In honor of Super Sunday, I decided to get my inner Belgian on.

It had been snowing feebly all day — zero accumulation, just cold, wet, gray and dreary. I thought briefly about riding the trainer, but after watching today’s Superprestige cyclo-cross online, indoor cycling seemed sissified.

I wasn’t exactly in the mood for cyclo-cross, either, though. ’Cross means filth, and Herself is opposed to same, having logged many hours this weekend doing loads of laundry without end and putting a sparkling shine on the palatial manse. If I were to prance in from the cold sporting a thick coat of goo like a retarded Irish setter, she’d blow me back into it with my own .357.

Thus the flat-bar Voodoo with fenders seemed just the thing. I pulled on wool socks, neoprene leg warmers and bibs, two long-sleeved polypro undershirts, one long-sleeved jersey and a winter jacket, tugged neoprene booties over the Sidis, donned tuque, balaclava, cycling cap and helmet, slipped on the winter gloves and rode off into a brisk north wind.

I had to take five under a bridge to loosen the helmet straps, ’cause the ol’ chrome dome was so heavily swaddled it felt like my lid was screwed down a few turns too tight. Then I gnawed on the wind and snow for about a half hour until I got good and cold and turned around to enjoy a bit of tailwind.

The comparative warmth almost lulled me into a false sense of my own sturdiness. “Hell, I suppose I could stay out a couple hours, log a few more miles,” I thought. And then the wind shifted a bit, firing a warning shot of sleet across my bow. Nope.

So home I went, and quickly too, thinking of hot toddies brimming with Bushmills and humming a bit of Irish doggerel:

Musha rig um du rum da, / Whack fol the daddy O,

Whack fol the daddy O, / There’s whiskey in the jar.

Hey, we can’t all be Belgians.

February 7th, 2010 | Category: Bike stuff, Winter | Comments (6)

Tom Tancredo, the gift that keeps on giving. Addressing the so-called “Tea Party convention” in Nashville, the former congressman (R-Tinfoil Beanie) and nativist nitwit said the nation should require “civics-literacy tests” of its voters.

“People who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House,” Tancredo oinked in his opening-day speech Thursday. ”His name is Barack Hussein Obama.”

Careful what you wish for, Tommy old boy. I’m guessing that most of the homegrown mouth-breathers who inflicted you upon the nation’s capital back in the day think Jefferson Davis was Grace Slick’s old band, a filibuster is a cowboy who specializes in saddle-breaking mares, and cloture is some kind of gay French fashion.

Your base couldn’t distinguish the Bill of Rights from the Communist Manifesto unless it was tattooed on Caribou Barbie’s tits, and thus under your proposal the prototypical Tancredo supporter would have as much chance of voting in an American election as Raul Castro.

February 6th, 2010 | Category: Deep political thought | Comments (5)

My custom Nobilette cyclo-cross frameset is getting ready for its closeup.

OK, I’m officially obsessed with cycling again. I actually felt guilty yesterday for doing a short run instead of a long ride. And I have the Adventure Cycling folks to thank for it (this note is for Herself, who will be looking for asses to kick once she sees this month’s credit-card bill).

So I’m rooting around in the garage yesterday, looking ruefully at all the two-wheelers that are going to need stem transplants, forks and bits of this and that to reflect my new position on the road bike, and it strikes me that instead of retro-fitting the entire fleet for the 21st century, I should simply launch a new flagship.

Mark Nobilette built a custom fillet-brazed Reynolds 853 cyclo-cross frameset for me a while back, but I’ve never built it up because I was hunting down stylish parts one at a time — a Race Face compact crankset and bottom bracket here, some Paul Component cantis there — and bike jewelry does not come cheap, even for a shameless beggar with generous friends in high places.

Glancing around the garage at the bikes hanging from the ceiling, surrounded by various boxes full of this and that, I decided it was time to quit looking for The Perfect Build Kit and get the damn’ rubber on the road.

So I snatched up some Time ATAC pedals from last century and an equally elderly Excel Sports Cirrus wheelset from my mango Steelman Eurocross (Mavic Open Pros, Dura-Ace hubs, DT spokes and Michelin Jet tires), Salsa Pro Road handlebars stripped from the now-straight-bar Voodoo, and a secondhand Selle Italia Flite saddle (traded a six-pack of New Belgium beer for it).

