February 2025

Watching

Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part 1. After a week of nonstop awful news, we needed some good old fashioned escapism. This mess of an nonsensical movie provided non-stop action anchored by a way-too-old Tom Cruise. Reminded me of Roger Moore in his last Bond flick. One implausible scene after another. At one point, a character gave a speech about how he would obtain a technology which, backed by the mighty power of the US, would rule the world. Hey, I thought this was escapism. Ugh. It is appalling that there will be a Part 2.

American Fiction – A film adaptation of Percival Everett’s book Erasure about an academic who writes a trashy blaxploitation novel and struggles with his conscience. Jeffery Wright was excellent in the lead. It’s sarcastic and funny and ironic as, forgive the expression, fuck.

Riding

A pretty decent month considering I had carpal tunnel surgery on February 3. The surgery and icy roads relegated me to riding Big Nellie in the basement for 262 miles. I did 181 miles on the Tank before taking it in for its annual physical. The Mule came home from the bike shop and carried me 233 miles, the longest ride being 40 miles. The best part was that many of the rides in the second half of the month were in shorts. I ended the month by riding to Friday Coffee Club for the first time since January. My mileage for the year is 1,451.

The Natchez Trail tour I signed up for through me some surprises. It starts in Jackson, Mississippi instead of Nashville. That adds a day of driving to and from the ride. To get back to Jackson from the end in Nashville requires a 7 hour ride in a shuttle van. Ugh. Lastly, the itinerary change, adding, most significantly, a 92-mile day near the end of the tour. Knowing these things I probably would not have signed up but it is what it is. I need to get some serious training in. Let’s hold March weather behaves itself.

Reading

Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go by George Pelicanos. The third Nick Stefanos, private eye, book set in DC in the 1990s. A story nearly as implausible as MIDR- Part !. Interesting only in the descriptions of DC neighborhoods like the area around Nationals Park back when it was nothing but warehouses and run-down seedy looking buildings. The story begins with our “hero” goes on a drinking binge and passes out in his own puke near the bank of the Anacostia River. When he comes to he witnesses a murder which he must solve because that’s what alcoholic PIs do.

The Mediocre Follow-Up Tour (a. k. a. The No-Name Tour) by Me. Re-reading the journal (made from blog posts on my phone) of my 2019 tour brought back a host of memories, many of them bad. It turns out that riding 3,000 often mountainous miles on one good leg isn’t such a good idea. Oddly, my memory had changed the location of many events during the tour. One of the advantages of riding with Mark and Corey during the first half of this ride was that we collectively made decisions, nearly all of them good. Once I was on my own, I pushed myself way too hard.

The Big Blowdown – George Pelicanos’s fifth novel tells the story of the generation of Greek and Italian immigrants who set the stage for the Nick Stefanos books. This is by far the best of the Pelicanos books I’ve read so far. It follows the fates of neighborhood kids who go to war overseas and end up mired in the grim underbelly of DC.

Truman by David McCullough. Although I didn’t finish it yet, I’ve been plowing through this 1000-page, Pulitzer Prize winning biography for a couple of weeks. It’s worth the time to read about his service as an artillery officer in World War I, the Truman Commission that rooted out waste in government military spending, his repeated long-shot wins in elections, the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the decision to drop the atomic bomb, the deft avoidance of a post-war economic calamity, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine which led us into the Korean and, later the Vietnam wars, McCarthyism, and more.