig an extensive network of canals and such to make use of the water suddenly at their disposal.  I can’t very well tell my kids not to play, because the only saving grace of this particular work detail is that we don’t have to get a sitter as long as those two stay out of our hair. 

At one point Alexa killed my siphon by lifting up the end of the hose, and the prospect of another mouthful of filthy water doubtless influenced my reaction.  Here I marveled at my own grumpiness:  I should be glad that my kid is even halfway listening, whether or not she absorbs the lesson, because most kids would be ignoring me completely, flipping me off and/or dumping more sand in my tri-sink apparatus.  Which was proving to be my Waterloo. 

I scraped most of the sand out of there, to the detriment of my already wind- and ice-water-chapped hands (girlie-hands that should take real work in stride but have been softened by office work) and then set about trying to unclog the sinks.  Between flossing the pipes with a hose and trying to build up enough pressure to blast out the sand, I got confused and turned on the wrong valve and got a full sprinkler going, right in my face, soaking half of my dry-clean-only sweater.  Did I mention that there was a cold wind howling through there?  I thought this was spring!  I thought this was California! 

Anyway, I eventually got the drains basically working, and Lindsay and Alexa complained bitterly when their water supply was finally cut off for good.  It was sort of hard to tell what Erin had been working on this whole time.  The place looked better, sure—the sand was smoother, there was a bit less of it on the non-sandbox surfaces—but it seemed like I’d been fighting with the sinks for ages; surely by now everything else should look good as new?  I’d hoped so, because my contribution would be practically invisible, and one little boy in five minutes would probably re-clog the whole sink station before any adult laid eyes on it.  But there was no metamorphosis in the yard, and—worse yet—Erin still had control of the coveted push broom.

Oh how I envied her that push broom.  I think the best thing about the push broom is that you can just stand around leaning on it, feeling like a government-employed janitor killing time until his shift is up.  Whenever I do schoolyard cleanup I fantasize about living in a socialist country, taking comfort in the idea that when that whistle blows, I’m done, whether or not I accomplished anything during my time there.

Our actual situation is quite different:  we don’t get to leave until Erin is satisfied that we’ve done a kickass job of cleaning, one that will bring glory to the Albert family within this preschool community—never mind that they’ve already rejected our daughter and by extension our whole family, so it’s too late anyway.  And never mind that most of the other volunteers probably show up, set a tipped-over pail upright, bury a few dog feces, and bail after five or ten minutes.  I looked around and made the mistake of being obviously between tasks, and Erin asked, “Are you ready for our special job?”

Man, I thought this whole thing was special.  You mean we have some extra tacked-on thing to do this time?  Yes, we do.  We have to organize the tool shed:  she’d signed us up for this.  Now, if there’s one thing I’m really uncomfortable with (actually, there are actually a great many things I’m uncomfortable with), it’s organizing some area that isn’t mine.  If somebody went and organized the tools in my garage, I’d be really annoyed.

Actually, that’s untrue.  I’d be really pleased if somebody organized my garage, but only because there is no organization there—I’ve got house tools (coarse, ugly, practically unusable) and household gewgaws (incomprehensible, crummy, made in China) all mixed up with bike tools (beautiful, perfect) and bike parts (precise, precious, expensive).  But this isn’t my garage we’re talking about.  It’s an established preschool, and if there’s one thing worse than performing manual slave labor to incrementally beautify this doomed child-ridden environment, it’s putting out similar effort to actually lower the quality of the adult-focused subset of that environment.  Somebody who actually cared about the tool shed probably spent a fair amount of time and energy figuring out how to organize it, and it’s pretty well organized.  What could I do to show that I’d put in my time, besides changing things around arbitrarily?

So I hauled everything out of there, swept, and hauled it back in.  This took a great deal of time.  Most of what I was hauling out were tricycles:  really awesome, heavy, bulletproof tricycles, the coolest I’ve ever seen.  At least a dozen of them.  Glorious, surely European-made, some with trailers, some with cargo bays, most of them swept back like choppers, with the sleek yet burly industrial look of WWII-era aircraft or Kitchen-Aid mixers.  Where did these things come from?  The newer tricycles among them—also Euro, also cool—were already wearing out.  The older ones suggested an earlier time, a golden era, when the preschool was either totally flush with cash, or had a kid whose dad was either a tycoon or just very, very fond of exquisite trikes and children.

I suppose handling this fleet of sweet trikes could have been pleasurable to me, but the sad fact is, my appreciation was lessened by the thought that Lindsay doesn’t even ride the trikes, because she’s not strong enough to pedal them.  (I’m not surmising this—she’s told me so.)  Alexa tried to ride one while we were there, but the effort of running over a hose or a tree-root-lifted concrete lump was enough to ruin both her forward movement and her resolve.

So anyway, I got everything out, sorted some rubber balls (a grown man, sorting balls!), flung some things back behind other things to create the impression of tidiness, swept a bunch of sand out of there, and then brought everything back in, and half the sand with it.  Meanwhile, another family had shown up to clean the inside of the school, and their kids ran through the puddles, joined by Lindsay and Alexa.  Those two completely forgot their very clear instructions, and tracked sand all over the play structures until they looked exactly like they did when we arrived.  I kept a close eye on the tri-sink area, ready to intervene should anyone go near it with so much as a pinch of sand.  Another gust of wind came in and broke loose a mind-boggling flurry of leaves, which settled down over the sand  like a blast of confetti in an operating room.  (Don’t over-think that metaphor.) 

To my amazement, at this moment Erin declared we were done.  And for what?  By the time we found Lindsay’s and Alexa’s shoes, put our equipment away, and hauled ourselves out of there, the place looked like a war zone.  Two and a half hours, and the teachers will probably think we never showed.  Sweet.

