“Friction makes me hot!”
The stupid, it burns
Last night, I heard somebody say possibly the stupidest sentence ever uttered in the English language. Now, I could tell you that it started with “Bill O’Reilly hit the nail on the head last night”, and most of you would say “Stop right there, you’ve already won the prize”. But the stupidity continued to pour forth like sewage: “when he said that Putin got Time Magazine’s `Man of the Year’ instead of PatreiusPatreaus because PatreiusPetraeus is winning the war in Iraq and Time would never admit that”. At this point, I threw up in my mouth a little.
But because I hang around with pilots, and a large number of them are the types who believe any bilge that Fox News tells them to believe, I shut up and try to steer the conversation away from the things that would make me have to stab this guy in the face.
Canadian Ski Marathon
Here I am skiing near the beginning of doing the Silver Courier du Bois. I look a little tired here, but I’m pretty sure this is the near the first or second feeding station on the first day, so I’m not sure why. Maybe I was just cold? At various points along the way, they made large marks on your bib, such as when you got your pack weighed or when you finished a day. Maybe an efficient system for preventing cheaters, but it sure ruined your bib as a souvenir. But that’s how I know that this was early the first day – no marks.
I already wrote about my memories of the CSM. You can re-read them here.
Lorne Scots SRTP 1979
In the summer of 1979, I did the Summer Recruit Training Program with my unit of the Canadian Forces Reserve, the Lorne Scots, Peel, Dufferin and Halton Regiment. Back then we called it “the militia”, but living in the US has ruined that word for me.
Road Ski Race
(This is first of a new series: my mom sent me a bunch of my old pictures for Christmas and I’m in the process of scanning them and uploading them.)
In 1980, I was doing most of my training on road skis because my knees were already hurting. The Southern Ontario Ski Division had their first ever road ski race, and I figured I had an edge on the guys who were normally better than me on the snow because they probably trained mostly on foot. So I lined up on the front row beside guys I knew were way better than me on skis. Well, it turned out that they were still way better than me on road skis, so I quickly ended up in the back of the pack. But at least I was near enough the front of the pack in the first lap to get my picture on the front cover of the first (and probably last) issue of “Track”, the newsletter of the Southern Ontario Ski Division.
In case you can’t figure out which young fit hirsute guy is hiding inside my current old bald and obese shell, I’m the one wearing bib number 532.