- In The Bleachers by Steve Moore - 09/02/2004

I think another good nights sleep tonight and I will fully recover from this past Labor Day weekend!

I had some serious fun for a few days there. I put in some good rides during the day and caught some good tunes at night.

The big ride of the weekend was on Monday. We hit the Mount Falcon - Lair o' the Bear loop. Mount Falcon was a bit tougher than the last time I rode it (May of this year). I started off strong and then about a third of the way up I ran into some difficulty. I just wasn't feeling well for almost the rest of the climb. Fortunately, I was able to recover before the end of the climb and the rest of the ride went off with no problems. The ride is just under 20 miles and I completed it in 2:15 (About 8 minutes longer than my May time). I did the climb to the gazebo in about 48 minutes. Not bad, but I want to go tackle it again, hopefully the next time with no hiccups.

I caught a couple of nights of music at the Taste of Colorado. Sunday night was Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and Monday was Little Feat. BBVD was good but I was really into the Little Feat show. They put on a good show with the final 45 minutes containing quite a bit of good jamming. You have to love old guys that can rock n roll.

I had some fun wandering around checking out all the tents for those two evenings. There where some cool little stands tucked here and there. It is kind of funny though, I was at the Taste of Colorado but didn't eat a lick of food. Well I did have a piece of Cheese Cake on Monday, but I didn't purchase it. I did purchase a few beers along the way. OK, quite a few. Tuesday was a bit blurry to start with. The bike commute to work did clear out the brain a little bit, enough to make it through work at least.

I think I needed a weekend to recover from my weekend ;)

www.9-11pdp.org/

Meet the revised 9/11 Commission

Following the July 22, 2004, release of its official 567-page report, the 9-11 Commission, in accordance with its founding statute, disbanded as a government entity on August 21, 2004. All ten commissioners believe, however, that it is critical to educate the public on the issue of terrorism and what can be done to make the country safer. They would like to do so by reaching out, in bipartisan pairs, to communities around the country, encouraging a national conversation on these critical issues. In the absence of such an effort, they are concerned that there will be insufficient public examination of how the lessons learned from the terrorist attacks can be used to shape public policy. The perils of inaction are far too high - and the strategic value of the Commission's findings too important - for the work of 9-11 Commission not to continue.

For this reason, the ten commissioners have formed a 501(c)(3) organization - the 9/11 Public Discourse Project - aimed at fulfilling the 9-11 Commission's original mandate of guarding against future terrorist attacks, while adhering strictly to the same bipartisan and independent principles that guided it over its twenty month tenure. This new organization, intended to remain in effect for one year, consists of the same leadership of the 9-11 Commission, including its commissioners.

After being rather productive all day, I sat down to a retrospective evening watching the PBS program American Experience and their documetary "The Center of the World".

The eighth episode of filmmaker Ric Burns' award-winning series New York: A Documentary Film examines the rise and fall of the World Trade Center -- from its conception in the post-World War II economic boom, through its controversial construction in the 1960s and 1970s, to its tragic demise in the fall of 2001 and extraordinary response of the city in its aftermath.

Mario Cuomo (Governor, 1983-1994) ends the program with these comments:

I would like to see some depiction of all the religions list them all: atheism, ethical humanism, Catholicism, etc., etc. All of them. And you notice that each of those religions, these value systems, have two principles they share in common. And the two principles started with monotheism and the Jews: tzedakah and tikkun olam. [Tzedakah] means generally: we must treat one another as brother and sister. We should show one another respect and dignity, because we are like things. We are human beings in a world that has nothing else like us. And we ought to treat one another with love, charity-use your own words. And the second principle is: Well, what do you do with this relationship? Well, we don't know exactly how we got here, why we got here, etc., etc. That's for minds larger than ours. But we know that we are like kinds, and we should work together to make this as good an experience as possible. Tikkun Olam -- let us repair the universe. Now Islam believes that. Buddhism that has no god believes it. Every ethical humanist I ever met believes it. Those two principles: we're supposed to love one another and we're supposed to work together to make the experience better. That's all the religion you need, really, to make a success of this planet. And I'd like to see that in 9/11 somewhere. I'd like to see that captured somehow.

Something to sit down and think about for a while.

This morning I spent some time wandering around the web site for the program. There is quite a bit of information through out the site and would suggest to those who are interested to visit it and think about how that day in our recent past has changed us. Something else to think about, is, have we learned anything from the lessons it taught us? Are we better human beings, the same or worse?

A list of those who perished: 9.11.2001.html

Saw this cool graphic on a bridge along the Cherry Creek Bike Path yesterday and just had to take a photo of it.

It is pretty cool having a digital camera now. Now I can just post pictures whenever I please and not have to wait for film to get developed. What a technical wonder!

Click on the picture for a larger image.