Wake Me Up For The Tour de France So I Can Hit "Snooze" For Three More Weeks

Uh-oh.  It's a widdle bit cold in Portland--and it might snow!

So I went and checked the forecast, and it looks like there's a 60% chance that they might get one inch.  One inch!

Do you know what I would give to have only one inch of snow on the ground right now?  (Well, it's a rhetorical question, but if you must know, I'd go as high as US$50, or CAD$50.)  Here in New York we've got like three snowstorms sitting on top of each other now, with another one due to arrive this weekend.  It's just storms humping storms here at this point.  You've got to climb mountains of plowed snow just to jaywalk, and this morning as I was doing just that I fell through the roof of a Miata convertible!

And as far as the temperature, I guess 20 degrees American is pretty chilly, but that stopped feeling cold to me like two snowstorms ago.

So "Did you ride?"  Come on!  You people in Portland owe it to us to ride!  You're the most coddled cyclists in America, yet we've heard just about every complaint possible from you people over the years: "We've got scary streetcar tracks that make us crash;" "They put speed bumps on the Hawthorne Bridge that make us crash:; "They won't let us ride through the cemetery and dishonor the dead with our Lycra-clad asses".  WHAT-ever.  For the sake of your fellow cyclists, nut and/or vulva up for once in your lives and get out there, goddamn it!

(Or don't, actually.  It's probably pretty dangerous there when it snows.  I bet the typical Portland driver goes into a tailspin at the slightest hint of snowfall, even with the standard-issue Subaru.  If I lived in Portland I'd probably just stay at home with the giant smelly dog I own because I live in Portland.)

Speaking of Portland, did you know they say that Portlanders are the least attractive city-dwellers in America?  Well, they don't--at least not as far as I know.  However, scientists have conducted what must be the most useless experiment since the middle ages, and it has revealed that faster cyclists are more attractive:

The top 10% of performers were rated on average as 25% better looking than the laggards.

The scientists conclude that humans have evolved to recognise athletic performance in faces.

Yeah, duh!  First of all, everybody knows PEDs make you better-looking.  Just look at Lance Armstrong:

Come on, he never would have landed a dreamboat like Matthew McConaughey without the juice.

Second of all, do you really need a clinical study to conclude that nobody likes the French Breakaway Loser Pain Face?

(Thomas "Suitcase of Courage" Voeckler attempting to lick his own helment strap.)

And here's some more obviousness:

Dr Postma and his team found that women who were on the contraceptive pill were less likely to link attractiveness to performance.

"Typically, studies find that women using the pill have a reduced preference for masculine faces, and we found the same phenomenon: women on the pill had a reduced preference for faster cyclists," said Dr Postma.

I didn't go to science school or anything, but I don't need a study to tell me you can be less picky when there's no chance of getting knocked up.  Hey, if you're on the pill you can afford to have pity sex with a lousy cyclist once in awhile, because you know you're not going to wind up with a baby that looks like this:

(Encore, le "FBLPF.")

Also, he looks like he knows how to use his tongue.

And then there's this:

Many men argue that they find it difficult to rate the attractiveness of other males, but in the study the researchers found that men who took part had a fairly similar view on who was handsome as the women.

I wonder if at any point the researchers considered the possibility that men who volunteer to take part in studies that involve ranking the attractiveness of male professional athletes happen to be attracted to other men.

Maybe they can do another study to find out for sure.

As for me, the only way I can sit through a bike race nowadays is if it's reenacted with stop-motion videography, like this video I saw on VeloNews:



Though they left out the drug test afterwards:

Lastly, there are a list of acceptable excuses for running over a cyclist or pedestrian with your car, including but not limited to:

"I didn't see him."
"She came out of nowhere."
"I mistook the accelerator for the brake."
"I was overwhelmed by the 'new car smell' of my Mercedes."

Well, a reader tells me you can now add "I couldn't stop because I had diarrhea" to the list:

Persis Draper, 92, said she was on her way to visit a friend when she experienced a bout of diarrhea. She called her friend to cancel, but wanted to make a stop at the grocery store on the way home.

“I decided while I was out to get some rolls. I had a potluck to go to,” Draper said. “While I was on my way that’s when the accident occurred.”

But then the diarrhea struck again:

“I didn’t leave a scene of an accident because I was running away. I’m not the type of individual who would do something like that. I left because I had diarrhea,” she said. “I went back to check and there wasn’t anybody there.”

Uh, I'd imagine that when you're 92, every bowel movement is diarrhea.