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Deutschland Tour Pt.1

Friday, August 4, 2006

The Deutschland Tour on Cycling.TV has been a pretty good race so far, with some exciting finishes. The prologue was won by Gusev of Discovery Channel, who continues to hold the Leaders jersey and the best young rider jersey. Astaná-Würth scored a victory in stage one when Assan Bazayev outsprinted Erik Zabel and Danilo Napolitano to his first professional win. CSC’s Jens Voigt beat Davide Rabellin of Gerolsteiner and Astaná-Würth’s Andrey Kashechkin to take stage 2 in style.

Today the teen-aged Team Wiesenhof-AKUD rider Gerald Ciolek out sprinted Erik Zabel and the other sprint favorites to take a most excellent stage. Great sprint performances out of Ciolek are not too surprising, even though he is currently only 19 and on a Continental team — in 2005 he beat Zabel and Gerosteiner’s Robert Förster in a bunch sprint to become the youngest ever National Champion of Germany. Now in his second Pro year, rumors are T-Mobile is looking to pick him up from Wiesenhof for next year.

Overall Gusev continues to hold the leaders Yellow Jersey (by fractions of a second over Erik Zabel) along with the Best Young Rider’s White Jersey. Erik Zabel has a solid lead in the sprinters Green Jersey competition. The mountains really only begin tomorrow (Hartz mountains between Witsenhausen and Schweinfurt), but right now Gerolsteiner’s Stefan Schumacher has the lead for the Polka Dot jersey.

Voigt’s win in stage 2 was one part of a CSC hat trick for the day, winning three different races in one day. CSC as a ProTour team can and is fielding teams in three races across Europe right now, besides Voigt’s win with the D-Tour team, Fabian Cancellara took a win in the day stage of the Tour of Denmark and Marcus Ljungqvist won the day at the Paris-Corrèze. Amazing.

The great thing about Cycling.TV is that we can watch the 2–3 hour live show when it airs (usually starts around 9am EST) or if we can go out and do whatever needs to be done and watch the edited broadcast (60-90 minutes) of the stage anytime after they post it later that night. Awesome!

Johann wanted to know what cyclocross was, since I had referred to my amateur cyclo-cross racing in Germany and wanting to get a good cyclo-cross bike for winter and commuting use. Sure enough looking through the archives of Cycling.TV and there was the British National Cyclo-cross Championships from earlier this year. We watched Helen Wyman of Team Fat Birds Don’t Fly (I love that team name!) win the women’s championship and Discovery Channel’s Roger Hammond take the mens championship. Johann now knows what cyclo-cross is and thinks it very cool.

Did I say I like Cycling.TV ??

Also filed in Cycling | Tagged bicycle | Comments (0)

Blogging for Daisy?

Saturday, February 26, 2005

I knew I should have watched The Dukes of Hazard regularly when it was on!
CMT is looking for someone to fill the “vaunted position” of “Vice President, CMT Dukes of Hazzard Institute” with a salary of $100,000. Job responsibilities include:

* watch The Dukes of Hazzard every weeknight on CMT;
* know the words to The Dukes of Hazzard theme song, “Good Ol’ Boys,” written and performed on the series by the legendary Waylon Jennings;
* serve as media expert on The Dukes of Hazzard for the CMT Dukes of Hazzard Institute: must be available for TV, radio and newspaper interviews to share passion for The Dukes of Hazzard on CMT;
* write the CMT Dukes of Hazzard Institute online blog for cmt.com;
* be passionate about The Dukes of Hazzard on CMT;
* make appearances at special events such as Dukesfest 2005 in Bristol, Tenn., (June 4-5, 2005).

Anyone got an mp3 of the theme? Maybe a bootleg tape from one of the picnics in Luckenbach?

Oh and Steve, we gotta talk…

Also filed in Web | Tagged Texas | Comments (0)

Big Media Hurting America

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Theron Parlin just put up a posting arguing that Big Media is playing politics as entertainment through the Ideology Wars on so called political “debate” shows. Theron concludes, like John Stewart, that in the end they– along with the idelogues such as Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michael Moore and Al Franken — are only bolstering hatred between the parties and hurting America. I can’t help but agree.

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Painful Cover

Thursday, February 10, 2005

I listen to a few podcasts regularly — The Daily Source Code, Deutsche Welle Langsam, RevTim and Coverville. Coverville, if you are not familiar with it, is:

“A music podcast featuring the best and worst of cover songs. Presented with full legal licensing from ASCAP.”

Usually each show follows a theme or an artist or two. I usually listen to Coverville late at night when I am working, but lately I have been listening to playlists from my own collection in iTunes. Today I finally got around to listening to Brian’s Tribute to Holly, Valens and Richardson edition of Coverville.

True to his tagline, there were some good covers in there including Jerry Lee Lewis, The Misfits and Harry Belafonte and then… well… pain. So painful it was actually funny, at least for the fist 30 seconds. It was The Brady Bunch covering Don McLean’s “American Pie.” For this one I had to unplug the headphones and share the pain with Tammy. This song ranks right up there with William Shatner’s Lucy In The Sky with Diamonds cover. Good for a laugh or two, but also suitable for use in psychological warfare ops on roommates etc.

Now if only I had the iPod… but more on how I swallowed my iPod — and an iMac — later…

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Nuts!

Monday, January 10, 2005

Oh, if only this could really take place! Varifrank has created a marvelous scenario in which Gen. McAuliffe comes back and gives the Washington press corps a what’s for. A very good read:

“Son, if you and yours in this room continue to give these people the mantle of legitimacy, then the men under my command who died back there in Bastone will have died in vain. The war against the enemy of mankind didn’t end in Berlin or Tokyo or Seoul, that war goes on today. That war is being fought by men and women every bit as brave as the men who I served with in the past.

…

“People are going to die in this war until someone says “I surrender”. If you are ready to surrender, I suggest you do so, for the rest of us, I have just one word for you:

“Nuts!“