a couple of random thoughts

 For the past several years (except for a break for the COVID-19 debacle), The Princeton Public Library and the McCarter Theater have co-sponsored an event where readers join to read the entire text of Dickens' A Christmas Carol aloud (link to the 2022 event). The Excellent Wife (TEW) and I have done it several times. I was honored to be chosen as the first reader this year; I got to declaim, "Marley was dead, to begin with," and to drive home the 19th-century jokes with which Dickens peppered his manuscript. (The entire event is a time commitment of about three hours, but the story really is a great one to have read to you. While we could not this year due to other commitments, TEW and I have stayed for the whole thing in the past, and the variety in quality of the readers is part of the experience - yes, there are some halting and inexperienced readers, but there are great ones, and wonderful accents from many of the voices that make up Central Jersey. But you're also welcome to drop in and leave whenever you'd like.)

And one of my own personal traditions is to read the whole of A Christmas Carol for myself every December, and it reminds me that it's time to start.

The person who read after me was TEW, and the woman after her had this wonderful Indian accent (Hindu? Gujarati?). I have not heard Dickens played on that orchestra before, and it was novel and delightful... but THAT reminded me of one of my pet peeves: actors being credited with the lines they deliver. Judy Garland delivered the line, "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore*," but it was said by character Dorothy Gale, and it was written by the screenwriters (Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf**, or at least one of them).

Some actors are marvellously smart and verbal, and able to improvise (Devid Ogden Stiers apparently came up with the "...promises you don't intend to keep" line in the Disney Beauty and the Beast), and many others are clearly not. Those great quotes that you've been taking from movies are mostly written by uncredited writers, not the glamorous actors to whom you've been accrediting them.

I'll go back to Christmas Carol now. Cratchit, after all, needs to slide on the ice a few dozen times, and then run off to Camden Town to play Blind Man's Buff.

*NOT "Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore." Sheesh.

**How could a person with a name like that be anything OTHER than a writer?

good closing speech

 Youtube recently fed me a video from Psychic Derailleur through my feed. I watched it and liked it, and watched another, and liked it, and another, and now I'm smitten.

He closes his videos with a little speech: "I hope something good happens to you today. Until next time, be nice; work hard; ride bikes; play music when you can."

I like it. I might steal it.

limits: a surprising response to a smartass assignment

 At the start of club rides that I lead, I have a standard speech about rules and safety. I usually end with asking if there are any "Questions, comments, problems, arguments, or discussion?". Friend Jack H often asks some silly question as a joke, and I've taken to being silly right back. 

He's evidently been reading the rider agreement on the club sign-in sheet, which includes that the rider will "know my limits". He asked today if we could really know our limits, and I told him to write me an essay about it, as if I were his eighth-grade social studies teacher.

He must have been thinking about it on the ride; he took it far more seriously than I intended, and sent me this in response:

---

 Jim,  What an interesting subject, I will try to stay focused on how limits pertain to the joy of cycling.  Do we really know our limits? At the moment we do. We can feel it.. But do we ( I) normally push past that point? I would say yes. So the more interesting point would be Why?

Do we strive to be stronger, to belong, to be accepted? Or all the above. As humans we always want more. You name it, there aren't many people content with the status quo.

 

The club would like you to know your limits. When? When you feel like you could go on forever at the start of a ride. When you see the ride posted and second guess how strong you may or may not be. Are you feeling great after not riding much the last week. Did you put in a personal best with mileage for the week and think , bring on the A riders. 

 

Cycling is a unique activity . Greg leMond once said ( it never gets easier, you just get stronger). 

 

The more we ride I would assume on some level we do know our estimate limit. But if we just sit in and take it easy we can ride in that next level up or that longer ride. We can improve our endurance, our abilities. How else to improve. 

 

In theory it would be great to know our limits. But , say we do.  We sign up for a ride we know we can do. But the other number of riders want to extend their limits. Does that blow your limits out the back of the group?  

 

It is naive for me to assume others' motives or aspirations. I know myself and still am shocked  at how my limits change from season to season, week to week , day to day.  Is the better statement, Know yourself. Now at this point we can really go past  the entry price to the club. I COULD suggest upon applying for a club membership the club have cyclists fill out a questionnaire about oneself. 

Do we really want to go there?

 

To know one's limits is to know oneself.  Oh boy, I've been reading way too many quotes from the book (Words To Ride By.) 

 

In the amazing words of Sir David Attenborough, ( If I can bicycle, I bicycle)   I have nothing more to say on the subject. Or maybe I do......

 

---

 

I need to listen more. There are more things in these people I call friends than I expect.

still i am learning

 From a motto on an artwork misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarrotti, ancora imparo, still I am learning. Regular readers may remember that I've been thinking (undoubtedly too much) about pace on the rides I lead. I had an opportunity today to chat about it with some people I trust.

Tom H invited a few of us on a ride today. I initially thought I wouldn't be able to go due to dealing with the property management issues ensuing from the decease of the Excellent Mother-In-Law, but I was relieved of that duty for the day, and got to ride along with Tom, Laura OLPH, Jack H, and Rickety. (Forgive me, but I lost all the pictures today.) 

It was wicked hot, so we planned an early (for us) departure at 8am, and a shorter ride of a bit over 40 miles, expecting to be back about 11 before the heat got too bad (we were later than that, but not hugely so).

And it was a hot ride. But more important to me was the fact that I got to talk about my rides, and pace, and my social needs, and what reasonable expectations are (of myself, and of other people). We talked about aging, and some of the ways in which we're all dealing with that. We talked about family (and other) relationships. It helps to do this while riding, as the activity seems to push some of the extraneous matter out of the way, and it helps to talk about this stuff with people whom I've known, and with whom I've ridden, for years.

So the ride page, which shows our route, speed, and such stuff, tells only the most basic story about the ride today. The most important part isn't in the route or the numbers. I guess you had to be there.

giving up on latin

 Those who know me, know my intellectual snobbiness goes deep. But the little humility I've got demands I point out the limits of my learning. As my ol' pal, Desiderius Erasmus, wrote, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." He wrote it in Latin, so there's some latitude on the exact translation.

I'm giving up on Latin. I've just seen that there is an animated entertainment to be released entitled The Legend of Vox Machina. It's a Dungeons & Dragons story, and not my cup of tea. But that's not what I'm whining about; I'm old and cranky, and I find fault with almost everything that began after about 1980 (we can probably blame Reagan and his supporters).

The title, specifically the Latin, doesn't make sense. Latin uses word endings to determine how a word is used in a sentence, which has the advantage that you can completely upset the word order for the purposes of emphasis (one example of word endings changing to determine meaning in English is the use of 's to show possession; English, however, generally uses word order to determine word use: "man bites dog" is fundamentally different from "dog bites man").

And the word ending of Machina is wrong; it's the ending you would use if the machine in question were the object of a preposition. If you want to say "The Voice of the Machine", you'd say vox machinae.

I'm sure they took the term deus ex machina, "the god from out of the machine", and just yanked the word into their title (the term comes from drama. You can go ask your high-school English teacher about it; it refers to a practice in ancient Greek plays of getting a situation all messed up, then having a god come down from on high to clean things up [sometimes lowered on a mechanical platform, the "machine" in question]. They evidently liked that; modern critics and audiences consider it cheating [if you're gonna have a device fix everything up in act three, you have to set it into your play in act one]). In the case of deus ex machina, the ending of machina  is correct because machina is the object of the preposition ex, "out of".

It rankles just enough that I wrote this post about it. And I know so little Latin, that I usually have to go back to my textbooks (from 1973-74) to make sure I got stuff correct.

There are probably twenty people in the world who would see the title of the show, know enough Latin to know it's incorrect, AND get cranky enough to "spill some ink" about it (is it spilling ink if I'm blogging?).

Enough. I think it's time to give up on Latin. Nobody cares, and I don't need to broadcast any more examples of just what a wacko I am.

I might wear this shirt

 I'm not a t-shirt kind of guy, but I'd probably wear one that said,

"Your toxic freedom is destroying the world your children will inherit."

more of my racism

 I've been listening daily to Make Me Smart with Kai & Molly. They have a feature where listeners can leave a voice message in answer to the question, "What's something you thought you knew, but later found out you were wrong about?"

I called in with this one last week

This is Jim from Central Jersey. I'm a cisgendered white male, about to retire in a couple months, and one thing I thought I knew was how far down my racism and misogyny went, and I thought I had a handle on it. But the Youtube algorithm decided to send me some Tiktoks and such about feminism and antiracism, and holy cow. Stuff I thought was inconsequential, or polite, I now see how intrusive and thoughtless I was. And I can't even always go and apologize; it's not fair to use my white-guy protections to make myself feel better, at the risk of dragging up and replaying misery for someone else. The best I can do is live with my past, and do better. Thanks for making me smart.

They didn't use it.

not pedantic, enthusiastic

 

 

I might do something like this.

The Excellent Wife (TEW) and I sometimes go down rabbit holes of shades of meaning, tenses, subjunctives, and the like, and when we do, one of us will often look at the other with the knowing eye and intone, "When English majors marry...".

