GLOBADOM

BC GOLD. What is BC Gold? Why it’s a traditional native foodstuff much loved in Japan.

But no, really, what is it?

It’s herring spawn, naturally deposited on kelp.

If you eat eggs, you have no right to be grossed out by that. Right?

I have to try this.

Strangely, those two topics are not really linked.

On the weekend, I rode two more training races, again in a category higher than I would normally compete in. The one on Saturday was a pretty standard workout (rode hard, dropped early), but the Sunday race was something exquisite, in its own way.

I managed to stay with the main group for a surprising number (three) of laps. Apparently the group started coming apart on the first lap, and caught the A group not long after I slipped away. Scary. Rode it out, etc. But the hill itself commanded awesome levels of respect. Basically, it was one of those creepy cycling experiences where the suffering was fun. A certain Mr. Armstrong has been known to talk about the difference between “sweet pain” (climbing) and “sour pain” (time trials). Cyclists understand this sort of demented difference.

What hurts in March makes you strong in June.

Oh right, the wine: I finally got around to racking my crab apple wine, one of my last few interventions before I start inflicting it on others, which probably won’t happen until sometime in August. Racking is a simple process. You siphon the wine from one vessel to another, mostly to leave the sediment behind. The most time-consuming aspect is cleaning and sterilizing the vessels. A taste test revealed that the wine is still quite nouveau (which is to be expected), but it is very clear, and it has potential. One more racking and a few more months and we should be looking at several gallons of drinkable fruit wine.

The other thing you’re probably wondering: white or red? The answer is white. I might try making a red some other time by mixing in the crab apple skins, which is pretty much how red grape wines are made.

I don’t have anything useful or profound to say about the tragic death of four Mounties in Alberta on Thursday. I direct you to Colby Cosh for a perspective somewhat closer to the ground.

Item: Wired reports on a bill before the US Congress that would legitimize “censor services,” as they describe them. A panoply of movie-makers have previously opposed the various efforts to implement this stuff, both from the bully pulpit and also by joining lawsuits. A precis: you buy a DVD, and then you buy either a special player or software that automatically edits out the naughty bits. The most sophisticated allow fairly nuanced user control over the various editing parameters.

Meanwhile, various smart people have their knickers in a twist about a new Google Toolbar feature which can automatically attach maps to address-like content in any web page. To the extent I understand the dispute, it seems to be a debate on one side about the evilness of quietly modifying the original content of a web page, and on the other about whether there is enough user-volition to describe this as a content modification about as nasty as blocking pop-ups.

Disregarding the fact that an industry that accepts airplane and television (and TBS and Director’s Cut) edits of most of its movies doesn’t really have much of an artistic-integrity leg to stand on, I see a key unifying issue in these two battles, and one that also is a pretty big part of the DeCSS problem, too.

In short, it’s about the end-user’s right to modify and use content they have rights to in ways the originator may not have imagined. The “censor service” issue seems to me an issue with good traction right now, and it is to their credit that the EFF has taken up this case as a perfect example of why users would want the right to do so, and why anti-modification laws like the DMCA are a problem. With luck, maybe this will be a slippery slope of consumer rights that leads to the Promised Land for the EFF and Clearplay’s customers

Gord pointed out that my feed stopped working. If you care why, it’s because I rehosted my site and forgot to adjust the Feedburner feed. I’ve decided for no good reason to just go with Blogger’s default feed, but I also updated the Feedburner feed, so it might still work. Isn’t that nice?

This is another of my recurring ruminations on time. Supafamous has his fixations (warning: the least disturbing part of the linked post talks about castration), I have mine.

Today’s was brought on by a trip home on the bus, part of my post-race no-riding recovery day. The bus got me home about 35 minutes after I left work, pretty respectable; I’d expect the car to take 30 on most days, and the bike gets me home about a half-hour after I leave the bike rack, but requires a change of clothes on both ends and a shower at home. The bike commute compensates by folding in my exercise time.

Back to car vs. bus. The car saves 10 minutes a day, or 50 minutes a week. Not even an hour. Only 30-50 hours a year saved for all the expense of driving to work.

That’s not a huge amount of time. But what do you value your time at? How much would you pay to have those 30-50 hours a year back at the right moment? What about the fact that’s like getting an extra week of vacation time? And that’s five minutes.

