Month: September 2025

Finally – 50 States

I have been wanting to do the WABA Fifty States ride forever. It’s a really cool concept – the route takes you on all fifty of the state-named streets in DC. But it’s always a Saturday in September, and since I have two children with birthdays in September, I’ve never been free when the ride happened. But that changed this year – Gremlin 2 was in Raleigh, NC, for two soccer games, and Gremlin 1 is kinda too old to care if her dad is home. Gremlin 2 as well, for that matter.

So I did the ride. I started with a group of friends and friends of friends. Well, actually I started by dropping Gremlin 2 off in Alexandria at 630AM to catch the team bus to North Carolina. But I started the ride with friends. However, it shortly became clear that the pace they were going was not going to get me home in time to take Gremlin 1 to her soccer game, so I had to forge ahead on my own.

Quick plug for the turn-by-turn routing on my Wahoo (link is to one version newer than mine but whatever) – the ride is not marked like many are, and the roads are not closed, so you need to know where you are going. My Wahoo sent me on ONE wrong turn, and I followed the rider ahead of me on one other, but that was it.

It’s interesting to do a ride in the city. The organized rides I’ve done previously are out in much more rural areas, and there are not many cars. There are markers spray painted at turns. This ride is NOT that. We had to navigate around drivers, pedestrians, and other cyclists, not to mention they adjusted the route to avoid the H Street Festival road closures. It’s a very different vibe, and it attracts a different type of cyclist.

I highly recommend you do the ride if you think you’re able. It’s challenging – almost 60 miles plus 3,000 feet of climbing (and a good chunk of it in the last third of the ride, stupid upper Northwest and its leafy avenues). But you don’t have to do it FAST (unless you have a soccer conflict). The ride marshalls are pretty good if you aren’t comfortable on your own, or find some friends and let them take care of you.

Also, it’s better to have more time so you can celebrate with the other finishers at Metrobar. I had to leave so I could shower and take a quick nap before soccer.

Targeted like a Stormtrooper

The below comment made it through the WordPress spam filter and into my moderation queue. I don’t know why – it’s clearly garbage spam, and it’s on a 2006 post I did clearly trying to farm hits from John Scalzi’s large fanbase.

Hey! Just launched TurboJot — the AI-powered outreach tool that actually wrote and submitted this message. It auto-fills forms with human-like messaging and precision targeting, consistently driving more conversions than email or ads. Book a demo on our site: https://go.turbojot.com/discover

I’m leaving the link in because you should know what this company’s product is. It frankly isn’t bad at sounding like a person. Unfortunately, it sounds exactly like a person writing a spam comment or email. And the targeting – back at the height of this blog, I got a decent amount of traffic for the poorly written ramblings of a completely unfamous person. But this particular post (I don’t have hit counters from the beginning any more) has three hits this year. Probably all AI scrapers that managed to trick WordPress into thinking it was a “view”.

Hat tip to Adriano for the post title.

At Long Last – My White Whale

In about 2011, I got back into baseball cards. I collected for a while around 1989-1992, the peak of the Junk Wax Era, when the market was flooded with cards that everyone thought were going to be investments like the cards your grandmother threw away in the 1950’s. I never had any money then, but in 2011 I had a real job and some friends who were ALSO interested in getting back into it.

I started collecting Aroldis Chapman cards. He was a young Cuban pitcher with an AMAZING fastball. He played for the Cincinnati Reds, which meant as an Oriole fan, he could never really hurt me. I have quite an extensive collection of his cards from 2009-2014. Then, at close to the same time, there were accusations (pretty substantiated, I think) of domestic abuse AND he went to the Yankees. I lost interest in my collection.

If you aren’t familiar with baseball cards since 2010 or so, I need to explain a few things. In order to avoid the overproduction of the early 1990s, they do limited print runs of some cards. Often a player will have his regular card, then they will do, say, 500 of that same card with a different color border, and they’ll number then out of 500 so you know you have the limited edition. They also put the printing plates into circulation. These are three metal versions of the card that they claim to actually use in the process of printing the card. There is only one of each of the three.

At the height of my collecting, late 2014, I found this on eBay.

This is a framed mini card (my favorite type of card). The card itself is about the size of a tobacco card, and it’s encased in plastic, and then a cardboard border to make it the same dimensions as a standard baseball card. This is the printing plate for a 2011 mini. It says on the back that it’s card , but I have card , and it’s NOT that. I scoured every website that dealt with cards and I couldn’t find ANY evidence of this card existing. I did find that there was a card, , that was a Chapman found inside of a rip card. This is a regular-dimension card but thicker with a pull tab on the back. You can choose to pull the tab, lowering the value, but MAYBE there’s something inside worth even more.

However, even armed with this suspicion, nothing. I even offered a bounty for proof of existence and nothing.

Here we are, nearly 11 years later, and a few weeks ago a hit on my eBay search. I found it! I was indeed correct that it was from inside a rip card, and someone had it for sale! I went back and forth for a while because he was asking a lot for it. But in the end, I couldn’t resist. I made him an offer (still too much) and he took it.

Yesterday, it arrived.

I can’t believe it took over a decade.

And as you can see, the printing plate is a liar:

It’s not 5, it’s 385. Whatever. Stupid lying sticker.

As an added bonus, this has inspired me to try to sell off the collection, aside from a few favorites. They just take up space. I was hoping his new contract with the Red Sox would bump his popularity enough to get some interest in the cards, but so far that has not really been the case. Anyone want to buy some Chapmans? I’ve got some really nice stuff…