KM that is!! Saturday Dec 21. The plan is to meet at Starbucks in Cook St Village for a coffee and chat then start riding the Beacon Hill circle at 6:30 AM. There has been some discussion of doing 100 laps if the weather is reasonable. If not 100 Km. Personally, I like the idea of 100 Km 'specially seeing how I have not ridden past 70 Km since mid September.
Be there! Be prepared for 100 something!
Barton.
Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
Moderator: mfarnham
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barton bourassa
- Posts: 1141
- Joined: Fri Nov 09, 2007 10:16 am
Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
Barton Bourassa
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
Just sayin, this would be pretty amazing-er if it fell during the festive 500.
I've got an obnoxious helmet. It's green.
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
I need to train for the festive 500 so it's good anyway. And a 100 mile ride is a weekly requirement when training so that's good too. But 100 laps is ridonculous. I'll probably show up because why not.DavidB wrote:Just sayin, this would be pretty amazing-er if it fell during the festive 500.
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
As the Tripleshot VP Barton does possess certain "special powers", but I don't think they extend to altering the Earth's axial tilt. Just sayin...DavidB wrote:Just sayin, this would be pretty amazing-er if it fell during the festive 500.
"Talk - Action = Zero" - Joe Keithley
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
Well, perhaps the TS executive could strike a committee to consider the granting of such exceptional powers to Mr. B? 
The selection of the solstice has an undeniable panache—and a motivating resonance and symmetry with last June's SSSC. But it's also just an arbitrary date amongst a whole mess of mornings that feature a boatload of darkness.
Run this event the following Saturday, Dec. 28 and I bet you'll have a bunch more riders ready to pull for a lap, thanks to it then falling: (a) properly in the middle of the holidays, when obligations to family and propriety are loosened, (b) after the conclusion of Christmas shopping and other associated chores, and (c) during the period of the aforementioned challenge when the good women and men of Strava will actually be searching out opportunities for easy, stupid mileage.
The selection of the solstice has an undeniable panache—and a motivating resonance and symmetry with last June's SSSC. But it's also just an arbitrary date amongst a whole mess of mornings that feature a boatload of darkness.
Run this event the following Saturday, Dec. 28 and I bet you'll have a bunch more riders ready to pull for a lap, thanks to it then falling: (a) properly in the middle of the holidays, when obligations to family and propriety are loosened, (b) after the conclusion of Christmas shopping and other associated chores, and (c) during the period of the aforementioned challenge when the good women and men of Strava will actually be searching out opportunities for easy, stupid mileage.
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
Rolf, have you no taste? No romance? No feeling for the sheer metaphysical importance of that day? You and your ‘resonance’ and ‘symmetry’ shite, ye trifling mongrel of pragmatism. Your crass excuses show a flagrant insouciance to the planet’s alignment. This day is an annual occasion so pregnant with meaning that to ignore celebrating it almost invokes a retaliatory response by the gods. Don’t be surprised if somebody smites you for that post.
I think of the Solstice event as our way of building the modern version of a formerly pagan celebration. Like the earth that hurtles meaninglessly through space, we too can move in dark, contemplative circles, aware of nothing but the shriek of peacocks, the smell of spruce trees, and the gentle prattle of our fellow cyclists. There we are, circling, circling, circling, seizing the now, tracing a familiar orbit redolent of the cycle of life, where existence beyond the immediate time and space--the sweat, the pain, and the camaraderie—fades to nothingness.
While you and other Philistines can go out seeking ‘stupid mileage’, the rest of us will be building a modern celebration of life amid the darkness and the existential bleakness of this very short day.
Besides, I’m going to be out of town on the 28th.
I think of the Solstice event as our way of building the modern version of a formerly pagan celebration. Like the earth that hurtles meaninglessly through space, we too can move in dark, contemplative circles, aware of nothing but the shriek of peacocks, the smell of spruce trees, and the gentle prattle of our fellow cyclists. There we are, circling, circling, circling, seizing the now, tracing a familiar orbit redolent of the cycle of life, where existence beyond the immediate time and space--the sweat, the pain, and the camaraderie—fades to nothingness.
