GLOBADOM

So there’s, roughly speaking, a 5-way tie for first in the Northwest division, where our beloved Canucks play.

I think our division this season is the story of five rather good teams just tearing the crap out of each other. Every one of these teams is playoff-quality, but their points relative to the rest of the league are hamstrung by their lack of chances to play cruddy teams.

Or at least, I hope so. I can’t find a smoking gun stat to prove it.

The obvious thing to look for is records outside the division: are these teams much better against non-divisional opponents? Maybe.

Record vs. non-NW div
Van: 14-9-0  .609
Cgy: 15-10-2 .593
Min: 16-14-1 .532
Col: 12-14-1 .463
Edm: 12-11-3 .519

That last number, by the way, is my patented “percentage of potential points” (PPP) which is:

points / (2*games played)

That’s really simple, but it approximates a winning percentage like in baseball, but with a fudge for Circus Time points.

If you’re wondering, the Edm PPP for all games this season is .512, while Vancouver is a .559. Calgary leads with a .575, making them the effective standings leader at the moment.

I’m not really sure what this tells us. What it really may tell us is that I haven’t made any adjustments for schedule strength. Hm. Colorado has been beaten by Washington, Chicago, St. Louis (twice), Columbus…. Maybe Colorado just stinks, but that doesn’t explain why they do so well against NW division teams.

In conclusion, I have no idea what’s going on. The goal I’m reaching for is to find teams that will excel in the playoffs, though, and I suspect that with the heavily imbalanced schedule, there is more possibility for good teams to be masked by playing good opponents often, or conversely, for mediocre teams to look better by playing bad opponents often. How sweet would it be to play Philly, St. Louis, or LA a whole bunch?

I called a ‘cross ride for today, because I’m a nut. The ride turnout was dampened by lousy weather and hangovers, but five doughty souls showed up at Calhoun’s at 1300 this afternoon. Due to the disreputable outlaw nature of this ride, I will use pseudonyms to identify the participants. We grabbed some beers, filled up our water bottles (I can highly recommend Unibroue’s Fin du Monde as a sports beverage), and packed a few Shaftebury’s for the road. There was only one rule we abided by that day: no team kit.

We started out in a loop that retraced the three Vancouver ‘cross courses: West Point Grey Academy, Jericho Beach, and Vanier Park.

WPGA was unremarkable, though in the sloppy conditions some of the steeper slopes were unrideable. “Gord” (remember: not his real name) distinguished himself by being the only one able to ride the gravel pit.

Jericho was fun and ludicrously waterlogged. The race course followed a path that involved a little drop down a short, moderately steep slope, followed by a right turn onto a wide gravel path. I came through the section third. As I got to the top, I noticed a huge puddle covering the gravel path. Ahead, I could see Dave (his real name, but there’s so many Daves that doesn’t identify him) and The Kiwi pedaling through the “puddle.” It was considerably deeper than their bottom brackets.

Remember, at this point my new BB, the most expensive one I have ever bought, has about 25 minutes of riding time.

I cackled madly and dropped in.

I saw “Gord” and the Rocket Scientist looking over the puddle from the top. Then they committed to wet feet with the rest of us. It was the signature moment of the ride.

Fun was had by all. At Vanier we deviated from the race course rather than ride through an evilly rust-coloured puddle of unknown depths. This was a surprising turn of good judgment for a pack of riders with beer in their water bottles.

Throughout the ride, I tried to educate these fellows on the key elements of the code of Drunken Cyclocross. Mainly it comes down to “don’t spill your beer” and “leave no witnesses”.

We saw a few of the Bienniale sculptures, and used them as cyclocross obstacles.

We crossed the Burrard Bridge, checked out the Polar Bear swim (but did not participate, for triathlism-related reasons), yelled at people in bad French, and entered Stanley Park. Dave managed to slide out impressively on wet grass, and then said he didn’t want to be known as a sketch-pilot. Work on that more, Dave! Later, Dave claimed that the beer was performance-enhancing, and made him feel warm and happy.

Coming out of Stanley Park, we raced cars around the perimeter road and won. I would commend compact gearing to any semi-serious ‘crosser as a highly versatile choice: I could ride most of the courses in the 36, and the 50 was perfect for the road. The sawzall of gearing for the sawzall of bikes.

As a ‘cross ride, it was a total success. We got very wet, very muddy, and very giddy. That is what is supposed to happen. I think the beer helped. There is no doubt there will be a repeat performance next New Year’s Day.

Be there, or be a panty-waisted bed-wetter.

I completely rebuilt my ‘cross bike last night and this morning for this ride. Oh well, it needed it. This was the maiden ride for the shifters and the new crankset.

I paid $120 for the crankset (marked down from about a $500 MSRP) and put it on a bike I got at a garage sale for $10.

This is a very abusive thing to do to a fine and pretty component.

