Vive La Tour (or Cyclists Are Crazy Too)

Obsessively watching the Tour de France again. Here's a story from Stage 9 (Sunday).

Stage 9 was the last in the Pyrenees. There's a big HC (unclassifiable) climb, a peak named Tourmalet, about 3/4 of the way through the course. The descent just after the summit is a little tricky, down a narrow twisty mountain road. The riders went over in a few groups, two guys in the front, and then a group of 7 or 10 guys, and then the peloton (main field), followed by about half the race, who couldn't keep up on the climb, in variously sized groups of stragglers.

By the way, you might not want to be eating when you scroll down. I'm just saying.

Laurens ten Dam is a dutch rider who went over the summit with the second group. Apparently, he crashed like hell just after that. The TV didn't have video of the crash, but it looked like it must have been pretty impressive. This is what ten Dam looked like when he got back on the course:

This is a screen grab from a video I found on YouTube (here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qeU2HlDZFA) but I think you can still see the dirt and the fact that his jersey is shredded. He's also ripped up his left elbow and knee.

See, in the Tour, you don't get an injury time out. If you can't finish the stage, you're done. You go home. If you finish too slow, you're done. So you just have to go. In one early stage I saw a guy crash and ride the last 20 miles anyway with a broken wrist. Oh, my mistake - the TV just did a recap of injuries and it was Robert Gesink, and he actually rode 75 kilometers (46 miles) with a broken wrist. Right now I'm watching Kurt-Asle Arvesen, who's been grimacing and riding slow since a crash about 10 km earlier, hanging on to the doctor's car trying to decide if there's anything he can do to finish the last 40 km.

Actually ten Dam's crash probably wasn't very bad. It looks like he hit dirt pretty quickly, which is better than pavement, and he slid on his back a lot, which is better than sliding on your arms and legs. Oh, and though he didn't catch up to his breakaway group he rode the rest of the stage with the peloton no problem.

So here's the fun part. Laurens ten Dam is on Twitter.

Twitter is actually a great thing when it comes to connecting to "famous" people - or at least people with an inside view of things you see on TV. I follow two Mythbusters, NHL staff, some NHL players, Penn and Teller (he's actually quite chatty), and a bunch of pro cyclists. Especially for cycling, where there isn't a big US media presence, there isn't a lot of pressure for them to watch what they say. I mean, they do, of course, they're professionals, but also you get a lot of visibility into their lives. Like what they ate for dinner, problems with hotels and non-air-conditioned buses, and pictures of Levi Leipheimer in fluffy slippers.

Here's the photo Laurens ten Dam posted after Stage 9.

This is what you call "road rash." He also posted that the team doctor had to go shopping for more supplies.

Apparently the worst part of an injury like this is when you go to sleep, and you wake up and the sheets are stuck to you. Because, you know, your skin tends to ooze when it's like this.

So, road cyclists are officially crazy in my book too.

And you can read all about it on Twitter.

Vive la Tour.

• Laurens ten Dam's Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/laurenstendam
  
• Laurens ten Dam's photos: http://twitpic.com/photos/laurenstendam
  

Cow and Girls

Cow and Girls
Originally uploaded by erink

Was it "take your daughter to your underpaying, degrading work day"?

Bicycle Bell Ringtone

Found this in the Bike Pittsburgh blog. A local artist has been collecting sounds and publishing them as ringtones (for free!). She included this bike bell from one of the Bike Pittsburgh organizers.

http://www.locallytoned.org/tone/93

The bell, by the way, is wicked cool. Erok says he got it at Free Ride.

Bike Pittsburgh: http://bike-pgh.org/

The Number of Miroslav

Just a small thing, really, but one that should be known.

So there's this hockey player, Miro Satan. Yeah, Satan, but it's not pronounced like, you know, the devil; since he's Czech, it's got a sh- sound at the beginning.

Satan came to play for Pittsburgh last year as part of the neverending quest for Sid's winger. It didn't work out too well and Satan ended up getting sent down to Wilkes-Barre this spring to give the team salary cap room. But he took it well, went down and worked hard and helped out the youngsters, and then he came back up and had some good games for us in the playoffs.

