There are elements I strive for in each of my posts to entertain my 10 readers. Gentle self deprecating humor. Common sense in the face of social science stupidity. Outrage at lunacy and waste of taxpayer money. And always, always, reminding people of how much I love Stoker.

There is none of that in this post. Three of my cycling friends have been diagnosed with cancer in the last few months. They are all in various stages of diagnosis, surgeries and post surgical treatment regimes.

The prognoses of the three are unknown and uncertain. They could be cured or go into remission. They might lead long and healthy lives. Or they may not. All we can do is hope and pray and offer support.

Another cycling friend is having heart difficulties with some complications. He has had procedures and medications to try to bring the problem under control, but for now his cycling is on hold even with an e bike. It might not be as serious as cancer but it still sounds serious and troubling.

Yet another cycling friend listed his extraordinarily beautiful and nearly brand new custom build road bike for sale on Facebook due to ‘recent health challenges’. I have no idea what those are, but if he is selling this truly beautiful bicycle, ridden less than 200 miles, they much be significant.

My dad’s first cousin Dino Cortopassi passed away recently. The Celebration of Life was Saturday. It was very nice. My parents were very close to Dino and his wife Joan and their family, and it is hard to think of him not being here anymore.

Another cousin has cancer and is in and out of hospital.

We are all getting older and as we do health problems become more frequent and magnified. We spend more time going to doctors’ appointments and in hospital waiting areas. And, sadly, at funerals.

There isn’t anything we can do about this except try to enjoy the moments we have and do good and kind things whenever we can. Because eventually we can’t.

If you are looking for a blog that is going to pontificate about events concerning Russia, Ukraine, NATO, the U.S. and China, you are in the wrong place. But until the world comes to an end, I want to know what is OK to put over ice while we watch the evening news.

It seems that well meaning and patriotic bar and liquor store owners across the western world are pouring Russian vodka down the drain in solidarity with the Ukrainians fighting for their country.

Now here on Brumby Road, the vodka of choice is Stolichnaya. Always has been. ‘Stoli’ acquired cachet back in the late 1970’s when it first became available in the US and the Soviets needed hard currency to go onto the wheat futures market and steal our grain at rock bottom prices. I remember it sold for $25 for a 750 ml bottle, which was astonishingly expensive at the time. Even Jack Daniels was only about $10 per bottle back then.

Today at BevMo, you can get a 1.75 liter bottle for $23, which demonstrates that not all essential goods are participating in the current 7.5% annual inflation rate. And the quality seems as good as ever. Although with vodka it can be hard to differentiate, since it has kind of a numbing effect. Great for aches and pains and attitude adjustment though.

So I looked on the back of the bottle that we keep in the freezer, ready and waiting for the News Hour, and look what I found:

Produced and bottled in Latvia! Hooray! Latvia is a NATO member and one of the countries in the line of fire if Putin really wants to recreate the USSR, so I can buy their vodka with a clear conscience knowing I am helping an ally.

Then my friend Gavin from the UK (not that other Gavin, the mask man) informed me that the water is Latvian, but the alcohol is Russian! Gavin does something in banking and currencies and knows quite a bit more about this kind of thing than I do.

Now even if what Gavin (the Good Gavin, not that guy in Sacto) says is true, to me this seems like an excellent example of detente, “where East and West can meet as comrades, ease the tension, over drinks”. This is an obscure musical theater reference and the kind of thing that rumbles around in my head. Anybody recognize it? Here’s a clue…

I wanted to know more, so I went to Google and Wikipedia. Here is some of what I found:

Stolichnaya, for example, is a historic Russian brand owned by two different companies – one based in Russia, and one based in Luxembourg. The Stolichnaya vodka you find in the US, for example, is made in Latvia.

Luxemborg! The gnomes of Zurich are close to hand. You can’t get more Capitalist than that. And:

Stoli vodka is currently produced in Latvia, a former Soviet republic that joined NATO in 2004.

And now to add to the confusion:

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union the ownership of the brand has been disputed between a Russian state-owned company and SPI Group, a private company. The Stolichnaya sold in the US is made by the latter company, which distills it in Lativa (though it does use alcohol from a distillery in Russia).

So here is what I think happens. Low quality alcohol from Russia is sent to the magic vodka plant in Latvia. The distillery feed stock is made from fermented grain, possibly distilled once or twice. At the plant in Latvia the REAL distillation process and filtering takes place, then the Latvian water is added to produce the final 80 proof product.

