What happened is, he had his bike locked to his car while he went to services on Good Friday, and when he came back, his bike was gone, and he doesn’t think a nun stole it so basically his parents lied to him when they said “we are all the same” and his favorite movie is no longer “In the Heat of the Night.” (The deductive reasoning on display is staggering: It couldn’t have been monks, must have been black people.)

When I got home I vented to my friends. I told them I was going to scour those neighborhoods until I found the bike. In reply, a liberal friend gave me a lecture about profiling and told me to just forget about the bike. “That person needs our prayers and help,” she said. “They haven’t had the advantages we have.”

That’s when I lost it. I had been carefully educated by liberal parents that we are all, black and white, the same. My favorite movie growing up was “In the Heat of the Night.” Yet that often meant not treating everyone the same. It meant treating blacks with a mixture of patronizing condescension and obsequious genuflecting to their Absolute Moral Authority gained from centuries of suffering. It meant not treating everyone the same.

It meant leaving valuable things like a bike in a vulnerable position in a black part of town because you didn’t want to admit that the crime is worse in poor black neighborhoods.

Stupid strawman liberal friend! If we’re all “the same,” why did a (probably) black person (possibly) steal Mark Judge’s bike?

It actually gets dumber from there — on Page 2 he excitedly recounts the time universally loathed asshole Piers Morgan totally told off Toure — but long story short Mr. Judge has decided that “black pain is no different than white pain” and so therefore Soledad O’Brien (??) should stop complaining. After all, the black person who may have stolen his bike may also have “a car, a nice apartment, a hot girlfriend and good health.”

I mean, sure! That’s possible! It’s definitely within the realm of possibility that the hypothetical black person you assume stole your bike because you were near a “poor black neighborhood” when it disappeared has a really sweet life, sure.

Wise up, White Americans. Your liberal parents lied to you when they said “this country’s centuries-old tradition of state-sponsored discrimination and institutional racism means a black person would never steal your bike, so just park that shit wherever.” Or like maybe your “white guilt” is just weird curdled racial resentment (“even though I try super hard not to be incredibly racist black people still won’t forgive me!”) which caused you to go in a really weird direction with your otherwise totally normal anger about being the victim of some random crime of opportunity.

“In the cold light of morning your story was either extraordinarily shoddy, to the point of being reckless and unprofessional, or a vicious hit-and-run job,” Peters wrote. “In either case, a categorical on-air apology is required.”

CBS News spokesman Kevin Tedesco said Wednesday he couldn’t immediately comment on the letter, but said: “We consider this the most thorough investigation into doping in the sport of cycling ever done.”

Former teammate Tyler Hamilton alleged in the piece that Armstrong talked about using the banned blood-booster EPO to prepare for his third Tour de France in 2001 and cycling’s governing body, the International Cycling Union, helped him hide a positive test at the Swiss event.

Last week, the head of Switzerland’s anti-doping laboratory, Martial Saugy, denied allegations Armstrong tested positive for performing-enhancing drugs during the 2001 Tour de Suisse.

Saugy said his lab did find suspicious levels of EPO in four urine samples from the race Armstrong won, but he didn’t know if any belonged to the seven-time Tour de France winner.

Armstrong has repeatedly denied doping and has never tested positive. Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles are investigating an alleged doping program in Armstrong’s teams.

“60 Minutes” also reported ICU officials brokered a meeting involving Armstrong and Saugy’s World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited lab, which tested the Swiss race samples.

Saugy told the Swiss daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung last week that he met with Armstrong and then-U.S. Postal team manager Johan Bruyneel, but not in Lausanne as Hamilton claimed and unconnected to a suspicious test result.

Peters added the show’s producers were alerted by Armstrong’s camp prior to the show’s airing that the Swiss-related allegations were false and provided evidence to refute them.

“What is particularly disturbing is that ’60 Minutes’ had access to the true facts, could easily have verified them, and apparently chose instead to broadcast untruths and then layer innuendo on top of the falsehoods,” Peters said.

