Good morning,
Today’s forecast for Whitewater calls for scattered thunderstorms today, and heavy rainstorms tonight. Eventually, one National Weather Service forecast or another will prove correct. The high temperature is forecast for 85 degrees.
There’s a Landmarks Commission meeting in the City of Whitewater this afternoon, from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. The agenda is available online.
The Wisconsin Historical Society recalls that on this date in 1832, there were more developments in the Black Hawk War:
Black Hawk War Encampment in Palmyra
On this date during the Black Hawk War, General Atkinson led his entire militia, which included future Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Zachary Taylor, to a camp just south of Palmyra. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers, edited by Sarah Davis McBride]
Frontier Airlines, eager to make its presence felt in the Wisconsin market, painted one of its planes with a badger on the tail. They held a contest to name the badger, and Buddy was the winning name. The badger looks great, even if the rest of the plane looks non-descript. The badger more than makes up for it:
Very sharp, indeed.
If you’ve been following the Tour de France, you heard about all you might have ever wanted to know about cobblestones. Stage 3 was a boon to anyone who wanted to talk about road surfaces, risks from road surfaces, or risks from the early stages of the Tour. (Some of which involved rain on Stage 2, a condition that the Tour’s organizers could not have commanded.)
If the question is whether a common man could ride well under those conditions, the answer is surely no. I’ve not tried to ride on cobblestones, not by myself at slow speed, and certainly not in a group (where I could not sustain anything like the steady speeds of the riders on the Tour, in any event.) Still, many of these riders are familiar with this kind of pavement, have been in races on it before, and can and did manage well.
I think It’s exciting to watch not because these riders cannot do well, but because I — and countless others — couldn’t do something like this at all.
I can think of two riders who did very well indeed: “Cancellara back in yellow as Hushovd claims the stage.”