What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?

February 27, 2013 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 33 Comments

One of the downsides of spending 22 years working solo in a home office, besides not being able to get a gig at Yahoo!, is that one tends to take on attributes of those lost tribes National Geographic is forever un-losing, or the Japanese soldiers jungled up on various Pacific islands who never got the word about the emperor’s surrender.

Outsiders are suspicious characters, their fabulous tales not to be given credence. And should they drag you from your village or spider hole toward what they deem “civilization,” you may expect to contract smallpox, TB or the clap. Better to make pincushions of the foreigners with blowgun darts and shrink their heads, or fillet them with a katana and get back about your business.

The Boo Glissando is a concept townie that marries a bamboo laminate with titanium.

Which is the long way around to saying, yes, I was compelled to attend the North American Handmade Bicycle Show in Denver, where I was put on display by the white devils, and all I came away with was a massive tab for docking my Subaru Outrigger and a medium-heavy case of Snotlocker Surprise.

In all fairness, I wasn’t exactly dragged. Having missed last year’s NAHBS, I was determined to take in the Denver edition, if only because I wouldn’t have to depend on United Airlines to get me there.

But I was planning to attend mostly for kicks. I didn’t count on being shanghaied into helping judge the 2013 NAHBS Awards, filling in for the absent Patrick Brady of Red Kite Prayer. This was not unlike inviting a Jivaro headhunter to stand in for Len Goodman on “Dancing With the Stars.”

So I had to get there way too early for a daylong refresher course on how little I know about the velocipede, and if you were one of the losers who came away empty-handed, award-wise, well, I can only say that it wasn’t my fault. It was those other guys. My judicial pronouncements were limited to the usual half-witticisms, like “I’d ride the shit out of that one if someone gave it to me,” “That belongs on a wall with a frame around it,” or “I can see taking that thing into your average shop for a tuneup and finding out afterward that the mechanics all hanged themselves.”

Being simpleminded, I gravitated toward simplicity, as exemplified by the Level keirin bike, the Boo Glissando and the English Cycles time-trial bike, which we named best in show shortly after noon on Saturday.

This last really has to be seen up close to be believed, as photos don’t do it justice. Rob English is a time trialist, a two-time winner of the Oregon state championship, and his considerable talent and ingenuity were clearly focused by his love for the discipline.

Once we’d wrapped up the awards, I took another refresher course, this one in bullshitting. It’s easy to bullshit over the Innertubes or in a magazine column, but improvising chin music on the fly takes practice, which I was out of. So I spent the rest of the show chatting up a number of old friends and colleagues, and that’s probably how I contracted the Snotlocker Surprise.

Damn the white man anyway.

You can’t spell ‘news’ without ‘ew’

February 9, 2013 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments

Trying to keep abreast of the news lately is like following the Budweiser Clydesdales around with a demitasse spoon and a lace napkin. Some days there’s just too much shit for one guy to shovel.

For example, this is not the first time I’m glad I don’t live in Boston.

Also, Los Angeles.

Some buttmunch (or more likely, buttmunches) stole a quarter-million euros worth of bikes and gear from a Garmin-Sharp truck parked outside the team’s hotel, putting them out of the Tour Méditerranéen.

Say it ain’t so, Cipo’.

Is that a drone in your pocket, or are you just unhappy to see me?

And so on, and so forth, etc.

Meanwhile, I have a bum knee that apparently requires physical therapy — always good news for a fella who makes his marginal living in the bike biz — and Mister Boo had to endure a bath, a nail-clipping and the expression of his anal glands this morning. So we’re all a little irritable around the DogHaus today.

How’s tricks with you? Speak up in comments.

A rough ride

February 5, 2013February 5, 2013 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments

Black Hawk bouquet — A virtual bouquet for the victors in the Battle of Black Hawk.

From our Good News and Bad News Department:

First, the Colorado Supreme Court told the knuckleheads running Black Hawk to stick their bike ban where the sun don’t shine, opining that cyclists have every bit as much right to the road as do busloads of bluehairs itching to flush their Social Security checks down a two-bit casino town’s loos.

Next, not everybody was delighted with the recently concluded world cyclo-cross championships in Kentucky. Take Steve Tilford, for example. Tilly should have every reason to rejoice — after all, he won the Masters 50-54 title — but he’s seething over what he says was the organizers’ failure to provide functional bike-cleaning equipment in what proved to be an incredibly filthy contest.

