March Recap

Riding

I’m finally making a bit of progress on my riding. In January I averaged a little less than 20.5 miles per day. That creeped up to 25.7 miles in February. In March I averaged nearly 31.9 miles per day. I did six rides of 40 miles or more. Two of these long rides were to the Kenwood neighborhood in Bethesda, Maryland. The streets are lined with old cherry trees; on the second ride they were at peak blossom and it was a riot of eye candy.

For the month I logged 892 miles, over half of that was on The Mule. I did 70 miles indoors on cold, rainy days with Big Nellie doing the honors. The remaining 340 miles was evenly split between Little Nellie and The Tank.

I hit a couple of cool milestones this month. The Mule passed 74,000 miles on March 22. The next day I passed 2,000 miles for the year. As of March 31, I’ve ridden 2,273.5 miles. I’m on a pace for 9,144 miles for the year.

I continued to do physical therapy exercises six times per week for my lumbar stenosis and my neck problem. I have determined that the source of my neck problems is The Tank. Something about the bike is tweaking my cervical spine and causing nerve pain up into my head. It sure is strange that after 29,000 miles the bike and I are no longer compatible.

Watching

True Detective – Season Two. This eight episode show did not get good reviews when it first aired. Rachel McAdams, Vince Vaughn, Taylor Kitsch, and Colin Farrell are the stars. That’s a lot of acting firepower. It’s hard to say where the series goes wrong. The plot (like all True Detective plots I’ve seen) is a mangled mess. Or it could be the casting. I really didn’t buy McAdams as a hard nosed cop or Vaughn as a small time criminal wheeler dealer until the last couple of episodes.

True Detective – Season Three. In for a nickel, right? Mahershala Ali crushes it as a cop who investigates the case of two missing kids in small town Arkansas. His character is young when the crime happens, middle aged when he is deposed by some attorneys, and elderly and dealing with dementia when interviewed by a TV reporter. Stephen Dorff as his partner and Carmen Ejogo as his wife are also excellent.

My Cousin Vinnie – Another old movie that I had never seen before. Marisa Tomei won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing the fiancee of Joe Pesci’s Vinnie. Very funny courtroom, fish-out-of-water comedy. (Tomei is one of several great actresses who attended my Alma Mater, Boston University. Others are Geena Davis, Julianne Moore, Alfre Woodard, and Faye Dunaway.)

The Academy Awards – Robert Downey Jr. finally won an Oscar, for Best Supporting Actor in Oppenheimer after being stiffed for his Leading Actor performance in Chaplin. Al Pacino won that year for playing a blind man in Scent of a Woman, a movie that bored me senseless. How ironic that the awards show ended with an aged Pacino mumbling the Best Picture winner, Oppenheimer.

The Eras Tour (Taylor’s Version). Impressive, even for someone like me who isn’t exactly a Swiftie. It’s always fun to see a performer at the top of her game. How the heck they made this film as quickly as they did is a mystery to me.

Dunkirk – Christopher Nolan’s account of the evacuation of the British Expedition Forces from the beach at Dunkirk during World War II. Expertly made with a cast of dozens of British and Irish actors. Kenneth Branagh, Mark Rylance, Ton Hardy, Barry Keoghan, Cillian Murphy, and on and on.

Day 1 of Baseball – I spent the day flicking back and forth between the Washington Nationals game against the Reds in Cincinnati and the Los Angeles Angels game against the Orioles in Baltimore. Both the Nationals and the Angels demonstrated their key weakness: bad starting pitching. It’s going to be a long summer on Half Street in DC.

Reading

Blowout by Rachel Maddow. Everything you’d ever want to know about the intersection of the oil and gas industry and geopolitics. Sleazy executives. Corrupt dictators and oligarchs. Environmental disasters.

Drift by Rachel Maddow. The founding fathers wanted it to be hard for presidents to wage war and gave the authority to do so to Congress. After Vietnam, presidential war powers were hamstrung. Reagan, Cheney, and others (Meese is a pig) found workarounds, not all of them legal. Defense spending has ballooned since Reagan and, combined with three tax cuts, has undermined spending on non-defense government programs. (Hope you trust that bridge you’re about to drive over.) Maddow’s snarky Drift dovetails nicely with Michael Beschloss’s Presidents at War.

Over the Hills by David Lamb. In 1994 with no bicycle touring experience whatsoever, 50-something foreign correspondent David Lamb, a whiskey drinking smoker, rolled away from his home in Old Town Alexandria and headed for Los Angeles. His route took him through Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. He had eight flats. He stayed all but a few nights in the kind of fleabag motels that I dread on tours. His account of the trip is one of the best I’ve read. It absolutely nails the mental aspect of solo bike touring. I read this 29 years ago. It aged like a good single malt scotch.

How I Became Red Bike Guy by Joe Flood. This is a memoir consisting mostly of contemporaneous accounts of living in DC during and after the Trump presidency. The author is a bicyclist, writer, photographer, and communications professional (and personal friend) who lived in downtown DC through years of insanity. Fed up, he started to use his expertise to fight back. In one such episode, he rode a red bikeshare bike around an assembly of white supremacists on the National Mall, mocking their clothing and ineptitude. This bit of counterprotesting went viral on the internet. The book expertly chronicles how Trump and his enablers traumatized the people of DC, the particulars of which I had put out of my mind.