Arrrr!

New discovery: languages for Facebook.

I think only assholes change their language, personally. The people who take Spanish or Italian and decide to switch it to Espanol or Italiano are, in general, jerks.

This was until I found the "English: Pirate" setting.

It's amazing. The links on top read Home Port, Me, Me Hearties, and Bottle o' Messages. Logout is now Abandon Ship. And posts we're made 40 minutes ago, they were made 40 Shots o' Rum Ago.

Try it out. It will never get old.

Numbers!

I just got Google Analytics. There are just so many numbers, charts, graphs... I don't even know what to do with myself.

There may be many numbers, but all of them are small. I had two visitors yesterday.

The things is, I can tell where both were from, what OS they have, the browser they used, and their ISP. It's so precise I'm pretty sure I can isolate who one of them was - I'm going to say the Mac-using, Firefox-having visitor was probably Bryan. Especially because one of my visitors came through algomaha.

The other one is a mystery. God knows who else would read this thing.

How awesome is this?

Congrats to former Kaos standout Matt Landen, who recently graced the (virtual) pages of PEZ Cycling News making a move on Levi Leipheimer at Sea Otter.

Makes me not feel so bad about not being able to hold his wheel on TT workouts.

Dee Zee

I love Dave Zabriskie.

UPDATE: In more somber news, Dave was the victim of a break-in while at the ToC. Two of his cars, 13 of his bikes, and his Olympic ring were stolen, among other things. What a bummer. I hope they find his stuff.

FUN FACT

Fun fact: Remember how Canadian superstud Svein Tuft took a surprising silver medal the World TT Championships? Yeah, me too.

I just read that Tuft's old squad, Symmetrics, has an annual budget less than Fabian Cancellara's yearly salary.

Which makes Svein Tuft just an unbelievable badass.

AP Photo/Marcelo Hernandez

OH MY GOD, WE'RE HAVING A FIRE... SALE

Evacuate the schoolchildren!

Speaking of evacuation, you know the Tea Fire you've seen on the news lately, that one in Montecito? It came within a half mile of burning down my grandmother's house. Check out some of the pictures of it. Also, my favorite climb was burned from the base most of the way to the top. And the top was burned over the summer.

To show you just how close it got: See the road in the bottom of this picture I stole from Getty/AFP? I ride it every single day when I'm in Santa Barbara. And it takes me ten minutes to get to this house from my grandma's front door.


I ride under these high tension power lines also. They're in the hills above the city.


And my dad, who just happened to be in town, took this picture from the back deck before they were evacuated for three days.


So it's been a harrowing couple of days, wondering if the house would burn or not. In the end, the flames were contained about half a mile from her house in the foothills. If you're interested or intrepid enough (Bryan, I'm thinking of you here), you can check out how close Kenmore Place is to the fire boundaries. It's in Mission Canyon, an areas adorned by permanent "Extreme Fire Danger" signs and one of the areas in the city designated by the fire department as "a loss:" if the flames get in, it cannot be defended and the whole canyon will be left to burn.

So I'm glad it didn't come to that, because we just bought our tickets to go out there for Christmas.

Hey guys, remember that time this happened to me? Yeah. Me too.