While you and other Philistines can go out seeking ‘stupid mileage’, the rest of us will be building a modern celebration of life amid the darkness and the existential bleakness of this very short day.
Besides, I’m going to be out of town on the 28th.
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
Darkness and existential bleakness notwithstanding, I'm afraid that Barton's special VP powers also preclude slowing down the speed of Earth's rotation. Dec 21st will still be 24hrs long.Alan wrote:...amid the darkness and the existential bleakness of this very short day.
"Talk - Action = Zero" - Joe Keithley
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Stéphane Tran
- Posts: 620
- Joined: Sun May 16, 2010 9:24 pm
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
Alan, I would be happy to hand over the forum post of the year trophy to you.
Alan wrote:Rolf, have you no taste? No romance? No feeling for the sheer metaphysical importance of that day? You and your ‘resonance’ and ‘symmetry’ shite, ye trifling mongrel of pragmatism. Your crass excuses show a flagrant insouciance to the planet’s alignment. This day is an annual occasion so pregnant with meaning that to ignore celebrating it almost invokes a retaliatory response by the gods. Don’t be surprised if somebody smites you for that post.
I think of the Solstice event as our way of building the modern version of a formerly pagan celebration. Like the earth that hurtles meaninglessly through space, we too can move in dark, contemplative circles, aware of nothing but the shriek of peacocks, the smell of spruce trees, and the gentle prattle of our fellow cyclists. There we are, circling, circling, circling, seizing the now, tracing a familiar orbit redolent of the cycle of life, where existence beyond the immediate time and space--the sweat, the pain, and the camaraderie—fades to nothingness.
While you and other Philistines can go out seeking ‘stupid mileage’, the rest of us will be building a modern celebration of life amid the darkness and the existential bleakness of this very short day.
Besides, I’m going to be out of town on the 28th.
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
<thunderous applause, hooting, stamping of feet>Alan wrote:Rolf, have you no taste? No romance? No feeling for the sheer metaphysical importance of that day? You and your ‘resonance’ and ‘symmetry’ shite, ye trifling mongrel of pragmatism. Your crass excuses show a flagrant insouciance to the planet’s alignment. This day is an annual occasion so pregnant with meaning that to ignore celebrating it almost invokes a retaliatory response by the gods. Don’t be surprised if somebody smites you for that post.
I think of the Solstice event as our way of building the modern version of a formerly pagan celebration. Like the earth that hurtles meaninglessly through space, we too can move in dark, contemplative circles, aware of nothing but the shriek of peacocks, the smell of spruce trees, and the gentle prattle of our fellow cyclists. There we are, circling, circling, circling, seizing the now, tracing a familiar orbit redolent of the cycle of life, where existence beyond the immediate time and space--the sweat, the pain, and the camaraderie—fades to nothingness.
While you and other Philistines can go out seeking ‘stupid mileage’, the rest of us will be building a modern celebration of life amid the darkness and the existential bleakness of this very short day.
Besides, I’m going to be out of town on the 28th.
kateweber.com
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
IN! I'll join in at Beacon Hill. I'm planning on 100 laps.
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stevierooks
- Posts: 146
- Joined: Sat Nov 03, 2012 6:37 am
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
I'm in for the Silly Solstice 
100 laps please!
Tgirl is well enough to come out and provide support. She has offered to be there to provide a base camp with her car.
Rooks
100 laps please!Tgirl is well enough to come out and provide support. She has offered to be there to provide a base camp with her car.
Rooks
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barton bourassa
- Posts: 1141
- Joined: Fri Nov 09, 2007 10:16 am
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
Philistines? 
Getting published in Common Ground doesn't anoint you a connoisseur of the aesthetic, Alan. It's more like a bucket of Crisco: super flaky and likely to cause internal swelling.
