Tour crap even on the rest day
Posted on July 22, 2003, by jank in Sports.

Chris Charmichael, Armstrong’s coach, apparently is doing an AP gig during the tour. Today’s piece has an interesting bit towards the end about Indurain, the Basque rider who was the only man (so far) to win 5 Tours in a row. I hadn’t realized that Armstrong got a chance to ride with Indurain (Or with Johan Bruneel, his current director sportif). No wonder Armstrong has a healthy respect for the Tour now.

Ah, The Good Old Days
Posted on July 22, 2003, by jank in Stuff.

Review of Bum Wine. Brings back memories of Texas Street Liquor (third item) just over the bridge in Bossier “Get-Down” City.

Finally - Good News from Congress
Posted on July 22, 2003, by jank in Politics.

Someone is actually looking for Fraud, Waste, and Abuse. Kiss that ballooning budget goodbye!

Happy Birthday Tom
Posted on July 22, 2003, by jank in Life.

(Thanks to Garrison Keillor and the Writer’s Almanac for the heads up)

Tom Robbins’ birthday is today. I’d like to say that reading his novels has changed my life; it hasn’t but I’d like to be able to say that.

What Robbins did do for me was to show me that novels written for adults could be fun. Pure, joyous fun. After an adolescence spent soaking up Tom Clancy and the rest of the techno-thriller folks, finding Tom Robbins’ Still Life With Woodpecker on a friend’s bookshelf at college was a welcome breath of fresh air. I spent a rainy February Saturday afternoon in Trinity U’s library reading Even Cowgirls Get the Blues cover-to-cover sitting in the stacks while avoiding writing up an electronics lab report. The heady mix of sex, scoffing at authority, and deep musings on things that don’t matter were a welcome relief from Fourier transforms and log scale plotting.

Tom Robbins turned me on to Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. (It’s still hard for me to believe that Wolfe’s the same guy who wrote The Right Stuff) It was also the first time I seriously questioned my supply-side, libertarian leanings. Strange things to come from a novel about CHOICE. (I stayed to the right, but it was a good thought exercise)

In any case, I’d like to extend thanks and best wishes to Mr. Robbins (not that he’d ever come across this backwater of the blog world). Truly creative writers are few and far between these days.