A friend posted on Facebook (I hear it's all the rage these days) about an article in the Times Online where Father Gabriele Amorth, the Chief Exorcist [Is that a wicked cool title or what?!] for the Catholic Church revealed that the "Devil is in the Vatican". Apparently this is why the church has committed so many transgressions, why priests molest young boys and why investigations into suspicious matters on the part of the church (conducted by the church of course) have been conveniently expedited or flat out covered up.

Really? That's nice.

First of all it's extremely cool how you can 1) claim that there is a devil and then 2) claim that he is responsible for all the wrong that you do. That conveniently absolves you from any blame – except perhaps for not calling Father Amorth to exorcise that shit. If you cry foul to this argument then you are 3) a godless heretic and 4) probably have the devil in YOU. Old fashioned exorcism anyone?

ASIDE – I wonder just how busy Father Amorth is these days… is possession running rampant and I just don't hear about it or is he perpetually warming the bench and buying heaps of Preparation H stock?

Circular or self-justifying arguments are pretty sweet when you can pull them off and who better to do this than the biggest formal organization on the planet – the Catholic Church. Clubs (and yes, I am using the term loosely) achieve a sort of critical mass at some point and the Catholic Church reached that point loooong ago. There are now so many members and it's teachings are so socialized that if you speak out in opposition people look at you like you are insane.

ANOTHER ASIDE – It has always mystified me when people get al up in arms if you hold them to the standard of accepting ALL the teachings of the Catholic Church and not just the ones that they find convenient to adhere to. Have you ever heard someone say, "Well, I'm really just 60 percent Catholic, the other 40 are pretty hedonistic to tell you the truth. I mean I'm down with heaven and hell and all that, but a bodies' got to shoplift every once in a while in this tight economy just to get by." Didn't think so. And don't even get me started about all the closeted Republican politicians…

Fortunately there are a few 'insane' people out there that are more articulate than I and can throw some cold water on this charade; very eloquently of course.

One of these people is Stephen Fry, the well known British actor, writer, comedian, television presenter, film director, etc., etc. Although not a direct rebuttal to Father Amorth, this speech is awesome and pretty much sums up how I feel.

If you want, you can watch the complete, unedited version of the speech here.

Thank God for people like Stephen Fry. Irony intended.

Back in the day I got my first bike shop job at the University of WA ASUW Bike Shop. It was a super gig – low stress, I learned a lot and kept in touch with many of my co-workers for several years after leaving.

One thing that was rampant at the shop was working on your own bike. Off the clock, on the clock, whatever. Employees were always using shop rags, chain oil and tools to pimp out their own ride(s). And really, when you make that little, it's hard to focus much blame. As long as the customers get helped (which they did) then the manager would usually turn a blind eye. Heck, he did it more than all of us combined…

So today when I got my weekly copy of University Week in my Inbox I had to laugh out loud when saw this picture and caption:

"Student Tomio Tran works on his own bike on a recent morning at the ASUW Bike Shop. The shop will move to the first floor of Condon Hall when the HUB begins its remodel in June. To learn more about the Bike Shop, visit its Web site, here."

Some things never change. And you know what? That makes me feel good.

It was probably only a matter of time…

There are all kinds of cyclists, each one more of a niche market than the next. One particularly small segment of cyclists call themselves randonneurs and there happens to be a local club; appropriately named Seattle International Randonneurs.

I have a few friends that belong to SIR and I have on a couple of occasions attended an official brevet with them. There are always one or two rides hosted by SIR that I would like to do each year and so this year I figured what the heck and signed up. Not that it's required, they just seem like good people to support.

Just like bike racing it turns out you can't just sign up with a local club, you also need to join RUSA which is the national governing body of randonneurs. So I did that too.

What ride am I thinking of doing this year? a 300K up in Bellingham when there are no races. Specifically on April 3.

I have an uncle "Buck" (yeah, I know…) who is 94 years old and who has been in and out of a hospital recently. When my father said he was going to visit a few months ago I figured it would be good to go with. It has been at LEAST 30 years since I was in the south and it is very interesting to say the least.

First of all it's pretty stinking hot and muggy. I guess that's to be expected in the summer but in the middle of October? The day we arrived it was 89 with wicked humidity (feels like 95 according the weather service) and if you did anything other than stand in the shade you were dripping with sweat. Especially when you are a pasty, soft northerner like me… Every business has the AC on full tilt and you practically catch instant pneumonia when you walk inside a building.

We drove out to see my aunt Loraine and cousin Shannon. My aunt is 87 and a wonderful person. Sharp as a tack and she and her daughter (66 years old) were just full of priceless quips and nuggets of southerness.

• First of all she keeps calling my father (who goes by "Professor Criminale" practically everywhere in Seattle) Billy. Leave it to a sibling to keep it real. Of course he calls her "Sis", a word I have never heard him utter ever.
• "I'll be in the back seat, I don't need a seatbelt."
• Shannon works in some government subsidized low income housing project where she handles the applications and which is "mostly full of minorities". She is not talking about Hispanics.
• A "colored man" used to come by and prune the fruit trees.

These conversations pretty much cemented what I perceive about the south.

When it's depicted in a cool black and white photo of your home town, when it evokes nostalgic thoughts (read: memories of experiences you never had), when it causes you to learn cool historic facts, and of course when it's not happening to you.

