Teased on the Matrix Revisited DVD, the Animatrix project is coming out on DVD next year. Seven anime stories based on the universe of The Matrix. The Wachowski brothers must be making a mint. I wonder how much it costs to license the rights to adapt a story from the Matrix mythology.
How many traffic signals in Manhattan?
The movie leads with a quote: "There are three sides to each story. My side, your side and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each one differently."
And so Robert Evans gives advance notice that he'll be narrating his side of the story, and that's fine. He knows it will be biased, but honestly so. Frankly, it's loads more entertaining because it is his point of view. Who doesn't want to hear directly from a guy who produced The Godfather, Marathon Man, Love Story, and Rosemary's Baby; married Ali Macgraw, then lost her to Steve McQueen; got caught in a cocaine sting by the DEA; was a suspect in the murder of an associate; committed himself to a mental hospital for fear he'd kill himself; and all the while, bedded most every gorgeous model and actress in Hollywood?
At the same time, I read an article in The New Yorker about traffic, and how it's getting steadily worse all across the country. So I think, perhaps I'll take public transportation.
But yesterday, some kid hijacked a bus in Seattle, drove it at insane speeds down a local city street, demolishing a few cars, sending a few people to the hospital, finally crashing on a sidewalk just down the street from my house. Ironically, without knowing what had happened, I was hitching a ride back home from Amy and we were discussing a bus accident in Seattle many years earlier. Then, the bus in question was the one I usually took home. Some guy shot the driver, shot himself, and the bus ran across a few lanes on the Aurora bridge, smashed through the side rail, and plummeted head first down through a few floors of an apartment down below.
So maybe I'll bike? No, the office won't let me bring my bike up to my office. I've had three bikes stolen in my life, I'm not going through that heartache again. All offices should allow employees to bring bikes up to their office. Ours allows dogs but not bikes. Hmm.
Anyway, next to the table of contents, in the left-hand gutter, is always a vertical pillar of adspace. Usually, it's for a book. Today's featured book? You Are Not a Stranger Here. The first rave review excerpt reads:
"A genuinely heartbreaking work of staggering genius."
Obviously an appeal to the hundreds of thousands of readers of Dave Eggers book of that title.
The next review? By Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections:
"A wonderful rarity: an old-fashioned young storyteller with something urgent and fresh and fiercely intelligent to say."
An appeal to the millions of readers of Franzen's novel.
Intrigued, I visited Amazon to check out the book. Only then did I find out, after reading a few customer reviews, that it was a collection of short stories, not a novel. Not just that, it was the #9 best seller in the bookstore.
Had to be the New Yorker ad. I've never even heard of that book. Makes me thing that was a darn good ad, and that the table of contents page in The New Yorker is one damn valuable piece of real estate. It's pretty hard to navigate the New Yorker without checking out the table of contents, one of the best in any magazine. Because people use it, and because it's very spare (author, page, title, subtitle, and a one-line fragment about the subject of the article), the ad space next to it jumps out at thousands of readers every Thursday.
If I ever publish a book, I'll know I've made it if my publisher buys that ad space.
A collection of short stories in the top 10! That never happens.
iPod: beautifully functional; great asset for creative professionals, because the proper soundtrack for life is always at hand; not good for jogging or working out, because it's a hard drive, and those are inherently delicate.
Sharon's having a boy! Alan saw his "boy part" on the ultrasound.
Oh well, thank goodness for football. I just participated in my first ever rotisserie football draft, so I'm all ready for Sunday pigskin action.
Roadsters scream mid-life crisis, or pampered wife. They're glorified go-carts.
File 101 in "Studies that confirm the obvious". Scientists have found that beer goggles do exist, increasing attractiveness of the opposite sex by 25%.
Off to the San Juans for a weekend of R&R at Juli's family condos. Honey!
Toni's tying the knot tonight, and I've volunteered to be wedding photographer. Hmm, this should be interesting. Kinda wish I had the Nikon 85mm AF portrait lens, but gadget lust is a never-ending hunger. At some point, there's just the craft. I've been perusing the Joe Buissink site for inspiration.
At long last, Disney is bringing out the American release of Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away. Disney and Miyazaki is a good pairing; he is Japan's premier animator and purveyor of wonder. The Quicktime trailer is gorgeous.
I have it on DVD, but I've been waiting until my receiver returns to watch it. Can't can't can't can't wait.
Another can't miss event for film buffs everywhere: the digitally restored Metropolis (Quicktime trailer). I really hope it comes to Seattle. It inspired a Japanese animated film which fell far short of the original. Fritz Lang was a mad genius.
