Category Archives: Not Cycling

Reasons to be cheerful in Melbourne…at last

Dear Rouleurs,

Whilst winter has been utterly dreary with no trips to the MCG and in last 2 months serious restrictions on movement, both due to stage 4 lock down, Team MMT’s mood has significantly improved. October has brought warmer weather and daylight savings has kicked in producing pleasant evenings to boot. But its two major events that have occurred this week that that has put a literal spring in MMT’s step.

The first occurred on Friday night, with MMT’s beloved Tigers went toe to toe with a hostile Port Adelaide on their home ground in front of a full house of Port supporters and …won…unf#%kbelievable. Even if the Cats roll the Tiges next Saturday, that game and the mental strength it took to win will be long remembered by Tiges fans everwhere. So here is it the MMT appropriated AFL graphic of the path to the Finals.

Its been a very weird year…period but this result is bewildering. Both Grand Finalists have:

=>been playing away from home for over 100 days in their respective hubs.

=>lost their initial Qualifying Final.

=>beaten the hometown team on their own ground in front of their supporters.

That is very odd, even in a year when lots of bad and odd things have been occurring. Which brings MMT to the other wonderful event of this week, today’s easing of Stage 4 Restrictions, in particular the one that was starting to drive MMT a bit nuts, the 5km radius restriction. MMT wrote about this a while back and has done some where upwards of 500km in his 5km radius.

So when this changed from this….

MMT’s Tour de 5km Radius. When daily exercise was set at 1 hour this meant tooling around Albert Park Lake. When this was lifted to 2 hours it meant he could ride to Williamstown. Alas MMT is yet to fugure out how to ride his beloved Trek Domane on water.

To this…

Hallelujah!!! MMT can ride to Mordialloc, Altona and Meadow Heights again with no daytime exercise time restrictions…woo hoo. I’m so looking forward to a cruise to Blackrock tomorrow.

Damn, normal road cycling has resumed in Melbourne for MMT. Unfortunately the same can not be said for cycling in European where COVID-19 is rampaging in devastating second wave. In seems unlikley that the Giro d’Italia 2020 will finish in Milan, and the classics have taken hit with both the Paris-Roubaix and Amstel Gold being cancelled. Let’s hope a vaccine is close to being released to the world’s population. This year has just been awful.

Until next time, ride safe and Go Tiges

MMT

Melbourne is stage three lock down and someone at Garmin is having a very bad day…

Dear Rouleurs,

Of course it was too good to last. Back in May, Australia looked like it had dodged a COVID-19 bullet. Now that bloody virus gotten loose loose in Northern Melbourne and trigger this new stage 3, 6 week lockdown. Almost all the COVID-19 cases in Australian are in Victoria at present. About the only silver lining in this awful mess, is that road traffic around Melbourne has reduced significantly, which is great for cyclists. Who knows may be Melbournians will adopt the bike as their preferred mode of transport.


MMT took a snap shot of a great Mark Knight cartoon, that is in all honesty is bit rough on Victorian Preimer Dan Andrews. However it does capture the mood of frustration about how Victoria’s quaratine system was clearly being run by muppets. It appears that the Rydges on Swanston in Carlton and the Stamford Plaza in Melbourne’s city centre have been the epicentre for this new surge….WTF…. As the number of new cases keeps bounding along in the high 400’s, it will be interesting to see how the security company running fares in the recently announced inquiry.

Now speaking of stuff ups, something very odd is going on the Garmin Connect website. MMT has been trying to upload today’s ride around the Capital City trail when he encountered this error. Its been down for nearly 8 hours, which is seriously weird, given that its probably sitting on a Google or AWS cloud. MMT will be really f%#ked off if his 56 km ride disappears in into thin air. He finally navigated, clockwise the Capital City Trail, on the third attempt.

MMT checked a few social media groups and tried the website again tonight and its apparent something has gone wrong. Even an a UK newspaper, The Independant, has reported the outage. Someone at Garmin must be having a very bad day. In word…bugger..may be the website has caught COVID-19 or been done over by Chinese hackers…conspiracy theories run wild.

Until next time, ride safe and keep safe

Marv

COVID Photo gallery

Dear Rouleurs,

MMT has been busy collating a series of happy snaps and social media memes as a record of COVID-19 and its impact on Melbourne. Most of these photos have been taken whilst MMT has been out and about on his bike. Speaking of which, MMT is quietly chuffed at doing over 1000 km in June.

So the photo below, isn’t included in the gallery as it was taken in Sydney. MMT thinks it perfectly captured the insanity of what was occurring in Australia’s grocery stores back in March 2020.

Chapeau!! to the Newtown branch of NSW Fire and Rescue service. Readers you can find MMT’s COVID Gallery <-here.

Until next time, ride safe and stay safe.

Marv

Its the end of the world and I feel fine or Apologies to REM

Dear Rouleurs,

All over the world, a lot of people are having incredibly shit experiences with worst global event since World War 2. People are sick, dying, unemployed, suffering from extreme social distancing and wondering what happens next. MMT is no different. Europe’s death toll is slowly abating and has been overtaken by the USA. At least here in Australia and in our next door neighbour New Zealand we have been spared the worst.

In MMT’s small part of the world, he’s been deeply concerned, seemingly struck down by the common flu after his last ride on Good Friday. Stupidly, MMT rode in the wind and wet for nearly three hours and by Sunday afternoon was feeling pretty average. His youngest daughter has a much milder version of the same thing. Given the asbence of a few key symptoms its seems unlikely that either of us have COVID-19. Daughter No.2 has had a couple of trips to the ER with breathing difficulties attributed to Croup. However next week, once the worst of this is over, MMT plans on visiting his GP and having a chat.

So last blog MMT shamelessly stole a couple of graphs documenting the infection rate in Victoria and in Australia overall. The latest version of the graphs spell out how effective Australia has been contact tracing, isolating oversea visitors or returning Australians and controlling cluster outbreaks. If the Ruby Princess cruiseship debacle hadn’t occurred it could have been better.

This is Victoria’s:

This is Australia’s:

The curves in both graphs have experienced the required flattening. The cost of which is likley to paid for by generations of Australias, present and future.

So to tie back to were MMT started, MMT has been revisiting the music of his youth via a social media platform, that he refuses to name on principle. One of those albums was Document No.5, which contained the song and lyric, ‘Its the end of the world and I feel fine’. MMT is not sure about the ‘fine’ part yet.

Until next time, stay safe out there

MMT