That’s good enough for me. Stolichnaya is a NATO friendly product. So unless BevMo and Raley’s decide that anything that sounds Russian must be gone from the shelves, I’m going to bring a bottle home. Or 2…

Last Saturday was a Red Letter Day on Brumby Road. First I sported a new fashion look on the Club ride, then got a new version of my LOOK back after an OCS component update.

First the fashion faux pax: when I got to the ride start in Valley Springs I put on my jersey, but I was having trouble with the zipper. The little tab at the bottom had kind of worn away, so the jersey kept opening up from the bottom. The sides of the jersey were flapping in the wind, especially going down hill.

The flapping was irritating. And I was worried that my phone and wallet might fall out of the back pockets. So I had to take desperate measures.

I wear bib shorts, and the shoulder straps are supposed to be worn under the jersey. But I pulled the straps up and over the top of the jersey and tucked the bottom under the bibs, creating the ‘walnut farmer’ cyclist look.

Of course I got a lot of teasing about this, and someone took a picture and put it on the Club Facebook page. There was even talk that the page administrator might change the cover photo, but nothing came of it.

I once came upon a rider on a Backroads Tour in France who was wearing his bib and jersey the same way, and I my have made some disparaging comments about this in my blog. And as I have been reminded, world class endurance cyclist, multiple times RAAM Champion and Valley Springs resident Seana Hogan wears her bib shorts this same way. She has a practical reason for doing so; remember she spends long, long periods of time in the saddle and occasionally nature calls. Her sartorial method saves time. Form follows function…

Seana is a big champion and can do what she wants, but on me the look is ridiculous. Roberta posted the picture from a Terry Catalog of someone who can definitely pull off the bib short look, but I hope I don’t have to resort to it again.

Later that afternoon Mark Stemey of OCS returned my new look LOOK. I got the bike back in 2009, and I decided that it could use some upgraded components. Mainly I needed lower gears if I was ever going to take the bike up some serious climbs,. The Dura Ace 10 speed drive train was limited to a 28 tooth cog in the cassette. I need a 32 tooth cog at least, and a 34 tooth is even better.

So I got some new stuff; SRAM Red levers and derailleurs and a cassette and a new chain and a new handlebar and bar tape, and asked Mark to do the installation. He picked up the LOOK and brought it back a week later, on the same day I sported a new cycling fashion look. I’m LOOKing forward to years with the LOOK but I hope the other look was a one off…

It is no secret that California really needs significant rain, and the clock is ticking toward spring and summer fast. If you were outside yesterday, you might think summer was here already.

This year’s weather has been quite variable. There was record rainfall in October which affected the walnut harvest. November was completely dry. December brought record snowfall and significant rain to the valley. January and February have returned to the dry pattern. Great for cycling, not so good if you like to take showers or irrigate orchards.

Facebook has started doing something kind of clever in an effort to keep people clicking away. They offer you ‘memories’ of posts you made on a certain day in previous years. Here is a sample:

February 2013 looks like the beach weather we are currently enjoying while simultaneously feeling guilty for doing so and worrying about the drought. February 2019 looks like an ice age is coming and glaciers are returning to the Sierras. February 2017 looks like God decided to break his promise to Noah never to destroy the earth with a flood again.

Three Februaries, three extreme weather events. The same thing can happen in March. Years back before Facebook there was a drought ended by a ‘March Miracle’ of late season record rain and snowfall. It was a great year for the water supply and a terrible year for cherry growers. Those lazy bees just didn’t want to get their stingers wet. I don’t have any ‘Facebook Memories’ of that year, but I know our line of credit got a workout with no cherry crop to sell.

Sometimes I think that ‘professional’ educators are going out of their way to make writing a blog the easiest thing in the world. Consider:

One Connecticut school is under fire for handing out a “Pizza and Consent” assignment, where eighth-grade students were given a handout stating that pizza can be used as a “metaphor for sex,” which instructed students to list their favorite and least favorite pizza toppings “in relation to sex.”

“Here are some examples: Likes: Cheese = Kissing,” the assignment states. “Dislikes: Olives = Giving Oral,” stated the assignment given to eighth graders within the Enfield Public Schools.

“Now that you know this metaphor for sex, let’s explore your preferences! Draw and color your favorite type of pizza. What’s your favorite style of pizza? Your favorite toppings? What are your pizza no-nos? Now mirror these preferences in relation to sex!,” the assignment states.

Now if you think I am making this up, here is a picture of the pizza diagram, all ready to be topped (from below?) with sexy metaphors.

