My head, in addition to containing the frivolous and neurotic weasels that make up my brain, handles all my looking, hearing, and blabbing. There’s also a measure of snot production, but that process is not well understood by my mind weasels, so I will leave it out.

It also serves as the only real port of entry into my guts, though in my younger days I did put a few things up my nose. I am older and wiser now, you’ll be glad to hear.

Yes, my head is the metropolis of my body. The rest of me is comprised mostly of less interesting countryside, with a few points of interest, depending, of course, upon your definition of “interest”.

My head, being the Atlanta to the rest of me’s Georgia, makes an effort to keep itself warm by turning a portion of the food that I introduce into my stomach into hair. Some of it grows on the top and back of my head, some grows on my face, and some attempts to bridge the gap between my eyebrows so that I will look as stupid as possible.

These I occasionally remove with the use of tweezers and swearing.

Most of the facial and eyebrowial hair is easy for me to see, and so I can regulate its length and style. In this way I mitigate the stupidity of my appearance in hopes that I can explore someone else’s points of interest. I’m intrepid like that.

However, the hair that grows out of the top and back of my head is hard for me to see, as well as hard for me to properly reach, so I pay someone else to cut and style it for me. There is a business located not one hundred yards from my front door that offers these services, and I set an appointment yesterday to have them performed.

Long story short, it was a great experience. Not only is the place close enough to walk to — I could probably somersault there without too much effort — but I got a great haircut, and even more importantly, the girl who cut my hair asked me about me the whole time. Yes! I got to blab uninterrupted about myself for nigh on an hour. It was great.

I even tried asking her about her life a few times, but she quickly steered the conversation back to me, which was bait that I instantly took like the great big self-absorbed windbag that I am.

I can’t wait to get my hair cut again next time.

My friends, the internet is in an uproar. If you know any nerds, shield your women and children from them because they are currently in a very agitated state and may lash out, or worse, attempt to show you their blog. You may be wondering what has them so riled.

I don’t have a very good grasp of it myself, but from what I gather, some nerds in Switzerland have built a giant thing that does stuff. It’s called the Large Hadron Collider, and if you pretend that you know what it is, you automatically seem smart.

Back in my college days, I attempted to seem smart by conspicuously carrying a copy of “The Theory of Relativity” by Albert Einstein around, hoping girls would see it. Then I tried conspicuously playing guitar on the quad and poor Albert Einstein was left to gather dust and cigarette ash in my dorm room.

I guess the Swiss/French nerds never learned to play the guitar, because their giant thing finally did whatever it was built to do today. Nice work, gentlemen!

From the articles I have read, they are accelerating things down an item at speeds in excess of “fast”, and then banging them into one another, and the whole process requires energy levels of 7 or 8 higglejiggles, which is highly impressive.

As you can see here, the things are on the opposite side of the item from the stuff.

There is no doubt that we have to spend money on science, and I fully support it even though I have no idea what is going on. I have tried to understand some advanced scientific precepts, but I have a learning condition that limits me severely, which is known as “stuplazy” (a crippling combination of laziness and stupidity).

Not that I let my condition stop me from broadcasting my opinions on the internet, mind you.

My concern is that comparable levels of funds are not being spent on the arts. Where is the seven mile, 8 higglejiggle underground doohicky that pushes the theoretical limits of selfishness, I ask you? Poor Kanye West, the Einstein of selfishness, is forced to glean whatever discoveries he can just from walking around being himself.

These goings-on are concerning to me, but what is even more concerning to me is that Rupert Murdoch, the King of News, is about to shut down news entirely.

How will I monitor the Swiss/French nerd happenings now, I ask you? Perhaps more importantly, to whom will I link when I attempt to lend credo to my blogular drivel if not the New York Times? Some other person’s blog? Hah!

I would step in and create a new New York Times myself, perhaps named the Atlanta Stuff That Happened, if it weren’t for this damned stuplazia, and the fact that all my money goes into bicycles. Oh well.

Perhaps that Large Swiss Item will find an answer to these mysteries. I hope so!

It is my belief that humans are humans no matter where you go. So, when people say, for instance, “These kids today, they are more selfish than we were”, I believe that to be false. I think that there is an ultimate limit of selfishness that a human being can achieve and, except in certain laboratory conditions, it cannot be overcome.

Believe me, I have tried. And, to be fair, so has Kanye West, who is to the unsurpassable limit of selfishness what Einstein was to the speed of light.

When I try to launch an accurate guess at the ratio selfish to selfless acts I have performed in the last week, I can only think of a half dozen or so that were truly meant to help others. Now, granted, as a hermit who shuns most non-outdoor-sports-related interaction, my needs are the only needs to serve around Manland. Not that I’m that much more considerate when living with someone else. Sorry, Cheryl!

Ah, I’ve just remembered I held a door for someone at the coffee shop. That counts, right?

To take another angle, I also hear people say when I suggest cycling as a means of exercise to them, “Oh no, I couldn’t… the drivers here are just horrible!”

They may indeed be horrible, but surely no more or less horrible than drivers in Atlanta. How could they be? They are talking and texting as they drive on the same cell phones Atlanta drivers are.

This is sometimes counter-intuitive, I admit. Aren’t kids exposed to a much wider array of filth these days than I was as a kid? That I can’t say. I remember having access to nudey magazines pretty much as soon as I was old enough to be interested in girls without their clothes.

