Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2017 Vuelta a España Stage 20

Introduction

If you don’t have the time or inclination to watch the Vuelta a España live, but are tired of typical recaps such as tongue-biting professionals write, perhaps you’ll welcome the opportunity to laugh at an account by an amateur whose cynicism about this supposedly clean sport sometimes creates a bias. Today I give a biased blow-by-blow of the all-important Stage 20 of this Vuelta, which is surely the hardest stage of all and will decide the overall winner ahead of tomorrow’s boring, flat sprinters’ stage.

2017 Vuelta a España Stage 20 – Corvera de Asturias to Alto de l’Angliru

I’m not going to waste your time … we join the action of the final climb of the Vuelta, the Angliru, a 12km monster, beyond category.  Sure, there has been plenty of action already today but it hasn’t amounted to anything.

What you may have missed over the last few days—as I had—are two important developments.  First, in a 40km time trial, race leader Christopher Froome (Team Sky) took a minute out of Vincenzo Nibali (Bahrain-Merida) who sits 2nd overall on GC.  This put Froomestrong, who dopes (yes, he does, anybody can see it) in the overall lead by a seemingly insurmountable 2 minutes. But then, in a subsequent mountain stage, Nibali and the Spanish champ Alberto Contador (Trek-Segafredo) managed to drop Punky Froomester and take like a minute out of him. This almost never happens so I really wish I’d watched.

The result is that, going into today, Froome still has like a minute on Nibali, but now seems on the back foot. Maybe Nibali and Contador will tag-team this so Contador can get a stage win (about all he can hope for, being way back on GC) and Nibali can pull off the GC victory. I for one would love to see it. Not that Contador is clean or anything, but for some reason he’s my favorite doper of the modern era. I guess this is because Contador has style, doesn’t look bad on the bike, and loses a lot. I’m mainly sore at Froome because he’s a ghastly gaunt ungainly guy, and he and his team make the sport boring by being too dominant.

Hmm, it looks like Condator isn’t even in the lead group. So he’s not necessarily going to end his career with a grand tour stage win. Oh well.

Now here’s something interesting. Team Sunweb is working really hard on the front, which duty is normally left for Team Sky. What’s Sunweb’s purpose? The announcer says, “Blah blah blah Kelderman blah blah podium blah blah blah.” It’s hard to hear because I’m on the back patio of a coffee shop with a bunch of people who are having really interesting conversations. It’s also hard to see my screen because it’s a sunny morning. Also, my brother Max is like this incredible magnet who draws all his friends to the table, so I get introduced to each of them in turn. Then I feel I should apologize in advance for being a dick by tuning them out in favor of my laptop. Why do I do this? Why would I rather write this silly report than socialize with cool people? I don’t know. I just can’t help it.

Sunweb actually has several guys on the front. They look pretty badass. This team seemed to bob up out of nowhere this year—I first encountered them in the Giro d’Italia—and I guess I’ll have to read up on them at some point.

Looks like Contador is like 54 seconds behind somebody. Maybe 54 seconds behind the GC group? Or a breakaway? I’m starting to think he’s ahead of the GC group. So, 54 seconds isn’t a ton, with 10km to go, but I’m wondering why nobody is talking about (or showing) Nibali. I mean, he’s the guy who has a chance in the GC. Who cares about a stage win, in this GC-deciding stage?

I was really groggy before and now I’ve had a cup of strong, black coffee. I don’t brew it this strong at home. I’m starting to tremble, and I think I’m at risk of having to run to the loo. I might miss an all-important attack! Maybe I should seek sponsorship from the good folks over at Depends.

All they’re talking about is if Contador can catch up!  Who cares!? He can’t overtake Froome in the GC, so he’s dead to me!

I can see Froome (you could recognize his gawky, poor form from space) tucked in there behind Sunweb and Sky.

Contador is with an Orica-Scott rider, Yates (which of the Yates brothers I don’t know or care) and some guy named Mas. Mas used to have a longer name, but he cut it down to save weight.

You know how modern action and horror movies have that shaky-camera, cinema verité thing going? I’m hoping the lack of detail and precision in this coverage is creating the same effect. Is it working? Are you on the edge of your seat, creeped out by a general sense of bewilderment?

The big Sunweb guy is still forcing the pace. You can see that Froome is struggling because his neck is all bent. I wonder … does his head always dip to the right, or does it sometimes go left? His entire body is rigid. I guess it’s possible that he’s not a doper, but an actual automaton with a hyper-alloy combat chassis, like The Terminator.

I guess they’re just showing the Contador drama because the pace is too high in the lead group for Nibali (or anyone) to attack. The cameramen have probably stopped bothering to check very often because they know how this thing works.

Some Sky guy just took off his jacket and threw it on the road, but my brother, looking over my shoulder, couldn’t see very well and said, “Wait, did he just wipe his ass with a spectator’s flag?” I confirmed this, just to keep him entertained.

I missed a couple of kilometers just now because I got caught up in a conversation. Let me figure out what I missed. Looks like Sky is still on the front, no change. Surprise, surprise. I would just love to see Nibali launch some blistering attack and just obliterate this GC group. Maybe his victory salute would be flipping the bird with both hands, or maybe some cool Italian equivalent of that.

Looks like Contador’s in a small group of guys that is like 40 seconds behind. Actually, wait! I think they’re actually ahead! Probably they were behind some nobody, whom they’ve overhauled and left behind. Look, I’m really sorry for how screwed up this coverage is. I thought it would be fun, that you’d feel like you were watching from a sports bar, but of course that’s absurd.

Nibali’s team has taken up the lead of the GC group. It seems like pedaling hard on the front could never work against Sky, though. Maybe they should take Nibali off the back a bit, and then give him like a full lead-out sprint so that when they come past the front of the group they’re going like twice as fast. And then the domestiques could all crash in the road to create a physical barrier, to slow down the chase. I mean, how is going hard at the front going to soften up Sky? Sky was on the front breaking the wind, and now they’re getting a draft! How does this leading thing help?

Oh no! My feed has frozen! And it was working so well! Maybe Sky management is on to me! Or maybe I’m delusional about anybody, even you, noticing or caring what I have to say!

So Sunweb is chasing to protect Kelderman’s podium spot, apparently. And Contador wants a stage win. And Bahrain-Merida is training for next season by working really hard.

Woah, Contador seems to be dropped! Soler, I think, has dropped him! It’s only 5km to go and Bahrain-Merida is still grinding away on the front. Nibali is doing nothing. He’s just a passenger. He must have used up all his strength earlier in the week. This GC group is small, with Tiger Woods, Poels, Zakarin, Kruijswijk, and some other bike racers. Wait, not Tiger Woods. Just Woods, whoever that is. Mr. Woods.

