Elgar, Parry and Michele Bartoli

Someone from Montreal asked me recently if I saw much live music in Halifax, he'd heard the live-music scene here was amazing. The Symphony I said. Well, it's live, our other running buddy said! I've seen three live acts in the past five days. Last Thursday la Belle and I saw Heart at the Metro Centre, which for a night was liberally drenched in estrogens! Not quite the Symphony, but they did all their classics and knocked a couple more years off my hearing. Job done in other words. The next night, after the tinnitus had subsided, we saw Dutch Robinson play with the Symphony at the Cohen. A much mellower night. It was an experience to hear a full orchestra get funky with Lets Get It On. Last night I heard Nova Sinfonia's recital of the Enigma Variations. This always puts you in a bit of a patriotic mood as you nearly always go from Nimrod...

...to Jupiter...

...to Jerusalem.

Rule Britannia indeed.

Anyway, there was some very unBritish weather this morning. For the benefit of our British reader, the thermometer looked a little like this this morning.

Yup, -13.3C. Now this was taken last week, and -13C was the air temp, but it wasn't windy. It was about -8C this morning, but a brisk north wind dropped that to about -20C. Even die-hard bike commuters were likely looking at their options this morning. Apart from Ian Loughead, who I'm sure rode over the bridge.

It should be pretty obvious that I'm not riding outside when it's like this! Hell, walking outside to get the car sometimes makes me feel like Capt. Oates. So I've been hitting the turbo instead. Can't say it's "fun" as a nice ride in the country would be, but I do have some bike-related goals this year and I suppose I need to keep my legs in the habit of turning circles. As with many, I try and dull the mental Turbo pain watching movies or some-such. The past couple of daysI've knocked off a Liege-Bastonge-Leige and a Fleche Walloon. Unfortunately, my only videos (as in your actual VHS) are from the late 90's, both of these races were the 1999 editions, the height of the EPO era. This makes watching them an exercise of the upmost cynicism. Having said that, I watched the '99 Fleche for a reason; the weather was miserable in that race, rain and snow. Watching the pros slog through that made me think an hour on the trainer was actually the cushy option!

You can't help but feel the only guy not on drugs was that fat Belgian bloke half way up the Mur de Huy, you know the one with a Duvel and a paper cone of double-fried frites and mayonnaise. The jury is surely out on everyone else. You can watch Bartoli and Vandenbrooke's duel on La Redoubt but over-dub Phil n' Paul's amazement at Bartoli's ability to attack twice and Vandenbrooke's ability to still drop him with your own, more cynical version.

We know Vandenbrooke was on the heavy water, after this it seemed he spent as much time suspended or under investigation as he did riding. To the best of my knowledge, Bartoli has never been accused of doping, but his name did allegedly crop up in the Operacion Puerto lists. To me Bartoli always looked perfect on his bike; that nightmare of a Mapei kit notwithstanding!

I had a mate who looked a bit like that; lean and smooth. Effortlessly aerodynamic. Perfectly positioned on his bike. He had a lower position on his road bike than I had on my aerobars, or it felt. Always made me feel overweight, lumpy and upright! Git. Before you think Dazza was some kind of bike-God, I had to pull him out of a couple of ditches in our time and I pushed him home once (on our bikes; it was a like a 20 mile hand-sling). Of course it was a two-way street and he pushed me home once too! Cheers Dazza.

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Scrambled glia

Hmm, had another one of those weird anxiety dream-type events. I dreamt I was at a triathlon with an out-and-back swim. Which is odd since I don't swim any more. Anyway, I did the swim in the race, which was odd since I was the TD. Afterwards the RD, someone in the TNS community (who shall remain nameless) told me I'd cheated and cut the turn. "We're not having Andrew doing any more of his shit" was the phrase I heard in my dream. Which was odd becasue the RD was also racing. Plus, I'm pretty sure that even though the red-mist descends when I race, I'm fairly scrupulous about keeping not only to the rules, but to the spirit of the rules.

So all-in-all, none of it made sense. Maybe the blow to the head I received yesterday scrambled a couple of circuits (well, OK, scrambled a couple of circuits even further).

In better news, Joshua (my eldest) did his longest run ever on Saturday at Leah Jabour's "Ugly Sweater Run" on Saturday, at the grand age of 12. Just under an hour. Poor lad, on Sunday his legs hurt! First time ever too! I won't be entering him in any more 10Ks any time soon. This was a one-off given it was billed as a long, slow social run in an ugly sweater. He's 12, fer goodness sakes, surely the Athletics Canada LTAD restricts kids like him to 5Ks!

