Big news as the Tour de France is set to get underway: 7 cyclists, including favorites Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, are implicated in a doping scandal and ejected from the tour. More from cyclingnews and VeloNews. Stay on top of the story at TdFblog. Meanwhile, Lance Armstrong continues with his own controversy.
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We just got back from watching the Astros get hosed by the Rangers 6-0. Very disappointing.
My latest addiction is sudoku. No doubt most of you know what sudoku is by now, but for those of you that don’t, it’s basically a logic puzzle solved by filling in a grid of numbers. Despite the Japanese name, the puzzle concept actually originated in New York, and rose to popularity in English newspapers last year. The traditional puzzle is a 9-by-9 grid, divided into nine 3-by-3 blocks. When finished, each row, column, and block will contain the numbers one through nine. I’m not the only addict, apparently. Sudoku caught on big last year, as articles in the New York Times, the Economist, and Slate attest. A recent visit to Barnes & Noble revealed a table stacked with sudoku books containing both compilations of the puzzles and its many variations, as well as discussions of various arcane strategies for solving them.
You needn’t shell out any cash to play the puzzles, though. Many newspapers now include sudoku puzzles in both their print and digital editions, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and others. There are also a number of free sites devoted to the game. My favorite is Iron Sudoku, but you can also play at Web Sudoku and Random Sudoku, as well as a bunch of others. You can also download sudoku solvers, the best of which is probably Simple Sudoku, which also has an online tutorial in some basic solving techniques. More solving techniques are also described here. Now I just need a support group…
The Tour of California is an eight-day, 700-mile bicycle race through, you guessed it, California. It started on February 19, and concludes on Sunday, February 26. Sponsored by Amgen, and hoping to raise awareness and funds for cancer cures and treatments, this is the first year of the Tour. The route map indicates that stages 4 and 5 will go through the San Luis Obispo area, so hopefully my parents will get some decent pictures. The Tour site offers an rss play-by-play feed, and Cycling News has updates, photographs, and other route information. There are also already a ton of pics up on Flickr, including big sets from frenquency, bigempty, mnorri, and visceralpleasures. You can also check out all photos tagged with “Tour of California.”