Tour de France Recap, Week 1
It's not about the bike(s).

After a solid week of racing concluded this morning I am reflecting on the first week of the Tour this year. As some of you may know I am a huge fan of the Tour de France. It's such an amazing time each year to wake up at 7:00AM to watch a sporting event. It's unusual at first to be watching a sporting event with your morning coffee and breakfast rather than in the evening with beer and Buffalo wings. Not that I ever really engage in the latter, but I have seen it done on TV. Oh, My Boys!

The Tour is televised in America on Versus, a television channel I wish that I never had to watch. Unfortunately for me it happens to be the exclusive network for the only two sports that I watch: Cycling and NHL Hockey. Yeah, I'm the one who watches those sports. So for three weeks every summer and a few nights a week during the fall, winter, and spring, I tune into Versus. For the remaining 92% of the year not occupied by either of those sports it is generally playing bass fishing, bull riding, deer hunting or some other sport that involves torturing or murdering animals. Also it plays WEC Wreckage which features humans torturing and murdering themselves which is a little more appropriate, I suppose.

A few years back Versus made the decision to add Al Trautwig into its mix of Tour de France commentators. Originally (well, originally for me) the lineup was much simpler: Phil Ligget, the wise old sage of bicycle riding who often refers to "the suitcase of courage"; Paul Sherwen, who is Phil's younger experienced former rider with great color commentary; and Bob Roll who is a madman that has frantic hand gestures and sometimes rides a bicycle in the nude and offers a much more twisted color commentary to counter the relative sanity of Paul Sherwen. At first, I was no fan of Al Trautwig. In fact I decided to start calling him Al Basshat, which at the time I thought was an extremely clever and cutting commentary on the lack of respect I had for the man and his function on the team combined with a brilliant twist on the phonetic breakdown of his last name. Eventually Trautwig grew on me during the Tour de France and as a commentator for the New York Rangers. So it was that I stripped him of my mark of shame and refrained from calling him Al Basshat, a testament to the respect he had earned with me.

This year I was surprised to see a newcomer to the Versus group: Craig Hummer. Hummer, for one reason or another, was brought in to replace Trautwig. Apart from having a very silly name, Hummer does not lend a heck of a lot to the group. His chief responsibility apart from moderating a group that really doesn't need any moderation, seems to be calling Bob Roll "Bobke" about a hundred times per telecast. Sometimes he calls him "Bobke" twice in the same sentence. There is never a time when he is speaking to Bob Roll where he does not throw in a "Bobke" at some point just in case the viewers were confused about who he was addressing or what the asinine nickname was that he insisted on calling him.

Versus spends a tremendous amount of time appealing to the dumbest portion of the American sports audience (that's quite a statement). I'm not terribly afraid of any of them seeing this and getting offended because I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of the people watching Versus's non Cycling coverage cannot read. Everything on the channel is about how awesome and macho men are and how painful all the sports they show are. Cycling does not have a great reputation as being badass. That's not to say that falling off a bicycle at 38 miles per hour, or climbing up the Alps, or riding over 2,000 miles through France is not difficult and grueling. It's just that they don't wear boots or cowboy hats when they're doing it. Instead they wear tight spandex and that makes macho men feel very uncomfortable.

Like all sporting events on television, commercials are high in quantity but low in quality and variety. Therefore you get very familiar with about a half dozen commercials played in heavy rotation. Last year we suffered through 648 viewings of the blue Scotch painters' tape commercial. This year here's the crop we're looking at:

1.) Macho, Macho Men



This is an extension of the incredibly lame website designed to "Take Back The Tour": http://www.takebackthetour.com/

All the text from the site is found on the commercial. The purpose is twofold: 1.) fool people into believing that cycling is SUPER HARDCORE and 2.) stick it to all the boneheads who were doping last year and make it clear that the cyclists involved this year are not going to stand for it! Not anymore! Especially since most of them are former dopers! Did we mention how hardcore cycling is?

Every interview with every rider and every team manager this year is about how awesome they are at making sure no one is doping. Boy is it going to be embarrassing when people start getting kicked out of the race this year!

2.) Brand New Start



This commercial is pretty meaningful (if you know who any of those people actually are, if you don't it's just confusing) and actually quite moving the first time you see it. Then you see it 65 more times before the end of the day's stage and you grow to hate it intensely. When I record shows on TiVo I sometimes forget to fast forward through the commercials. Every time I hear this guitar and vocal combination it sends a signal straight to my brain and my hand unconsciously snaps at the TiVo remote to hit the skip button. Luckily this is the one minute long version and the one that actually airs is only thirty seconds.

