auscyclefan94 said:
The stage in Morzine Avoriaz where we had ordering pizza/food in the background which annoyed me. Those guys are journo's so they need to be consistent and some of their comments have not been throughout the podcast. They seem to really suck up to Wiggo and don't give balanced coverage. I don't really like Moore or Freibe tbh. I find them annoying and personally they seem to think the podcast is more about themselves than the race. Bring back the A TEAM of benson and Jones.
I hear you on the inconsistency then. I'm not trying to convince you to like the podcast or anything with what I'm going to say next—in fact, I think much moreso I'm just trying to answer my own question of why I'm enjoying it—but I wonder if we're divided on the podcast because of the sort of perspective we're getting. That is, I actually don't mind if the journalists are, at times, the subject matter or focus of the podcast themselves.
For me, the Tour gets a tad bit more boring every year, just getting used to the pattern of racing. I suppose not quite as boring as the US Postal years (save for '03), but even a slightly (slightly) more open era of contenders isn't keeping my attention as much as the first few editions of the race I followed closely. So, getting a new perspective in the vein of how the journalists are following the Tour is interesting to me. I guess that's not what you're looking for, and perhaps it's not even what they're trying to do in the podcast, but I'm intrigued by it.
Full disclosure: If we were to do a complete psychoanalysis, my becoming more of a fan of journalists than riders probably has something to do with the fact that I already feel like a washed-up racer myself at 24, having seen my best Cat 1 days happen a couple years ago already, and not doing much to change it at the moment because I'm focusing on my studies more than the bike.
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So I was thinking all of the above as I was listening to the latest episode, Stage 12, and Anthony Tan tells the listeners to keep in mind that they're not actually having fun in France. I couldn't exactly come up with an exact percentage of sarcasm behind that quotation, but, even with an undetermined amount, let the record show that I'm apparently enjoying the podcast for the wrong reasons.
Back to podcasting about journalism though (journalism about journalism—metacriticism?), it was great to hear some commentary from Richard Moore mostly about feedback from the forum and online comments on journalists and riders. There's a very interesting topic of conversation. Thanks for pursuing it, guys. My only surprise in that section is that apparently you're especially offended by auscyclefan94, which I think is a bit misguided. This thread is quite tame compared to any overt trolling (which I think we're free of so far), and I think auscyclefan94 has in fact already influenced the tone of the podcast the last few days, as well as helped spur on this aforementioned intriguing section about how to process online feedback. So, good stuff.
One last point in this admittedly too-lengthy post is that I'm incredibly saddened to have backed Tan Man on inertia and then hear he's planning Hotel California as opposed to 99 Luftballoons (okay, 99 Red Balloons, we'll let you slide with the English version). What's a guy have to do? On inertia though—I don't know what six dictionaries you checked, Friebe, but doing an online search on almost any established dictionary yields pretty much universally the following succinct (and correct!) definition:
"Inertia is the name for the tendency of an object in motion to remain in motion, or an object at rest to remain at rest, unless acted upon by a force. This concept was quantified in Newton's First Law of Motion." And the adjective is "inertial," not "inertious." I really want to break Moore's and Friebe's inertial frame of reference on the matter....
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