1. Ride from Port Moody to New Westminster for work
2. After work, ride from New Westminster to south Richmond
3. 35-minute bike race
4. ride back to Port Moody

The name is a misnomer. You only wish you were dead. The morning ride is about 30 minutes, the evening ride is 3-4 hours, depending on how you figure it.

Results? Well in the "C" group tonight, Ryan from EV won the first prime thanks to an excellent leadout from Ryan from EV. In the second prime, Ryan from EV was barely pipped at the line. The finish saw Ryan from EV shoot out of the pack incredibly early on the last lap, in some sort of hybrid of a sprint and an attack, leaving the pack behind for a win that looked easy. Ryan from EV did the cleanup work by not trying to chase and winning the bunch kick, making it a 1-2 for Ryan from EV.

Ha ha. The other Ryan from EV, a rider I don't know from before, declared he felt "a little tired" at the start line. We must hope he never feels frisky, or people could get hurt. He was the perfect leadout man in the first prime, which I took easily. He just missed the second prime, thanks to an opportunistic draft-to-sprint by a strong and sprinty opponent. He also led the pack out for the first part of the bell lap, then sat up and let another guy try to go all the way, then attacked with maybe a quarter lap to go and left everyone in the dust. I didn't chase and cruised to a fairly smooth second place.

The whole race was quite eventful, featuring several attacks that were given enough rope to hang themselves. It was fairly sophisticated racing for a bunch of Cat 4s. I'm not just saying that because of the Red Tide results, though the two of us were clearly the class of the field on a dead-flat course.

In other news, blackberry season has begun. I ate my first berries off the bushes in Richmond, where they always mature the earliest.

A minor work anecdote. I realized as a colleage spoke at our weekly "Ops" meeting that I had a minor piece of information I had to convey to them, which led to this when the chair called for questions: "I'm calling a meeting of the KB group next week, and [colleague's subordinate seconded to the KB project] is invited, and I'm going to raise my voice at the end so this sounds like a question?"

That went over surprisingly well.

On our evening walks to the beach, TLO and I kept seeing these swarms of little wrigglers in the water that we took for tiny eels from a distance. Tonight I got a close up look at one in the shallows.

Not an eel. Probably one of these:

Definitely some form of clam worm, probably Nereis Vexillosa, and probably the epitoke (reproductive) form. Cool but weird.

I have been thinking about the utility of failure, especially its importance to institutional quality.

Failure and Democracy

Churchill's beloved least-worst system is, I'll claim, indifferent at best in selecting good leadership. It's not obviously a strength of the system, and the usual obsession with electoral reformers is to make the results of elections better conform to the will of as many voters as possible.

That's the wrong part of such a system to care about. Democracies and dictatorships (of all stripes) seem to have their highs and lows when it comes to getting leaders. It's possible the very best governors are scions in hereditary lines, since they are unique in being groomed for leadership from birth, and without requiring any skill at the somewhat unrelated vocation of campaigning for election.

But when the leadership in a functional democracy has failed, the leaders go away. Sometimes it takes a few years for the election cycle to roll around, sometimes it requires the nudge of term limits (because even in democracies, incumbency effects can be strong), and sometimes insiders push a leader out of power for fear of facing the future wrath of voters, but at all levels there are practical mechanisms for ejecting utterly awful candidates and incumbents.

In dictatorships, bad leaders are often bad leaders for life. Worse, good leaders often stay long past their sell-by date, and become bad leaders for reasons of running out of ideas, changing circumstances, corruption by power, or even senility.

If you think of democracy as a mechanism for making bad leaders leave, it starts to make sense.

Failure and Economics

Certain overly-large entities aside, market capitalism is no good at incubating success. But its virtue is that ventures fail. There can be reasons other than inherent long-term unprofitability for businesses to fail (and sometimes unprofitable businesses outlast sensible explanations), but bad businesses almost always fail eventually, even if that failure takes the form of selling out and silently disappearing into the purchasing company.

By contrast, organizations without a well-defined failure condition (like being unable to make payroll) are vulnerable to outlasting their original purpose, or surviving in spite of their success or failure to achieve stated goals.

Government programs are notoriously hard to eliminate. Part of that is because there is no natural, even hostile pressure for them to maintain viability. Their existence is not tied directly to results, in most cases.

I have seen a couple of cases of this in post-secondary student government, where funding is virtually guaranteed and tied directly to student enrollment rates. Combined with minimal democratic involvement due to an indifferent and only lightly-affected student population (especially at two-year colleges), you have a formula for some very weird outcomes. (and also here, and this sad litany of the SFU Student Society's zombie pub "business").

Final Thoughts

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill

I've found that as much as being clever or good is a means to success, a lot of my success has been down to patient endurance. Failure is rarely final: if you learn and revise, you can fail better the next time. If you keep improving, and you keep trying, you'll probably succeed.

Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I attack. - Ferdinand Foch

It's a trivial example, but in bike racing I remember that some of my most memorable successes arrived in races where, at some point, I felt terrible. We're talking within moments of abandoning the race at mid-distance and being utterly at the end of my rope, barely able to turn the pedals. And then when the final sprint arrived, I won. It turned out all the other riders felt even worse! The secret is that in many enterprises, your competitors are failing as bad or worse than you. Never forget that success can sometimes be a matter of returning to the fray for one more try.

