Yes, it’s that time of year again, and things have become so dire that it became necessary to make documentaries about Frank Zappa and Shane MacGowan to show us how to do it right.
Look here, brother — we’re not jivin’ you with that cosmik debris. Now is that a real poncho or a Sears poncho?
Tags: Frank Zappa, Zappadan
Mad Blog Media 
December 4, 2020 at 4:22 pm |
Oh, fuck. And a little while ago I hit a patch of icy mud on a technical trail and crashed into a tree. Gotta take off these tights and see what my quadricep looks like, as it took about ninety percent of the impact. My forearm took the rest. It feels fine. Quad hurts like hell.
December 4, 2020 at 4:28 pm |
Ouch. That’s what happened to me when I slid out hiking that loose trail the other side of Candelaria Bench. Slammed my left quad into a big round rock. Lucky it was a smooth one. But shit, what an ache, and a Technicolor bruise to go with it. The limping home was all manner of no fun at all.
What were you riding? Against my better judgment I was on the trails today too, but this time aboard the Jones (h/t Paddy O’B). I was surprised at how few icy bits there were, even in the shade; the trails were mostly dry as a bone.
Mister Jones and me.*
*Not pictured
Click here for a bigger pic.
December 4, 2020 at 4:44 pm |
I was on the Stumpjumper. I stopped taking the cross/gravel bikes on the La Tierra Trails as they are just too rocky and no fun at all. The trails were wet with snow patches today, so where the snow was melting, it was muddy or slushy.
This was on the new part of the trail which is quite fun and a little technical. Where I crashed you drop down a sharp little drop and have to veer sharp left as you are picking up speed and hitting the bottom. The right half of the singletrack was muddy and I didn’t clear that so I slid to the right and that is where the tree is right on the edge of the trail.
Fortunately the tree and the bicycle are fine.
December 4, 2020 at 4:50 pm |
There was a descent like that at the old Fairplay Nordic Center. Quick drop with a hard left at the bottom and trees for guardrails.
Fuck me. I was and am a horrible cross-country skier, that bit was always in the shade and icy as Darth Cheney’s Freon bloodstream, and I was always afraid I was gonna have to use one of those trees as an emergency brake.
As if going uphill on skinny skis at 10,000 feet wasn’t bad enough.
December 4, 2020 at 7:40 pm |
Since we moved to Fanta Se, its now forty miles to my old groomed trails up in Bombtown. I miss them but it seems like a waste of gas to drive all the way up there. sigh.
December 4, 2020 at 7:59 pm |
Sheeyit, you shoulda seen La Tierra before it got all formal and citified. I remember riding out there in the Eighties on various rigid and hardtail mountain bikes and this crit bike that a welder acquaintance had turned into a cyclo-cross bike with a whole lot of wheel-toe overlap.
It was a great spot for the unscheduled get-off. We’d go out there when the weather was too evil to ride the national forest and see how many different ways we could hurt ourselves.
I can’t remember the last time I was there, but it was after it became an actual bike park instead of a scattering of trails in the arroyos. Matt Wiebe took a digger more or less straight away and the earth shook. He taco’d a wheel and that was that.
There was a spot like that in northeastern Bibleburg Back in the Day®. It was east of UCCS and northwest of Palmer Park, just a maze of wandering trails, uphill and down, junked cars, dumped appliances, the works. We had woodsies out there when I was in high school and rode mountain bikes there in the early Nineties. Got buried under a disco housing development and university expansion. So it goes.
December 4, 2020 at 8:10 pm
La Tierra is great for me as its five riding minutes from the miniature Fanta Se estate. You should come up here and we can ride La Tierra for shits and grins and write about it and then score lunch at Valentina’s, Tia Marias, or some other great dive. Sure beats having to drive to a fucking trailhead. Seeing bikes loaded on cars always makes me wonder what the point is to it all.
Sitting here at 2000 hours, the pain in the leg is less rather than more, so I know its a bad muscle bruise rather than a broken damn femur. One of the advantages of riding lots and having quads like trees is that if you hit a tree with the leg, the femur, as well as the tree, is well insulated from catastrophe. Nice tear in the skin though but fortunately, we have peroxide and iodine solution.
Now, for another alcoholic beverage and two more Ibruprofen….
December 5, 2020 at 6:46 am
Yeah, a broken femur is contraindicated these days, and most others, come to think of it. An old college buddy just broke one of hers in a fall on Thanksgiving. Ain’t none of us getting any younger or more bulletproof.
I give thanks for pain relievers, whether encapsulated or bottled.
December 5, 2020 at 5:09 am |
And how did the Jones do after you got those bars through the gate?
December 5, 2020 at 6:43 am |
The Jones did quite well, though I wasn’t asking a lot of it. I skipped a long undulating section with a narrow, rocky climb and a couple iffy descents, reasoning that if there were any ice, snow, and/or mud, that’s where they’d be.
Funny. When I’m muscling the 30-pound Jones off its hook and getting it ready to ride, I always think it’s going to be a struggle, horsing the fat-tired beastie around and about. But once I get out there it’s great. Soaks up a lot of the feedback I can’t avoid running drop bars and 35mm tires and gives me more options as regards lines through rock gardens (over rather than around).
I need to get comfortable with running the low tire pressures Jeff Jones recommends, though. Fixing flats on the fly takes a little vigorous pumping with 2.4-inch tires, and I only carry one spare tube with the Jones and the Co-Motion. So I tend to run the tires pumped a little harder than is optimal.
December 4, 2020 at 8:26 pm |
You guys ain’t got nothing on what Herb had to endure, Rudy’s star witness in front of the Michigan state legislature committee. . I think she ran into a tree head first. Plus, she forgot the chewing gum to give her main points some emphasis. And, some folks say she may have had some hair of the dog prior to testimony.
December 4, 2020 at 8:44 pm |
I think I saw that hearing. And I thought I had problems hitting the road with my skull a week prior to my scheduled Ph.D. proposal defense. Wow, that Michigan debacle was a Marx Brothers special, and I don’t mean Karl.
December 5, 2020 at 7:15 am |
I saw a couple clips of that, and of Rudy “Tooty” Giuliani farting like an elephant, too. It’s a rare pol who can make bad noise from both ends at once, but Rudy the Tooty is certainly one of them. So pro.
December 5, 2020 at 7:34 am |
So much winning for Rudy. I still think there is a giant skeleton in the dumpster’s closet that Rudy knows about. How else can I explain that donny keeps supporting him?
December 5, 2020 at 7:52 am |
Just takes a good sound man to make sense of it.
December 5, 2020 at 8:16 am |
If he kept his mouth shut and let his other end do the talking, he would make more sense.
December 5, 2020 at 11:27 am |
I think Trump has something on Rudy. How and why would somebody be doing and saying the things that he does? Perhaps and with respect to all of us who will eventually lose more of our synapes, Rudy is facing senility in the public eye. Poor Rudy. Somebody please bring him some milk and a pillow.
I hope you’re doing much better Khal. I didn’t read this strip until this morning and missed out on your icecapades of yesterday. Get well soon so that you can libate for pleasure and not for alleged medicinal reasons.
I just love the thought of those days of trying to make those icy corners XC skiing. You better dance on those skis quick to keep the edge. Keep stepping, keep stepping, out shit, oh shit, oh shit ! I made it. Yep. Fun times. Regarding XC skiing locale: North of Sun Valley there is a groomed trail that parallels the river / Hwy 75 and is many kilometers long. It gradually slopes down into Sun Valley. I passed through there one February on a bright sunny day and wished very badly that I had my skate skis. I was always going to go back but I haven’t yet made it.