Normally, I'd get out the ol' thesaurus and attempt a riposte to your sensationally solipsistic anti-solisequiousness. But that would just be annoying.
Instead, I'll tell you a story.
Back in the Bronze Age, people didn't know much. They wandered around drooling and tending to their orifices: insert–extrude, insert–extrude. Then someone noticed cycles in the natural world: it was dark, it was light; the days lengthened, shortened, then lengthened again. These early people sorely needed a distraction—anything to take their minds off their orifices, which were chafed from so much singular attention. So they observed rites and celebrations based on the movements of celestial bodies. On these special days, they would tend to their orifices with extra tender care.
Then the Greeks came along and founded a great tradition of special, mutual orificial treatment. Rome rose and fell, gifting us a calendar built around the sun's movements. But something else rose around that time: proselytizers of Abrahamic, monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) whose power to control their flocks lay in the denouncement of "heathens" who were into self-pleasure and worshiped the many gods of the natural world. The one and only God was the shizzle. And the sun coming up and going down and all that was entirely incidental to His awesomeness.
Through the Middle Ages, the pagans suffered horribly from the Inquisition, witch-hunts etc. Their orifices suffered especially when rats of the Black Death killed half of Europe. Bubonic plague afflicts lymph nodes in the groin. Just think of the poor orifices! (Around this time, Nicolaus Copernicus opened his orifice and gave the world heliocentrism, or the notion that we run rings around the sun, not the other way round.)
In the late 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment arrived. From the orifices of Voltaire, Montesquieu and Immanuel Kant we finally had the primacy of Reason. Kant, in particular, wrote the book on metaphysical and aesthetical analysis. He propounded autonomous thought, free from the dictates of external authority—in other words: Wo/Man should think for her/himself. This stuff was gold. Kant was the first dude to correctly guess that the solar system formed from gas out of a nebula's orifice, and that the Milky Way was a disc of star systems. He is also credited with first expanding human thought beyond the solar system to the galactic and the extra-galactic. Kant paid little heed to his orifices.
Revolutions wracked the western world and in the 19th century, Romanticism's emphasis on emotion and the Counter-Enlightenment gained force. Reason was out. For a short, glorious time, orifices were back! Revived were the tales of the Celts and Vikings—and the Brothers Grimm pulled together most of what we now think of as folklore. Present-day Wicca and neo-druidism find their roots in the myths and fascinations with non-classical antiquity of this time.
But it wasn't long before the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the primacy of machines, and capitalism and materialism displaced religions as the main organizing forces of society. Our natural world became fuel and "natural resources." And boy did the Modern Age really stick it to the poor pagans. First, European imperialism led the racial oppression of aboriginal orifices worldwide, then electricity rendered the sun's comings and goings even more of an incidental curiosity, and finally, corporations appropriated the Christmas tree and Sinterklaas to sell shit. The world wars got everyone so into each other's bidness that nobody had time to even think about their orifices. Existentialism took the driver's seat.
By the sixties, all the attention given to politics, warfare, technology and science was bumming people out. Their souls were hungry, their orifices neglected. But the counterculture rejected organized religion as part of the establishment, and the people instead turned on to personalized, folk- and indigenous-inspired religions of the self, like neo-paganism.
In the seventies, naturists and back-to-the-landers used their orifices to yell a lot and modern environmentalism was born. In the eighties, a tidal wave of consumption temporarily drowned out the few crystal-healers and other orifice-oriented pagans. But by the nineties, waves of people inspired by their cool, authentic, celtic-patterned rings, trips to Stonehenge, and Enya CDs on repeat, started to look back up at the sky, searching for something bigger than themselves, their orifices tingling.
Since Y2K, the revival of Beltane festivals has given thousands of young people (and plenty of hairy, older folks) good reason to visit Scotland and Ireland and go out on the piss, get naked and raise their orifices up to lofty, pre-Christian heights. Information technology now isolates us so profoundly from our communities that our souls are left to wander witless through a metaphysical wasteland. Some of us are left with lives so bereft of meaning that we return to the state of our Bronze Age ancestors, reaching through the gloom and grasping at patterns in the movements of the sky, again crafting rites and celebrations, trying to hitch our own tiny movements onto the cycles and patterns of nature.
