Month: May 2018

A love-hate relationship

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Winter Table | self-portrait by The Burning Hell

This is why I love the Innertubes: You can hear something delightfully off the wall on the local NPR affiliate, look it up with a few strokes on the keyboard, and discover an entire band of Canadian weirdos you didn’t know existed. Well done to Peggy Hessing, who was spinning the platters during Friday’s Afternoon Freeform.

I’m particularly fond of the lyric: “Life is a comedian who used to be funny but then became a born-again Christian. Now it’s all punch and no punch lines and he calls his routine his mission. And he doesn’t understand the difference between laughing at and laughing with him.”

This is why I hate the Innertubes: Your “smart” hardware can use it to rat you out.

Siri chirped some inanity at me once when I had a lot of balls in the air and I told her to shut the fuck up. “I’d never talk to you like that,” she replied. You can say that again. But she can’t. I turned her off.

 

Tanks, but no tanks

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
“Goddamnit, just look at that traffic. I knew we should’ve taken that left turn at Albuquerque.”

More than 41.5 million of us will be traveling this weekend, most of us via suburban battlewagon, according to AAA.

What, you thought they were all taking the electric bus? Brother, have I got a bridge for you.

My man Hal Walter beat an estimated 760,000 of his fellow Coloradans to the exodus, motoring north on Thursday to help his mom celebrate her 80th birthday. But he should meet plenty of them on the way back to Weirdcliffe, especially if he’s late getting to Mile High and Bibleburg, the traditional pinch-points along Interstate 25.

“Plain and simple, people just aren’t worried about pump prices,” said AAA Colorado spokesman Skyler McKinley, who predicted “a busy summer travel season.”

Hm. Maybe so. But Herself and I will be staying put, for this weekend, anyway. Traveling on holidays is like pub-crawling on St. Patrick’s Day — strictly for amateurs.

Thus we will be riding our bikey bikes, and pulling some weeds in the back 40, and listening to the little girls next door squeal as they run through the sprinklers surrounding the nice little bit of lawn that their parents just had installed for their summertime enjoyment.

What are all y’all up to?

A hard rain

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
The clouds over the Sandias look to be answering the bell for round two.

It rained and hailed like a mad bastard for a spell yesterday, the first moisture to make landfall here in the better part of quite some time. Fifty-four days, to be precise.

The trees lost a few leaves, and the Duke City lost at least one resident, who got swept to the next world via the North Diversion Channel. Firefighters rescued five other folks from various places they shouldn’t have oughta been. Water don’t play, yo.

We might get some more today, and we might not. Regardless, don’t expect to see me loading up the woody with my board inside, heading out and singing my song. I have other, drier diversions in mind.

Electric bus(t)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
OK, so I’m just spitballing here, but what if we got these really long extension cords. …

Huh. “Problems plague push for electric buses.” Imagine my surprise. The phrase “One hand washes the other” was coined by some poor sap who discovered the hard way that giving a handjob with one mitt while grabbing a sheaf of greenbacks with the other can be a very messy business indeed.

Maybe some enterprising sort can just airdrop a shit-ton of Bird scooters on LA and Albuquerque. Save a bunch of money, create jobs for chargers, and give the locals a new reason to be shooting each other all the time.

Back to work

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 33 Comments
The Bianchi Orso 105, intended for everything from “commuting to centuries, long distance touring to backroad bikepacking,” according to the company website.

Just as I was getting used to the idea of not having much to do, being a geezer whose increasingly feeble revenue stream depends on the depleted wells of bicycling and journalism, suddenly I have two bikes to review for Adventure Cyclist, and one of them posthaste, if you please, as another reviewer’s bike seems to have gone someplace without him.

REI’s Co-op ADV 1.1, a classic triple-ring tourer tarted up with hydraulic disc brakes.

The new arrivals are a Co-op Cycles ADV 1.1, a $1,299 tourer from REI, and a Bianchi Orso 105, a $2,100 “all-road” bike with its roots in the venerable Volpe line.

Some people snicker at the idea of buying a bike from REI, but I’ve reviewed a couple of Co-op’s Novara predecessors and felt they delivered solid value at a reasonable price. “The Novara Verita,” I wrote, “will take you everywhere but to the cleaners.” The Mazama adventure bike was likewise “light on the wallet” and fun to ride.

I have some time on Bianchis, too. When she was affiliated with the organization Sky Yaeger loaned me a Castro Valley for a spell, and I liked the Zurigo Disc enough to add it to the fleet, though it suffers from an alloy frame, carbon fork and disc brakes, a.k.a. the Three Horsepersons of the Apocalypse.

The Co-op will be first out of the chute, and boy, am I glad I have some kilometers under my bibs, because it weighed in at 34.7 pounds before I installed the pedals. Expect to see me paying frequent visits to that 26-tooth granny ring. I guess that’s why they call it “work.”

Speaking of adventure, T.E. Lawrence died on this day in 1935. Keep an eye peeled for all them derned kids on bicycles, hogging the road.