we just won't be defeated

dopes

in a few weeks a new champion will be crowned in europe, and it ain't gonna be no pansy soccer player.  and all of a sudden the field is wide open.  the first tour de france of the "post-lance" era is set to begin tomorrow, and it's anybody's game.  well... almost anybody's.  included among about 20 cyclists in a spanish blood-doping investigation are pre-race favorites ivan basso, jan ullrich, francesco mancebo, and alexander vinokourov won't have a shot.  floyd landis, levi leipheimer, and george hincapie have to be doing cartwheels right about now.

of all, i feel bad for vinokourov.  he left t-mobile after last year's tour tired of being in ullrich's shadow and joined one that apparently promotes "...a system of team doping."  even though he wasn't implicated in the investigation, several of his new teammates were.  teams are required to field at least six cyclists to be eligible, and after five cyclists from astana-wurth were named today, they have only five eligible to ride.  maybe vinokourov was doping too.  i don't know.  but he wasn't named, and he still can't ride.  if i were him i'd be looking for yet another new team.

mancebo, who came in fourth last year, announced he was considering retirement, which his own team manager equated with an admission of guilt.

before today, i had picked basso to win.  now, i guess i am gonna go with hincapie, and the discovery machine.  lord knows he's earned a bit of the glory, after supporting lance all those years.  but i'll be rooting for rabobank and michael rasmussen, who won the "king of the mountains" jersey last year.  after today, he just might have a shot to win it all.

UPDATE: so i've been watching OLN and - honestly - i'd be lying if i said i wasn't rooting for big george hincapie to win it all.  it'd be the cycling equivalent of jeff hostetler's super bowl victory.  no - it'd be more like if joe montana's back-up won a super bowl after he retir-.  um, wait...  maybe it doesn't matter what the appropriate football analogy would be.  the big thing is, well, it would be big, and the nice thing about the tour is that i can support both hincapie in the overall competition and rasmussen to take the polka-dot jersey, and win in both cases.

holland, 2006

and speaking of pitchfork, they report some exciting news today for the discriminating indie rocker.  recluse and erstwhile neutral milk hotel frontman jeff mangum has returned from the depths of... where ever he was, to post the following on an elephant 6 message board:

news and fish and meaningful messages.
hello again.

for the past few months ive been putting together the pieces of everything ive written in the past three years and its been a revelation. whenever i had the time ive been writing melodies and keeping them in my head for later, and songs just accumulate, im not waiting as some have said. i still dont know how we’re going to put it all together, the songs will have more noises and collages in them. because of that we dont know whether this will be korena pang or neutral milk hotel or michael bolton but that doesnt really matter. names are just a box we put things in to separate them, and we’re figuring out what box these songs go in.

we dont have a timetable for releasing the album yet, so dont get your hopes up for new songs now. if you want more “aeroplane” just ignore all of this, the songs are songs but they’re longer and more free. when jeremy came down after his tour we just spent days playing noise while screaming and it was incredibly liberating.

it has been so much fun that we will for sure be playing a show or two, probably more. freedom is a wonderful thing but at a certain point you need the routines of normal life. ive had that for a while but i realized last year at the show with the livys that the best sort of normal ive ever had was on the road with my friends. getting to gigs late with cars coughing and trombones smacking on doors, the giant egg leaks over the masses, the yolk sustains us, we eat whites for days. it can never be the same but i need to get as close as i can to that again.

so thats all. everything is happening soon, this is the year.
thanks for listening. jeff.

for the uninitiated, jeff is the voice behind one of the three greatest records of the 80's, 90's, and today.  "in the aeroplane over the sea" is unquestionably on my desert island, and has only gotten better since i received it as a gift in 1999.  and i liked it a hell of a lot to begin with.  if this isn't some cruel hoax - which it may be - this is very good news.

i've added a couple of mp3's to my audio files.  if you don't know NMH, you'll want to listen.  if you do know NMH, you already know you'll want to listen.

i also like that fish are apparently more important than "meaningful messages."

