Master Baker

Sometimes there's an advantage in having such a wide range of life experiences at work.  Sure, no-one is ever going to call on me to exsanguinate a fish or do a quick spot of PCR or manual sequencing, but I still get to use my mind and it seems nowadays whenever anything needs writing or proof-reading I get the call.  There'll be no more split infinitives on Cyclesmith's website on my watch!  Stephane, our floor manager is a trained chef and when I got to work yesterday I found these on the kitchen table

 It was all I could do not to scarf the lot down immediately.  however, I did consider placing a "Not for consumption; display purposes only" sign on them.  The cupcakes were delicious, either gingerbread or carrot-cake.

Whilst eating my cupcake I had a look on cyclingnews.com, under the pretense that if I was going to cyberslack in a bike-shop, I should be doing so on something that could be construed as work-related.  Actually, velonews.com has a very good tech section, which has to be work-related, but I digress.  Whilst on cn I nearly choked on my cupcake, but in a good way, when I saw the pictures from the Liquigas end-of-season party.  The riders, naturally, were dressed as pure Eurotrash; exhibit A; Vincent Nibali's trousers;

...but then the North Americans were no better.  Who can remember (I'm trying to forget) Garmin-Cervelo's team intro this season and Christian Vande Velde's Norwegian curling trews?  Why?

The Liquigas boys didn't eschew trousers but their guests did;

those are the Miss Ciclismo ladies in the back cavorting in the nearly altogether.  Here's Miss Ciclismo 2011 Nancy Bernacchia there, doing her best to remember the Little Prince has sucked on a bike for nearly a decade now and the Piccolo name-tage is surely wearing thin....

And there is so much a double entendre there.  Maybe thats why Nancy's smiling.  So much for taking women in cycling seriously.  Maybe Bronzini was right.

Still. when you consider the family-safe North American version was David Zabriske doing karaoke, maybe a bit of southern European elan is the lesser of two evils.

AD