Wine Quality Doesn't Corellate, Either

If you are like me, you frequently find yourself asking, "I wonder what nation has a Gross Domestic Product most comparable to that of Ohio?"

Don't sweat it: The answer is below.

I got it from this intriguing map purports to have the answer -- not just for Ohio, but for every other state in the Union. Illinois' GDP, for instance, is roughly equal to Mexico's. Oregon's is comparable to Israel. California's GDP pal? France.

So says the map. I have no clue how old it is, and can't vouch for its accuracy. (But I don't have to. I'm not on the clock. And interesting trumps accurate anyway.)

One clear conclusion: GDP is absolutely no predictor of cycling success. Need proof? Here's a hint to the question at the top. Ohio's secret parallel-GDP nation has produced Tour de France stage winners Cadel Evans, Baden Cooke, Robbie McEwan, Stuart O'Grady, Phil Anderson and Neil Stephens, plus many other ProTour riders. (Have you guessed it yet?)

Ohio has produced ... Davis Phinney.

On the other hand, the Australian philosophy seems to be, "When you're sitting on your ass all day, you might as well sit on a bike." The land area of Oz is bigger than the whole U.S., and the Australian population is 45% larger than Ohio's. Yet our GDP is still comparable?

We must be too productive to jack around on bikes.

Me? I must be Australian.

- JN

(In the unlikely event you want more detail about the map, go here.)

Metablogging

There's no doubt that by the time I've heard about something cool on the Internet, it has ceased to be cool. At a minimum, it is passe. Or, typically, it has degenerated into the existence of a crackhead, staggering toward death in a perpetually futile quest to recapture the feeling of that first high.

So when I come across a blog where the daily comments reach into the hundreds, I know I'm late to the party.

This blog -- Stuff White People Like -- might be following that rule. Its posts already draw hundreds of comments, so it's popular enough for me to hear of it, meaning it lost its cool luster some time ago.

Or maybe it's an exception. Let's watch for awhile and see. In any case, I'm white and I like the blog. So maybe the authors should write about their own blog.

Oh, yeah: It has nothing to do with cycling.

- JN

Brevity, Compatibility and Gang Bangin', bike-squad-style

To find friends as nice as mine, most people have to go to prison. Not me. I ride bikes. (Lately, I'm not sure which is preferable.)
My kind friends have suggested that I've been a bit long-winded lately. "Maybe you should post more often so you don't go off on another one of those psychotic rants," one suggested the other day.
Point well taken. So I dedicate today to brevity. In the spirit of Ohio's wildly scrutinized primary election campaign, I'll just do talking-point bullets:

• It figures. I just spent about $100 on a few pairs of Campagnolo socks, only to get the jolting news that Shimano has acquired Pearl Izumi. Now my sickly expensive socks will wind up being incompatible with my stupidly costly Pearl Izumi Ultramicroatomicsensor shorts, and I'll get bad shifts.
• Mark my words on this: Shimano's Pearl Izumi will come out with some new standard every few years that renders all prior PI clothing obsolete and is not backward compatible. The Three-Arm Jacket, or some such. For $350.
• On the subject of clothing: My Snake Bite Racing colleagues and I just got our new kits. I'm going to call them "colors," because I feel like I'm now a member of a gang. I've always wanted to be in a gang, or a "posse" of "homies," but I couldn't get past the part about getting the shit beaten out of me for initiation. But if a bike team had an initiation, it would be like getting initiated by these guys:

Yo, word: When I got made in SBR, the whole team stood around me and scratched and kicked at me and tried to pull my hair (when it was 2 mm. long instead of completely shaved off); only one blow landed, and the guy hurt his hand and couldn't shift for a month. So he called me a fag. And then they sent a young associate member after me to take me down in a race (after I crossed the finish line). Truth.

Just kidding. Gotta add the "just kidding" or someone will curb me.

• There's a foot of new snow and the first highly anticipated race of the season is four days away. If you gotta race in mid-winter, though, the only place to do it is at the Mid-Ohio Raceway. My bet is that they have enough plows to make the track spotless. So it should be in perfect shape for me to get dropped on the fifth lap.
• My reader demographics recently got significantly better -- or perhaps worse, but at least richer and more snooty -- when a certain erudite Cuyahoga County Common Pleas judge pumped me and this sordid blog up in an email to about 50 of his high-falutin' friends. That day, the hits on my blog were off the charts. (Oops! Sorry, y'Honor -- after the whole Dudas thing, I'm probably giving you hives by putting references to you and the word "hit" in the same paragraph.) I'm imagining the folks in his email address book generally ride Sevens and Serottas. I should suck up. After all, with that kind of heft in my corner, maybe I really can shoot Lanigan and Malone after all. But just with the Crosman 760. And only with a couple pumps.

- JN

Piles of Guano on Magic 105

When I was a little kid, my family and I had the horrendous misfortune of having our home become a pigeon roost.