This was the view at the start of the run, and that's quite some display of ugly sweatery. Interestingly there were two hockey jerseys, with one person thinking an Oilers' jersey was the epitome of "Ugly" whilst the other went with a Leaf's jersey. Such hockey sectarianism aside, some of the sweaters looked like ones I would have worn quite unironically in my youth.

Thank goodness for changing times!

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Going off half-cocked

Take a good look; maybe your only chance to see Alberto Contador Velasco in Saxo kit! Pistolero is going down. Well for now. One year and losing the '10 Tour title say the reports. This could be a bad day for cycling. No, not in the way you'd think. Is it bad that the guy who won the "world's biggest bike-race " is taking a doping sanction? Does it paint the sport in a negative light? I would say "No". On the contrary, it would be far worse if he finessed out of it just because he won "the world's biggest bike-race".

Unfortunately, there seems to be finessing going on. There have been machinations, or the appearance of machinations from the beginning; from the long delay in notification to the current wrangling over the nature and duration (if any) of the sanction. Also, the role of the Union Cycliste Internatinale (UCI), the International Federation (IF) that governs cycling, in this has been questioned. What role have they played in this case? Does it even have a say in doping cases?

To the best of my knowledge, the sanction is supposed to be two years. Vinokourov was given a year in '07 by the Kazakh Cycling Federation, a term that was seen as nationalistic in nature i.e. to get Vino back on the national team as soon as possible, and the UCI appealed successfully to get him the mandated two years.

One year bans are handed out, but this is usually when the accused charger has "cooperated". This time-off-for-good-behaviour approach sticks in the craw. Danilo di Luca just got a year ban for a second doping offence (well kinda second offence, the first one was only an implication in Oil For Drugs but he still served a ban). The nature of his "cooperation" the second time around wasn't clear. He confessed to his own doping but didn't implicate anyone else. So how does this merit a reduction? More-so a reduction that allowed him to start racing almost straight away, we must add!

It's been said that it is unfair that the cyclists are taking the rap and having their reputations tarnished and careers destroyed but the team doctors and in some scary cases the team veterinarians (Dr Mabuse anyone?) are in the the main, getting away with it. Which is why it was so so gratifying to see Stefan Matschiner get prison time recently for helping Bernhard Kohl, among others, to blood dope. Of course, "among others" hides a multitude of sins including the fact that cyclists were not the only ones supposedly re-transfusing their own blood. Remember, in Operation Puerto, track & field athletes, soccer and tennis players were all allegedly in the net yet it was only cyclists, including Ulrich and Basso, who were named. Don't get me started.

So Bertie (not the Colin Firth Oscar nomiated Bertie, the other one) is getting a year, and that smacks of preferential treatment. Listen to the arguments. It was only 50 pg/mL, clearly accidental, let's get the guy back racing as soon as possible. After all, he did threaten to retire if banned. If Contador is seen as the future of cycling by the powers that be, then that's no good. Here we have a champion everyone likes, we must do what we can to keep him.

Implicit in those statements is Contador's post-sanction return, none-the-less. There has been a remarkable discontinuity in the treatment of post-santioned dopers. OK, so Basso could come straight back in to the highest levels but that was a couple of years ago and times have changed. Have they? Vino, straight into the Astana A-squad and won the '10 la Doyenne. Not all's bad; he was booed in the finishing straight! Petacchi, who still doesn't know how to use an inhaler properly, welcomed with open arms, back in the ProTour (or whatever we're calling it now, World Tour I think) and working to get his tally of wins back up after being stripped of a years-worth of results. Di Luca gets a Katusha contract right out of the ban. Rasmussen on the other hand, guilty only of not being where he said he would be (I'm not standing up for him in any way but compare to Di Luca who was caught red-handed with CERA in his system) can't even get the UCI to return his calls. His assertion that there was a UCI "black-list" of formerly-banned riders seemed like sour grapes once upon a time, but is unfortunately soundng more like UCI policy! Landis, even when flying the Floyd Fairness Fund flag high and proud, was lucky to get a gig with Rock Racing, alongside Oscar Sevilla and Fransisco Mancebo; let's just say Rock Racing's bad-boy image wasn't all down to their "rad" Primal jerseys. It was the French Foreign Legion of cycling, with Sevilla and Mancebo not so much exercising their right to ride for a foreign team as it was trying to stay one step ahead of the UCI and Puerto! Landis' case is probably the closest to Berties; current TdF winner with drugs in his system. No ifs, ands or buts over what and how much. Was there testosterone? Yes. Was there clenbuterol? Yes. Landis is ridiculed and summarily drummed out of the business whilst the UCI appears to be trying to cushion Berties' blows.

