What did I tell you about these ‘Sprint’ finishes?

After what are basically 5 of 7 no results, Armstrong and Team Radio Shack are 2:30 out of the race lead and :50 behind his main rival, Alberto Contador of Team Astana (Schleck and Cancellara the race leader of Saxo are also considered contenders to watch).

Justin Davis of AFP thinks Armstrong is looking at week 3 to make his move but I don’t know, age and guile may suggest otherwise.

It’s not that today’s stage is particularly hard climbing, but tomorrow is and then there is a day off Monday and more mountains Tuesday.

And goodbye Alps.

That recovery day sure looks tempting and if I were a team boss I’d have a plan for it I’d have to reveal today- am I going to bring it or keep up and hope for the best?

Today’s special extended coverage (wtf?) is 103 miles of Tournus to Station des Rousses with 6 climbing sections, most of them 2s and 3s.

Armstrong- “I think there’ll be some guys attacking on Sunday, and Tuesday could be a complicated day, difficult and right after a rest day which is sometimes deceiving for guys.

But this race is so weighted towards the last week that my impression and my opinion would be to wait (to attack)”

I wouldn’t wait too long.  It’s not that Tiger is such a good player, but he’s bringing his A game on Thursday not playing for the cut.

The official commentary–

An initial cull

This medium-altitude mountain terrain will be more difficult than Liège-Bastogne-Liège, because the climbs last for between 6 and 12 kilometres, starting at the 40 km mark. Thereafter, there is not even a single centimetre of flat road; it will be up, down, up, down and so on and so forth. At the finishing line, there may still be around thirty riders together. The slopes are not massively difficult, so it is not necessarily a stage for a major climber, more so for a rider like Cadel Evans or David Moncoutié. However, an initial cull will take place and those who are not on form, who will not reach the front of the race, may already be looking at a Tour that is lost.

Your only crack at Keith and Rachel tonight.  Dateline extended maximum exposure lockup trapped until Monday stalker.

• AMC– The Cowboys
• Bravo– Legends of the Fall
• CNBC– The Rainmaker
• ESPN– The Dollar General 300
• ABC Family– Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• FX– Miracle
• Oxygen– While You Were Sleeping
• SciFi– Eureka 3rd season finale and 4th season opener.
• Turner Classic– Abe Lincoln in Illinois and Young Mr. Lincoln
• TNT– Titanic
• USA– Ocean’s Thirteen

Disney has a fair sampling of Phineas and Ferb (premier of “Hawaiian Vacation” @ 9) so I’ll probably watch that instead of anything good.

Later-

Fresh Leno (but why?).  Good Eats– Dutch Ovens.  SciFi repeating Eureka premier, Haven (new to me) and Warehouse 13 (new this week).  Look Around You, Computers.  

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Suicide attack kills 65 in Pakistan tribal belt

by Lehaz Ali, AFP

1 hr 50 mins ago

You may think I’m sports obsessed, but I look at it as a cultural metaphor.

We should never forget the Blues v. Greens.  Losing Theodora was the real end of the Roman Empire.

This guy can command an hour of primetime.

The thing about professional athletes is that they get eyeballs and eyeballs are money.  And as rich as you think these communistic unionists are, they don’t overcharge quite as much as the banksters.

My anarcho-syndicalist side says the players should own the teams and collectively self organize and what else are you going to call the Heat next year under guru Pat Riley?

The best team money can buy?  They have salary caps, why do you think the Knicks suck (other than they just do)?

Drew Carey says goodbye to Cleveland for a chance to do really good improv with his buddies?  What could be a more all-American success story?  You might even say goal directed- a ring for the thing (do you have Prince Albert in a can?)

Last day before the fireworks begin.

I’m not actually convinced Lance can pull this one out.  I’ve done comeback tours and inertia and entropy are not to be despised.  That said he goes out on top as a contender because nobody since Ullrich has put in the scare that he has.

He broke his collar bone last year you know.

The big picture hasn’t changed- another Sprinter’s finish signifying nothing yesterday and the same to look forward to today.  Tomorrow we begin climbing which should tell us a lot.

We will definitely have to start learning other cyclists’ names to prove that we’re real fans and not merely moved by the Islanders’ remarkable streak in the ’70s (better than rooting for the Rangers).

