Jonesing for the Tour de France

Today, Monday, July 16th, is a rest day for the Tour de France, or Le Tour de France, and I am suffering a mild case of withdrawal. With eight stages completed, the race has become one of the more interesting editions of late, and a morning staple. The field is peppered with favorites, the crashes epic, and every day a new hero emerges.

One of the most refreshing moments was T-Mobile rider Linus Gerdemann's successful breakaway on Saturday, a ride that propelled the 24-year German rider into the yellow jersey and the white jersey (best young rider), as well as the stage win. Gerdemann stressed the need for a new generation of "clean" cyclists to put their stamp on the event that has been synonymous with drug scandals over the past several years.

Of particular note are the two main announcers of the race, Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen, who bring the beauty of the English language, a deep understanding of their sport, and a keen sense of both geography and history to their broadcasts. Watch a single Tour broadcast and compare them to the panoply of morons that clutter the booths of football and baseball. (Jon Madden has become a bumbling parody of himself with him "booms" and "bams".) Rather than dumb down their broadcast, Liggett and Sherwen assume that you have a working brain.

There are still 13 stages to go...

A final note...check out the www.versus.com website coverage of the race, much easier to navigate than the official website, www.letour.com.

Books and the end of something...

A couple of musings about books.

I buy all my mysteries from Mysterious Galaxy, an independent bookseller specializing in science fiction and mysteries. I even pre-ordered the last Harry Potter novel. Yeah, I can get it at 40% off from Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com but that's not the point.

The point is that these small independents are the lifeblood of authors. A couple of times each week Mysterious Galaxy sponsors book signings from some of the biggest and smallest name in mystery/crime fiction. From Michael Connelly and Robert Crais to the less well-known, and is some cases superior talents of Alan Russell and Don Winslow, Mysterious Galaxy offers an intimate environment to listen, learn and buy.

And then there's the staff, including Patrick, who always greets me with our favorite word from the HBO series Deadwood.

The store is fun, intimate, and only a few blocks away from another of my favorite San Diego establishments, Liberty Tobacco (but that's another post for another time.)

My other thoughts surround the end of the Books section of The San Diego-Union Tribune. If there has ever been a champion for books it has been the section's editor, Arthur Salm. His columns, insights and suggestions are gems.

The handwriting on the wall was first the inclusion of the Books section into the Arts Sunday section. From there it was only a short few weeks until it disappeared, now folded into the increasing drab Arts section. The local fish-wrapper has now sentenced its literate and polished book reviews to the same fate that nearly every American daily has adopted. Only six U.S. newspapers have a stand alone book review section.

There's enough ink and newsprint for Paris Hilton, Phil Spector, Brittany Spears and entire columns featuring local American Idol "judges" but not enough for books. Another black mark for The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Fourth of July in Mexico? My ass!

The American in Mexico...on the Fourth of July. We decided, at the last minute, to take a Carnival Cruise down the Mexican Riviera. Yesterday, the Fourth of July, we happened to make a port call in Ensenada, a city less than two hours south of San Diego and a favorite day-trip or weekend retreat for Americans who find Mexico fascinating, romantic, colorful...or just plan inexpensive.

Did I see a single American flag, even a paper version, hanging outside any of the Ensenada watering holes, restaurants, or tourist traps?

Not one.

But walk through downtown Santa Barbara, California on Saturday, May 5th and you would have sworn you were in Mexico. Mexican flags and shameless promotion of Cinco de Mayo. The most absurd pandering establishment was a bar themed as an English pub. I poked my nose in, contemplating indulging in one of my worthwhile pursuits (drinking my way through the single malt alphabet--let's leave that for a different post) when I saw the ceiling festooned with Cinco de Mayo promotional material.

OK, we're the paragons of capitalism, and I was in Santa Barbara where it's a party every weekend (as if the Barbarians need an excuse to party!) so I can temper any perceived cynicism by pleading that it is just us doing what we do we do best...make a buck.

Yet somewhere in all of this there might be a lesson. Why no flags in Ensenada? Why not indulge the Americano tourista? After all, a peso's a peso.

Or can we chalk this up to being proud of your own country. Mexicans tear their hair out when we beat them in soccer, causing a national examination of spirit. Mexicans in the United States (whether here legally or not) drape themselves in the flag of their country.

Meanwhile, our national angst seems bent on apologizing for our country. Apologizing for what? For remaining the beacon of the world? For being the land of opportunity? We seem to walking around too worried that we are going to offend someone.

Before I go all James Brown and Living in America on you, I'll sign off.

But not before saying that for the first time in my life I'll admit that I missed the fireworks and The 1812 Overture.

Never, never land

Some things take on a life of their own.

The entire clan attended a wedding last Saturday and it was a posh affair. Incredible meal, announced course by course on a menu displayed at each place setting. Dessert was accompanied by Starbucks coffee.

My son, Justin, decided to order tea, not because he prefers tea to coffee (that would be his sister, Liz), but because he has never had a cup of Starbucks coffee. It's not that he's a rabid anti-globalization nut, as he readily acknowledges Starbucks commitment to fair trade coffee, its forays into organic coffee, and the company's rather forward thinking benefits program. (He does, however, personally blame Starbucks for the demise of Mike's Coffee, a Poway neighborhood coffee shop.) He's never had a cup of Starbucks coffee and didn't want to start last Saturday down some personal road to caffeine perdition.

And that led to a conversational riff about other "nevers". Birdmonster band mate David Klein's grandmother has never eaten anything from McDonald's. Imagine, billions and billions served and the incredible statistic that here in the U.S. one in seven people have a meal at McDonald's every day, and David's is the octogenarian poster Nana for healthy eating.