So Contador has 55 seconds on the GC group , and might even be leading the race. This would be more exciting if I actually knew. I refuse to say he’s dancing on the pedals like the announcer just said. That is so hackneyed. Contador is prancing on the pedals. His feet are spinning beautiful pirouettes. He’s boinging on the bike. He’s pogo-ing. He’s pistoning. He’s pedaling.

Okay, a vaguely familiar tall guy on that one team is attacking the GC group. If this attack comes to anything I’ll figure out who he is.

Contador is just macking it on the front! Let’s just say he is in the lead, and not worry about what happened to Soler. For the ageing champ in his last grand tour to be solo off the front, in his homeland, makes a good narrative and might even be true. In fact, with the doping problem so totally unresolved in this sport, making shit up seems as reasonable as reporting only what is truly believed.

So, here’s what’s happening. Contador is in the lead! It’s not a fairy tale, like the announcer is saying; I mean, that would imply this is just too good to be true.  But is it? I mean, it’s not like Contador never wins. And it’s not like a GC hopeful who has a bad day early and is no longer a GC threat couldn’t just save up some energy and then count on the GC guys to let him go. Is that really too good to be true? No, actually, it’s not uncommon!

Hey, guess what? I just noticed the caption says “Cabeza!” No, that’s not Spanish for “caboose,” it means “head,” as in the beef brains you can get on your burrito at a really authentic taqueria. Mystery solved! This is the head of the race! Contador truly is off the front! It’s a fairy tale romance!

There’s that big guy again! It’s Steven Kruijswijk! Of Lotto NL – Jumbo! This is really exciting as evidenced by all my exclamation points! I almost never use exclamation points unless I’m really excited, or have had too much strong coffee! This is crazy! I’m sweating like a pig! I’m sweating more than these bikers! Man this grade is steep! And Contador is practically weaving!

He’s got 58 seconds and 3.5km to go. Maybe he’ll pull it off. Behind, Kruisjwijk is plowing on, with a somewhat decent lead on the guys behind him. Where is this guy on GC? I can’t remember. I guess he either stands to climb onto the podium for the GC, or fall off it. Maybe he’s trying to take time out of Kelderman? I’m sorry. It’s been a hard week. I probably should have just slept in this morning.

There’s this teammate of Nibali’s who is super strong and has been on the front for ages and ages upon ages. His expression never changes. I think he’s one of these guinea pigs for the new alternative to doping, which is to surgically destroy certain parts of the brain as a way to shut down inhibitory nerve centers. This allows the athlete to literally push past the normal limitations that the brain imposes by prioritizing its own oxygen supply. Note: I totally just made this up and there’s not a scrap of truth to it (that I know of).

It’s under 3km to go and Nibali still hasn’t attacked. His mother and I are really disappointed. If he is the father of a small child, perhaps later today that child will start crying and say, “Daddy, you never win!” That happened to me once. True story.

Wow, the security on this course is terrible. Nobody will get out of Contador’s way. Assuming most of these are Spanish fans, don’t they understand they could ruin the big fairy tale? Is that any tale to tell their grandkids? “Our national hero, Alberto Contador, was on his way to a glorious victory on the hardest mountain stage of his final grand tour, right here on home soil, but I got in his way and he crashed into me and lost. That’s how I got this big scar on my face. Not from the crash, mind you, but the hoodlum fans afterward. I guess I should have stayed out of the way. Tee-hee!”

Kruijswijk is riding really well. I’m still not sure what he’ll have to show for it other than knowing he’s a badass. That must feel really good, thinking, “Those Sky guys are lubed to the gills, but I’m still breaking their legs! Look how fast I’m going! How did I ever get this fast? This is amazing! Outta my way, motherfrockles!”

Krijswijkiny! (To coin a new exclamation.) Look at this crowd!

Uh oh, my brother Max is telling a really funny story and I’m getting distracted! He’s talking about something I actually care about! My concentration is shot!

And now my Internet feed has evaporated! Again! I’m really sorry!

Oh no! One of Froomie’s teammates seems to be dragging him away from the rest of the GC group! It’s curtains for Nibali! I guess he was tilting at windmills all along. How Spanish of him.

Zakarin has dropped Kelderman … I guess he has a shot at the podium now? Remind me not to tune out of the Vuelta for days at a time and then not do my homework before presuming to explain a bike race to you people.

Less than 1km to go, and here’s what the race looks like:

I take it back, it’s 1.2 km to go.

Here’s Froomie’s teammate practically dropping him.

Oh no, Froome is only 30 seconds behind Contador!

Contador is dying! But the road flattens out a bit. I think he’ll be able to hold off Froomestrong.

Froome is clearly not as strong as his teammate. I should really learn this teammate’s name. And forget Froome’s.

And here’s the final moment of drama!

My online correspondent keeps telling me to buy the CBS Sports channel. But that coverage is commentated by a couple of drunken Aussies, always rambling about throwing a couple more shrimp on the barbee. I really like Sean Kelly’s commentary, which consists mainly of saying, “Yes.”

My correspondent says, “No, they’re not drunk … they’ve only had seven beers!” (Full disclosure: I’ve never heard these Aussies and have no credible reason to assume they’re drunks. But they’re not Sean Kelly.)

Hey, look, my feed is back!

Looks like I missed the grand finale. Oh well. Let’s assume that Contador won, and that Nibali didn’t take a minute out of Froome in the last kilometer. Okay, here’s the instant replay.

I give Contador a lot of credit for not doing that stupid “pistolero” victory salute where he pantomimes shooting a handgun. I got really tired of that act back when Contador was winning a lot.

Froome comes in third. He had some help.

His teammate helped too, of course, but by “help” I was of course talking about whatever high-test PEDs seem to enable him to crush everybody despite having all the finesse and grace of a child’s crayon drawing. Of a zombie.

I’m not going to bother with the podiums or interviews or making fun of Juan Antonio Flecha. Let’s just assume he’s wearing a Pepto-Bismol colored shirt and saying, “Contador won because he rode faster, which seems to happen a lot in this sport.”

Note: I will be crowdsourcing the funds needed to buy the CBS channel, or Fubio, or whatever the hell that stupid new extortion network is that has smothered all the good free feeds. Yes, of course I’m joking! I would never ask for money. This blog will always be free, and I hope you appreciate that, even if you get what you pay for.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2017 Vuelta a España Stage 15

Introduction

Why watch the Vuelta a España? Good question. It’s the least prestigious of the grand tours, not even a little brother but more like the Cousin Oliver of the Tour de France. On the other hand, the Tour is usually pretty boring thanks to Chris Froome and his US Postal team. Oops, did I say US Postal? I meant Sky. Same diff. The Vuelta can actually be considerably more exciting than the Tour, particularly when the Tour riders are too tired to dominate.

Well, this year Froome isn’t too tired for anything, and already has the race pretty much locked up. The only hope for a close contest is if something dramatic happens, like he crashes and forgets to bring his bike along when he chases back on. Whatever happens today, I’ll be reporting it candidly, without pulling any punches or leaving any accusation, fair or not, unhurled.

