A Thousand Times No

I learned a long time ago not to leave my bikes out on the street overnight in Philly. Two bikes Houdinied into thin air from right in front of my house, both of them U-locked to large, stationary metal objects. (Thieves in town are so crafty that they’ll strip the suspension forks off secured mountain bikes in the blink of an eye.)

Part of my daily routine is walking my commuting bike up and down nearly thirty feet of stairs in order to house it indoors. On Wednesday, I locked it up outside when I returned from work, intending to run errands in the evening. I ended up staying home and working on various other things, forgetting about the bike until Thursday morning.

The bike was still there, fork and all, but the headlight wasn’t. (Oddly, the taillight was still in place.) Ah, Philly: you snooze, you lose.

After being off my road bike for nearly two years, I’ve slowly been trying to get my distance riding legs back. In addition to not quite having my full pistons, I have more junk in the trunk nowadays than what is, er, aerodynamically desirable. Now that Fatty at FatCyclist.com has somehow melted into Svelty, I think it’s time for me to redouble my efforts, even as I embrace my inner cream puff.

To that end, on Monday night I tried joining Sturdy Girl Cycling group ride. Long story short — I got dropped, totally dropped, within the opening five miles. My great downfall, as always, was in the hills. I’ve been riding mostly on flat road so far this seasons, and climbing takes its own set of gears, both on the bike and in your legs. You will feel every extra ounce of booty when you match yourself against a steep grade. The Sturdy Girls also ride in a double paceline — a Procrustean bed for weightier riders, who tend to compensate for a slower uphill pace with steady, and sometimes blistering, downhill momentum.

The season is young, and I’ve got all summer to train. Maybe by Labor Day I’ll be able to ride like a (sturdy) girl.

I heard the news today, oh boy…What the Sam Hill just happened at the Floyd Landis trial yesterday?

Full disclosure: (a) I am, in cycling terms, ancient — old enough to remember Greg LeMond’s breakthrough victory at the Tour de France, and just how dapper he looked on the cover of Sports Illustrated when he was the first cyclist ever to be named Sportsman of the Year; and (b) I grew up in Minnesota, where LeMond used to live off-season then, and still lives now. I used to stop by the same bike shop on Hennepin Avenue that he did, long ago and far away. For me, the name “Greg LeMond” conjures up something more than just the rancorous Jeremiah who’s earned the ire of a younger generation of riders and aficionados.

The current animus people feel towards him was palpable last fall when I was at the Trexlertown Bike Swap. As the crowds milled through the grounds at the Lehigh Valley Velodrome, the track announcement system would intermittently spring to life with plugs for the concession stand, reminders of where to find the cash machines, and homing calls for lost parents. It’s a T-town tradition to broadcast “celebrity sightings,” letting everyone know when a world-class cyclist like Bobby Julich or Marty Nothstein is in the house.

Still, I was surprised when they announced that Greg LeMond was walking around the back turn of the velodrome track. At the sound of his name, one twentysomething standing next to me muttered, “He can go fuck himself.” Another turned to his friend and said, “What, can he still even get on a bike anymore, as fat as he is now? I doubt I’d even recognize him if I saw him.”

A few minutes later, I overheard a pair of men who were around LeMond’s age joking around with one another. “He’s totally not in shape any more,” said one. “Yeah, but I’m sure he could kick your ass on the bike,” replied the other. “No doubt,” the first conceded, “but that still wouldn’t mean he’s in any kind of shape.” Ouch.

I’ll admit, I’d also grown weary of hearing LeMond go after practically every cyclist on the European circuit, non-stop, full-tilt. He’s been the squeakiest wheel known to man when it comes to the question of doping. His fervor seemed to extend beyond the rational bounds of efficacy, and has been widely attributed to a mixture of professional jealousy and personal spleen.

Well, now it looks like it was personal, but not at all in the way we thought.

Yesterday, Greg LeMond got up in front of a room rife with reporters and, under oath, testified that he had been sexually molested as a child. His hand was forced by Landis’s now ex-business manager, Will Geoghegan, who had anonymously phoned LeMond the previous night. Geoghegan tried to intimidate LeMond with crude allusions to revealing the childhood abuse, a closely held secret that LeMond had confided to Landis alone last fall.

Geoghegan, besides being too low in the tank to block his phone number from caller ID, is a lousy student of cycling history. As Laurent Fignon could have told him, you can pump dozens of rounds of lead into Greg LeMond and he’ll still beat you to the wire.

