What's wrong with this picture?

Out of a Father's Day email add from a vendor that sells consumer espresso machines:

This just in: Business slow? Let people touch your cat

Thanks to this news article from the BBC, we now know the real secret to success: Don't just use a stray cat as your new station master: make it your mascot. In fact, don't just make it your mascot - let people "touch her all over the place."

Makes me wonder what is going on off-camera to the left of this picture. . .

Signs

Where have I been for the last week and a half? Well, I spent a few days hanging out with Lance Armstrong.

. . .

Ok, so I didn't actually hang with Lance, but I did see him speak at a conference. Which is where I actually was last week. This week it's back to the regular daily grind of being a road warrior. And thus I bring you these images from my travels:

Every time I see this sign:

I think of this song by Dschinghis Khan. Just thought you might want to know that.

And now a question: How do you spell "ghetto" in Swedish? I'll tell you:

"Home-made ragtop Volvo."

And now for something completely different. A blurry picture:


Had I managed to not do such a craptacular job of taking this photo, you would have been able to count the following: Three motorcycles, and five strapping young men. You do the math. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. . .

And now I bring you Central PA, in all it's holiday weekend traffic glory:

Notice the red lights stretching into the distance. Mind you, this traffic was moving at about 5 mph. We weren't near any big city, and it was off-hours. No accidents or road work, just a few thousand people trying to fit on the same stretch of tarmac on Rt 80 in the middle of nowhere. God, how it makes me wish for a bicycle. . .

My first race is this coming weekend. Of course, I have a raging cold/sinus infection right now. With that, I close. Good luck getting Dschinghis out of your head. Moskau, Moskau. . .

An Ode to DZ

As most cycling fans probably know, Dave Zabriskie crashed horribly in the Giro earlier this week, breaking a vertebrae. In a show of support and respect, I present the first ever Friday Fun Time Haiku:

David Zabriskie:
Time Trial champion.
Hope your back heals soon!

. . .

Okay, that was really lame. Let me try again:

DZ broke his back.
Now he gets some valium.
Hey, think he'll share some?

. . .

Yet again, allow me to revel in my own lack of poetry skill:

You fall, hurt your back.
I cannot write good haiku,
so I better stop.

Hey you!

Hey you! Just because you're driving a Mini Cooper, doesn't mean that you should try recreating The Italian Job. So get off my ass and start driving like a responsible adult!

Hey, where did my puppy go?

Uh oh! I think this Accord must have eaten it:


Okay dude: you can spend thousands on a full body kit - including fender vents and an insane hood with more scoops than a late 90's Impreza. And these aren't the primered bargain basement items you usually see akwardly taped to imports, but rather high quality parts that have actually been carefully painted. You even sprang for LCD screens built in to the headrests and center console. Yet, apparently you liked the stock wheels so much, you left them on . . .

Sungrass! five dorrar!

Last weekend, I discovered that my blatantly generic budget sunglasses were scratched. I might be OK with this, since the glasses came with multiple sets of lenses, except I threw the rest of the lenses away when I bought them. One of the spare sets was so garishly bright orange that it gave me the appearance of a radioactive superhero. I'm sure that if I ever wore those lenses, I'd need to put a special visor over top of them to protect the world from my freakishness. So, no more lenses. There is also the issue that the rubber tips to the earpieces have completely fallen off. These glasses are clearly history.

So I face a dilemma: purchase another pair of cheapy glasses, with the intent of misusing them to destruction? Or, finally step up and buy some real glasses?

I wear glasses when driving, cycling, and running. I'm not exactly a style nut. Spending a fair amount of my cycling time on a tri bike in the aero position means that I value visibility out the top of the glasses, leaving me to consider one-piece lenses with no top frame, a-la Rudy Project Maskeryna.

I've also taken a liking to Julbo's Race series.

Though they have full frames, they appear to have lenses large enough to not block vision. They also seem more sport oriented, while the Maskerynas strike me as a fashion statement. At the very least, the Julba glasses are available with Zebra lenses, which seem pretty spiffy.

At any rate, if anyone actually reads this blog and has sunglass-related expertise, please let me know what you think.

The Ronald Moore Theory

I have occasion to work with a programmer named Ronald Moore. He's brilliant. He's also an arrogant asshole. I know that if something important needs to get done and I bring it to Ronald, two things will happen: 1) He'll yell and swear, and 2) It'll get done: and the end product will be GOOD.

I'm happy to put up with Ronald. It's a colorful break from the otherwise often dull and dreary professional environment I live in. However, people like Ronald represent only a portion of the human population. Based on his two main traits (brilliance and arrogance) and their antipodes (useless and humble), we can classify the entire population into four segments:

1)Arrogant and useless
2)Humble and useless
3)Arrogant and brilliant
4)Humble and brilliant.

The first type are the worst. They're the ones that drag teams down, and dull the results of the people that surround them. They disrupt meetings, promote their own irrelevant agendas, and generally refuse to play by the (constructive) rules. The second type might not contribute in an earth-shattering manner, but at least they're not offensive. And, hey, the world needs people who are good at getting coffee for meetings. The third group, Ronald Moore's group, are somewhat like the second - not ideal, but they're OK. I'm more than happy to live with them. The fourth group: well, I'm not convinced the fourth group really exists. If there are people out there in that group, I'd like to meet them.

Perhaps one day we'll design robots who occupy the fourth group, since us humans seem so bad at it. Then, they can do all our work for us, while padding our fragile egos.