Review - Da Crack Taqueria, Poipu, Kauai

Introduction

As I discussed in my last blog post, I took a vacation to Hawaii recently, and though I know you don’t want to hear how great a time I had, and conversely nobody wants to hear any complaints that start out “When I was in Hawaii,” everybody loves a restaurant review, right? Well, given that it’s a review of a hole-in-the-wall on the most remote archipelago in the world, and you will probably never go there, maybe you’re not that interested.

But wait, are you a foodie? And do you like taquerias? Are you curious about one man’s effort to find good spicy food in the land of poi? (If you haven’t heard of it, poi is a paste made of taro corm that ancient native Hawaiians allegedly ate, and which you can still get, and which I did try, and which has a flavor a lot like Spackle or Bondo but not as intense. And yes, “corm” is a real word, and yes, I did enjoy using it just now—first time!)

Okay, what if you’re not a foodie? Might you be a tech-weenie? Well then, read on, because—lacking a laptop PC in Hawaii—I dictated this entire review to my smartphone. That leads to all kinds of fun: you can decide for yourself how impressive the voice-recognition software is; laugh at it biggest gaffs; and try to decode (via context) the intended words lurking beneath best-efforts like “dustless pros,” “whole ten toes,” and “run Russian unicorn.” I’ve left the haphazard capitalization in place, such as the so-called smartphone’s decision to capitalize “Chipotle” and “Thunder” but not “hawaii” or the first word of any sentence. I’ve also left misspellings uncorrected, because poor spelling seems to be an island tradition.

(Note: I originally sent this via e-mail as a race report to my bike club. My race reports focus almost exclusively on the food, to the point that it simply doesn’t matter that I lacked a bicycle during my vacation.)


Restaurant Review – Da Crack Taqueria, Poipu, Kauai

Greetings,

This is a non race report because I’m not doing any racing much less riding while I’m in Hawaii but I’m going to give you a report anyway because not riding racing should never stop you. the food is what’s important I’m going to regale you with the tale of our taqueria here on Kauai because you like to try different taqueria is at least some of us Lindsay of course being the notable exception who hates all Mexican food. okay now I’m really ticked because my whole last sentence all of which was dustless pros has been lost because it couldn’t connect. you see, I’m using the voice recognition because I have awkward stubby fingers to type like the dickens on a proper keyboarding but don’t do so well with these smartphones. stupid anyway, the place we went to as this little hole in the wall taqueria called Da Crack. it was highly recommended on Yelp or whatever those one of those sites one of those rating websites. the logo was a crew leader on cartoon of a guys butt crack. on that basis Alexa refused to eat there but we didn’t give her a choice. Lindsay meanwhile hates all Mexican food on principle making me wonder who the father really is.

so what’s a walk up place just a counter no tables no chair there’s a little tiny bench along the wall outside but it’s really a carryout deal. the whole menu is on a chalkboard but they are also selling their logo bearing hats and shirts. so it’s a combination of small time and self congratulating big time. not that I have any problem with that my favorite place ever la fiesta sold really groovy t shirts. but now I have stolen my own Thunder by mentioning la fiesta because you know that I can’t possibly given to Sterling review to any place having summoned the ghost of my long lost favorite place. this is Andy speaking not Andy and right now I’m eating with a weird seeing images.

Erin has a fish taco for $11 and I do mean fish taco, singular, but hey Islands prices, right? Alexa and I both had pork burritos, but they were not carnitas, they only had shredded pork, which is a shame, and is matched by the offering of only whole ten toes or whole black beans, not the refried beans that I think should be required in all talk worldwide. but the burritos to come stalk with cheese and sour cream, which is pretty nice because of some expect to be nickel and dime stood up on everything when you’re traveling in hawaii.

so one of the unique things is that they offered two kinds of sour cream or perhaps it was dressing for the fish taco and that was either Chipotle or what sabi and I had to guess that erin would want massage me because she had wandered off to supervise Alexa who refuse to be seen standing in front of a place called Da Crack. Not “what sabi” or “massage me” but wasabi, geez. the burritos were un remarkable and run Russian unicorn remarkable in terms of choices except that it was Mexican brown rice, and cabbage instead of lettuce. Unicode Lindsay ordered see Keiki kids cheese quesadilla, which route was about five dollars, and wish we could have easily made at home which we should have done because of course we took these back to our condo to eat on the lanai.

okay, down to brass tacks. how was it already, you surely want to know. well, the fish taco have these little bricks of fish that looked slightly funny, and meet us a little nervous, at least me, because you know this is the land of spam. not spam as in unwanted email like this one, I but I mean real spam, as in shoulder of pork and meat, or whatever spam stands for. you know, Hormel spam. but the fish, which was probably mahi mahi, was not at all like spam and in fact was quite tasty, and those hotties sour cream, which you’re going to have to figure out what I mean kama because surely this voice recognition software is going to butcher wassabi yet again, was quite tasty. it was a flour tortilla, oddly enough, but there’s a silver lining in that in that the taco, there being only one of them, it was fairly big. it had a side of pinto beans and that aforementioned Mexican brown rice, which were both pretty good, and if there was any complain I had with this thing is that there wasn’t enough salsa, but we had some handmade store bought salsa from the island heater that was fairly good. plus we had some dose Aki’s beer, the special lager with the green label, which wash everything down real good.

so on to the main item that being the burrito, the tortilla was grilled rather than steamed which is great, and the size was pretty good, and the beans were black which of course is not as good as refried was pretty darn good I actually like the rice pretty well. the cabbage was good, & I think I’m going to start using that in our home made make your own tacos, an albert standby, because it gives a little extra crunching is probably better for a kids at being cruciferous. the meat of course is the star of the show, & I couldn’t help but to wish that my shredded pork was carnitas, or that I’ve gotten beef, because it turns out most of the beef on this island seems to be local grass fed beef, but I forgot that and when you’re getting something at a sketchy walk up counter called Da Crack, there’s something that causes you to hesitate about taking any gambles on your meat.