As is traditional, we went to midnight mass, followed by a gift exchange with the in-laws.

This year, I’m sending The Lovely One off for a spa day, but she pulled off that rarest of tricks: giving me a gift I had forgot to ask for, that I would never buy for myself (too extravagant) and that I really wanted.

It’s the blanket in the photo above. That is a genuine Hudson’s Bay “Caribou” throw, made of pure wool, thick, dense, and fiercely warm. It doesn’t even remotely qualify as a “gift for us”: TLO finds it so itchy she can’t come in contact with it.

The question is, of course, what a technophilic 30-something guy whose idea of thematic interior decorating would be a toolchest in every room is doing lusting after Bay blankets.

I can only put it down to “authenticity.”

However madly, badly, and occasionally ignorantly, I have very specific, well-formed aesthetic ideas in my tiny skull about what constitutes the real, the proper, and the pleasing. A glib reference would be to say it’s like Restoration Hardware’s aesthetic, except for the goods in question not being completely shoddy crap.

Okay, so Restoration Hardware isn’t the best example. Actually, it’s about the worst. But I shall pass by.

Understand that this is a very personal and probably irrational definition of authenticity, which might be more properly described as “things I like.”

The first element of authenticity is that the item be good. In a blanket, durability and warmth are the basic requirements. In a bicycle, reasonably light weight, functionality, and reliability are key. Well, let’s just say that very few disposable things are authentic. Corn broom? Authentic. Push broom? Authentic. Swiffer? Inauthentic.

Where was I going? I like stuff that works well, lasts well, looks good (but always in a way subservient to function), and if it has a history, a story, or a particularly clever or novel design, so much the better.

I am not always a follower of my own aesthetic. I buy cheap crap too often, but I try to do it only once. I sublimate my cheapness by haunting used markets and other sources of unloved but authentic equipment. No object is more authentic, in my mind, than an alloy-rimmed early-80s steel road bicycle with mid-range Suntour components, bought for $10 and upgraded with modern brakes and calipers if necessary, and a modern Hyperglide cogset just for fun. Such bikes are utterly unvalued, but so gloriously competent that I could ride one to work, in a bike race, or across the continent, and it would do any of those things at least 90% as well as a brand new, utterly specific bike costing $1000-3000+.

Other places where I follow this aesthetic? I have a used Yamaha receiver (RX-V795B) that decodes Dolby and DTS digital signals, but doesn’t switch HD-quality video. Modern HDMI/component converting/switching receivers start at about five times the price. I bought a $50 component video switch box and am still several hundred dollars ahead of the game. It is a fair trade for having to walk over to the box every time I want to change inputs.

Authenticity is outside of price, but that doesn’t mean the authentic is always cheap, or even a good deal. But $200 on omakase at Tojo’s is an authentic experience.

But $200 worth of Noka chocolates? A very, very inauthentic experience (þ: Daniel Rutter)

The wonderful thing about being both lazy and a blogger is that I can write this Christmas letter to you on Christmas Eve, and you’ll still all get it in time for Christmas!

This has been a weird year. I could easily write it off as something like “the cat died, grandpa died, and I got fat and had a bad year of bike racing. Or I could talk about some of the stuff that didn’t make it to the blog, which is even sadder, but I shan’t, because there’s a reason I don’t blog some things.

But the point is, I’m not sad. It has not been a year of moving from high to high, but some nice things have happened. The Lovely One and I are doing okay, the nutdog is reasonably well-behaved and quite adorable, and we’ve both had interesting projects and plenty of work. Did I mention I haven’t been fired yet from my day job? That’s a pretty big deal right there.

But never mind that. The evidence is in: within broad parameters, externalities do not change your overall level of happiness very much or for very long.

This sounds like my own intuitive sense of how happiness works, so I am easily swayed by the argument. Yet in the subject of happiness, I also find myself reaching towards Aristotle, referenced in the Wikipedia:

From the observation that fish must become happy by swimming, and birds must become happy by flying, Aristotle points to the unique abilities of man as the route to happiness. Of all the animals only man can sit and contemplate reality. Of all the animals only man can develop social relations to the political level. Thus the contemplative life of a monk or professor, or the political life of a military commander or politician will be the happiest.

Hm. We feel happiest when involved in something with which we have some skill and practice? Gord? Yep, it’s our old friend flow making an appearance.

So if I have a not-very-seasonal message for you, it’s that whether as consolation or horrid fate, you’re probably always going to be about as happy as you are. If you want to fulfill your potential, find a worthwhile activity, and Flow into it. Do it for ten thousand hours and maybe you’ll get good at it.

You need a seasonally appropriate message? In the last hundred years, nobody has been more clear on the subject of Christmas than Charles Schulz. And his quote on the script of the Christmas special (“if we won’t do it, who will?“), might serve as a personal motto, except that I already have one (“verum de parvis, verum de magnus”).

