From O'Hare

We're separating ourselves from Milwaukee and the U.S. as we speak, even though it doesn't feel that way yet. Instead, our trip right now feels more like a regular summer trip. At the same time, there has been this strange (but happy) change of perspective: for most of the past two years, we really believed it was time for a change, one that probably would involve a move away from Milwaukee. So we were looking forward to it. But then came the past couple of weeks with one farewell after the other, and now we looking back with rather mixed feelings. We're still excited about our European adventure, but we're also a bit sad to leave our friends. As for other feelings, I'm certainly still sore from dozens of trips up and down our various stairs in the past couple of days. That first ride in Holland this weekend is going to hurt too.

Things I won't miss about Milwaukee

1. The weather, December through May.
2. Rush hour traffic on the way to the Pettit.
3. My job.
4. Superweek delays.
5. The Octagon Farm guy.

Five things I'll miss about Milwaukee

1. The cycling community, especially on the East Side of town.
2. The Wednesday ride to Port and back.
3. Our neighborhood (Alterra, Oriental, Beans & Barley, Quedoba, Hooligans, ... and yes, Whole Foods)
4. The Pettit and the speed skating community.
5. Holy Hill.

Honorable mentions:

The Hank Aaron Trail
Waterpolo at the Schroeder Y
Fiddleheads (Thiensville)
The three "hills" at the lakefront
The Tuesday sprint ride

Celebrity book

Cracked the Bruyneel book for the first time, last night. It appears to be a celebrity book: If you're as well-known as B, and also connected to an even bigger story (mr. Armstrong's), you'd be foolish not to try to cash in a little further. So you get a ghost writer (to his credit, B picked one who knows something about cycling), get another celebrity (A) to do a preface, and you tell your story. Doesn't mean there can't be anything valuable in it (I remember really liking the first half of mr. Armstrong's and ms. Jenkins's first volume), but so far, I haven't found anything yet.

but Johan is a big asset

Bruyneel, that is. Of course, he's of the current peloton, supposed to know everyone and everything. And he's Flemish. His contributions in prime time are excellent (which is not to say that the others are worthless, they're just not as vigilant as I'd like them to be--a bit lazy, as I put it the other day). Bruyneel has been around for a long time, and having read David Walsh's book, I can't keep from thinking that a good title for his own book (now: We Might As Well Win) would have been: We'll Do What it Takes. Speaking of Bruyneel's book, I have it on loan from the same friend who so generously gave me a bike to ride for my final days in the U.S., and will take a look now, before heading over to Amsterdam on Wednesday.

Glass half full? Phil and Paul

When I came to the U.S. twenty years ago, ABC News may have had an hour of Tour coverage every Sunday, if that. Now, we have every stage live on cable, with lots of re-runs the rest of the day. And on many days, it's well worth watching. Still, if you have European coverage to compare this too (especially Flemish television), there remains much to be desired. The commercial breaks continue to be very irritating, especially because whoever decides on their timing does not seem to be watching the race. But that's the way the bills get payed over here, and unless PBS found a way to take this on, there's probably no alternative. Speaking of watching the race, sometimes you wonder how big a priority this is for the commentators, even the vaunted "Phil and Paul." I'm sure they're being told to make it accessible and exciting for the average U.S. sports fan, who doesn't know a lot about cycling. But most viewers must be cycling fans, people who follow the sport all year long. This group is rather poorly served by the Versus team of talkers. They sure talk a lot, and half of it is peripheral, sales talk-kind of stuff. Instead, what you need from a commentator is added value. We can all see that the Alps are pretty and that the helicopter is giving us great pictures. The reason the commentators are there is to tell you stuff you don't know; talk knowledgeably about the race you as a viewer are watching with them (and otherwise just shut up). Example: unlike most home viewers, the commentators are supposed to have a list with names and start numbers in front of them so that they can quickly identify a rider (if they can't recognize him outright) as he appears on the screen. But they rarely do, and so they might as well shut up (which they don't). Other example: they talk and they talk (usually the same stuff over and over again about teams with ties to the English speaking world--that, and the eternal "big Jens Voigt"), meanwhile missing all kinds of opportunities to spot things that are actually on the screen and spot them at least as quickly as the home viewer. This morning on the ascent of the Col du Croix du Fer, to give one specific example, we saw CSC initially set a very hard pace. Numerous people were getting dropped. But then, after Arvesen had been pulling for a while, certain people started coming back. One of the first was Menchov's main lieutenant (Laurens ten Dam, whom they never identify, even though he and I were in the same Steven Rooks Classic, last year), and he was followed by a small group. The time it took the great Phil and Paul to notice this, and to shift their story from "this very select group" charging up the mountain to the new situation, was outright embarrassing. They do try, and so does the always struggling and usually irritating prime-time crew, but they don't try hard enough. I really think it's a matter of effort, because most of these guys are legitimate cycling experts, people who've earned their stripes as members of the peloton or as professional journalists. What's the reason? Part of it is that they get the balance wrong between journalism and entertainment, and Versus is probably partly to blame for that. But I think another reason is that they can get away with being lazy. They can get away with being lazy the way a Flemish commentator never could, because his audience would either desert him or demand his replacement. But these days, many American cycling fans are about as discerning as the average Flemish fan, and they deserve better. Cycling fans of America! It's time to stop being merely happy with the amount of coverage we now get! It's time to take our expectations to a new level. It's time to require that Phil and Paul (and maybe eventually also poor Bob) start working hard again to makes us admire them--not for their celebrity status, not for their ability to entertain us, but for their sharp eye, unrelenting focus on even the smallest race development on the screen (and off), and for their ability to tell us things we did not yet know!

