How Can We Make The War In Iraq More Eco-Friendly

Oh. My. God.
The Onion is so irreverent, I cannot believe it।Not even the War in Iraq is respected.

to which I will add:

"Whenever someone asks me if I want water with my [bourbon], I say I'm thirsty, not dirty. "

Joe E. Lewis

I got a knife...

"I hate my parents, too." Female Trouble is one of my favoritest movies. John Waters at his finest. The Baltimore accents make me laugh and laugh. Sorry, Baltimore, you're funny sounding. And full of weirdos.

Here's a home furnishing I can really get behind. The home defense table...

From dead asleep to kicking ass in seconds flat...

There was trailering today, but it was quick and cameraless. Felt good on the climbs- that detour thru Pebble Beach is the cooolest. And plus I get the super swoopy downhill thru Veteran's and no traffic on the ups? Done. As for the extended trailered climbing: thinking about the comments from yesterday's post and the climbing loaded theme, I really moved around fore&aft on the saddle to good effect today. Found such a sweet spot on the rivet for the Monterey Mystery Spot that I smiled all the way up. That's fun bike riding. Most times, I just get bogged down in the pull and grit my teeth to suffer through; telling myself (keep breathing) "it'll be over soon, stay on it and pull" while sitting and gripping. Not today, and the movement made all the difference. Thanks, Thinking about Climbing!

Looks like no G.A.S. for me this weekend- bummer. Maybe I'll go race CCCX instead. I mentioned it to N and she said she wants to bring her friends and heckle. Bill, that's your influence biting me in the ass. That's what I need, 3 giggly 10 year old girls pointing and laughing.

Who wants to race singlespeeds?

Prosthetics for Chihuahuas?

It deburs the brake housing, and places ferrules on the ends. It lubes the cables before insertion. It tensions each caliper return spring to a just-so state of crisp equality. It centers the cable carrier for even pull...or it gets the hose again.


Trailering today.Looked over the Burley Solo before setting out, for safety's sake, and...

Yes, that's a hole my pinkie fits thru. And, on the other side

Yes, that's a 10mm deep groove worn thru the fabric and the plastic reinforcement bar! Will be sending these to Burley to see what they have to say. I put a pillow on either side of J when trailering (no, not every time, but damn near) in an attempt to keep him upright/off the walls, but. A kid is gonna sleep and slump over in a trailer- it's how they roll. To not take this into account when designing is irresponsible at best. Fixed it with a tie down wrap around.

Here's the secret sneak going down to Veteran's Park. You come ripping off the schmoovely pave twisty road and stuff it right thru these boulders.


and then head down the singletrack briefly

under the cypress
down down to town. Then the foggy bike/tourist path bayside




And back up in the hills to get away from the fog heading towards _____ ____ ____ . A hidden gem. Looking up the East end's sneaky back door, there was a deer scoping the traffic situation

Climbing the main road to the park. I didn't try to tilt the camera to fake the grade, I just was tired and rushed. It's a neat (and seldom seen) perspective on the bay

Looking up the grade

Cruising along the ridgetop

Looking North from the hiking trail at the Monterey Pines. This place has the last old growth stand around, and it's got a real nice feel

Here's the view from the other end. The sneaky West back door. See with your eyes how tucked in J is with his woolie blanket and his aristocratic pillows
The trailer binding. I know it's cruel, but I'm willing to sacrifice it's freedom to make it beautiful. And, plus it can't run away from me all bound up like that, it'd fall over.


Monterey-style back road

Rockin the Country Gentleman style today, bitches. Sorry I left the white (perforated!) kid leather gloves at home

And a brief look at some weathered shellaced cotton tape. It's Forest Green under an Amber shellac. Click to appreciate




Seeing all these intreweeb teaser photos of people who've received their Big Dummys is making me antsy. Come on 22" Big Dummy....come ooooon.

And, y'all might be innerested in this, because yor Horrible People. And I'm out!

Didn't It Rain?

But the sun's out for the next week or so. "You like that? YOU LIKE THAT?!?!?" as J does say. I love Mahalia Jackson. And, somewhat relatedly, if you get the opportunity to go to the New Orleans Jazz&Heritage Festival, go. Spend all day at the Gospel Tent if it feels right, sometimes it does.

Other times church is to be had on the bike. Spring is coming.

Check out New Animals, and follow the link in the entry to "I want to Believe", the exhibit by artist Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim. It will blow your mind.