Okay, I get it now. If I had been carrying a secret like LeMond’s around for several decades, a secret that involved involuntary abuse of my physical being as an eleven-year-old child, I can easily imagine myself going off my nut if I heard grown men saying they had no choice but to voluntarily abuse their bodies with an alphabet soup of EPO, T, HCG, HGH, and who knows what else.

Look, I’m not saying any rider injected, infused, ingested, or otherwise consumed anything — though increasingly, they themselves are. But I can see how it would just tear LeMond apart on the inside to hear the rationalizations. What he’s gone through puts an entirely different twist on shrugging your shoulders and saying, “Sorry, can’t be helped.” It doesn’t make LeMond’s behavior over the past several years any more pleasant; it does make his actions instantly more comprehensible.

“I’ve had to deal with understanding it because the shame has been so great,” LeMond disclosed yesterday. “Now, I’m not ashamed. I’m not a victim. I’m proud of where I’ve come—my life and my marriage.” Well said, like the champion he was, and is.

Ultimately, in a forced sprint, Greg LeMond proved his mettle — and his grace — one more time. Chapeau.

I got my first pair of glasses when I was eleven years old. Since then, it’s taken me a very long time to get around to wearing contact lenses. I waited until contact lens care became simple and streamlined before I took the plunge: Multipurpose all-in-one cleaning solutions, disposable lenses, toric correction for my astigmatism, and extended wear properties that allow me to carry on for days at a time with my lenses continuously in place.

Even so, adjusting to contact lenses was a challenge. When you’ve spent the vast majority of your life with a physical barrier between your eyes and the rest of the world, trying to finger your own eyeball feels acutely unnatural. The first time I requested a contact lens prescription, I was so squeamish about anything getting near my eyes that the ophthalmologist’s assistant was having difficulty administering eyedrops. “Perhaps,” the eye doc gently noted as I squirmed and flinched in the examination chair, “you’re not an ideal candidate for contact lens wear.”

A couple of years ago, I decided to give it another try. The exquisite corps at Modern Eye, a local eyewear store with a Dada theme and superlative customer care, held my hand each step of the way. Every comically drawn-out step, from the hour-plus it took me to insert my first single contact lens, through a few lens-cleaning solution allergies, to my strange aptitude for repeatedly donning the lenses inside-out.

After all that effort, we finally found what works for me: Bausch & Lomb PureVision Torics, a relatively large, yet highly breathable lens. Their thickness makes them difficult to invert, and therefore easy to apply. I can go for months without wearing contact lenses and still pop these in on the first attempt. In stark contrast with my many friends who keep piping the sad refrain, “I have to take out my contacts, my eyes are killing me,” I’ve repeatedly fallen asleep in these lenses at the end of overlong days, and awaked bright-eyed the next morning.

As I tried to remove my contacts earlier today, I started having difficulty lifting out the left lens. My left eye felt a bit itchy, but there was no sign of the lens — when I peered out of that eye, all I saw was a myopic, astigmatic blur. So where did the lens go? Had I dropped it in the sink? Did I accidentally rub it out just moments before? There was no sign of it anywhere. I stared, wall-eyed, into the mirror, but couldn’t detect anything resting on my eye. Eventually, I removed the other lens from my right eye and simply gave up.

A few minutes later, as I continued to fiddle with my itchy left eye, I felt something odd lingering around its outside corner. Voilà, there was the missing lens, scrunched up on itself from all my aimless prodding. Clearly, I should return to leaving them in whenever I’m really tired.

That, and quit poking my eye like I’m one of the Three Stooges.

I just stumbled across the Mandarin version of Avril Lavigne’s latest single, “Girlfriend” — Aiya! Utterly, completely infectious, the song is a cross of fast, crunchy guitar riffs and vintage Toni Basil. If you had told my little Casey Kasem-listening, 11-year-old self that I would hear a Top 40 artist in my lifetime singing in Chinese, I would have told you to go get your head checked. But the future is now, and here we are.

Lavigne doesn’t sing the whole song in Mandarin, just the chorus, which consists of six lines. In the original English, the lyrics are:

I don’t like your girlfriend
I think you need a new one
I could be your girlfriend

I know that you like me
No, it’s not a secret
I want to be your girlfriend

She’s recorded versions of the chorus in eight different languages:

• English
• French
• Italian
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• German
• Chinese
• Japanese

Reportedly, Lavigne was going to have a go at Hindi, but it proved too difficult. The Mandarin couldn’t exactly have been easy, and compensatory splicing is audible in the most rapid portions of the Chinese recording. Meanwhile, listeners all over the Web are weighing on the relative merits of the various versions.