Moving on, we have the last in Godfrey Reggio's great "Qatsi" trilogy, Naqoyqatsi, with another sure-to-be-wonderful score by Philip Glass, arrives October 18. Naqoyqatsi is "life at war," while his previous two, which arrive on DVD in mid September, were life out of balance (Koyaanisqatsi) and life in transformation (Powaqqatsi).
How about a film from Werner Herzog, with a score by Hans Zimmer? That is the promising creative force behind Invincible. Also stars the always sharp Tim Roth. I didn't even realize Herzog was still making movies. Amazing. His Nosferatu and Aguirre: The Wrath of God are movie hall-of-famers.
Of course there's Punch-Drunk Love, Heaven by Tom Tykwer and starring Cate Blanchett (first of the Heaven, Hell, Purgatory trilogy originally planned by Krzysztof Kielowski, Bubba Ho-Tep (Bruce Campbell plays an aging Elvis who battles mummies!!!) and way off in the distance, The Two Towers, which I'm just about to finish reading again, and Gangs of New York. It's not a historic lineup, but it contains enough nuggets to keep it from being a dismal second half.
New trailer for X-Men 2 (X2). They had the good taste to use music from Holst's The Planets (name that planet smart readers).
None of the singers are amazing, but the weekly drama to see who the fickle public eliminates is intriguing. At this point, my money's on Kelly. Justin is a ham whose voice is thin, and Nikki's just not a very good singer, and I'm not sure what kind of look she's going for, but it's not good. How she survives every week is the great mystery of the summer.
Tuesdays and Thursdays are always a mad dash home from work to salvage enough daylight from the remains of the day to complete my bike training rides. Today it was a frantic rush around the south end of Lake Washington. I got home and it was pitch black out so I finished my training ride on the indoor trainer. It doesn't get light in the morning until past 6am now, so morning rides of any length are out when early meetings are on the docket. Did the summer ever start here in Seattle? I must have been napping.
My allergies are going crazy as well. As I've gotten older, the frailties pile on. Arthritis in the knee, grey hairs, allergies. I was never allergic to anything as a kid. I like to think that the counterbalance is a monumental surge in intelligence and worldly charm.
Menthos!
This morning, when my alarm went off, I couldn't move. Physically, and not because I was tired, but because of pains from a Saturday afternoon full of broomball at the Amazon company picnic. My brain sent the order to my left arm to rise up and turn the alarm off, but my arm was locked up at the shoulder joint. So I laid there and listened to the talk show hosts of some radio station (for all the years I've been in Seattle, my alarm clock has been set to the same radio station, but I have no idea which station it is). For some reason, these radio talk show hosts were discussing the impending baseball strike. After listening for a short while, it was clear they knew nothing about baseball or the strike, and they chewed out some poor caller who tried to argue against them. I'm not sure why people bother calling in to radio talk show hosts. Most of these morning hosts are ignoramuses who simply know to package vapid arguments in rabble-rousing rhetoric.
What is true about the baseball strike: You don't have to sympathize with baseball players or owners. I've never really sympathized with baseball owners. Most are greedy businessmen with no knowledge of baseball. And while I love watching some of these baseball players play, I can't say I sympathize with them (I definitely can't empathize with them). In this economy, with plenty of people just looking to get work, if a professional player has his salary capped it's no great tragedy. Yes, it's true, the median salary in baseball is much lower than the average salary, which everyone seems to quote liberally (the average salary is elevated by a small number of huge contracts; most pro players actually make about $400K per year, which is far far from poverty but a far cry from the $2M average salary so popular in the press). Still, for those who make the pros, it's a charmed life by any reasonable standard. I don't know too many people who are concerned about the plight of players and owners, and that's completely understandable.
However, lots of points being bandied about are ridiculous. First of all, baseball players are not expendable, as the radio hosts insisted. Baseball as an entertainment may be expendable, but today's MLB players are, for the most part, not. There is only one Alex Rodriguez, and there's no one in the minor leagues who can replace him. There are 750 players in the major leagues today, and you won't find 750 players with the same skills anywhere in the world. Sure, you could get a bunch of semi-pros or minor leaguers to cross the lines and replace them, but let's be real. No one would fill pro stadiums to watch them.