2017 Vuelta a España Stage 15 – Alcala la Real to Sierra Nevada

Common wisdom is that this race’s final summit, Sierra Nevada, is named after the famous mountain range in California. What a typically ignorant assumption. Of course it’s named after the brewery in Chico (slogan: “Marinating college kids’ livers since 1979!).

Today’s route is brutal. It’s only 129 kilometers (80 miles), but goes over the 1st category Alto de Hazallanas, does a long descent, then finishes atop the beyond-category Sierra Nevada. Look:

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Chris Froome won it. There, I said it,” says the Eurosport announcer annoyingly. Look pal, it’s bad enough that the result is practically predetermined … do you have to rub it in?

As I join the action, we’ve got about 70 kilometers to go, or more accurately the racers do. There’s a breakaway a couple minutes of the road. It’s so cute how they pretend they have a chance of staying away! Or perhaps they’re just cynically grabbing some airtime.

This climb is 7km at 15%!  Wow! These guys are just dying, their upper bodies seesawing like crazy, all form just plain gone! There are pitches of over 20% here.

There’s some Cofidis guy leading the race.

He’s somehow suddenly got 1:12 over the shrapnel of the breakaway, which of course has detonated. This is Stéphane Rossetto, who looks pretty good for a guy who’s completely doomed. I hope I look that good when I’m doomed. Of course, maybe I’m doomed already and just don’t know it. Maybe Rossetto doesn’t know it either. Naw, he knows it.

Maybe Rossetto didn’t read the race bible, and thinks this is the final climb? I raced with a guy once who mistook the final prime for the finish, and threw his arms up in the air. Okay, it was me. In my defense, the race organizers didn’t know that you’re not supposed to have a prime on the penultimate lap. Or maybe they read that in the rules but didn’t know what “penultimate” meant. They probably thought it had something to do with Bic.

Back in the peloton, Team Sky is swarming on the front making sure everything stays boring.

The peloton is getting stretched out and frayed and won’t be long for this race. It’s been a brutal Vuelta and I’m sure everybody is tired. Since the coverage is suspended right now for a bunch of ads, I’ll fill you in on what’s been going on. Froome immediately showed his dominance on the first mountain stage, took the leader’s jersey, and has been strangling the race ever since. Nobody else has a chance, so the rest of the peloton is just showing up and collecting their paycheck. The most exciting part so far has been Froome crashing twice the other day. The second crash, on a descent, was weird … I watched it again and again, mystified. What happened? It wasn’t like he overcooked a curve, or hit a patch of something slippery, or anything like that. It looks like he just literally fell off his bike. Really weird. Here’s a snapshot, or you can watch it here (watch from about 21 seconds in).

Froome is pretty far back in the pack right now. He has so many teammates in this group he’s flanked on either side, despite nothing but Sky guys on the front.

The Eurosport commentator thinks Froome doesn’t look so good, on the basis of him standing, then sitting, etc. This means nothing, of course. And Froome looks awful all the time anyway. Now Sean Kelly (the other commentator) points out that Froome is eating a gel. “If you can eat a gel on a climb like this, you can’t be hurting too bad,” he says. He must really hate this other commentator. Perhaps it’s mutual. Or who knows, maybe the first guy deliberately says stupid stuff, just to act like a foil, a straight man.

Oh, I forgot to mention, Alberto Contador (Trek-Segafredo) is riding his last grand tour (possibly his last race?) and has been riding really well, except for one early disastrous day when he supposedly had the flu. So he’s got no prayer in this race other than to put on a good show here and there.

They’re 2.4km from the summit. There’s a chase group with Romain Bardet (AG2R La Mondiale) and Steven Kruijswijk (Lotto NL – Jumbo) and a couple others.

See those two white dots in the middle? That’s how my feed shows me it’s frozen, as if I couldn’t tell.

Bardet had a great Tour de France, but has been nowhere in this Vuelta. How could he, though? How could anybody? How is it that Froome magically has great form? All good questions.

Wow, this road is really narrow, and in really shape. I’d love to ride it somebody, perhaps by myself I can go as slowly as I need to.

Could Tejay van Gardaren (BMC Racing Team) win a stage this year? Well, certainly no GC teams would chase him down. That’s a polite way of saying he’s not in contention. He was, for a while there, until suddenly he wasn’t.

Some guy named Sander Armee (pronounced are-MAY) is leading the climb, having dropped the other breakaway riders. Armee is on Lotto Soudal. I don’t know what happened to Rose or Rosa or Rosie or whatever that other guy was called. Armee must have a really ugly face, because the cameramen refuse to show it. Either that or the motorcycle can’t manage to pass him.

Back in the peloton, Sky still has things well in hand.

Everybody is over the summit now, and then they’ll descend for about 25km (~15 miles) before the final climb, which is a beast of about 28km (~17 miles).

Froome is up toward the front of the peloton for the descent, so that if he inexplicably falls off his bike again, at least he’ll take down some of the other contenders with him. Okay, that was a cheap shot. He’s actually a very good descender. Mostly.

Rossetto has just been passed by the 4-man chase group.

Okay, here’s a head-shot of Armee. Turns out he’s a real looker.

The other two in the chase group are Nelson Oliveira (Movistar Team) and Adam Yates (Orica-Scott). Not that it matters. The peloton isn’t far behind these guys and on the final climb, when the GC guys hit the gas, that gap will vanish.

So, I’m keeping a close eye on Vincenzo Nibali (Bahrain-Merida). He skipped the Tour de France this year, after failing to win the Giro d’Italia, so in theory he should be fresher than Froomestrong. Nibali sits second on the GC, just 55 seconds behind. Nobody else has a prayer. Nibali did outsprint Froome for third recently, picking up a 4-second time bonus.

Astana has been on the front a fair bit today, which is kind of weird. Their highest-placed guy, Fabio Aru, is down in sixth, over 3 minutes down. So I guess their strategy is to wear down Team Sky, including Froome, so they can launch Aru on the final climb and he can take like 4 minutes? Good luck with that, guys.

The chase group have hit the final climb and now they saw off Oliveira and Rossetto. They’re bearing down on Armee. He’s got 30km to go, all of it uphill.

The racers are about 20 minutes ahead of schedule. Kelly says it’s because the breakaway took so long to form. I think it’s because the producer of the coverage has a party to get to or something, and gave strict orders to wrap up early. It’s like that pro wrestling match where the producer needed to be somewhere, gave the command, and the winning wrestler didn’t even bother to take off his jacket before getting into the ring. What, you’ve never watched pro wrestling? Don’t give me that.

It’s still Astana on the front. I really don’t get that.

And now the chasers have reeled in Armee.