Finally, Frank Sinatra claimed that he never wore a pair of blue jeans in his life.

Surly in Chicago

Yesterday I was at Midway Airport in Chicago, flying Southwest, and I eagerly brought my good friend, Ron Penland, to PotBelly Sandwich Works for his first PotBelly submarine sandwich. What at operation! Eager, energetic members of the PotBelly staff work like musicians in a symphony to turn out hundreds of sandwiches every day. It starts with one employee asking you to shout out your order when you're about ten or fifteen down in line. By the time you reach the counter you are then asked by another employee what condiments you want on the sandwich.

Smooth, efficient and tasty. Oh, I don't want to forget the unusual selection of beverages, sugar cane sodas, IBC rootbeer, and other "not found everywhere" drinks.

All came to naught when I checked out. A rather surly young lady, who had nothing more to do that operate a cash register, significantly diminished the collected efforts of every other PotBelly employee. When I asked for a jar of hot peppers to purchase and carry home she stared at me. I repeated the request and she pointed with her chin and said "Take that one there."

"The display jar?" I asked.

"Uh-huh."

She rang me up and we exchanged a $20 and the $7.25 in change.

"May I please have a bag for the peppers?" I asked.

Again with the head point, this time to a bag on the counter. So I bagged my own peppers and sat down to eat.

Great sandwich, by the way. But there was a bit of an unpleasant aftertaste regarding the service.

As I waited for my flight I thought I would refuel with some joe. I walked in A Piece of Cake, a shop that proclaims itself to be a bakery, bar and deli. I placed my travel coffee mug on the counter and asked for a cup of regular coffee.

"Small or large?" the cashier asked.

"Whatever you need to charge to fill this up," I answered.

"We don't do that. You have to buy one of our cups."

All right, let me give this young lady the benefit of the doubt. Maybe this is some stupid corporate policy, and maybe she doesn't even agree with it. But, please, a little courtesy would have been nice.

I decided not buy any coffee at all. Why would I buy a paper cup, pour it into my mug and then throw the paper cup away? Don't we have enough garbage?

Perhaps these are minimum wage jobs. I doubt it, but in each instance, it might be the case. Unless these two paragons lose the attitude they will never rise above those entry level positions.

Where the couches go to die...

At best, the concentrated Goleta neighborhood of Isla Vista is a strange community. Yards from the campus of University of California Santa Barbara, Isla Vista's population is composed of young men and women, most between the ages of 19 and 23. Most are living in their first apartment or house that didn't have mom and dad riding herd.

Think of a young adult equivalent of Escape from New York.

Pedestrians rule, motor vehicles crawl through streets teaming with students on foot and on bicycles.

And like many UC campuses and the surrounding environs there is more than a whiff of entitlement as well as the certainty of the newly educated who envision themselves saving the world from their less enlightened parents. Here's where Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is embraced as gospel, where Michael Moore's biannual video rants are cheered, and where anything remotely conservative is vilified.

As it should be for this is the age for idealism and big dreams and youthful confidence.

Green? Hell, yeah! Vegetarian, vegan? Absolutely.

This year a UCSB environmental group attacked a perennial problem that occurs with the mass exodus of students at academic year end. As the houses empty tons of furniture, electronics, household goods, clothes and books are unceremoniously dumped. Garbage cans and dumpsters overflow. Couches are strewn along every street. And while this group did admirable work, creating a central clearing house for large pieces of furniture, there are still pockets of hold-outs.

As I walked Isla Vista following graduation last week, I was appalled and sickened to see a landscape that resembled a bombed-out Baghdad or a Tijuana trash site. Front yards filled with empty bottles and plastic glasses. Scorched streets littered with carbonized hardware from couches burned to "celebrate" graduation. Lawn furniture tossed from homes on Del Playa onto the beach, and most shocking, a couch floating in a kelp bed in the ocean.

If they care so much about the environment, trot out green credentials, and eschew chewing animals, why do so many of these privileged young adults think they have a free pass for the week surrounding year-end?

What's up with all the TVs?

Everywhere you go you are assaulted by televisions. In the waiting lounge at the airport...televisions. At the athletic club...televisions (and usually duelling televisions set to different stations at max volume.) In a bar or restaurant...televisions.

I'll give you the sports bar or the themed restaurant. You expect to have twenty TVs cracking out every baseball/football/basketball game airing at that moment and perhaps even some of the fringe "sports" like poker. (When did poker exactly become a sport?)

But to walk into a high-end restaurant and find TVs sprinkled around to compete with decent conversation and a bit of, God forbid, silence.

There's a thread of thought that you can't go anywhere on this planet and not hear something. In other words, no true silence. There is no Bose noise cancelling, Get Smart cone-of-silence, noise-free zone anywhere.

But the electronic noise is overwhelming. Cellphones with their seemingly infinite number of rings that include Justin Timberlake songs, hand-held video games chirping, beeping, exploding away, those friggin' aforementioned TVs, the pulsing rap music escaping from the open windows of a pimped-out Honda civic, and the white noise hum of music leaking out from the iPod headphones.

Increasingly you have to plan to escape the noise of the modern day.

I like to choose my noise. Moving water on a stream. The woods at the beginning of the day with the first drumming of grouse, a woodpecker, the gobble of a turkey. Elk bugling in the fall. Wind soughing through the trees. The crackling of a fire and the din of millions of tree frogs. Rain on a tin roof.