Secondly, salary caps are not inherently good. They do not, by necessity, increase competitiveness. Basketball has a salary cap, and that sport has more back to back champions in the past several decades than any other sport. Football has a salary cap, but the competitiveness there results more from the number of players required to field a competitive team (and the high number of injuries in that sport to key positions) than to the salary cap. A sensible revenue sharing plan, like the one Derek Zumsteg of Baseball Prospectus suggests, is a far superior solution to guarantee competitive baseball. Frankly, even without a salary cap, it's no given that the team with the highest payroll this year, the Yankees, will win the World Series. In fact, in many ways, the Oakland A's, with a payroll a third of the Yankees, are a better team (their rotation of Zito, Mulder, and Hudson is certainly stronger this year than the Yankees front line of an aging Clemens, a tired Mussina, an old and overweight Wells, a rehabbing Pettite, and an inconsistent El Duque). Most of the lack of competitiveness in baseball is the result of lousy personnel management.
And frankly, on principle, a salary cap is counter to the American way. I wouldn't want my salary capped except by the amount of economic benefit I could bring to my employer, and the same should go for baseball players. The fact is, millions of people every year pay lots of money to go watch baseball, and that wouldn't happen if those 700 players didn't come out and play. So economically, they've earned that money. The salaries that are offensive are the fat contracts teams pay for players who are clearly not worth it on the field, like the huge contracts given to Greg Vaughn, or Mo Vaughn, or Bobby Higginson, or Mike Hampton. Of course, the easy conclusion to draw is that if you don't like MLB player salaries, don't go to the games! Don't buy jerseys and caps, don't watch baseball on TV, and the owners really won't be able to afford to pay the salaries that they do. They won't be able to charge the prices they do for season tickets and individual seats.
So feel free to complain about player salaries, and the looming strike. I agree, the owners and players should be able to compromise on the luxury tax and avoid a strike, or I will give up on baseball for a long time. Cold turkey. But don't argue for salary caps or that the pro players do not possess unique skills which keep the fans rolling through the turnstiles unless you're willing to admit that a great portion of your antipathy is rooted in jealousy.
Do I feel sorry for myself? I do not.
End of an era. My faithful Pioneer 1009W has moved next door with Scott, and a new Pioneer 720HD has moved in to serve as my faithful entertainment companion. Man, I loved that 1009W. After it was calibrated, it just put out an awesome movie picture. The 720HD has a ways to go to achieve that. It needs breaking in and lots of calibration. But it can handle progressive scan and high-def signals, and it was high time for me to join that world. Now I just need my receiver back and I'll be ready to begin hosting movie nights all over again.
The trailer(s) are out. Click on Punch, Drunk, and Love to see each of the three. Can't wait for this movie!
Music (RealAudio) to surf by.
Just rode for the first time with John and Jim from work. Damn they're fast! I could barely catch my breath the whole way around Mercer.
It was funny, some big huge 240 pound 6' 4" dude with oak tree trunks for legs pushing some monstrous gear passed us, and Jim jumped out and chased him down and passed him. When Jim rode by, that guy did a double take and started riding like a madman, and then John jumped out to catch him, and they were all furiously pushing the gears up this hill, and I was 20 meters back about to have a heart attack.
The good thing is, I got my spring out of the way for the week. Everytime I ride Mercer at 6am, some riders fly by me. You want a fast ride, the Mercer morning circuit is it. No casual riders get up at that god awful hour to suffer on a bike. There's not a whole lot of conversation, either, especially since you don't have any air in your lungs to spare. All you hear in the shadows of the morning dusk is the click-click-click of the shifting gears and the muted mechanical clatter of chain on cassette.
My goal is to get my speed up so that I can chase all those huge dudes down in the morning.
Ah, to be 23 again.
But not 24, that was a lousy year for me.
The results are in. Sight and Sound polls critics and movie directors themselves, so these are the "experts" picks, for whatever that's worth.
Across the director and critics lists, the films I haven't seen are all the ones not yet on DVD: La Regle du Jeu (Renoir), Tokyo Story (Ozu), Sunrise (Murnau). In particular, I really want to see Sunrise, a silent film, but it's only available on VHS. I think there's a laserdisc version, and I may have to track that down once my receiver is back from the shop.
Lists like these will always invite a lot of debate, but for those who haven't seen these films, you can't really go wrong with any of them.
Sidenote: Safe to say Transporter won't be making any future Sight and Sound lists. Trailer looks fun, though. One of the unfortunate byproducts of China's takeover of Hong Kong was the outflow of all the talent from the HK movie industry. Fortunately, perhaps because of this outflow, we're seeing that HK influence in cinema of other countries, especially the US. When that influence is perverted, you get crap like Romeo Must Die. The Transporter, directed by HK vet Cory Yuen, looks like a lighthearted, mindless romp that doesn't take itself all that seriously.
