My friend Priscilla made comments about both my age and my taste in music in my Uriah Heep post.

I didn’t want to have to do this, but I’m now forced to make you watch a YouTube video of Airbourne.  New music, and very un-Uriah-Heep!  (I’m sorry, PZ — but you brought this on yourself.)

Where I live it’s always windy.

But yesterday was far worse.  Sustained winds were about 20 mph, with gusts up to 30.  Not the best day for biking.

But as Eddie Merckx was fond of saying, “Don’t be a big fat pansy.”  (Okay, actually I don’t know that The Cannibal ever said any such thing at all.  And if he did, it probably would’ve been in some Belgian dialect, with umlauts and other such things flying all over the place.)  So I got out and rode.

My friends, it was a short ride — 26 miles total — but it started with15 miles straight into the maw of that hellish wind.  They say the Belgians train for the mountains by going to the coast and riding into the wind.  And I can see how that would work, because I was going about the same speed I do going up mountains.  But when you go up a mountain, you get to see the result of the effort — a good view, usually.  I got to see more of the endless plains I’m surrounded by.

But I did get an honest-to-goodness 11 miles of almost pure tailwind going home.  Haven’t ridden that fast on the flats since my racing days.  It was a beautiful thing.

Here’s a great article from the Freakonomics blog.

For my first post, I can’t go wrong with music.

My birthday was last week, and my Mom and Dad gave me a Barnes & Noble gift card.  So today I hopped on their site (Barnes & Noble’s, not Mom and Dad’s — the latter don’t have a site yet, at least not that I know of) and ordered two Airbourne CDs and one from the old days, Uriah Heep’s Demons and Wizards.

I like to keep up with at least some new music, so my pop culture references aren’t all hopelessly out of date.  (Movies are a lost cause — my favorite quotes coming from Monty Python and Better Off Dead puts me right out when I talk to colleagues born after 1970 — which is, increasingly, most of them.)  So Airbourne is a score — one of the discs I’ve got on its way came out mere weeks ago!  The only problem is that almost nobody listens to the kinds of music I like, so my references to Disturbed and Muse don’t get me very far culturally.

Uriah Heep is just re-upping on the stuff I grew up with.  (No, I’m not quite old enough for them — lots of my early music came from my brother John, who’s, like, 20 or 30 years older than I am.)  I listened to Demons and Wizards on vinyl endlessly back in the day.  Here’s the band, in all their glory.  (I didn’t realize until I found this video that John actually sang for UH.  At least, I’m pretty sure that’s his ‘stache and shirt — but I don’t recall the ‘fro or the suit.)

One of the beauties of Uriah Heep is they give me an opportunity to show off and pretend I know a damn thing about fine literature — all because I’m somehow aware that the band’s name is a character in David Copperfield.