And now, ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Broke Dick O’Dawg and his Gnawin’ Prophets!
While listening to “The Blue Plate Special” on Radio Colorado College this afternoon on the way back from Whole Paycheck it struck me that what the world needs right this minute is another First World white-guy blues band.
I’ve even got the name and everything.
Broke Dick O’Dawg and the Gnawin’ Profits.
I don’t think the flute is gonna cut it, though. Never shoulda pawned m’gee-tar. I tell ya, sometimes I feel like I been tied to the whippin’ post.
Great Honky Blues Tunes Not Performed
By Broke Dick O’Dawg
and His Gnawin’ Prophets
I had a little fun shooting the video of the Jones bike. There’s plenty of room for gadgetry on that 66cm H-bar; I was going to add a flower vase, but ran out of hose clamps.
I haven’t been on a bike of any type for a week — a terrorist wasp nailed me in my left ankle during a hike last Wednesday, the sonofabitch swelled up to the size and shade of a ruby-red Texas grapefruit (the ankle, not the terrorist wasp), and I have whiled away the hours since full of Benadryl and bad ideas, trying to get a metric shit-ton of work done with my shoeless left leg propped up on a box.
And the weather has been picture-postcard, Chamber of Commerce, fall-in-Colorado perfect, too.
Gah.
The Co-Motion Divide Rohloff got its closeup today.
I did get out for a short while today. The ankle looks more or less like an ankle again, rather than a botulistic bratwurst, and I needed to shoot a bit of HD video for an online review of the Co-Motion Divide Rohloff, having just wrapped production on a Jones video. So I spazzed around in Palmer Park for an hour, playing Quentin Ferrentino with a couple of dusty old Hero 3 Black Editions.
The Adventure Cyclist gang and I met with the GoPro people at Interbike, but only editor Mike Deme walked away with one of the new Hero 3+ dinguses, though I thought I batted my eyelashes most fetchingly at the product guy. Bitch.
So I had to make do with obsolete technology in my latest projects, and as usual it is the little people — you, the viewing public — who must suffer.
Still, that makes two videos in two days. Stick that in your hobbit-pipe and smoke it, Peter Jackson.
Every time some greedhead with a talent for skinning the rubes floats a Barnumesque balloon full of canned farts and damned little else, I miss Ed and his quiver of curmudgeonly arrows.
Here’s one Ed aimed at tourism back in 1993:
“Tourism is the biggest industry in the world, and apparently it functions like any other industry — if there’s a conflict between telling the truth and making money, so much the worse for the truth.”
Writing of the perils of “health-care rationing” in 1994, Ed said:
“Here’s some news for our protectors in the U.S. Senate — unlike you, with your excellent, government-funded health plan that covers everything, most of us already have rationed health care. It’s rationed by what we can afford, or by how much our insurance companies will pay.”
And in discussing a plan to raise Colorado’s gas tax by a nickel per gallon back in 1987, Ed said the only problem he had with the concept was that it was about $9.95 short of what was needed.
A gas tax of $10 per gallon, he argued, would reduce street crime, air pollution and penny-ante tourism while giving a boost to carpooling, public transportation, cycling, walking, and something called “telecommuting,” which he confided was “how this column gets from Salida to Denver.”
“Raising the tax won’t even be a good start, though,” Ed concluded. “Get it up to $10 a gallon, and see how Colorado prospers while becoming a vastly better place to live.”
All these examples of Ed’s savvy come from his Denver Post columns circa 1985-98, compiled in the 1998 book “Deep In the Heart of the Rockies.”
Ed left us last year, but his words remain. And a new collection of Ed’s work from 1999 to 2012 is being assembled by daughter Abby Quillen, along with her husband, Aaron Thomas, Ed’s friend and colleague Allen Best, and friend of the DogS(h)ite Hal Walter of Hardscrabble Times, among others.
The book is a Kickstarter project, and if they don’t raise the minimum funds needed (a pittance of $5,500), the book won’t happen. I think it’s a thing worth doing, and have kicked in a couple of bucks.