I'll grant you that all the guys in this commercial are disgraced former riders but somehow this still seems disrespectful to them to basically highlight how they're all dopers.

I'm also struck at how much the song reminds me of This is Our Country from that pickup truck commercial. I always expect this commercial to end with the line, "This is Our Country" which wouldn't make any sense but would either make you want to buy a Chevy (or Ford?) or just make you remember how much you dislike the music of John Mellencamp. Or is it just me?

3.) Armor All Commercial with Some guy!



Every so often Versus reminds you that you are traveling in uncharted waters. I don't own a pickup truck and I'd hazard a guess that I never will. I'll also hazard a guess that I don't know who the hell that guy is in this commercial. Everyone in this commercial is in awe of this guy so I'm going to guess he is famous. He's famous to people who would be watching Versus and to these yokels in the commercial so I'm going to assume he's achieved his fame by either wrestling antelope or racing some sort of vehicle (my money's on a tractor). I guess it doesn't matter because I am a horrible self-loathing hippie-type who lives in New York City and will most likely not need Armor All any time soon. And if I do move to an area which requires me to have a car I will use my past level of eagerness to attend to general automotive maintenance to assume I won't need Amor All then either.

4.) Saab Repetition



Question: What's worse than seeing a commercial ten times in an hour? Answer: Seeing a commercial that repeats itself three times, ten times in an hour! This is by far my least favorite commercial in the group. Last year (to the day actually) I wrote this article about how much I hated Saab's Born from Jets ad campaign. If I knew then what I know now I would have kept my big mouth shut and let them continue on with that line of ads. Saab, squeezes all of the fun out of the sponge of life. Saab, squeezes all of the fun out of the sponge of life. Saab, squeezes all of the fun out of the sponge of life.

5.) Video Professor (How to Buy and Sell on eBay)



This is advertised as a brand new product. I discovered eBay from my dad's friend in 1997 and I put anything about computers that I discovered over a decade ago from a baby boomer well out of the classification "New". Video Professor has been around forever, hawking his CD-ROMs to poor unfortunate people sad enough to spend money to learn from this guy. That being said I feel really bad for the Video Professor. My heart aches every time I see his commercial and hear him at the very end as he whimpers, "Try my product." If I send him a check for $10 do you think that would help? I really don't want to try his product, but I want to support him nonetheless.

Maybe I should put a PayPal donation button on my site for Video Professor. Poor guy.

Last night, Jen and I -- with a group of friends -- wandered around the streets of Brooklyn, listening to the sounds of the exploding fireworks reverberating through the streets and off of the buildings. We'd set out a bit late to view the fireworks and we only caught glimpses of them reflecting off residual smoke and the rain that was lightly drizzling.

Eventually we could the best available spot to watch the fireworks. Sure there was a bridge and a tree in the way, but we had an okay view. Here's a shot I got of the finale. I was expecting the finale to be a bit bigger.



Apparently New Jersey was upset that the fireworks were on the other side of Manhattan this year because they didn't want to have to get their own fireworks barge. Nobody has it tough like New Jersey.

Screw My Kids! I Want To Spend Time With My Kids!

The other day I was watching the latest episode of Jon and Kate Plus Eight (warning, website has annoying music that you cannot turn off see Wikipedia entry for less annoying information) when I saw a commercial that grabbed my attention more firmly than any commercial has since the Daisy May's BBQ USA commercial. Sure, you could focus on the fact that I watch Jon and Kate Plus Eight but instead I will distract you using my rhetorical slight of hand to focus on this commercial.

The commercial that grabbed my attention was this commercial for Dixie displosable plates:



I regret the poor quality of this video but a big thanks to the person who uploaded it. Because of the general crappiness of TiVo I am not able to upload the commercial myself, something my ancient ReplayTV did with great ease before it died.

For those of you who either don't care to watch video or did not pay close attention to it, let me sum it up. The commercial features a number of soulless, vapid mothers who seem to have just taken a deep breath of laughing gas. The mothers in the commercial each take turns half-laughing their way through statements about why they like Dixie paper plates. One can only assume they are planning on serving confinement loaf to their families on said paper plates.

Here's what the mothers take turns saying:

"I will no longer be defined by the number of dishes I wash."

"I'm trading in my apron for something a little more glamorous."

