GLOBADOM

Only days after my loving bike club gave me the award for best crash (“Favell’s Famous Folly”: I got it for going 2/2 on inviting people to the ride and having them wipe out on my rear wheel) the namesake of the award crashed on our club ride and broke his hip, not that long after coming back from breaking his other hip.

The rest of the ride was not nearly that bad, but still sucked. Three hours of heavy Fall rain exposed considerable issues with my riding gear, the ride dwindled to me and two others as everyone else either gave up or was taking care of the fallen rider, and I managed to flat twice on the ride. After the second flat, I couldn’t fix the holes in my tubes due to a combination of the rain making patching tricky, not being able to find the holes at the side of the road, and a growing distractedness as I got colder and wetter. I eventually gave up, walked a mile or so to the nearest fried chicken joint, ate a meal, and was still unable to fix the problem. So I gave up some more, and started walking the mile or two back to my car, until I came upon Cables & Cogs, a friendly, repair-oriented shop. Inspired, I popped in, bought a new tube, picked up a cheap-and-cheerful clear plastic rain jacket (worn by the pros because they’re impermeable and let the sponsor logos show through) for $20, and they let me change the tire in the comfort of the shop floor, using their pump. Successful at last, I carried on and got back to the car after the usual stop at Bon Ton for some pastries (The Lovely One favours the Philippine; I am more changeable).

Sure, I was wet and cold, had seen a comrade badly injured, and was completely gutted by the ride, but pastries!

After retrieving TLO from her office, we went on a cultural excursion: off to the Heffel Gallery, since they were exhibiting a rather unusual Emily Carr canvas prior to its auctioning.

This particular canvas was noteworthy in that the main painting was a respectable oil of an Arbutus tree, but the back side of the canvas had a surprise waiting for restorers under a wash of black paint: an early portrait by Carr, apparently the earliest-known oil portrait by the artist (Carr was never famous as a portrait painter, but made her reputation with dramatic coastal landscapes), and possibly a self-portrait.

To my eye, the portrait was not only very good, it was a better painting than the arbutus tree.

The rest of the auction was to consist of high-end Canadian art: you got your other Carrs, your groups of Group of Sevens, and then your deservedly obscure artists. I saw some things I liked (the Carr portrait, a painting by E.J. Hughes, whose work I had previously seen an enjoyed in an exhibit in Victoria, miscellaneous others), and some very, very bad art. We’re talking can’t-draw-hands figures, sloppy landscapes, and tried-their-best Picasso imitations which finally suggested to me that Picasso might have talent, at least relatively speaking. Our home has four very simple flower still-lifes on the wall, all done by TLO’s grandmother. I think I can say without sentimental judgment that I liked the best of grandma’s work better than at least half of the paintings at the gallery. Our art shows an eye for composition and the hand of an artist with considerable skill; one of the gallery paintings looked like a miniature impressionist landscape done with a brush held between the artist’s teeth.

But the bad art was eclipsed by the stuff I liked, so it was a grand visit.

And since we serendipitously parked in front of the Girl Guide shop, we stopped in and bought some cookies.

Okay, so my club-mate Gordon Ross is a faster rider, I can live with that. But did he have to go and start a weblog that had better layout, pictures, and content than mine? For heaven’s sake, he even has an erudite take on the Storyeum , which I forgot to review after we went. (My verdict? Gord is right on all counts.)

But I can take heart in the fact that the name “Wired Cola” is way more neat-o than the name of his blog. Disseminate? What were you thinking, Gord?

Hey, here’s a hint for all you infrequent coffee-drinkers like me: If it is 21:30 on a Wednesday night, and you stop by the Laughing Bean with your spouse for a snack, do not order a medium-sized cup of their very good medium-roast coffee, which tastes so smooth and flavourful and goes so well with the peanut butter toffee bar.

If you do not take this advice, you will still be up at 02:00 the next day.

I delivered the Trail-A-Bike to its new owner yesterday, a process which involved attaching it to my bike and riding to work. When you have an extra 30 pounds of metal hanging off the back of your bike on a third wheel, it’s pretty easy to go fast downhill.

On the way home, sans Trail-A-Bike, I got a flat. No problem, close to home, I walked it off. Was so sleepy that night I went to bed hours early. No problem, I got up extra early this morning to fix the flat. Which went fine, until I pumped the tube up to full pressure and found a second leak near the valve stem. Change tube, call in to work that I’d be late, get to work late.

I’m in a low-motivation state right now. But I have some deadline-stuff I’ve gotta get moving on. Get in the game….

Ah crap.

I had a long, thoughtful post here, and then I deleted it through stupidity. Short version: spent the day at home, working on my bicycles, fixed up and rode my fixed-gear, made a simple dinner for a tired TLO, watched a movie, and turned on the TV to find that the exit polls were diverging from reality.

Oh, and if you haven’t, read the transcript of bin Ladin’s recent PSA. A fascinating insight into the mind of an evil man.

