All year long, I've been watching (as Phil Leggett would put it), "a certain Canadian rider". I watched him perform really well in all the great spring classics.

I fully expected him to finish somewhere in the lower half of the Tour, not because he couldn't do well, but because I knew he would go balls-out to help Christian Vande Velde win, and he would spend the first parts of each stage at the front, and then the last part at the back, exhausted, just trying to make it home after putting in a Herculean effort to help VDV.

When VDV crashed out of the tour, I saw a slight hope of glory for Ryder. The next day was the cobbles stage, and I'd seen Ryder fly over the pave in races like Paris-Roubaix, I knew that while the rest of the tour, including all of the other classics specialists, would be doing whatever they could to shepherd their respective team leads through the pave stages, and that would leave Ryder free to go out with the break-away, and then power over the last 30 - 50k and see who could hang on.

For the first 100k of the stage, it went exactly as I dreamed. He got into the break and got a substantial lead, and left the rest of the break to solo to the finish. Unfortunately, the Saxo and Cervelo teams had other ideas, and two of the strongest Classics racers in the world (Cancellara, who had beaten the best of the cobbles riders in an amazing solo break just a few months prior, and Thor Hushovd, who had won two previous editions of Paris-Roubaix). When I saw those two towing Andy Schleck up, I repeated "Go Ryder" over and over again for the last 20k of that stage, like it was my own personal mantra. I knew it was going to be a nail-biter.

It was. Ryder finished 5th on that day, and the best hope of a stage win for Garmin went out the window. But the silver lining on that cloud was that Ryder had gained a bunch of time on the rest of the field, and, if he could just hold on, he could, I figured, hold on to a high overall place in the race through the Alps.

It was a slim hope, the Tour has the best riders in the world, all tuning their form up for this three week period. It's got hellacious hills, that riders climb at insane speeds. Ryder's a climber, but he's a big guy, and he has an extra 5-10 kg over pure climbers to drag over those cols. All I could think was, if he can find the big group of elite climbers, and just hang on the back for as long as possible, he'll be the best Canadian finish in 22 years. And he was.

Garmin was outstanding. They didn't seem to be able to help him much on the climbs themselves, but he was always in the first 20-30 riders up the climbs, and he never had to try and bridge any gaps on the early climbs, and he was always in the mix on the climbs. Through the alps he rode his own pace, and managed to find other climbers that were going the same pace. The amazing thing was the riders that he managed to stay with: past tour winners like Sastre, mountain goats like Joaquin Rodriguez, tour heavyweights like Denis Menchov, and Andreas Kloden. The creme-de-la-creme of Tour riders. Every day through the Alps, he found his pace, and he managed to stay with some of these guys.'

Even so, he wasn't doing that great. On the stage into Mende, just before the Pyrenees, he was in another break that came up against the desires of the Astana team, who drove the main pack fiercely to put their team leader on the top of the hill overlooking the town of Mende on top. Ryder, who had been in the break all day, couldn't stay with the pack up the short fierce final climb.

Still. He was in 13th place, and he could even lose big chunks of time in the Pyrenees and keep a top-20 finish, which, in the Tour de France, is something that other riders have built entire careers around.

Going into the Pyrenees was tense. He hadn't done that well through the Alps, and the stage into Mende had obviously put him on the rivet. I was nervous. What made it worse was constantly searching for him in the peloton, especially in the stages through the Alps. He was still an also-ran, and Phil and Paul never mentioned him. Liz and I spent the entire three weeks looking for the orange helmet poking up over the rest of the mountain goats. We'd shout excitedly when we saw him. "There's Ryder! He's still in it!" Meanwhile, Phil and Paul would be moaning over the abysmal performance of Lance Armstrong.

But every stage, into Ax-3-Domains, over the Port de Bales, over the toughest climbs in the Pyrenees, Ryder was right there, not sacrificing much time, and staying with the best riders in the Tour, climb after climb. Phil and Paul started out in wonderment "How is this big Canadian staying with the mountain masters?" they asked, after the stage into Ax-3-Domains, then, they started to mention him more, they would look for him in the leading groups, and mention him, using words like "Phenomenon" and "Surprise Talent", and my favourite "Weight of a Nation". He started getting post race interviews. It was wonderful. He moved up from 13th to 10th over those 3 stages.

Then, the Queen stage. The second ever mountain-top finish on the Tourmalet. Everybody expected a mano-a-mano duel between Contador and Schleck, and that's what they got. My eyes were focussed behind, in the 2nd group on the road up the famous climb. A small group had formed including Tour giants like Menchov, Sami Sanchez, and Roman Kreuziger. They were the lucky few that could grab Contador and Schleck's wheel for just a few pedal strokes, and they were constantly about a minute and a half behind. The entire climb was through a dense layer of clouds on the mountainside, and the TV cameras would only flash back occasionally to the 2nd group on the road. About 2 km from the top, I stopped seeing Ryder in the group he'd been all climb. "Oh Well," I thought "He won't lose that much time, and he'll lose a couple of places, tops" It was still the best in over 20 years.

