Water Bottles 6 - All Your Base Are Belong to Us Edition

o How are you, Spambot? All your base are belong to us. You have no chance to survive. Make your time. Ha ha ha. A recent bit of comment spam indicates I've gotten onto some spambot mailing list. In other words, somebody set up us the bomb. So I've enabled Turing Word check and comment moderation, to make sure the spambots can't get in and bother all us humanoids. But don't worry, I've opened up comments to everybody, not just blogger members, by way of compensation Y'know. For Great Justice.

o Hills. They are the place where hairy legged commuters wearing Team Discovery jerseys and Maillots Jaune go to die, usually right after they pass a fat dude on a fixed gear bike and give him the hairy eyeball. I’m not a very good climber, but if you’re going to pass me and glare like you just accomplished something, and you want to race the hill for pink slips, as I'm sitting there on a flat spinning out on a fixed gear... well, if you do this right before a long hill and throw down the challenge, you’d better make it stick, Fred. Otherwise that bumping noise from my tires... that's your ego I'm riding over. And I'm fat. It will hurt your ego to get run over by me and I will do it repeatedly because I need to practice my bike handling before cross season. I'm a lousy climber - so what does that make you, Fred? I'm not braggin' here, I'm just sayin'. Ps. I liked the involuntary snot thing, Fred. That's authentic suffering. I totally approve of that part of the routine. See you on the commute tomorrow. Tell Elvis I said hello when you see him again.

o It seems that cows have trouble scratching their backs. That's why powerlines running through fields are handy. The poles/towers give cows something to rub on, and to scratch their backs on. I noticed this while riding last weeked. Funny, the things you notice during a long zone 2 ride. Any of you ever notice random crap like that?

o Like snakes. I notice snakes all the time because my usual loops take me through three or four local swamps. A dead snake in the road is just as scary when you come up on it at 22 MPH, as a live snake. You can’t tell if it's alive or dead until you are right on top of it. On the plus side, as long as you aren't trudging uphill, you are probably going fast enough so that the snake can't bite you. On the downside, with your heart beating at 165 BPM, that poison will be in your bloodstream in no time, and you'll have trouble getting help because everybody will think your blood poisoned rambling about "snakebite" had to do with you being upset about a flat tire or something earlier in the ride.

o “I keep a bottle of whiskey handy, just in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.”
- W.C. Fields.

o There are jerks in sports other than cycling. Sometimes, even the fans are jerks. One of today’s lead NFL stories is that the Cincinatti Bengals have started operating a hotline for fans, so that anybody in the stands can drop a dime on another fan who is being a jerk. But what in the hell does "being a jerk" mean in the context of NFL stadium bleachers? “He’s rooting for the Jets, the jerk… I think I’ll call the warden.” "His face is painted, and you know what that means... yeah, that's right. A Jerk." “He booed the home team… time to jack him up, the jerk.” This can’t end well. Besides, given what the Bengals have been up to, with five players arrested in two months, one player arrested four times since New Years, shouldn’t the Bengals have a hotline for fans to report jerk players instead? I’d pay the $4.95 a minute to make that call.

Thus endeth this Special Edition of Water Bottles. All your base are belong to us.