The Horserace Blog will give you fresh polling crack. It strongly suggests, quite the opposite of Slate’s meta-analysis, that the race is all but decided for Bush.

Well, they can’t both be wrong! Or can they?

Back in the land of non-crazy theories, Kausfiles has been outputting a steady stream of useful links and data, including a hit job on his own magazine’s Election Scorecard (Wisconsin all but locked up for Bush, despite what ES thinks), an apparent correction of Hitchens’ endorsement (apparently he meant his entry into Slate Votes as a Bush endorsement, but then I already knew that. (That’s the secret to predictions: once reality conforms to your prediction, however tenuously, declare victory and get out of there).

This is not a political weblog! What am I doing? Okay, um, I got the parts for the Trail-a-bike, and couldn’t resist $20 worth of nice new bike gloves at the same time. I have some long-reach brakes on order (those are great for upgrading old bikes), and so far the trick-or-treaters haven’t blown up our car. I was fairly impressed by the costumes this year, including a strangely elaborate white thing that was probably a ghost, but which The Lovely One thinks was a marshmallow. We’ve already eaten the last of the candy.

So keith taunted me with a little e-mail about my previous post on the US election. He thinks, as he put it, that my track record of misguided election predictions will be intact.

Hm. Maybe. I wrote a long note back to him, and am going to restate the least funny parts here.

The presidential race is a complete toss-up. Any last-minute surprises (cf. Bush’s DUI snapshot of the last weekend of the 2000 vote) could easily tilt the election dramatically. Turnout (as mustered by the “get out the vote” or “GOTV” plans of both parties) will probably be the decisive factor in the really close states.

Slate has updated its Election Scorecard today, and is still calling the race for Kerry. But it’s incredibly tenuous. I think that Real Clear Politics has a view of the state-by-state race that makes the undecided nature of the race more clear. They show 116 Electoral College votes as a complete toss-up, not counting the 82 EC votes that are “leaning” one way or the other.

It’s at this point that the sheer toss-up nature of the vote is clear. The will of the voters, for all practical purposes, is evenly divided. I am reminded of my feeling about playoff sports: a season of play tells you which team is the most consistently superior, with a reasonable level of statistical meaningfulness. A playoff is more or less a crap-shoot, even in the case of 7-game series, but especially with a one-game runoff. You can always resort to the argument that one team was chosen as the best on that day, but it’s unsatisfactory to me that for some reason that is seen as the team to remember. One rarely recalls the team with the best season record, unless that team also wins the play-offs.

Back to elections, the American two-party arrangement at the federal level makes every competition a close one, and one decided every 2-6 years, depending on the office. This isn’t as bad as it might seem to countries with multiple federal parties of substance. The key is that both parties are seeking to win half the voters. This necessarily makes the parties avoid severe extremism in their presidential candidates (like it or not, neither W. nor JFK represent a political extreme, either within or without their respective parties), that being reserved for locally elected candidates like congressional representatives.

With such a close, and essentially randomly decided race, I almost wonder if it wouldn’t be better to use some sort of sortition, and make the essentially random nature of the process be made explicit. One variation of this election-by lottery that has been proposed is to randomly draw the candidate from a single ballot.

Not much new to report. A fairly uneventful bike ride on Saturday morning. The afternoon was occupied by a tech-support project which was inconclusive. Oh dear.

The return to Standard Time today affects me quite acutely. It means more light in the mornings, which will give me a respite from the recent dark commutes to work.

The good news doesn’t last long, though. At this time of year, the daylight ebbs away daily. The Vancouver Sun did a feature article (can’t promise that link is permanent) on how quickly it gets dark, and how it’s especially bad in Vancouver: Edmonton may have snow on the ground that could stick until Spring, but Vancouver gets far fewer hours of daylight than any other major Canadian city. It’s not a small gap, either: Vancouver, 390 hours; Toronto, 505; Calgary, 670. Even Victoria gets 429 hours between October and February.

For a cyclist, the season change is acutely noticeable. I check the weather every morning before dressing for my commute, picking between gear for cold or wet weather. The darkness dictates that I bring and use my lights on the way to work, and with the time change, I will need them for the afternoon ride. Sunrise on Sunday: 0659. Sunset: 16:53. I finish work at either 1630 or 1700, so I’m well into dark rides in the next few weeks. On November 15, the sun sets at 1630.

Indoor soccer. Game 1 of a lunchtime doubleheader. We have a 4-goal lead with 3 minutes to play, so I sub for our goaltender, who also happens to be our top scorer.

The game ended tied 5-5.

D’oh!

We lost the second game. I did not play goal.

Last night, after I came back from my test-ride of the new bike, I noticed that I could see one of my high-cut and one of my low-cut biking shoes on the shoe rack. I looked down at my feet. Sure enough, I had done the ride with mismatched shoes.

A warning to others.

It’s Friday tomorrow. Come on Friday. Now, where’s my gin and tonic?