the salsa was okay, but I ordered hot and this stuff was pretty darn tame. they did have a great nation called fire but I avoided it on principle because I think it’s lame to call something fire, and by the way didn’t Taco Bell already steal that name? so anyway I said it was a good burrito, but not a great burrito, and then Gertrude Stein punch me in the face.

so, a little background about the name of this place, which I have to admit did not entice us to eat there. according to the counter person, this place was huge in the 70’s and had some sort of standard name, play pou taqueria or something, but everybody nicknamed Da Crack, and then when it folded in 2007 it was a great opera and everybody back for them to open up again and so when they did this time they just gave it the official name of Da Crack. so what has the script loyal following, almost every review you read says its where the locals go, & I guess I can’t blame them because it’s one thing to come from the Bay Area, possibly the best place for burritos in the entire world, but another to be on some isolated island where most of the food is not Mexican, and where most of the food probably shouldn’t be Mexican, if I’m to be perfectly candid.

bottom line? if I found this place in the mission I might think it was kind of neat because it was a little different a little island inflected, a little islandy you might even say but I wouldn’t go back there because it was perfectly mediocre. but if I found this plays in Saint Johnsbury Vermont, or in Ashburn Virginia, or in an airport, or hell, even in Boulder Colorado, I would think I was a revelation and be very glad to have it around. but that doesn’t mean anything could ever have me rocking a Da Crack baseball cap.

Mahalo.

Misspelling in Hawaii

Introduction

Earlier this month, my family took a vacation to Kauai.  (There, I typed “Kauai” without misspelling it.  That word, and all Hawaiian words, often trip me up, as “Hawaiian” did just now, and it’s a good thing—perhaps—that  my word processing program instantly flagged the error.)

Where was I?  Oh, right, Hawaii.  I can’t blog about how great a time I had there, because nobody wants to hear about it.  But I also can’t complain about anything, because any complaint that starts out “When I was in Hawaii” isn’t going to generate any sympathy.  And yet, this having been a terribly expensive vacation, I feel like I should somehow get some good blogging mileage out of it (as I have done with an overpriced museum visit and a pricey pair of cycling shoes).  So in this post I’m going to examine the strange sense I got that nobody in Hawaii can spell.

Not that I’m not saying Hawaiians can’t spell.  Somehow, visitors to Hawaii also can’t.

Misspelled food

My family is a foodie bunch.  (Can “foodie” be an adjective?  It can now!)  So perhaps it’s not surprising that the first misspellings we spotted were food-related.  The very first was a section on a menu called “Desert.”  I cut people slack when they (incorrectly) write “just desserts” because when the word “desert” is used as a noun but (correctly) pronounced like “dessert,” to indicate “something that is deserved,” we’re into some pretty arcane English-major territory.  But when a restaurant misses that second “s” in “dessert,” you hope they’re better at hygiene than spelling.  Still, we’d have brushed it off had not another restaurant, a day or two later, made the same error.

Later on, we saw “TACO’S” on the banner for a taqueria called Da Crack, and I decided this wasn’t a deliberate error (along the lines of “da” for “the”) but just an uneducated approach to spelling that treats apostrophes like garnish.  (Too bad Da Crack didn’t have any really good garnish, like cilantro.)

In the case of ethnic food, particularly Asian food, I’m very quick to forgive misspellings, and often count them as a sign of authenticity (along with their cousins, the weird word choices you see like “Fire Burst Stomach Trips” or “Eight Precious Rice Pudding”).  And sometimes Asian restaurant misspellings can be really funny, like “Braised pork in spicy Human sauce.” 

I’m less understanding when it comes to Western misspellings, like we found in our condo.  The hosts had left a handy list of restaurant recommendations, and it had some pretty blatant errors.  For example, a burger place was touted as “a much healthier choose than McDonald’s.”  The name of this burger place?  “Bubba’s Buger.”  This led to lots of corollary jokes (especially popular with my daughters) such as, “Anybody feel like eating boogers tonight?”  But the funniest misspelling on this list was a recommendation for a health food restaurant where we should “order the Acai bowel, full of antioxidants and pure energy.”

Misspelled journal entries

Perhaps you’ve stayed in a bed & breakfast or inn where there’s a nicely bound little journal in which guests can record their feelings about the place.  This journal doesn’t function like Yelp, since you’ve already paid for and occupied the place, so most guests just gush about how great a time they had and how wonderful everything is.  So there’s a lot of gloating, and perhaps some one-upmanship as well (i.e., attempts to be more thoughtful or articulate than the last guy).

Almost every entry in the little book at our Princeville condo had misspellings.  Here is a partial list, courtesy of my older daughter who read them out to me as she went along: 

• beutifil, beutifilly
• foget
• eastun (for “eastern”)
• beatifull
• evere (I had to see this one myself to make sure it wasn’t just a handwriting flourish)
• do able (for “doable”)
• awsome
• well (for “we’ll”)
• what so ever
• cando (for “condo”)
• click our heals (within a “Wizard of Oz” reference)
• use to (for “used to”)

What I found particularly strange about all this is that the people writing in the guidebook didn’t seem slapdash about it; their handwriting was neat and their sentences well-crafted.  None of the entries looked to have been penned by a sloppy t(w)een  (other than that of my own daughter); and there weren’t any LOLs or FWIWs or GR8s or other signs of Gen-Y shorthand.  And yet it costs big bucks to stay in this “cando,” so it’s not like these were uneducated people.  I was, and am, deeply perplexed.

By the way, here is my own condo journal entry, which you can scrutinize for misspellings and/or one-upmanship:

Why so much misspelling?