And now, Alan, we return to the timing of Tripleshot riding round and round Beacon Hill Park in the dark. After tracing the origins of paganism above, I hope it's now obvious what's driving your self-delusion. You've slipped backwards a few millennia. Like a petulant child, you choose to ignore all the progress we've made since antiquity. Yes, the Enlightenment set us up to do some bad shit—particularly where exploitation of our fellow humans and the environment are concerned—but it also freed us from the irrational and distracting pursuit of completely arbitrary and fundamentally meaningless religious practice. Kant and others showed us what we are: autonomous agents in a physical world that is completely indifferent to our existence. The Universe doesn't give a tinker's cuss what we're doing when the sun stands still in declination on Dec. 21. The annual event is only noticeable looking out from our tiny marble, spinning through the vast infinity of space. And taking all of existence into consideration, it really doesn't matter.
But this doesn't mean I approach these laps around BHP as a nihilist. I simply find my meaning in the performance of the feat itself, not whether it coincides with the movements of the solar system. I want to ride 100K around the park with my friends because I want to ride 100K around the park with my friends, not because our bloody planet is at a certain angle! My meaning comes from the camaraderie and spirit borne of striving together with my fellow riders in pursuit of a common goal. In fact, scheduling the event around competing obligations and identifying the day and time that best balances my and my fellow riders' practical needs (Dec. 28?) is an expression of our mastery of the Universe. It says: We are in control. We are the masters of our own destiny. The meaning of our existence does not reference the world around us, it is us.
Last night over pints, you confided how much your ass hurt following the Summer Solstice Stupid Century last June. You said over and over again how you could hardly ride home, how your orifice hurt for days afterwards.
There was pain in your words, Alan, but there was also a twinkle in your eye—you romantic, you.
Getting published in Common Ground doesn't anoint you a connoisseur of the aesthetic, Alan. It's more like a bucket of Crisco: super flaky and likely to cause internal swelling.Normally, I'd get out the ol' thesaurus and attempt a riposte to your sensationally solipsistic anti-solisequiousness. But that would just be annoying.
Instead, I'll tell you a story.
Back in the Bronze Age, people didn't know much. They wandered around drooling and tending to their orifices: insert–extrude, insert–extrude. Then someone noticed cycles in the natural world: it was dark, it was light; the days lengthened, shortened, then lengthened again. These early people sorely needed a distraction—anything to take their minds off their orifices, which were chafed from so much singular attention. So they observed rites and celebrations based on the movements of celestial bodies. On these special days, they would tend to their orifices with extra tender care.
Then the Greeks came along and founded a great tradition of special, mutual orificial treatment. Rome rose and fell, gifting us a calendar built around the sun's movements. But something else rose around that time: proselytizers of Abrahamic, monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) whose power to control their flocks lay in the denouncement of "heathens" who were into self-pleasure and worshiped the many gods of the natural world. The one and only God was the shizzle. And the sun coming up and going down and all that was entirely incidental to His awesomeness.
Through the Middle Ages, the pagans suffered horribly from the Inquisition, witch-hunts etc. Their orifices suffered especially when rats of the Black Death killed half of Europe. Bubonic plague afflicts lymph nodes in the groin. Just think of the poor orifices! (Around this time, Nicolaus Copernicus opened his orifice and gave the world heliocentrism, or the notion that we run rings around the sun, not the other way round.)
In the late 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment arrived. From the orifices of Voltaire, Montesquieu and Immanuel Kant we finally had the primacy of Reason. Kant, in particular, wrote the book on metaphysical and aesthetical analysis. He propounded autonomous thought, free from the dictates of external authority—in other words: Wo/Man should think for her/himself. This stuff was gold. Kant was the first dude to correctly guess that the solar system formed from gas out of a nebula's orifice, and that the Milky Way was a disc of star systems. He is also credited with first expanding human thought beyond the solar system to the galactic and the extra-galactic. Kant paid little heed to his orifices.