I'm not talking about a couple pigeons. I'm talking Tippy Hedronesque -- nest upon nest, filled with pigeons that crapped like cement mixers. Our eaves and the walkways between our house and the neighbors' would get covered in piles of guano so deep that archaeologists would stop, thinking they were Indian mounds.

The droppings were so acidic that they literally would eat through asphalt shingles and cause the porch roof below the eaves to leak. White streaks ran down the side of the house. We were ashamed. And nothing worked. We tried plastic snakes, and gummy, sticky stuff that they supposedly were loathe to sit in. I think they took to using both to reinforce their nests.

Aside from the physical mess, the cooing just about sent me over the edge. You might think is soothing when you first hear it. But when 20 pigeons think they're roosters and start arguing in a Satanic chorus right outside your window at dawn, it becomes Cheneyesque torture, like having glass ground into your face or hearing Jeff Tanchak give a weather forecast.

Coincidentally -- or not -- my brother John and I finally prevailed upon our parents to get us a Crosman 760 air rifle about the same time the pigeons began to get out of hand. The 760 was no Daisy spring-ding. It was the kind you could pump up -- and up and up. A poor boy's Benjamin, as it were.

Now, I confess that at that age, I might have fantasized that it would be great to grow up, get a .30-30 and shoot a deer and enjoy the great outdoors and all. I might have checked out "Outdoor Life" from the library. I plucked some deer photos out for target practice.

But I wasn't a bloodthirsty killer. I never hunted until college, and only a few times at that before I realized that while marksmanship was a hoot, blasting a bunny or a bird to death for no good reason felt kind of ... well, sinful.

Nonetheless, sometimes there comes a point in a man's life when he is left no choice but to take up arms in defense of something fundamentally dear. In my life, that time was when I was about 9, and the fundamentally dear things included sleep, and shingles.

I won't drag this out too long, but one day a pigeon sat on the Schraders' roof, no more than 20 feet from the bedroom window where I'd already ripped a hole in the screen just the size to accomodate a pellet gun's barrel. I pumped the gun at least two times more than the recommended max of 10 pumps. Then I took aim and fired a Charles Whitman sampler.

I was the Audie Murphy of the Squab Squad, picking off pestilence and vermin with my parents' tacit approval. I expected, or hoped, that the bird would wobble, gasp and maybe do a half-spin before falling forward, like the marauding tough guys always did after Alan Ladd or John Wayne blew them away. Instead, the pigeon fluttered down, two stories, to the ground.

My heart raced as I ran downstairs to find the carcass. But when I stepped out the side door, I was most disturbed to find the pigeon standing there on the ground, as if it were waiting. It looked at me -- a bloodless stare of blank recrimination. Suddenly, the fun started to go out.

It had to be hurt, I figured -- probably mortally. And I knew it must be suffering, which was the last thing I wanted. A sportsman takes down his target with one clean shot, right? Some sport I was. I'd just done the equivalent of snapping a leghold trap on a muskrat.

Guilt washed over me and a lump rose in my throat. I have to end this humanely, and quickly, I told myself. One more shot -- the proverbial "out of its misery" round. So I pumped up the gun 10 more times, loaded a BB and fired, almost point blank, into its head. The bird blinked. A drop of blood ran down the side of its blue-green head. Then it started to stagger away. Oh my god, I said. I've got no choice but to do it again.

But this time, as I pumped up the rifle, the bloodied bird began to trot out from between the two houses. Into the front yard. Where the neighbors could see.

Lots of the neighbors had pigeon problems, too, and wouldn't mind a bit of pest control. But they wanted something unseen and sanitary. They surely didn't want to have to be confronted by the violent mechanism, nor the executioner.

The bird seemed to know this. Maybe it remembered the public-opinion impact of My Lai. So it ran -- walked, really --- across the Schraders' lawn with me chasing it and pumping on that gun's forestock lke Joe Morgan at the plate.

Pufft! Another shot.

Blink! Another ghostly ocular taunt, a wink at my guilt-thrashed soul.

That pigeon, I thought, must be in searing pain by now. It was all my fault. And still the bird walked away, onto the Millers' lawn.

Then it made a mistake that had to make us both feel better: It wobbled into the little right-angle crotch where the Millers' concrete steps met their porch. There, I stood over it and fired. And fired again. And again. It took seven shots in all before the bird fell down and quit moving.

I looked up to see the Graff girls and their mother staring slack-jawed at me, eyes bulging in fearful disbelief.

I wanted to explain that I wasn't being a psycho -- I was being humane. I was trying to end mad suffering as quickly as possible. Their faces, however, told me I was heading for hell.

The point is that the whole escapade started out nobly -- I wanted to eradicate the vermin that were damaging our home and potentially spreading disease. But I wound up looking crazy. My parents found out and I got in a bit of trouble -- mainly over the embarrassment and spectacle. And frankly, I felt horrible about how it all went wrong -- too much suffering and mess.