I suppose it would be very imperialist of me, almost Manifest-Destiny-ish you might say, to judge Hawaiians’ spelling of English words when their native language is so very, very different.  Throughout our vacation I struggled to pronounce the native Hawaiian words that frequently popped up as place names and other proper nouns.  I fared far worse than our GPS narrator when saying, for example, “Ala Kalanikaumaka Street” (though we noticed that the GPS Lady pronounced it a little differently each time).  And yet this is actually pretty straightforward compared to words like “pu’uwai”  and “ku’uipo,” with their surplus of vowels and weirdly placed apostrophes.

Still, I can’t explain away the English misspellings based on the oddities of Hawaiian spelling.  After all, plenty of people are able to master two entirely different alphabets; as a high school student I was pretty good at spelling Russian words correctly.

Could poor spelling be related to the blissful, carefree apathy that comes from drifting your life away in an island paradise?  Well, it is the case that the lovely Anini Beach had been called “Wanini Beach” until the “W” fell off the sign, and rather than fix the sign, the Hawaiians just shrugged their shoulders and let “Anini” become the new name. 

But, as you’ve already noticed, these theories don’t explain why visitors to Kauai, like those writing in the condo journal, can’t spell.  It’s not like something comes over us in the week or two we spend here.   Even my daughter’s journal entry had only one typo—a missing apostrophe—which is exactly the kind of sloppy mistake she makes at home.

And those comical misspellings in the list of restaurant recommendations provided by the condo owners?  Well, the owners don’t actually live in Hawaii.  This is their just guest home.  If memory serves, they live in Texas.

And so, after much reflection, I’ve decided that the misspellings have little to do with Hawaii, and mostly to do with technology—and the lack of it.

Huh?

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the journal in the condo is that it’s the rare example of non-typed text.  Think about this for a second:  how often do you read something handwritten?  The non-typed text I come across generally falls into one of two categories:  1) graffiti, and 2) my kids’ schoolwork.  Do I see misspellings in these kinds of text? 

Why, yes.  Perhaps the only words I see among graffiti that are consistently spelled right are the profanities.  Everything else reflects the fecal-mindedness of the graffitist.  Meanwhile, my twelve-year-old isn’t bad at spelling, but my younger daughter, age ten, still has much room to improve.  A sonnet she wrote recently— which  had very good meter and perfect rhyme, and which was very deep, being a letter to her future teenage self, bagging on herself in advance and promoting nostalgia for a time when she wasn’t “blotet [sic] and lazy”—contained no fewer than twenty-three spelling errors.

Aside from graffiti and kids’ stuff, virtually everything I read is typed, and our modern means of typing have all kinds of built-in technology to (help) eradicate misspellings and typos.  The original tool, the spell-checker, not only identifies errors but arguably helps people learn from their mistakes.  The spell-checker is not a perfect tool—for example, it’ll catch “buger” but not “Acai bowel”—but it’s been masking poor spelling fairly effectively for about thirty years now.  (At least, when it’s turned on.  I’m going to assume that restaurant people just aren’t very good with computers.)

The problem is, the classic spell-checker is losing out to more modern tools that are less educational.  Smartphones have features that enable you to type sloppily, generating character strings that only remotely resemble words; the operating system is smart enough to make good guesses at what you’re trying to type.  I can type “t-y-p” and it suggests “type,” “types,” “typo,” and “typed” and I can touch any of these to accept that word.  This is especially handy with trickier words like “beautiful.” 

When I’m on my smartphone I use the Swype technique, aka slide-typing, where I drag my finger through the letters of a word and, amazingly, the OS recognizes these words, no matter how sloppy I get.  It’s not so good with “Acai” or “mahalo” but does great with most common English words.  If I Swype “beutifil” it seamlessly corrects it to “beautiful,” just as it discreetly turns “awsome” to “awesome.”  Typing in this way, a person could generate readable text for decades without ever learning how to spell.  This is just great, until you’re suddenly forced to use a pen and paper to compose your message.

So, if you think the spelling is bad now in handwritten messages, just you wait.  We’re seeing the mere lack of spell-checker now; in another couple decades, when Gen-Y starts making enough money to rent “candos,” they’ll be even less well equipped to work out tricky words like “bowl” and “awesome” on their own.

Epilogue:  voice recognition

Do people also use voice recognition software to compose messages?  I don’t know.  I suspect that this technology is mainly used for giving instructions to your phone, and that the modern generation prefers the silence of typing and Swyping.  That said, it’s hard to really tell.  When you see a guy walking down the sidewalk yakking on his smartphone, he could either a) be having an old-fashioned voice conversation, b) be dictating a message to his e-mail program, or c) be a crazy person talking loudly to nobody or nothing at all, with the phone held up as a prop.

As it happens, I did investigate the efficacy of voice-recognition for large bodies of text:  because I find Swype typing tedious (and didn’t have a laptop with me on vacation), I dictated a restaurant review to my phone.  Needless to say, I’ll be making that review available on albertnet:  maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

Biased Blow-By-Blow, Tour de France 2014, Stage 17

Introduction

Perhaps you don’t feel like getting up early enough to watch the Tour de France live.  And maybe the TV schedule is too complicated for you, or you’re just not quite interested enough to spend an hour or two watching, and yet want more complete coverage than a final-ten-km video.  Above all, maybe you’re tired of commentators biting their tongues when a known doper does something “not normal” but they have to report it at face value, praising the doper for his strength as though it were legit.  If you’re any of these people, or in fact anyone at all, read on for my journalistically unchained, often biased blow-by-blow report of stage 17, the penultimate mountain stage in this year’s Tour.