I made it to the store, returned my DVD, and was unlocking my bike to ride back home when a tall stranger called out to me.

“I want you to know that you have convinced me to buy a bike.”

My brow furrowed. What new scam was this?

Then I noticed he too was holding a DVD in his hands.

He continued — “I was behind you back on Shattuck…”

I interrupted. “You were driving the white car!”

Yeah, he said. And then, noting that we had arrived at the rental store about the same time, he said that watching me zip through traffic had convinced him he needed to get his own bicycle. He talked about getting in shape — he even mentioned the magic words “carbon footprint.” I told him about my favorite bike shop — which happened to be just a block away from the rental place. He gave me his name, Joel, and I gave him mine. We discussed the always delicate intersection between cyclists and car drivers out on the open road: My moment of tension, wondering if the white sedan driver would get aggro when I took the lane; his moment of impatience wondering whether I was just going to sit in the lane and slow him down.

“I hope I see you out on the road, Joel,” I told him as I headed home. He smiled.

You may be wondering why I decided to share this tiny urban cycling vignette. In the big scheme of things it’s not all that important. But it brightened up my day like a ray of afternoon sunshine breaking through a blanket of San Francisco Bay Area fog and I just had to share the glee. Real human contact with a complete stranger is much rarer in our lives than it should be. And any time someone decides to ride a bike instead of driving a car is good for them and does the world a favor. And might even be good for someone else too, who isn’t riding a bike … yet.

On my 100-mile ride in West Marin yesterday, I signaled for a left turn on a rural highway, and I got yelled at by a woman who was irritated at having to slow down to accommodate me. A blasting headwind for the last 20 miles of the ride did not improve my mood after that all too familiar demonstration of our ability not to get along. This morning I woke up sore, and not really crazy about the idea of getting back on the bike at all.

But I did, and lo and behold, the fog lifted! Today is a good day. Go ride a bike.

Maes is running against Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, so it’s understandable that he’d attack Hickenlooper’s record. And, obviously, Hickenlooper’s weakest point is his apparent desire to tear up the Constitution and replace it with a U.N. treaty, as evidenced by his support for bicycling more.

Maes knows that sounds “kooky,” but:

Maes acknowledged that some might find his theories “kooky,” but he said there are valid reasons to be worried.

“At first, I thought, ‘Gosh, public transportation, what’s wrong with that, and what’s wrong with people parking their cars and riding their bikes? And what’s wrong with incentives for green cars?’ But if you do your homework and research, you realize [the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives] is part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty,” Maes said.

Gosh! Four hundred red bikes available for rent, funded by donors and grants, does seem innocuous. But now that you mention it, it is probably the first step toward complete United Nations control of Denver.

After this delightfully Jack D. Ripper-esque bit of nonsense made its way around the national blogosphere, the campaign scrambled to “clarify” the bike statements. And, to its credit, Maes’ spokesman did clarify that the candidate really thinks a bike-sharing program means that the mayor of Denver is “taking orders from the U.N.”

“Those quotes were taken widely out of context,” he maintains. “In the echo chamber that is the blogosphere, they’ve reached almost legendary status as a huge political gaffe. But it was really an off-the-cuff comment used as an example to illustrate a larger point — which, of course, was completely thrown to the wind in the coverage.”

What was that larger point? According to Strauch, “it was that a mayor or a governor shouldn’t be taking orders from the UN. Using the B-Cycle program to illustrate that may not have been the best example, but that wasn’t the focus of Dan’s comments at all. He’s not anti-bicycle, which is the way it’s been made out — that riding a bicycle is tantamount to bowing down in UN headquarters. He was talking about a very specific program Denver is enrolled in, and that’s only one example of how that program is entering Colorado through Denver.”

So, his point was not that a bicycle-sharing program represented an unconstitutional “strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty.” His point was that … the bicycle program wasn’t the best example of said unconstitutional strategy to sign away our sovereignty to the U.N. Maes has nothing against bikes! He just thinks that sharing them brings us one step closer to One World Government.