Which is why I did not go get a big-boy gun -- say, a .270-cal. Remington bolt-action rifle -- and walk into the studios of WMJI-Magic 105 the other morning, even though the vermin known as Lanigan and Malone are far more noxious and full of shit than those pigeons.

You may remember the Lanigan show as being the open sewer of hatred toward cyclists -- the show where the hosts screamed about how "bikers" don't belong on the road. The show that egged listeners on with laughter as callers told tales of whizzing pop bottles at cyclists, or running them off the road. Ha. Freaking. Ha.

The escapade became just the sort of minor scandal that DJs love -- naughty publicity coast to coast and a faux apology from Clear Channel that let the show milk even more pub. Some well-intended dumbasses accepted the apology and maybe a $200 tax-deductible donation to Don't Kill Bike Riders Very Often, Please, and called it even.

Lesson learned? Obviously not.

This week I was driving to work in a storm of snow and freezing rain and accidentally hit the MJI button. This time the two corpulent pustules were railing against pedestrians, joggers and dog-walkers who had the gall to use their feet on the plowed streets instead of walking on the snow- and ice-covered sidewalks. The nerve! Lanigan was getting all worked up. What right do they have using the roads? What's a fatass radio host supposed to do -- drive his Caddy all the way around the runners, two feet to the left? Why bother, he implied -- run them down because they don't belong.

I'm not a hater, usually. I have my bad days, sure, but I don't really wish heinous things on people, even enemies.

But in this case, would it really be hateful to eradicate the vile plague that is that show? Or would it be like certain wartime heroics, where an act that's evil in another context becomes an act of nobility that saves society from, say, Nazism?

It would have been exciting to pull the trigger. But what if the hosts just lay there gurgling? What if they kept blinking? I know I couldn't handle that.

And I know that jury selection would be too risky, given the number of haters around here who think Lanigan's rants are entertaining. So I would have probably gotten grounded for a long, long time at LCI.

But I couldn't help but dwell on it as I rode my bike at lunch today. I thought of this:

I have a brother who is a pretty good man, a guy who has given the world three great kids and who has served as a police officer for 34 years, clearing our streets of killers and threats. My brother has cancer that very well may be terminal, and he is suffering through the treatment as I write.

I won't bring myself to Lanigan's level and advocate violence. But I can dream. And I hope this is the dream I have tonight: I reach down my brother's throat. I grab his cancer like a bloody black catfish and pull it out. Then I turn to Lanigan and Malone. I open their mouths and shove that cancer deep into them, and I let it go. Then I laugh about it with my listeners.

Aw, shucks. I'm just joking. C'mon ... it's in good fun.

Get it?


- JN

What Would Joe Friel Say?

Hmm ... tomorrow's weather forecast calls for a high of 34 degrees, with intervals of sunshine. Sounds a little risky. We all know we don't have an adequate base of sunshine to be doing intervals this early in the year.

The Heightsriders Peloton at ToC?

I think I've figured out why the TdF doesn't want Astana racing. The team looks like crap.

The pix of Astana driving the peloton during Thursday's Tour of California stage might as well be photos of the Shaker Sunday-morning group ride. Astana's riders look only a little better than the folks who wrapped themselves in garbage bags for the ride home from Sandusky during Pedal to the Point last August.

See what I mean?

These dudes look like they were grabbing windbreakers from the spectators. How'd you like to be a sponsor who dropped a mil only to see your team obscuring your logo with $11 Nashbar C-thru rain jackets?

By the way: How many of you NEO riders are shedding tears for the supreme hardship that these guys endured? Not sure about y'all, but as of Feb. 22, after interminable sub-freezing weather, snow, freezing rain and all the other crap we've dealt with here, I'll be first in line to volunteer for a ride in shorts and short-finger gloves if the only price I pay is drizzle and headwind. Maybe not for seven hours, but then again, it's not my job.

Neither is blogging, though. Good thing, too, after the string of lame posts lately.

JN

Rock (Not) Racing

Rock Racing's proven and suspected dopers -- Tyler Hamilton, Santiago Botero and Oscar Sevilla -- have been kicked out of the Tour of California because they're all still under a cloud. Their team owner, Michael Ball, tried to jump to their defense. Ha.
"When you have adversity, it brings a team closer together and makes them stronger," said the nouveax riche blue-jeans baron. "If my guys could never race again, I'd still pay them and send them into the city to tell children that there are better things to get involved in than drugs or gangs."
Wait a sec.
Rock Racing is a gang. Ball sure wants us to think so.
And the only reason he could hire three former continental stars to compete on a domestic U.S. team is because drug abusers are out of fashion among most of the rest of the UCI teams.
There is a lot of material to work with in the above. So I'm passing it on to someone who isn't overworked and overdue for bed.
Like Ball, I give and I give.

JN