Kruijswijk is looking really good in the breakaway. I am totally going to use his name next time I play Hangman. You know who used to be really good at Hangman? My kids. I could never guess their words when they were younger, because they couldn’t spell. It’s really hard to guess a misspelled word. Now they can spell better and have lost their edge.

Armee has blown and is going backwards. So has one of the Astana guys who pointlessly did so much work earlier. There’s probably a story behind that. “Chernetski, I don’t like you,” directeur sportif Alexandre Vinokourov must have said before the race. “I want you on the front today, setting the tempo until you blow. Do it or you’re fired.”

Contador attacks!

Miguel Angel Lopez (Astana) is with him! It’s an all-or-nothing Hail Mary type move! Of course it’s doomed, but I love the idea of a bold move like the days of yore before race radios turned the sport into Moneyball.

At the front, Bardet and Yates have dropped the other two.

So, Lopez is 3:48 down on GC, in 10th. Who knows, maybe Astana has been working on the front to set him up (not Aru). But Sky doesn’t look rattled and they’ve still got plenty of guys.

Yates has now dropped Bardet. I guess he sees no point in having a breakaway companion, since the whole rest of the stage is uphill and there probably isn’t that much benefit from drafting. Besides, Yates must figure this is a shot in the dark anyway, with only a couple of minutes on the peloton and 25km more to race.

The peloton has under 30 riders in it, and five of them are Sky. No other team is this well represented, as usual.

Did you know that when Will Smith played Muhammad Ali, he had his ears pinned so they wouldn’t stick out so much? Maybe they could do that with Froome’s elbows. Just a suggestion.

Lopez and Contador are 45 seconds behind Yates. “He’s suffering majorly,” Kelly says of—who? Yates, Lopez, or Contador? But does it matter? Kelly says this about everybody. It’s just filler. It would be fun to be at a dinner party with Kelly. Asked a difficult question by his mother-in-law, he’d say, “He’s suffering majorly,” just to buy some time, before answering her actual question: “I can’t remember for sure but I think we have a Roth IRA.”

Contador and Lopez catch Bardet. He looks pretty blown, but manages to latch on. And now the peloton is catching up to Armee.

Yates is doing really well, having increased his lead to 50 seconds. Maybe he has a side bet going with somebody about how long he can stay in the lead. Maybe side bets are how these non-Sky riders motivate themselves given that all traditional goals are hopeless to achieve.

Bardet is now leading Contador and Lopez. Who knows, maybe he sat up a bit after Yates dropped him, so he’d have somebody to work with. Perhaps Yates is an introvert and Bardet is an extrovert. I’ll bet that’s it.

So:  Yates is riding a Scott bicycle, and in my last race I also rode a Scott bicycle. Coincidence? Yes.

After a commercial intermission, Yates’s lead has gone up to 1:05. Pretty impressive, really.

Perhaps Lopez is just getting ready to set up Aru later. It doesn’t look like the long-bomb move is going to achieve a whole lot, because the gap to the GC group is not really going up much. Lopez is virtually ahead of Aru on GC at the moment, but Aru is the team leader. I’d rather see Lopez do well today, myself. That’s because Aru is basically wearing tube socks, which is a fashion trend I’m really getting sick of. And anyone who beats the odds by depriving Froome of a stage win on a mountaintop finish is a hero to me.

Contador, Lopez, and Bardet have caught Kruijswijk.

The GC group is down to about 20 riders, and Sky still has 4.

Nibali attacks!

With 12km to go, he better have good legs. I would love to see Nibali spank Froome, frankly, ever since that 2015 Tour stage when Nibali soloed to victory and Froome cried foul like a little bitch.

Wow, Yates’s lead is up to 1:17.

Nibali has 20 seconds on the Froome group. Of course, whatever time he might manage to take today won’t guarantee him anything … there’s a 40km time trial coming, which clearly favors Froome who is an eerily fast time trialist.

Well, in the time I took to type that, Nibali got caught by the GC group. Man, what a waste of keystrokes.

Yates is still looking really good, and with 10km to go, maybe he’s got a chance!

Man, what an animal! Yates is climbing this bad boy in the big ring!

Froome looks as bad as ever.

With 8km to go, Yates’s lead is starting to drop. He’s at just over a minute now (on the chase group) and he looks a bit saggy. Perhaps if the four chasers catch him, Contador can get a stage win. That would be a nice consolation prize since his GC hopes were dashed so early.

Thomas de Gendt (Lotto Soudal) is somewhere between groups, having attacked yet again. I haven’t reported on it thus far because he tries to solo in every race he does and it never comes to anything. Why does he do it? Nobody knows. At least, no spectator knows. Maybe the other racers know. Maybe they tease him and he can’t stand to be in their company.

Lopez is really driving the pace of the chase group. The gap is down to 57 seconds. And suddenly Kruijswijk has been shelled! Both Contador and Bardet are out of the saddle to keep up with Lopez! Now they settle in.

And Lopez goes again and drops Contador, then Bardet!

Contador and Bardet regroup. Man, Lopez is gone! He just straight-up vacated! I don’t think there’s any question of him catching Yates now.

Sure enough, the gap to Yates is down to 33 seconds. Lopez looks really, really strong. I’m not sure how much leash the GC group will give him, but he could move into the top 5 on GC at this rate. I guess everything could change if a GC contender (say, Nibali) actually attacked Froome, I mean for real, none of this silly testing-the-waters stuff, but that’s almost impossible in the modern era, as we all know.

Lopez is only 11 seconds behind Yates. And he’s macking it! And just like that, he’s got him.

Man, he closed that gap like nothing! But Yates has jumped right on … maybe he was saving something up there.

Oh, man. I sure got that wrong. Yates detonates!

Uh oh. Yates isn’t the only one having problems.

Looks like I’ll have to settle for a Spanish-language feed from here on out. And a spotty one at that. It freezes constantly.

With under 3km to go, Lopez has 57 seconds on … well, could be the chasers, or the peloton. I can’t tell. Okay, looks like the chase group got caught. So now it’s Lopez off the front, and Ilnur Zakarin (Katusha Alpecin) has attacked ahead of the GC group.

Wow, Zakarin is really motoring! I guess he is looking to increase or protect his GC position.

Contador has been dropped from the GC group. Wow, Aru is getting dropped, too!

Lopez is on the final switchback! And he’s got the win!

Zakarin crosses the line 35 seconds behind. Maybe with this he will make into the top 3 on GC.

The GC group, in tatters, blathers over the line. Can a group blather? Yes, though I guess you’ll have to take my word for it. No, they weren’t talking. But it was a blather. Straight-up blather.

“It was a big day, and lived up to its billing, don’t you think?” the other announcer asks Kelly. “Yes, well, it was a big day, but [because Sky is too dominant, it was actually totally fricking boring],” Kelly replies. No, that’s not verbatim but you get the gist.

