Carl from Chicago has been keeping it quiet, but his new wingsuit hobby is starting to catch on.
Sports
Thoughts About Rural France
For those who are interested, I have begun blogging about a two week bike trip I recently took to the Pyranees at Life In The Great Midwest. It will probably end up being a fifteen or twenty part series so feel free to follow along over the next several weeks if you like.
For this blog I have a few short thoughts about how I felt as a tourist in southern France.
Photo
The worst part about riding your bike through the Pyranees in southern France is the awful views at the top of the mountains. This from the top of the Tourmalet.
O Hare Terminal Five
I recently went on a bike trip to the Pyranees in France. I trained for this for over six months, slaving away in my basement on a trainer as well as doing other workouts in the hostile winter here in exchange for two weeks of payoff on the mountains in France. Everything went wonderfully on the trip (more on this later). I was pretty excited when I was packing and leaving. It was the sort of feeling that you got in college when you knew you were going to ace a test. All the preparation and pre-work was done, it was simply time to perform.
The Moral Bankruptcy of International Organizations
In the category of “headlines so obvious that you can’t believe you haven’t seen them sooner” here is a BBC article titled
Qatar’s Bin Hammam accused of buying 2022 World Cup
While I am far from a football expert I wrote about it here in particular how the greens that protest everything under the sun didn’t seem to mind NOT using some of the dozens of world class stadiums already built for football (soccer) around the world and let Russia and Qatar win the next 2 world cups, which required the construction of many more stadiums, which strikes me as completely the opposite of being “green”, but I can’t follow their logic anyways.
Back to the Qatar bid which seemingly MUST have been based on bribery because no logical set of criteria would award this tournament to a bidder that
1) had a non-existent history of success and barely even participated in the sport on the global stage
2) had no facilities to utilize
3) would likely have to play games under the blazing sun in virtually a furnace
4) would have to truck all fans in from around the world to attend the games
But of course we know why they won as is stated in the article above.
Suspended Fifa vice-president Jack Warner has made public an e-mail that claims Mohamed Bin Hammam “bought” the 2022 World Cup finals for Qatar.
I do like Australia’s response to the final outing of this obvious outcome.
Meanwhile, independent Australian senator Nick Xenophon has demanded that Fifa refunds the Aus$45.6m ( £29.6m) they spent on their unsuccessful bid to host the 2022 World Cup. Xenophon said: “It appears corrupt and highly questionable behaviour goes to the core of Fifa. “Australia spent almost $46m on a bid we were never in the running for.”Now we hear that bribes may have been made to fix the result for who will head up Fifa.”
Finally let’s just drop the pretense of these international organizations being for anything other than the interests of those that run them. That goes for the Olympics too. Want to reward Russia for their fine behavior in the international stage, including the invasion of Georgia and general meddling in all the states on their borders? Give them the winter Olympics, in a facility that isn’t even built (no bribery there, either).