So it’s time for me to go to Midnight Mass, so I sign off. Have a Merry Christmas, and a Happy, Flow-y New Year. My gift to you is this take on Pachelbel’s Canon:

Via: VideoSift

So someone in my household picked The Great Canadian Polar Bear Adventure for our evening’s viewing. I’m not saying it was The Lovely One. It could have been me….

About 3 seconds in, I sense trouble brewing when I realize this is a live-action drama starring talking polar bears. About 3 minutes in, things take a turn for the weird: we get to eavesdrop on a mundane conversation among a couple of seals, right before a bear eats one of them!

Ten out of ten for not eliding the whole “wouldn’t the Lion King want to eat most of his subjects?” question, minus several million for personifying a bear that is now muzzle deep in what was recently a personified seal! If one anthropomorphized being eats another one, is that anthropocannibalism?

You know a TV drama is Canadian when it stars the vocal talent of Megan “Anne of Green Gables” Follows. Howie Mandel, and (for some reason) Don Cherry have also been roped in. The whole thing is “Star Wars Holiday Special” levels of weird. I fully expect a singing polar bear by the second act.

This is mostly an apolitical weblog, but since I was looking for some early juice on the new leader of the Liberals and found nothing, I thought I’d write it myself.

Though some had already written this surprise scenario (candidate in fourth place in delegates going into the campaign wins), it was only written as a surprise.

So who is Stéphane Dion?

In a field which pitted the Harvard Guy against the NDP Guy against the Western Guy (the Female Guy was knocked off the ballot after the first round, the Gay Guy threw in with the NDP Guy at the same time, the Hockey Guy got eliminated in the second round, and the Really Sleazy Guy gave up even before the first ballot…ah heck, just read the Wikipedia entries), Stéphane was the Quebec Guy.

He was also the Establishment Guy, inasmuch as he was a cabinet minister under PM Chrétien, and (surprisingly) also under PM Martin. If this was to be the convention where the Liberals took their chance to make a break with the recent, fairly scandalous past by electing someone who wasn’t in government under Chrétien, (best represented by Ignatieff or Bob Rae) the Liberals decided they didn’t need to do that. But! He did have the good grace to be shocked (and according to Colby Cosh, not shocked, shocked!) at Sponsorship et al.

For my part, I’ll make a snap judgement that any candidate who received the endorsement of Ms. Burning Crosses at any time is automatically minus one point. Balancing that is that Mr. Dion is not Bob Rae.

The Liberal party doesn’t need or want, and probably shouldn’t heed my opinions. And in my experience, the broad spectrum of punditry is likely to overstate Dion’s weaknessess and strengths. My gut feeling (let me reiterate: largely worthless) is that things like character and network affiliation matter much less than coherent, well-defended policies.

To that end, the biggest problem the Liberals face in the near term is that they already had their dozen years, and while they did some things well (it hurts me to admit it every time, but they did a competent, if not optimal job of fiscal management) while sleazing up government pretty remarkably. Meanwhile, Stephen Harper is so far doing a boringly competent job (my favourite kind!) and history says that as long as he continues that path, Canadians will give a sitting PM the benefit of the doubt.

My sure-fire prediction, though, is that after the next election, the PM of Canada will be Steve something. Take that to the bank.

First, I should apologize to everyone in the hotel: that was our dog who decided, against all past history, that every thump in the night needed to be barked at. Thanks, dog.

Second, the weekend was off the hook. You’re going to see film of Saturday’s cyclocross nationals shortly, but I’m here to tell you about Sunday’s race.

Jungle-cross? More like Bizarro-cross! The race started with a 300m or so run. I was running (literally) second until I was demoralized by the Ironman tat on the leader’s ankle. Really. There was a rideable over-the-ankles water crossing. Large chunks of the course were mowed out of a hayfield. There was a wooden bridge, and then another wooden bridge so mud-covered I never saw the surface. I made my usual “mountain bike course” joke to Noiles, and he went off. I think it’s fair to claim that the course was more technical than some mountain bike races I have done.

Maybe the best part yet was being complimented by the finish line judge on my stylish dismount at the finish line. I did a double-take and realized that the judge in question was Wendy Simms, in her words, “giving back.”

And now, unless I go nuts and do the November 25th race in Bellingham, I can pretend that the season is over. Time to go and watch velodrome racing, and generally just watch my weight and do push-ups for three months. Then training begins in earnest.

From The Onion: Over-Competitive Lance Armstrong Challenges Cancer To Rematch.

I often think the funniest thing about Onion articles is the headline, but in this case the article strikes a perfect balance between horribly tasteless and pitch-perfect hilarity.

Of course, the meta-joke is that the over-competitive Armstrong is famously Blackberry-addicted to egosurfing himself. Unless he gave that up when he retired (yeah right), one muses about his reaction when that story popped up.