Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light...

Okay, I'm not raging against the dying of the light. I'm raging at not having ridden for two days in a row, for work having overtaken my plans to get to Super Secret Svenny Night Cross Practice, and for having blown out my eating plan over the last 36 hours like the Germans blew out the French.

I got out of work about 45 minutes late, and that is the key 45 minutes. Make it out by 4:00 (after a 10-11 hour day) and it's up to the near-Baltimore environs of the Secret Practice Grounds by 5:00, 45 minutes early. Make it out by 4:30, and there's no way to make it by 7:15. So I'm sitting in traffic in College Park trying to get to Cherry Hill Road, screaming profanities at every little indignity in traffic. It took two hours to get home thanks to my failed attempt to get to cross practice. It was getting dark when I got home. I was seething. Still am.

I am *so* over working in D.C.

In truth the extra rest day was just what my legs needed, being probably around -40 CTL after Monday's little Patapsco excursion. But I still needed an effing ride just for stress relief and to keep from hitting the fridge as if it had insulted my mother.

There was some pretty major extreme work stress involved. I had to go to a meeting at which, through no fault of my own, some professional relationship bridges were probably burnt. I wanted to vomit, which is not the ideal way to spend 120 minutes of your afternoon. Nothing I could do about it though. That fact didn't make me want to vomit less, however.

Today just sucked, and not being able to ride made it suck even worse. I've said before that riding & racing is my stress relief valve; that is never more clear than on a day like today where stress was as near maximum levels and no ride was available.

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In the good news, Dave provided me with a bit of laughter tonight. Turns out he went to Hains to do intervals, and a bee stung him right in the nipple or thereabouts.

And in other laughable news, I got around to watching the finale of Whale Wars. Turns out they launched one of their guys, the sociopathic Pete Bethune, onto one of the whaling ships, the crew of which promptly locked him in a cabin and hauled him to Japan for trial. He spent some months in a Japanese prison, and was eventually given a suspended sentence. The most amazing thing was that the head of Sea Shepherds stated that they publicly expelled Bethune, to allow the Japanese judges to save face and give Bethune a light sentence. Bethune for his part says that hearing he had been expelled from Sea Shepherd was the lowest experience of his life, as it came whilst he was sitting in a supermax between Yakuza thugs, rapists and murderers.

I don't buy the saving face argument; it seems pretty clear to me that Sea Shepherd cut him loose to avoid compromising the Sea Shepherd organization. After watching their amateurish shenanigans during the 2010 whaling season - including compromising their tactical method for boarding boats by videotaping it and letting it be broadcast - this one capped it. The lack of military or even maritime discipline in their operations has always galled me; I have found their undisciplined ship handling and shipboard behavior (down to a near-mutiny this year) disgusting and foolhardy. What captain so cedes control of the ship so as to let his undisciplined crew endanger themselves like this? But this little stab in the back capped it for me. I don't often use the term but Paul Watson came across as the lowest form of life in this last episode, as a buddy fucker. Even if it means somebody takes a hit, you don't sell a buddy out like that. It was disgusting.

It was also interesting that the Japanese protesting the Sea Shepherd activities called them racists. I think that this is a reference to the fact that certain predominantly white countries allow whaling (Norway, USA) by indigenous peoples and by some non-indigenous people, yet here it is Japan getting picked upon. The possibility that the fundraising and media efforts are focused on exploiting dislike of an ethnic Asian group the U.S. has had a history of demonizing (sometimes justified, generally not) has bothered me all along. The Japanese have been pretty sketchy in justifying their whaling, citing "research" purposes, and they do indeed survey the catch but then they sell it and serve it to school children in keeping with Japanese tradition. It is an indigenous activity with them as well, no less than the Inuits. So why pick on the Japanese and not the Inuit or whichever Norwegians catch a quota? Like Watson's justification for cutting Bethune loose, something smells a little fishy about the tactical choice to go after the Japanese.

And I still don't know why they think sending some hirsute swampies in broken down boats is going to do the trick. In the real world, actual war doesn't work so hot but if you really want to declare war on somebody, you send a battalion of lawyers after them, and that usually smothers whoever you are targeting pretty darn well. Damn these Sea Shepherd people. They are so half-assed irresponsible and unsympathetic, that they're driving me to cheer for a bunch of bastard illegal whalers. Jerks.

Oh well. That series ended just in time. The NFL is starting up and I can now transfer my hippie loathing straight to the Cowboys and Iggles. I guess in that respect Whale Wars is good training for me, and now I'll hate those two football teams with a loathing previously reserved for the dippy whale worshippers.