Failure is a vital mechanism. Learn from it. Study it. Embrace failure. Succeed.

Actually, I picked two. And an honorable mention, who didn't win anything.

HONORABLE MENTION: Bill Asher. He evoked the spirit of "friendly" riding very well and punctuated it with a "Hell yeah! I love riding a damn bike." Very anthemic.

SPECIAL JURY PRIZE: Bob Schwartz. His meditative story of perseverance and effort and simple, agonizing riding with his daughter, was worthy of note. TLO picked it as the winner, and I said it was powerful enough, but not anthemic enough. We're going to award Bob, or maybe his daughter, a nice new cycling toque from my club.

WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER: Dave the skiier.

Reasonably speaking, I thought Bill and Dave's stories were very very close, and if I gave it to Dave for any reason, it was probably a bit for CanCon, and a bit for his insight into the particular joys of competitive skiing. So Dave gets the camera.

Thanks to all who participated, and thanks to our generous sponsor, AXE body wash. It makes you not stink!

There are no spoilers in this review. Or rather, the book assumes from the start that the reader knows how this story turns out: Scott, with four companions (and many more in support teams) makes an attempt to become the first man to reach the South Pole. They make it, but Norwegian explorer Roald Admunsen has beaten them by a mere month, and Scott and his party die on the return trip.

When I say the story is told adequately, I mean that the author (Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the youngest members of the support parties) writes out the story comprehensively, including extended quotes from the diaries of his colleagues, both surviving and deceased. The core of the tale is not one, but rather two journeys: Cherry-Garrard himself participates on the non-fatal "Winter Journey," a bizarre trek to an Emperor penguin rookery in the dead of winter, for the purpose of collecting eggs for science. While the title of the work refers to the entire 3-year expedition, I think it is the Winter Journey (not Scott's fatal polar trip) that Cherry-Garrard thinks of as the worst of the worst journey.

But the first volume of Worst Journey is mostly tedious: as reference material, the difficulties they have in sailing from England to Antarctica on a small ship overloaded with cargo, ponies, and sled dogs is a worthy appendix, but that and their base camp preparations make up six of the first seven chapters.

So here is my recommendation for making the most of this book:

1. Use a tabbed web browser, and open a new window.
2. Download both volumes in their illustrated versions (I have linked to the HTML forms of those above). Put them each in their own tab in your browser window.
3. Five maps are included in the two volumes. Get the highest-res versions of each of them, and keep them handy for reference, each on their own tab. You may wish to use a separate image-viewing app. That has its benefits. I didn't have it myself, but if you have access to a good map of the relevant part of Antarctica, it might help. I am guessing without proof that someone has done a Google Earth overlay of early Antarctic exploration.
4. Read the Preface and the surprisingly long Introduction in Volume 1. The Introduction is excellent background material on the journeys to the Antarctic that preceded this one.
5. Skip Chapters I-IV. Look over the very nice illustrations. Read Chapter V, which covers a mundane depot-supply journey, but will give you a good background on how a "normal" Antarctic journey works.
6. If you are keen for some character study and an idea of the team's life in their winter camp, read chapter VI, but feel free to skip it.
7. Read Chapter VII. It is an awesome study in misery, barely survived. You can skip Professor Cossar Ewart's report on the Emperor Penguin embryos. Today, we firmly believe that penguins are not early and primitive birds. (I would not read this as meaning the Winter Journey was a waste: I think confirmation of plausible null hypotheses is an underrated part of science.) Don't miss this classic line: "I don't know why our tongues never got frozen, but all my teeth, the nerves of which had been killed, split to pieces."
8. On to Volume 2! We are now at the core of the book, and I recommend reading all of chapters VIII-XIII. If you get bored reading Chapter XIV, feel free to skip ahead: it is not necessary to understand the later stories. The Note at the end of the chapter on sled runners is entirely optional.
9. From there, read to the end, but if a chapter starts to bore you, skip ahead. In a way, the last four chapters are four different rehashes of the same story: the discovery of Scott's team and a post-mortem assessment of what went wrong. It's interesting throughout, but long. If you get bored, read my summary below.

Why They Died

We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last.

—from Scott's "Message to the Public," his last letter.

The Scott expedition failed in a remarkable fashion.

On January 3rd, 1912, Scott told the final support team who would make the Pole attempt: Scott, Evans, Oates, Bowers, and Wilson. January 4th, the three men in the support team who weren't chosen turned around and began their long return journey to the safety of the base camps, while the Pole expedition carried on. They made the Pole on January 17. The distance from there to their main base camp was about 800 miles, and they were picking up supplies from depots all the way back.

They lost their first man, Evans, on February 17th. He had lingering cuts and frostbite that simply wouldn't heal, and just got weaker and weaker. He collapsed and died relatively rapidly.

The second man, Oates, died March 17th, famously absenting himself from the communal tent with the words "I am just going outside and may be some time." He was suffering badly on the journey, and was both fading rapidly and notably delaying the party when he sacrificed himself by walking into a blizzard.

