So I’ve been a little slow to update the blog lately because I’ve been busy gluing tires, cleaning layers of dust and grime from my bike, and driving all over Flanders so I can race. So it’s catch-up day today.

We’re now two races into the season, which kicked off (for me, anyway) last weekend in Knesselare, in what had to be one of the hottest races I’ve ever done. In fact, it was one of the rare cases where I would have preferred to be lapped, just to end the complete misery that I was in. Alas, I rode too well for that, and ended up with a solid — if exceptionally painful — result for my first race of the season. I’ll spare you the details (which would go something like, “…then I pedaled more, it really hurt and a needed a drink…” for about 45 minutes or so) and just link to the photos, which are here.

Fighting the heat in Knesselare.

Saturday’s race was cooler — a very welcome change — but even harder, featuring a series of steep, dusty, and technical hills, nasty off-camber stuff, and a set of stairs. For me, anyway, a good chunk of the course was much faster if I ran than rode, and so I ran. A lot. To the point where, a couple of times, I actually had to pause for a second just to persuade myself that I could keep going. But I had a shockingly good start and then managed to keep picking people off throughout the race, mostly by just continuing to pedal my bike while other people had to literally stop and recover. Not really a tactic, but it worked well enough.

Handling the turns in Eernegem.

In the end, my persistence paid off and I rode one of the most successful races I’ve ever done here in Belgium, pulling down a solid mid-pack finish. (Editor’s note: a mid-pack finish doesn’t sound that great, but when you’re racing against the Belgian Masters national champion and a swarm of others just as fast, all of whom could hold their own with many of the top racers in the US, you learn pretty quickly to be satisfied with the middle of the pack.) I didn’t do well enough to bring home any prize money, but the real reward was getting to watch the fantastic pro race that followed ours. We had a great time and saw a real show put on by Sven Nys and Niels Albert among others. The only bummer was Dieter Vanthourenhout’s truly awful looking crash. Amazingly, he walked away looking not all the worse for wear.

My full report is up at Cyclocross Magazine. Many more photos are on Flickr.

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As a solar physicist, They Might Be Giants’ hit Why Does The Sun Shine? has always been near to my heart. But many people have pointed out that it does contain some important inaccuracies, most notably that the Sun isn’t a “mass of incandescent gas”; it’s plasma.

Well, it turns out, TMBG have corrected themselves.

There will be news on the cycling front very soon, I promise. There are tires waiting for glue and frames waiting (patiently, in some undisclosed warehouses) to be built up. And races to be raced, although maybe not quite as soon as I had hoped. Stay tuned.

Today, I want to share this rather horrifying (if hilarious) story of what happens when you try to publish a ‘comment’ in an academic journal. To be fair, I suspect this situation is not the norm — journals and editors, like most things, are a varied bunch. But, having been through the publication process a few times, on both sides, as referee and author, I’ll guess that there are more than a few readers out there who founds this simultaneously amusing, disturbing, and very close to home.

You have to give credit to Prof. Trebino for seeing the humor in the Kafkaesque circumstances in which he found himself.

There’s more at ScienceBlogs.