And what about Fuyu Li? Who? The Chinese cycling champion (as in ITT national champion). He was also caught with clenbuterol last year. Also, in the minuscule 50-100 pg range. You could be a cynic, but perhaps Fuyu Li's problem wasn't the Clen as much as it was not having won a couple of Tours yet. Do we ever hear any moral-wringing ( and wrangling) arguments from the UCI on Li's behalf? Any splitting hairs over the performance-enhacing meaning of 50 pg of clenbuterol? Do we ever hear the UCI equate the Li and Contador cases? Hey, both vanishingly small amounts of a drug of questionable efficacy? Nope. Contador gets his blows cushioned by both his national and international federations whilst Li gets tossed under the bus; just another bad boy with PEDs in his system. Fu Yu indeed.

No, the rules are the rules. It shouldn't matter how many Grand Tours he's won. He did the crime, let him serve the time; and by time, we mean two years. If we don't, then cycling's whole crusade against PEDs, already on shaky ground, will be exposed as gutless. Open to abuse, depending on who you are, not what you've done. This isn't pour encourager les autres; Contador shouldn't have coming more than someone in the same situation, he should be getting the same. And if cycling's latest great white hope retires in a fit of pique because of it, then so be it. We picked the wrong great white hope. At least we won't be seeing that stupid victory "gesture" for a while.

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Oh, I copy-and-pasted those images off cyclingnews,com; they're their IP, not mine.

Quantum Effects and Vehicle Ownership

Got dinged big time with the winter parking ban. I left the Deer Killer (sensu stricto the Deer-Strike-It-In-The-Haunch-And-Let-It-Bleed-To-Death-In-The-Woods but that doesn't trip off the tongue so easily, or indeed sound quite so macho) in a local supermarket carpark given that we're not allowed to park on the street. The problem was not so much leaving it there as leaving it there for about a week without moving it, to the extent it got plowed in and then set in a small ice-drift as the snow metamorphosed over a couple of quick freeze/thaw cycles into the Windsor Street Glacier. If your car becomes a small geological feature it's obviously illegally parked, so they towed it.

I'm telling you; this car is becoming more trouble than it's worth, and it's not worth much. A vehicle I didn't want in the first place, which nevertheless has survived a couple of serious threats to sell it and a failed MVI which pretty much cost the Blue-Book price to get a sticker and still comes back to me like a faithful dog. Woof! Perhaps there's a moral here and I should treat her with a modicum of respect. Let's face it; she did make that heroic trip to Montreal last summer (which I could have sworn was well beyond her mechanical capabilities) and shrug off that deer without so much as a twitch; "get out of my way 150 lb deer","No", Thwack! "Told-you-so".

To be honest, the whole process of getting the Deer Killer back wasn't so hard, a couple of phone-calls, a trip to police HQ and a ride out to Exhibition Park to pick it up. Fortunately HRP displayed an amazing amount of common sense, seeing as to prove the missing car was mine I technically needed the missing car's registration and proof-of-insurance, which of course, are in the glove compartment of the missing car which I was trying to ransom out of the missing-car-lot in the first place. Think about it; your car goes AWOL so you schlep off down to the police station where they ask you for what you don't have because it's in the car you're reporting AWOL and trying to recover. They might as well ask for the license plate; no I don't have that either because it's with the car, and the car is AWOL.

"I'd like to report my car missing, I suspect it's been towed"

"Certainly Sir, licence and registration please"

"I don't have the registration, it's in the car"

"But without the registration documents Sir, you can't prove the missing car is yours"

"But I don't have the registration for the missing car because it's in the missing car"

"The alleged car Sir".

I think "Alleged Car" gives the Deer Killer an even more rakish air than the deer-dent. Anyway, so as you can see, the car is simultaneously there (you know you have it) and not there (you don't have the registration and insurance to prove it to the police). It's Schroedinger's car, which probably explains why the police don't think it's yours in the first place.

Maybe this is what they mean by 21st Century policing; not so much CSI as invoking quantum physics to logically deduce where stolen proerty is. Now I think about it, it's kinda Dirk Gently.

