Category Archives: Expert Analysis

*Ira Glass voice* It’s like this. You’re on your bike. Out for a ride in the hills of Baraboo, Wisconsin. And you get going pretty fast on a long downhill. And then it happens. You start to shimmy. */Ira Glass*

Interviewee #1: I’m not a very technical rider, right? But I have this pretty good bike, and I like to go fast.

*Ira Glass* This is Tim.

TIm: So when I ride downhill, I like to pretend that I’m Alexandre Vinokourov.

*Ira Glass* Just a note for our listeners. Alexandre Vinokourov is the world-famous Khazak cyclist who got caught for blood doping at this year’s Tour de France. */Ira Glass*

Tim: So I get down in this aerodynamic position, leaning way out over the front handle bars. And I look down at my speedometer and I’m going like 40.

*Ira Glass* So, let me get this straight. You were going 40 miles per hour on your bicycle?

Tim: Yeah, well, it’s not that fast, actually. Unless you’re like me and you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.

*Ira Glass* Cause that’s when you start to shimmy?

Tim: Yeah. My bike starts to, like, vibrate. It feels like it’s going to explode, and here I am going 40 half-way down this huge, curvy hill, and I can’t see what’s around the next corner.

*Ira Glass* So what exactly causes the shimmy?

Interviewee #2 (the expert): Shimmying is caused by one of three things.

*Ira Glass voice* This is Fred Metheny.

Fred: Your bike either needs a frame adjustment, or its wheels are out of true, or your headset needs adjustment.

Tim: Well, if by headset he means my brain, then yeah.

*Ira Glass* Well, today on our show, Shimmying. What to do when your life suddenly seems to go out of control. From WBS in Madison, it’s This American Live. Our show today in two acts. Act one, “The School at Night.” Tim Storm has the story of what it’s like to be in an empty classroom on the brink of the new school year. Act two, “Underestimating Water.” We look at the deceptive nature of water, and why news of flooding never does it justice.

A week ago, this worldwide association of astonomers voted to add three new planets to the solar system. Pluto’s moon (or twin planet, depending on how you look at it) Charon would be included, as would some other big floating rocks by the names of Ceres and Xena (named after the Warrior Princess).

Last week’s proposal would have led to potentially hundreds of new planets had it passed. But it didn’t pass. Instead, the astronomers of the world started questioning the definition of “planet.” The simplest one was something like this: “any spherical object that orbits the sun and doesn’t orbit other space objects (thus ruling out moons, which orbit planets).” Way too general. There would have been planets everywhere, for crying out loud!

The alternative to this outlandish proposal was to oust Pluto by setting some sort of size limit and by saying that the object must have cleared everything else out of its path around the sun. Pluto is smaller than our moon and it passes through this big asteroid belt, so its path isn’t clear.

Personally, I was leaning toward eliminating Pluto since its orbit is slow as hell. It takes 248 years for that slow-ass ball of rocks and gas to get around the sun. I mean, in the Tour de France, if you don’t meet the time cut-off, you’re out. And in the Ironman, if you don’t cross the finish line by 12:00 midnight, that’s it. You’re not an Ironman.

It would suck to have to bag the race minutes from the finish line after 17 hours of competing, but hey, if you want to play with the big boys, you gotta meet some standards. Pluto’s been in the race for 76 years, but I’m through waiting for it to get its act together and step it up.

I was doing laundry just now and I completely forgot to add the clothes. The washer ran through its entire cycle without anything but soap and water in it. How about that?

Two depressing events took place on the not-popular-in-the-United-States sporting front today. Depressing for me, anyway.

First, a whole bunch of top cyclists were suspended from the tour de France, which starts tomorrow. The two top favorites, Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, are out, as are Oscar Sevilla, Francisco Mancebo, and Joseba Beloki. I was rooting for Jan, who would have won several tours if it weren’t for Lance. I figured this year, he deserved a victory. But now he’s out.

There are about 50 more people implicated in this scandal; it could end up leaving the field pretty up-in-the-air. As far as I know, the entire Discovery Channel Team is still in the tour, as is Floyd Landis. Most of the sprinters are also still in the race, so there will still be some good stuff to watch.