But don’t just grind off the nub of your commute. Rationalize your time-use in your whole life. Life is that most precious God-given gift, and it’s painfully finite. Take some care with it, and save the bits you’ll never miss.

Why did I take the bus then? I can play Gameboy on the bus.

So, I did my first bicycle race of the season, a nice jaunt scheduled at 80 km. For training purposes, and to properly test my skills, I rode with the “B” group. Even on the line, it was obviously a huge group. It may have been close to a hundred riders in the B group alone, with substantial A and C races, too. It may have been the largest race I have ever been in.

Oh dear. After 15 minutes, I couldn’t believe I’d be able to stay in the race. But I told myself that if I was suffering, so was everybody else.

That turned out to be not as true as I hoped. At one point, it seemed like we were averaging one crash per lap, all in the same corner. I was hoping to push near the front of the pack and stay there, where you can actually work in the race, and where the riding is, counterintuitively, a lot easier. I got there exactly once in the whole race, and couldn’t stay. On this dead-flat course, the sprints out of the corners were routinely in excess of 50 km/h. My max speed on my computer was over 57 km/h, which is almost beyond my experience. The sheer size of the pack was one of the biggest issues with moving up in the race.

I made one rookie error: the organizers (my own club) announced they were strictly enforcing the yellow-line rule (no going over the centreline of the road; a common issue in amateur races, which often are only able to close half of the road to traffic). What I didn’t understand is that it wouldn’t be the case on the corners, and my cornering performance probably suffered accordingly: I was safe but slow, and I was cornering against experienced racers, which meant they did it well.

I made another error that was even more foolish: I didn’t make sure my handlebars were tight enough. They were tight enough for my commute on Friday, and they were tight enough for the first part of the race, but the combination of a course with several very rough patches of road and some bar-wrenching out-of-the-corner sprints loosened my bars.

After an hour and 40 kilometres, I was tired and fighting loose bars. Each problem complemented the other, and I have serious bike-control issues that crop up when I get tired. The bars only made that more troubling. The wrong kind of leveraging synergy.

After one or two sprints where I had to drive to my limit to catch back on to the back of the pack, I surrendered to the inevitable and pulled up to fix my bar problem. Since this was a training race, I then slipped back into the back of the pack, which lasted another half lap before I was dropped again.

Ouch. Average race pace was not extraordinarily high, but the surges and distance killed me.

Lessons learned: I’m not as fast as I hoped. Equipment preparation will catch you out. I think that not pushing beyond the limits of sanity was a good choice. I’m optimistic that I may still be fast enough: I won’t have to beat most of these racers (largely Cat 3, not my own Cat 4) in my regular races. I need more work.

But the glory of cycling remains supreme. The merciless test of rider skill and strength, the sweet, focused suffering, and the simple joy of going out and riding your bike on a warm late-winter Sunday morning is wonderful.

Just to clarify what is going on below, I live-blogged the Oscars. I did this myself, so I don’t have anyone special to thank.

Eastwood gives a reasonable speech. The funny line is comparing himself to Lumet, and proclaiming “I’m just a kid!”

Best picture: also Million Dollar Baby. Reasonable speeches by the three of ’em.

Conclusion: pretty spare show, Rock did a darned good job as host. I’m not the ideal audience for the show.

Best actor nominees. TLO likes Johnny Depp when he’s “cleaner.” The girls don’t like Leo DiCaprio. Marjie, on Eastwood: “Is that his daughter?” Mike: “no, that’s his wife. His daughter is older.”

Jamie Foxx wins for “Ray.” Haven’t seen it, but heard it was good. Then again, you usually hear that some people like performances that win this award. Foxx thanks the late Ray Charles for “living.” Hm.

He thanks his agents and managers. Marj: “Nooo!” Mike compares him to Rod Tigwell (“Jerry McGuire”). He shouts out to Halle and Oprah. Marj psychically calls it: he thanks his late grandmother. Oh: she saw him do it on the Golden Globes. But at least he says why he loves her. Now he’s crying. It seems more meaningful than the best actress speech, somehow.

Blogging may be delayed momentarily. I just won this.

Eastwood just won best director. He brought his 95-year-old mother.