It's supposed to look like that, right?

Here in Columbus we're in the midst of one of those dreaded "wintry mix" storms that we see way too often.

Interestingly, last Tuesday night we had the same kind of storm which dropped a nice 1/8" layer of ice over much of the city. I decided that before I left early Wednesday morning I would get the trash can from the end of the driveway. (what a good boyfriend I am...) Naturally, it wasn't until I was all the way to the bottom of the driveway before the coefficient of friction dropped sufficiently, I fell heavily and my humerous and scapula decided to take a break from their long and close relationship.

That look you see above is actually a smile, you just have to look at it through the lens of a couple hours of intense pain, that's all.

I got the word today that I have another month of sling-wearing to look forward to, so my New Year's resolution to try to do some more regular posting will have to wait a little. Oh, and I'm super happy we decided to invest in a Wii...

The Old High School

A post on Tiger Stadium from Shyster today reminded me of a similar situation in Wooster back in ~'95. After many years of hearing about how dirty, unsafe and generally awful the old high school was, the city ponied up somewhere in the the neighborhood of $39 million to build a new one.

Everything was great, the students (we) spent the last few weeks of the final school year committing random acts of vandalism that never would have been tolerated in any other situation (let's face it, the teachers hated that building, too) and the next fall we moved to the glittering new palace of secondary education. Of course, someone decided that the old high school was an architectural landmark worthy of preservation and mounted a long and expensive campaign to save it.

The original plan had been to tear it down and build a nice, new, state-of-the-art elementary school but, thanks to the "preservationists" (This building was a pretty common looking neo-gothic circa 1915 building, nothing special as far as I can see) the plan changed to preserving the facade and building the grade school inside of it, at god knows how much additional cost, and we ended up with a ridiculously expensive three story (when's the last time they built a school with more than two? One assumes there's some kind of fairly plausible reasoning for that...) grade school.

Sounds a little like a "recreational and educational" center in a Major League ballpark. Or a research center in an old Lazarus store. Actually, the school sounds better, but still a waste...

This "sailing" thing sounds easy...

So some dude at CNN decided to play Walter Mitty and thought he would make the sport of sailing his victim.

Who would have thought, even despite his Kiwi heritage, that achieving Olympic level skill in any sport, let alone sailing, might be more difficult than showing up for an afternoon of coaching from an Olympic gold medallist?

Blackwell for RNC Chair?

So Ken Blackwell is looking at tossing his hat in the ring for RNC chair... Just what the Republican party needs to counteract Barack Obama: A guy alienated the minority community with his actions in the leadup to the 2004 Presidential election, spent a significant portion of his spectacularly unsuccessful 2006 gubernertorial campaign sidling up to evangelical mega-church ministers, and is (charitably) a poor public speaker.

But hey, at least he's black, so that's good right?

Big Dork Shows You How to Change Your Bike Tire

Warning: May Bore
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfdoYO0VWvg

Future topics could possibly include:

Your Bottom Bracket and You

What's Your Quill Diameter?

I'm thinking I'll branch into sailing, too:

When Your Centerboard Won't Go Down

Spreaders: Swept or Straight?

I'm also open to offers for feature length films... I'll be waiting by the phone

The Opposite of Schadenfreude

It's selfish. It's bitter. I can't help it. Four times a year (it's not five since the Bluejackets are so terrible there never was hope... did you know they're the only team in the NHL that has never made the playoffs?) I look at the joy experienced by sports fans in places like Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Chicago, Baton Rouge, Gainesville, L.A., etc. ... and it bugs me.

I was hoping the Phillies would win the World Series, My sister, brother-in-law, and their kids live in Philly, so I have a little connection. Now I have to hear all the stories about how Philadelphia hasn't had a "major professional sports championship" in 25 years, the huge parties in Center City, etc.

1948. This year marks Cleveland's 60th year without a "major professional sports championship" (Do AFL chmpionships count? I don't think so.) It's a record of futility that boggles the imagination.

The Cubs haven't won a World Series since 19o8. Poor Chicagoans. What about da Bulls and da Bears?

Red Sox fans endured The Curse of the Babe (cue spooky music, it's halloween) for 80 years. Of course, they had the Celtics and the Patriots to help them get over it.

Cleveland fans get to cycle back and forth between the abysmal and the oh-so-close-almost-but-not-quite-good-enough. Year after year, season after season.

Then you add in the Buckeyes. Now there you have pretty consistent excellence, but lately we've had a lot of the oh-so-close-almost-but-not-quite-good-enough. Let me re-cap a recent 12 month period of an Ohio sports fan's life:

--Ohio State football dominates whole season, Troy Smith wins Heisman, and, heavily favored, we get embarrassed by Florida in National Championship Game.

--Ohio State basketball, with one season wonder phenom (not that I'm bitter, he's having a great NBA career...) Greg Oden, dramatically work their way to championship game. And get stomped by Florida.

--The Cleveland Cavaliers, led by local hero (and Yankees fan, what the hell?) LeBron James, improbably make it all the way to the NBA Finals. And get soundly beat.

--The Indians cap a great season by blowing a 3-1 lead in the ALCS.

--And, finally the football Buckeyes manage to backdoor their way into another National Championship game, and get stomped.

As a fan, it's a little hard to get up off the mat after a year like that.

So really, I'm happy Philly won, good for them and their fans. Maybe THIS is the year for us!

Change?

We were standing around at work today (that happens in a bike shop when the weather turns cold...) and the talk turned to the election. On one side you had a recent college graduate from a comfortably well-off family (he's living at the lake house for now, if that gives you an idea) who is virulently anti-Republican and strongly pro-Obama. As his foil, the boss, forty-ish, from a staunchly middle class upbringing, who neatly straddles political stereotypes: a vegetarian with a concealed carry permit.

There was a lot of good-natured shouting and hollering, and finally detente was reached: politicians are all at least a little crooked and not much ever really changes, so it probably doesn't really matter in the end.

It occured to me a little later: George W. Bush has affected an immense amount of change in the last 7 1/2 years, in my opinion almost none of it good. So maybe we shouldn't be so cynical about "Hope" and "Change."

I sure hope I can hope for change for the better.

Ohio for Obama?

There's been some discussion lately by my brother Ethan and David Broder of the Washington Post about the change in electoral attitude in rural Ohio. This is a fascinating change, as Ethan mentions, compared to the way we remember it growing up.

So the big question is... with all this pro-Obama sound & fury in Wayne County, (and one assumes, elswhere in rural Ohio,) is it enough to overcome the 11,000-12,000 vote deficit in the county from the last two presidental elections in the county. Of the 70,000+ registered voters in Wayne County fewer than 40,000 voted in 2006, so I'll interpolate (swag) that Bush won with no less than 60% of the vote in 2004.

Of course, Obama doesn't have to take Wayne County, but there are deficits like this all over rural Ohio that are key to winning the state. To me, it seems unlikely that the vote will swing enough to the Democratic side here in Columbus or in the other liberal areas of the state to give Ohio to Obama. I made some rash predictions in 2004: when looking at the early returns maps I saw only rural Ohio reporting and Bush with a strong lead, I assumed Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, and Youngstown would swing the state to Kerry, but the margin was not wide enough, (these were the areas short on voting machines and long on lines at the polls, too, but that's another issue.) Bush's margin in 2004 was 118,775, so that's fewer than 1400 per county (Wow, that was really close... vote!)

With that number in mind, and the anecdotal evidence from Wooster, sounds pretty good for Obama, huh?