Today’s 142 mile stage between Montargis and Gueugnon has 4 four rated climbs and climbs from start to finish.  It might be possible to make a team time trial break away statement going into the Alps but it’s unlikely any one is going to take a gamble like that given how beat up they were on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Keith & Rachel.

9 pm, History– The Universe, “Lightspeed”.

10 pm, Futurama– “Proposition Infinity” World Premier.

• ESPN– World Cup Prime Time Special
• ABC Family– Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
• Food– Good Eats, Cheese and Tacos
• SciFi– National Treasure
• TBS– The Chronicles of Riddick
• AMC– Outbreak
• Turner Classic– Gidget

Now you may claim I’ve unjustly excluded The Waterboy but no Adam Sandler movie can ever be unjustly excluded and these lists are things I’d actually watch, not gouge out my eyes to avoid.

Later-

Live Leno.  Jon has Marilynne Robinson, Stephen Arturo Rodríguez.

Next week is re-runs and the week after that they are pre-empted, so last original episodes for 2 weeks at least.

Midnight to 1 Futurama from current season.  Dill Pickles on Good Eats.  Rebroadcast of last night’s Warehouse 13 premier.

• Turner Classic– Beach Blanket Bingo and Bikini Beach.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 US to deliver billions in equipment to tackle Afghan bombs

by Lynne O’Donnell, AFP

Thu Jul 8, 12:29 pm ET

As my regular readers know I have 5 or 6 lives and one of them is as a computer technician.  I started out writing poetry for machines and some of my earliest training is in COBOL on Hollerith Cards.  My favorite set of tools a ‘C’ compiler with good symbolic debugging.

But there’s no money in that anymore and I got trapped in the world of hardware, building and fixing machines which there is also no money in anymore when you can buy a disposable piece of junk for $400.

For some people that’s just a month’s phone bill.

But you can get acceptable results just from assembling the piles of parts people accumulate and the resulting systems were quite wizzy bang in their time and you only have to use one quasi reliable but very common OS- Windows XP.

I don’t recommend running it in an environment of less than 256 Mb or a 450 Mhz + processor, but there’s a ton of non-dual core tech that works just fine for the usual things.

What are those?

I use Office ’97.  What else do I need?

If I’m doing a really professional presentation I use Pagemaker 6.5.

I use Firefox 1.5.0.12.  It still works, why fix it?

These all work just fine in that environment, the limitations are your memory (sometimes less than 768 Mb) and your bandwidth.  Sometimes they will only handle 60 Gb hard drives without BIOS fixes and run at the slower 33 and 66 ATA rates.

Of course my own problems fascinate me more than most and I’m still dealing with massive load time fail with Yahoo News and the kona29.kontera.com element.

My current line of attack on that may seem a little round Robin Hood’s Barn, but it serves several goals.

I have some drive space for an install of Ubuntu.  Ubuntu comes with a more up to date version of Firefox and has some organizational tools that would be helpful in producing the content.  Ubuntu is stable and virus free and has some good cross OS scans available which I could use on my own system and my nephew’s (pretty surely virused, and a laptop to boot).

So I look at this as kind of an information exchange.

Whether yesterday could be called a good day depends I guess on if you are rooting for Lance and how hard.

It is easy, as Lance himself suggests, to look at the 17 riders ahead of him in the GC (General Classification or overall standings) and say- that’s a lot of people to get past, but it’s not really as bad as all that.

First he’s only 2:30 behind the race leader, Cancellara, at all; which makes up about 30 seconds of yesterday’s 3:+ deficit.  Secondly, not all of those 17 are contenders in the overall race.  A majority of them are sprinters who have been helped out by the fact that 2 of the 4 stages so far (including yesterday) have had dead classic ‘Sprinter’ finishes where the Peloton has caught up any break aways and teams have used drafting and team tactics to position their sprinters for a mile or less dash to the line.

The winners of these stages rarely gain more than :30 to :45 over the main body which all get the same time because of the ‘neighborhood of second base’ NASCAR scoring.

Today’s 116.5 mile ride from Epernay to Montargis is fairly flat with 2 climbs rated at 4.  It is one of the last 2 Stages before the Alps, where Tours are won and lost.

In related subjects, accusations of doping continue to dog Armstrong (who has never, ever tested positive).  He was heckled by a protester at the finish, evidently for the second day in a a row, and the Landis accusations have been taken up by the World Anti Doping Agency.