otis day and the knights

during the king pepper heyday, i heard more ricky martin than i really care to admit.  i heard it every friday and saturday i was at the pepper, which was every friday and saturday.  i sometimes heard it in between.  after several hundred listens, my brain numbed of it and an odd thing happened: i actually began to enjoy it.  you may not realize it, but there is a really good guitar lick in there, amongst the dance-y silliness.  or silly danciness, if you prefer.

back in january, i frequently listened to the killers' record "hot fuss" from a co-worker's itunes.  immediately preceding the killers, alphabetically speaking, was kelly clarkson.  i'd heard of kelly clarkson but didn't know her song.  (and honestly i probably wouldn't have known who she was had lumpy not had her as her IM icon following her american idol victory.)  anyway, at some point it occured to me to see what all the (hot) fuss was about, and i immediately knew that this particular song was part of my key to a second KttD title.  at first, i dreaded the numerous listens that would be required to learn the lyrics, but once again, i actually began to like the song in question.  it's pretty good, and the musical performances are, in fact, stellar.

these two tales have something in common.  both songs relied on session musicians to back up the singers.  this week, the british isles' answer to pitchfork - stylus - offers a salute to the unsung hero, the session musician.  it's no bud light commercial, but it's a start.

plantmaaan

it's finally stopped raining and the sun is shining here in the DC area.  and not a moment too soon.  not because the rain has stopped, but because maybe now we can put the "i'm building an ark" jokes behind us.  (i'm probably as guilty as anybody, but i don't feel good about it.)  contrary to what you may have read here - or on any other blog - these storms were kind of a big deal.  we got about ten inches of rain in two days, and these were violent rains.  i received the picture below from dan, who lives in arlington.  that's dan and sarah's house below the massive tree.

Danshouse

Plantmaaan

as vrabel was quick to point out, this photo is vaguely reminiscent of the legendary "plantmaaan" polaroid from the hotrod collection.  plantmaaaan was shot following a series of similarly violent storms a decade ago.  the large tree in the back yard of the slanty house on patrick street decided to shed some limbs.  it was just another polaroid until roy - in a drunken stupor - inscribed the title of an utterly forgetable solo song by pavement's drummer.  he initially inscribed the title on a photo of the termite infested wall next to our washer and dryer.

that house was such a dump.

dan should send his photo to roy for inscription.

i should look for the "plantman" video on youtube.  it was as good as the song was bad.

SIX MINUTES LATER: plantman video.  youtube pretty much rules.

boom goes the dynamite

it's apparently "youtube week" on the internets, as websites as disparate as espn and pitchfork both proudly feature a mere smattering of the best the site has to offer.  seriously, don't click on either of those links. several hours of your life will be irretrievably lost.  and you won't miss them.

unfortunately, in what is a grave oversight, neither of those lists feature my personal favorite: kentucky basketball.  if these guys don't make the "boom goes the dynamite" guy feel really good about himself, there is no hope for him.  poor guy.  i sure am glad i have never done anything embarassing that has been caught on video.  whew.

Number one with a bullet

oddly, i am glad it's a song i know.

NICE GUY EDDIE: When I was coming down here, I was playin it. And "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" came on. Now I ain't heard that song since it was big, but when it was big, I heard it a million-trillion times. I'm listening to it this morning, and this was the first time I ever realized that the lady singing the song, was the one who killed Andy.

MR. BLUE: You didn't know Vicki Lawrence killed the guy?

NICE GUY EDDIE: I thought the cheatin wife shot Andy.

MR. BLONDE: They say it in the song.

NICE GUY EDDIE: I know, I heard it. I musta zoned out whenever that part came on before. I thought when she said that little sister stuff, she was talkin about her sister- in-law, the cheatin wife.

JOE: No, she did it. She killed the cheatin wife, too.