Revolutions wracked the western world and in the 19th century, Romanticism's emphasis on emotion and the Counter-Enlightenment gained force. Reason was out. For a short, glorious time, orifices were back! Revived were the tales of the Celts and Vikings—and the Brothers Grimm pulled together most of what we now think of as folklore. Present-day Wicca and neo-druidism find their roots in the myths and fascinations with non-classical antiquity of this time.
But it wasn't long before the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the primacy of machines, and capitalism and materialism displaced religions as the main organizing forces of society. Our natural world became fuel and "natural resources." And boy did the Modern Age really stick it to the poor pagans. First, European imperialism led the racial oppression of aboriginal orifices worldwide, then electricity rendered the sun's comings and goings even more of an incidental curiosity, and finally, corporations appropriated the Christmas tree and Sinterklaas to sell shit. The world wars got everyone so into each other's bidness that nobody had time to even think about their orifices. Existentialism took the driver's seat.
By the sixties, all the attention given to politics, warfare, technology and science was bumming people out. Their souls were hungry, their orifices neglected. But the counterculture rejected organized religion as part of the establishment, and the people instead turned on to personalized, folk- and indigenous-inspired religions of the self, like neo-paganism.
In the seventies, naturists and back-to-the-landers used their orifices to yell a lot and modern environmentalism was born. In the eighties, a tidal wave of consumption temporarily drowned out the few crystal-healers and other orifice-oriented pagans. But by the nineties, waves of people inspired by their cool, authentic, celtic-patterned rings, trips to Stonehenge, and Enya CDs on repeat, started to look back up at the sky, searching for something bigger than themselves, their orifices tingling.
Since Y2K, the revival of Beltane festivals has given thousands of young people (and plenty of hairy, older folks) good reason to visit Scotland and Ireland and go out on the piss, get naked and raise their orifices up to lofty, pre-Christian heights. Information technology now isolates us so profoundly from our communities that our souls are left to wander witless through a metaphysical wasteland. Some of us are left with lives so bereft of meaning that we return to the state of our Bronze Age ancestors, reaching through the gloom and grasping at patterns in the movements of the sky, again crafting rites and celebrations, trying to hitch our own tiny movements onto the cycles and patterns of nature.
And now, Alan, we return to the timing of Tripleshot riding round and round Beacon Hill Park in the dark. After tracing the origins of paganism above, I hope it's now obvious what's driving your self-delusion. You've slipped backwards a few millennia. Like a petulant child, you choose to ignore all the progress we've made since antiquity. Yes, the Enlightenment set us up to do some bad shit—particularly where exploitation of our fellow humans and the environment are concerned—but it also freed us from the irrational and distracting pursuit of completely arbitrary and fundamentally meaningless religious practice. Kant and others showed us what we are: autonomous agents in a physical world that is completely indifferent to our existence. The Universe doesn't give a tinker's cuss what we're doing when the sun stands still in declination on Dec. 21. The annual event is only noticeable looking out from our tiny marble, spinning through the vast infinity of space. And taking all of existence into consideration, it really doesn't matter.
But this doesn't mean I approach these laps around BHP as a nihilist. I simply find my meaning in the performance of the feat itself, not whether it coincides with the movements of the solar system. I want to ride 100K around the park with my friends because I want to ride 100K around the park with my friends, not because our bloody planet is at a certain angle! My meaning comes from the camaraderie and spirit borne of striving together with my fellow riders in pursuit of a common goal. In fact, scheduling the event around competing obligations and identifying the day and time that best balances my and my fellow riders' practical needs (Dec. 28?) is an expression of our mastery of the Universe. It says: We are in control. We are the masters of our own destiny. The meaning of our existence does not reference the world around us, it is us.
