Floyd on Larry King

Innocent, innocent, innocent.

The doctor said it, "IT'S A JOKE." Nobody takes testosterone to recover from a tough day and boost up for a good recovery. Ridiculous. Floyd is awesome.

Floyd Article

Here's an article in cyclingnews.com that goes into several possible reasons for the positive result.

Poor Floyd!

Let's talk about FACT. TESTOSTERONE IS NOT MAGIC. It is not like Popeye with his spinach, where you slap a testosterone patch on your scrotum and immediately you're Captain America. If you want positive benefits from doping with testosterone, you have to do it for WEEKS. If he had been doing it for weeks, his other blood would be in question too. And it's not. Everyone's assuming he had a crap day on Stage 16, he went to the old can of testosterone, his muscles all went DING! and off he zoomed to victory. Untrue. One time use can make a positive test, but it does not affect performance.

Our local paper, this morning, has an eight inch headline that says "TOUR DE FRAUD?" and right in the middle, between DE and FRAUD, is a picture of Floyd Landis, holding his hands up in victory. Great.

1. Do they think they're so incredibly clever as to come up with this unimaginative pun? Do they not know that every other columnist, newspaper, blog, and housecat is saying the exact same soooo clever pun?

2. Can't they use one of the Floyd-in-pain pictures like everyone else, instead of picturing him there looking all smug and triumphant and like a big smug cheater?

3. I understand that they need to cover it, because naturally, everyone's wondering and thinking and curious about it. But this is the most coverage the tour has gotten yet, even on the day FLOYD WON. Even on the day all those other guys got axed for being *suspected* dopers. This is what puts cycling on the cover of the sports page.

4. I like Stephen Colbert's response to it. OF COURSE he's got massive quantities of testosterone. He's an AMERICAN. Get used to it! Hehehe.

5. Floyd is innocent. He said this: "All I'm asking for is that I be given a chance to prove I'm innocent. Cycling has a traditional way of trying people in the court of public opinion before they get a chance to do anything else." The court of public opinion is being led and misled by these damned hysterical headlines and images.

Floyd Landis
cycling
sports
doping

Floyd Is Innocent

I will never, never, never believe that Floyd was doping. Never. This afternoon after practicing riding his two-wheeler, with training wheels removed only two weeks ago, Benny was planning his next bike ride, and he said, "I will try not to get too many downs." A down meaning... a fall. Then he went on:

Benny: We don't get too many downs.
Me: Who is we?
Benny: Me and Floyd Landis.



HIS FIRST SPORTY HERO WORSHIPPING. AND NOW THEY ARE ACCUSING HIM OF INJECTING HORMONES. I don't care who says it, I don't care who believes it, I don't care if they show me BLACK AND WHITE EVIDENCE "proving" it's true, I will never believe that Floyd was doping -- NEVER NEVER NEVER. If that makes me a blind naive fool then GOOD, show me where to sign up for the club. He was clean.

Did he do something miraculous on Stage 17? YES. Might there be some strange irregularities in his body chemistry because of the herculean effort required to pull off such an astonishing feat? YES. But I believe it's possible for the body to overcome itself, for an athlete to do something that seems impossible, without drugs, but with sheer animal will, and mind over matter.

FLOYD IS CLEAN. I will never believe otherwise.

Floyd Landis
cycling
sports
doping

Human Body in Benny's Words

I asked Benny to teach me what he knows about the human body:

First your food goes in the mouth and you crunch it up small enough to swallow. Then, you get it down into the esophagus. It's something you push, push, push, push down into the stomach. The stomach can drift down into the small intestine. Now the small intestine is a river that flows to the large intestine. The large intestine is so stinky! Because there's POOP inside! Back to the stomach. We'll teach you that the stomach can let everything down to the liquid part of feel. In the small intestine, the food will be soaked up into villi. It gets delivered to all parts of the body in veins and with arteries. What gets sucked out in the large intestine is water. The extra water goes into the tube, gets through the kidneys, and then it goes into the bladder. When that happens, you start to tinkle. Even the food in the large intestine can get pushed out of your body too. But when that happens, that is not tinkle. It's... POOP!

Here in the breathing, your air goes down the trachea, which is not like the esophagus, as the esophagus pushes it down, and the trachea doesn't push the air down. You breathe, and the trachea blows it down like the three little pigs. Like the wolf blows down their houses. Like it does to the trachea, as it blows the air down into the body. And the part in the body that it goes into is the lungs. And there's another part of the body that's air. It's red and it's liquid. When you get a cut, you'll see it bleeding sometimes and you'll see some scrapes sometimes. And you can not see it when you don't have any cuts. It's about the good blood and the bad blood. And there's the heart. First, the bad blood goes into the heart, and then it goes into good blood. What helps it is the lungs. And then it comes out of the heart, and then it comes into the body!

