Les Elkins' page.

Web pages are either a voyeuristic thrill (if you're reading them) or a narcissistic thrill (if you're writing them).

Biking pics

From Western Montgomery County to the Washington and Old Dominion, then to the Mount Vernon Trail, the Capital Crescent to Rock Creek Park: last July, I did my first century.

Spending time on the lower C&O Canal towpath. (Thereby getting back to nature on the ruins of one of the major civil engineering projects of the early 19th century). And a little further up, in preperation to do the whole thing one of these days, from Cumberland MD down to Georgetown in DC.

And in 2003 I did indeed do the whole thing...

More on all the above: bikewashington.org

Where I'm spending too much time on and off:

www.newhotsjazz.com
www.vloc.org
solo.wdcr-scca.org/
www.savoyards.org
www.rockvillebrass.org
www.laureloratioriosociety.org
www.hexagon.org
www.glemnontumc.org

And here are some pictures and music from the Jefferson Street Strutters. (It's somewhere to use a fake book.)

-Les Elkins
lese AT capaccess DOT org

Last update 11/9/05

Misc. quotes:

"The typing on the keyboard takes about a year. The staring out the window can be any length of time and is usually harder." - William Gibson on the time it takes him to write a book.

"My business card does read, 'Will rationalize for food.'" - Carolyn Hax

"Flattery will get you nowhere, but don't stop." - Ace Lightning

"And to hell with Kate Hepburn; Veronica Lake was on the prowl." - John Varley, "Steel Beach"

"'A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down -- very important traits in times like these." - Robert Benchley

"If you want to build a ship, then don't drum up men to gather wood, give orders, and divide the work. Rather, teach them to yearn for the far and endless sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Camping alone requires a rational mind. Certain sounds outside your tent are from water droplets falling from tree branches onto damp earth and leaves, not from blood dripping from a madman's meat cleaver. If you listen very closely you can tell the difference." - Joel Achenbach

"War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. The crueler we make it, the shorter it will be." - William Tecumseh Sherman

"My past keeps coming up into my future and messin' with my good life!" - Jesco White

"Don't meddle with old unloaded firearms. They are the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created by man. You don't have to take any pains at all with them; you don't have to have a rest, you don't have to have any sights on the gun, you don't have to take aim, even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him. A youth who can't hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three-quarters of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his mother every time at a hundred. Think what Waterloo would have been if one of the armies had been boys armed with old rusty muskets supposed not to be loaded, and the other army had been composed of their female relations. The very thought of it makes me shudder." - Mark Twain, Advice to Youth speech, 4/15/1882

"It's the only place where you can show up for an evening of casual illicit sex, cold-blooded murder, incest, drunken orgies, drug abuse, slapstick comedy, and the occasional walking talking statue from hell and still call it high culture." - The Baltimore Opera's A Beginner's Guide to Opera

"Along with gunsight camera footage and Wile E. Coyote cartoons, I could watch that all day." - Stephen Hunter

"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.... It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion, and whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men, governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? Difference of opinion is advantageous to religion. The several sects perform the office of censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth." - Thomas Jefferson in Parton's "Life of Jefferson", pp. 211, 212.