Why do I watch this sport? It’s pretty futile hoping something unexpected will happen. It’s always the same … either Froome wins the stage outright, or Sky lets some GC no-hoper have a bit of stage glory while locking down the group of contenders to make sure Froome has no problem hanging on to the GC lead. About the most I could really hope for is a freak accident that disrupts the essentially fated outcome.

It’s kind of like how, back when I got the newspaper, I’d read all the comics, even the really stupid ones like “Family Circus.” I knew it was pointless, that I was just wasting my time, but somehow I held out hope that one day, one of these comics would actually be funny. And they never were. At least the grand tours have a bit better track record; after all, this year’s Giro was actually quite exciting, particularly because the race lead changed hands due to a mid-race toilet emergency. We were all on pins and needles wondering if Dumoulin could make up the minute or so he lost trying to take a dump. Maybe somebody needs to slip Team Sky some powerful laxatives at some point. Maybe then we’d have a real bike race.

Well, they’re interviewing Juan Antonio Flecha now, so I’ve officially lost my patience. You know what, Vuelta a España? Just shove it.

Okay, I guess I’ll sit through Lopez’s interview. “My team was amazing. The route was really hard. I am happy.” Funny… he sure doesn’t look happy. Maybe that’s because he’s just realized how totally hackneyed his interview responses have been. “What would my speech teacher say?” he might be thinking. “I’m a total failure as a public speaker!”

Here is the stage result.

And here’s the new GC. Sure enough, Zakarin has made the (virtual) podium.

If Froomie doesn’t dominate Tuesday’s time trial too badly, I might be back to cover the final mountain stage, up the Angliru, on September 9. So stay tuned. Or not. Whatever.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - My New College Apartment

Introduction

Well, it’s back-to-school time, and nowhere is that more exciting than in a college town. I rode my bike through the Berkeley campus recently to enjoy the secondhand tension and giddiness of the new kids milling around. In their honor, I’m running this piece from my archives about moving into my new apartment, and getting to know my new roommate, at the dawn of my sophomore year at UC Santa Barbara.

Enjoy please enjoy.

Moving in to my college apartment – September 21, 1989

We’re all moved in here, pretty much. We’ve had a hell of a time trying to get furniture. The manager is always ready to talk our ears off, but never seems to get anything done. We had a big mix-up when T— arrived: seems the manager thought that my brother Geoff was our third person, because he happened to be hanging around when she came by. So when T— showed up, she tried to get rid of him. What a mess. I’m working really hard to believe that the manager isn’t just being racist (i.e. maybe she wouldn’t have rented to T— if she’d known he’s black). Maybe she thinks Geoff was planted as a ruse. I still can’t convince the manager that Geoff doesn’t have a set of house keys.

I got my new roommate at random. I was in the housing office trying to find an apartment for T— and me, and absolutely couldn’t find a place the two of us could afford on our own. Last year we had three guys in a one-bedroom and it didn’t work out so well, though that was mainly because the third guy was a jerk. Still, we wanted a bit more space ... but I finally gave up. Thus the third roommate I now had to produce out of thin air.

I have to admit, it makes me feel like something less than a social success to be in this position. All my friends from last year met their future roommates in the dorms. The dorms were like the perfect dry run. Not having lived in the dorms, I didn’t have this option, and I couldn’t predict if any of my pals would make a good roommate. Besides, if you consider the odds of growing to hate your roommate, it’s best to pick a mere acquaintance; that way you don’t risk ruining a friendship.

And why didn’t I live in the dorms? Too pricey. Even the bottom-of-the-barrel, very cheapest off-campus dorm, called Fontainebleau, cost too much (though I actually came within one signature of committing to it before chickening out). It was $4,500 for nine months and I was afraid to ask my parents for that kind of money.  (Not afraid they’d say no, which is a certainty, but that they’d be disgusted with me for even asking.)

Not that I’m bitter about missing the dorm experience. For $4,500 you live in a closet (albeit a closet with two beds and two desks) and eat recycled food. My freshman friends last year waxed eloquent on this point. The unused French toast from breakfast is repurposed for grilled cheese sandwiches at lunch. Quiche from today’s lunch is tomorrow’s soufflé (which, in dorm kitchen parlance, means any unidentifiable food that is covered with a fresh layer of cheese and re-baked). Most students like dorm food at first, because it’s not the whole wheat, lentils, alfalfa sprouts, and ground turkey they had to eat at home; refined flour and fat at first seem like luxuries. This gets old, so soon the students are merely tolerating their dorm food; then they start complaining; then they subsist on microwave popcorn and Pop-Tarts for the rest of the school year. Me, I gotta have my own kitchen, even if it’s infested with roaches.

My new roommate is really strange. He’s the result of my settling for almost the first guy I could find hanging around the Community Housing Office. It was my third visit there and I was desperate, and grabbed this greasy, puffy, nerdy guy and said, “Dude, you can be my roommate. It’s the Penthouse apartments on Abrego. Come sign the lease.” The guy looked really hesitant, and just stood there humming and hawing and mumbling stupid things like “Um, I don’t really know you,” until I was ready to punch him in the face. Standing nearby watching, looking amused, was this really thin, pale guy with a huge curly sphere of hair ensconcing his head. He was like this giant photo-negative dandelion. He walked up and said, “Hey, I’ll be your roommate.” Now the first guy looked torn, but I wasn’t about to give him a second chance—he was dead to me. The second guy, my new roommate, is named C—. I instantly took a liking to him, and this liking has grown over time.

C— is an art studio major, and he doesn’t own anything. I mean, he literally has no belongings other than a big Glad bag full of his clothes. His wardrobe is about the size of my “unwearable” collection (which I stuffed into a Huggies box that serves as a table for my typewriter). Among his garments there’s not a shred of cotton anywhere. I think he’s trying for the “starving artist” look. I can’t quite place the fabric ... all weird shades, stripes, or plaids, some of them having a weird shiny sheen to them. Maybe they’re the same material as those original Star Trek uniforms. I checked the labels: lots of Rayon and Polyester. Actually, cotton is represented, but only as a part of a complex hybrid involving at least two other fabrics. C—’s attire is sort of like what a real bona-fide grownup would wear if he couldn’t afford new clothes. Wait … could these threads be hand-me-downs from his dad? No, couldn’t be that, because come to think of it, these clothes actually look a fair bit more stylish than what forty-somethings would ever wear. Could it be that C—’s wardrobe is actually cool? Hell, I don’t know. (I mean, how would I know?)

I had to ask C— where he got his weird boots. He said he got them from some old man and before he could wear them he had to pull out these funky inserts that were supposed to fix up the old man’s back. Those boots look like something out of an ancient still life oil painting, maybe of the Georgia O’Keefe vintage. I guess that fits: an art studio major ought to look like he came right out of some weird painting. C— always wears a pair of jeans with paint spattered all over them. He calls them “work pants.” Except that all his pants look like that and I don’t think he ever works. I mean, I guess he works in the sense that painting pictures is work, but it seems like he’s having too much fun to think of it that way. He likes to say, “I’m gonna head over to the studio and put the hammer down.” But he says this in a laughing way that implies “as if.”

