View From the Bushes

Conventional wisdom has it that the best time to retire is when you've reached your peak, rather than waiting until infirmities, time and diminished talents force you out. About a week ago I was blowing the wrapper from my straw at a friend and it occured to me that I was past my straw-blowing prime. That in fact nearly a decade ago, when I had lodged a straw wrapper in my friends ear-canal was the time when I should have retired. A few days later, on Monday morning while waiting for Spiderman 2 to start, I went to get a drink. Upon returning I noticed that my brother-in-law had fallen asleep. Yes, this is the same brother-in-law whose potato wedge I stole, and when he breaks my nose one of these days it will probably be less than I deserve.

Returning to the story, seeing him there stirred the primordial evil inside me like that Simpsons where Bart is trying to be good for the reverend's daughter. So, pausing in the aisle, I tried ripping the straw open, but with a giant drink in one of my hands it wasn't going so well and I just about abandoned the whole project. Finally, I managed to rip the wrapper, but even then I was sure that the end was no longer air-tight. I leaned in and shot it right into his cheek. Of course he woke up like a sentry on the western front, a crazed look in his eyes, his arms flailing. Of course, everyone immediately started laughing. One of my sisters was laughing so hard I thought she might fall out of her chair. It occured to me yesterday, that this was my straw-blowing pinnacle, and so effective immediately I've retired from blowing my straw wrapper at people.

When I woke up today and checked my website, I discovered that around 2500 spam comments had been added to the blog yesterday. Imagine my excitement... I was about ten minutes into deleting them by hand when it finally occured to me that I have access to the database where everything is stored and that it would be far easier to delete them directly out of the database. I'm not sure why I never thought of this before, but I guess I was so used to interacting with the blog through the web interface that I was stuck approaching it from the standpoint of a hammer when there was a nailgun waiting in the other room. As it was, it still took me around a half hour because I was deleting them based on the IP and at the same time adding that IP to the block list. Since they had used around 50 IP's, it was a non-trivial amount of time. Also, there was the five or ten minutes it took for me to figure out the blog's database.

As far as the tour goes, Lance and more particularly US Postal won the team time trial, which put Lance in yellow. The didn't just win, but rather slaughtered the opposition by over a minute. Of course, because of the new rules the 2nd place team only lost 20 seconds. Considering that the 2nd place team, Tyler Hamilton's Phonak Team, had five flats and three crashes and rode the last third of the course with only five riders I think I'm okay with them only losing 20 seconds on the day. It's unlikely that Lance will keep the jersey all the way to the mountains. They're still quite a ways away and he won't want to burn-out his team. My guess is that a break will eventually succeed and someone in the break will take the jersey.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross