Out Of Thin Air

I’ve been to two games this season and have two to go; also have caught the last two games on T.V. Sadly, though not unknown to soccer, three of the four games I’ve watched this season have been 1-1 ties. But they’ve all been exciting.

The first game, against Kansas City, should have been a 2-1 victory for the Rapids. Conor Casey scored near the end to tie things up; then Conor created a great chance for himself that saw him hitting the post on a wide open net. In his partial defense the ball was slightly out of control and he had limited time.

The next game was in person as well, against FC Dallas. This was a hot one in the afternoon sun. Casey was not playing; he was injured. His bald head, big frame and aggressive style of play landed him in trouble when he banged heads with another player in a game I didn’t see – this was before I knew that PBS covers all our games.

Without Casey, the Rapids lack scoring punch. The way they scored against Dallas was on a penalty kick for a call that I didn’t think they were really threatening the goal on. But we took what we could get.

Last week, via TV, watched them play San Jose. They won that won, 1-0. The goal was credited as an own goal – Omar Cummings crossed it from the right wing; it deflected off a defender and confused the goalie, so it hit him in an unanticipated manner and found its way into the net. I don’t know why it was deemed an own goal for sure, since a defender deflected it first. But it also appeared the goalie had time to react to the deflection and didn’t.

In that game, local boy Colin Clark tore his ACL – he did that in August of last year, and has now done it again. This takes him out for the rest of the season. Colin Clark and Conor Casey are two stars, and also the only two genuinely Colorado boys on the team.

Today’s game was against Philadelphia Union. Union is an expansion team added in 2008. Their stadium is “soccer-specific”, like the Rapids, and both are part of an urban renewal/redevelopment project that creates a terrific fan experience. Philly’s stadium sits next to a cool bridge on the Delaware river.

The Rapids goal in this game was by Larentowizc, who is from Philly and said this was the game he was most looking forward to. Larentowicz is an awkward player who has trouble playing to his left foot, and looks a bit uncoordinated. But he is fast and has a powerful, accurate shot from midfield, and he took advantage of it today.

Conor Casey returned in the game as a sub in the second half. He had a concussion and blurry vision for a week. Disappointingly Claudio Lopez didn’t come into the game in the second half like he usually does – he has tremendous energy and sometimes seems like the only player in the second half. Conor is the most highly skilled player on the team, but is lazy and saunters around opportunistically. Omar Cummings, the Jamaican, is incredibly fast and fun to watch, but pretty disappointing at: 1. passing 2. crossing 3. putting the ball in the net. So a mixed bag.

Here’s a flight attendant who did it in grand fashion.

As you may have guessed, I have begun watching this series. Netflix has all eight seasons – 192 episodes – available for streaming. I started a week ago, watching the first 24 episodes in one week.

It’s one of the most intensely enjoyable entertainment experiences I’ve had. I laughed, I cried, I clung to the edge of my seat.

I put off this show during the Bush years because it came on Fox and its creator is a right winger. It encouraged torture among the soldiers watching it, supposedly, because the lead character tortures people who stand in the way of information that can lead to preventing an assassination or bombing. The criticisms are discussed in the wikipedia. I won’t go too much into that because I don’t really feel that television influences my behavior that much – I don’t condone torture if I see it on TV, any more than I condone murder because it’s on TV. But anyway, now that the Bush paranoia years are done, I am allowing myself to indulge.

So this was a well written show that won a bunch of emmys. It’s gripping, with an arcing plotline that extends over 24 episodes. With television shows as opposed to films, there’s more time to develop character and plot nuance. So as a storytelling means, shows can be richer.

It’s also not politically biased, at least not extraordinarily so. As an example, one of the lead characters is a Democrat running for President, and he is a very good man. As one observer said, any military/espionage drama is somewhat conservative in nature, dealing with themes of national security. But as another observer put it, 24 eschews the niceties of the ACLU and the moral absolutism of the Bushies.

Plus, it’s got Jack Bauer.

In reading about some slain medical aid workers* in Afghanistan, I saw an AP article that took a separate paragraph to deliver the apparently dramatic statement: “three of the slain were women.”

Um, so the seven dead men are less important?

Someday I dream we will live in a world where women’s lives are deemed just as throw-away-able as men’s.

*They were Christian missionary types. Their Afghan killers thought they were trying to convert them away from their heathen religion, instead of bringing them life-saving medical supplies. For a great film that explores the ethics of Christian missionaries in the dangerous parts of the world, I recommend “Rambo IV.”

When bicycling, one obvious hazard is cars. When alone, I use the following strategy: I ride my bike, and the cars go around me.

When bicycling with others, which is not very often, I get exposed to the “car back” phenomenon, in which the person behinds me shouts out this innocuous, ungrammatical phrase like we’re on an episode of 24 and they are conveying to me need-to-know, vital information I was not privy to and that shows how responsible and caring they are.

Thanks for the info, but I already knew a car was approaching using what’s known as the “auditory” sense, in which I perceive the vibrations of sound waves through the air in a manner indicating they emanated from an approaching car.

While I’m fairly used to the sound of cars approaching, I don’t know when the sound of your voice is going to suddenly appear, at loud volume, in a startling manner. I don’t need you to startle me into being aware that a car is coming. That poses more of a threat than the car.

Even if a car is coming, nothing in my behavior changes. I ride in more or less the same spot, as far over as is safely possible. So it’s not like I’ll move over even if I somehow suffered hearing loss and couldn’t perceive the approaching car that you did with your dog-like auditory powers.

Then, I am supposed to tell the same thing to the person in front of me, lest I be perceived as anti-social (which I am, at least when the socializing is done for suspect reasons).  So the charade propagates itself.

I live in a swing county in a swing state. I find that kind of exciting. I’m one of the few people in the country whose vote matters. I find it sad that our politics works that way, but if somebody gets to be in that position, it may as well be me.

We have an interesting race for Senate going on, between two Democrats – Andrew Romanoff, and Michael Bennet. Romanoff is young, sincere, a political insider. I became slightly acquainted with him when I used to be more active in politics. I developed a very favorable impression of him. He was House Minority Leader, then Speaker of the House when the good guys became the majority party.

Michael Bennet is a rich, Wall Street kind of guy with background in finance, the dirty profession. He’s a phony who was brought in from corporate land to run the Denver Public Schools as superintendent. In this New York Times expose, it is revealed that he decided to finance budget shortfalls using derivatives. These finance guys are all the same. The scheme backfired, in his mind, because “no one could have foreseen the 2008 credit crisis.” Um, right, no one could guess that sometimes incredibly risky investments done for the benefit of Wall Street types go sour. I really hate this aspect of our society. At the least, he could say, yeah, I gambled that this investment would work, and it didn’t. My bad, I should not have done that. I’m sorry.

Adding to his phoniness, Bennet was appointed Senator – he has yet to face election to the office, until this fall. However, by most reports he has done a good job in his brief tenure as appointee. Though it should be noted that he was against health care reform until Romanoff announced he was going to run against him for not being progressive enough. Suddenly, to shore up his street cred with his party’s base, Bennet found religion as it were, and changed his mind to support health care reform.

Obama has been stumping for Bennet; meanwhile Bill Clinton just threw in for Romanoff. I think Obama has shown too much loyalty to finance guys, and it’s a strike against him. Obama is a good man, but maybe not a great man. And Clinton is trying to create a contrast between his side of the party and Obama’s, I think.

I say maybe because it’s good to reserve judgment in politics. Both Bennet and Romanoff would be good senators. I just watched a documentary about Jeff Smith in Missouri, whose style reminded me a bit of Romanoff’s, and it turns out he was a cheat in the election who let down all the people who believed in him. But still, I’m pretty sure Romanoff is in a different league from that.

On Thursday I was not in too bad shape despite the trifecta from day prior. Even so, it was a comparative rest day, with only Kenpo X to keep busy with. Also I walked three miles in the yard.

Today was stretch/rest day, but I decided a nice five mile run at the track would be fun, so I did that. Alas I don’t have time for stretch X today, but am planning to do it tomorrow along with Chest/Shoulders/Tri and then Back/Biceps, with two sessions of Ab Ripper.

I’m giving some thought to not getting up at 5:30 a.m. for the first time in a month. I have been sleeping nearly perfectly, so this might be risky, but I can go back to the 5:30 start the next day, at the cost of being groggy for a day or two when I can’t fall asleep until a couple hours later and thereby don’t get enough sleep.

The reason I’m interested in sleeping in is I still haven’t had a day where the 5:30 alarm didn’t wake me before I was ready. I don’t know what my natural sleep time is, still. I think it’s around 8 hours. Even though at my age, it should have dropped to around 7. When I go the eight hour route, I’m more likely to have nights where I wake up one or more times, but I tend to feel very well rested and better at my workouts. If I go the 7 to 7.5 hour route, I’m more likely to never wake up during the night, but I feel much stronger urges in the afternoon for naps.

Oh, allergy news. Evening August 5th is when my terrible annual allergy problem began. My eyes are OK so far, but the nose is starting to run. This will go on till mid or late September, getting much worse at times to a point where I will want to scratch my eyes out.

One reason I’ve been walking in the yard a lot is I’m hoping to build some kind of immunity to it, but I think that has about a 5% chance of working (even though rationally it seems very logical). I also learned a trick last year – at night I can be mostly allergy free if I close the windows and either wash Millie off or banish her from my room (which makes me sad).

They say we’re getting allergies to nature because of our sanitary upbringings. I was raised in Massachusetts and played outdoors a ton as a child, and was fine in Minnesota, too. But in upstate New York and Colorado I’ve had the same problem in August/September. Anyway, if I spend a ton of time outside in Colorado, I would think my body would adjust, but it seems not to work that way.

Today for the first time I did a p90x triple – Legs/Back, Back/Biceps, Chest/Shoulders/Tri. Ab Ripper X x 2 – couldn’t go x 3 on that yet. I also walked 20 laps in the yard with Millie (2 miles). I have been building up to this level, and thus far avoided injury.

They have found that exercise >= pharmaceutical antidepressants for your mood. So when I work out now, I try to think less about “getting through it” and more about “living in the now” as I do it, and appreciating the consequent mood boost. This has helped me to go from one hour workouts to three hour workouts.

The Onion points out that job interviews use silly, demeaning rules and tricks as a means to arbitrarily screen people out.

I have exciting new political thoughts to share, eventually, but for now, I have this: Ralph Nader is an amazing man who did many a nice thing for the U.S.A before fucking it up.

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans owe their lives or injury-free status to the work he did on forcing the auto industry to make safer cars. Thank you Ralph!

In the late seventies, the Democrats gave up trying to hold the country together. They stopped making economic issues a priority; they let the Republicans explode the wealth gap, and they even went along with it. In this environment, Ralph no longer had the clout he used to have through Public Citizen. It was very slighting to him, a man of great will, an “unreasonable man,” as a documentary about him is called.

Frustrated with his impotence, in the 90s and 00s, he began running for President as a third party candidate. As a result, in 2000, he was the proximate cause of Bush winning the election and the ensuing death of about 650,000 Iraqi people at the hands of Republican stupidity (unless you think ethnically cleansing Middle Easterners is good, which it might be if we’re really in a race for survival against them. But you put yourself in strange company if you do that).

So Nader’s work saving lives was later undone by taking Iraqi ones through his unreasonableness.

I’ve read many pithy defenses of why it’s OK for Ralph to run for president, and I half-heartedly agree. But I most-heartedly agree that the reality of our politics is it’s the Yankees vs. the Red Sox. You pick one team and fight for it, even if your team, the more deserving team, still leaves a lot to be desired. You don’t loosely ally yourself with one, then relentlessly undermine it with criticism and counter-productive electoral strategies the way Ralph did. To do that is so…liberal.