Biased Blow-By-Blow Report – 2014 Tour de France Stage 17

I join the coverage just in time to hear “we’re going to take a break.”  So now I’m looking at an ad for LeMond.  Not the cookie, but the three-time Tour de France champ and his new show.  So in the interest of fairness here is an ad for the Le-mond cookie.

Today I’m back to my postcard-sized live Internet feed after seeing most of this Tour on an actual TV set while on vacation.  (I didn’t have an actual PC on me, which is why I didn’t file other reports, other than the second stage which you can read about here.)

The riders are on the second of four climbs on this short but brutal stage.  This climb is the category 1 Col de Peyresourde, 13 km at 7%.  The rider in bib number 3, Vasil Kiryienka (Team Sky), is off the front solo.  His nickname, Vaseline, isn’t really his nickname.  At least, not that I know of.  Actually, his nickname is the White Russian because he’s from Belorussia.  All right, I’m going to come right out and say it:  I don’t know this rider’s nickname.  In fact, though I’ve heard his name many times, I know almost nothing about him.

So Kiryienka has about 45 seconds on a chase group of about twenty.  In that group are Bauke Mollema (Belkin Pro Cycling) who sits in 10th overall ; Pierre Rolland (Europcar) who is in 12th overall; Jurgen Van Den Broeck (Lotto-Belisol) who’s in 13th; Frank Schleck (Trek Factory Racing) who’s in 14th; and Joaquim Rodriguez (Katusha) who is way down in 68th but always a contender for a stage win and who will want to pick up KOM points today, being only one point behind polka-dot-rocking Rafal Majka (Tinkoff-Saxo), who is also in this group.

Speaking of J-Rod’s team, I would like to point out that every English speaker in this sport misspells, and mispronounces, “Katusha.”  You can read it in the Russian on their jerseys, or at least I can, and the second vowel is a ю, which sounds like “you.”  So it should be “Katyushka.”  There, I’m glad to finally get that off my chest.

Other than the guys I already mentioned, the chase group doesn’t have any GC contenders.  It does, however, have race leader Vincenzo Nibali’s Astana teammate, Jakob Fuglsang, who’s all the way down in 72nd place after a harrowing high speed crash earlier in the Tour.  The poor guy came in way after the leaders that day, probably just happy to make the time cut, and when asked how he felt he replied (rather casually, I thought), “Well, I’ve had better days, but nothing’s broken.  I just hurt everywhere.”

Kiryienka is really motoring along and now has about 2½ minutes over the chase group, which has about 5 minutes on the peloton.

Tejay Van Garderen (BMC Racing Team) needs to be worried about this breakaway because a few riders in it aren’t that far behind him in the GC.  Mollema trails him by only a couple of minutes; Rolland by a couple more; and Van Den Broeck by a minute more than that.

J-Rod outsprints Majka to the summit of the Peyresourde and takes 2 points out of him in the KOM competition. 

This Eurosport announcer just said something about “taking your crêpes suzettes out of the fridge and putting them on your head.”  What on earth?

Nicolas Roche (Tinkoff-Saxo) and Jesus Herrada (Movistar) have broken free from the chase group and are narrowing in a bit on Kiryienka.

Now they’re on a commercial break.  The Euro ads are far less depressing than the American ones I’ve been seeing for the last two weeks.  I’ve been watching on NBC-SN, which seems to be one of those second-tier networks with cheap ad space catering to a similarly second-tier audience.  The ads, taken together, create a composite profile of a vain, balding man whose home is in foreclosure, and who is trying to lose weight via light beer and vitamin products, and has some kind of sports injury requiring a high-tech knee brace with rejuvenating copper thread (and real simulated snake oil) in it, and whose PC is infested with viruses.  Other than the Tour, this NBC-SN network covers car racing, poker, and a bunch of hour-long infomercials for music CD collections like “Pop Goes the 70s.”  I was getting pretty depressed by all these commercials so now it’s good to see the same ads for cycling shoes, bikes, bike trainers, and watches that Eurosport has been dishing up for years.

Now the coverage is back on and they’re showing helicopter footage of the third climb, the first category Col de Val Louron-Azet, 7.4 km at 8.3%.  It looks suitably monstrous from above:  barren stone faces with sharp edges.

“Cointreau and Nutella in a pancake, not good for the head,” the announcer says.  Man, it’s hard enough to watch the racers while also typing this report when the commentators are actually making sense. 

Roche and Herrada are back in the main chase, which has shed a few riders and now numbers 17 souls, 1:20 behind Kiryienka.

Kiryienka is 5km from the summit of this penultimate climb.  His lead having been cut in half, I’m pretty sure he’ll get caught on the final descent or at least on the final climb, the famous Huis Categorie (beyond-category) Pla d’Adet, 10.2 km at 8.3%.

I really hope the yellow jersey group can catch all these guys.  Not surprisingly I’ve been rooting for Tejay throughout this Tour, and despite a crash early on he was doing great, sitting 5th in the GC with just a few minutes between himself and 2nd overall.  But then yesterday, the first stage I didn’t get to watch, he finally had that dreaded bad day and slipped to sixth, 9:25 behind the apparently unbeatable Nibali and 4:37 behind the filthy doping Valverde who’s still in second.

One thing I love about watching cycling is that I can relate somewhat to the experience of these guys.  No, I’ve never been in any way close to them in ability, but when I have a bad day, I get a taste of the misery that produces.  I’m turning the pedals of a similar bicycle, at a similar cadence, using similar muscle groups, over (in some cases) the same climbs.  That’s a lot different from the home viewers of Indy car racing, who have only ever driven consumer-oriented sedans and station wagons and who are bound by the national speed limit.

