Attention, penny-pinching hipsters: You can now get your fixie on at Wal-Mart.
And while you’re browsing, why not pick up a new pair of pants for your little sister, since you got chain grease and designer java all over the ones you borrowed from her?
Really broke hipsters can spend their pennies on this model.
The folks behind the USA Pro Cycling Challenge formally unveiled their routes for the Aug. 22-28 stage race today, and the prologue — slated for right here in scenic metropolitan Bibleburg — should please the Chamber of Commerce, the Convention and Visitors Bureau and any other buck-hunters hoping the area’s scenic beauty outsells its reputation for screaming loonies.
Unfortunately, it’s not much of a race course.
The 5.18-mile route is mostly downhill or flat, barring a short climb from the gun in the Garden of the Gods and another over the railyard approaching the finish at U.S. Olympic Committee headquarters in downtown Bibleburg.
The biggest obstacle will be a hard left turn at the bottom of Ridge Road onto Pikes Peak Avenue. Ridge is a steep little mother, ordinarily ridden in the other direction by cyclists seeking healthful exercise, and anybody who fucks it up will slide right through West Colorado Avenue and Highway 24 into the Red Rock Canyon Open Space, there to be eaten by bears.
From that point on it’s mostly bullshit — one quick right-left at North 29th Street takes the riders onto West Colorado Avenue and then it’s a long road that has no turning through Old Colorado City to the finish. In short, bor-ing.
I’m thinking the place to be is at that left-hander at the base of Ridge Road, with a big sack for carrying off the salvageable high-zoot components of the fallen. It’s an easy half-hour ride from Chez Dog, and I have plenty of messenger bags.
Meanwhile, here’s a short video clip of the interesting bits of the Garden of the Gods section from an unauthorized ride I took on the course this morning. Sorry about the jerky video, especially on the descent, but I had the Flip Ultra HD clamped to the stem instead of my helmet to cut the dork factor. I have to buy my own toys for this kind of playtime, don’t you know, and this thing was already in the quiver.
And slainte to Elvis Costello for letting me liberate one of his tunes for the shoot. He doesn’t exactly know or anything, but we share a name (Declan) so I expect he wouldn’t mind. Much.
I stumbled across Alison Dunlap while riding in Palmer Park today. She was conducting a clinic for another rider, but graciously took a minute to stop and shoot the breeze.
She and husband Greg Frozley have an 8-month-old squirt, Emmett, and haven’t been getting much sleep, but nonetheless Alison looks fit and ready to kick ass (Greg was at home riding herd on Emmett while Mama took care of business). I should’ve taken a pic. Bad cycling journalist.
Alison took some amusement from my drop-bar 29er, the Voodoo Nakisi, which — being a cyclo-crosser of some small experience herself — she initially mistook for an actual ’cross bike. Nope, it’s a weirdo, just like the guy riding it.
But with a pair of 700×38 WTB Allterrainasauruses and a low end of 22×28 the Nakisi is an ideal bike for about 75 percent of the trails in the park. The others I can’t ride on a 26-inch hardtail, and I’m not inclined to buy a double-boinger just to test-drive our UnitedHealthcare insurance policy.
As it is, I have regained just enough fitness, strength and technique to do something appallingly stupid on two wheels, one of those “hold my beer and watch this” moments that winds up on YouTube. You know the feeling? “Well, I just rode that so surely I can ride this. …” It always ends badly.
We’ve been getting a taste of burning Arizona timber lately thanks to the Wallow Fire, which at last glance had scorched more than 120,000 acres near the Arizona-New Mexico border.
Could be worse, I suppose. We could be living in the path of the sonofabitch, which shows no signs of petering out thanks to high winds and a wealth of fuel. Or we could still be living in Santa Fe, which has been seeing ash fall from that fire and four homegrown conflagrations.
Come to think of it, it wouldn’t take much to set Bibleburg alight. It’s been drier than a popcorn fart here, so much so that local officials are conducting fire drills, and as you know we are not exactly lacking for small hat sizes. A smoldering butt flicked out of an SUV window, an unattended campfire or a live-fire exercise gone wrong at Fort Cartoon and we won’t have to worry about those beetle-killed pines anymore.
Herself had a video-production class the other day and so we screwed around shooting footage of Miss Mia Sopaipilla and Turkish. She used a bunch of Mia clips, so I decided to give equal time to the Turk (a.k.a. Big Pussy, Mighty Whitey, the Turkinator, Turkenstein, et al.).
Using my little Flip HD makes the process pretty much a no-brainer — why Cisco croaked this product is a mystery to me — but I’d kind of like to try one of the newer Canon HD digital camcorders. I have a Canon ZR500 that records to Mini DV cassettes, but it’s kind of clunky, doesn’t do HD and spazzed out when Herself tried to add some of its clips to a collection for her class. Strictly stone knives and bearskins — I mean, jeez, the thing is 5 years old! If it were in Maine, it could have a job.
In unrelated feline news, do cats dream (if only of Hollywood superstardom)? National Geographic wondered that, too, and here’s what they found out, via Discoblog and Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, a dude who has his own feline issues. Plus he’s a Trekkie to boot. I wonder whether the old “Star Trek” episode the Drums and their cats were watching happened to be “Assignment: Earth.”
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