As I was saying, I was lucky and didn't have to argue from quantum principles that the car was mine, although I often feel the need to invoke the Uncertainty Principle around my car (not necessarily Heisenberg's Principle, it just has a general air of uncertainty about it) and I was issued in short order with the magic blue slip with which to ransom it out of captivity.

Maybe "ransom" is too strong a word, given that the cost of getting her back was only about 0.001% of the ransom asked for Richard Lionheart (assuming silver costs ca. $20 a Troy Ounce and the dollar is at par). However, the only thing that stuck in my throat about the whole thing was to do with paying to get the car back. No, not the rate, I can live with that. There's the truck to do it, guys to do it, the six miles towing, digging the damn thing out of it's own private glacier, the overnight parking and I suppose there's also a hefty deterrent factor in there too to prevent you from parking illegally in the first place. Mea culpa. No, it's that the towing company only accept cash.

Yup. Cash only. One company has the contract to tow illegally parked cars for the City, and they only take cold, hard, untraceable cash. Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, you wouldn't be the first person to suggest it, but doesn't that sound odd? I can see the business case in that yes that it does cost businesses to accept credit cards. It's why TNS for example only accepts cash at the Bluenose Sport's Expo, but last year at the Expo we sold less than $100 of TNS-branded merchandise and the fees (to us) for you to buy your $5 TNS mug would have likely outweighed the cost of the mug. However, it's a matter of scale and it certainly cost more than $100 to ransom out the Deer Killer and one suspects I wasn't the only one today. If you're charging half a monkey to redeem a car the City had you tow in the first place, then remember that cash-only has a reputation. Perhaps if you're working law enforcement, even if it's only extreme parking-ticket enforcement, you should at least have the appearance of legitimacy. Caesar's wife and all.

Just sayin'

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Flying the friendly skies

Here we go again; this time sitting at the gate in the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood Airport and wondering if New Year will be celebrated, as planned, in Halifax or if we'll ring in 2011 in a departures lounge somewhere on the east coast. Looking out of the window, the first thing that strikes you is the question "Who designed the Southwestern paint-job?". Red, purple *and*orange? Neither two of these colours go together, mcuh less all three. Yikes! It must have been the same people who did the Kona Jake The Snake paintjobs a few years back.

As a last guilty pleasure of the vacation, I just indulged at Dunkin' Donuts. I swear this is the first time I've Dunkin'd since post-docing for Steve Kaattari over a decade ago. Steve would always bring a box or two of Dunkin Donuts to lab meetings. Then again, lab meetings would start at 07:00 so as not to interfere with lab work so donuts were the least he could offer. In his defense, I understand Steve has calmed down *a lot* since those days.

Speaking of guilty pleasures, the cabs down here all have roof-mounted adverts that seem to sell, solely, strip-clubs or lawyers (imagine that in Halifax!). "Always cheap, always tacky" (or something similar) I read on one sign, but I forget if it was for a strip-club or a lawyer.

Now the donut is gone, I suppose the vacation is finished. Back to the quotidien grind of daily life. That I can deal with. However, I think the <30 degree (Celcius) temperature change between here and there might be harder to cope with! I hope I don't crack when I get off the plane.

See you at a run in Halifax this weekend; I'll be the one bundled up like Shackleton in the Antarctic for a mere 0C with flurries.

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Woof woof, bacon, maple syrup and manatees

Well, I have never spent a Christmas quite like this one. Am currently down in Fort Lauderdale, FLA with la belle et ses parents. So that's a fully fracophone Christmas. This has had the effect (an advantage to some I'm sure) of shutting me up almost completely; my French isn't good enough yet to think and speak on my feet! I can keep up with simple conversations but by the time I've translated a sentence, come up with a suitable reply and translated that, the conversation is somewhere else completely. So my verbal contributions are effectively limited to "Oui", "Non", "Pamplemousse", "Toaster", "c'était écoeurant" (probably misspelled but my accent is atrocious anyway) and the ever popular "Oui, je vais prend une autre bière". After a couple of bières it gets better, especially if the Canadiens are playing. You'd be surprised how far you can get with "Carey Price, eh?"

This morning, Boxing Day, we were up at 5. Yup, five, 5, cinq. WTF? La Belle had entered us all in the Greater Fort Lauderdale Road Runners Resolution Run, an essentially pan-flat 5K in a State Park somewhere near the ocean. So, that was up as early as I do for the Bridgetown LC, in the car for 6 and registering for the race at 05:40. Except they got my registration wrong and couldn't find my dossard because they'd written my name as "Nacanay". That was a new one for me.

You know this guy? I don't.