So when somebody completely detonates on a mountain stage, my heart goes out to him because eleven years ago, after flying (in my penguin-like way) over the Col de la Croix de Fer and the Col du Telegraphe, I cracked at the base of the Col du Galibier and had to deal not only with the horror of being passed by dozens of guys, but with the profound wretchedness of having to make it over two more horrific climbs, while limiting my losses, before I could call it a day.  In the third week of the Tour this kind of bodily breakdown is bound to afflict somebody and it’ll be something to see.

Kiryienka is really suffering now and his gap is down to 41 seconds as he nears the summit.

Now the chasers have got him in their sights.  Wow, he’s really grimacing.  I wonder what’s going through his head.  Is it “What was I thinking?”  Or is he so fried his mind is a complete blank?  Well, they’ve got him, 300 meters from the summit.  This KOM sprint will be fun to watch.

There goes Rodriguez!  Majka is right on his wheel!  Majka goes for the pass, but he is denied!  Unless there’s a major shakeup on the final climb, J-Rod will have the polka-dot jersey at the end of the day.  (Did you notice just now how I used the phrase “at the end of the day” to actually mean “at the end of the day” instead of as a clichéd throwaway expression conveying practically nothing?  You’re welcome.)

The yellow jersey group is over the summit now.  AG2R La Mondiale attacks!  This is probably designed to give their leader, Romain Bardet, an opportunity to take time out of Thibaud Pinot (FDJ.fr).  Pinot sits in 3rd overall, two places ahead of Bardet, and has the white Best Young Rider jersey that Bardet wants to get back.  Surely Bardet is counting on Pinot’s notoriously poor descending skills, which were sad and sometimes bewildering to witness during last year’s Tour.  But Pinot has gotten a lot better and I doubt this attack will mean much with that giant climb still to come.  I’d hate to be Pinot right now, though ... I’ll bet he’s completely stressed out at the pace this group is having to pour on.  Serious pucker-factor there.

What’s really interesting to note is how small this yellow jersey group is.  It’s down to about ten riders.  I’m not sure how far back the rest of the peloton is, or if there even is one anymore.  This group is now only 2:15 down on the breakaway.  I wonder where Tejay is.  That’s one disadvantage to this Eurosport coverage:  being enemies of freedom, the British commentators don’t pay any special attention to American riders.

I’m pretty sure Tejay is in this group.  There’s definitely a BMC guy and he’d be the most likely guy to still be in this group.  (His teammates Peter Velits and Amaël Moinard are in the front group.)  I don’t see any Lampre-Merida riders here, so the other American hopeful, Chris Horner, must have been dropped.

Speaking of Horner, my daughter made a good point the other morning as we were enjoying the Tour together and I was explaining the white jersey competition.  “They should have a best old rider competition,” Alexa rightly pointed out.  Wouldn’t that be great?  He’d get a grey jersey, of course.

The front group is on the final climb now, and Roche has attacked.  He’s immediately matched by Giovanni Visconti (Movistar Team).  Now he’s attacked again and has a pretty good gap.  This group has broken up a lot.  For now we have Roche and Visconti, and a bit behind them Moinard and Rolland, distanced from the rest.

The yellow jersey group is at 1:55 and I think they’ll catch most if not all of the original breakaway riders.

Roche really looks miserable now as he falls off Visconti’s pace.  Roche’s face is the nonverbal equivalent of whining.

Back in what’s left of the original breakaway, Majka attacks!  He’s looking to distance Rodriguez (and of course anybody else he can).  He looks pretty good but now the camera is following Visconti again so I’m not sure if ... okay, Majka’s attack was fruitless and now Schleck is taking up the pace.

Bardet is by himself ... I guess he was dropped at some point by the yellow jersey group and is fighting to stay in contact. 

And now, in the breakaway group, Majka has attacked again and has a good gap!  There are double KOM points at the top of this climb, and by now he’s learned he can’t outsprint Rodriguez.  He grabs the antenna of a motorbike!  I don’t know why!  I think he’s trying to steal it!  Maybe this guy grew up on the wrong side of the tracks.  Other than that I can’t imagine his motivation for this bizarre act.  I mean, yeah, when I’m struggling on a climb I’m tempted to grab anything I can, like the saddle of a little girl on a BMX bike who has just passed me, but this is the Tour and it’s not like Majka could get away with hanging on like that.  What will he say later?  That he was trying to make a point to the motorbike driver, like “You shouldn’t be here” when clearly the guy should?  Totally bizarre.

Visconti is looking very solid as he continues in the lead.  He’s only got 7 km to go, but they’re a tough 7 km.  He has half a minute on Roche, who has now been joined by Moinard and Rolland.

Back in the yellow jersey group, Jan-Christophe Peraud (AG2R La Mondiale) has attacked!  He’s sitting in 4th overall, a minute out of third, so it’s not hard to guess his motivation.  Nibali easily matches him, but this group could explode if there are enough of these attacks.

Majka is really going well, having a sizable gap on the Rodriguez group.

Tejay is still hanging in what is now a group of five:  Nibali, Peraud, an evidently resurgent Bardet, and—whoah, there goes Nibali again!  This is really making things tough.  Peraud is able to match Nibali but that’s it, Tejay looks like he’s dropped along with with Pinot and Bardet.  Notably missing here is Valverde, who has not responded well to all these accelerations and is dropped.  I’m sure Valverde will have strong words for his pharmacist tonight if he can’t catch back up.

Majka must have passed Roche, Moinard, and Rolland at some point because he now catches Visconti.  It’s amazing how quickly he made his way to the front of the race.  He might just be able to get a stage win today.

Tejay’s trio has passed Van Den Broeck.  That original breakaway has been totally scattered, needless to say.  Rodriguez is struggling and will very likely lose the KOM jersey, as Majka is at only 3 km to go.

Nibali attacks yet again!  He’s insatiable!

And now Majka attacks Visconti!  And it’s an amazing attack!  He’s totally spanked him!  Man, Majka has got the power.  Really, really blistering pace he just put up.

