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What is Lance hiding?
Wednesday, August 24 2005
As I tinker and fuss with the details on my deck, I've been entertaining myself with some sort of audio stream, be it conventional radio or locally-rebroadcasted internet streams. These days it's about half music and half news, usually the news stream of KCRW (Santa Monica). You can take the Eastcoaster out of California but you can't take California out of the Eastcoaster. Anyway, today I heard two interesting things on All Things Considered (a show I've been enjoying since the 1970s).
The first was about Lance Armstrong, the Clarence DeMar of the Tour de France. Supposedly a test of some old urine samples came up positive for the performance enhancing drug erythropoietin (EPO). This meshes perfectly with something my old housemate John told me when I was visiting him in Philadephia only ten days ago. John had read somewhere that Lance Armstrong faked his heroic battle with cancer as a means of explaining various unusual substances in his body that he'd actually injected there to help with his Tour de France performance. But it's not only that, there's also the recent bike ride Lance Armstrong took with the figurehead of all that is foolish and fake and nevertheless on a bicycle because he's a cowboy who never actually learned how to ride a horse: George D. Bush. You have to wonder why any celebrity with any shred of mainstream credibility would want to be associated with a president whose popularity is at about 40%, and the answer almost has to be that he himself is embattled or otherwise in jeopardy. My guess is that the next celebrities we see with Bush will be Arnold Schwartzenegger, Michæl Jackson, and O.J. Simpson, in that order. I'm sure Lance Armstrong knew this fresh new doping scandal was about to break, and he hoped to have some - any - competing headline with his name in it at the same time.
There's also the possibility that Lance Armstrong was actually in the clear on his past doping, but then for some reason (say, the flattery of a presidential invitation - we don't always think clearly at such times), he decided to take Bush up on his offer of cycling companionship. Only then did people, especially those in the far-left tree-marrying media, start asking themselves, "What's up with this Lance Armstrong guy anyway?" Then it was just a matter of time before they found his old urine samples. We're told they were only tested as some sort of random equipment-calibrating procedure, but who really knows the real story?
The other interesting segment on All Things Considered concerned the post-Classic-Rock band the Hold Steady, which has erupted overnight like an angry case of carbuncles on the face of the homecoming queen that is the American rock scene. For once, though, this eruption is justified. It really is because of the music. Knowing nothing about them and only hearing the odd song on a streaming station, I could hear its special quality of greatness right away, though it doesn't fall within the boundaries of my preferred genres of rock.
As usual for an ATC segment, this one included several interviews of members of the band as well as at least one critic. A critic said that the thing that was so great about the band was the disconnect between the gut-level bar band guitar riffs and the intellectually-nuanced nature of the lyrics (which are nonetheless delivered with a bar band bleat). I was telling Gretchen this critic's opinion some time later and she didn't get it, so I reformulated it to: "It appeals to your id and superego at the same time." Sure the guitar and organ riffs are cliché and over-the-top, but when you grew up on that stuff, they provide a certain visceral guilty pleasure, particularly when they're delivered with such precision, bravado, and comic overstatement.
My success with lag bolting the solar deck's southern pillars to the sloping roof deck beneath it had me thinking I should probably do the same thing with the pillars of the laboratory deck, which land on the roof of the shop area of the garage, near the very northern end of the house. So this evening I set up the tools I needed and an eight foot step ladder on the ground near the westmost of the two pillars. Again I was cursed with first-attempt misfortune as my first hole found a lot more air than wood. By the time I got this one lag bolt in correctly, it was mosquito hour and I had to call it a day.
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