Abby hopes to use the proceeds to fund a memorial bench, and perhaps a scholarship in Ed’s name for students interested in journalism or Colorado history.
But perhaps the best memorial to Ed would be the book itself, a reminder that the smart guys will not always be around to slap the hands of the hucksters trying to pick our pockets, or worse, and that we will have to start paying attention and raising a ruckus on our own behalf.
Editor’s note: The Twitterati are abuzz with references to various wave/not wave essays, which goes to show you that the times, they are not a-changin’, no matter what Mr. Dylan said. I wrote this piece for Bicycle Retailer and Industry News back in 1995.
I swear to Eddy Merckx, the next time I wave cheerily at a passing cyclist and he just gives me The Look, I’m gonna chase his arrogant ass down, knock him off his bike, drag him back to my house and chain him to a wind trainer in front of the television, where a steady diet of anaerobic-threshold intervals and “Full House” reruns — coupled with a chamois full of red ants and occasional encouragement from a Bull Buster cattle prod — should drive home the argument that courtesy is the grease which keeps society’s bottom bracket spinning freely.
What is with these guys? Unlike passing motorists, I generally wave with all five fingers on a given hand, and there are no pentagrams tattooed on my palms. Has the mousse that grips their so-carefully coiffed ’dos soaked through their scalps to enmire the already-sluggish machinations of their brains? Are their Oakleys so dark that they simply can’t see my friendly salutation? Have they heard the ugly rumors about me, their sisters and the Sonoran donkey?
Beats me. I have no answers. But, as you might expect, I have a few theories. And here they are:
• Me Cool, You Lame — You, the non-waver, may think that your bike and/or cycling attire is way neater than mine, and that to wave would be to compromise your coolness. But I’m a Media Dude, see, and that means my bike is so much cooler than anybody else’s that I have to let it get all grunged up and filthy-looking just to keep wanna-bes like Claudia Schiffer and Tom Hanks from trying to steal it. Should anyone make off with this bike, of course, I can track them by the hideous shrieking of its 4-year-old, unlubed Dura-Ace chain. But I won’t bother, because I’ve got three or four even cooler ones at home that I never, ever ride, and I didn’t pay a nickel for any of them. Hahahahah.
• I Have a Goatee and You Do Not. This is a corollary to Me Cool, You Lame. It’s also on a par with thinking a Murray preferable to a Merlin. I sport a full salt-and-pepper beard and a sizable bald spot because of a nagging case of testosterone poisoning picked up in Vietnam when I was teaching Chuck Norris all about karate. You, on the other hand, wear a straggly soup-strainer named for a smelly barnyard animal fond of eating garbage, and it doesn’t even cover your zits all that well. As my daddy was fond of saying, if you can’t grow more hair on your face than you can on your butt, you should shave.
• I’m Too Scared to Take One Hand Off the Bars. This is a theory with potential, since most velo-snobs seem to spend all their free time rifling Mom’s purse for the cash to buy purple chainrings and trying to trials-ride the tables at Espresso Yourself instead of practicing basic cycling skills, like waving to other cyclists, riding a straight line, and and blowing your nose without getting boogers all over your Banesto jersey.
• I’m Dumber Than a Food Stamp Office Full of Suntour Executives. Also a theory with potential, this assumes big lag time between the eyes registering an occurrence — a friendly wave, a big smile, the development of trouble-free indexed shifting — and the brain processing the information: “Duhhh … hand up; smile on face; duhhhh … he was WAVING, George! Yuh, yuh, that’s right … he was WAVING, George! Can I pet the rabbits now, George?” That’s a Steinbeck reference, dude. Jeez, four years in grammar school and four years of reform school, and you didn’t learn nothing in either place.
• Don’t Bother Me, I Am a Racer. “Look, Marlin, it’s a USCF licensee! And here we thought they were extinct! We’ve got to move quickly — I’ll get the tranquilizer rifle and the ear tags; you call the Smithsonian and National Geographic!”
• Exercise is Serious Business. Sure it is. So is getting chained to a wind trainer by an irate stranger with a sound-proofed basement, an ant farm and a cattle prod. Think about it … then wave.