Now listen up, because i’m about to share a bunch of really good information against my own best interests, and it will save you some money.

As you might know, I’m really cheap. I like buying stuff cheaply, and I like selling stuff for more than I bought it. Sometimes being cheap just means knowing a good store to buy interesting bits cheaply (I went to Daiso this weekend and found a “third hand” bicycle brake adjustment tool, plus an assortment of useful metric nuts, $2 each), but that only leads you to normal sorts of good deals. Online deal-hunting through eBay and sites like Tech Bargains are other avenues I am exploring, with limited success (the costs of shipping and exchage rates are a high barrier, though the recent strong Canadian dollar has made these options more attractive).

But for really, really good deals, I believe that the most buyer-favoured venue you are likely to experience is the private garage sale. Okay, maybe dumpster diving is even cheaper, but good pickings are usually only available during Spring clean-up weeks.

Garage sales feature the most highly motivated, naive vendors available to normal buyers. The goal of a garage sale is generally to get rid of stuff first, and to get money second. Large, odd items, bicycles, and that eternal boondoggle, exercise equipment, will all go for pennies on the dollar.

Not all garage sales are perfect. I have seen sellers asking $50 for wretched department-store bikes. You have to hit a fair number of sales to find good stuff, and most importantly, you have to be able to assess the condition of the item you are looking at, know what’s wrong with it, and know what it should cost. It pays to have some expertise in the stuff you are searching for.

It also takes patience, just like thrift shop chasing (thrift shops…Value Village probably has the most interesting stuff most often, but they charge a bit more than Salvation Army or smaller shops). And you never know where you’re going to find the good stuff. You’ll hit a couple of sales, see nothing of interest, and then you’ll stumble across one that has some extremely unlikely deal available.

Stuff I have bought at garage sales: old video games, high-end bicycle saddle bags, early-80s road bikes, any quality bicycle predating brifters (for road bikes) or front suspension (on mountain bikes), toys, record albums, and much more. Oh, and don’t forget to bargain: the tagged price is always negotiable, and I expect you to dicker it down on general principles!

In other deals, the Build-A-Bear Workshop people taught me a whole new lesson in customer retention. The Lovely One got a reindeer from them last year. She named it Ruddy, gave her address in the little computer at the end that creates Ruddy’s special storybook, and so forth.

Today, she got an e-mail from the company wishing Ruddy a happy first birthday. It included a coupon good for a free t-shirt for the stuffed animal. That’s a lot of goodwill they just bought, and good on them. They raised the bar for customer love.

If you are reading this, you’ve missed the lunar eclipse tonight.

I got home, ate some lasagna (which I later found out was vegetarian. Soylent lasagna is green!), and did a rudimentary bike tire change, which seemed to go well. The new Park tire levers worked, which is good. I would recommend them over any other bring-along tire lever MEC sells (I’m referring to the plastic Park levers, which curiously are not shown on that page). I haven’t tried the Quick Stik yet, but its packaging warns that it works best on mountain bike tires, and not so good on road tires. The fixed-gear bike is back in business, and with new, non-insane gearing (44/16 or so, which is quite normal for a road fixie).

I took it for a very short test ride, which was completely satisfactory. I looked to my right as I rolled along the Barnet highway, and saw the lunar eclipse somewhere near the peak, a dull red moon. It’s one of the more impressive sky sights for an urban dweller, since it happens to a full moon, and is visible even where streetlights abound.

Maybe it was some sort of omen, then, that the Red Sox, after one of the weirdest baseball playoffs ever, won the series under that strange red moon. Curse of the Bambino, only team in baseball ever to come back from a 3-0 series deficit (and against the hated Yankees!), and then an easy-looking romp through four games against the Cardinals. My guess? Not omens, but apophenia.

Gregg Easterbrook’s last TMQ column makes the point that while baseball is the pet sport of many intellectuals, football is a much more mentally taxing game, one which relies extremely heavily on teamwork and smart play. I concur with his ideas, but they really only affect the players. For me, the joy of baseball (a sport which I can barely stand to watch) is the way which it lends itself to statistical analysis, and the way in which some very clever analysts of the game have even used that to construct better baseball teams (here’s to you, Billy Beane).

This can only be done in football with the greatest of difficulty, because it is such a team sport that it is hard to quantify individual contributions to team success, or even to figure out what it’s important to do well in football. That hasn’t stopped aficionados like those at Football Outsiders from trying. But on the whole, you can do more interesting things with baseball stats.

The best line of the Sox victory belonged to their boy manager, Theo Epstein, who, in an on-field interview after the win, exhorted fans to “go get drunk!” So far, it seems absent from the news reports, but I heard it live on the radio, so it really happened.

Back to my bike ride, it was short but pleasant. Cool weather, so I took it easy, but wearing a jersey and my new 3-pocket fleece (thanks, Value Village!) kept me warm. Fixed gear is a lot of fun, because of the purity of the experience. No shifting, no coasting, just pedaling.