The University Week (a weekly email newsletter that all UW staff/faculty/students get and which I hardly ever read) featured an interesting article about Seattle in the Great Depression of the 1930s. And you can read more about this because 80 students did a bunch of research. I love this stuff.

I have never even seen a shanty town in person, never experienced real financial hardship; but of course seeing an amazing panoramic picture of it with the Smith Tower in the background is awesome. And when I say awesome I of course mean awe inspiring and not, "Dood, that is so rad…"

My friend Jeff D had his bike stolen and was notified because someone found out about it on a blog post and gave him a ring. Nice. The Internet finally did some good. Except that the bike was not recovered and its still out there… So in hopes that this post will let someone else who has seen this bike Contact Jeff before they hock it on eBay, here is the info:

My house in NE Seattle was burglarized last night and my TT bike was stolen. Please keep an eye out for someone trying to unload a 55 cm black Cervelo P3 SL model year 2005. The most distinguishing feature is brand new a Quarq power meter on brand new rotor cranks. Luckily I had training wheels on it, Velomax I think, and not Zipp.

Thanks,

Jeff

(206) 335-3551

All blogs (at least as far as I know) have an RSS feed. Some authors choose not to make theirs public or to advertise it but I do. RSS seems like the easiest way to stay in touch with all the stuff you want to read, no way am I going to actually visit each site every day just to check and see if something new has been posted… that's ridiculous. Instead I just add the RSS feed for the blog to my favorite RSS reader and bingo, every time the author posts something I am sent a message. Simple, clean and burns way less calories.

A long time ago I discovered FeedBurner. How cool! So I immediately created an account, changed the RSS feed address for my blogs and forgot about it.

ASIDE – FeedBurner gives you statistics regarding your feed and you can also easily control and embellish your feed. All that neat-o gee wiz stuff that makes the Internet so cool in the first place.

Some time after I did this Google acquired FeedBurner. My blog (I use dasBlog) has this cool 'feature' where you can enter your FeedBurner username and it automatically changes the feed address. That was super slick until my FeedBurner username no longer worked. And no, I couldn't just plug in my Google account.

Not only that but I had signed up for this other nifty service I found called AddThis which added another layer of obscurity that I had to troubleshoot through when I finally realized that my RSS feed was not working.

ANOTHER ASIDE – AddThis lets people easily add and/or share your blog/web page with social networking sites and bookmarking sites and web based feed readers.

But now I'm all done and I learned a few things. Like:

• FeedBurner has some cool features since I last checked in! Stuff like SmartFeed which makes your feed compatible with any reader or device.
• I am now offering my feeds as email subscriptions for folks who just don't want to use an RSS reader.
• You can use MyBrand (another FeedBurner feature but only if you control your own DNS) to create a CNAME so that the URL for your feeds is something like feeds.yourdomain.com. How cool! Of course I did this.

Now that everything is all straightened out I can forget it all again. Here's hoping no more big changes happen to the free services that I use.

Son of a bitch…

I saw my PT last Friday and was made to realize that every single core exercise I have been doing recently is being done incorrectly. I felt so deflated.

I hosed my back about six(?) years ago and after ignoring/resting it did not help and after re-injuring it about three years ago I finally saw my doctor, had an MRI scan, discovered I had a bulging/herniated disk and sought the help of a PT.

As is probably the case all too often, patients are not meticulous enough and after time they start to get sloppy with their form and soon they are not doing themselves any good or even doing themselves some harm. I was no different. Not only was I no longer doing the good exercise incorrectly, I was also inadvertently doing 'bad' exercises meaning I was doing stuff that was aggravating my injury. F'ing hell.

So I went and found a new PT as my original one had moved on and we started from scratch. He looked at my scan and discovered that I had TWO bulging disks. Nice. He also made me acutely aware how weak the muscles were that I thought I was exercising these past two years.

Time to re-find the resolve to deal with the back and hopefully realize some improvement.

I have seen most of these pictures before but today when I heard a song by The Pogues on the radio I had to go back and check them out. Big mistake… These seem like the quintessential pictures that you would show your kids when they are considering hitting the road with a band instead of going to college. That or not brushing their teeth. I mean Jesus H, I had heard that Shane MacGowan had crap oral hygiene but it turns out he has nothing left to worry about - all of his teeth are f'n gone.

I'm not sure how this guy ever made it to 50 years old but damn it he did make it. How did he make it this far? According to him, it was all the drinking, smoking and partying. Case in point:

Social networking is fun but if you use lots of networks it can be a hassle/time suck as well. Thank goodness everyone seems to agree with me and there are more and more way to have one network pull updates from others.

My most recent discovery is Flickr2Twitter. I have had a Flicker account for ages but since I usually post all my pictures on my own web site I never used it. Now I do. If you sign up for Flickr2Twitter you get a unique email address and any picture you send to that address will be posted to your Flickr account and a link will be sent to your Twitter page. You can provide a description and tags using the subject and body of your email message.

And of course there is also the Twitter app for Facebook so you can have your Facebook page pull all your Twitter updates.

The end result is I can take a picture with my phone, send it to my Flickr2Twitter address and update three social networking sites at once. That kind of efficiency is something I can really get behind.