Team Lardbutt isn't the fastest team in the US, it isn't the best-equipped team, and we sometimes wonder if it exists at all outside the imaginings of Chief Lardbutt Greg Taylor. Here's some Lardbutt philosophy on a subject we've all pondered - life's contradictions and ...
Meeting The Ghost
Click here. Don't think - just do it.
For those less impulsive souls unwilling to temporarily abandon the safe and comfortable surroundings of our host, the good ship Cyclingnews, let me explain. This particular hotlink leads to Googlism.com, a website developed by an Australian company that is, for good or evil, slightly more addictive than salted peanuts. Googlism.com (not affiliated with Google itself, we are told) is an internet search engine whose function it is to go out and scrutinize the cyber-mothership of all search engines, Google, to see what it "thinks" about a topic of your choosing. You type your search term into a little box, the computer magically scours Google for opinions on your selected topic, and out pops the answer in a series of simple declarative sentences. Anything that you can think of is fair game for Googlism.com - people, places, things, or dates. Sometimes the resulting "Googlisms" are spot-on. Sometimes they aren't. Sometimes the results are hysterically funny. And sometimes the results are downright poetic.
Cool, isn't it?
After spending some time mining for Googlisms about obvious stuff - me, my dog, my boss - I decided that it might be an educational exercise to get the measure of Google's opinions on a variety of cycling-related subjects.
Okay, what about riders then? Let's survey Google's opinion on some current bike racers. Picking a name at random, our first subject was Frank Hoj, who is riding for Bjarne Riis' Team CSC this year. An excellent rider, he'd be a good test for Google. So in he went and, after cogitating a while, the computer spat out a single, enigmatic line:
Well, obviously Frank Hoj is away. It's the middle of the afternoon in Europe, for goodness sake. He's probably out riding his bike. Let's try someone else.
How about Floyd Landis? He's one of my favorite riders and, with his exploits at the Tour this year, Landis has emerged as one of Lance Armstrong's key teammates. Surely Google will have a lot to say about Floyd.
I wasn't disappointed. We had a bit of a false start when the search term "Floyd Landis" came back blank. No hits. Undeterred, I shortened it up to simply "Landis", which produced a small avalanche of information. Google knows all about Floyd. Some of it wasn't terribly surprising:
I don't remember reading any of that in the U.S. Postal press kit. Maybe Floyd Landis is a bit more of a Renaissance Man than we all thought.
Having garnered these stunning new insights into the life and career of Mr. Floyd Landis, it became obvious that my research would not be complete until I ran a search on his team leader at U.S. Postal. So in went "Lance"... and...
Wow. All I have to say is that, according to Google, there is a side to Lance that most fans and followers of the sport apparently don't know about.
His companion, Ms. Crow, is undoubtedly ecstatic with this development, and it will certainly ease things with his many sponsors during promotional appearances. ("No Lance! Heel! Awww... don't do that on the rug! Bad Lance... baaaaad Lance!")
So it was a bit of a shock to learn about Lance's heretofore-unknown singing career with the boy-group NSYNC:
Oh never mind. I'll just rely on Cyclingnews for all of my Lance updates, thank you.
Before shutting the computer down I decided to pose one last parting question to the Great And All-Knowing Google. I'd thought about it a while and it was, if I must say so myself, a real humdinger. A philosophical question, a question for the ages: what is a bike?
"BIKE"
Good lord, a computer did this. Stunning. Brilliant. I guess that there are those who will say that the only possible explanation for why the search results are so lyrical and full of insight is that we've gotten a little glimpse of the latent bit of humanity that resides within the Internet, the imprint of the souls of all who have had a hand in creating and maintaining this electronic wonder. The ghost in the machine, deus ex machina for those who went to Catholic school. A ghost with the soul of a poet and the heart of a cyclist.
And before we get too carried away here, it's also ghost who tells people that Floyd Landis is a gay minister in Denver.