"I deserve a paper plate that's as strong as I am. It has to stand up to my grandmother's marinara without soaking through."

"My children come first, it's as simple as that."

"And I'm proud to use Dixie Ultra Paper Plates because it means fewer dishes and spending time with my family."

"Make it a Dixie day."

First let me start off with this disclaimer: I am not a super overboard left-wing nutjob who tries to impose a 'green' agenda on everyone in the world. I am someone who tries to do his best, who recycles, who tries to do what he can to minimize waste. Largely this has to do with living in New York City and just needing to do this in order to have room in my cramped apartment. I do also care about the planet and feel that if I can recycle my computers, batteries, cans, bottles and paper then I'll at least know that I'm doing something.

That being said I recognize the need for paper plates. I've had barbecues, I've had dinner parties where there just aren't enough regular plates and I have used disposables. I also recognize that Kate (from the above Jon and Kate Plus 8) frequently uses disposable plates. I have no trouble giving her a pass on this given that she has 8 children 6 or under! I'm impressed that she can even feed them at all.

I am learning that this commercial is about a month old and I can't even believe that in this time period that the Dixie company would make such an advertisement. There is a national fever around 'green' and reducing waste and recycling and saving the planet. I don't mean this to sound like Dixie is an evil mega-corporation which wants to poison the environment. But from a public relations standpoint this seems like maybe the worst marketing blunder I've ever seen a company make. Everywhere you go companies are trying to market the things about their company or product that help the environment. Dixie has thrown that all aside in such an egregious fashion that you almost have to admire it.

Maybe in 1988 this commercial would have been fine. But the message that comes across in 2008 is: "Hey, screw this whole global warming and environment nonsense. I'm much too busy (or lazy) to do dishes!" Of course that line would be delivered by another pie-eyed mother who would giggle at the very end of the statement. Perhaps there would be audible gurgles from another mother in the background taking a bong hit.

Whether you agree with the cause of any of these environmental issues or not, this is a monumental gaffe on the part of Dixie. I've encountered very little mention of this ad anywhere and I'm a little surprised by that. I guess everyone is still too busy being fake-outraged or counter-fake-outraged by the Dunkin' Donuts thing from last month.

Water Bottle, The Perfect, For Me!

I'm gearing up for a big bike ride in a few weeks. This ride would have been fairly average for me a few years ago but now, being out of practice, it will be a good challenge. A few years ago, when I worked roughly 4 hours a week, somehow it seemed easier to ride over 100 miles a week. These days, what with a steady job and all, it's difficult to ride over 100 miles a summer. However, then I had to eat $1.19/lb bologna sandwiches for dinner and these days I'm able to enjoy a slightly more elegant lifestyle which includes non-canned foods and the ability to occasionally buy things that I want. A fair trade off I suppose.

My bike needs a bit of a tuneup, I need to get some new tires, tubes and some of the general kind of maintenance that I trust only to a professional. I have neither the desire nor the ability to tweak my bike in order to make it safe. I'm always afraid when I do general maintenance that I will mess up and my wheels will fall off when I'm going 30 miles per hour down a steep hill. Even if said adjustments are only made to the cage that holds my water bottles.

Speaking of water bottles, I need new ones. So I went on to Amazon to search for some appropriate bottles when I found what seemed to be the perfect water bottle, The Elite Higene Water Bottle.

When I read the product description I was not convinced as to whether this was the perfect water bottle for me, however, I was convinced that it had been poorly translated from an undetermined foreign language, most likely by an online translator such as Babel Fish. Here's how it reads:



Just for fun I translated that text to French, then to German, then back into English and here's what I got:



Interesting.

Well, I was convinced. I ordered two!

Happy water bottle for me enjoy the hat! Further next?

Jen & Nate Buy The Farm . . . Share!

There hasn't been a huge amount of updates here lately as Jen and I have purchased a farm share from this farm! What does that mean? Well, it means we get a bountiful supply of farm fresh local produce every week and we get to keep our culinary chops sharp by coming up with recipes to utilize all the product we get. It's kind of like Iron Chef except with much less talent, far less exotic ingredients and everybody wins!

Jen set up a new blog to catalogue our adventures. You can check it out here:




I have an RSS feed set up through chefelf.com but I'm not sure if I should make it visible just yet. I could have it import directly into chefelf.com but I am undecided about it at the current moment.

We're pretty much through all of our produce for this week so we're just waiting to see what comes in next week. I'm hoping for more French breakfast radishes!