The thing is, C— could probably afford a lot fancier duds if he wanted to—he might just have to cook once in a while instead of eating out every meal. Okay, I’ll give him a little credit: he went to Lucky’s the other day for a major shopping trip. Here’s what he bought, taken right from the receipt: “deli, chnk tuna, Campl soup, clam chowder, boysen prsvs, clam chowder, ll pnut btr, salami, mayonnaise, whp crm chs, tomato soup, bn/bac soup, mex salsa ml, campl soup, salami, olym rnd tp, kleenex, lettuce, non food, coke clas 6p, dr pepper.” I’m not sure what “olym rnd tp” is … I think it’s bread. And I know what the “non food” is: Velveeta.

The Penthouse Apartments are much nicer than La Loma, where I lived last year. I will confess that La Loma had one advantage, at least on paper: it had a pool. That said, I never so much as dipped a toe in that pool because on my first day I saw the neighbors giving their dog a bath in it. I don’t know why this bothered me so much; I guess I just wondered what else that pool was used for. It’s also the case that I never saw a single tenant swim in it ... what did these people know? My roommates steered clear too, other than one of them throwing up in it one night.

So, the Penthouse Apartments look pretty sharp, with their crisp blue doors against the white exterior walls. La Loma was this uniform ghastly green.  Also, the Penthouse has regular college-aged neighbors, instead of the blue-collar guys from last year, packed like ten to an apartment, who seemed to despise all college kids. Not that everybody here is a UCSB student. It turns out the guys next to us in #23 aren’t really college students per se—they’re all here for the English Extension program. One guy is Swiss, another Japanese, and the third Korean.

The Korean, A—, is really strange. He just cruises right into our apartment like he owns the place, and talks our ears off while picking up and inspecting all our belongings. On the plus side, he’s also very generous, feeding us tasty Korean dishes his mom somehow mails to him. (Freeze-dried, perhaps?) He also offers us free cigarettes, which we decline, and various Kent-branded chotchkies (pens, lighters, keychains) from his dad, who manages the Kent affiliate in Korea. A—’s English is surprisingly good, considering that he’s only been in the U.S. for eleven days. He complains that he doesn’t get along with his roommates very well. Apparently the Japanese guy hardly speaks a word of English, and the Swiss guy only speaks German—that’s all he needs, because he always has at least half a dozen other Swiss guys couch-surfing in the apartment and “borrowing” A—’s stuff.

Whoever it was at the housing office who thought it would be cute to put these guys together sure wasn’t thinking very clearly. As if it weren’t hard enough for a foreigner to adjust to a new country, each of these guys has to cope with three distinct cultures, all squeezed into that tiny space. Shouldn’t these people live with Americans so that they can learn the language the way we speak it? As it is, they’ll all probably reinforce each other’s mistakes. I guess it could be worse: they could be sharing a tiny apartment in La Loma.

Of course, the Penthouse isn’t without its problems. The door jamb is broken so we can’t lock the front door, and the “porch” light outside is full of water. The chandelier/fan unit in the kitchen hung too low, and I would always bump my head on it, so I finally got pissed and took the whole thing apart, and at least half a cup of orange water poured out. Good thing this was before we tried turning it on. After removing the lamp part for head clearance, we were left with these hanging wires, and theorized that when the maintenance guy, Calvin, would try to rewire the light next year he’d have to use trial and error, and could end up knocking out power for all of Isla Vista. So T—, being the electrical engineering major that he is, enclosed a schematic of the wiring before putting the thing back together.

The bathroom is really not this apartment’s best feature. Due to routine flooding I should probably invest in waterproof shoes. Check out the neat pattern on the sink tile. You know what that is? It’s human hair! Left over from last year’s tenants! Preserved, like a fossil, or a scorpion’s skeleton encased in amber! I think it’s actually set in epoxy; I’ve scoured and scoured but I can’t get rid of it. But now that I’m satisfied that this hair wont’ interact with me or any of my toiletries, I kind of like it.  It looks kind of cool! It could actually be decades old!

I’m not so happy about the sink itself. They gave us this little rubber plug that we have to shove in there whenever we run the water, whether we’re filling the sink or not, because otherwise the bathroom fills with this terrible raw sewage smell.

The toilet pretty much works, though it does slobber a little and of course overflows from time to time.  But a real bonus is that the seat isn’t cracked. You literally cannot cut your bottom on it. It is also attached pretty well; it doesn’t slide around like so many cheap apartment toilet seats.

Now, we’re not so lucky with the shower and tub. The lag time on the shower is devastating. You get the water temperature just right, then engage the shower head, and everything’s fine, and then suddenly the water is coming out scalding hot, it’s just blanching your flesh and you grope desperately with the controls to cool the water before all the skin melts off your body. And nothing changes, at least at first, and then suddenly it’s liquid nitrogen spraying on you, and you have to hold still lest you bump into the wall of the shower and have your arm shatter like glass. You go back and forth between boiling and freezing until you’re too scared to continue and just decide your shower is over. Now you find yourself standing in four inches of dirty, sudsy water, which forms grey rings around your ankles. The drain at this point is making sounds like a fat kid choking on a piece of chicken skin, fighting for air.

This bathtub drain seems to have a more or less infinite amount of human hair trapped in it from probably every past student ever to live here. Every morning I go at that drain with the plunger, and the drain vomits up another big clump. See that thing that looks like a rat? It’s just a big clump of hair! I haven’t thrown it out because I’m kind of hoping my roommates will step up and do it, in the spirit of fairness, since I’m the only one who ever plunges. I’ll admit that I’m actually just too scared to throw out the hairball ... I mean, what if I it turned out it was a rat?

But things are coming along. We’ve actually managed to score furniture. None of us owns any furniture at all, and in fact most UCSB students don’t own any furniture, but the landlords play this stupid little game where they pretend the place comes unfurnished. I guess they don’t have enough furniture to go around, so getting anything is like horse trading. Except we have nothing to trade, we just have to beg. Now the apartment is finally equipped: two desks (but no dressers), five chairs (two ripped; all heinous blue-green vinyl), three beds (none of them capable of being stacked as bunk beds, so they take up most of the single bedroom), and yes, the pride and joy of our furniture fleet: a sofa. That was really hard to get ... almost nobody gets a sofa just by asking. But the manager finally took pity on us when she saw T— sprawled out on the coffee table after eating too much. I’ll have to remember that as a tactic for next year!

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

ECLIPSE 2017, BAYBEE!

Introduction

Oh, shit! I’ve only got an hour and a half to write about the big eclipse! If you missed it yourself, maybe I can help give you a sense of what it was like. And if you saw it in person, clearly you love a solar eclipse and this post is for you, too.

