Month: July 2011

Through the roof

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

One of the lefty bloggers I follow, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, wrote recently: “We are ruled by charlatans and cowards.” And after watching this rope-a-dope chickenshit over what should be a strictly routine procedure — raising the debt ceiling — I couldn’t agree more.

The latest cynical gambit from the Repuglitards, who throughout the process have been focused not on paying the bills they’ve rung up, but rather on getting yet another American laid off (Barack Obama), appears to be to pass the buck now in hopes of getting to hammer the prez and his party in the run-up to the 2012 elections. Let him raise the ceiling now and we’ll knock him to the floor in the general, goes what passes for thinking among this lot.

Well, God knows whichever flag-pinned feeb winds up wearing their nomination like a scarlet “E” for “Eejit” will need all the help s/he can get. But this is despicable even for Turtleneck, Punkinhead and the rest of those smirking ward-heelers. Just ask Kevin, who weighs in with his own mighty snark here.

Last I looked there were a whole lot of folks out of work and an economy limping along like a three-legged sloth with the piles, and these assclowns think the smart thing to do is strive mightily to make matters even worse? Are there no pitchforks? No torches?

Happy Monday

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Soma Saga loaded
The Soma Saga loaded fore and aft for a recent test ride.

Today was a rest day in the Tour, and in Dogpatch, too.

Getting out for a ride on the weekends, when I’m in the VeloBarrel, has been impossible — it’s pretty much full-on from 7 a.m. until 4 p.m., which is about when the rain begins bucketing down.

On Saturday I managed to ride for a whole half-hour before the rumbling and pyrotechnics started, and Sunday I never even made it out the door. So it was excellent to ride hills for a couple of hours today.

As I mentioned earlier I’ve been test-riding a Soma Saga touring bike for Adventure Cyclist lately, so just for giggles I broke out my Soma Double Cross for purposes of comparison. It was missing a wheelset (loaned to the Saga), so I took one off yet another bike, replaced its nine-speed cyclo-cross cassette with an eight-speed MTB jobber (the DC now sports a triple XT crankset and an XT rear derailleur), and off we went.

Soma Double Cross
The Soma Double Cross, stripped of racks and bags.

I climbed the Col du Peregrine and the Côte de Ombres des Montagnes, then took a spin around the Garden of the Gods before finding a flattish way home. And y’know what? That’s a damn’ nice bike. Not light — like the Saga, it has Tange Prestige main tubes and a Tange Infinity fork up front, lesser chromoly behind, and it clocks in at about 23.3 pounds in its present configuration with a pair of chubby 700×32 Panaracer Pasela Tourguard tires, a USE suspension post, and bar-cons and aero brake levers instead of STI.

But the DC serves up a comfortable ride, and a versatile one, too. Despite its ’cross-bike bottom-bracket height and shortish chainstays Stan Pun at Soma/Merry Sales calls it “a good loaded touring bike with a couple of compromises … a very nice all-rounder/commuter.”

In other words, a bicycle. Wondrous machines, those. We should all have as many as we can afford.

Tour de Fence

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 34 Comments

Good God. If this keeps up the winner of the 2011 Tour de France is liable to be a disembodied head in a glass jar, rolling onto the Champs-Élysées in a Radio Flyer wagon.

Nah. UCI would never go for that. Four wheels, and who knows what’s in that glass jar? Besides a rather battered head, that is.

It wasn’t the upstairs that got torn up on Johnny Hoogerland — it was the basement, thanks to a handy barbed-wire fence that he encountered at speed after a Euro Media car piloted by a mental defective and/or homicidal lunatic clipped breakaway mate Juan Antonio Flecha, who in decking it body-checked Hoogerland through that fence. It was nearly a hat trick, but the guy who would wind up wearing yellow at the end of it all, Thomas Voeckler, managed to keep the rubber side down.

Now, I’m not saying that the driver should have been dragged from his vehicle and had the mortal shit kicked out of him, but … actually, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Ejected from the Tour? Dude should be ejected from the planet, in a 55-gallon drum full of scorpions, broken bottles and an iPod playing “John Tesh’s Greatest Hits” at top volume.

Meanwhile, sounds like the old decreasing-radius turn did for Vino’, Dave Z. and the rest. Having had my own holy-shit moment in one of those broken-backed sonsabitches I can feel their pain, kinda, sorta. But I was alone for mine, not auguring in with a few dozen colleagues, and I managed to stay upright. Jeebus.

Massif, but not decisif

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Rest and rehabilitation
Mighty Whitey bags some Zs on his Turkintowel while recovering from a nasty abscess.

There was a little fencing but no fireworks today at Le Tour, a stage in which nearly everyone seemed to be thinking, “Don’t fuck up.”

Super Spaniard flexed his quads a bit in the uphill finale, to no particular purpose, and pronounced himself content, though he had the Schlecks stuck to him like a couple of cheap tattoos.

Given the misfortune that has been plaguing the homeboys in this go-round it was nice to see Tejay Van Garderen ride strongly — until the final few kilometers, anyway — en route to the polka-dot jersey and the most-combative prize. And it was even more impressive to see big ol’ Thor Hushovd hang onto that yellow jersey on a hilly course, day one of two in the Massif Central. But right now Cadel Evans is looking like the man to beat.

All in all, it was a long day in the old VeloBarrel, and by the time I finally broke free for a short ride it proved very short indeed. The skies looked blacker than the Republic’s future under President Bachmann, and I wasn’t out a half-hour before the rumbling started, and then the rain. I just barely beat it home, for the second consecutive day.

The Turk’ was camped out on my drawing board, where he has spent much of the last week while being treated for an abscess under his right jaw. The big galoot is not exactly cuddly and we thought he was just being pissier than usual until he popped the damn’ thing. Talk about nasty. So off to the vet we went, and now we are both poorer and wiser.

Cats are strange beasts. If I had had that thing on me the Atlantis crew would have been able to hear me yowling from the International Space Station.

Tour de Emergency Room

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Say what you will about this year’s Tour, it has rarely been dull, if your idea of excitement is watching people fall off for no good reason — clipping spectators, taking headers into ditches, surfing guardrails, you name it.

Poor old Chris Horner came home from the war with a party in his head today after getting caught up in a massive crash with about 25km to go. He rolled in DFL with a carillon playing in his head, and the video was not pretty to watch. As they were prepping him for a hospital visit he was asking if he had finished. Yow.

If Horner starts tomorrow he is either insane, tougher than whang leather or some combination thereof. Meanwhile, RadioShack is down to one functional GC hopeful, Andreas Klöden, sitting fifth at 10 seconds. And VeloNews’ John Wilcockson opines that all the North Americans are fucked, demoted to getting into breaks and chasing stage wins.

Ah, well. So it goes. I don’t have a horse in this race, though I confess to a soft spot for Horner, who seems to enjoy his work so much. Cadel Evans is still second, the soporific Schlecks are both in the top 10, as is teammate Jakob Fuglsang, and Ivan Basso and Super Spaniard are lurking within a minute or two, which is nothing in the mountains. Hell, Horner lost time in double digits on a flat stage.

So, yeah. The nonsense should abate a bit once everyone gets an idea of who the real players are, and the first hint of that comes this weekend, with Saturday’s stage to Super-Besse and Sunday’s slog to St. Flour, where many a pretender will find himself done and dusted.

I’m hoping for a weirdo to pop out of the box. But you know what they say about that — hope in one hand and shit in the other, then see which one fills up faster.