Today marks my five year mark at Amazon.com. I've never done anything for that long in my entire life, other than grade school. Unbelievable, especially if you'd asked me if I'd still be there when I joined in 1997. Amazon will always be indelibly twined in my memory with my late twenties.
To commemorate the occasion, the creators of Sex in the City were kind enough to insert Amazon.com in tonight's episode. Charlotte is too embarrassed to purchase a self-help book in a bookstore so she heads home and orders it online from Amazon, only to have Amazon recommend a whole series of other embarrassing self-help titles.
Monheit's a towering presence, both literally and musically. She's extremely tall, at least six feet tall in heels. Her voice is amazing live: full, rich, and commanding. The digital sampling of a CD sucks the life out of it. She has the voice of a veteran diva but the stage presence of, well, a happy go-lucky 23 year old girl. She giggles a lot between sets and is clearly one of those girls who loved performing as a child in talent shows or family gatherings. She's completely at ease in front of a large crowd and didn't seem nervous in the least. She just went for it on every song, accompanied by a three piece band (sax, drums, bass) and blew us all away.
In contrast, Norah Jones is extremely shy on stage. I saw her Friday at the Moore theater, where she performed all the songs from her CD and a few others, including one by AC/DC! Norah's sweet and smoky voice belies her shy personality. She smiled and nodded her head in mock celebration once when some guy shouted, "I love you Norah!" Cute. But otherwise, she just introduced each song and got to work, alternating between a grand piano and an electric keyboard.
Fabulous voice, and snazzy jazzy pacing on her piano playing. I'd like to see her again in a few years, after she's gained more confidence on stage and feels more comfortable interacting with the audience. Once she realizes how talented she is and lets loose a bit, she'll be even more popular a performer than she is now, which is saying a lot considering her show in Seattle sold out on the first day, and considering she's on pace to sell a million copies of her debut album.
Inspiring stuff.
A while back, at the office, some coworkers happily circulated the following humorous customer review for an actual product from our toy store. You can find it by going to this product page and sorting the customer reviews by "Most Helpful". It should be the first customer review.
U. Milton's Ant Farm a fun way to learn about Toil & Death, July 25, 2000
Reviewer: A toy enthusiast from Sandy Springs, GA USA
Uncle Milton's Giant Ant Farm is a fun, interactive way to teach children ages 5 and up about unceasing, backbreaking toil and the cold, inescapable reality of death. My little ones had a front-row seat as worker ants labored, day in and day out, until they inevitably died of exhaustion, their futile efforts all for naught. The ant farm, complete with stackable tiny ant barns, see-through 'Antway' travel tubes, and connecting 'Antports,' is a child's window into the years of thankless, grueling labor that await them as worker drones in our post-industrial society. It's the fun way to teach your kids to accept their miserable fate stoically. The ants, which come separately from the farm, are bred in New Mexico and mailed directly to your home. Within days of arriving, a majority of the ants die at the hands of the small children responsible for regulating the temperature, humidity, and food supply in their delicate pseudo-ecosystem. Even under optimum conditions the ants survive no more than 20 weeks in the farm. As a result, children are assured the chance to contemplate the inescapability of their own mortality and the whole family will be reminded that the spectre of death hangs over every creature on this Earth. The lesson that the ants' labor is all in vain becomes clearer as time passes. During the first two to three weeks, the exclusively female worker ants are extremely productive, building an elaborate system of tunnels and hills amongst the miniature green trees and red plastic houses dotting the interior of the plastic dome. However, because neither male ants nor a fertile queen is provided with Uncle Milton's Giant Ant Farm, making reproduction impossible, the farm is doomed to extinction from day one. You'll learn such fascinating things about the natural world, like the fact that the social structure of an ant colony is extremely complex, with individual members occupying such castes as soldier, messenger, and larvae attendant. At some point, Uncle Milton's ants become cognizant that their hierarchical structure has been stripped away, rendering their already near-meaningless existence totally futile. There seems to be a breaking point at about the 22-day mark when the dejected ants begin to die off en masse. At this point the ant farm enters what is known as the "death-pile phase." A spot is chosen by the worker ants to deposit their dead, and the burial mound steadily grows as the few remaining ants devote more of their time to gathering and burying others. Yes, with Uncle Milton's Giant Ant Farm, arbeit macht fun!Look at the date on that review. Now go read this Onion article and look at the date on it.