Total solar eclipse of Aug 21, 2017

I witnessed the eclipse from the Bay Area, or to be precise my house at 37.8851 latitude, -122.27531 longitude. (Well, that’s precise enough to give you the idea, without helping you burglarize my house.) Of course I could have found a better locale, but to be honest I put off my eclipse planning until the morning of. Local options, according to a helpful website, included Indian Rock Park, UC Berkeley, Civic Center park, the public library, and the Chabot Space & Science Center. Most of these recommendations centered around who else would be there (e.g., “There are sure to be gaggles of smart Cal students viewing the solar eclipse around campus”). While I can appreciate this—after all, the most fun part for me about touring Amsterdam’s Red Light District wasn’t watching the sad, ragged prostitutes but rather the Oklahoma hayseeds ogling them—astronomy really is more of a solitary activity, don’t you think?

Part of my decision came down to weather, of course. I wasn’t about to drag my family up to the Chabot Space & Science Center if the Berkeley hills were blanketed by fog, so at dawn I did a little recon of the area, by bicycle. (Full disclosure: I’d have ridden up there anyway.) Here’s what I found:

Dang it! I decided to avoid any kind of hassle and just watch from home. My hopes weren’t entirely dashed, though, as the forecast was for the fog to burn off by 10 a.m., with the eclipse starting at 10:15. It was going to be close.

At 10 sharp, with the sky still a uniform grey, I decided to wake up my kids. (Yeah, that kind of teenager, that kind of summer.) I made like this was gonna be epic. My younger daughter grabbed her camera. We headed out back. I’d set a timer to count down until 10:15, without telling my kids the inconvenient truth that they’d probably already missed a lot of it. To be honest, I was a little vague about the details myself. I knew I was supposed to get some kind of special viewing goggles, so that we could see a progressively larger bite being taken out of the sun before things got dark, but I never got around to procuring them. My wife was similarly useless.

Speaking of my wife, I’ll confess I have no idea where she even was for the eclipse. It’s possible she didn’t know what time or even day it was to transpire. She’s not a giant astronomy fan. Back in like ‘97 we were vacationing at Canyonlands National Park and my dad joined us. We went to this very remote place, far away from any lights or people, and my dad set up his telescope. For the next 2 or 3 hours (or so it felt) he gave us an astronomy lesson. I’m not a great lover of this subject myself; the only constellations I can make out are  the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt. My interest waned, at a very young age, after I found out my brother Max had lied to me about the Big Dipper. He said that meteorologists can predict rain based on whether the Dipper is right-side-up or upside-down. This seemed so incredibly useful that I couldn’t take the truth later. Plus, to a simple guy like me, the constellations seem like such bullshit. It takes so much imagination for this or that collection of stars to resemble something, you might as well just make it up from scratch. “There’s the Devil’s Skateboard over there, you see, and if you follow that line of stars up—there, you see that cluster there? That’s Dracula’s Harelip.”

So anyhow, my dad’s lesson was losing me entirely, I was suffering from museum knees, and then my wife heard a noise and turned on a flashlight to make a quick scan around us.  “Thanks a lot,” my dad chided, “you just ruined astronomy.” (The flashlight beam had spoiled our night vision, you see.) I’ll never let my wife live this down. If she ever suffers a setback I say, “Well, you are the woman who ruined astronomy.”

It’s tempting to say our poor eclipse preparations were a result of my intimidation in the face of science types, or my wife’s emotional scars from the Canyonlands episode, but the truth is, we’re just kind of disorganized. This poor parenting is particularly flagrant considering how well my dad had risen to the occasion for my last solar eclipse, which was in February 1979 and which I witnessed from my hometown of Boulder, Colorado. My dad, who was an actual rocket scientist, had equipped my brother Max and me with these cool little flat rectangles of smoked glass. If we stacked the two of them together, we could look right at the eclipse. This might not seem like a big deal in this modern day and age where everybody and her mom gets special eclipse glasses, but in those benighted days nobody had this. We were all just supposed to go outside and prance around and be excited until the darkness came.

And that’s what my less fortunate classmates were doing (the whole elementary school was let outside for this, and it was a brilliant sunny day) when they spied Max and me taking in the action and uttering spontaneous wow-cool noises. They crowded around and begged us to let them have a turn with our little glass pieces. This was unprecedented. I mean, sure, kids gathered around us on the playground all the time, but only to shout insults, pummel us, witness us being pummeled, and so on. They never gave us anything approaching friendly interest.

(You might think I’m exaggerating. I encountered a Bay Area native recently who has always thought of Boulder as a dreamy, hippie, flowery place where everybody is sweet and good and nice. I assure you that Boulder in the ‘70s was nothing of the kind. Schoolyard bullying was entirely tolerated and the place was full of vicious little bastards. Believe me.)

So this benign attention from my classmates was novel. Kids were actually saying “please” to me. And so, after I’d had my fill of the spectacle of the sun looking a bit like a progressively less full moon, I relented and allowed my friends a try. “Now here’s the thing,” I cautioned, “you can’t put one lens over each eye. You have to stack the little glass lenses together and look through the pair with just one eye.” (Actually, however I put it was surely less articulate than that.) I went on, “If you look through just one of them, you’ll be blinded!” My dad had driven this message home to Max and me, and we weren’t even tempted to push our luck. But my friends ignored this warning completely and put one lens over each eye.

“Man alive, that’s AMAZING!” they cried. Now they were set upon by the other kids, and of course my friends (all two of them) let their friends have a try, and they let their friends, or at least the more popular kids they wanted to curry favor with, and pretty soon half the school was getting a turn. I kind of wanted my lenses back, but the more pressing matter was that every single kid was doing it wrong, holding one lens up to each eye, so I knew the whole lot of them were going to go blind and it was all my fault. I could have yelled, “Stop it, you fools, you’ll go blind!” but I was just too shy.

Finally, some even quieter kid (who had probably been waiting in vain for a turn) said, “Isn’t everybody going to go blind?” I shrugged and said, “Yeah, I guess.” This kid went running off to get the Principal, who came running out, horrified, and confiscated Max’s and my lenses. He eventually gave them back but on the condition that we only blind ourselves with them since we had our parents’ permission to do so. Ah, those were the days.

But Max and I only got the basic eclipse gear… for our older brothers, Dad did something even cooler. He built this thingy that would attach to the non-eyepiece end of a telescope to turn it into a projector. Little wooden rods a few feet long attached to a white disk onto which an image of the eclipse would be projected. I don’t suppose this is actually a miracle of engineering, as I’ve just looked online and found similar (though frankly less elegant) versions depicted. But back then, nobody ever took initiative like this. Boulder dads were smart, I guess, but in my experience they were either absentminded professor types always puttering in the lab, or granola-loving hikers wandering around on trails, or the generic grunting type of dad who seemed to always be watching the Bronco or Buffs game. These men didn’t send their kids to school with a precious telescope, tripod, and handmade thingy to worry about breaking.

