Western Missouri

Sorry I haven't taken any pictures yet, my battery died. The roadside motel I wanted to stay at was full of construction workers working on bridges in the area so we're at a holiday inn express tonight not far from lebanon, MO. Cities here always have biblical names like damascus, berea etc. I think there should be a town in the south called "jesus".

While listening tot he radio on our last day in appalachia, there was a radio preacher who yelled "ha!" at the end of every phrase, like the rapper juvenile. Like "it is the honey of gah-yad ha! and the honey of gah-yad is good ha!". We went to an old pentecostal church during a sunday service to get water but left before they could get us to handle any snakes.

another thing was that i found an all old country music station that plays exactly what i want to hear all the time. they play about an hour of country gospel music every morning. The best song of this variety today was "the witness protection of the lord". there was also a song where the chorus went "jesus loves you, I don't". I think the "hello, america" prevalence ont her adio can be chalked up to it being a song about taking a train to new orleans and it was the one year anniversary of the hurricane yesterday. I put that together maybe a week too late to consider myself smart. Devin you are right abotu the hit song of the summer, it's the only song to play on urban stations, pop stations and even light rock stations.

In more radio news, there is a senatorial campaign ad that i love where a plainspoken older guy is complaining about the liberal positions that the other candidate takes up and he mentions that she doesn't support ethanol "'what side is she on? that would be the other side'. i'm jim talent and i support this message". Can someone tell me just what kind of scam ethanol is? I get the idea that it's a massive subsidy to corn farmers to run cars off of corn oil but that it's incredibly inefficient. Alexa, can you or AJ put it into small words for me?

in motels i saw the land before time, inside 9/11 and the flight of the phoenix (a frank capra joint).

The land before time is an animated movie about dinosaurs. any fifth grader could tell you that the brontosauruses and triceratops didn't share the same habitats and weren't even around during the same eras of time. Also it was animated by don bluth, more famous for space ace and dragon's lair. He quit disney cause he didn't want to be exploited like all the old guys who he trained under were. I feel like the animation was lazy cause the movie was maybe 65 minutes long and maybe 10 minutes of it was flashbacks where they got to reuse animation from earlier in the film. i don't see why they had to make the movie about baby dinosaurs, kids love dinosaurs already you don't need to make them kids to make them sympathize. ids will watch a movie with an adult protagonist. i think keith david should have played the part of the main character.

Inside 9/11 was a documentary about how things went down on 9/11 minute by minute. It's one of three national geographic terrorism documentaries out currently. i'm sure you all know the basic story but it was well done I thought although they did all kinds of trick stuff like have a woman talk about how she was sure her husband was dead and then cut to an interview of her husband so the surprise is that he lived, etc. they left out the part where bush knew all along because dracula told him about it though.

flight of the phoenix was great. jimmy stewart, richard attenborough, ernest borgnine, a mexican guy, a french guy, a german designer a monkey several others crash a plane in the desert and have to rebuild it. i was going to say they should remake it with keith david and set it in outer space but they already remade it with giovanni ribisi as the german designer. weak. oftentimes, movies are given a science fiction setting when they don't need it, event horizon and pitch black are two movies that would have been better if they were about hardy seafarers and ghost ships in seafaring times and the like with no space ships.

the question for today is what movie should have been a science fiction movie and what science fiction movie should have had a non science fictional setting? You must answer this question. My answer is that star wars should have been set in the old west and obi wan kenobi should have been an indian. brewster's millions should have been set in the year 3000.

i'm sorry i get sidetracked talking about movies, it's just that i think about an d talk about cycling all day. i have the same conversation with strangers every day, they ask the same 6 questions over and over. cyclists coming the other way ask the same questions also: what's the terrain like? what motels are cheap, etc. dan and i talk about mostly the same things every day: what towns we're going to go through, how many miles we should go that night, where we'll meet up, what is the best thing to eat for breakfast, etc. dan is 23 so he can do things like drink 11 beers and eat seven taco bell tacos and then watch adult swim until real late and somehow still be OK the next morning. he also ambushed me with bottle rockets overhead a few days ago. ahh to be young! By the way to any ex-students of mine, when i mention anyone drinking alcoholic beverages please note that they are over 21 and that this is going on after the day's riding is over. Also when i say alcoholic beverages i mean root beer and when i say botttle rockets i mean pressed wildflowers.

We had to go a couple miles on a gravel road cause a bridge was out today, other than that it was not an eventful day. we're seeing more dead armadilloes on the road as well as an armadillo-like creature that i don't know the name of. the amount of roadkill going on daily is incredible. raccoons, possums, squirrels, birds, frogs, turtles. it's really alarming and the face that dead animals, especially mammals, make is really hard to look at for me.

I don't know if i mentioned this but I saw a live fox for the first time in my life, he was crossing the road and looking really clever and shifty like he was going to catch a hen or something. I feel stronger as a cyclist than ever before and if i have a lighter day (less than 75 miles with no major climbs) I feel like I can go for more hours, although I can't because we usually don't get started until about 11 AM. I hope I may be becoming a superhuman larger than life paul bunyan type who will scare the ozark mountains and make the ohio river cry, etc but that's probably just crazy talk form being i the sun too long. I am still having fun although I want to take out a restraining order on my bike seat.

I want to tell most of the people here in america's heartland that they are the crazy weird ones. Now I know how jake and adam feel travelling around to various backwater places and having the strangest people ever born look at you like you're the crazy one. Granted, i am wearing bike shorts but still, they must have seen that before but still they all stare like i'm bleeding.

Tomorrow, we plan to ride into golden city, which is the last stop before kansas. regardless of what thomas frank says, i hear the problem is that it's uphill all the way with wind usually blowing right in your face and towns 64 miles apart so it's generally too far to go past one.