Reactions generally fall into the same few camps, regardless of which language Avril’s tackling: “OMG/WTF, this is terrible, her accent is horrible.” “Give her credit for making the attempt — could you do any better in so many different languages?” “How awesome, now I love her even more!”

Having taken a crack at singing publicly in every single one of those eight languages, I’m definitely ready to give Avril some props for being game enough to try. Learning to sing in a language you don’t understand can be fiendishly difficult, especially if you don’t have tools like the International Phonetic Alphabet and diction coaches to help you through it. Doing it at the speedy pace of Lavigne’s song only makes it tougher.

What I do hear right off the bat is that Lavigne used a different method for learning the phonetic sounds of Asian language versions than she did for the European language versions. Relative familiarity, perhaps in the form of the Roman alphabet, breeds self-content: Lavigne’s vowels are actually more accurate in Chinese than in French and German. Her Mandarin coach obviously steered her towards a heavy-on-the-R’s Beijing accent, giving her the distinct “cat-fighting” sound of the most orthodox pronunciation in the Middle Kingdom.

There’s a reason it’s called a “hook” in songwriting. Love it or hate it, this is by no means the last you’ll hear from Ms. Lavigne.

Thank you so much, Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority! O you, of the fetid acronym (SEPTA) and unwittingly self-parodic slogans (”We’re getting there”), you of the random bureaucratic caprice. I am so infinitely grateful that you switched to a new regional train schedule today with absolutely no advance warning, departing from the city a full ten minutes early and leaving me stranded after having dropped $5.50 on a day pass. I guess the switch also came as a surprise to you, since you could only offer riders a series of messy, stapled photocopies rather than actual printed train schedules.

Had someone been able to pick me up from the train for my afternoon of tutoring in a community college 25 miles out of town, this would not have been so bad. Unfortunately, when I called the one classroom parent whose cell phone number I keep for such emergencies, she explained to me that she would be unable to pick me up. Unbeknown to me, her entire family had just moved to a new town this past week. A new town in upstate New York.

So it was time for my friends at PhillyCarShare to come to the rescue. I called in search of a car for four hours, and was able to book one at a nearby neighborhood parking lot. As I reached the lot exit, I pulled out the vinyl-coated parking card assigned to the car and attempted to push it in the cardreader slot. The gate arm stayed put as I tantrically tried every variation: up, down, front, back. Finally, I pushed the “Help” button on the cardreader. “You need to put in your credit card,” squawked the voice at the other end. I explained that I already had a lot card, but I simply needed to know how to insert it. “You need to put in your credit card,” the voice said again. We Abbott-and-Costelloed for several rounds until I finally crammed the card further into the slot, raising the gate.

When I finally made it into the classroom to teach, one of kids asked about the meaning of the word “alphanumeric”. We talked about letters and digits, and then I started writing a string of non-alphanumeric characters. They broke into laughter when I pointed out that this was a traditional way to represent foul language in cartoons.

So let me now repeat: Thank you so much, @$!&?# SEPTA.

 

 PRTQ: The Better Take: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is in the midst of conducting a talent search for new radio voices. The open-call wing of their search, which organizers have nicknamed “This American Idol,” is being conducted online at publicradioquest.com. Though there is a long string of legalese about the contest rules and criteria, it all boils down to what the judges are calling “Hostiness” — the ineffable quality that makes listeners pause their radio dials on the left side of the FM band in order to keep listening.

Naturally, I put in a submission. The two-minute time restriction on our demos, combined with the personal profile questions, felt uncannily like NPR-meets-speed-dating, so that’s where I went with my sample clip. Go ahead and listen in, and put in a vote for me if you feel like registering for the site.

If I seem lukewarm in my pronouncements, I am. Of course, I’d like to advance in the talent competition. But to be perfectly honest, I doubt that will happen. I’m happy with my audition concept, the final script, and the production values. Still, I’ve listened to the competition, and there’s a lot of really fantastic work out there. More to the point, my own submission was short on “hostiness,” the relaxed, intimate twinkle that draws listeners in. I’m frustrated, because I know I’ve got plenty of hostiness in me, and if you’re a regular listener, you know it, too.