And my Internet feed has frozen.  Damn it!

Majka looks at the camera and gives a wink.  That’s how awesome he feels.  Now he’s under the 1 km thingy.  It’s tempting to call it a banner but it’s these four tubes arching over the road.  Well, more like two tubes that intersect each other, like giant crêpes suzettes.  (Have I lost my mind?)

Now Nibali has 1 km to go.  He’s kind of promiscuous, Nibali ... every time I see him he’s with a different rider.  Now it’s some Cannondale guy, must be Alessandro De Marchi who I swear has come out of nowhere.

Majka has this in the bag!  He’s pumping his fist.  And now he crosses the line with the very popular pointing-at-myself victory salute. 

Oh, good, he amends it with a more traditional victory salute.  More on this topic in a minute.

Nibali crosses the line with Peraud right on his wheel.  Rolland crosses, and now Schleck with Mollema right on him.  Roche is not far behind. 

Valverde is over the line, 1:34 down, with Tejay and the two youngsters right behind him.

One name that has not come up at all today is Leopold Konig.  This Team Netapp-Endura rider was in 7th in the GC going into this stage, a handful of seconds behind Tejay.  He’s been dropped today so that’s good for Tejay.

Now, back to this victory salute thing.  I’m really getting tired of the pointing-at-myself business.  The sheer me-me-me aspect of it is just not very gracious.  And last week, we saw Nibali doing this bizarre thumb-sucking salute when he won his second stage.  I guess it was a shout-out to his infant offspring, but you think the baby was watching?  I doubt it.  Babies care even less about bike racing than American adults.

LeMond is being interviewed by some EuroDouche wearing awful, simply awful orange pants.  They’re the color of orange sherbet.  If I were LeMond I would refuse to let the camera roll until the guy changed into some normal pants.

So, where was I?  Oh yeah, victory salutes.  When Michael Rogers (Tinkoff-Saxo) won yesterday, his victory salute was a big bow.  I thought that was corny, but it sort of fits.  Rogers, being a major doper, was giving a performance, the mere semblance of having actually bested everybody.  It’s kind of like Kevin Spacey giving a bow after playing Richard III onstage:  no, Spacey himself didn’t die during the performance, but he did a good rendition of Richard III dying, just as Rogers really did look like the best man yesterday.

I guess I should be happy to be seeing LeMond’s commentary instead of just watching the barbaric, retrograde spectacle of podium girls presenting awards, but I guess I just can’t get past the orange pants of LeMond’s co-commentator.  Plus they keep bringing strangers over to talk.  I guess this is the Tinkoff-Saxo director they’re talking to now.  Do I care what he has to say?  Well, I don’t know.  He’s not a master orator or anything.  “Majka is a fun kid,” he says.  Yeah, I gathered that based on the wink.  You know what?  I think I better cut this off here.  I have my day job to get to.

Taking the Certification Exam

Introduction

Who knows why you decide to get certified.  Maybe your employer demands it.  Or maybe it’s just a demonstration of your commitment to your career.  Perhaps it increases your salary, or your value on the job market.  Whatever the case, you’ve gone to the boot camp or done your self-study track, you’ve read the book and the study guide, you’ve made your flashcards, you’ve taken the sample tests, you’ve combed the Internet for other resources, and now you’re going to actually take the test.  Here’s what to expect.

Taking your certification exam

Signing up will be more difficult than you expect.  These test facilities are low-margin operations.  The simple steps to create your account won’t work.  Click submit and the screen shimmers, refreshes, and you’re back where you started.  Open a ticket.  Try a different browser.  Only when you try a totally different PC will it work.

When you show up, they’ll thrust you a dog-eared sheet of rules in a greasy clear plastic sleeve.  You won’t read the rules because, really, what recourse would you have if you don’t like one of them?  Besides, you’ll mind your own business and not try to cheat.  So you nod and sign the form.  They require two forms of ID.  The instructions here are unclear:  one must be a government-issued photo ID, the other can be something basic like a credit card, but an example they give of an acceptable photo ID is your employer-issued work ID.  But unless you work for the government, this doesn’t meet the requirements.  The reason you even worry about it is that your driver’s license, or driver license (depending on what state you live in), is expired.  There is a rule that it can’t be expired.  Do you lead with the employer-issued ID, then?  No, it doesn’t look official enough.  You hold your breath while the clerk dutifully records the expiration date of your driver license, without registering the fact that it’s expired.

They’ll ask you to turn off your electronic device, but you won’t have brought one, especially not your laptop because you know the lockers are only big enough for a small purse.  They make you take everything out of your pockets and even remove your watch.  You put your personal effects in the little locker.  The key has a giant fob and they forbid you to put it in your pocket.  Then they make your turn your pockets inside out while standing on the painted clown feet.  Standing there with your pockets pulled out, you suddenly realize you’re acting out the non-verbal punch line of a dumb riddle:  “Would you rather kiss an elephant on the trunk or a rabbit between the ears?”  Then they make you pull up your sleeves and your pant legs.  You quip, “Nothing up my sleeves!” in some nonspecific cartoon voice, and to your amazement this gets a chuckle.  You thought these people were humorless.  

Then they will go over you with the wand, like at the airport, looking for—what?  Weapons?  You turn around.  “Arms out to the sides.”  You will now be looking at a calendar on the wall showing that famous statue in Rio de Janeiro, Christ the Redeemer, seen from behind, and you’ll realize your acting it out, too.

Certain rules will be recited to you.  “You are not allowed to visit your locker during breaks,” she will say.  She is new and her colleague will correct her:  “No, you actually are.  For medication only, or food, no checking notes or turning on your phone.”  The new person will have the hang of this job in two weeks tops and then it will get progressively less interesting and rewarding.  For now she is going into the actual testing room to prepare your computer.  It is very quiet in there and there are a dozen video cameras under little domes attached to the ceiling.  It could be that some of the domes have no camera within them:  placebo cameras.  There are partitions between the test stations, like the partitions between urinals in your nicer restrooms.