In this time, few people are willing to make the effort. To make the effort to ___________.Something in the day to day takes precedence over that big ride in Big Sur ( or someplace near you that's kickass and takes some time and effort to git to), or that once a month chance at riding under the full moon (The FUCKING BIKE CLUB), or-even better- riding the road in the pitch dark, or ...you get the picture. People, make the dang effort. It's what makes the difference. You can ride your comfortable local loop any _ucking time you want, if you get the opportunity to do something epic Do It. Rearrange your schedule, call in favors, promise (and then deliver) favors...just make it happen. Cuz soon enough, you won't have those opportunities.

Following are some folks in the 1920s who made their choices...

The Krazy Kat Klub...

Do you think they looked back and wished they'd stayed home?

Krazy Kat was a newspaper komic by George Herriman very worth looking at, not least for the kooky vistas of Coconino County...

This all stems from the sun being out and reflections on rides and chances at rides gone by, and is dedicated to Hevi Kevi. He makes the effort like nobody I know, whether it's deciding spur of the moment in Vegas to head to Utah with some dirtbags to ride bikes in spite of woeful underpreparedness of both body and bike or tracking down a friend in a foreign strip club, in a foreign city to hang out and drink beers across town at another strip club. Thanks, Kevi, it would have been so much easier to bow out.

You know the drill...

By now, this seems routine. J and I are doing this ride at least once a week these days....stay at home Papa during the week & all. Yep, today was a Brown Lunch Day. The stove had been left in the truck, which L had taken to work, so we rode along the water front today to get there and get it.This is looking South across Carmel River Beach. Dang. It looks real silvery in the picture, it was not so dramatic live.


Looking Southwest across the handlebars towards Point Lobos.


We rode picturelessly through Pebble Beach, up the A climb (up through the Monterey Mystery Spot, where gravity is far stonger than elsewhere) and across above Huckleberry to the secret sneak down to Veteran's Park-"the periscope park"- where J had a snack and played on the equipment. I chased him around on the ground and got cocky. Took my monster show up onto the plastic walkways and slipped and busted my ass on the playground. Feckin' Sidis. It hurt, man. I got a maybe broken knuckle on my left pinky. Serious. So I sat the last 1/2 out, and then we dropped faaaaast and twisty down to the touristbike path. From there on to the Frog Pond...

Checkin the geese and ducks...


After all this rain the soil is so saturated, this is a necessity...

And you knew we were headed to the stairs.

Again with the twig addition to the fuel tab on the Esbit (love that stove). This was required today because there was only one tab packed with the stove.


Brown lunch (lentil soup) supplemented with tempeh sausage mixed with roasted cauliflower and carrots.


The stairs.
And just when I thought we were safe, the devil shows up. Evil planner of many dark Satanic tRaining camps. Master coacherguy (he can jump higher and spit farther than any Carmichael). Excellent bike fitter and knower of bike things. All around good guy...
Mr.Coach C____ B______, hisself. Look at the fancy new kit from Joselyn's. There's a clash with the fancy new rig from Jamis. What to do, what to do?

Then we rode home. My knees hurt. It's weird....but the week+ of sitting around and doing nothing has not helped my fitness.

Lazy Rainy Sunday

Dullsville here. More rain, no massage bookings. Spent the day in my PJs. Kids have been out of school all week, and they're driving me (and each other) Crazy.