Scott made his final journal entry March 29th, knowing the end was near, and he and his last two companions are presumed to have died that day or soon after. They died a mere 11 miles from "One Ton Depôt," (about two day's march, at worst), but they made that final camp on March 21st, and were stuck there by an improbably long blizzard until the end, though weakness made their chances of ever marching those eleven miles iffy on the 21st, and lower with every passing day.

Depending on how you interpret their end, they died of starvation after ten days without a meal, they died of thirst while surrounded by snow, or they died of exposure while lying in their sleeping bags, inside their tent. Most directly, they died because they had no fuel for their camping stove: in the severe Antarctic temperatures, it was the only way they could melt enough snow to get sufficient water.

It will not shock students of disasters that whatever the proximate causes, there were a series of small problems and mistakes that contributed to the death of Scott's party. I have not yet read an account of Admunsen's South Pole journey, but Apsley-Garrard says he used five men, sled dogs, and a shorter but un-surveyed route. This compares to Scott's group of five man-hauling sledges with four of them on skis but the fifth walking.

Scott had planned for a four-man trip to the pole. Worst Journey dwells on this point, noting that adding a man shortened their food rations and left them with one man on foot and four men on skis. Although the walker (Bowers) kept up (he died with Scott and Wilson in the final encampment), it must have slowed the pace of the journey. Cherry-Garrard points out the other ways the journey was hobbled by an extra man, but the one that stood out was his claim that cooking for five would take about 30 minutes longer than cooking for four. This seems like an astounding time-drag on a party that, no matter what, was going to be pressed to its limits. The cumulative loss of 30 minutes of sleep every day over the six weeks before Evans died may have been the difference between life and death for the other four by late March.

The most obviously fatal problem was leaky fuel cans at the depôts. The fuel gave out because the team continually found the cooking fuel reserves were less than expected, and the ultimate cause was probably bad seals on the cans. And again, for six weeks, they were five men leaning on that fuel supply, not four, and I believe the largest contribution to the longer food preparation time was lengthened cooking times, which suggests that the fuel consumption of a fifth man was very substantial indeed.

But the problem that fascinated me is discussed in gory, mathematical detail by Cherry-Garrard in Chapter XIX: they were continually starving to death.

Tour de France riders are claimed to get into five-figure caloric requirements on their big days, which consist of five to six hours of high-effort riding by immensely powerful riders. So the claim of 8500 calories for hours of high-effort work at -10°F (-23°C), especially including the terribly cold camping and sleeping conditions, seems entirely plausible. The baseline "Summit" ration was under 4900 calories. To put this in perspective, a 3000 calorie surplus or deficit is generally regarded as worth a pound of weight gained or lost. That means the Pole party was on something better than a pound a day of weight lost for about three months. I doubt any of them was carrying 90 spare pounds.

There were many other small ways that Scott's party died. "Scott and Scurvy" is highly suggestive that scurvy was a contributing factor to the ill health of the South Pole team. Scott himself points out they had a late start, a problem caused by their support-team ponies being far less useful than hoped (they also had experimental motorized sledges which were not relied upon in their planning, but which were utter failures). I note that Admunsen used dog teams and men on skis to go all the way to the pole and back. The Scott expedition used dog teams at various times, and found them fast at times, but their route could not accommodate dogs at one key point, and so the crucial part of the journey was accomplished with sledges full of gear pulled by men on skis or foot, as conditions allowed. I think Admunsen's use of dogs gave him a much larger margin of error than Scott had, both in terms of speed and energy use. It's also clear that most of Scott's men were not expert dog-handlers or horse-wranglers: this showed up in everything from their poor choice of horseflesh when they bought the ponies to their general unease with the dogs.

This surprises me a little. Scott planned out this expedition in meticulous detail. He knew that travel speed was a matter of life or death on this journey, and yet he fudged his margins of time and transport in several ways: a late start with less pony support than expected. Man-hauling for enormous distances. And last but not insignificant, taking four skiiers and one man on foot to the South Pole.

But Scott and his men always knew they were taking a chance. They took it as carefully as they could figure it, but they took it, and they paid for taking a chance. That's how chance-taking works. In the end all their margins of error were used up, and turned into a narrow margin of failure. And thus death.

If you want some further reading, I strongly recommend the article "Scott and Scurvy" as noted above. It addresses the interesting question of how the true knowledge of the prevention of scurvy became lost by the time of the Scott expedition, and was both a problem for the South Pole Journey and substantially misunderstood and misrepresented in Worst Journey. You won't go wrong by reading Krakauer's Into Thin Air, a very well-written recounting of a famous and multiply-fatal incident involving Everest summiteers. The concept of Everest's "dead zone" has some very particular parallels to last leg of Scott's South Pole journey.

So there's the good parts of The Worst Journey in the World. I commend it to you.

Why doesn't anyone tell me these things?!

Last year, I made my third trip to Syros (TLO has done many more), and we finally visited an incredibly impressive church located in a huge, secluded seashore cave that for some reason, nobody had bothered to mention to us. Note that TLO's father grew up on Syros. Her uncle still lives here, and saw us almost daily on every one of these trips. Neither has even been there. This is roughly equivalent, in my opinion, to living in Vancouver and not visiting the Sun Yat-Sen garden.