Contador and Schleck came in first, then they just had the camera going on the finish line. Joaquin Rodriguez finished about a minute back, and then about 30 seconds later, the camera zooms in on a figure emerging from the clouds near the finish line. "Menchov must have had good legs today" I thought. Then Liz said "Is that Ryder?!", and I saw the distinctive orange helmet coming into view, and it was! Ryder had attacked all of the best mountain climbers in the biggest stage, in the biggest and best bike race in the world, and come in 4th. Not the best, but better than anyone had ever hoped for. That day alone jumped him up into 8th place overall.

The Tour de France is the biggest pressure-cooker. It only takes one bad day to lose the race entirely. The list of contenders who dropped far, far out of contention in one bad day is filled with champions like Lance Armstrong, Ivan Basso, and Cadel Evans, who, in the Alps went from 1st to 18th, and lost nearly 18 minutes. Nearly every stage was, for me, filled with trepidation. Would this be the day that Ryder started going backwards? The time trial (a.k.a, the race of truth) was no different. He had never performed spectacularly in a Grand Tour TT, and he didn't in this one either, but the field ahead was full of mountain climbers, most of whom are notoriously bad at TTs. He managed to claw 2 minutes out of Joaquin Rodriguez and jump into 7th.

Most Canadians woke up to see him on their morning paper this morning. I can imagine them sitting back and reading the paper thinking "Huh. Seventh, eh? That's not bad, I s'pose"

This is when I want to shake them up and say "Not Bad?! Not Bad! It's fucking fantastic is what it is!" I considered myself one of the biggest Ryder fanbois in the entire world, and even I was prepared to be amazed if he finished in the double digits. Top ten was inconceivable.

Chapeau, Ryder, and chapeau, Garmin. Every year, you manage to surprise the world with a top-ten finish that no-one expected.

Wiggins learns too late who is Wigan, and who is really Manchester.

Wikipedia surfing brought this to my attention. It's a diary entry from a party that crossed the Great Salt Desert in 1850.

Finally Allen and one of the other men dropped to the ground exhausted, when, to the amusement of the others, Allen began to pray. "O Lord Almighty, send us just one drop of rain!" Immediately from a few fleecy clouds scattering rain drops began to fall, and as Allen and his companions had a rubber blanket, they quickly spread it out. But not a sufficient quantity of water fell to admit of its running together

Apparently, in their application, BP said they had "proven equipment" for dealing with a deepwater spill much bigger than the one currently spewing in the Gulf of Mexico.

"This is an unprecedented situation, not just for BP but for the oil industry," BP communications chief Andrew Gowers said at one point, "and we are inventing new technologies on the go to tackle this." BP global CEO Tony Hayward has deemed some of the failures "real-time learning." The exploration plan for the now-blown-out well, filed with MMS, says the company was capable of handling a "worst-case scenario," which it describes as a leak of 162,000 barrels per day from an uncontrolled blowout. That is 6.8 million gallons and 32 times more than the original estimate of 5,000 barrels of crude per day. That estimate has since risen to 12,000 to 25,000 barrels a day. Asked in a Senate hearing to reconcile the "proven equipment" statement with the trial and error taking place in the Gulf, the British firm's top U.S. executive, Lamar McKay, struggled to come up with an answer. "Obviously, when that document you're quoting was turned in, we weren't expecting this," he said.

Original Article Here

Monday was Memorial Day, so my American friends were talking about war, and the commemoration of it.

Two Poems, one familiar, one not. You can tell from reading them why the latter is unfamiliar, it's as dense as a black-hole, but packs way more of a wallop than the sing-songy first poem.

In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918) Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.


We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

How to Kill by Keith Douglas

Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.

Now in my dial of glass appears 
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
Now. Death, like a familiar, hears

and look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the waves of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.

The weightless mosquito touches
Her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.

I've written about this before, but Chimamanda Adichie talks about it much better. It's worth every second of the twenty minute runtime.

Liz does all the laundry, and then carts it upstairs for me to fold.

I now have to learn how to do this.

I will not fit nicely into your neat little box, even though I fit all the criteria below (Yes, even including the pants…)

Read the first one if you’re a techie. (How do you know? Take this simple test. Do you use BitTorrent? Do you run Linux? Do you have more e-mail addresses than pants? You’re a techie.)

From Pogue’s review of the iPad.  Liz wants one…  That’s what I’ll say if we ever get one.