Now. There's this website. Yahoo Sports includes data on all the NHL players. If you search for some player's name you will probably find his Yahoo Sports page which has his stats and news and such. And the URL for that page will be in the form "http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/players/[some random number]"

Only I don't think it's always a random number. Because to pull up data on Miroslav Satan, the number you have to put in there is "666".

I probably just made some database webmonkey's day by noticing.

Miroslav Satan on Yahoo Sports

First Week Farm Share

First box from Kretschmann Farms.

Fuck Censorship

I heard via Twitter this morning that Christopher Handley has pled guilty to obscenity charges related to his manga collection. Handley got in trouble when an Iowa postmaster inspected a shipment of comics from Japan and decided to involve the police.

Handley faces a $250,000 maximum fine, up to 15 years in prison, and forfeiture of property siezed in the case, which I'm not sure but could be his entire collection. What's more, before the trial Handley was harassed by the state: as conditions of his release (while still "innocent") he had to turn over his computer to the investigators, agree to random inspections of his home, and submit to periodic drug tests. When the prosecutors learned that he was still visiting anime-related sites on the internet and had viewed some cheesecake-level Japanese fashion books (with adult models) they ordered him to cut it out, and to submit to mental health counseling.

The problem with Handley's collection is that it included a few drawn images of under-age characters in sexual situations. This set off the child porn detectors, despite the fact that no actual children were required to create the material.

Handley's collection included 1,200 manga comics, plus hundreds of DVDs, laser disks, and video tapes. The case focused on a few hundred images - I heard 150 to 300 individual pictures - that were considered to be obscene. This guy was not a porn collector, he was a manga collector. I'm sure I have objectionable material of the same sort in my house right now, and probably at the same rate.

It should be said that icky sexual situations are not terribly uncommon in Japanese popular art. Seriously, schoolgirl sex, rape, some nasty stuff with tentacles (well, also some hot stuff with tentacles) - all are tolerated much more by Japan than we would do in the US. Especially in anime and manga, which can provide a completely fantasy-based environment. Why do they look at that stuff? I don't know. But you don't have to find it titilating to find it culturally interesting.

Neil Gaiman covers this pretty well in this blog post: Why defend freedom of icky speech? In this post, Gaiman responds to a fan's well-reasoned argument that simulated child porn is potentially damaging with examples from literature, history, and even the bible. Yes, it's basically the slippery slope argument, but it's well done.

So. This is dumb. It's not the only dumb thing our government has done, but it shouldn't happen. There are lots more stories of woe you can read at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and while you're there you should make a nice donation too.

Here's the CBLDF news releases about this case:
CBLDF Disappointed By Guilty Plea in Handley Manga Case (May 2009)
CBLDF To Serve As Special Consultant In PROTECT Act Manga Case (October 2008)

And here's some more information from another blogger: MangaBlog - Editorial: The Handley case and the slippery slope

Project A-Ko DVD sleeve image from Amazon.com - there's actually no sex in this film at all, but what's going on with that skirt?

One GoodThing About Philly

It's this guy: David Leonardi, the Sign Man.

(Photo copyright Getty Images.)

He's been doing this since 1972, when he got season ticket seats in the second row. The article and a link to a video interview are here on the Flyers website. (The video is worth checking out, it has his footage from the Flyers locker room when they won the cup in 1974 and shots of him and his wife showing up in their wedding clothes.)

He even came to Pittsburgh last year to mock the Pens in person during the Eastern Conference Finals (though he was presumably not involved in this legendary signage incident, one of my favorites). He taunted Fleury for "spin[ning] like a ballerina" during stoppages, among other things.

I love stuff like this. It takes effort. Unlike Philly's modern favorite, "Crosby sucks," you actually have to know the game and the players to come up with this kind of quality put-downs.

Vince Lascheid had it. The Civic Arena organist who died last month at 85 had a large repertoire of musical taunts, as well as pun-related theme songs for most of the Penguins stars. When the ref made a bad call, he threw out a few bars of the carol "Do You See What I See?" or, in extreme cases, "Three Blind Mice." (Back in those days of one ref and two linesmen this was an especially good choice.)

So it's great to see Leonardi going strong. This is old time taunting. The modern NHL could use a few more like him.