Continuing that theme, we did a side trip to the island of Paros, mainly with the goal of visiting sister island Antiparos (great name, right? the third island in the group is called Despotiko. Really). This was our second trip to Paros over the years, but we'd never been to Antiparos. You take a very short ferry-trip from Paros to get there.

And somehow, so far, nobody thought to mention the REALLY INTERESTING CAVE! Yes, TLO has a guidebook that notes it as one of the highlights of the island, but we're talking about a thing that drops 100 metres into the depths, is cavernous enough that it can be explored by normal people (with the caveat that the trip to the bottom and back involves 100m of vertical stair-climbing), and that is impressively riddled with stalactites and stalagmites. If you go anywhere near the Cyclades and don't visit the Cave of Antiparos, you're missing out.

My photos don't do it justice, so just go search flickr for better ones. But here's a taste:

I hope that gives some sense of the scale and verticality of the cave. This isn't a top-to-bottom view. It's not possible to see clear from the lowest point back to the mouth.

Our transport on the island was provided in a most entertaining fashion, via a rented quad:

It's like Steve McQueen and Magnum P.I. had a fat love-child.

"Quads" are so named because they tend to make their users into quadriplegics. Not really. But only in Greece would such a thing be considered legal road transport, as opposed to an entertaining mechanism for off-road self-harm.

Compared to a scooter, this thing is incredibly unstable, and it feels it. With two people aboard, it was so obviously dangerous going around corners that it was the safest vehicle imaginable: I was unwilling to take even the slightest bend at more than 20 km/h. That was fine with the machine, since it had a 50cc engine and the clutch slipped up any slope, so I had to nurse it along at single-digit speeds in some cases.

TLO liked it because the seat was comfy. I liked it because I like danger. It cost 15 Euros; that's a value proposition I can get behind.

Greek transportational creativity is not limited to mis-purposing ATVs. They also like to mis-purpose rototillers:

That's not a joke. You really are looking at a rototiller turned into an improvised motor vehicle. I have seen these being driven on the road.

So yeah, I love Greece.

Our reward was nice swimming and the filthiest beach I have ever seen. I don't directly blame anyone.

It seems that certain beaches are just well-positioned to catch every bit of floatsam around, and this is one of them: the litter on the beach was surely not the result of visitors to the beach, as the character of the debris wasn't right: not enough broken liquor bottles, too much stuff that looked like it washed overboard: milk crates, orphaned sandals, broken up plastic bits of just about anything imaginable, what looked like a marine transponder or radio, and so forth.

By comparison, the neighboring beaches of Lia and Grammata have magnitudes less litter on them, and are just as attractive to visitors, if not more so.

We picked up a lot of interesting shells and rocks, and a message in a bottle, seen in the photo above.

We didn't open it until we got home, which was just as well. It was mostly in Greek, dated five days before we retrieved it, and probably didn't travel far, since it indicated the authors were headed to Piraeus (the port of Athens; the most frequented ferry route from Syros).

It was so obscene that after the first sentence, TLO's dad was unwilling to translate it. The gist was a series of insults aimed at the reader, along with the admonition in English at the end that "if you are foreigner do not translate it! We are Greeks."

Astoundingly, the authors of the message (Alexandros and Nikos) left phone numbers. Note I don't say they left their phone numbers, since I feel that would be an unwarranted assumption given the evidence.

So there you go. Our Greek adventures continue apace. Despite the dirty beach and the dirty message in a bottle, the swimming was a treat: the water was clean. The hike was pretty serious, but we had fun.

Sad to say, I think the church is only mildly interesting for the un-Orthodox: it's not particularly remarkable, though it is large. There's a small art gallery on the church grounds that, amazingly, has a Rubens hanging amongst a bunch of other paintings ranging from okay to atrocious.
The rest of the island was entertaining, though. We ate lunch, rented a scooter, and saw the sights. Tinos has its share of pretty villages, a pretty beach, and a pretty green valley. There's a pretty steep stair-climb hike that takes about 15 minutes going up, and that gets you to the highest point on the island: Xombourgo. Most of the museums we might have visited were closed, a consequence of typical siesta-influenced Greek opening hours and the fact it was off-season.

A note about that off-season thing: this is late May. in Greece, that's the low season. I have no idea why: the aforementioned bad weather amounts to three rainy days in the two weeks we've been here, and that's unseasonal. The temperature has been in the 25-32º range most of the time. The beaches are both lovely to swim on, and virtually empty.
August, if you're wondering, is the high season. Except for heat-addled Australians doing their upside-down version of snowbirding in Greece, I can't see any point in low-40º temperatures, crowded beaches, and high-season prices.
Back to Tinos: we ate lunch at Ψησταρια Ο Βλαχοσ (say "psistaria o vlakhos"). Translation: The Idiot's Grill. They served me something that the Greek side of the menu called "pancetta*," which started out bacon-thin and bacon-crisp on one piece and ended up like a pork belly with some riblets in it on the other. Note also the fries, which were good. We'll call that a solid victory for Greek bacon, and for idiots.