The Amazon customer review is obviously plagiarized. I realized this one day while flipping through my hard copy compilation of The Onion. I forgot about it until I was cleaning out my e-mail inbox today and found the review, forwarded from someone at the office.
How pathetic. I think you all should go and vote the review unhelpful. I did. It's like people who hear a great joke and can't wait to rush off and tell ten other people the same joke and pass it off as a creation of their own witty personality.
The second series of films on BMWFilms.com will feature directors John Woo, Tony Scott (Top Gun) and Joe Carnahan (the upcoming Walk Among the Tombstones with Harrison Ford).
Gladwell wrote an interesting review in this week's New Yorker of a book about the deadly Chicago heat wave of 1995. Anyone from Chicago knows the summers are hot and humid, but that summer, a confluence of rare conditions caused 739 deaths in the span of a week.
One of the points he makes is that politicians and social structures shouldn't be judged on how they perform under normal conditions, but how they perform under peak conditions. Chicago's systems failed when the heat wave hit its peak. Local power company transformers burned out, leaving tens of thousands without air conditioning. City hospitals failed to call upon help from the suburbs quickly enough, leaving a shortage of ambulances throughout the downtown area. Some hospitals closed their emergency rooms because of overflow. Under peak conditions, Chicago's infrastructure failed the elderly of the city, and more died in that week than died in the TWA Flight 800 crash or the Oklahoma City bombing, though you don't hear nearly as much about the Chicago incident.
What interests me is the idea of judging people under peak conditions. For example, your friends might be happy to help you out from time to time, but then you become an alcoholic, and they head for the woods. Your spouse vows to be by your side through thick and thin, but as soon as you lose your job, you're on your own. You're reasonably happy with some people on your team, then a big crunch hits and you need them to work overtime on a weekend to nail a deadline, and they grumble or beg out. Chris Webber is acknowledged to be an immensely talented power forward, but come the end of playoff games, he's at the top of the key, back to the basket, waiting to hand the ball off to someone else to take the shot.
There's something to be said for judging all people that way, including ourselves.
By the way, DVD lovers need to crack open the piggy bank (not the small one, the big one). Band of Brothers, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Extended Edition), The Simpsons Second Season Box Set, Grease...that's not even mentioning some other DVDs which reasonable people might consider must own, like Spiderman, Monsters Inc., Amelie. There are people who don't own a single DVD, don't own a DVD player, never watch movies more than once. I've long since stopped trying to understand them or judge them. The gulf is there, and we stand on opposite sides.
After all, it's so easy to judge.
Hollywood's new infatuation: pitting two popular villains or heroes against each other. Among Hollywood's upcoming projects:
Alien vs. Predator
Batman vs. Superman
Freddy vs. Jason
Michael Buffer must be wetting his pants (BTW, if you want to be jealous and spiteful towards anyone, is any target more deserving than Buffer? Has anyone in the history of man accomplished more with less? At least Anna Nicole Smith had to shack up with some 90 year old grandpa to earn her millions and her TV show).
What's sad about this all is that since the foes are of such high profile, you know that neither side will really triumph. No one's going to die off here. It's not as if the creative brians favor one side or the other, and it's especially true if the rivals are represented by different studios. When the Japanese made a film of the Godzilla versus King Kong, the two fought to something of a draw. There's an American cut in which King Kong comes off as the victor after tossing Godzilla around by his tail like a limp noodle, but the Japanese cut tips the scales in favor of Godzilla a bit more.
In any case, it's possible to make an interesting film in which two protagonists battle to a draw, but in these cases it's unlikely. At any rate, give me Tom Wolfe versus John Updike, or Tom Wolfe versus John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving. Or Kasparov vs. Karpov. Ali vs. Frazier. Any battle involving two arrogant egos the size of Manhattan. Competition is spicy, and life is otherwise bland.
Nope, not a post about Austin Powers: Goldmember (saw it Saturday--after the fun fun opening sequence, I was surprised to discover I was bored when all the familiar characters showed up again, doing their thang...could it be, Austin is old news?).
At Eric's birthday BBQ and bocce affair, heard clips from the new Shirley Bassey Remix Album, Diamonds Are Forever. Hot stuff. The Propellerheads, John Barry, and Groove Armada? I'm in!
On a tangent, the best track to listen to while driving really fast? The Chemical Brothers Out of Control, featuring vocals by New Order's Bernard Sumner. The bassline is evil, it always inspires me to downshift and blow by the next ten cars on the highway.
