Luck is an odd thing

While Jose 'Pepe' Reina, Liverpool's Spanish goalkeeper (and probably one of the top 5 keepers in the world), was busy using all the luck he could muster to save 2 out of 3 penalties in 'Pool's match against Chelsea last night (see footage below), his house was being burgled. Quite unlucky indeed. Is luck one of those things that you only really have access to so much of at one time? Like if you use it all up taking down the house at the blackjack table, are sure to get a speeding ticket on the way home from the casino or something? I dunno. But apparently a lot of footballers are getting their houses ransacked while they are off playing games. This article goes into detail of the Reina incident, but here are some of the other notable burglaries:

The Merseyside home of Jerzy Dudek, Liverpool's goalkeeper from the 2005 Champions League final penalty shoot-out, was burgled in June 2006 while he was on holiday in Poland.
Daniel Agger, who scored for Liverpool last night, had his Wirral home burgled in September last year.
Reds striker Peter Crouch's house in Alderley Edge was targeted in the same month while he was on England duty.
Everton winger Andy van der Meyde was burgled twice last year, including one raid in which his pedigree puppy was taken.
Wayne Rooney also lost memorabilia, including his BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year trophy, when his parents' Liverpool home was burgled in July 2006.

Weird, eh? I've heard of heard that there are theives out there who scour the classified ads and internets for obituaries and/or wedding announcements of rich people, hoping to burgle the people while they are attending services. Pretty good thinking, really.

Anyways, check out the good luck Reina had in this shootout to determine who was going to Athens for the UEFA CHampions League Final (vs. the winner of today's AC Milan/Man Utd 2nd-leg clash)

Your 2007 Tour Preview

In honor of the upcoming big fight [potentially the last one like it ever] this coming Cinco de Mayo between the Golden Boy Oscar De La Hoya and Pretty Boy Floyd Mayweather (previously discussed here on this tube), I bring you the preview of another irrelevant, corrupt, scandal plagued sport's biggest event, the Tour de France. The only problem is, I don't really follow cycling at all. But I do love google. And here is what I turned up.

The race is starting in London this year, for the warm-up stage known as the prologue. It is referred to as the Grand Départ du Tour (here is a helpful guide for how to type letters with french accents), and it is the 6th non-Frenchie city to kick things off, after Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Luxembourg, and Dublin.

Below is a map of the tour. If you speak/read French, you ought to check out this cool flash with all sorts of info about each leg of the race.

Logistically, everything you need to know is here:

The route

+ Running from Saturday July 7^th to Sunday July 29^th 2007, the 94^th Tour de France will be made up of a prologue and 20 stages and will cover a total distance of 3,550 kilometres.

These 20 stages have the following profiles

+ 11 flat stages
+ 6 mountain stages
+ 1 medium mountain stage
+ 2 individual time-trial stages

Distinctive aspects of the race

+ 3 mountain finishes
+ 2 rest days
+ 117 kilometres of individual time-trials (including the prologue)
+ 21 Category 1, Category 2 and highest level passes will be climbed

12 new stop-over towns

+ London
+ Canterbury
+ Waregem
+ Villers-Cotterêts
+ Joigny
+ Chablis
+ Semur-en-Auxois
+ Tignes
+ Tallard
+ Mazamet
+ Cognac
+ Marcoussis

But let's get to the only thing anyone in America actually knows about cycling. Well, other than Lance Armstrong. All cyclists (except the revered Lance), are cheats. They blood-dope, they take supplements, and are probably corrupt on numerous other levels that are naked to the lay eye and would take an actual cycling fan to know of. Of course it's always the team doctor's fault or the team manager's fault and players would never knowingly take anything (just like in baseball). But none of that matters, all we know is they are cheats. Jan Ullrich, Lance's once-great nemesis had to retire because no one would hire him because his cheating was so bad. Ivan Basso is also now out of a team, same reason. Shit, last year our very own Amish homeboy Floyd Landis drank some magic Jack Daniels the night before his fabled Stage 17 ride that turned him into Superman. All those guys, and others, will be missing from this year's tour. Who is supposed to win then? Good question. It doesn't really matter, as long as the guy is clean. If this tour has more scandal, that could just kill it as a credible professional sport. Sorta like boxing will finally be dead if Mayweather beats the pulp outta De La Hoya for 12 rounds, but the Golden Boy still ends up getting a split-decision victory (my current prediction). I just wish my parents weren't going to be in town this weekend so I could watch that fight somewhere.

Here are some Americans to cheer for in the 2007 tour:
George Hincapie (Discovery Channel) [Lance's most notable domestique]
Bobby Julich (CSC) [Aging team rider, once a badass]
David Zabriskie (CSC) [a time-trial specialist]
Christian Vandevelde (CSC) [who I like cuz he's a badass domestique]
Levi Leipheimer (Discovery) [all around badass]

nice view

I am not sure what side of the publicly funded ballpark debate I come down on, but doesn't this look about one million times more awesome than the Dome?

Sorry American productivity...

... but I just had to share this with my friends: ALLofTV.net. Now you can enjoy your favorite TV show, whatever it is and whenever you have access to the high speed internets. Scary. And probably illegal. But most definitely awesome. Enjoy.

