It’s Friday, and you know what that means. It’s time for Friday Hair Metal! I suppose I should really put together some kind of graphic for that. Anyway, today’s selection isn’t technically hair metal, it’s merely the next best thing. It’s Slash (featuring Kid Rock) with my favorite song off of his new solo album, “I Hold On.”
For whatever reason, my iPod always drops that song into my playlist right as I’m reaching Mile 5 of my typical weekend 10K training runs. And it works for me. Helps me hold on, so to speak.
Anyway, I bring it up because not only is Slash a seminal member of a late-80’s hair metal band, he’s also a guy who’s still making the same basic kind of music he was back in the heyday. And he’s still selling records. But look, this record and Axle’s Chinese Democracy are really more tragedy than triumph, you know what I’m saying? I mean, Slash’s record is okay—most of it’s pretty good, really—but imagine what it could have been with Axle doing the vocals. It could have been legendary. For example, imagine “Beautiful Dangerous” with Axle nailing those high notes instead of Fergie-warbling-on-audiotone. Now that would have been a great song. Straight out of the “Appetite for Destruction” playbook and probably just as popular.
What a shame.
If you’re wondering, the other song I really like on that album is “Back from Cali” (featuring Myles Kennedy). I guess I’ve become a sucker for the power ballads in my old age.
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Today’s stage of the Tour was another crash-fest. Which is weird because it was the flattest stage of the Tour. Nothing whatsoever happened for the first maybe 125 km and then suddenly crashes all over the place. Britain’s Bradley Wiggins (Sky) crashed out with a broken collarbone, and American Chris Horner (Radio Shack) went down in a ditch and lost something like 12 minutes—apparently because he was unconscious! Anyway, they’re taking Horner to some French Emergency Room for tests, and according to sources on his team, it doesn’t look like he’ll start tomorrow. And that’s a Hell of a shame because Horner finished 10th at last year’s Tour and won this year’s Tour of California, the biggest cycling race in America. Anyway, it sucks that he crashed. He was a domestiqué for Lance Armstrong for years and years, but after Armstrong finally burned out last year, Horner placed in the top ten. This year it was finally his chance to try to shine on his own. I was really looking forward to seeing what he could do.
Still talking Radio Shack, fucking Levi Leipheimer crashed again, too. He crashed yesterday in the rain and lost something like two minutes, and then he crashed again today and lost another three minutes on top of that. Ugh! I mean, I don’t know that Leipheimer was necessarily gonna rock the Tour this year, but he had a decent chance of at least getting into the top ten finishers, but that shit is out the window now.
Eh. With Lance gone, I don’t really care all that much about Radio Shack as a team anymore, but I was following some of their riders, especially Horner. He’s 39, this was probably his last chance at glory, and he was riding well. I didn’t particularly think he could win, but I did think that he had a decent chance to get onto the podium, and I thought that Radio Shack had a chance to repeat winning the Team Award (for fastest overall team, in total time, on the entire course). Right now, that’s not looking too good. They’ve still got Andreas Kloden in the top ten, and it’s possible that he’ll be able to finish the race in the top ten, but it’s not like he’s a real contender. We saw Alberto Contador drop Kloden like a sack two years ago in the mountains, and since then Contador’s only gotten better while Kloden’s gotten older. That’s just kind of the way life is.
At any rate, Mark Cavendish won today’s stage—no surprise there—but the really great thing about that was that the stage finished just as it was lunch time for me, so I was able to walk to the bike shop across the street and actually watch the finish first hand. I also bought three inner tubes. Anywho, it’s amazing to watch those guys as they approach the finish, and in particular, I find it amazing to watch the way that Cavendish’s team, HTC-Highroad, controls the peloton on the approach to the final sprint. The video is below, but if you don’t ride, it’s probably hard to appreciate just how fast these guys are going and how much skill it takes to do what they’re doing at the speeds they’re doing it while surrounded by a hundred other riders and a half-million screaming French biking maniacs. Anyway, I love it.
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The new issue of Competitor Magazine (July 2011) came out a few days ago, and I picked it up when I was at the bike shop. I continue to like the magazine—especially because it’s free—but mostly because those guys aren’t afraid of a little high-end, athletic cheesecake. God bless America. The world could use some more athletic cheesecake in my humble opinion. There are plenty of voluptuous and/or surgically-enhanced girls out there shakin’ it; give me a girl who can spell “beautiful” without having to look it up and who can run a 5k in under 24 minutes. I mean, come on. A guy’s got to have his standards, no?So. Anybody doing anything good this weekend? Tell me what you have going on!
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