Then it was time for our next adventure. But first, a suicidal road-crossing chicken. Really. As we were riding along on the rented scooter, a chicken at the side of the road, against all reason and my short history of avoiding chickens, darted into the roadway as we approached, and then ran in front of the scooter for a bit before finally choosing life, and living to tell the joke about why it crossed the road for another day.
As we scooted about on the rental-agency-suggested itinerary, we kept encountering our fellow scooter renters, a Taiwanese couple that was just a few minutes ahead of us. We leapfrogged around the island, chatting occasionally at the stops. Make of it what you want that the strangers we had the most in common with on the island were Chinese tourists. But we weren't that similar: his SLR was a Canon EOS, while mine was my trusty Pentax.
We didn't stay overnight: we caught the late ship back to Syros, and there we are.
Not much more to say about Tinos, or the trip so far. We're hiking, eating, sleeping, drinking, secret-training, swimming, Cocoa-learning, napping, and generally doing just fine. Even the weather is better since I started writing this.
More stories to tell (preview: R&R discover an obscene message in a bottle), and a few videos to show, but that must wait until the bandwidth gets a tad more reliable.
*Having donated a huge chunk of vocabulary to English and several other languages, modern Greek has no compunctions about borrow-words from many languages. There are some charming Greek-rooted words for modern items, like Κινίτο (Kinito), which is "mobile," as in a cel phone. (Compare to German, which awkwardly uses the English-as-it-is-not-spoken "Handy" for the same item), but if the Greek for "computer" is «κομπυτeρ» (uh, "computer"), who's borrowing what?

After:

It's my ridiculous city bike.
This thing rocks. I've taken a basic 5-speed city bike and added just enough parts to make it into a happy set of wheels for Syros.
Thanks to a botched attempt to pull the freewheel on my last trip (Maillard; the proper removal tool is very hard to find), I bent the old wheel's axle. Because this was a bike that was brought to the island from the US, it has 27" wheels, virtually unknown on the Continent. So I had Overtime Sports in Coquitlam dip into their dwindling supply of 27" rims and build me a freehub-based wheel.
This solved several problems: carrying a complete bike to Greece (something I seriously contemplated) could have been close to $200 and would have been a logistical nightmare. It fixed the broken axle. And it allowed me to add much lower gearing, something I badly needed considering the hills that every ride begins and ends with. As best as I can figure, the concluding climb is about 40 minutes long averaging a 10% grade. It's murderous even with my new 32-cog.
I have left the steel front wheel alone. It works fine, and the biggest problem with steel rims is terrible wet-weather braking. Since it only rains about three days a year in Greece (and has rained on me 15 minutes in the 10 weeks or so I've spent here over the years), that's not a big problem. I'll just stay home on the rainy day.
To go along with the big new cog, I needed another rear derailer. The incredibly cheap Shimano "SIS" (TY-2200, I think) derailer is ugly and heavy, but works perfectly. It was in my parts pile. The key feature is it has the right kind of derailer hanger for the cheap old hanger-less bike. A new SRAM chain mates with the 8-speed cassette, an 11-32 SRAM.
I also added a saddle from my pile, as the old one was a nasty sprung saddle, large and uncomfortable. The Avocet R1 has been retired from cyclocross racing, owing to being bent by repeated rough re-mounts. It will experience considerably lighter duties on the island. I also brought some saddle mounting hardware, but not a post: it's the original steel post with removable bits at the top, sort of like the latest in integrated seat masts.
I bring clipless pedals every year, and then take them home after my vacation. Crank Brothers Candy pedals, this time.
To-dos: the bars should be dropped or flipped. The bottom bracket is making ominous noises, and deserves an overhaul, and possibly a replacement. If I decide to replace the BB, then the crank will have to go as well, and if I do that, I would put a cheap compact double (or more likely a really cheap mountain-bike triple) on it, and add a front derailer, and use that moment to add downtube shifters, since I'd need to add a front shifter, and the old shifter doesn't have enough cable pull to move across 8 gears (I just get 12-32 on the very wide cassette. I've never missed the 11).
And before it got any further than that (front wheel, drop bars) I'd just get a different bike. In its present state, it does very well at its simple job: taking me up and down the hills of Syros so I can get my secret training in.

Here's what I did Monday:

• 2 hour secret-training bike ride that started at 06:45 with a severe 10-minute climb and ended with a very severe 40-minute climb. The middle bits were easy enough. The roads are twisty and the local traffic is pretty laid-back, so I occasionally pass cars and scooters on the flattish or descending bits. It was glorious.
• Cleaned some dishes, hiked to Lia (Λια) Beach with TLO, waded, and back
• Swimming at another beach, then a late lunch: grilled pork steak (μπριζολεσ).
• Much-needed siesta, followed by hanging around the house, and a bit of light housework. Soup for supper, and then to bed.

The joys of vacationing with your mother-in-law, as illustrated by a conversation on Tuesday. (Background: the shower door is stuck part-closed, and I have a pot belly):

Mom-in-law: "I opened up the shower door a little so you can get in."

Ryan: "It's okay, [TLO] and I are skinny. We can make it."

TLO: "I thought you said part of you got stuck on the door."

