Seems a full house trumps the Mouse — Interbike has reconsidered its decision to shift the show from Las Vegas to Anaheim for 2011.
I couldn’t care less, as I haven’t been to Sin City in four years and was not anticipating an invitation to Interbike Disneyland. The last time I was there, back in 1997, I was pretty much describing Anaheim the way I would Vegas, and BRAIN’s publisher has long since grown weary of the word “sucks” when it appears under my byline.
So, yeah — good news, guys! Come September 2011 you can look forward to another week’s worth of watered whisky, secondhand smoke and steel-toed kicks to the nuts from the Sands unions. The people have spoken. And as usual, the voice was coming from below the belt and well behind the buckle.
Autumn is on us with a vengeance, if you happen to be a plant or a penniless drunkard without a furnace. But midweek the temps should be in the low 60s to high 70s, which means I can dial the ethanol heater back a notch or two.
Screw the calendar — today was the first official day of fall. I know this to be a fact because when I set out for a quick 45 minutes of cyclo-cross after a morning of light labor I was wearing arm warmers, knee warmers and an undershirt in addition to the usual kit, and wishing I’d opted for long-fingered gloves.
I had planned to do a few go-rounds at a nearby school that has a gravel track, some short, sharp run-ups, a bit of asphalt and even a log to hop. But some anonymous teabagger has let the grounds go to hell, so after trying and failing to find a suitable path through the weeds I rolled off to my old standby, Monument Valley Park.
Unfortunately I apparently took a couple of goatheads with me, and just as the ’crossing was starting to feel good the front tire went soft. Oh, bugger. Out with the bad tube, in with the good tube. This mini-pump works about as well as the Senate. Look at the time. The sis and bro’-in-law are en route from Fort Fun, expecting lunch. Home wi’ ye, ye bald-pated tosspot.
And that was my Sunday in Bibleburg. How was yours?
The Air Force Academy as seen from the New Santa Fe Trail.
People often ask me how I can bear to live in a stony-broke garrison town full of Bible-thumpers, Birchers and boneheads, a place that can’t afford to keep its streetlights on unless you care to adopt one, where economic development seems confined to the crucial tattoo, pawnshop and medical-marijuana sectors and nearly half the respondents to a recent survey think we’re headed in the wrong direction (unless you’re ripped to the tits and pawning your deployed sister’s iPod to get some fresh ink).
I ask myself the same question every time I venture out of our little enclave northeast of Colorado College. Here the streets are wide, the trees tall and the neighbors friendly. It feels like the sort of small-town America that probably never existed beyond the confines of a black-and-white TV screen — until you head north, east or south and experience the real Bibleburg in full color, 3-D, with SurroundSound, a collaboration between Steve Spielberg and Terry Gilliam with an assist from Stephen King.
So mostly I don’t do that. Beyond the once-weekly dash north to Whole Paycheck my north-south peregrinations are generally restricted to cycling along the Pikes Peak Greenway/New Santa Fe Regional Trail, which offers a 35-mile auto-free roundtrip if taken south and a 60-mile out-and-back if ridden north. I used a portion of the trail for a time trial to the North Gate of the Air Force Academy on Tuesday and failed to medal even though I was the only contestant.
Greater cosmopolitan Bibleburg as seen from Palmer Park.
East I head mostly never, having learned in the Seventies that the real Bibleburg stops somewhere around Hancock Avenue, about six blocks from here. But I will venture in that direction as far as Palmer Park, a trail-rich, 730-acre reminder of what that side of town looked like before Bibleburg dropped trou’ for the developers. I spent an hour and a half there yesterday trying to remember how to ride a mountain bike.
This is a survival mechanism learned from Ernest Hemingway, Jim Harrison and other word-slingers who often longed to be somewhere other than where they were. “Do not scorn day trips. You can use them to avoid nervous collapse,” writes Harrison, who should know.
In fact, I feel a day trip coming on as we speak. I just put new tires on the Nobilette and I am so out of here.
Seems it wasn’t Chinese pork that tripped up Alberto Contador after all. In what’s sure to give a boost to the Spanish beef industry, El Pendejo — disculpame, El Pistolero — says he tripped the Dope-O-Meter® after dining on a chunk of homegrown carne the team chef ordered up during the Tour ’cause the French hotel’s meat tasted like ass.
I don’t know how they ever caught that steer for butchering, full of clenbuterol as it must have been.
His story brings to mind an old Gilbert Shelton gag, first used in a “Wonder Wart-Hog” strip and then reprised in “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.” The initial version involved a motorcycle race; the encore featured a police chase.
Here’s my riff on the joke:
Two cowboys on roundup stagger back to the ranch with their chaps shredded, their hats in tatters and generally looking like they’d been et by a coyote and shit off a cliff.
“What the hell happened to you fellas?” asks the foreman.
“Aw,” replies one, “this cow we was a-chasin’ ran away from us so fast we thought our horses had stopped so we got off to see what was the matter.”
• Late update: Meanwhile, Contador’s homeboys Ezequiel Mosquera and David Garcia Da Peña are also deep in the mierda, but for hydroxyethyl starch. The fiesta never stops.
Mad Blog Media 