Original here. How are you not checking out XKCD every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday? It is one of the last bulwarks of brains and sense against the onslaught of anti-intellectualism, anti-vax, and all the other anti's that will bring down civilization. (One of the things I love about XKCD is that when I don't understand it [it's OK; you probably won't understand all of them; Mr Munroe is brilliant, and makes comics in many areas of his learning], I find that topics relating to the comic come up as some of the top suggestions in my Google searches. When smart people don't know stuff, they go check it out.)

and on currying favor

 The good opinion of a fool is not worth having.

when the cards are stacked against you

 There is no shame in not having that which is impossible to get.

put it on a t-shirt

The Excellent Wife (TEW) has resolved that she wants to be more engaged with people and wants to try more new things. "I'm going to try to err on the side of 'Yes'," she said.

Well, "Err on the Side of Yes" is nearly perfect. If she had more time and energy, I'd be trying to get her to print some and sell 'em on Etsy.

Err on the Side of Yes

july 4 all paces, with link to photo album

The link to the photo album will be down there somewhere, but I might make you read through the whole blog post to find it; I'm in that kind of mood.

After last week's Saturday ride, on which I assiduously avoided the rain that never came AND overdid myself on little sleep and no breakfast, I tried to do a recovery ride on Sunday that was a failure-to-recover ride. I was sore-legged and tired all day Sunday and Monday, and I was a little worried about doing the All-Paces ride today.

(For the few readers I have who don't know, a few times per year, my bike club, the Princeton Freewheelers [they keep promising to update the website, and it is my fond, if waning, hope that they will] holds a collection of rides for member riders at all paces: we leave from the same place at the same time, and [theoretically] get back about the same time.)

I look forward to the All-Paces rides. I like to see the people I haven't seen for a while, and to meet some new folks; I like to see how some are holding up marvellously from year to year and others are less so; I like to see the bikes I haven't seen. There is always some new technology or bike-y weirdness. The rides themselves are rolling chaos: we ride with people who don't often ride together and aren't used to one another's styles and behaviors. Rarely, though, are there injuries because of it, although there are usually enough close calls for some good stories and high dudgeon.

Along with the occasional surprise visitor.

So with some anxiety, I packed up the bikes and The Excellent Wife (TEW), and we rolled down to Mercer Park early enough to find parking. Dave H was leading, and I'd swept for him at the Spring Fling, and THAT was rewarding: Dave actually stops to make sure the folks off the end are keeping up, and tells me where we're going. I enjoyed sweeping for him, and looked forward to it today.

(Yes, I can be anxious and look forward to something at the same time. Do I contradict myself?)

Dave led us on this ride up through Mount Rose to Hopewell. Shortly before the break in Hopewell, I looked down to see my bottle cages were empty. The two bottles I had so diligently filled and put in the car were safe in the car where nobody could get them, especially me. I was grateful when we stopped at the convenience store there, and loaded up with Gatorade. (Our usual stop, the Brick Farm Market, was closed for the holiday.)

And while we were there, Team Erudite passed by; I called out my greetings.

On we went to Rocky Hill and then towards Kingston, and on the Kingston road I felt the rough surface and squirelly handling that usually means a flat in the rear wheel. I pulled over with the common Flat Tire Committee, and I was replacing the wheel on the bike before Dave rolled back to investigate the holdup. A rider asked if I wanted water to clean my hands, and I pointed out my empty cages. Dave helped me with water the rest of the way back (he freezes half a bottle, and then fills the rest; it's an idea I might steal if I ever get organized enough the day before a ride to do so).

WE got back just about the same time TEW's ride did. I left the warmer-than-tepid water in the car and drank a couple of Dr Pepper's as a restorative. I'm better enough now that TEW is reminding me of the chores that I've been avoiding.

And HERE's the link to the photo album. There are some good ones; you'll want to see if you're in there, and you'll also want to see if there are bad pictures of some of your friends.

Addendum: Chris C got a couple of pictures of me changing my tire.

mine, too

I was catching up with the ODDman posts I've allowed to slip by, and I came upon a graphic that said, "Using Latin phrases to look smart is my modus operandi."

It's mine, too.

I was gonna copy the graphic here, but since the only thing on it is the text, it's really unnecessary, don't you think?

ODDman's post here.

does this mean i'm a muse?

After my previous post and my complaints about not being able to dress for the weather, Freewheeler Paul (I don't use his last initial because it makes him look like I'm referring to a pope) wrote a poem. Go see the original in the comments to the Facebook post.

November is the new October
with trees of flame and fields of gold.
What happened to the early winter?
By now it should be fu$%ing cold.