Coffee ride

They belong, even during the racing season. I'm not having any kind of racing season at all, but thank goodness we've kept the coffee rides going. This morning just three of us, breaking no rules on the way to Thiensville (small ring only; no sweating); then we had nice weather on the patio (one power scone for the whole table); and on the way home some nice, warm rain. We made a detour onto the campus of Concordia University to see if any St. Louis Rams had arrived yet, and discovered this nice path going up the bluff. First we rode a different path down, one switchbacking about a dozen times around a long stairway, then while riding along the waterfront, we saw this strip of asphalt set against the hillside up ahead. The grade probably is between 10 and 15%, and it's no longer than 200-300 meters, but the path still reminded me of these narrow little roads you see in the Ardennes or Zuid-Limburg: you could, if you really had to, probably get through with a car, but it's really not built for that. At the risk of creating tension between the Concordia and cycling communities, I'll say that it would be a pretty good spot for hill repeats (as long as you're patient on the way down).

Something useful someone could do

This story today on msnbc, about how many people with little experience riding bikes in traffic are doing just that (because of high gas prices), and the sometimes hairy situations this creates.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25695376/
Here's how an experienced bike commuter could make a little money on the side and/or provide a useful service: pair up with a bike shop and organize bike commuting clinics on weekend days. You could make it very elaborate, but basically you'd share your experience from basic bike handling skills, to fundamentals about equipment (get a damn flasher, get two, no three--for crying out loud; and what the hell do you think you're doing here without a decent helmet?), to where to ride in traffic (and where not) and how. If I wasn't moving to Europe, I might just do it myself. I think that even without high gas prices there is a good number of people who on many days really would prefer to ride a bike for short commutes and other errands. Few U.S. cities, however, make it easy, and, of course, few Americans grow up riding bikes the way for example the Dutch do. And there is the little matter of many drivers not enjoying sharing the road with bikes (and in some situations, you can't blame them). But it's changing, and it can be done. Now I'm almost sorry I'm moving away.

Just wrote to the paper

It has been on my mind for a while, and earlier this afternoon I sent the following to the Wall Street Journal:

Anti-Frank conspiracy?

I'm wondering if there is some kind of unorganized conspiracy of silence among Wall Street Journal readers against the paper's new columnist, Thomas Frank? Every week Mr. Frank takes great care to pen what to most readers of the Journal must be a pretty provocative essay, and while I haven't done a systematic search, I can't remember reading one letter in response to a Frank column, positive or negative. The idea to invite Mr. Frank to write I weekly column was an excellent one. Being confronted with ideas that directly challenge one's own convictions is one of the better ways to become more clear about these convictions (and sometimes even adjust them). It's one of the main reasons I myself subscribe to the Journal. Reader letters about left-of-center positions are my favorite part of the paper, and yet, very few readers seem to want to engage Mr. Frank's arguments. Is he so strange that people don't know what to do with him? Or does he instead make us so uncomfortable that we've decided--individually, yet also collectively--to ignore his columns in the hopes that he'll just go away? What's going on?

Organizing my head

This would be one reason to write on a regular basis: before getting down to serious business, process the random thoughts that always float around my head early in the day. It could be a way to get organized and to think things through better, because that's what writing does for you. On Thursdays in Milwaukee, some of these random thoughts usually concern the Wednesday training ride; on all days, they involve all matter of work-related issues, from mundane tasks to serious projects.
First the Wednesday ride: normally the group is large, and the pace fast, but Superweek is ongoing, and yesterday a couple of storms also were moving through the area. There were 10-12 people, but all were gone by the time we got to Donges Bay Rd, "we" being my reliable friend PK and me. Because we were going to get wet anywhere we went, we decided just to do the regular ride. I suppose yesterday qualifies as the first thunderstorm ride of the year, but it really didn't amount to much. Still, it was nice to ride in the warm rain again--also a first this year. The rain actually stopped 15 miles into the ride, and the rest was just a very pleasant, not too challenging ride which I did entirely in the small ring. We tied for the line in Port, and forgot to sprint for the stop-ahead sign at Mequon Rd on the way home. There, we took a left, because on the way up we had followed our last companions through the short-cut, and you have to do the whole route.
Other random thoughts go back to the reception at the Woodrow Wilson Center in D.C. on Tuesday--the second event to promote our new Encyclopedia of the Cold War (http://www.routledge.com/books/Encyclopedia-of-the-Cold-War-isbn9780415975155). We had a nice turn-out, thanks to the Cold War International History Project's publicity machine, and I was interviewed by the Voice of America (I'll post the link, once they get the interview up on their site). I feel pretty good about the two volumes, although with a work of this magnitude, produced essentially in less than three years, there will always be things one could revisit. Maybe in a couple of years we can take another look.
Finally, fall teaching. I'm supposed to think about that too: two Cold War courses, and maybe a third now. But the move has been distracting. On that front: I caught the recycling guy this morning, which was excellent, because in addition to filling our bins, I had placed several boxes with discarded files behind the house (they had gotten rained on several times since early last week), and I had the whole backstairs full of bags and boxes. The guy was excited to hear I was going to Holland (I had never met him), congratulated me and asked me to look for public works jobs for him over there because he's getting tired of Milwaukee and the U.S. Most important, he was willing to wait while I dumped all this paper in his truck, even helped me wheel down two additional bins full of the stuff. One more thing out of the way. Now back to the Cold War.

Keeping a blog?

Today I was told that one function of a blog is to keep your friends apprised of what you're doing, especially if you don't live close. I was also strongly encouraged to write frequent updates, especially after our upcoming move. That would be one definition of believing that you have something to say, which seems to me a major reason to keep a blog. That, and being interested in communication with others. Leaving it to updates about your own life, however, is also a rather limited definition, unless you cover all significant aspects, which in my case would include thinking about history and current events. I'll think about it some more.