Of course it isn’t actually possible to cheat on this kind of test.  You will recall with a chuckle how a guy once tried to read your bluebook during a English Lit final exam.  How could he possibly have hoped to gain enough insight, without the context of your sprawling essay, to improve his own?  Then you’ll recall a really funny tale one of your professors told you.  He was giving a summer session course on feminist literature.  There was one man in this class, an immensely obese and hairy fellow who always came to class wearing only a Speedo.  (This was during the sixties.)  He was so fat, the rolls obscured the Speedo and he appeared to be naked.  During the final exam, the woman seated next to him suddenly became flustered, turned in her exam after only ten minutes, and left.  Written in her bluebook was:  “I need to talk to you in your office.”  She came to the professor’s office the next day and complained, “That man was looking at my bluebook.  I looked over at his to see if he was copying off of me, and discovered that he was writing about my breasts!”  The professor replied, “Well, in fairness, he was actually writing about Gertrude Stein’s breasts.  But it’s okay, you can retake the exam.”

Lost in this reverie you almost won’t notice the clerk gesturing to you come over to your PC.  It will be a cheap desktop, sitting right up on the desk, very old school, and the monitor, though a flat-screen, will be crooked and cheap and sad.  You will be given two little whiteboards that aren’t boards but just sheets of plastic, and two greasy dry-erase pens.  You will label these “transparencies” because you will feel a need to classify the simple objects available to you during the test.  But they’re not actually transparencies, because they’re not transparent.

You must display your two forms of ID and your key on the desk.  It will be too hot in there but when you remove your sweater you’ll be told to put it back on:  “The cameras don’t like extra objects in their field of view.”  Except it might be a clumsier, or perhaps less clumsy phrase, than “field of view.”  You will also be given a little calculator, which will serve no purpose during the test expect perhaps calculating your possible score if you know which problems you probably missed, which you won’t.

There will be a PC tutorial on how to use the multiple-choice test software.  It will be emphasized that the sample test you take will not have any bearing on your score for the actual test, but this won’t satisfy everybody.  Some people will be sweating bullets and will consider skipping the tutorial.  So just in case, the questions in the sample test will include the answers so you can ace the test and boost your confidence.  The test will be about astronomy, and you might learn something from it.

During the actual test the proctor will come stand behind you for minutes at a time.  They will have warned you that they reserve the right to do this.  You will remember that the rules also stated, in bold, so you noticed it, that everything you do will be recorded, visually and audio-ly.  Is there an equivalent word for “visually” that connotes sound?  Don’t ponder this:  the clock is ticking!  You’re wasting time!

The test will be made more difficult by awkwardness in the answers.  There are two versions of this awkwardness:  either all four answers will seem wrong, or more than one will seem right (when only one answer is allowed).  You are forbidden to disclose any content of the test, as doing so would cause irreparable harm to the certifying body, harm that no financial compensation can remedy.  So I will explain the awkwardness modes via analogy.

Suppose the test was evaluating your knowledge of what food is served in Italian restaurants.  The question “What boiled entree item is most popular?” would have these answers:

A. Minestrone

B. Spaghetti

C. Noodles

D. Ravioli

You know the best answer is “pasta,” but that’s not an option.  And “spaghetti” is too specific.  So it must be “noodles,” but that doesn’t really cover penne, farfalle, etc. which are not long and ribbon-like.  And doesn’t it technically have to have egg in it to be a noodle?

Or, the answers will be:

A. Minestrone

B. Noodles

C. Alimentary paste

D. Ravioli

You won’t like “noodles” for the reasons given above, but what the hell is alimentary paste?  That phrase certainly wasn’t in the book or the training or the sample tests.  It is both the correct answer and the weirdest possible way of expressing it. 

Depending on the test, there may be one more possible scenario:  there actually will be two totally correct answers (in this example, pasta and alimentary paste) but you’re only allowed to choose one, so you literally have a 50/50 chance of getting it right, and that’s just the way it goes.  Your instructor will have warned you about this.

The cryptic answer choices will be far worse on the actual test, of course, because the subject matter will be totally arcane to begin with, not something simple like food. 

There will not be a buzzer you slap when you’re done with the test.  The testing software will tell you that you’re done, and a printer somewhere in the facility will print out your score, but this will not alert anybody.  So you’ll sit there for a little bit before venturing out of the test room, feeling like you’re doing something wrong.  You’ll be clutching your greasy transparencies, your giant locker key, and your two forms of ID, and you will smell like a dog because you’ve sweated so much in your wool sweater.  

There will be congestion in the lobby area because so many people take these tests.  Priority will go to an unfortunate woman who is checking out to take a break and must be escorted to her locker.  She is in a huge hurry; it may be that she is making for the restroom to throw up.  You will present your items to the clerk who will be visibly flummoxed for some time before realizing you’re at the wrong desk because you took that other type of test.  You will finally be given your score printout, which looks like you cooked it up yourself.  But they initial it and use this special stamp to make it official.  Because you didn’t bring anything to the test, you have no folder or bag to put this in, so you’ll carry it—unfolded because it’s an official document—in your hand when you walk back across town to your office.

One more thing:  they will not wipe clean your greasy transparencies, nor had they provided a tissue so you could do this.  They put the transparencies in a folder.  Will somebody analyze your scribblings later, to determine if you cheated somehow?  Or will they scrutinize them as part of a larger psychological experiment?  Could it be that you only thought you were enhancing your career prospects through this ordeal, but were actually unwittingly taking part in a study?  You will never know.