A box full of as-yet-unused parts included a cable hanger for a 1-inch steerer; an FSA front derailleur, Ultegra rear derailleur and Dura-Ace nine-speed bar-cons; Ritchey WCS seat post; Control Tech SCR-5 aero brake levers and top-mounted levers; and the aforementioned Race Face cranks and mismatched Paul cantis (black Neo-Retro, silver Touring). I’m still missing an 11-28 cassette, a stem and a chain, but the folks at Old Town Bike Shop have those a-plenty.

And that’s where this frameset just went, as I am qualified to build sentences and paragraphs, not custom bikes. A casually assembled paragraph can be painful, but is rarely fatal.

February 5th, 2010 | Category: Bike stuff | Comments (10)

The DBR has yet another new stem — and a new fork to go with it.

Busy, busy, busy. Deadlines, chores, exercise. There just ain’t enough hours in the day. I don’t know how people with real jobs and children ever get a damn’ thing done. I’m a free-lance rumormonger, a professional slacker with two cats, and I spend most of my time with my head jammed firmly up my ass, cursing the darkness.

Herself brought some class of a bug home with her the other day and feels puny, yet must suck it up and deal with her real job, which can be a lulu at times. I thought I was catching it yesterday, but all I had to do was decide whether it was smart to ride the bike for an hour or so (turns out it was, as I feel much better today).

Speaking of which, the road bike has a new fork, a Ritchey Comp Carbon Road with an alloy steerer, so I’ve been able to give the cockpit a slightly less geezerly appearance through many spacers and a stem with a tad less rise than the average flagpole.

The Ritchey site only mentions one rake option for this fork — 45mm, the same as my old Wound-Up — but the fork that showed up on my doorstep had 43mm of rake. Screw it, I had the guys at Old Town Bike Shop install it anyway. I’m into instant gratification and bad surprises. Gives me something to write about.

The new fork seems to damp the unpleasant feedback from our crumbling roads better than its predecessor, and the bike’s overall handling seems slightly improved, so this morning I checked the rake on the DBR’s stock alloy fork from the mid-1990s, and lo and behold, it was 43mm. Go figure.

Today I’ll give it another test ride around the AFA with Big Bill McBeef and Deb, assuming I can keep up. Gravity seems awfully strong lately, but I am not.

February 3rd, 2010 | Category: Bike stuff | Comments (18)

Big Bill McBeef swept me up once again this morning and dragged me out to the Air Force Academy for a chilly group ride, and this time I remembered to bring some ID, more’s the pity. The AFA is a hilly place that once hosted the world road championships, and as a consequence I spent more time dangling off the back than a dingleberry on a fat dog’s ass.

Oh, the shame. I had a 39×25 … and I used it. Me, the guy who climbed everything in the 19 back in the day, a day that like me is very far back indeed in 2010.

Happily, I was able to catch my breath at the periodic ID checks. There were three of them — one at the south gate, another just short of the B-52, and a third on the backstretch by the visitors’ center — so I had a couple moments to suck it up and pretend that I wasn’t really about to blow partially digested oatmeal all over my new Ritchey stem and fork.

And despite my suffering, it really was a good thing that I’d remembered my driver’s license. Several of our number had not, and one of them was caught between checkpoints, with no way to get past the guards to his car.

For all I know Bob may still be there, oscillating back and forth between coppers like a tennis ball between the Williams sisters. No wonder the guy climbs like a meth-addled monkey.

January 30th, 2010 | Category: Bibleburg, Bike stuff, Winter | Comments (15)

"Catcher In the Rye": A gateway drug to the hard stuff.

J.D. Salinger has finally gone where nobody can bother him.

“Catcher in the Rye” may have been the first real book to capture my attention. I had read a ton of crap — both my parents were fiends for education, never having had much themselves, and I had a library card about 30 seconds after exiting the womb. But “Catcher” really spoke to me, as it did to about a jillion other teen-agers who thought they were the only people alive who knew the world was full of phonies, morons, bastards and slobs.

Salinger sent me shambling down the dark alleys of American literature, where I made more strange friends — Jack Kerouac, Ed Abbey, Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Jim Dodge and Charles Bukowski. I never really made it back to Main Street.

The New Yorker has slapped up 13 Salinger stories on its website, and The New York Times has a long obituary. Rest in peace, Holden Caulfield.

January 28th, 2010 | Category: Arts & letters | Comments (14)

“You didn’t get me down, Ray … you never got me down.”

January 27th, 2010 | Category: Deep political thought | Comments (2)