There was an underground ring of nudey magazines circulating our neighborhoods and schools, as I recall. We put them in plastic bags and buried them in back yards and vacant lots, or hid them in tree forts. Somehow I got my hand on a copy of “Oui” that was neither faded by the sun nor loaded with dirt from being buried, and it was my most treasured possession until I got an electric guitar.

Now that I think of it, I only remember ever buying one nude magazine in my life. I was heading out of town to play a gig in Chattanooga, TN and I spotted what I considered to be a particularly ridiculously-titled example, so I bought it and presented it to my fellow musicians in the van as a centerpiece of discussion and learned debate. It was well received at the time, but at the end of the trip no one wanted to be the one to claim it.

No one wanted to be the one so interested in its contents that they would actually pick it up and take it home, so a very public display of throwing it away as a group had to be made.

I don’t really know what it is like to be a kid today, with all the new things there are to see and do thanks to the internet, but I do think that everyone is going to be okay as long as they keep their wits about them.

Thank goodness we have someone like Kanye West out there to push the boundaries, so that we normal folks can gain perspective.

He is a pioneer!

Like any cyclist, I constantly study the weather report with some intensity. Rain means rust on my components, and while a steel brush could probably remove most of that, it can’t do anything for my image should anyone see me with rusty components. It’s already bad enough that I’m still racing on an aluminum frame.

Like politics or the Mac vs PC argument, the bike frame materials argument is a big pile of abstract numbers and specifications that ultimately boil down to which one you like more. Carbon is more expensive and has the cool factor, like a Mac. Aluminum is stiffer but has arguably the same performance or better for less money, like a PC, and steel is for people who judge each other on beard length or ironic tattoos, like Linux.

Then there’s the component group debate which, oddly enough, falls into the same three slots. Campagnolo is the cool, expensive choice (like a Mac). Shimano is less expensive, more widely used, and probably has just the same performance (like a PC), and then there’s SRAM, which is… um… which is screwing up my analogy.

I’ll just stick SRAM in with the fringe players, even though some pro teams ride SRAM and it enjoys arguably more cachet than Shimano.

Here’s a handy chart to help show you what products and ideologies go together:

We get started right out of the gate with my font choices across the top. We have Helvetica for “Hip”, Times New Roman for “Stodgy”, and Papyrus for “Fringe”.

Times New Roman is in nearly every book ever printed, and Helvetica is on things that people need to be able to read, like subway maps and the new Census form. You may recognize Papyrus from every artsy/crafty flier ever made by someone who is not a designer (and should never become one), or the Avatar subtitles. If you see Papyrus in the wild, you know you’re looking at work done by someone who isn’t a designer, and is very likely a miser.

On the next line, we have carbon fiber, the coolest and most expensive frame material, then Aluminum which is not quite as cool but has a lower price point and a higher market share, and finally Remington Steele, who looks smart in a tux and pronounces aluminum “al you minnyum” for some reason.

The component groups I have gone over already, and the politics you know about as well, with the possible exception of the tomato which represents, of course, the Sidewalk Tomato who I heard will either make a run for congress in 2012 or be included in a soup.

Last, but certainly not least, we have the computer section, which features Apple, Microsoft, and a fat nerd who represents Linux/BSD. If you don’t know what Linux or BSD are, then smile because you’ve probably had sex in the last year.

That about wraps it up for this week, my friends. Have a great weekend and meet me back here on Monday morning!

I imagine the fine folks who work in the TV industry right now are in a bit of a pickle. It is much the same pickle that the movie, magazine, and music businesses have been in over recent years: How can they keep making money when people can download and share their content for free?

Who wouldn’t want to watch network TV after all the work they’ve done to ensure that commercials are louder than the shows? Lord knows I don’t want to miss one second of the latest missive from the used car industry. I am told they’re also working on a special setting for your TV that allows them to show advertisements within advertisements, but that’s very experimental stuff and would probably blow your speakers clean through the couch.

In the case of the music business, iTunes came along and offered a model that seems fairly simple and works pretty well. Now everything seems happy in that world, but there is still some contention in TV land. Many a suit is wrinkled.

The TV people take timid steps into other styles of distribution, but seem reluctant to go all the way into a new idea, like someone trying to quit smoking by “cutting down”.

Take Hulu, for example. It’s a web site where you can watch any show you want at any time. It has an ad-supported model, which means that the content providers get some money for letting people watch their show. This is all fine and well, but where’s the ad-free subscription option? I would be willing to pay a monthly fee to watch The Daily Show and Colbert Report ad-free whenever I wanted, but the TV people are standing in the way, chain smoking. Why?

Well, my guess, and I know almost nothing about the workings of the TV industry, is that that idea would mean that the revenue would go directly to the show, not to the network, since the idea of a network would pretty much be dissolved. See what I did there?

In this case, the networks are like a long-time girlfriend, and consumers are like a boyfriend who has inherited a fortune. Except it’s not really a fortune, it’s the internet. The boyfriend all of a sudden finds himself with options, and starts eyeballing a new, younger, more attractive girl, played in this soap opera by online/on-demand/ad-free viewing.

You can see how some very uncomfortable conversations would be had here, and the idea of a three-way is right out.

Sooner or later, this situation is going to come to a head, and I don’t think the networks are going to like where it ends up. Let’s just hope they don’t make this any more uncomfortable than it has to be.

At least they should quit smoking. That is gross!