PAgent’s Progress

Holy Crap.

Thirty years after making the United States Olympic Cycling team and twenty years after winning the DuPont Prize for human powered speed and ten years after retiring from professional cycling, Fast Freddy Markham has stunned the cycling community by winning the Dempsey-MacCready Prize at the Nissan One Hour Challenge in Casa Grande, AZ, on July 2 2006.

Markham won the event with a new world record speed and brought the One Hour Title back to the United States for the first time since 1990, the last time Markham held it. Markham averaged a record 53.43 miles from a standing start, this beat the old mark held by Canadian Sam Whittingham by more than a mile.

Fast Freddy Markham is one of the greats of human-powered racing. The bike on which he won the DuPont Prize (for going faster than 65 mph), the original Gold Rush, is in the Smithsonian Institution. And he’s still going strong.

Congratulations to Fast Freddy and the Easy Racer team.

Click on the pic for the Easy Racer press release, some great pictures, and a video of Fast Freddy blazing down the highway

We have some very good neighbors who happen to be fairly devout Christians. While they are not overbearing in the application of their moral values, they nevertheless have moral values, and have raised their children accordingly.

That’s why I almost did a spit take a couple of years ago when I saw their attractive teenage daughter wearing a pair of sweatpants with the word “Juicy” written across her butt. What was this, advertisement? And was this the kind of thing you wanted to advertise? How ‘juicy’ you were?

Of course I found out that ‘Juicy’, or more properly ‘Juicy Couture’, is a brandname, and probably an example of her parents choosing their battles carefully.

But I’m still mystified by the whole phenomenon. We men are told we are pigs if we stare at a woman’s derriere. And yet, there’s a whole subset of clothing that plasters advertising across the butt of women’s clothing. It seems a bit unfair.

Asswriting is a Flickr photoset dedicated to examples of butt-propaganda in the LA area. While the photos are funny, the commentary on the photos is just as entertaining.