MiL: "Parts of him are huge!"

TLO: "That's not the part that got stuck."

On the other hand, my mother-in-law (and I must say, she and my father-in-law are a joy to travel with, and generous to a fault) has taken it upon herself to be my cycling coach, which is great. She's keen to ensure I go out for my rides and only lets me have half a cake-piece per day. It's like living in the Triplets of Belleville. I return home from each ride covered in bugs. Today, I figured out that it all happened in one moment, as I plowed through a cloud of midges on a descent. I felt rather than saw them.

The ridiculous modern magic of air travel is seriously diluted by the real-world implementations of it.

That's not an amazing insight. But don't let it distract you from the modern magic that causes it: air travel is really, really cheap. Maybe even deliriously so.

So I left on a jet plane earlier this week, along with TLO and her parents. We had the misfortune to be traveling to Athens via Frankfurt, and on the very day when a general strike closed the Athens airport (and later in the day, saw three people die when an associated protest march turned riotous and firebomby).

With our FRA-ATH flight cancelled, the YVR Lufthansa people advised us (surely correctly) to just fly into Frankfurt and take pot luck with the next day's flights.

Lufthansa FRA promptly looked over our situation, sent us to a nearby hotel (NH Mörfelden), and fed us. The hotel didn't look particularly promising: it was located in the middle of an industrial park, and clearly built to serve the conference-and-layover set. But it was clean, well-furnished, quiet, and the dinner and breakfast buffets were far better than expected. It probably made the whole trip more comfortable than the straight shot would have been. So a bit of thanks to the Athens airport traffic controllers for joining the strike, and to NH Mörfelden for being the nicest mismatch of bad view/good place ever.

The next morning saw us back in the Frankfurt airport, deep in the standby line for an ATH flight. We knew our chances were toast when they offered a €400 payoff for any already-seated passenger willing to take a later flight. Lufthansa's backup plan was re-routing us onto a flight to Bucharest, and thence onto a TAROM flight to Athens.

It worked! Despite about 30 minutes between the scheduled arrival and departure times, we made it, and Romania's flag carrier entertained us with goofy in-flight programming and a very silly in-flight magazine, which appeared to be actively soliciting Romanian celebrities to say how well-treated they were by TAROM, a ploy which was about as transparent and convincing as a videotaped speech by a hostage soldier. They got us to Athens, only about 24 hours behind schedule. In a further non-surprise our eight checked bags, last seen in Vancouver, appeared on the conveyor belt and were no worse for wear.

The in-Europe flights were done on a pair of Boeing 737s, and it may be the most humble, practical, and emblematic passenger carrier of the jet age. There isn't much to say about these, except a general fan-boy shout-out to the single plane that did the most to bring flight to the masses. It's no coincidence that notoriously-profitable carrier Southwest built its business model around the 737.

I'm writing this from Athens. We're staying with family until tomorrow's boat to Syros. Athens (at least the neighborhoods around here, far from downtown) looks perfectly normal. The trash was collected today, a clear indication that the country has been returned to service.

And now we're booked on a morning boat to Syros. Expect much less of this in the near future, as there is no nearby wi-fi to beg or borrow from the house (thanks, AIRTIES_RT-205! Your generosity will not be abused.) Future web surfing will involve planned expeditions into town, hopefully at long intervals.

We here at Wired Cola have a simple policy towards pitches, corporate promotions, and special marketing offers: we can be bought, and we're cheap. How cheap? Our rate card is too embarrassing to publicly disclose. Email me if you must.

But in a rare twist on our usual beggar-thy-readership policies (all twenty of you), there's something in it for you this time.

It's a Flip video camera! I know, the best new gadget of 2007!!

I kid, I kid. I'm pretty sure this is the MinoHD, which is more like the best new gadget of 2008. Keira-Anne thinks it's the MinoHD, and she seems better informed on this stuff than I, probably because she checked, and I was more "what the heck, free goodies, yeah." In fact, maybe just go over to her site, since she's got one to give away too, and that way maybe you can win twice. Don't worry, I probably won't check. She writes more often than once a month, too, so if you just stay there and stop reading me, I'll understand.

Regarding the camera, I'd love to technically digress here, but I've already had one White Russian tonight, so let's go with, um, 720p=good, and don't let anyone other than James Cameron tell you otherwise. Note that James Cameron has a huge pile of money he uses to pay for his editing system. You do not.

Right, where was I? Glorious sponsor of all this?! AXE, they of 101 ways to de-stink the male body, and advertising so resolutely aimed at the early capture of the long-term consumption preferences of 14-year-old boys that their marketing acts as an active anti-recommendation to thirtymumble-olds like me. I'm not sure they care: my use of this stuff would probably be an active anti-recommendation to the 14-year-old boys. I'm not cool, I admit it.