UPDATE: so i was curious....  i only vaguely knew it, so i downloaded it from itunes this afternoon.  and i like what i hear.  not only is it relevant to QT's best film, but it's a damn good song to boot.  of course, i am a sucker for both old country songs and - in noah webster's sense of the word - ballads (which this is both).  why didn't anybody tell me before?

fever pitch

dabysan wrote about this over the weekend, but my comments seemed - at least lengthwise - to deserve a post of their own.

the problem of soccer is scale.  every thing (except its players) is too big.  the game lasts ninety minutes - at least thirty minutes too long.  the field, which apparently isn't even codified to a standard size, is about 100 by 150 yards.  that's three times the size of a real football field, people - with the same number of players.  no wonder they stand around so much.  and those players - they are athletes only in the most generous sense of the word.  seriously, would it kill you to hit the weight room every once in a while?

soccer apologists often claim that if soccer awarded seven points for each score then real football fans wouldn't complain so much.  that's just stupid.   soccer frequently gives us 2-1 or 2-1 nothing or worse: 1-1 scores.  that'd be a 14-7 game - at best - in the NFL.  everybody who knows anything knows the average football score is somewhere in the 24-21 neighborhood.  clearly there just isn't as much scoring in soccer.  and that so many games end in ties is inexcusable.

soccer is the "most popular sport in the world" TM (soccer fans) solely because it is so easy to play.  all you need is a semblance of a ball.  it's - again - an issue of scale.  more people may participate than any other sport, but that doesn't make it the best.

the odyssey

my commute is not that complicated, though it takes a while.  i walk down king street to the metro station, wait for the yellow line to gallery place, transfer to the red to bethesda, and walk a block to the office.  most days i don't even notice that it takes just under an hour.  once i am on the train, i usually have time for both the crossword and the sudoku and to skim the news before i disembark.  not today.

i should have known there would be problems.  DC is notoriously bad when weather conditions are less than optimal.  a light dusting of snow sends the town into... well, a flurry.  still, it didn't seem like that much rain.  i guess northwest of us must have been hit a little harder, because there was still - apparently - a fair amount of flooding.

i could see from the street that the platform was crowded - more crowded, in fact, than i'd ever seen it.  as i reached the top of the escalator, i learned why.  the yellow line was closed between l'enfant plaza and mt. vernon square.  shuttle buses were running.  shit.  my transfer is exactly between those two points.  fortunately i had time to consider my options as several minutes (and by "several," i mean "a lot") elapsed before the next train appeared.

by that point, i'd scrapped my plan of waiting for the blue line and taking a more circuitous route in favor of the first available train.  besides, seats on the blue are sometimes hard to come by.  i figured i'd see how the bus situation looked and make a decision.  what i hadn't counted on was holding the train for at least ten minutes at crystal city.  and i certainly didn't count on holding another twenty minutes at pentagon city.  and though i counted on a cluster at l'enfant plaza it didn't occur to me it would take fifteen minutes just to leave the station.  so i didn't have a whole lot of faith in the bus plan.

i called the office to let them know at 9:20 that i was setting out on foot for farragut north.  i had heard (erroneously, it turned out) that metro center was flooded too, so my plan was to head to the next stop up the line.  but what i thought was farragut was actually macpherson square and farragut was another fifteen to twenty minute walk past that.  it took me forty minutes to get back on the subway after leaving l'enfant plaza.  the only thing preventing me from questioning my judgement was that all of DC was a mess.  constitution avenue was closed, screwing things all up.

one hundred and fifty minutes is entirely too long to spend travelling to work.

People say I look like...

i don't get a lot of "famous person" comparisons, but i hear a lot of "you look just like my friend/cousin/aquaintance in dublin." i'm not irish.

june gloating

Ramsey Cup

to the left is the coveted Lord Ramsey's Cup.  it is awarded President's Day annually to the best worst karaoke singer in all the land.  the land, of course, being Old Town Alexandria.  four months have elapsed and i am getting restless.  there are those who believe they can take the prize from me - the only two-time champion - but those people are stupid people.  they know who they are.

by the way, the steelers won the super bowl this year too.

if being a bad winner is wrong, i don't want to be right.