I'm a lasagna boy!

Regular is as regular does

I spent a lot of time during high school at the formica tables and long counter of a certain Dunkin Donuts . One of the more fascinating minutiae of the operation was the mechanism used to make regular coffee: somehow, in the few seconds between dispensing the drip coffee into a styrofoam cup (or massive plastic mug) and passing it across the counter to me, the person working the counter would swing it under a cream dispenser and a sugar-adder.

For me, regular coffee means different things. If I'm in the 212, it's a Greek paper cup with the legend "We Are Happy to Serve You", two sugars and a half-inch of cream. Invert once or twice, with finger covering the steam vent, and it's delicious. In the 415, regular is a small mug of espresso with a little hot water on top.

The donut shop itself was a treat: open 24 hours, far enough away from home that I needed to drive (and once locked myself out of the car while parked there, middle of the night, my parents out of town). The clientele were esoteric in an urban way, despite the suburban location: Manny, the card-trickster and math genius (who later showed up at the late lamented Greenhouse in Shadyside); Bob, the sometime employee and occasional lunatic; others may come to mind, eventually ...

Halfway house to hell

As I was walking between Anna's apartment and mine, two blocks along Haight St., I passed a 40-ish man wearing a fleece jacket. He looked around nervously and then walked up to a woman looking in the window of Doe. He said, "This place is like a halfway house. Come on, I don't want you walking here alone."

yo fixie!

Lance is going at the Hour.

January 24, 2005

So Many Miles to Cover and So Little Time to Do It
By JOHN MARKOFF

SOLVANG, Calif., Jan. 20 - On a sunny Southern California afternoon, a crowd gathered in a hotel parking lot here to watch Lance Armstrong and his team complete its daily six-hour training ride.

Though it appears to be a solo effort, bicycle racing is clearly a team sport. In Armstrong's case that team effort extends to an informal group known as F-One, an array of sports physiologists, computer engineers, aerodynamicists, as well as bicycle, helmet and clothing designers, which met for the first time this year on Thursday.

Indisputably the world's best cyclist, Armstrong, the six-time winner of the Tour de France, has been hinting broadly that he might take a year hiatus from the event he has dominated since 1999. He has also speculated that his next goal may be a sporting challenge virtually unknown in the United States until now.

For the rest of the world, however, the Hour Record, as it is known, holds as much magnetism as ascending Mount Everest. The object is for a solo rider to ride as far as possible in 60 minutes on a banked velodrome.

The record was first set in 1893 by the Tour de France founder, Henri Desgrange, with a mark of 21.95 miles. Since then, many of the world's cycling greats have taken turns assaulting the standard. Chris Boardman of Britain, a time-trial specialist, most recently set a mark of 30.721 miles in Manchester, England, in May 2000.

The event is attractive to Mr. Armstrong because it plays to many of his strengths: he is domineering in time trials, a category he has defined by his ability to produce extraordinary amounts of pedaling power over long periods.

"I think it would be an amazing spectacle," said Morris Denton, an executive for Advanced Micro Devices, one of Mr. Armstrong's sponsors. "If you look at the crowds Lance draws in the United States and you think about what would happen if you put some kind of marketing effort behind this event, it would be immense."

Mr. Armstrong has said he will not announce his intentions until April at the earliest. However, the plotting began here last week in a windowless hotel conference room for an attack on the Hour Record.

Johan Bruyneel, who is the coach of Mr. Armstrong's team, and Bart Knaggs, the president of his sports management company, Capital Sports and Entertainment of Austin, Tex., assembled the group to begin discussing the complex strategy and design issues that need to be solved.

Mr. Knaggs made clear to the group in his opening comments that no decision had yet been reached on which races Mr. Armstrong would attempt this year.

"Right now it's an idea," he said. "It's a four-minute-mile kind of thing, but we don't have it on the calendar yet."

The colorful history of the event is divided between an "athlete's record" originally set at 30.71 miles on a traditional track bike by the Belgium cycling legend Eddie Merckx in Mexico City in October 1972, and another record set using the most advanced technology.

The Merckx record went unchallenged until Francesco Moser broke it in January of 1984 at 31.57 miles, using a technologically advanced bicycle and a radical aerodynamic position.

Mr. Boardman then set the record of 35.029 miles in September 1996 in Manchester, only to have the Union Cycliste Internationale, the bicycle racing sports organization, set new rules in an effort to rein in the pace of technology.

Now, Mr. Armstrong must decide which record he wants to break.

"You have a philosophical decision to make," said Jay T. Kearney, a sports physiologist who is a vice president at Carmichael Training Systems, a company in Colorado Springs that oversees Mr. Armstrong's training regimen each year.

That is not the only decision the F-One group is faced with. In a presentation before the group last week, Mr. Kearney laid out a matrix of variables, each of which could have a drastic impact on Mr. Armstrong's chances.

