Category: Bike stuff

The long view

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments
Welcome to the jungle.

“Jungle?” you say. “Looks more like desert to me.”

Indeed it does, especially when you gain some perspective by leaving the mean streets behind and hoofing it a mile or so southeast and about 500 ankle-twisting feet up into the Sandia foothills, just below the Candelaria Bench Loop.

But it’s a jungle, too, down there. And for a cyclist, well … let’s just say we’re not the apex predators.

I was reminded of this on Friday when I got the word that one of my riding buddies had been hit by a car at Alameda and 4th.

He and another riding bud were eastbound on Alameda, preparing to turn left onto 4th. Alas, auto traffic being what it is down there, RB No. 2 made it to the left-turn lane without incident while No. 1 got boxed out. So No. 1 hung a right, planning to make a quick U-turn and head north on 4th.

But there was this car, and the laws of physics were applied, and our riding buddy got carted off to the hospital with what I’m guessing was a pretty significant elbow injury (a couple breaks and a dislocation, according to RB No. 2).

It’s particularly disheartening because he was riding so well and with such enthusiasm last Wednesday. And then this happens.

Still: It could’ve been a lot worse. A lot worse. I ride Alameda west from Guadalupe Trail now and then, to get to the bosque, and I always feel like a rabbit on a rifle range.

Let’s all us cottontails be extra careful out there as we’re hopping down the bunny trail. They’re always locked and loaded on the firing line.

Kick the tires and light the fires

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams finally get off the deck on Wednesday, bound for the International Space Station. | Photo: NASA Television

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams picked a fine day to get out of town. The temps at the Cape were headed for the century mark, and before the week is out I expect a few of us here in the Great American West would be happy to join them at the International Space Station, even if we’re light on luggage and have to drink our own wee-wee.

“A hunnerd-twelve in Vegas? I don’t wanna see Carrot Top that bad. They got a casino at the ISS?”

The Duck! City is under a heat advisory tomorrow — not Vegas bad, but bad enough — and though I’m still not 100 percent sinus-wise, I got out for a short snout-flushing trail ride this morning while temps were still in the 70s. We could hit 101° tomorrow, and I’d just as soon not add heatstroke to the sinus infection.

Could be worse, though. For instance, as we speak, weather-related boogeymen have kept Herself parked on the tarmac at Baltimore Washington International for two hours and counting. Southwest’s flight-status window shows her flight as “departed” — which I guess means, “taxied away from the terminal” — with touchdown in ABQ an hour later than originally intended.

Assuming her Boeing product ever gets off the ground, that is.

Jeez, we can put a man on the moon, but … well, actually, no, we can’t. Never mind.

• Late update: Charlie Pierce has some thoughts on Wilmore, Williams, and Boeing.

Ups and downs

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
No news is good news.

Wind and other things that blow kept my bike mileage in the double digits last week, which would not be such a bad thing if it weren’t for my addiction to the news.

After spending too much time in front of the monitor and not enough behind the handlebar I came this close (finger and thumb so close together that you couldn’t slip the homepage of the Albuquerque Journal between them) to canceling all my subscriptions. Bad news, badly written, barely edited, and poorly presented.

The motto of The New York Times used to be “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” At lesser journals wiseguys often revised it to “All the News That Fits, We Print.” In the Age of the Bottomless Internet it might be “All the News We Print Gives You Fits.”

Practically nobody needs to know most of this stuff, much less write about it.

“The rise of executive butlers.”

“At-home IV drips are the latest luxury building amenity.”

“We tried to pet all 200 dogs at the [Westminster Dog Show]. Here’s what it all felt like.”

Newspapers have always provided a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, of course. But once the sheer volume of treacle was limited by the traditional 60/40 ratio of ads to news, which constrained page count; editors’ desire to focus on what was actually important, like, uh, the fucking news; and publishers’ insistence that the final package turn a profit.

There is no bottom to the Internet, no satisfying its endless appetite. Ever fed a baby bird? Imagine one the size of NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building, but with a basement that extends all the way to Hell.

Whew. Now. All this being said, I have stumbled across two items you might enjoy reading over your morning coffee, shot of whiskey, or morning coffee with a shot of whiskey in it. And surprise, surprise: They both come from the godsend that rescued me from pulling an oar in the sinking longboat of daily newspapering, the wonderful world of bicycling.

First: The Washington Post presents a fabulous report by Peter W. Stevenson on Indiana University’s annual Little 500 bicycle race, made famous by the only cycling movie worth the price of a frame pump to put it into the ditch, “Breaking Away.”

It’s not clear who shot all the video and photos — Stevenson, a video producer, is credited on some, but not all — but they really help tell the story. And I love the still of the Kappa Alpha Theta rider hovering in midair over her saddle during a remount.

Second, The Cycling Independent gives us an essay by Laura Killingbeck, “A Good Time at the Dollar Store.” Killingbeck, free to explore after three months of housesitting, sings a soggy hosanna to the joys of the open road, a song I’m always eager to hear.

I’m supposed to do a short ride in the foothills with my fellow geezers this morning, but Killingbeck makes me want to strap some camping gear to a Soma and wobble off on a skull-flushing tour of wherever. Shucks, it’s not even sleeting here.

Up the Wazoo

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
It’s always happy trails on the Blue Wazoo.

DeeCee being a rather long slog via Subaru, I decided I’d settle for a short mood-altering run on the neighborhood trails yesterday.

I won’t travel by air, as you know. And if I did, the airline probably wouldn’t let me take my torch and pitchfork, even as checked baggage.

Anyway, what do I know about taxidermy? Sure, I could collect a few souvenir heads in our nation’s capital with my handy-dandy Gomboy folding saw, but then what? The TSA says you can board a plane with fresh meat, but they may decide to add a cautionary note about “the severed heads of Supreme Court justices” after running your lumpy carry-on through the scanner twice because they didn’t believe what they saw on the first pass.

And if you do manage to make it home without incident, preserving and mounting your prizes for display in the den is not a chore you want to hand off to anyone who doesn’t owe you a really big favor.

Shucks, even a six-pack of ears pinned to a cork board in the garage can make for some pointed conversations you’d rather not have, even if you explain that the fuckers never used them for listening, only to keep their trifocals from falling into their black robes or onto the bench, and anyway, with the fat stacks of attaboys they get from their rich pals they can have a new pair grafted on before you can say, “Case dismissed.”

So, yeah. Herself and I went for a nice trail run in the sunshine, and afterward I decided I was still not in the mood to update myself on the latest news, so I changed costumes and took the Voodoo Wazoo for an enjoyable 90 minutes of light gnar-shredding in the Elena Gallegos Open Space.

Today I see the courtroom drama has shifted back to Manhattan. Time for another run. I can’t remember where I put that saw.