Last night over pints, you confided how much your ass hurt following the Summer Solstice Stupid Century last June. You said over and over again how you could hardly ride home, how your orifice hurt for days afterwards.
There was pain in your words, Alan, but there was also a twinkle in your eye—you romantic, you.
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barton bourassa
- Posts: 1141
- Joined: Fri Nov 09, 2007 10:16 am
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
So Rolf, are you telling us you won't be out for a few laps of Beacon on Saturday?!!?
I am pleased that the universe does not give a tinker's cuss about me riding round and round on any given day. On Dec 21 I will not give a Bourassa's cuss for the universe as I ride round and round and round and round again in the "camaraderie and spirit borne of striving together with my fellow riders in pursuit of a common goal".
It is just a day!
Hope to see there and then again maybe on the 28th!
Barton.
I am pleased that the universe does not give a tinker's cuss about me riding round and round on any given day. On Dec 21 I will not give a Bourassa's cuss for the universe as I ride round and round and round and round again in the "camaraderie and spirit borne of striving together with my fellow riders in pursuit of a common goal".
It is just a day!
Hope to see there and then again maybe on the 28th!
Barton.
Barton Bourassa
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
Great post Rolf, but you started losing me at 'orifices', and then by the time you got to Kant, my mind was wandering like a lonely planet tracing its sad arc across the universe. Frankly, the size and length of your verbiage exerted some gravitational pull, and soon my mind was orbiting the only tune I know that features both orifices and philosophers. So.... in praise of Adult ADHD, (whoever said it's not a 'real' disease is wrong) I give you the opening verse to Monty Python's Philosopher's song:
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Schopenhauer and Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya'
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
SOCRATES, HIMSELF, WAS PERMANENTLY PISSED...
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Schopenhauer and Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya'
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
SOCRATES, HIMSELF, WAS PERMANENTLY PISSED...
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
Oh, no, Barton. I and my orifice hope to be there for a few laps of fun on Saturday! It's gonna be great. The actual minute the sun will stand still in declination is 9:11 a.m. It would be pretty cool to finish then—but it would mean starting earlier. For example, holding 31.4136125654 km/h from 6:00 a.m. to 9:11 a.m. would just about do it! Anyone have a gadget that could squawk if we go below a set speed?
(My point above was purely to point out the pointlessness of pointilist pontification... and to goad Alan into writing more funny stuff. )
(My point above was purely to point out the pointlessness of pointilist pontification... and to goad Alan into writing more funny stuff.
)Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
As Kant (and Al Wilhelm) would say: Mission erfüllt!
Last edited by Rolf on Wed Dec 18, 2013 4:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
Rolf;
Having spent last weekend dealing with a nasty case of norovirus, all this talk of orifices is making me queasy all over again.
That said, it's interesting to note that Freud contended that during the first 18 months of development, human infants are "orally fixated" - I wonder what he'd make of your mid-life "orificial fixation"?
See you Saturday.
Having spent last weekend dealing with a nasty case of norovirus, all this talk of orifices is making me queasy all over again.
That said, it's interesting to note that Freud contended that during the first 18 months of development, human infants are "orally fixated" - I wonder what he'd make of your mid-life "orificial fixation"?
See you Saturday.
"Talk - Action = Zero" - Joe Keithley
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barton bourassa
- Posts: 1141
- Joined: Fri Nov 09, 2007 10:16 am
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
This is simply hilarious! I am LMAoff! Fantastic, Rolf!
Great poem Alan!
Yes, I do imagine, reluctantly that you John have had lot of oroficial experience this past few days!
I do hope to see lots of folks out Saturday and the following Saturday! Why not eh?!!
Great poem Alan!
Yes, I do imagine, reluctantly that you John have had lot of oroficial experience this past few days!
I do hope to see lots of folks out Saturday and the following Saturday! Why not eh?!!
Barton Bourassa
Re: Winter Solstice 100 Dec 21
Deontologically speaking, riding a hundred laps on Saturday could be a categorical imperative.