And so my older brothers, Geoff and Bryan, were even bigger heroes than Max and I were. The whole fricking junior high crowded around them as they assembled the amazing eclipse-viewing apparatus, and everybody oohed and aahed at the sight of that bitten-into sun. In fact, one teacher was overheard telling her colleague, “I heard Dr. Albert is an honest-to-god rocket scientist, plus he’s tall and has broad shoulders. I would sleep with him in a heartbeat.” I might be exaggerating a bit here, because a) I wasn’t actually there, this being at my brothers’ school, and b) I totally made that up. But it could have happened.

The newspaper showed up, and my brothers with their telescope apparatus made the front page—big photo, story, the whole bit!  The reporter spelled both their names wrong … I mean, he wasn’t even close. It was like “Brien and Gorrlfley,” almost like he deliberately got them wrong out of spite, or so it seemed to me back then.

Getting back to 2017, and this recent eclipse: when my timer chimed, indicating the official start of the totality, I yelled, “Kids, it has begun!” I tried to get them to prance around joyfully but they seemed a bit disappointed in the reality of the spectacle. At this point, special eclipse goggles would have been useless. What would we have even looked at? From across the fence I heard my neighbor yell, “Where’s the sun?”

Now, don’t think I didn’t bring any gear to the event. I did have my camera and made a movie. Look, here it is!

My favorite part of the eclipse was when my neighbor called out over the fence, “Dana, I’m so glad to have shared this profound experience with you.”

But the eclipse wasn’t over yet! I ran inside and called my brother Bryan. He was witnessing amazing things even as we spoke, having taken his lucky family on a long road trip to Culver, Oregon, near Bend (i.e., in the middle of nowhere). I tried to find Culver on Google Maps. “It’s near this hippie commune called Madras,” Bryan explained unhelpfully. Here’s the map.

Bryan was so excited. “Dude, did you see the Bailey’s Beads?” he asked. “Did you see the Diamond Ring?” I’d never heard of either of these phenomena in my life, but I confidently answered, “We did not.” He hadn’t either, somehow, despite everything else being perfect.

“It wasn’t pitch dark,” he said breathlessly, “but we could feel it getting colder. The streetlights came on. We could see planets, but not stars. We were supposed to see these snake-y shadow things, like snakes slithering over the ground. Maybe the hippies up in Madras could see those. It was so, so unbelievably cool. The shadow moves at 4,000 mph across the ground. We could see this mountain range in the distance that wasn’t dark yet.”

I asked about this thing only lasting for two minutes. That really didn’t match my memory of it. “No, it’s the total darkness that lasts for two minutes [you fricking moron],” he said. “The bite being gradually taken out of the sun takes like” (what did he say, an hour? two hours?). “I’m still watching the sun come back out from behind it, even as we speak [you ignorant fool]!”

I asked if he had protective goggles. “Yeah, stupid protective goggles!” he said. “They’re so lame, they’ve got these warnings all over them, across every printable surface, warning how dangerous this endeavor is, saying it every way they can think of, saying ‘Do not look for more than 3 minutes.’ Why not? I’m gonna look for an hour and then write them a letter!”

Here are a few of my nieces rocking their über-cool eclipse goggles:

I bemoaned my lost opportunity to travel to a good eclipse-viewing spot where I could inculcate in my offspring the majesty of the celestial heavens. “Well, there are lots of lunar eclipses you could watch with them,” Bryan offered. I made the mistake of admitting that I’m not real clear on what a lunar eclipse even is. He started to explain it, and I felt like a kid again. A stupid kid.

“You see, the Earth rotates around the sun on one plane. The moon rotates around the earth in a slightly different plane. When these line up you get an eclipse. So there’s the shadow of the moon that’s smaller than the earth, so it crosses over the humina humina humina and then there’s this arctangent and blah blah blah penumbra, and then over here you’ve got your lunar orbital plane 5.1 degrees from the ecliptic, and then [unintelligible], and you are getting very sleepy, keep your eyes on the swinging watch, you are going down, down, down….”

Suddenly my neck jerked. “Hello, hello, hello?” Bryan was asking. “Sorry, I was talking to Mute,” I said sheepishly. “So … tell me about your road trip. Tell me about the venue. [Tell me something I can grasp.]”

“Dude, so, you need to get signed up on Twitter, because NASA has some really cool stuff. I’ve seen countless lunar eclipses because I’ve been on guard for them,” Bryan said, apparently in earnest. So if there’s anything I’ve learned from this eclipse, it’s that there are even nerdier people in this world than I.

“[Enough with the lunar eclipse!] So tell me about your road trip,” I persisted. “Tell me about Culver.”

“Oh yeah! So we got here at like 3 a.m. No problem parking. Biggest issue is that the town didn’t really prep for the eclipse crowd. Fortunately there are 3 San-O-lets left over from the crawdad festival (kinda bummed I missed that), but they were totally overflowing, each with this mountain of crap almost up to the hole, and no toilet paper of course. That was pretty gross. On the plus side, the mayor came through with all these pans of cornbread, also left over from the crawdad festival, which she was trying to get people to take. We ended up accepting a 20x30-inch pan of cornbread which we ate with chili. It wasn’t bad. Apparently here in Oregon they believe that incarcerated people should work, so the cornbread was baked by prisoners.”

 “So you found all these files baked into it?” I asked. He replied, “Yeah, and wads of spit too. But good.”

That’s almost my entire story of the big eclipse. But then there was this sad epilogue yesterday evening. My older daughter was sitting at the computer looking really glum. My wife was concerned and trying to draw her out, to figure out the problem. College prep worries? A falling out with a friend? My wife was getting nowhere.

Finally I said, half-jokingly, “Is it the eclipse?” My daughter almost smiled. “It is, actually,” she said. She was touring the Internet reading about the eclipse and came across Randall Munroe’s xkcd cartoon about it. If you hover your mouse over the cartoon you get an extra caption: “It was—without exaggeration—the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” Munroe is to my daughter what Justin Bieber is to most teenage girls, so this was a profound statement. It was dawning on my daughter just how much she’d missed out on by having a deadbeat, incurious, non-science-obsessed dad.

I had to make it up to her. So we looked up the next big eclipse, which hits Texas in 2024. We studied the eclipse path online. It goes right through Austin, a city I’ve always wanted to visit. “Look,” I told her, “your Uncle Peter raced on the national team with Lance Armstrong. Surely Lance will remember him. Lance has a place in Austin. A big ol’ ranch, I’ll bet. I’ll send a few e-mails, call in some favors, and get us invited.  I’m getting such an early start … surely this can be arranged. So. Count on it. You, me, Lance … ECLIPSE 2024, BAYBEE!”

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.