Now, I have no interest in casino towns. I consider gambling a tax on stupidity, which should be painful, if only in the wallet pocket. But I’m forced to take note when the highwaymen who run these shitholes tell me I can’t pass through unless I’m in an officially approved vehicle. So chapeau to the cyclists who got ticketed and fought the sonsabitches all the way to the Supremes, and won. They should celebrate with a bicycle parade through Black Hawk, the bigger the better.

As for worlds, well, I wasn’t there, but from a distance it looked like a fairly hellish weekend for all concerned, especially the poor sods struggling to keep the rising Ohio River and Beargrass Creek from turning the course into a water park.

That said, having raced nearly all of my “career” as a masters racer, I got used to shabby treatment early on. Masters racers are the equivalent of the casino’s bluehairs — the marks, the rubes, the suckers, genial nitwits who amble in to get fleeced and then shooed out to grow a fresh coat so the promoters can keep the lights on for the main act. I never raced a world championship, but there were plenty of times when nobody in authority could be bothered to tell me how I placed, much less help me keep my bike operational.

They always managed to cash the check, though.

There’s snow in them thar hills

January 29, 2013January 29, 2013 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments

Snow? In January? who'da thunk it? — Snow? In January? who’da thunk it?

The weekend was a tad busy, and come Monday I had a minor case of the ass.

I wanted, needed, to go for a ride — especially since I have a couple of bikes that need reviewing in fairly short order — but my usual routes had become yawn-inducing, an affliction that surfaces from time to time, like malaria or herpes.

The weather had mostly been sunny and dry, so I decided to spend a couple hours dicking around on the trails in Palmer Park, and riding a fendered MonsterCrosser® on the bone-dry single-track proved a pleasant change of pace.

Good thing I got ’er done when I did, too. Because we awakened this morning to a heavy wet blanket of snow on the deck. Thus today’s exercise consisted mainly of upper-body work, to wit, shoveling.

I’m not complaining, though. This ongoing drought is no joke — come Thursday, we’re back to another stretch of sunny, windy and 50-something — and I fear for our silver maple, which shades my office window. It takes a lot of water to keep a big tree happy, and an inch or two of snow every couple of years won’t do the trick.

A Rove-ing down memory lane

January 24, 2013 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 31 Comments

The Kona Rove is a cyclo-cross-slash-whatever bike, with eyelets for racks and fenders and plenty of clearance for tires forbidden by the UCI.

The departure of the flu coincided with a return of springlike weather, so I’ve been spending some time outdoors of late, searching for my lost legs.

It’s been three weeks since the bug laid me low, and my pipes are still not quite up to snuff — I’m gonna have to refill that albuterol prescription one of these days — but nonetheless it’s been pleasant to be out and about, far from the iMac and its penchant for delivering evil tidings.

The bike of choice lately has been the Kona Rove, which as mentioned in an earlier post is on deck in the Adventure Cyclist hit parade. As usual, I can’t say much about it until the paying customers get theirs, but I will note that it’s not a touring bike — the Sutra fills that particular niche for Kona.

I had to put a little Irish on the front fender's left strut (it's much better than English) to work around the Hayes disc brake. — I had to put a little Irish on the front fender’s left strut (it’s much better than English) to work around the Hayes disc brake.

Nope, the Rove is one of those whatever bikes, which is to say that whatever you feel like riding it will handle without complaint.

It’s been interesting to watch the industry come up with a fresh take on the kind of machinery I rode when we lived up Weirdcliffe way. I tried to get Brent Steelman to build me a drop-bar mountain bike to tackle the wealth of gravel roads, two-track and single-track we had up there, but as I recall he had doubts about welding up such a weirdo.

So instead I made do with one of his old CC cyclo-cross bikes. Brent billed the CC as “a 700c mountain bike” — in fact, it may have been one of the earliest 29ers — and in its final configuration before I sold it to a friend its Excell frameset wore 700×40 Ritchey rubber, a triple (46/36/24), a seven-speed 105 drivetrain (12-28) and bar-end shifters.

The Rove comes stock with a set of 700×35 Freedom by WTB Ryders, but it likewise can handle 700×40 tires, and with fenders, too. Go without fenders and you can run tractor tires, if that’s your idea of a good time.

The Rove is considerably burlier than my old CC, in part because it uses Hayes CX5 disc brakes for stoppers instead of a pair of Dia-Compe 986 cantis.

Of course, its rider is considerably burlier than was the old ’crosser who used to race that CC, so I’ll hold my fire in that regard, stone-wise.

And besides, that which does not kill you makes you stronger, right? The flu didn’t get me, and I doubt the Rove will, unless I try to pick it up and run with it. That would be just begging for it.