#bikeridefail

I'm fine, well, at least no worse than I was.

Short swim this morning. Left shoulder very cranky about recovering and stretching forward. The water was very thick, and stayed that way for 30 minute swim and some core.

My back has been feeling much better. So much better that I thought I'd try some easy spin on my bike just to see how it feels. Not right is the answer. I could feel my back muscles pulling slightly, some of the muscles around my right hip sending complaint notes right away, and there was no strength in my legs at all.

Even so, I thought I'd go around the block a few times, nice and gently to see if I could warm into it. This on a day where it's 29 C out, and I did some stretching beforehand.

That only lasted for 1.4 K, and there was a loud bang from the front tire. Oddly enough, that's the second flat in a row on the front tire. But this one was in a really weird place. Right along a seam on the inside, right next to the rim. I checked the tape really carefully and it's fine. The tube is from last year at least, maybe older, so I'm guessing the rubber just got tired of life. I won't even try to fix it; I just threw it away.

All that said, it gave me a chance to play with my new bike toy. Check out the stand!

Here's one of my favourite pieces of street art. It's right outside a wine store on Stephen Avenue. I hadn't seen it in a while, though maybe I just haven't noticed. Excuse enough for a photo.

Last week the big TV screen was near Banker's Hall, now it's down by the Glenbow. This was taken at the hight of lunch time, and you can see the interest. More people watched when it was at Banker's.

I know some (many?) of you follow the Olympics with passion and zeal. Maybe it's best if you skip the rest of this post. Since I started training for triathlon I have a whole new respect for what the athletes do, and how hard it is to peak at just the right time. My problem is not with the athletes, oh no.

It's with the IOC, and their deal with the devil sponsor agreements. Telling ordinary people what they can and can't wear into the stadium to protect some voracious corporation's "brand" is complete overkill. In Calgary they had the nerve to tell The Olympic Flame restaurant that they couldn't use that name. They told the IOC to bite their butts and suck on it, seeing as how they had been in business for decades, and a court backed them up. Corporations are not people, and don't deserve to be treated that way. What with the tax breaks they aren't really paying for the games anyways, since it's a shell game with their tax money. The accountants get richer, and the government is out tax dollars.

 I'm sick of the nationalism, and the medal counts, and weeping and wailing and breast beating about how many medals we've won, and how many we should have won. I hate the commercials and commercialism. I hate the pablum they put on the air to fill the time, and the inane commentators.  I would rather not watch the sports achievements than wade through all the dreck and filth to get there. There are some sports that shouldn't be in the games. Anything involving animals, for example. If the horse got the gold medal, there might be something to it, but as it is, we are not comparing apples to apples. Where equipment is used, it should be as nearly identical as possible for each competitor. The point is to measure the people, not the corporate sponsor's technological prowess.

I'm fine with the federal or provincial governments giving the elite athletes a stipend that they could actually live on so they could train properly. They could start by taking it out of the multimillionaire professional sports players, but I don't mind some of my taxes going to that. It's better than the graft supporting political parties and the blood suckers of the public tit like Bev Oda and her $16 orange juice. Don't get me started on Allaudin Merali, and his hundreds of thousands of dollars of "expenses".

Maybe if the stipend was a reasonable number we could cut the corporations out of the loop entirely. I think this building newer and grander facilities every time at enormous taxpayer expense, to say nothing of the IOC bidding process, is a complete and total boondoggle. We should build some standard facilities somewhere, call it international territory, and hold the Games there all the time. Every country pays an entry fee to support the facilities. Countries that don't send equal male and female representation don't get invited. Build a standard screening process to ensure that athletes meet qualifying standards, and start the doping tests essentially as soon as they are identified. Do the same for the various officials.

My idea, and it's mostly serious, is to bulldoze the Vatican, since it doesn't do anything useful or relevant to today's world, and build state of the art facilities, where the various qualifying and world competitions could be held whenever needed. It's one of the few plots of land that doesn't actually belong to a country. It's close to a big airport, there is public transit of a sort, it's near sea level, and there are times of the year that the climate is quite nice. Plus Italy could use the hard currency.

Or put it in Greece, as a symbol of the history of the Games. Make them give up some land so it's international territory again. They could really use the currency.

If we're going to do medal counts, why don't we do it on a per capita basis? That would balance out the big rich countries buying their way to the top of the medal counts.

There's more, but I need to start winding down, or I won't sleep tonight.