And there's something else about the digestive system. Girls have three holes, and the boys have two holes. Both the boys' holes are to the digestive system. And the girls don't have all their holes to the digestive system. They just have one hole to the reproductive system. The reproductive is where the baby comes out. You'll see it so tiny, the size of a baby dolly. And they have just two holes to the digestive system.

FW: Bones

FW: Digestion

Brain

Birth Story Blog

Hey, I submitted the story of Benny's birth to a new blog called Birth Stories that a friend just started. It's up how here. If you have a birth story with pictures to go with, she's looking for lots more to post.

Ice cream

Too near

Flower

Bridged

Hunt

Caching

Throwing Stones

Tour de Port

Maynardia

Sadie

Pony

Multimedia message

Quilt store

Tree

Leroy sat on the mushroom.

Fireplace

Here

Barkeyville

Butler PA

Waiting 4 Ahno

Allegheny Mtn.

PA

CSPAN

Scenic

MD

P Mc C

95

I need this to be good.

Car place

Pool

Leroy

Breakfast

Norfolk

Va

Multimedia message

W Va

Gone

Out

Grandparènts

Can

Here

Shoulda slept in

Juice

Breakfast

Up @ 5:2O

Hotel

Dinner

Sun

W Va

Crap

64

Traffic!

Fireworks

Swim

Hunters

No mow

Looking

Got it

Carmax,

Cachers

Treasure

Caching

Thoughts on Le Tour

1. When Thor Hurshovd shows his grandchildren his yellow jersey all soaked with blood and gore, I hope he tells them he was attacked by a Frenchman with a machete or an ogre or a terrorist or something, and not that he was sliced open by some dopey tourist's plastic green hand-waver. I also hope that his team members went back to that line of tourists and beat the guy's head in.

2. I *love* that George Hincapie got the yellow jersey by sneaking into that sprint and grabbing two seconds! So clever! He's probably a herkimer jerkimer like the rest, but I thought it was really sweet how he talked about getting a phone call from Lance Armstrong -- there was nothing snotty or bitter about it -- he was just tickled to be wearing that jersey for once. I am glad that Thor Hurshovd got it back though, after that arm-slicing thing yesterday.

3. Dan picked the winner today -- what an AMAZING finish. So awesome. I picked Tom Boonen again, and he did win that one sprint.

5. These sprint finishes are so confusing. I really think the cameras could be better operated. If NBC were covering this instead of OLN, we would have a better view. But then we'd have Katie and Matt instead of Bob Roll and that wouldn't be a good trade.

6. Is this the Tour de France or the Tour de France and neighboring countries? They keep oozing out into Germany and Luxembourg and Holland and whatnot.

I pick Tom Boonen again for tomorrow. I am dumb but loyal.

tour de france
cycling
sports

Swim

Mexican restaurant

Baby ducks

Ducks

Ducks

Ducks

T Ball

Door locked

Benny

Superman

Tour's On

Cold Mountain

Liking Jude Law has been elevated to the level of national pastime among my demographic. The last few movies I've seen him in, he was in his clever fop mode, and I started losing sight of why. In this movie, he was different. Spectacularly different. I never watched this movie when it came out, because I thought it was going to be sappy. It was not. The reason is Jude Law and his fierce, raw performance as the soldier dude who leaves the confederate army after coming back from the brink of death from a gunshot. He leaves to walk a thousand miles through a war zone, avoiding the home guard who want to put him back in the army. The reason he walks is Nicole Kidman, the awkward and beautiful belle he left back home in Cold Mountain, was being harrassed by locals and starved by the war. She wrote him a letter telling him she needed him back.



It's rare when two actors can make love at first sight work on screen. These do.

Another reason I didn't watch it was that I have an irrational dislike for Renee Zellwegger and she got so much attention for her role, which I thought would be too precious. It was a little precious, but also was hilarious. In this very dark movie, which had me crying a bunch of times, it was a welcome bit of levity.

I'm glad I watched it finally. Wouldn't want to do it again soon, because of the wrenching sadness. In the ethos of this movie, there are more than two sides in a war, and none of them are good. The victims are the soldiers, the civilians, and everyone affected by the changed rules of war. "Hey, there's a war on," is an excuse for a lot of sick injustice, and that doesn't ever seem to change.

movies
Jude Law
Cold Mountain