Le Tour

Forgive infrequent posting, but of course, Le Tour de France is on! Time that would otherwise be spent being witty is now spent with eyes glued to tube, watching cyclists pound the pavement for a couple hundred kilometers until a sprint for the finish. Crazy-ass excitement, and yesterday US Postal absolutely nailed the team time trial, beating the second-best team by more than a minute — a monstrous gap in cycling, and one that would have nearly assured Lance Armstrong the victory, except of course that this year the organizers (who are French, after all) changed the rules so that the winning team would only gain 20 seconds against the 2nd place team, no matter how large the time gap in real life, and any team that finished would only lose 3 minutes at the most. Exciting, anyway. We have also discovered that by taping the morning coverage on OLN, rather than watching in the evening, we can completely escape the phenomenally annoying bumbling of Al Trautwig, a universally unwelcomed addition to the broadcast team. It does mean that we have to also give up Bob Roll, who has been assigned the job of continually being interrupted by Al’s inane questions and stupid analogies, but there will be more Bob another day, and I just can’t stand Trautwig. Hey, OLN! Read the Velonews letters — you won’t be feeling the love! (Which is a shame, because we’re all very grateful they’re covering cycling at all, really.)

Did ya get this far? Then I’ll drop the cycling and tell you to run out to see Jim Jarmusch’s “Coffee and Cigarettes.” Funny, sweet, observant, it’s just a series of vignettes of people (mostly actors playing themselves) conversing over (and about) coffee and cigarettes. Iggy Pop and Tom Waits were worth the price of admission alone. You must, you simply must . . . . (Though I should admit that when I first became aware of Jarmusch I used to get him confused with Wim Wenders, and so I usually think of his name as carrying a German pronunciation: Yim Yarmusch. I don’t hold this against him.)