A veritable tabula rasa, a blank canvass to express the divine and disgusting aspects of human sexual behavior. Brought to you by public schools and paid for with taxpayer dollars. In 8th grade too! Grammar and writing skills and arithmetic are out, and associating erotica with mozzarella is in.

Can you believe that ‘professional’ educators created this stuff? They think The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn needs to be banned but a discussion of peccadilloes and preferences is completely appropriate.

Now eating pizza and the participating in the metaphorical activities associated with the toppings are my idea of a perfect day. When it comes to pizza, Stoker and I are in complete agreement: Pizza Guys. We get the regular crust with tomato sauce, topped with pepperoni, yellow onions, and fresh green peppers. We will sprinkle on Parmesan but never dried red pepper flakes. Other toppings are acceptable, but these are our favorites. However we would never tolerate anchovies. And pineapple is blasphemy.

When it comes to the using toppings as metaphors, I’ll just say that whatever Stoker wants, and whenever she wants it, is fine by me. I didn’t need a ‘modern’ 8th grade assignment to know that.

Last week, the Washington Post spoke with several economists who listed their ideas on how to solve the economic issues facing the nation. One idea listed for the White House to “combat inflation” was price controls. The idea was suggested by the Roosevelt Institute’s Todd Tucker, in which he argued that the time may be at hand to “destigmatize” concerns over price controls.

“To ensure that the wealthy do not bid up prices for essential items, the time is now to begin destigmatizing greater democratic control over price levels,” Tucker concluded.

You might think economists know a lot. They have complicated mathematical models and theories (Pareto Optimality, anyone?) and can be seen making predictions and proclamations on television with great confidence. They speak in a kind of code. Terms like ‘money supply’, ‘quantitative easing’, ‘deficit spending’, ‘currency fluctuation’, ‘excess demand’ and ‘the federal funds rate’ come tripping off of their tongues.

Of course the track record of these economists in predicting what is going to ensue is not so great. They can always blame this on ‘exogenous shocks’ which means that some variable that the economic model does not take into account changes suddenly and dramatically and disrupts the equations. Covid is a perfect example. But since life itself is kind of a series of exogenous shocks, the usefulness of economists is mostly a moot point.

Really, economists do not know so much. But one thing they do know is how to create a shortage. And that is for the government to set the price of a commodity or service below the ‘market price’.

What is this ‘market price? you may ask. I could get all wonky on you and speak of demand curves and supply curves and functions and marginal cost of production equaling marginal price. But since a picture is worth a thousand words, take a peak at this diagram and you’ll get the idea:

Let’s take a real world example using one of Stoker’s and my favorite commodities: Côtes du Rhône vin rouge. The typical bottle that finds its way to our Raley’s market sells for about $12. At that price Stoker and I will purchase a bottle a day, to keep the Covid away. Remember my last blog? Got to keep stocked up.

Now $12 is the free market price, balancing production and consumption. Stoker and I would pay much more, but because there are consumers who will switch to something else at a higher price, we don’t have to. Similarly, there are producers who are willing to produce the wine for less than $12, but they don’t have to accept less. The market price balances the value of the product to the last consumer with the production cost of the last producer. In Econ speak, the market clears when Price = Marginal Cost of Production = Marginal Value to Consumer.

Now let’s say that the government determines that this $12 price represents a case of the ‘wealthy‘ bidding up the price of an ‘essential item‘ and so decides to exercise ‘greater democratic control over price levels‘. They decree that henceforth the price of a bottle of Côtes du Rhône vin rouge will be a more Equitable $5. Selling it for more is now a crime.

This well intended action will have consequences. Demand will increase, because now some people who don’t want a bottle at $12 will be quite happy to pay $5 for it. And supply will fall, because only the most efficient producers will be able to make a profit at $5 per bottle.

The result of this market disruption is that the economy moves from a point of Pareto Optimality to a non Pareto Optimal point. Consumer Surplus and Producer Surplus are both reduced, and everyone is less well off (aka ‘poorer’) than they would be had the government not gotten into the price setting business. Oops, I did get a bit wonky there. Guilty as charged.

If you think gas lines, bread lines, lines at the meat counter or in the Côtes du Rhône vin rouge store are a good idea, just write your congressperson and tell them you think high prices are unfair, inequitable, and perhaps even racist. And that the government needs to set the prices at a reasonable level. Life is only fair when everyone can afford everything and we are all economically equal. Equally poor…

“Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities” (1 Tim 5:23).