Also, their site there is some sort of especially bad Flashtastrophe that wouldn't even let me in when I tried, but whatever, it's probably rubbish anyways, but they have so many ads on TV you pretty much know the drill already: buy their products, wash in them and use them on your armpits, improbably beautiful women magically appear. I wouldn't know, I'm bald and married now. But they're all hip to social marketing (thus this post) and so they have a YouTube vid to go along with this campaign, and it's totally deplorable in the usual ways, and of course I can't possibly recommend you watch it, since it glorifies sexual harassment (but in a cute way), suggests some hot women are into furry play (which is almost certainly not true, and not worth it regardless), and then has this bit at the end that makes getting beaten unconscious by two burly men look like a wild end to the night, not the harrowing, painful, bloody experience it almost always is. But hey, it would be cool if it was true! I like stories too. But the women are hot, so maybe watch it! If you like Kid Cudi, it's probably cool.

What? Contest. Kat, the very friendly marketing person who emailed me with this promo in the first place, wants me to get you, my readership, all 20 of you, to share your "power anthem." I was not previously familiar with this concept (and again, probably just go read the details at Keira-Anne's blog, because she's coherent and probably didn't write her post after drinking and doing two video game write-ups and having an unproductive day at work because she was basically lazy, because she's not, which is why her blog has 20 or so posts this month (I tried to count them all, really, but my Telus connection is so slow that when I called to cancel it this month because we're going to give Shaw a go, the nice retention specialist on the phone could only look at our "high speed" capabilities and say things like, "wow. We really need to upgrade our service in your area," and so her whole April archive page didn't even load while I was counting and so I lost interest, and besides it doesn't really matter what the exact number is, she has around 20 posts a month) and I have two), but this is an event or experience that changed you.

I think people who don't work for AXE call those life-changing experiences, but the bodywashers may be trying to hit on a certain amount of resonance with the idea of the anthem as devotional Anglican music, or more likely the concept of a rousing, symbolic composition, which I guess maybe suggests that whatever your anthem is, you've probably re-written it to be the good-parts version of your life story, but I can't blame you for that.

Right, so eventually I'll tell you that the contest is about sharing your anthem in the comments below, and me picking the best one and giving that person a Flip MinoHD (probably, unless it really is a Flip Ultra, which would be sort of okay, I guess, or if Kat reads this and decides hm, maybe this isn't the best fit for AXE's social marketing efforts since Cousineau seems to be borderline loony, and what the hell is with all that biting-the-hand post-ironic nonsense going on here, but of course I'm betting that I can have my cake and bite the hand that feeds it to me by being really funny and linking to their site and mentioning AXE bodywash so many times that they pretty much go with "any publicity is good publicity, and being made fun of by uncool thirtysomethings is even better," and so yes, I'm probably playing into their hands while still seeming hip and distant from the process of writing this for a non-zooming video camera and a gift basket of AXE shower gel (which is mine to keep, and which TLO, my lovely bride, seemed to think would be really good for me (which may prove what Christina Hendricks has to say in this interview about man-smell, which is probably just made up, because Esquire's "sexy women are articulate!" profiles always seem made-up in exactly the same way as Maxim's "sexy women are sexy!" profiles seem made up. And I'm not saying Christina or Liz there aren't articulate or sexy or both: it's more a sense that so many of these articulate or sexy women in each magazine are articulate or sexy in such similar ways that there's a strong sense of editorial homogenization going on. As an example, see this profile of Bar Rafaeli, in which Ms. Rafaeli sounds eerily like the same kind of articulate woman as Ms. Hendricks, and when they briefly talk to James Victore, Ms. Rafaeli's body painter, he also sounds like the same kind of articulate woman as Ms. Hendricks, and sexy to boot))).

Penultimately, I shall describe my power-anthemic experience. No contest: I'm supposed to say "walking down the aisle with TLO," and for sure that was wonderful and I'm still glad I did it every day, not least because she looks like a 9/10 scale (so help me, I calculated it) Joan Holloway and makes me laugh out loud every 12 hours or so, but weddings are for women, and marriage is just something that makes my life wonderful all the time. The real answer was the 8-hour death ride Tobin and I subjected ourselves to in March 2008, wherein we rode 100 km of dirt roads in search of a hot spring we couldn't even reach because we hit the snow line, and which was way more ride than we bargained for. As a runner-up, I might suggest that fleeting moment in 2005 when I was in peak shape and winning bike races.

These peak moments probably say more about my shallowness than anything else, because they're just bike rides. But one attraction of a really good hobby is the chance to have experiences that feel like existential tests. If you're lucky, you never experience an actual existential test during your day job, and you can (like me) afford to simulate them in your off-hours under controlled conditions. I do recommend such a hobby, though. It doesn't have to be cycling. It shouldn't be triathlons.

Finally, the rules. If you're smart, you've already read Keira-Anne's blog and have figured out that you need to write up your own power-anthemic experience, and you've posted your entry there, so you can just copy and paste it from her comments into my comments, and you're covered. The one and only prize is one of the two Flip whatevermodeltheysend cameras that Kat is going to send me on behalf of AXE (makers of body-care products for adolescent males, and terrible Flash-based websites, but actually I just tried it again and this time it loaded properly, though it took about 90 seconds (but that might be Telus) and when I clicked on one of the body wash flavours it took me back to the first page again and GOOD LORD AXE IF YOU WANT ANYONE TO CARE ABOUT YOUR WEBSITE DON'T MAKE IT ENTIRELY OUT OF FLASH! I ACTUALLY CHECKED IT IN MY BLACKBERRY'S TERRIBLE WEB BROWSER, AND BECAUSE YOUR DESIGNERS WERE JUST SMART ENOUGH TO HAVE A FALLBACK FOR FLASH-FREE MOBILE BROWSING, I LIKED IT BETTER THAN USING SAFARI!! THIS IS NOT A WELL THOUGHT OUT PLAN!!!). The other camera is for me. I have plans for it.

