Microbano

She just didn’t sell it there. It was sold to Vladez businessman Larry Reynolds directly:

http://gov.state.ak.us/archive-1111.html

Stage 5 of the 2008 Tour de France is the longest stage of this year’s suffer-fest, and given the relatively flat profile of the 232 KM/144 mile route from Choulet to Châteauroux, it promised to be a showcase for the sprinters.

In cycling stage races, of which the Tour is one, sprinters are kind of like base stealers. What they do is very dramatic in comparison to the rest of the action, consumes a huge amount of team resources in execution, and often nets the team nothing more than a dirty shirt and evidently, in the case of Tim Raines and the best sprinter in the world Tom Boonen of the Quickstep squad, a love of Bolivian marching powder. Since Boonen was busted for nose dusting before the tour, the title of top sprinter – leading to the green jersey – on this year’s tour is as wide open as Joe Perry’s septum.

Here’s the thing about big time cycling. To explain how it works to people who aren’t interested, we who are use a whole bunch of team sports metaphors. See the second paragraph. But what people don’t really get about it is that even though these guys all look alike on their bikes, they are highly specialized. If you take a look at a baseball or football team, it’s fairly obvious who is there for speed, who is there for strength and who is there to host floating sex parties. These differences are much less obvious in a cycling line-up: they are all (more or less) rail thin, they are all gluttons for punishment and they all look good in spandex short shorts and a great many meatheads assume they are bitches.

Which is why Briton Mark Cavendish’s victory at the line today was such a statement. The best of the rest outside of Boonen – Thor Hushovd, Erik Zabel and Robbie Hunter – were signposted by the 23-year old from the Isle of Man’s all-out, sustained burst of speed to take this stage. And since the green jersey competition is often the only one that is contested right up until the final day, showing that you can win a stage is key.

And before you ask “why?” or “how else do they gain points?” or “do they do anything to prepare their nuts for three weeks of pounding?” let me tell you something – it doesn’t fucking matter. Watch the race, see the lovely French countryside, appreciate the sacrifice of years of nut smashing with a ball peen hammer and learn as you go.

Tomorrow, the Tour goes 192 kilometers/119 miles from Aigurande to Super-Besse crossing the huge fucking pile of volcanic rock in the middle of France known as the Massif Central. The stage contains two category 2 climbs – which to you and me translates as mountains so fucking big your university car would never make it up them.

Until then.

The Monaco Grand Prix represents the acme of an industry dedicated to scaling the heights of both engineering and hype.

On the hype front these days, motorsports are unstoppable. With Lewis Hamilton and CART’s Danica Patrick, ‘08 podiums are practically champagne soaked Selmas. This Obama/Clinton swirl of celebrity is matched only by the gee-whiz factor of the vehicles they pilot - piles of engineering wizardry so high that it is almost impossible to see their original purpose.

The justification for all the resources dumped into race car engineering – as if racing would cease to happen were there not “a reason” for it – is well worn. Everything that goes into cars on the track comes back as better, safer (and usually faster, therefore less safe – but we’ll put that aside for the moment) passenger cars. And this is an argument that with a little scrutiny does bear fruit – semi-automatic transmissions, modern tire technology and a whole host of passive, active and supplemental safety features we take for granted in modern vehicles have their roots in motorsport.

But, like the old canard of “downstream technology” to justify the zeppelin-esque budgets of the space shuttle, the benefit to everyday drivers of F1 technology only goes so far. Did building race cars that were reliable enough not to require an on-board mechanic aid in advancing mobility? Undoubtedly. But cars that can drive upside-down? Don’t think so.

Of course, I realize that extravagance is the point. The outrageous performance figures are just part of the carnival of excess that is an F1 weekend. From breasts to boats to bottles, the idea is more, faster, bigger.

Luckily, there is a way for Formula 1 to re-define the cutting edge without losing any (even initially) of the speed, glamour and danger that makes it so attractive.

Electricity.

If Tesla motors can build, market and sell an all-electric car that does 0-100 kmh in four seconds for $109,000 USD, Formula One teams can surely produce electric cars with performance profiles not too far off what they currently have from the $300 million it costs to field an F1 team.

And imagine if they did. Imagine if tomorrow F1 teams were told that the last year they had to compete with fossil fuels was the 2009 season. How would that make the larger world look at electric technologies? People who had no idea about the capabilities of electricity as a transportation fuel would suddenly realize that one of the fastest production cars in the world was electric. They wouldn’t really care that it is six times more efficient than anything that performs anything close to it.

F1 would go from being merely the number two sport in the world to being the number one agent for change in the world.

The car companies would of course be upset. As would the oil companies. But F1 is a business and at the moment, there are no more worlds left for it to conquer. It can’t get any more popular doing things the way it does now. But going all-electric would make this pillar of old-economy promotion as shiny as the latest silicon valley start-up.

In 2006 Max Mosley said that the future of F1 was one where efficiency would play a part. If F1 were to go all-electric for 2010, the age of gasoline vehicles would be over. F1 shouldn’t just consider this, they should do it; right now.

If THIS is the kind of dedication to a snow sport story we can expect during Vancouver 2010, those will be a thrilling games indeed.

The only snow one usually sees in London falls on the backs of pub toilets. This guy doesn’t let that stop him.

I love limeys. Their superior attitude in all matters humanitarian, intellectual, sporting and cultural both high and low is just so quaint in light of their relative position in the world. And it is for all these reasons that I love the POMie gossip email popbitch. Trashy as Fresh Kills in content, it has Rhodes Scholar pretensions in attitude. That’s why this little tidbit on LeBron James in this week’s edition seems so fitting:

NBC star Lebron James’ new house in Ohio has casino, two-lane bowling alley, barber shop, aquarium, sports bar, recording studio, and master bedroom with a two-story walk-in closet.