The Covid Vaccines do not seem to be doing a great job of preventing people from getting Covid. I know several people who got all the shots and still got the virus. And we hear nearly every day about another celebrity or politician or sports star who has been double jabbed and boosted coming down with the virus. The latest is Elton John, who had to cancel his concert in Dallas. My friend Kent and his wife had plane tickets and hotel reservations to see the show. They were lucky that Sir Elton cancelled one day before they left.

Note I did not say that vaccines are useless. All I said is that they do not stop people from getting Covid. There are too many counterexamples to deny that is true.

Stoker and I are both double vaxxed and boosted, which may not be enough to vanquish the virus from Brumby Road. But Côtes du Rhône Vin Rouge to the rescue!

The study discovered that those who consume five or more glasses of red wine a week had a 17% lesser risk of catching the virus.

Finally a Covid prevention program I can support wholeheartedly! Five glasses a week? No problem! Let’s ‘make assurance double sure’ and just say two glasses a day to be safe. A sacrifice Stoker and I are willing to make in the fight to stop the spread.

Unfortunately, if you are an IPA type, the news is not so good:

However, the report had some bad news of pint lovers. It revealed that those who drank any amount of beer and cider were at a 28% higher risk of getting Covid.

So if you are a beer drinker, you are being as socially irresponsible as the unvaxxed or unmasked. 28% higher versus 17% lower? That is a 45% difference. I expect Dr. Fauci to hold a press conference immediately calling for a big reset in American’s drinking preferences. Do the socially responsible thing and pull a cork today…

The 1970’s were the decade that I changed the most. In January 1970 I was 14 years old and in 8th grade. Ten years later on New Year’s Eve 1979, I had just finished my first year of employment with a consulting firm in Washington DC. During those ten years I graduated high school and university. I fell in love twice and got dropped by both women, causing me much angst. But now I’m so grateful for those two, because they paved the way for Stoker and a subsequent 39 years of marital harmony.

The 1970’s were a pretty traumatic decade for our country. There was the Vietnam War. Oil boycotts and gas lines. Iranian students took hostages at our embassy, a crisis that lasted more than a year. Inflation in the US reached 15%. By the end of the decade President Carter urged us to deal with the energy crisis by putting on a sweater and lamented our “national malaise”. Good times!

The 1970’s are well behind us, but for me ‘Age 70’ is just ahead. And many of my cycling buddies have either turned 70 or will shortly. The latest is Dean, who crosses that threshold today. So yesterday 4 of us decided to join him in a 70 mile bike ride to commemorate the occasion.

We started in Linden with our fellow Stockton Bike Club members for the Jenny Lind Pancake ride. We rode to the Jenny Lind Odd Fellows Hall for their fundraising pancake breakfast. Coffee, tomato juice (Bloody Mary jokes abound) eggs, sausage or ham, and two hotcakes for $7. This is one of our favorite mid ride refuel stops for certain!

That got us to mile 20. Instead of back tracking to Linden we headed south towards Milton. The five riders who decided to ‘go long’ were Birthday Boy Dean, Kent (age 66), Bill (70+), Marlin (70+) and me (65). Kent had laid out a route which was basically the Pedaling Paths to Independence Ride backwards. That would get us to 62 miles, and we would add a short Linden loop to get to the required total.

When we got to the intersection of Hwy 26 and Duncan Road, we had 62 miles in the books. It was time for me to apply my local knowledge of the roads to get us to something close to 70 miles, but certainly over that magic number. No one wants to roll around a parking lot for 3-5 minutes to get the odometer to turn over. I did a pretty good job; we did a little loop and pulled into the Orlando’s parking lot with 70.7 miles on our Garmins.

The miles=age tradition on our birthdays gets a little more daunting each passing year, but Dean had absolutely no problem with 70, and since I’m only 65 I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to manage 66 miles come next June. I hope I have companions like these gentlemen to accompany me. No pancakes though, my birthday is at the end of the month and the Odd Fellows breakfast is the second Sunday. Can’t have everything…

From Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins:

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.
Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm.
There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay?

Tom Robbins wrote Still Life With Woodpecker in 1980, and I read it as soon as it came out in paperback. I’m old enough to remember when the hardcover ($$$) edition came out first, and the paperback followed later when the money that could be extracted from hardcover sales became a trickle instead of a river. And e-books hadn’t even been conceived. Kindle and Amazon were decades away.

Significantly, I read it about the time Stoker and I started to date. Well before we got married. When we did get married in 1983 we set out on a journey to try to answer this ‘only one serious question’. We may not have found the exact solution, but we have made a good first approximation.

This year we celebrate our 39th anniversary, and for some reason this number seems so much larger than 38 did to me a year ago. Heavens, we are approaching 4 decades together!