WKW directed the video for DJ Shadow's 6 Days. The video stars Chang Chen from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (he played Zhang Ziyi's lover, lucky SOB) and features Christopher Doyle's trademark velvet crush cinematography. It's not as visible streamed over the Internet, but check it out for yourself. It's at DJ Shadow's website--I found the link buried in current news.
WKW, like Soderbergh, doesn't really storyboard. Just figures it out as he goes. Shows up, then decides how he wants to shoot different scenes. That takes a lot of guts in one's abilities, especially when shooting scenes out of sequence, as Soderbergh did while filming Ocean's Eleven.
Also, welcome back Kate. Just in time, a cycling buddy out of the blue.
Many of you will skip this baseball post, but I'm hopping mad. Being a Cubs fan provides a lifetime's worth of, as Tony Soprano would say, agita. If I ever become wealthy enough to purchase a sports team, I'm buying the Cubs and taking them to the World Series. I could be mayor of Chicago at that point.
The American adaptation of the Japanese horror classic--Quicktime trailer in high res. I have a hard time believing this adaption will match the original in creepiness, but it does star the talented Naomi Watts. If it's successful, prepare for a wave of adaptations because there's an entire library of good, low-budget Japanese horror films for Hollywood to mine (and ruin).
I'm not sure what burns me more, not getting my chips or the thought of someone else getting two bags of chips. I want a tax deduction.
9 minute later, the alarm is back on. Some ensemble morning talk show hosts babbling on with energy and enthusiasm that is superhuman considering the time of day. Inevitably, once a week, the host has to chew out a caller who's dying to hear himself live, "Please turn off the radio, Bob." Where was I? Oh yeah. 9 minutes. Why are all alarm clock snoozes set at 9 minutes? Someone has to tell me. Is there some scientific axiom that 9 minutes is just enough time for you to pass out again, but not deeply enough to achieve REM sleep? Maybe one company in the world has a monopoly on making the snooze chip for alarm clocks globally, and they're too stingy to change their production process to accomodate alternate snooze intervals.
I should have tried it with the hotel alarm clocks in France. They still measure time in minutes, but maybe the metric system means you have to multiply the 9 minutes by 1.67 or something like that so their snoozes are 15 minutes. Actually, they probably have 30 minute snooze increments considering dinner out in Europe lasts about 4 hours. How can you have faith in the European economy if they don't understand that the more people you cycle through a restaurant, the more money you make?
The damn Air France air baggage handlers were on strike in Paris when I flew over for my Tour de France camp, so my bags were stranded there for days as I flew on to Marseilles. Then on the way home, the KLM pilots were on strike so I was stranded a day in Amsterdam. They have laws limiting work weeks to 35 hours in France, and they still strike. And they complain about Lance Armstrong, an American, winning their race year after year. They should stop striking and get to work.
Did you play butts up in elementary school? There are few times in a person's life more terrifying than trying to survive playground games in elementary school. The Japanese film Battle Royale had it right. The corporate world is nowhere near as ruthless as lunch hour dodge ball, smeer the queer, or butts up.
Most people don't live near long extended hills with long, straight stretches that allow you to pick up crazy speed on a bike. On the Tour de France, riders hit speeds just over 70 miles per hour in the descents. That must be close to terminal velocity because they're not touching the brakes much. In the Alps, I hit speeds of around 52mph and feared for my life. If you spill, or hit a pothole, or get the wobbles, you either hurtle across the coarse pavement at 50 miles per hour, which is like whipping skin across a cheese grater, or you fly over the edge of the cliff and drop a couple thousand feet.
On the descent from Mont Ventoux, as I hit 48 miles per hour, I came around a turn and saw a cluster of people and cars by the side of the road. One cyclist had lost control and crashed. His bike was a mangled skeleton of aluminum, and he was unconscious. Blood was dripping down his forehead and caked on his face, and one of his legs was coated in blood and gravel. A man cradled his head.
I saw this, but when I rode on, I rode just as fast as before, if not faster. Cyclists who spend hours suffering a climb up a mountain don't want to be deprived of the visceral thrill of the downs. The pounding of a nervous heart adds to the physical excitement. At a certain speed, I won't even shift my hands to the brakes because the slightest movement might tip my bike off balance. Just hang on for dear life and hope the bike frame holds together.
On Death Ride this year, Tim saw a cyclist who had crashed on a descent, but in this case the rider died. It was the first death in the history of Death Ride, and perhaps that's the reason their website is currently deactivated.