One of the Old Town Bike Shop wrenches scored some nice ink in today’s Colorado Springs Independent, the local alt-weekly.

When he’s not puzzling over one of my beaters, Brian Gravestock spends a couple days each week refurbishing donated bikes for the homeless, with the help of three volunteers and two trainees, in a donated garage in West Bibleburg.

He and Peter Sprunger-Froese first started doing this sort of thing back in 1993, and today they have more “customers” than they can serve, thanks to brochures and word of mouth at the local shelters, halfway houses and soup kitchens.

Small acts of kindness and generosity often get swamped by the daily tsunami of evil tidings. It’s reassuring to see that not every good deed escapes notice.

• Editor’s note: Meanwhile, from the News As Usual Department comes Charles Pelkey’s take on the Eagle County hit-and-run. Bob Mionske weighs in, too. The Vail Daily, which broke the original story, urges the judge to reject the dimwitted DA’s insane plea bargain with Mr. Moneybags. And last but not least, a good-news/bad-news report: An LA fashion designer bumper-tags a cyclist, drives off, turns herself in, pleads no contest to two misdemeanors and gets 90 days in jail — that she will be allowed to serve on weekends. Jesus wept, what’s next? Letting rich folks hire homeless dudes and illegal aliens to do their time for them?

November 11th, 2010 | Tags: Good News Department | Category: Bike stuff | Comments (5)

Blue skies (not) smiling at me.

That’s the last of the blue skies around here for a bit. The temperature just dropped like a poisoned pigeon, Herself reports that she is driving home from Denver in a snowstorm and the forecast calls for rain and perhaps an inch or two of snow. Can’t be 70 and sunny forever, I guess.

After committing a bit of journalism in the morning I broke out a Steelman for a pleasant hour or so of low-impact cycling, then hopped on the Vespa for a quick spin downtown for lunch, just beating a light sprinkle home. Now it appears to be snowing, so I’m fortifying myself against pneumonia with a delicious glass of 2006 Ramón Bilbao Tempranillo Limited Edition.

Hey, it could be worse. I could’ve had to drive to Fruita for the VeloNews gang’s annual clusterfuck, and right now there just ain’t no good way to get there from here.

Happily, I wasn’t invited to attend this year, in part because I insist on being paid for hours logged and travel endured and in part because I refer to annual retreats as clusterfucks.

November 9th, 2010 | Tags: Clusterfucks | Category: Bike stuff, Fall | Comments (8)

Thanks to everyone who tipped me to the heartwarming story of a top-dollar money manager who does a hit-and-run on a transplant surgeon and gets charged with a misdemeanor (littering?) because a felony rap might adversely impact him career-wise. Yeah, right — like pulling a stretch in stir punches up the po’ folks’ résumés. I’d seen the story earlier but was reserving comment until I ran out of tequila and had placed the arsenal in the care of responsible neighbors.

Charles Pelkey at VeloNews, in his role as The Explainer, is in the process of trying to explain the inexplicable. Me, I’m on deadline with Bicycle Retailer & Industry News and contemplating a few hundred words of something less lawyerly (and less savory). Here’s a sample:

America’s terror of commies under the national bed has always befuddled me, since your homegrown pinko has, in my lifetime, been about as big a threat to the Republic as a dust bunny.

It’s the capitalists in plain view who cause most of our problems.

More as it develops. But first I have to feed the beast. And yeah, I was a commie until I started noticing that orthodox Marxist-Leninists and Industrial Christians had more in common — especially as regards their shared authoritarian “come to Jesus/Marx” streak — than either would care to admit.

November 8th, 2010 | Category: Bike stuff | Comments (17)

OK, all you leg-shavers, listen up. Enough already with the “presented by,” “fueled by” and “powered by” in your already-overlong team/event names. That lame-ass marketing bullshit stopped being cute a long time ago and it fucks with the rhythm of a race story:

Kent Corner (PetsNotSoSmart-Dr. Moreau’s Are We Not Men? Animal Clinic Powered by Devo) bested Watcher Lion (PizzaMart-Liquor World Fueled By Whiskey River Gentlemen’s Club) in the Close Cover Before Striking Institute of Studying Appliance Repair At Home In Your Spare Time Tour de Industrial Park to Raise Awareness of the Hazard of Electrocution.