 A few thoughts:

1. I'm flattered that he paid enough attention to come up with this.
2. Paul's a poet! Who knew? (I'm sure I didn't, although I've recently seen some poetry posts of his, and they're good.)
3. Global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, of course. Every patriotic American says so.

'merica magazine

I gotta link to this:

Not everyone will like this magazine. The following people in particular: If you insist that “America is the greatest” country in the world, in all things, even after you are presented with contrary evidence. Anyone who has a “These Colors Don’t Run” bumper sticker. If you are proud of not having a passport. If you’ve ever cluelessly asked why there isn’t a “White History Month.” If your response to “Black Lives Matter” is a tone-deaf “All Lives Matter.” If you support a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning. In fact if you wrap yourself in the flag – American or that treasonous one with the X in the middle. If the image you have in your head when you hear the word “American” is always a straight, white man. If you have ever unequivocally supported nuking people “over there.” If in 2002 you actually called French fries “Freedom fries.” If you have ever asked a native born Asian-American “Where are you from?” If you’ve ever told a black American in a surprised tone that “You are so well-spoken.” If you want a border fence built separating the United States from Mexico. If you think America was founded as a Christian nation. If FOX news is your 24/7 background noise. If you’re bellicose. Nationalistic. Xenophobic. Jingoistic.

The following people may possibly like this magazine: If you get pissed off at being an American, but you wouldn’t trade it with anything else. If you stand-up when the national anthem is sung at baseball games but you feel a bit embarrassed about it. If you’d never pretend to be Canadian when traveling abroad but you sometimes still hate to admit that you’re American. If you’ve ever gotten misty during the charge scene in Glory. Or when Sullivan Ballou’s letter is read in Ken Burn’s The Civil War. Or at any point in his baseball documentary. If you understand that the real America might exist in Wasilla Alaska but that it also equally exists in a Hell’s Kitchen gay bar. If you own a copy of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (extra points if it’s on vinyl). If you’ve ever wanted to visit the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. If you get a bit chocked up when you see immigrants take the oath of citizenship. If you actually (at least sort of) believe in Emma Lazarus’ words on that New Colossus in New York Harbor. If you see no contradiction in liking both country music and hip hop. If you know that Moby-Dick is the greatest novel ever written. If you stop to read historical markers. If you ever get emotional when randomly thinking about Abraham Lincoln. Or when going to the Lincoln Memorial, or the Jefferson Memorial, or Gettysburg, or the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. If you can’t quite shake the feeling that American exceptionality might be real – while at the same time admitting it doesn’t always mean “exceptionally good” and sadly often means “exceptionally bad.” If you’re one of the roughs, an American.

I gotta remember to got back there.

i hope he really said it

Bill Nye continues to be a hero.

From today's Oddman.

lacing a wheel

We have weather awfulness predicted for later, so an evening dinner date with friends was moved to a lunch date. I don't want to get the house dirty, and I had some enforced idleness this morning, so I decided to lace up the rear wheel for the Crosscheck project.

The garage is 32^ºF (0^º in the civilized world), even with the new insulated door, and, although I oiled the hub and spokes correctly, and started the lacing OK, when it came time to twist the hub, I twisted the wrong way. This would have placed two spokes crossing just above the valve, making it difficult to get a pump head on. The way I lace a wheel (the Musson method) is by putting all the trailing spokes on first, then all the leading spokes on one side, then the other. I saw the error when I had half the leading spokes on, so I undid them, turned the whole business the correct way, and tied 'em up again, before putting the leading spokes on the other side.

I'm blaming the cold garage. I did the fix in the warm bedroom, while The Excellent Wife (TEW) wasn't looking.

Below, a picture of the partly-laced rear wheel.

That was just after I fixed the error, and before I put the last spokes on. It's laced now, and in the garage awaiting tightening and truing (that's one process; I tried tightening first, and then truing, on the first wheel I built. It was Bohr-ing.)

(That's an inside joke. Niels Bohr, a physicist, is quoted as having said something like, "An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field." I've made a lotta mistakes in my bike wrenching, so I must be approaching expertise.)

The picture is to silence the one critic who complained about my first wheel build that I didn't post pics of the project to prove I did it... but can you imagine anything less interesting than pictures of a wheel each with a few more spokes?

Tomorrow is supposed to be warmer, but wet. I hope to put the rustproofing into the frame, and maybe I'll lace up the front wheel.

Edit 5:37pm: Front wheel is laced, too. This one went more smoothly than the first, although I did set a few spokes in the wrong rim holes, and had to backtrack. But the lacing is about 20% of the job; the proof is in the truing.

posted on my door at work

"If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes around with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"

I don't actually believe that, of course. But I think that the opposition needs a voice.

Original here.