Sanremo on Saturday!

Deep joy, the Milano-Sanremo is on Saturday, and it's actually going to be televised on UK tv, at a time when we can actually watch it!

We have a Stuey, two Fabians, and a Linus, plus Robert, Anders, Wouter and Daniele, who LLB always thought was Daniel EEEbennati, so we still pronounce it that way amongst ourselves.

There's quite a nice description of the course and tactics here, so now I am all ready for the event, and hoping that we don't have another accident-waiting-to-happen like this one from last year:

"Shoot that liddle dawg!"

I'm quite excited about watching a race live (we are still five days behind with our Tirreno footage, so don't tell me who won it!) as it actually happens, so hooray for Eurosport, more cycling coverage please, but NOT two races at once, it's just too tricky trying to watch them both and not get confused over who is in which race... being still in the middle of both Paris-Nice and Tirreno as we are, we've had to make ourselves crib-sheets with the names and numbers of our "pet" riders!

More good news - two more Schlecklanders! Welcome to Eva, and to another Kara, with fingers crossed that this Kara is not going to spend all her time in the Naughty Corner as our original Kara does...  This means I get to choose another pic of Our Glorious Leader:
 

With thanks to Mr Kemp at Photo.lu for permission to use it.

Good Tuftage, do we think?

More cycling news, if you can bear to concentrate on the words instead of Our Glorious Leader: the UCI - aaargh! my soul! my soul! - have until the 24th to appeal against Contador being let off.

Most of the cycling press seem to think that they will appeal, but there's not been any official word yet. I don't know how much it costs to mount an appeal, but it can't be cheap, and I'm thinking they won't appeal unless they are fairly certain of a win.

Unfortunately, a win is less likely now that another cyclist has also just been not-banned for having tested positive for clenbuterol: this is the case of Dutch mountain biker Rudi van Houts who said that he ate meat in Mexico which must have been how he accumulated 50 picograms of the stuff in his test - Conti had 30 picograms.

I say "unfortunately", which is a bit mean to both Conti and van Houts, but I am really having a problem with this whole issue.

On the one hand, if these two (and others) are innocent of taking any PEDs (performance enhancing drugs) then it's a good thing that their federations recognise that it's not always possible to check every single mouthful that you eat. And it's unreasonable to suggest that athletes - who generally eat high protein meat-stuffed diets - should have to have all their food supplies tested, or certified, or something.

But on the other hand, if there is anything the slightest bit dodgy going on, then athletes wanting to cheat will see this as a green light to go ahead and poison themselves with clenbuterol, knowing that they can claim innocent ingestion as their defence.

Difficult, isn't it?

As with many things in life, I guess that if there were an easy answer, someone would have done it by now.

Conti's legal team will no doubt casually mention van Houts' decision as supporting their case: they are also planning to point out how easy it is to buy clenbuterol. According to this report in BikeWorldNews,  they say it is "readily available to buy via the internet" and we know this to be true, having spotted it in an earlier blog entry being sold for weight loss.

I guess they are trying to make the point that the Bad Beef Producers can easily buy the stuff, even though it is banned for use in cattle.  Perhaps they don't quite appreciate the difference between fat women buying one bottle of the stuff to lose weight, and farmers buying additives by the sackload to dose up their entire herds... but we'll assume that they know what they are doing.

Well, finally for today, in case you are wondering why I haven't been quite as prolific this week as usual, it's all LEELU's fault (*points accusing finger*) for getting me interested in Twitter, which is now driving me demented and eating up my spare time. It's not as easy as you might have thought: thanks to the lessons from Auntie Leelu, I can now tweet (my last one concerned my washing machine, on the grounds that Leelu said "just talk about anything", heh heh heh) and I am starting to get my Lists organised.

Look, proof: note the subtle plugs for the blog, but apparently it's ok, you're allowed to do it.

I still can't work out how to filter out messages that are addressed to me that come in while I'm not online, and are therefore swamped amidst the general noise of incoming posts.

It seems quite rude that someone might say "hello" (don't ask me why), and I would never know about it:, so I wouldn't ever reply. Unless I just happen to be online at that very minute.

Perhaps the trick is that you wait until the person is tweeting, then quickly tweet them back?

Anyway, I said I'd give it five minutes - well, actually, I said that I would never last longer than  five minutes, same thing really - and it's been three minutes and 50 seconds, so I'll stick with it a bit longer... come and say hello if you have a Twitter account, and the best time to catch me is early in the morning - 7am GMT - and late afternoon. And no, I'm not using txtspk!