In the shorter end of the course of a career in journalism, you’ll come to recognize the regular phenomenon known as the slow news day. It’s pretty much just what it sounds like, a day when there’s just not a lot of news.

The Tour of Luxembourg isn’t likely to fire too many people up, most of the big guns are licking their wounds and waiting for the Tour and the Dauphiné Libéré is yet to begin. Thus, today is a slow news day.

Sometimes, slow news is good news — it gives you the chance to relax, pull back the reigns a bit, catch a breath. Some days, it’s maddening.

But some days, slow news days inexplicably yield a little nouget of absolute, and in this case rather abstract, hilarity.

Such is the case with Bernard Hinault, who had a righteous pop at I think just about everyone save the Virgin Mary today at “a presentation this week in Montereau, the starting village of the final stage of the 2009 Tour de France” (good specifics, VeloNews).

Either way, the fellas at VN were gracious enough to reprint some of the Badger’s quotes, extracted from Le Parisien.

On earpieces: “I am against them. It is just a ‘Game Boy’ that has a gigolo attached at the end telling the racer when to take a piss. With Guimard, we studied the map and the wind the morning before the stage.”

I love slow news days.