Seriously. Knock that shit off. You’ll notice that the real pros cuddle up to the simple hyphen, like HTC-Columbia, Garmin-Transitions or Omega Pharma-Lotto. Tell your sponsors that two big spenders make the team name and the ham-and-eggers get to hang out backstage. Money talks and bullshit walks, straight to the back pockets on the team jersey. And while we’re into the whole brevity thing, lose the “Cycling Team” part of your name. We didn’t think you were bowlers.

Finally, I notice while compiling results that all you bozos with the extra-long handles are mostly all hat and no cattle. When you’re racking up the DNFs or being timed with a sundial you want to give the working press something short, like Monk E. Spanker (OTB-Jacques).

November 7th, 2010 | Tags: Eschew obfuscation | Category: Bike stuff, Journalism | Comments (14)

I took this still of Marv playing guitar while we shot a short video of him performing kiddie songs for his grandchildren.

While experimenting with video and audio the past couple days it strikes me that I overlooked the first anniversary of my friend and neighbor Marvin J. Berkman’s passing on Tuesday. I pegged the date in my mind based on the post I wrote about his departure, but without noticing that the post had, as usual, been a few days late and more than a few dollars short.

I rarely mess around with advanced technologies — most days I count myself fortunate if I can crank out a few static words and pictures for fun and/or profit. Indeed, the last time I got semi-serious about video was when Marv asked me to shoot him playing guitar and singing some nursery rhymes for his grandkids.

He burned through his juvenile repertoire in short order and Herself and I asked him to play something for the adults in the audience. I kept the camcorder’s tape rolling, and I’m so glad we did, because we wound up playing the edited video at his funeral, and burning DVDs for his survivors.

Every now and then I think I see Marv’ marching along some street somewhere. He had a style about him, and a distinctive gait, and once in a while some stylish, snappy elderly gent comes oh so close. But it’s always no cigar.

Marv’ was one in a million, and we miss the hell out of him around here.

November 5th, 2010 | Tags: Marvin J. Berkman | Category: Absent friends, Arts & letters | Comments (3)

Quiznos Pro Challenge: One prologue possibility from Patrick O'Grady on Vimeo.

More fun with technology. This time it’s an old Flip Video camera that spits out .avi files, one of which I converted using Evom and then fiddled with in iMovie 9. The video sucks, and my editing is worse (first time out of the chute with iMovie 9), but it’ll give you a blurry, jittery peek at one proposed course for the prologue to the 2011 Quiznos Pro Challenge (my bike for this shoot was a Vespa, and the Flip rode along in a jacket pocket).

November 5th, 2010 | Tags: Flip Video, GarageBand, Toasted | Category: Bibleburg, Bike stuff, Technology | Comments (8)

The Toasted Sandwich Pro Challenge will kick off with a prologue in Bibleburg, organizers announced today. It’ll be interesting to see what they use as a course — I recall seeing a couple of proposals online a while back and they all looked like shit to me. But what do I know? I’m only a cyclo-crosser, and a retired one at that.

The local wiseguys have estimated that staging a leg of the Sandwich Challenge could cost as much as $150,000, which is sure to go over well with the locals, who have seen their park crappers closed, streetlights turned off and swimming pools drained in the midst of the ongoing economic downturn. Expect the haters to dominate the comments section under the Gazette story.

One thing’s for sure. The city’s gonna have spend some of that $150K on patching potholes. Add a diving board and a lifeguard to some of ’em and you’ve got yourself a swimming pool, if it ever rains.

November 4th, 2010 | Tags: Toasted Sandwich Tour | Category: Bibleburg, Bike stuff | Comments (5)