The major differences between our contests are that Keira-Anne's choosing her winner at random, while I will be choosing the best power-anthemic story, probably. I might change my mind if all 20 of you post really long stories and I get bored of reading them, but I can promise that I will at least not choose a bad story. You can just post a link in the comments if you want to point me at a story you've already written, or if it's too long, or if you want to tell it in a YouTube video or using a song you wrote yourself (shudder) or whatever. I'll follow all those links, or at least will not have any higher probability of ignoring them than I do the stories you post here.

Stories will be judged on power, anthemality, and spelling. The decision of the judge (me) is final, but TLO will probably read them, and if she likes your story, that will help a lot.

You have lots of time: I won't announce a winner any earlier than June 5, because I'll be . . . indisposed . . . for a few weeks, and won't be able to send out the prize to the winner any sooner than that. Offer is mainly for Canadians, but if you're a dirty foreigner with a really good story, I might be induced to make you the winner. Don't forget to put your email address in the appropriate field so I know who won.

And thanks again to AXE, who are paying for this, and Kat, who thought I was the nice kind of blogger.

At the dread risk of writing a meta-post, reduced service on the Cybermorphic™ front has been due to following up a full day's work with steady work on the History of Video Games exhibit, plus various other forms of having a life, which is a big pain in the ass that really eats into my blogging time. OTOH, I've been calling all video game playing "research" for the last six months, and that's fun.

I've also found that facetweeting has been scratching much of the writing itch of late. It's your own fault, really: once I figured out that I got about ten times as many comments on Facebook items as here, I let my desperate need for attention lead me on.

And so on and so forth. When Facebook looks like Friendster I'll still be here.

My new best friend Brennan gave me an old K-mount Hanimex 75-300 he wasn't using. Since my 1.5x crop Pentax makes every lens even longer, this is like having a 450mm equivalent lens at the long end. Barely hand-holdable, but a lot of fun, once I filed parts off of it so it fit my camera and put it on a tripod:

In other news, I may have stumbled on to something modestly interesting that will allow me to sell out a little (again), and if it happens, for once there will be something in it for you, gentle readers.

Not all 20 of you, though. A lot of you will get nothing.

#!/usr/bin/perl

#monte carlo calculation on Andrew's Birthday question.
# In short, this code allows a general test of the question:
# "if I have x friends, what are the chances that any y of
# them share a birthday?" It does so using Monte Carlo technique.
# runs should be set high (at least 1000, maybe higher) to give a
# good answer. I don't know what gives good confidence here.

# init a few things. bdaymatches is how many friends share one birthday.
use constant friends => 212;
use constant runs => 10000;
use constant bdaymatches => 5;
$foundmatches = 0;

# this loop calls yeartally once per run, adding each run to the array of
# runs called fullrun.
for ($i = 1; $i <= runs; $i++)
{
@temp = &yeartally;
$fullrun[$i] = [ @temp ];
#print "@temp\n";
# printf "THIS IS A YEAR BREAK \n";
}
#debug printing of the array:
# for $aref ( @fullrun) { print "\t [ @$aref ], \n"; }
for ($j=1; $j <= runs ; $j++ ) {
for ($k=0; $k <= 365 ; $k++) {
#print "$j, $k, $fullrun[$j][$k]";
if ($fullrun[$j][$k] >= bdaymatches) {
# print "incrementing...";
$foundmatches++;
}
}
}
#we really want matches/year
$foundmatches = $foundmatches / runs;
print "approx p for this formula: $foundmatches\n";
print "end of run";
# returns an array of counts of the number of people sharing each
# day of the year as a birthday.

sub yeartally()
#this is a sub because I thought that would save me zeroing things. Nope.
{
my @oneyear = ();
for ($j = 1; $j <= friends; $j++)
{
$x = int(365*rand);
$oneyear[$x]++;
# printf "%d \n", $x;
}
# print "@oneyear\n";
return @oneyear;
}

If you have any of the following games or systems (or manuals, posters, boxes, etc.) and you would be willing to lend them out for some months starting in late June, 2010, please let me know. If you have any leads on this stuff, let me know.

If you think I've left something obvious out, note that I may already have it, but I will welcome suggestions.

Ultima I
Quake I
Game Gear and a representative game (Sonic something something?)
World of Warcraft (box/art/manuals; I don't need the disc itself)
Zork
XBox 360 and Beautiful Katamari
Nintendo Game and Watch handhelds
PSP, and games (Gran Turismo, perhaps)
iPhone or iPod Touch (a dummy unit would work fine)
Pong arcade machine (or a Computer Space, if you happen to have a nice example of one of the rarest arcade machines ever hanging around). If you have another arcade standup, that would be worth considering. Hey, anyone have a Konami DDR station?