La belle had been cautioning me all week that it was an untimed fun-run and "don't do a Matt Callaghan" viz; bomb around a Running Room 5K Santa Run, winning the thing by five minutes, for naught, and getting injured in the process. As you know, running any race intentionally slow is an anathama; why give me a bib-number if you don't expect me to use it, but I resolved myself to run at a reasonable pace, with the leaders if possible, and not to do a Rami, go cracking off the front and pissing off everyone else who's just out for a good time.

View from the start. There was a signing asking boaters to reduce their speed and watch for manatees; no wonder I felt at ease, being in the presence of other fat marine mammals.

This lasted until the start. A group of four, including a handy-looking Junior, slid off the front in the first few hundred metres and were tantalisingly within sight, only a few strides. So instead of talking it easy and falling back into the laughing group, I closed the gap. There's something of the dog-mentality in me, and many of us I suspect, in that we carry a compulsion to chase down runners (and cyclists and even swimmers). Woof woof!

A car-ornament spotted in the race car-park. Neat.

The guys in the front group were savvy to the idea of "work" and we started taking turns;, going to the front to keep the pace high, but not to intentionally drop people. Yet. It was unasked but expected. Soon, people were sliding of the back and by half-way it was down to myself and one other guy, an ex-pat Jamican called Courtney. We did for the age-groupers by one mile and the Junior a little after. Courtney said the Junior kid been good when he was 14, but had recently discovered girls and his form had subsequently suffered. Good for us.

So, sorry La Belle, I was off the front doing 3:30s (kms), or a 5:30 mile for the first one, but I was doing it in company and to be honest he started it.

I had a crack at the win with what I thought was 200m to go, but what I thought was the 3 mile clock was actually the 1 mile clock (the race was 1 and a half loops) and even though I dropped Courtney I'd gone too early and he was coming back. I let him come back thinking I might, might mind you, recover enough to be able to cover his kick but who am I kidding? I'm a slightly overweight age-grouper on the wrong side of 40 and when Courtney went, all I could do was wave goodbye, bonne chance et bon voyage. I still got second, 17:30 something and it might have been a tad over 5K too.

My warm-down was longer than the race!

There were no prizes, but the GFLRRR set up a table with all the unclaimed prizes from their races, first come first served. I have to say, they have way cool prizes. I was there pretty early and secured 3rd Senior Masters Lady from the 2009 Spookactular 5K. Score!

After that we debouched to brunch. On first sight, the Club Tropical seems pretty run down, kinda closed off and possibly a mafia front (I've read Donnie Brasco). But all the cars outside had "Je me souviens" on the license plates; it's run by expat Quebecois and on Sunday they offer a Canadian brunch, which is essentially plus du bacon avec sirop d'érable et cretons. Done. I'm sold. So two plates full of cured pork-products and home-fries later (there was fruit, but why? There was bacon!), I'd recovered from a ca. 600 calorie run with a 1000 calorie breakfast. Double-score!

As well as offering two chronic diseases in one (atherosclerosis and diabetes) they also have shows with Quebec artists who are playing the snowbird circuit. I wonder if it's the unofficial social centre of the francophone community in the Greater Fort Lauderdale area?

Seeing as we'd dispensed with a race, a run and a slap-up breakfast by noon, we killed time in the afternoon by going for a walk on Hollywood Beach. It was cold by Florida standards, 15C, and people were, I kid you not, wearing coats, tuques and scarves. At the race I saw one guy in tights, long-sleeved technical mid-layer and gloves! It was 18C! Anyway, seeing as it was "freezing" the beach was deserted, and it had a bit of a tropical island feel; white sand, blue, blue ocean and palm trees

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I have to say, Christmas decorations look a bit silly in such an environment!


Oh well, compared to what's meterologically on offer in Nova Scotia or the UK, it's a breeze. I feel kinda guilty I'm not sharing in the collective misery, but I'm sure Mother Nature will have saved some for me when I get back!

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Signing off

Here we go, sitting in the departures lounge at YHZ. So far, so good; everything seems on-time, reducing the probability of spending Christmas in a terminal lounge, but there are many miles to go yet.

Heading off into, among other things, a bit of a communications blackspot. Probably a good thing, to go off-line a little. I mean, how important can those Nigerian 404 emails really be? They can wait until I get back. Looks like I'll get a chance to read words printed on real paper, and maybe catch up with my podcasts. Should that sound Luddite-ish, just remember, constant information bombardment isn't communication. Less quantity, more quality.

See you in the new year

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