Chris O’Riordan’s Triple Play

College baseball. Minor leagues. Then what?

Click here to read the latest sports story from yours truly.

And a video, too!

Dang it's Dangerous to be a Wife

So I'm going through crime stats on the FBI's website for a story, and I come upon this little graph:

In 2008, ladies were the biggest losers.

When it comes to being offed by someone you know, it appears wives and girlfriends are in the greatest peril.

So to all of the husbands and boyfriends out there with uxoricidal and girlfriendicidal tendencies, here's some advice: Don't do it.

Let's make 2010 the year women are our friends.

Ladyfriends in 2010!

RIP Baked in Telluride

Telluride is my happy place.

So says a sticker I bought there last year. And it's true. There's something about Telluride that makes me supremely happy.

But what?

I thought about it for a while, and came up with this: Telluride doesn't change.

Much.

OK, let me restate that: many things about Telluride haven't changed over my lifetime. And there's a certain sense of peace that comes with returning to a place where my childhood memories were formed--and it's always just how I remembered it.

Baked in Telluride, the quintessential hippie bakery with delicious everything, was an important part of the Telluride time capsule. It had been there my entire life and then some.

When I was probably 6 years old, Baked in Telluride gave me my first taste of freedom. My parents would give me a buck to buy a few bagels in the morning--all alone. It was a huge responsibility. I got to run to the store by myself, pick the flavors, and pay.

I always slipped on the carpeted incline into the store--every year of my life--but never thought that the entrance should be changed. Sure, it took some technical skill to enter, but once I was in, I'd be greeted with cases of beautiful baked goods, like ginormous macaroons. And pizza. It always smelled like pizza. Delicious.

So imagine my grief when madre called to announce that Baked in Telluride burned to the ground on Feb. 10.

(Image from the Durango Herald.)

This is what's left:

(Photo from Telluride Daily Photo.)

Conspiracy theories already abound in the tiny box canyon town. According to madre and padre, self-proclaimed professional sleuths, one such theory is:

The owner of the grocery store next door owned the BIT building. He's wanted to expand his store to compete with the store in Lulu City for some time, and now he can collect the insurance money to help expand into the lot that was once Baked in Telluride.

Nice theory. But I'm rooting for BIT to come back. Big time.

The Telluride Daily Planet reports that the fire was sparked by BIT's giant oven. The last line of the article says owner Jerry Greene "hopes to build a new bakery in the space as soon as possible."

You can do it, Jerry!

In other news, apparently the rice crispies and other baked goods on the ski mountain are not nearly as homemadeishly delicious as they were before BIT burned. Which leads madre and padre to believe BIT supplied the mountain with the delicious baked goods that fueled my multiple Gold Hill escapades.

All of Telluride suffers.

Bring BIT back soon!

Rant on Rating Journalism

In what seemed like a thinly veiled effort to boost user numbers for start-up site Newstrust.net, my classmates and I were asked to sign up for an account at this site, then rate three news stories on the same topic. (I chose the earthquake in Chile.)

I believe rating news is one activity where the truth will not necessarily emerge from the collective knowledge of average citizens, which seems to be the point of Newstrust. Also, I don't think this knowledge could even be gleaned, as I don't believe each story reviewed will ever get more than a handful of reviews, because, as it always is with news, what was news yesterday and worthy of rating is old news today, and not as interesting a read.

This inherent news problem makes the goal of having the cream rise to the top, or however the saying goes, impossible as the average rating of a certain story will only reflect the polarized, subjective views of a few people.

Even as a person going through training to be a better journalist, I wouldn't suggest my ratings of certain stories as particularly helpful or even necessarily reflective of an unobtainable "true" rating determined by mashing together ratings of several people.

A few problems I had with the site:

1. If you're rating a story that has already been rated, it's not too far fetched to imagine you might be influenced by the rating presented when determining your own.

2. Search results for stories rated on the site are terrible--it'll be difficult to find a story on a topic you'd like to know more about by searching for it on NewsTrust.

3. The banner that allows users to rate stories only appears on the page where the original rater posted the URL. If you click to "read more," and the story opens on another page, the NewsTrust banner disappears and you can't rate the story from there.

It's a noble goal to want to make people more media literate. And forcing people to think about what they've read and why they feel it was or was not informative is a good way to do that. But I think the people that are going to take the time to do that are probably not the people who most need to be taught about media literacy.

It's a great idea--the act of rating a news story should help a reader become more media savvy. However I do not think anything of great significance will be revealed in the collective ratings themselves, as the stories being rated are constantly shifting according to the daily news cycle, and will therefore never have enough ratings to reflect some kind of collective knowledge about what is good or bad journalism.

And thus, I end my journalism rant.

Brought to you by Dead Tired, an after effect of competing in your first triathlon of the season...even if you only did 2/3 of it...and it was a sprint...

More on the Treeathlon to come!

Mourning Athleticism Lost

I just received an email from Planet Ultra informing me that the Camino Real Double Century went well this year.

And it made me a little sad.

OK, a lot sad.

That means it's been over a year since I did my first double century with my favorite ultracycling buddies Robyn and coachubby. That means that at this time last year, I could swing my right leg over the Silver Bullet, clip in, and ride for 18 hours straight. Up mountains, down mountains, up mountains again. Just out there, enjoying my buddies' company. Or, you know, huddling together in a ditch on the side of the road in the freezing rain. That's fun, too.

And so, this evening, I mourn for my long lost ultrafitness, which has been obliterated by training weeks so short they don't even count as training, revenge of the hambutt, and a fondness for frosted bite-size chocolate mini wheats.

At least my brain is getting toned.

Proof? It hurts.