let the silliness begin

The TdF starts Saturday and the idiocy and hijinks have begun in earnest. First off, Alessandro Petacchi is officially suspended from Milram due to his non-negative test results for salbutimol at the Giro. Scratch one sprinter from your TdF fantasy team.

Second up, the red-headed step child of the ProTour peloton, Unibet.com, have been denied a start at the Tour because they have not shown good results this year and do not have a high ranking in the team standings. Imagine how it feels to be the team owner who jumped through untold numbers of hoops, ponied up insane amounts of euros just to get a ProTour license and then your team isn't allowed to race over half of the ProTour events due to some obscure French law regarding advertising for gambling and lotteries (yet, somehow Lotto is okay). Then you are denied a spot at the most prestigious Grand Tour of the season, despite having changed your title sponsor to appease the law, and the reason given is lack of results as in a "you didn't race very well in all of those races we didn't let you race in" sort of thing. Further, no one seems particularly eager to take up your cause, either. Pissed wouldn't begin to describe how you'd feel. Oh, and by the way, Unibet are ranked 19th, just ahead of Milram (who are headed to the Tour) and just got second overall in the team competition at the Tour de Suisse.

I don't know if you have noticed that all of the Operacion Puerto coverage seems to always mention the "complex" system of codenames that was used to identify the rider's blood bags. Hmmmmm, let's see Jorg Jaksche's codename was "bella Jorg". Wow, the stunning decryption capabilities needed to crack that code are mind-boggling... Are you kidding me? 9 year-olds can come up with better codenames.

Well, the house painting has reached a point where the use of a ladder is no longer remotely safe and I have to go rent some scaffolding. Amazingly enough, the painting has gone far quicker than I imagined and the house looks sooooooo much better. I can't figure out why we waited this long to paint it.

Hope you had a good 4th. We had a little cookout with the folks. They bought a new grill and I think they are trying to use it as much as possible. We did benefit from their acquisition of a new refrigerator by getting their old refrigerator. Ours was in its death throes as it would wheeze its way through the night, occasionally peeing water into its little tray and freezing all of our lettuce out of spite. Here's to you dented up old refrigerator with no handles. Good riddance.