They’re so fucking clever they figured out what the Global Icon needs - a recurring role on Studio 60 or maybe I’m missing the point and this is a quiet lobby for a return of Pat O’Brien and Brent Mussberger to the peacock network.

Technorati Profile

Dear reader/Sarah Spain,

In the absence of personal riches or connections, footballing talent, a job at Dolphin’s Stadium or any interest at all in NFL football generally or the Indianapolis Colts or the Chicago Bears specifically, I am willing to offer the following X items in exchange for your taking me to/giving me tickets for Super Bowl XLI:

I. I will provide your tribe with 60 guilders worth of trade goods. Specifically duffel cloth, iron kettles and axe heads, hoes, wampum, drilling awls, Jew’s Harps, and diverse other wares. These items can be divided amongst tribe members in any way your tribal elders see fit.

II. I will be your best friend.

III. During the course of the match, I will fetch you food and beverage items. However, I will only perform this service after you promise to “time” me to see how quickly I can perform the food and beverage collection. You will not in actuality time me - as I return from each “race” you will give me a fabricated time slightly slower than the previous one. This will motivate me greatly to do better next time.

IV. You: Crockett. Me: Tubbs. Without exception, for the entire week in Miami. Unless of course, you would prefer to be Tubbs. In which case you are black - and I can get us into corporate tents.

V. Nothing says taking care of people, football and Miami like a nice, new set of Isotoners.

VI. I will disown the Lord Jesus three times before sundown.

VII. Have a threesome. Sorry, that is from my upcoming “XXX things a man has to do before he’s 30″ list.

VIII. At the conclusion of the game, I will convince you to leave your commemorative cup on the ground where it belongs.

IX. When Billy Joel takes the field to sing the national anthem, I will begin to drunkenly make the trite, obvious and irrelevant argument that Marvin Gaye sang the finest national anthem EVER at the 1983 NBA all-star game with a serious and vehemence that would suggest I was arguing Roe v Wade. By the time Prince takes the field at half-time, I will have implicated “that cocksucker Joel” in ending the once-promising career of Eddie and the Cruisers. By the end of the fourth quarter I will have shit myself.

X. I will shoot a bullet hole through every Wiser lock I see for the remainder of the week.

A cat in heat is an incredible thing to behold. They cry all night, they meow all day. They walk around with their “face down, ass up”. They will fight to get outside in order to advertise to every tom, tom and tom within a mile radius that they have an itch that needs scratching. Most troubling, when your cat is frolicking at your feet like she is in a Whitesnake video, you feel - as you did when Kelly LeBrock was stroking that lucky, lucky Jaguar and you were simply stroking - that this creature is making a pass at you.

Since USA ‘94, soccer in North America has taken a similar posture. A strangely familiar creature - given its ubiquity on planet earth - writhing around on a carpet marked for football; constantly reassuring us that if we give it a try we’ll fall in love.

And so, last week… David Beckham. Oh, he was coy alright. On Good Morning America he looked Euro-slick, but strangely unthreatening as two middle-aged women for whom a transatlantic flight is no more exotic than a cross-town cab played off his accent with cutesy-pie interpretations of greetings, American style. But as with all situations wherein big media properties get meta-promotional with other big media properties, the inevitable question was “who is plugging whom”?

In the end, the only reasonable answer is “who cares” - but these are not reasonable times. So, discouraged from looking for the unreasonable answer, I got back to the business of trying to shut that fucking cat up.

What I found was a how to guide for Q-tip fucking our cat into a state of satiation. Seriously. I won’t post a link for fear of ending up on some sex offender list somewhere, but suffice it to say if you Google cat in heat q-tip, you’ll find not only how to do it, but also a fan-fiction-esque description of a cat orgasm.

I have wanted to throw this animal under a bus for the last week or so, so this was not out of the question. And, we had dinner guests over so it might have been amusing. But, in the end, cooler heads prevailed.

North American Soccer in general, and the MLS specifically, on the other hand, lubricated with TONS of Simon Fuller, got out the Q-tip and reamed the shit out of the the common Beckham feline. Perhaps they had had quite enough of his cheshire grinning, his playful hair tosses and his deadball wizardry (circa 1999, but still). Maybe they just wanted some sleep.

The problem is that the q-tip is not the real thing. According to the online cat fucker’s advice column, after you’ve debased yourself to a degree seldom possible outside prison - the cat only stays quiet for a few minutes. You’re trying to deflect an action based on thousands of years of evelution with dildonic slight of hand - and they know what you’re up to. A male cat’s penis is barbed for fuck’s sake.

And while Brand Beckham is a slick marketing machine, the fuel that runs it is a footballer who - for all the criticism leveled at him in footballing circles, particularly in England - is used to playing at an elite level, for big stakes. MLS just ain’t the sort of barbed cock this particular pussy is used to being fucked with.

So, as the cat slutted herself out to our dinner guests and shoved her snapper into the face of an unsuspecting napper (namely me), State-side soccer completed the biggest acronym shift since WWF began to mean “panda bears” again - as MLS slowly morphed into NASL. The only question that remains is this - how long will it take before everyone involved - Beckham, the US media, MLS, fans - realize we’re just fucking each other with q-tips to try and stop the wailing.

Come on, as if THIS isn’t Jack Black’s Jim Carrey in the Truman Show, Bill Murray in Lost in Translation comedian makes the jump moment.

Seriously.