tour de France
 
With 90% of sports talk radio devoted to talking of trades and draft choices it's nice to see some actual sport taking place.  OLN (Outdoor Life Network) is showing the Tour de France daily.  Yesterday I saw Lance Armstrong battling his way to second place through the Pyrenees.  It's incredible watching the cyclists make those steep climbs.
 
Today was a short segment on the tour into the city of Nimes so not as exciting as yesterday.  The race resumes on tuesday when they head to the alps.
 
It's been pleasantly mild this July with relatively low humidty and temperatures in the low 80's. 

my car sucks

For the forth time in 9 months my car has broken down

there are the occasions of ailment

# Oct 15: battery dies

# May 1: serpentine belt snaps

# May 15: tensioner assembly collapses

# tonight: I have no idea what happened but the car died in the parking lot at Fountain Square. I waited 2 hours for the tow truck to show up. Ironically, I was planning on attending a Buddhist meditation class at Fountain Square. Going south on College the car was making all sorts of weird sounds and having a hard time getting acceleration from a stop. Well, while the rest of the class was learing about samsara, I was experiencing the real thing. Thankfully I was able to accumulate merit and practice patience and put the results into the path.

reading an old Article in the Atlantic Monthly about Robert Moses, the man who was the driving force between many of the bridges, tunnels, parks and parkways in the New York area. When I was growing up in Niagara Falls, NY we lived right off of the Robert Moses Parkway and that was the first limited access highway I became aquainted with.

Ironically Robert Moses never drove a car, I don't believe he ever had a drivers license.
The man who designed all these highways never himself drove down them.

I'd like to list these improbable occupations I've run across in my life:

I had a roofer once who lived on the first floor of a 5 story apartment building.

A mortage broker who rented an apartment.

I tried to think of some hypothetical ones:

A dentist with no teeth

A teetotaler that runs a bar

..list to be continued...

Ta gai lem holle dai!

nice long weekend, mostly spent in leisure

I've finished reading "Amnesia Nights" by Quinton Skinner. It's a good book that kept me guessing up to the end as to what the outcome would be.

The amazon link is here below.

Amnesia Nights

I've started reading "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote and am about 1/3 of the way through. Not much suspense in this one as I've read it before and am aware of the fate of the Clutter family. Still a fascinating read and the book that kicked off the "true crime" genre.

I saw two DVDs also, "Spellbound" and "The Basketball Diaries". The later has the infamous classroom shootout, with Leonardo DiCaprio wearing a trench coat and laying waste to his classmates. At one point I turned on the subtitles and had a revealing moment in regards to song lyrics. In one scene a basketball game is under way to the tune of the Doors: "Riders on the Storm". The lyrics came through on the subtitles and when I saw the line "Take a long holiday" I was taken aback. I don't know why but somehow I thought that Jim Morrison was chanting some Native American prayer or eastern phrase ala "Jai Guru Deva Om" in the Beatles "Across the Universe". To me the Doors lyrics always sounded "Ta gai lem holle dai -- Let your children play". Weird

I also went to a cookout at my friends Richard and Vickie's house and ended up manning the grill. Richard kept asking me how to barbeque chicken and then asked me to prepare and cook the food. I was more than happy to assist him soaking the poultry in the bbq sauce and tending to it on the charcoal grill.