(The candidate himself appeared on MSNBC on Monday: “The bike program in and of itself is fine,” he said. Then, he said: “When the mayor signs on to a program that’s sponsored by the United Nations, that should bring concern to people as to how that program may or may not be compatible with our state constitution.”)

It’s a credit to the craziness of Maes that Tom Tancredo — no stranger to nuttiness — has now inserted himself into the governor’s race as an independent, almost certainly throwing the election to Democrat and international velocipede plot co-conspirator John Hickenlooper.

Of course, Maes is positive he’ll win. He knows the real reason Republicans have had a nasty couple of election cycles, too: They’ve been too moderate.

“We don’t have to pander to the middle anymore,” he said to the Denver Post on Wednesday. “We’ve done it in the past, and we’ve lost doing that, and it’s time to stop doing that.”

And on Friday, the Post reported that Maes — whose finances have been a mess — asked an 83-year-old Republican activist for “more than $300″ to help him pay his mortgage. Maes’ brilliant response was to say that “he met Poundstone at her bank and she gave him $300 in cash as a campaign contribution.” Which, sure, that makes sense. (The “contribution” does not appear in any of his campaign-finance reports.)

The problem is that you are not supposed to take more than $100 of campaign contributions in cash. A couple of hours later, appearing on a radio program, Maes said he couldn’t remember if the $300 cash was a campaign contribution or a personal gift.

As for getting Maes out of the race? The Colorado Republicans know they don’t have a shot at winning the race — they just don’t want Maes’ craziness to sink all the rest of their candidates.

I got the bike last night. Then, this morning, I woke up and learned that Google has added a layer of biking directions to Google Maps. The bike gods, truly, are smiling. Because adding a layer of biking goodness to Google Maps is an unadulteratedly fine thing.

This is something that cyclists have been hoping for and working towards for a long time. Oh sure, I know there will be bugs in Google’s routing algorithm, which is designed to automatically suggest the most bike-friendly route to get you from point to point. It’s a lot trickier to figure out the best bike route for a trip than the speediest, most direct route for a car. Bikers will go out of their away to avoid high traffic streets or will purposely seek out especially scenic routes. And, if the alpha bike geeks who swarm in the Bay Area are any example, they will not be shy about exposing Google’s failures and trumpeting them to the heavens. But Google’s representatives are taking pains to stress that they will be welcoming user feedback to correct any errors or add additional info: My hope is that a properly designed and administered system will marry Google’s algorithmic-fu with localized human intelligence and, over time, we will get a platform of bike-rich geography that just keeps improving. That, more or less, is how the distributed knowledge-base that is the Internet keeps evolving.

However, I did think that Google’s geeks, especially those based in Seattle, were made of tougher stuff than this:

Uphill slopes: l don’t know anyone who enjoys biking up a hill, especially when you’re trying to get somewhere you need to be. Going uphill is worse than simply being much slower; it’s also exhausting and can take a toll on the rest of your ride. Our biking directions are based on a physical model of the amount of power your body has to exert given the slope of the road you’re biking on. Assuming typical values for mass and for wind resistance, we compute the effort you’ll require and the speed you’ll achieve while going uphill. We take this speed into account when determining the time estimate for your journey, and we also try hard to avoid routes that will require an unreasonable degree of exertion. Sometimes the model will determine that it’s far more efficient to make you ride several extra blocks than to have to deal with a massive hill. My teammates in San Francisco were relieved to see that this does indeed work!

He doesn’t know anyone who enjoys biking up a hill, in Seattle?! I respectfully suggest that these cyclists are not living in the right city. OK, maybe “enjoy” isn’t quite the right word to capture the exhilaration of burning quads and an aching back and black existential despair as you struggle in your lowest gear to get up an endless 15 percent grade. But there’s no downhill joy without that uphill pain, and how else are you going to get stronger?

I fully expect that the next iteration of Google Maps will include a feature that allows me to seek the hilliest route between two points. But I’ll be patient while I wait. Because I have a new bike, and now the whole world is a lot more shiny.