Despite a pretty good track record at finding the answer to the only question that matters, I am always on the lookout for tips and techniques that could aid in promoting marital harmony. For instance, I recall this advice from Robert Heinlein’s novel Time Enough For Love (1973). His character, Lazarus Long, kept a notebook of what he learned during his long life. His succinct advice for a happy marriage: “Rub her feet”. Husbands, take my word for it, that one works.

This week Pope Francis chimed in. He says the three most important words in a marriage are the ones in the headline below. He forgot “Yes” which is what successful husbands and wives both find themselves saying a lot, even if they would rather say ‘no’.

From a Belizean street market to the Vatican, advice to answer the one serious question.

Then there was the advice from the pastor of The Living Word Church in San Pedro Town, Belize. We saw his TV sermon on the local access cable channel in our air conditioned hotel room with an ocean view. We really rough it in the tropics.

The Church still exists and they are on Facebook!

Stoker (actually this is pre-Stoker, since this was in 2004 and our tandem days were all in the future) and I were sipping Belikin Beer and listing to this wise man tell wives “The husband is gonna drink the water. If he don’t drink water on the property, he gonna go off the property. You gotta make sure he stay on the property to drink the water”. He had similar advice for the husbands, saying “If you don’t stay on the property to drink you gonna get tainted water and bring it home to the wife and your family and the property and poison the well”. We were pretty sure he wasn’t talking about hydration…

Lazarus Long, Pope Francis and the Belizean pastor have all offered good advice. And Stoker and I are going to try to keep finding the answer to the one serious question. Here is one possibility: Get a pizza to go from Pizza Guys. When I pick it up and choose the flavor of the free ice cream that comes with it, I pick Stoker’s favorite. When she picks up the pizza she chooses my favorite flavor. Select your spouse’s favorite flavor, and that will make love stay…

Someone suggested that I drop the subject of masks. I certainly aim to please my 10 readers, so how about opera? The one Jeopardy category I occasionally do well at. We’ll start with Un Ballo in Maschera…

Only kidding folks. There was a time before we started tandem riding that Stoker and I spent quite a few nights at the opera. And afternoons too.

My first exposure to opera came from the 1980’s film Amadeus. Prior to that all I knew about the subject was from a Marx Brothers’ film and the famous sports quote attributed to NBA coach Dick Motta; “The opera isn’t over until the fat lady sings”. Sexist, weightist, and body shaming by today’s wokeness standards of course.

Amadeus piqued my interest, and the next step was to see a television production of Don Giovanni on PBS. That hooked me. We went to see a our first live performance, a production of Cosi Fan Tutte by Townsend Opera Players (TOPS), a local company in Modesto. Cosi has what I still think is the most beautiful music of any opera.

It is hard to believe how much Stoker and I got into this. We were season ticket holders and fairly big donors for TOPS. Ditto for Stockton Opera. I was even on the TOPS Board of Directors for a while. We also bought season tickets to Sacramento Opera. We bought tickets to 4 operas each year at War Memorial to see the The San Francisco Opera, a world famous company. We even took consecutive summer vacations in Santa Fe to attend a couple of performances by Santa Fe Opera in their spectacular outdoor theater.

When we were going to attend an opera I was unfamiliar with, I would read the story and pay attention to the characters before the show. At a production of Idomeneo in Santa Fe, I came to realize not everyone did the same thing. There is a moment of high drama in the last act where Ilia intervenes to offer herself for sacrifice to the Gods instead of Idomeneo. Her dramatic entrance, throwing herself on the sacrificial altar, was met with laughter from the audience. I cringed.

We drifted away from opera. First we stopped going to SF, because it was too much hassle. I got more into cycling which made Sunday Matinees less attractive because I wanted to do club rides most weekends. And evening performances never ended before 11 pm, which seemed much later than it did when we were in our early 40’s.

But what really put me off was a performance of Cosi in Sacramento. Cosi has wonderful music, as I said. It is also a ‘cautionary tale told with humor’ about men and women, and how one lover is interchangeable with another. But the director of this production decided to turn it into something resembling an episode of the TV show ‘Friends’. This is a PG rated blog, so all I will say is that a lot of the singing took place while kneeling and looking at someone’s waistline.

Socially staid types like me have to be tolerant if we are to enjoy the beautiful music and moving stories of opera, since most of the attendees are of a more liberal mindset. I left my politics, which are not left, at home. But I decided that this excessively lurid treatment of Cosi was too much. So our last live opera was the same as our first. As Mimi sings in Act III of La Boheme, “Addio, senza rancor“.