Who's in?

Any of my Minny friends out there want to form up a bike posse and do this? This being the MN MS Society MSTRAM Bike tour (the "Ride Across MN"). I want to do it, but not alone! James? Erik? Who's down? Its for a good cause (raising much needed money for MS) and we'll get to see a bunch of the state in a beautiful (ok, hot as hell) time of the year!

Food in the news

As you may well know, folks, my pet issue these days is food. Food policy, food safety, unhealthy food, and, my personal favorite, eating good food. So it's cool to see all these articles popping up lately that are dealing with food issues. Not too long ago there was this Time magazine cover with an apple wearing a sticker that read "Forget Organic. Eat Local." (Thanks to Time for not putting that article behind a firewall.) And it is a really good read, especially if this is your first foray into the issue of Good Food (food can be deemed "Good" in the capital G sense of the word if it successfully answers the where/how/who/when questions of its production, or inception, rather).

But alas, there is more. Food born illness is a big deal these days, what with E-Coli bagged spinach and peanut butter floating around. Not to mention deadly pet food (for pets, that is). These are not examples of Good Food because they fail in the where/how/who qualifiers: "factory farms," "industrial ag. techniques," and "agri-business" being their answers, respectively. And while industrially (probably not a word) produced food accounts for most (~80% I think) of all the food in our "Food System," we can't really blame agri-business for growing and making food that is killing us when our nation's regulatory agency doesn't have the ability to oversee them. See this article from the Washington Post a few days ago, saying how the FDA [and USDA] just seem to let this small sorta thing--you know, protecting us from food born illness--fall through the cracks, and what is worse, they say there is nothing they can do about it! Bullshit I say, although no one has cared to ask for my thoughts on this (thank god for blogs). Also, no real shocker here that the Bush Admin has stripped all of their funding and regulatory ability. Nor is it a big shocker that Dems, avid poll and newspaper readers that they are, now say they want to do something about food safety.

Luckily, Prince Charles will save us all. The Agrarian King, if you will. That is, once he becomes King. Turns out he's a bit of a foody-enviro-nut, much like the Domestique (except that he has the riches and resources to grow his own food, whereas I have just enough riches and resources to waste them at my local Whole Foods).

Unluckily, not even Prince Chuck will be able to save us from China. China is the world's largest exporter of fruits and veggies, and yet there is almost no regulation of food production in China. They routinely used banned pesticides and other chemicals, and chances are their farming practices are not what even a Texas oilman would call "green." And the whole deal with Good Food is that it is what goes into the food that makes it Good or not (think of this Good label I've created as a spectrum, some things can be better than others, while still not being very Good, while in other cases some things are clearly good and others are clearly not good, regardless of their relation to one another). Know what I mean? The qualitative valuing of food that I am shooting for here is a holistic approach, or an ecological view of food, if you will. All of it matters: where it was grown (and how far did it have to drive to get to your dinner place), who it was grown by, and how it was grown. When is important too, because food (at least fruits and veggies) start to loose their nutritional value the second they are picked from the vine.

ANYWAYS, the point of this post was to offer up some good and interesting links on food in the news, and what is more interesting than a few articles on the failed policies of our current administration, the growing danger of everything China, and an update on our ole pal Prince Chuck? Not much by my standards (which I admit, do appear to be excrutiatingly low).

But I just had to start ranting and babbling in this post because I think it is important for everyone to have a better idea of where their food comes from and I think that all of these stories nowadays (and there are tons more) indicate that our food system is fundamentally flawed and is undermining our nations' health. I think we (you and I) ought to try to and bypass or opt-out of the food system as presented to us at Safeway, Giant, Rainbow, Cub, (fill in your local grocer) and find ways to get good quality, healthy food. In that regard, the best thing any of us urban-dwellers can probably do is to join a local farm through a community supported agriculture program (or CSA). This means you essentially buy a share in a farm for the summer, and get food delivered fresh weekly. Its still early enough in some parts of the country that you might be able to join one for this summer yet. Find a CSA near you here.

Scary quote of the day

Monday, April 23rd's scary quote of the day comes from the very scarily titled article in the LA Times Abortion aside, conservative Christians like Giuliani for 2008 nomination. And here's the quote, along with the setup as seen in the article:

Retired teacher Lorraine Long, 74, said she was not "a huge Giuliani fan" and strongly disagreed with him on abortion. But she still might support him because of what she sees as his strength on national security.

"If we're annihilated, we can't fight abortion and the liberals," she said.

Well then.

Actually this is more than just a scary quote. What is scary is that Giuliani, despite the DC inside ballgame conventional wisdom that he is not conservative enough, is the clear favorite for the 2008 GOP nod, even among white Christian conservatives. Giuliani's appeal is not derived from partisanship, it's from 9/11, and since he is coming from outside of DC will probably be immune to whaat would be a popular theme for a Dem presidential hopeful, something along the lines of "Look at what their party did when in control of the executive, Bush et al have been nothing short of disaster, etc etc etc." That is, I don't think attacking the Republicanness of Giuliani is going to be nearly as effective since he is seen as such a moderate to liberal GOPer.