For example, while Mr. Boardman set his records at sea level, Merckx rode at a velodrome at high altitude in Mexico City. In detailed charts, Mr. Kearney showed the group how moving the challenge to higher altitude significantly cuts air resistance, making it easier for a rider to go faster. The benefit of lowered air resistance is balanced by the decline in maximum oxygen uptake, which declines at altitude, even for elite athletes like Mr. Armstrong.

Air pollution, or even a cheering audience exhaling carbon dioxide in an enclosed stadium can have a measurable effect on rider performance, Mr. Kearney told the group.

In Las Vegas during a recent appearance at a media event, Mr. Armstrong showed a keen interest in the Hour Record. He rattled off the distance that Boardman had gone in his 2000 "athletic" attempt to the one-hundredth of a kilometer. He suggested that one exciting way to try to capture the record would be to make a first attempt at sea level in Madison Square Garden. Two weeks later, he would tackle the event at a higher altitude, perhaps in Salt Lake City in a sporting center that is a favorite of speed skaters and has produced many records for that sport.

At the meeting here on Thursday, the F-One design effort was just beginning.

"You need to tell me whether you need 60 days, 120 days or 500 days to be ready," Mr. Knaggs told the group.

In addition to thinking about the possibility of the Hour Record, each representative made progress reports on preparations for the new Discovery Communications Pro Cycling team, which replaces Mr. Armstrong's United States Postal Service sponsor this year.

The F-One group is made up of Carmichael Training Systems; Giro, the helmet maker; Nike; Trek bicycles; the wheel builder Hed Cycling Products; the computer chip maker Advanced Micro Devices; and the aerodynamicist Len Brownlie.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

!(Take the A Train)

I'm still bewildered by the sudden disappearance from our lives of the MTA's longest subway line, the A. Will the A and C lines be out of service for five years? or nine months? Did a transient take down the daily commute for more than half a million New Yorkers? Or did ageing antiquated electronics do them in?

It's the Einstein Flip

      The International Year of Physics, as the United Nations has officially designated 2005, has already had its zany moments of physics fun, with more to come. This month, Ben Wallace, 18, a professional stunt cyclist, flew off a ramp in the London Science Museum and did a back flip 12 feet in the air while folding his bicycle sideways - a maneuver designed by a Cambridge physicist who said she was inspired by a tale that the 26-year-old Einstein had invented his theory of relativity while riding a bicycle.

Of swahili lessons and Nyquil doughnuts

A reminder to plan your doughnut heists more carefully. For crying out loud! What hare-brained thief would think to rob a doughnut shop? Didn't they learn anything from that song*?

*

If you want to find all the cops

They're hanging out in the donut shop

Snowflake jamz

This record-playing hippie bus is scooting around an image of Floquet de Neu -- wonder which record it is?!

Graf ain't got no home in the city

Gothamist's Jen Chung writes about the latest graffiti arrest in New York City, which is tough on "seedy culture". I love graffiti, and, judging from the tag's popularity on flickr it looks like all the hipsters do. Downtown San Francisco boasts murals and large works by graf artists from Mexico, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, and London (although we don't have any appearance yet by Banksy; we do have our own Twist, ditto). Back to fixed-gear bikes, trucker hats, and down vests, I suppose (Note to self: can I get a Coach chain wallet?).

Strike one, strike two, ...

As the 60-day cooling-off period for striking San Francisco hotel workers draws to a close, the unstable, Wal-Mart-induced predicament of Northern California grocery works comes to a head.

Attention All Grocery Workers & Supporters!!!
Tuesday
January 25th
Bay Area Wide Day of Action
for Grocery Workers!
Support Grocery Workers
No Justice No Groceries!
No Justice No Peace
Defend Healthcare!

The grocery negotiations have reached a crisis point. The grocery companies are continuing to insist
on deep and damaging cuts in healthcrare for grocery workers and their families. In order to put
pressure on the companies, the UFCW has given a deadline of Monday January 24 th for them to move
at the table. Please Join us on Tuesday January 25 th at the location below to send a strong message to the companies:

HANDS OFF OUR HEALTHCARE!!!
OAKLAND
Fruitvale & MacArthur Store
3550 Fruitvale Avenue

BERKELEY
Rose & Shattuck Store
(This store is a special focus of Labor Cmte. for Peace & Justice)
1444 Shattuck Avenue

HAYWARD
Foothill Blvd. Store
22280 Foothill Blvd. (Civic Center)
DEFEND HEALTHCARE
For more information about the grocery worker negotiations go to www.bayareacoalition.org
Central Labor Council of Alameda County, AFL-CIO
www.alamedalabor.org 510/632-4242 robert@alamedalabor.org opeiu:3/afl-cio

Contagious media

Joshua Kinberg's case was dismissed (technical details). Kinberg, a student a Parsons, built a bicycle that uses a biodegradable, water-soluble chalk to print political messages on the sidewalk. He was arrested during the protests against the Republican National Convention.