The Red Eyes of July

It's the blog post you write when you're not writing a blog post ... because you've caught the Kreeping Krudd and you feel like you're balancing on the thin edge of sudden death. One foot in the grave, the other on a banana peel. The 'krudd' is a virus that's going around here: everyone either has it, has had it, or is coming down with it. I thought I was going to escape ... nope. I was just the last one to come down with it.

(Last week I was making jokes: "Don't to stingy, share your germs around," say I, and kissed the man. Hmmm. In retrospect, one finds just cause to re-examine one's actions. In depth. Well, too late now: bring on the cough drops, and I'll take my tea intravenously. [Croak])

The red eyes cited in the title have, however, nothing much do with the krudd, which is all about glued-together sinuses, sore throats, hacking coughs and the general desire to grab a carving knife and go for any handy major artery.

No, no: the red eyes are all about watching TV at 1:00 and 2:00 in the wee small hours of the morning. It happens at this point every year, and it's unavoidable, since the event organizers refuse to change either the date or the time of the show. For some reason, they feel compelled to hold their race in broad daylight. In France. And, of course, Australia being on the other side of the globe, it's the middle of the night here when the event goes out on live TV. Asking them to schedule it at 2:00am in France invites rude rejoinders; I can't imagine why.

You guessed: it's the Tour de France, or TDF for short. Not that I have too much soul-deep interest in bicycles for their own sake, you understand, nor for sweating while astride them. But the telecast of Le Tour offers two inestimable plesures ... and I leave it to you to decide which order to rank them in. First the video travelog of France is peerless, you get to see the country from air and road, and it's way better than a bus trip. Second, the whole event involves a great number of athletic young men in rainbow-hued spandex and (it's traditional) no underwear.

Well, you asked. I distinctly heard the question, "What the hell is Keegan watching TV for in the middle of the night?"

Now, I need to go and take some pills, or hunt out that carving knife, or SOMETHING, so I'll leave you with the photos I promised to upload, of Seward, Alaska, on a summer's afternoon, when everyone else had the brains to stay battened under hatches and drink something hot and laced, and Keegan, in some curiously finite wisdom, went hiking down the shore of Resurrection Bay...


NOTE: click the picture to get a larger view.