Personally, I think they’re all on drugs. The tour is just a sick event. If you take out the two or three time trials, the average distance of a ride is around 120 miles. They have a few rest days here and there, but otherwise, they’re biking hard and long for three weeks. And the average speed over the course of the three week period is somewhere around 24 or 25 miles per hour.

They’re incredible athletes to begin with, but as five-time champion Jacques Anquetil once said, “you don’t win the Tour de France on mineral water.” A German sports journalist by the name of Hans Halter, wrote that “for as long as the Tour has existed, since 1903, its participants have been doping themselves. No dope, no hope. The Tour, in fact, is only possible because, not despite the fact, there is doping.”

Speaking of German journalists, they’ll all be writing about Germany’s victory over Argentina today. It ended in a shoot-out, which is always a bad way to end a game. I wanted Argentina to go on, but it wasn’t clear that they were the better team. Neither was Germany, for that matter, but someone has to advance.

Ideally from here (according to me), Portugal goes all the way. But if it can’t be Portugal, I’m rooting for Brasil.

England plays Portugal tomorrow: Brasil plays France. The semifinals are on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The problem is, we don’t have cable TV. So we can’t watch many World Cup games at home. ABC shows games on the weekend, but if you want to see, say, Ecuador vs. Costa Rica, you need cable. And half the time, you need Univision, the U.S. Spanish-language cable network.

Since it’s good Spanish comprehension practice in addition to often being the only option we have, Eileen and I have frequently gone over to her parents’ house to watch the Univision live broadcasts of the games. It’s been fun. We engage in a similar ritual of camping in front of the Ruzicka TV every summer for the Tour de France.

With the World Cup, however, we’ve had the unique experience of seeing both Univision broadcasts and ESPN/ABC broadcasts, all of which are targeting people living in the U.S. but different cultures within the U.S.. Univision roots for pretty much all of the South and Central American teams, since it’s mostly targeting hispanic immigrants. There’s a little more emphasis on Mexico, but they celebrate victories by Ecuador, Argentina, and Brasil pretty equally.

It’s been interesting noting the difference between the Univision coverage and the ESPN coverage. This country is obviously not too into soccer (which really should be called football, just, you know, cuz of logic), but I’m not here to criticize us for that. Yes, I happen to like watching soccer way more than baseball, golf, football, or basketball, but sports spectating is a social phenomenon.

I was just having this discussion with some other teachers on the last day of school. One of them remarked that he just can’t get into soccer. I told him about how insane it was to be in Quito when Ecuador beat Brasil and Argentina. There was a real feeling of unity. People were waving Ecuadorian flags out their car windows and honking. You could have gone up to complete strangers and hugged them. It was great.

And it made it hard not to get into it. If you are surrounded by people who love a sport, chances are that you’ll get into it. I admit to watching several “March Madness” games — in part because of the hype — even though I normally don’t watch much basketball.

Of course, there are other factors involved in fandom. You’ve got to understand the game; you’ve got to appreciate its difficulty and the skill of the players; it helps if you get to know the players’ names and faces. But I still contend that the social aspect of sports is really the most important.

All sports are absurd. When you sit back and think about them, they’re silly. Many of them involve attempting to put a ball in a designated place. Isn’t that just a little bit wierd?

If the U.S. wants to remain stalwart in its shunning of the most popular game in the world, that’s actually fine with me. I’m not going to complain about it. That being said, Univision’s coverage of the World Cup kicks ass. The few times I’ve seen the ABC/ESPN coverage, it’s been more about gossip than about the games. One example was ABC’s touching little human interest story on Landon Donavan’s selfless dedication to his future brother-in-law. Another was the “controversy” surrounding Eddie Johnson’s outrageous comparison between soccer and war. Like sports and war have never been compared before. Give me a break. I think one could argue that sports are a healthy manifestation of the same sorts of instincts that cause war and that the war metaphor works. In fact, with that metaphor in mind, consider the following statement: the U.S. chooses its own sports.