Saturday,
July 5, 2008
TOUR DE FRANCE BEGINS

The roads are alive

With the sound of sweating, cursing pro bikers fighting it out on the roads of France during the premier event of pro cycling, the Tour de France. I know it seems strange that a round redhead from Chicago is so enamored of this race, but I blame it all on being housebound in Holland and getting hooked on Sky Cable's real-time coverage of the Tour back in 1997. it doesn't hurt that cycling is a major sport in Texas -- you can hardly go out to Kroger without seeing someone in a CSC jersey pedaling along the suburban streets.

I can't quite slide my generous curves into a maillot, but I did indeed purchase an official Tour de France t-shirt direct from France -- the FedEx shipping cost more than the actual t-shirt, but I'll be wearing the yellow while watching the race.

And as per my tradition, I'm working on a baby quilt for my friend Erin, who is due to pop sometime in six weeks or so. Because I'm a sucker for pain, I'm exploring the brave new world of curved edges with a one-patch quilt called the Spinning Star (shown at left) as featured in the June/July issue of Quilt, which has the additional benefit of winnowing through my collection of batiks.

The result will be utterly gorgeous, I feel sure of this. The learning curve (ha -- I kill myself) is gonna be a bitch. And I just realized that this patch is très approprié for a quilt made during the Tour. Ha!

Critiquing commercials

When you watch the Tour, you get to see a certain brace of commericals over and over and over again. I am now saturated with the goodness of Bacardi mojitos, why Time Warner Cable has simple bills, and how shallow as a mud puddle Beautiful People(TM) like to drink Bud Ultra because it's low on carbs (I suspect it also tastes like diabetic cat piss, but that's just me).

However, being exposed to these commercials over and over and over again has resulted in me ignoring the surface gloss and looking at the oddities, as follows:

• Bacardi mojitos -- who knew that a bartender with chin scruff and a big ol' muddler pounding fresh mint leaves and lime slices in the bottom of a glass could get people twisting their booties all across the land? Now if he could only get the blonde in the white miniskirt shaking her moneymaker on top of a large rock to use some frigging isolation of her upper body, I would be happy -- this lovely honey has no real idea of how to shimmy, and seems to think that bouncing up and down and throwing one hip forward like she's trying to hip-check an opposing hockey player is sufficient. Um, to this bellydancer the answer is a great big "no."
  
  
• Farmer's Identity Shield -- is that Bret McKenzie from Flight of the Conchords trying to get his "Hi, my name is William" name tag back?
  
  
• Time Warner Cable -- Martin, the braniac kid next door, did the adult actor's taxes but doesn't know how to parse a phone company's bill. Of course, the kid is using his telescope sans sun filter in the middle of the day, which leads me to wonder just how smart he truly is.
  
  
• ExtenZe -- to enlarge "that special part of the male body." Need I say more?

<< Back  |  Email  |  Home  |  About  |  Forward >>