Unfortunately, I ran into some technical problems during the recording of my voiceover. While I had an early reading that I really liked, the sound levels came in unbelievably low, making my voice resemble a small fly buzzing off the wall. I couldn’t figure out how to adequately correct the gain levels in the original sound file, so I just ended up re-recording. And re-recording. And re-recording.

By the time I completed the take that was finally submitted, I was deeply fatigued. I was also speaking with a ponderous, projection-heavy cadence, fretting about making myself heard in the microphone. The result: a professional, but stultified sound, with a little too much punchiness in the mix. If I were a Hostiness snack, I’d be more Sinkie than Twinkie.

I finally figured out how the correct the volume levels on my preferred voiceover — after I put in my submission. Since then, I’ve been plagued by the sinking sensation of reaching the platform just as the train begins to pull out of the station.

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote in a legal opinion that he could not legally define obscenity, but “I know it when I see it.” I can’t define hostiness, but I know it when I hear it. If you listen to the submitted clip back-to-back with The Better Take above, and I think you’ll understand what I mean.

My entry speaks of consolation prizes, and I guess this is where I have to take my comfort: at least I’ve got the ears to know the difference.

I’m sorry that the frequency of entries has slowed here for during past few months. I’ve been confronting a very large pileup of Life Stuff, and that’s made for a cutback in time at keyboard. When I was younger (back in the days before the Interwebs, when we used to actually write letters to each other when we fanned out across the country), I was far quicker at churning out vast heaps of informal prose. Now my writing skills have slowed to a crawl. If there were some form of fiber supplementation for English composition, I’d be downing it religiously each morning with a small glass of orange juice.

There’s also been a recent flurry of activity that I haven’t had time to mention. For over a year, I’ve been thinking about purchasing a house. Window shopping, really, since I’m already in an economical, convenient, and generally comfortable living situation. I’m also situated in one of the nation’s bubblier real estate markets, so I’ve refrained from jumping in and enslaving myself to a sky-high mortgage.

Last week, I was preparing to put in a bid on a house. The twist: I was preparing to do it on a property that was being foreclosed and auctioned by the city. Yes, it’s a bona fide live auction, complete with people jumping out of their chairs to shout counterbids and an auctioneer who calls out, “Going once, going twice…” Long stretches of monotonous droning are punctuated by short spurts of frenetic, ulcer-inducing activity.

The house I wanted was slated to be auctioned last Tuesday, on May Day. At the last minute, the auction of the property was postponed. This happens more often than not, and I really think it’s for the best, since people ought to be given every opportunity to try to stay in their homes and work through their financial setbacks.

The postponement was only for a single month. In the first week of June, I’ll be going through this whole cycle all over again. Or not, if the current homeowner can right her balance sheet in time. Stay tuned for updates and keep your fingers crossed — first for her, and only then for me.

In the meantime, I’m mulling over the statement that cues the bidding on every property put up for sale. The auctioneer announces the property’s writ number, states the opening bid amount required to satisfy the city, and then opens the floor with the same four words: “Can I get more?”

Funny, I’ve been asking myself that a lot lately. Going once, going twice…

And now, in the “Funny You Should Find My Blog by Searching for That” category, I have just learned that I am currently placed both first and second in Israeli Google for the following search string:

drive you into a corner and kiss you a thousand times without a sound

“Funny, you don’t look like a tefillin…”

Speaking of which, few people have seen the surprisingly torrid 1998 film “A Price Above Rubies,” starring Renée Zellweger and Christopher Eccleston as a pair of Hasidic in-laws. (That’s right, Bridget Jones and Dr. Who — who nu?) One interesting, albeit highly indirect, tefillin detail from director Boaz Yakin appears onscreen: Eccleston’s Sender Horowitz wears his watch on his right wrist. Why? When you lay a tefillin on your left arm every day, it’s best if the watch stays on the other wrist.

Oy, how is it that I know these things? I guess Mossad will have to send their stealthy kissing minions (or minyans) to track me down and find out. Meanwhile, a nice date with a bacon-cheeseburger tribesman would be good, too. Chinese, anyone?

People, need I even say what day it is? Please, have a seat:

There was a great post on Language Log the other day about asterisked and encoded language, with quotes from the diary of good ol’ Samuel “Marshmallow” Pepys. This inspired me to play with the little interactive portion of the Tiffany’s website that allows you to build your own charm bracelets online. For a mere $975 plus tax, this could be mine (or yours):

Happy May Day, everyone!