I've recently found this great (and I really mean that) site for massage, if any of you are practicioners. Or, if you're just interested in self care. The stretching pdfs are excellent. They are also the source for the massage videos I've posted from YouTube.
Massaged L today, and that was a good thing. Spouses or S.O.'s of therapists are sort of like the children of cobblers...actually, our kids get massage fairly often, but L claims it was 4 months since I worked on her. She needs to use the foam roller on her IT band , more. You prolly should too, if you're riding a bunch. Her shoulders ( Trapezius, and Levator Scap in particular) also needed work- but almost everyone is in that boat. Our friend A_____ came over while I was working on her neck, and we spoke about A_____'s issues. She's got some undiagnosed (because her doctors can't figure out what the deal is) condition which is causing her lots of nervous pain down her leg and foot drop. I'm not a doctor and I don't play one anywhere. Alls I know is some massage. I had referred her to the guy I consider my mentor, and I wanted to know how her session had gone. I was very surprised to hear she was disappointed. I was surprised because the guy has such a great sense of underlying patterns of muscular imbalances, and is so effective with issues involving deep tissue. On the other hand, I'm not so surprised because he's a kook. He doesn't address the issue the client talks about, if he feels something else requires work. Most people- ok, almost all people not already familiar with receiving massage- think they know what they need. And that's understandable. (And there is a right and a wrong way to receive a massage.) So if you complain that your shoulder is bugging you, and the guy works almost exclusively on your low back...you might be pissed. And that's understandable. The thing is, your body is as interconnected as any spider web. Any pull on the web is going to pull all the fibers. So you may feel discomfort at the shoulder which has a root cause in a strain from an injury in your low back, and which you might not feel there because you have had that injury/strain so long you've become accustomed to it (and now feel it as normal or have blocked off your awareness of it cuz no one wants to live in pain and your brain can&will block the signals of discomfort/pain of a certain magnitude). And since it took some time to develop this set of circumstances, you betta recognize it will take more than one session to "fix" a problem. Massage works gradually to best effect in that some muscles can't relax until the strain from other muscles is relaxed first. And if the pattern of holding is chronic, it's affecting more than just the muscle in which you feel (most) pain- again with the web analogy, a muscle in distress will recruit surrounding muscles to help reduce it's strain.
Sooo, back to my guy-he also phrases things oddly and says things like " try and pedal the bike from the point of view of your circulatory system." Bastard. It took me months to understand what that meant. I had the issue I've mentioned before with my left Psoas and the dead spot in my pedal stroke. Every ride I'd at one point or several come back to wondering what the hell that meant. Bastard! And then I began entertaining the voodoo notion of reaching down the hip and leg with my awareness [typing this type of horseshit is making me uncomfortable], and it helped. It helped bring my focus to the area, that I'd unconsciously avoided before- to the point of hiking my hip while standing at the sink doing dishes. This is what it took for me to start addressing this...which ultimately got a lot better with massage from this guy and with the Lemond wedges (a product about which I'd never have entertained notions prior).
And back to A_____ and my guy together. It all boils down to that "click". A_____ is not the 1st person I've referred to my guy who won't or can't get past the kook factor. They don't click. She says she preferred my massage, though I referred her because I know he's more capable of doing the needed work than I am. But she's comfortable with me- as comfortable as A_____ can be receiving massage, cuz she herself is a kook of another sort.
The proper way to receive massage is to relax- be lazy. Don't anticipate or expect. That seems to be the proper way to do a lot of things. It requires a certain level of comfort to get to that point though.
One of my teachers told the story of some guy whose name I've forgotten who came to massage from a structural engineering background. He approached massage the same way, and became so good that people would come to him even though he smoked cigarettes (during the session! can you imagine that in this era of witchhunting?) and drank whiskey (during the session!). I picture him: all sweaty, shirtless or tanktopped, maybe wearing a headband and dropping ash on blissed out people getting healed. I don't smoke, but I aspire to that vision of beatific perfection.

Found a picture of the fake rust on the True mtb from NAHMBS. Yep, fake.

Have you ever listened to Real Rap Music ?

That is correct, biotches. Respect to the old school...Big Daddy Kane. Yes, yesterday was Real Country, what? Do something. You like what you like, because you want to. I lik what I lik because Bob told me to...

And.Plus, now I gotta mention...public,public,Public Enemy, KRS1,Too Short, GrandMaster Flash, BizMarkie, DJ Quik (if you don't know, now you really know), Run DMC, Beastie Boys,De La Soul, Tribe Called Quest..there's more, but I'm done thinking about it. Look them up if you want, esp. DJ Quik.

Balance and Options? wow. Thanks, Bog.

I'm not really liking what passes for rap now. DJ Kid Koala is A-mazing, but is that a different subsect? I no longer am in the know. That's ok with me, those are all artists I lik, and now I've moved on to the really hip world of bikes. That's what gives me my real street cred. By the way, I don't wanna hear about your Tupac- he only had A good song, anyway. Biggie? He could flow, but whatevah...

Have you listened to Real Country Music ?

Do yorself a favor, and give a listen. What passes for country these days is as bad as what passes for rap. Sit back with a can of beer and enjoy the dulcet tones of the very excellent Hank Thompson...

To this post I will add: Willie Nelson (so much more than you might think), George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Hank Williams, Hank Snow, (of course) Johnny Cash, Bob Wills, Patsy Cline, Leon Russell, Ernest Tubb, Jerry Jeff Walker, Waylon Jennings, Floyd Tillman, Merle Haggard, Orville Crouch,Loretta Lynn, who've I forgotten? This list is by no means exhaustive, and I'm not linking it because I don't feel like it- but if you don't have a knee jerk hatred of Real Country music ( or feel like getting past it if you do) these are good starters.

Also, I updated the Twin Peaks post with perhaps the most important pieces of the puzzle, that I'd forgotten to put in originally because my brain is small. Perhaps the blame for that lies with the current trends in country music. Rain and rain and rain leaves me no choice but to subject you to stuff like this rather than bikes bikes bikes.