Check this out... I did this several years ago... basically this is an 'album' of original compositions (except for the "live" track, which of course is Miles Davis' All Blues, another track is my interpretation of Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch, the rest are all my originals) I recorded in my home-studio - 'live' guitar & bass-tracks with digital accompaniment (yes, including the "sax solos" in a couple of the tunes) courtesy Apple's Garage Band. Enjoy!
Video highlights of the 2nd round of the UCI Women's Road World Cup in Italy.. the final sprint won by Emma Johansson (Orica-AIS) over World Cup leader Lizzie Armitstead (Boels-Dolmans Cycling Team) and Alena Amialiusik (Team Astana-BePink), courtesy Sportissimo. More video highlights to come as they arrive... check with prowomenscycling.com for updates (which includes an exclusive podcast-interview with Johansson, recorded prior to today's race).
Strava details here.
Today's ride was a late-afternoon jaunt (roughly 24 miles altogether) around East Arlington, mainly the hillier sections along Fort Caroline Road. It was quite windy (a pre-frontal trough passed through that dumped a lot of rain last night & this morning, with a thunderstorm around noontime). The portions of the ride that were the hilliest (upper-right sections in the map above) had residential streets that had some really short yet punchy climbs averaging about 5-6% gradient - one hill in particular was quite steep with an 11-13% gradient near the top - that one was marked in Strava as a segment: the "(Un)Pleasant Hill Dr Climb" (tee-hee!). There's no need to tell you that this is one of my favorite riding areas in Jacksonville! Strava details here.
This ride had everything! Speed, a few climbs (well, overpasses anyway!), headwinds - even danger in the form of a large & rather mean dog deep in redneck-country who gave chase but I was able to channel my inner Mark Cavendish and out-sprinted the mangy mutt - it was pretty fast, I'll give it that - that little spike in watts & speed just after the 5-mile mark is where that happened. Lizzie Armitstead (Boels Dolmans Cycling Team) wins the first round of the 2014 UCI Women's Road World Cup in Drenthe, in a 2-up sprint with Anna van der Breggen (Rabobank Liv). More info on the race (& series) at prowomenscycling.com.
UPDATE: A more extensive highlights-video (produced by the UCI) is now available with commentary by Ant McCrossan and Wiggle Honda's Rochelle Gilmore. This is the first of, what I hope will be, a series of photo-galleries of some of my weekend bike-rides. This first gallery is of a location in the Amelia-Fernandina Beach ride I usually do on some weekends (the map & profile in the slideshow is courtesy of Strava, recorded on my Garmin Edge 605 GPS-unit). It is of the scenic & historic village of American Beach, one of Florida's oldest African-American communities, known during its heyday as the "Black Hyannis-Port". Located on Amelia Island (just south of Fernandina Beach, in the extreme northeast-corner of the State where the St. Marys River defines the easternmost boundary between Florida and Georgia), American Beach was founded during the Jim Crow-era South as a place where people of color, who couldn't - Monday, February 3, 2014 will be a date I will probably remember the rest of my life... That was the date I had an oral-surgical procedure to have all of my remaining lower teeth removed (including both wisdom-teeth), and received a temporary-denture (pic at left is of a wax-impression taken several weeks before the surgery; the denture I'm now wearing is based on that). Why such a drastic procedure, you ask? This boils down to years of old root-canal posts that have deteriorated allowing abscesses to form underneath, crowns that have detached due to a dentist (not my current one) who did a crappy job on two of my molars and an incisor so that the crowns (and their posts) came loose a few years later, impacting wisdom-teeth (one was partially exposed and had a cyst underneath it, the other horizontally-impacting), other molars with old amalgam-fillings where the teeth were decaying underneath them... and, I'll admit, years of neglect. I've just added a Gig Audio section to this site. Click on the Gig Audio box in the upper right corner to view a landing page, or hover over the box to drop a menu of the individual player-pages. These do not have commenting enabled, so if you'd like to comment on any of those you may do so here. Enjoy!
Some recent photos of a portion of the beach at Big Talbot Island, between Jacksonville and Fernandina Beach, Florida. Located at the mouth of Amelia Inlet, Big Talbot Island is one of several barrier-islands in northeastern Duval County, FL that are designated as Florida State Parks, bordering the Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve (U.S. NPS/DoI).
A couple of years ago I published a gallery of another of these islands when there was a large oil-slick on the beach (presumably originated from the B.P. oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico). This island is further to the north... the beach is covered with a multitude of the 'skeletons' of fallen live-oak trees (they likely fell when Hurricane Dora hit here in '64, though I have not found any documentation to date to support that) - these fallen trees are a prominent shoreline-feature of these islands, Big Talbot Island in particular. More Info: Big Talbot Island State Park. Still more info here. I recently watched on the TV perhaps one of the most riveting and life-affirming installments of the PBS series The American Experience – perhaps ever! It was a retrospective of the year 1964. The nation was still recovering from the JFK assassination when that year began… a lot was going down that year: Freedom Summer and the brutal murders of the 3 civil-rights workers in Mississippi. The Free Speech Movement at U.C. Berkeley… Motown… LBJ v. Goldwater… Gulf of Tonkin… The Civil Rights Act of ’64… THE BEATLES!!!!! OK, the pic shown here (a LIFE Magazine – Asian Edition – cover from ’66) is a little ahead of its time given the subject-matter at hand, but WTF. My interest in The Beatles is almost literally lifelong – my parents bought Meet The Beatles when I was barely into kindergarten and my youngest sister was born that spring of ’64. In May… which might mean she was conceived when “She Loves You” was first released, who knows. This is the first of a few audio-player posts (hosted remotely on my home-site which is set up for Wimpy MP3-player, embedded here using iFrame) of past gigs I've done. This one is from 2007, at the Karpeles Manuscript Museum in Jacksonville's Springfield sub-division (north of downtown, near Florida State College at Jacksonville, or FSCJ), with Laurence Walden and the Jazz Connection.
Personnel
The Wimpy-player embed is set for auto-play. There are also buttons to shuffle the playlist and to turn on/off continuous-play. There are also slider-controls for volume & song-position (though the latter is a little wonky for some reason in this embed - I might have to check Wimpy for an upgrade). You can also click on an individual track to play it. Enjoy! |