racing union has received a veritable cornucopia, a horn of plenty if you will, of interesting missives from our dear readers. many of the questions seem to center on the same topics, over and over, endlessly repeating the same motif, tediously redundant. you gte the idea. we address them, here, today. let's get started.
q. what's up with your club? what are you guys trying to accomplish?
a. we're trying something new. the details are here. the simplest analogy describing what this will lead to can be found here. change is what we are all about, and change can be hard. the more you resist, the harder it will be. resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.
q. i checked out my horoscope this morning. it says: "the road is long for those who choose to take the long road. and it's short for those who recognize the short cuts. all things being equal, why not get there faster?" does this mean i shoudl dope myself to the gills to become a better cyclist?
a. no. let's take this in stages. the horoscope in question is from the print edition of the march, 3 2006 washington post, style section, c11, leo. i can't link to it as a resource because apparently, the print edition of the post contains different horoscopes than the express which is different again from the washington post online. since the different versions of the post cannot seem to agree on how the stars should guide our actions, i would tend to conclude that it may be difficult to discern their astrological wisdom. as such, i must urge caution in making their will central to your race preparation and planning. on a totally different different note, if you're looking at drugs as a way to get strong enough to beat up on people at industrial park crits, your problems are waaaayyy more profound than we can address here. oh, and by the way, i forwarded your name and address to usada and the usoc ombudsman. best of luck.
q. what are you guys, commies?
a. this charming query came in shortly after we launched the site. thankfully, mail like this has essentially tapered off to zero. it is worth noting that it's difficult to assert with absolute certainty that the racing union is definitively one thing or another thing. it is what the members want it to be. if we want to race bikes, we're a bike racing club. if we want to work for charity, we're a charitable organization. if we want to sell all of our stuff and buy a boat and put on eye patches and forcibly board other boats to steal their booty while screamming "yaaaaarrrggghhh, prepare to be boarded", we're pirates. people tend to want to categorize things. that, in and of itself, is not bad or weak. however, one must be careful not to categorize, simply to have something fit into narrow and predefined ideas about how the world operates. that, is weak.
q. oh my god, your new uniforms are slammin'.
a. yes, yes they are. hincapie has done a very nice job. they always do. but we keep it real too. you're not going to overthrow the current regime and orthodoxy and thought patterns if you look like crap. i would have thought that one look at our exceedingly smooth educational materials would tell you that we understand the dynamics of getting the point across to people. resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.
q. how come you never capitalize anything in your posts?
a. making arbitrary distinctions between letters based only on their placement within a sentence structure is a clear sign of a mindset that is inclined towards classist distinctions. really, it's only a hop, skip and a jump from capitalizing sentences to being an indentured servant on some duke's grand estate. once you reach the point where you need (need??!!) to elevate some letters over others, you've lost the battle and the war. talk about punked...
one day, you're writing out a letter to a friend, mindlessly allowing the first letter of each sentence to dominate the others in size and the next, well, your probably on your knees in some terrible agricultural backwater, pulling weeds from sun up to sun down for the right to occupy a hovel with the other workers on some landed gentry's estate. liberate your mind, and your ass will follow. the fact that i need to write these words indicates the truly sisyphean nature of our task.
we gratefully accept it. it is so rarely the case that something that needs doing is simple and fun. challenges are hard, and it's that particular quality that makes it rewarding. bike racers, of all people, should be able to appreciate this. if it was easy, everyone would have it or could do it, no? that's why they call it racing and not winning. got more questions? well that's great, because we have lots of answers. put your queries in the comments and we'll get you what you need.
- - - posted by scott