The lamestream media has finally caught on to the Mother Jones story about how British Petroleum is controlling — as in blocking — American press access to the mess these swine have made in in the Gulf of Mexico.

Speaking to The Washington Post, an unidentified turd-bag from BP — who remains nameless for no reason which I can comprehend — spake thusly:

“With regards to media, we follow an incident command system, a tried-and-true way of responding to crises. You have public information officers and you have a joint information center that includes the responsible party, BP, as well as government agencies who have involvement and oversight for this spill, the Coast Guard being the federal on-scene coordinator. We have state people, NOAA, representatives from Transocean [the company that owned the rig that created the spill]. We’ve had MMS. What we do is use information that comes in through our operations and create, if you will, the message to share.”

Uh huh. Well, fuck you, Captain Invisible. Journalism is not what is “shared” by criminals and the police, it is what is uncovered by a free press, which seems to be a little off the back here. I think a few journos need to get up in the grill of a few of BP’s hired goons, get arrested, and start writing some interesting stories from the Louisiana lockup.

But that’s just me. I write about bike stuff.

This being Bike Month in Colorado, I decided to designate today as Ride Bikes That Look Lonely and Unloved Day.

First I rode the Soma Double Cross — tricked out as a touring rig, with triple crankset, XT rear derailleur and panniers front and rear — to the Natural Grocers/Vitamin Cottage and fetched home 21.5 pounds of grub.

The bike handled pretty well despite all those spuds, onions and greens weighing it down, but then again I wasn’t climbing any hills and the ride was all of 9.6 miles, round trip; 26 minutes each way. I’m guessing that hauling 21.5 pounds of this and that up Hardscrabble Cañon might be an entirely different sort of lactic acid trip.

Next I broke out the old DBR ti’ mountain bike, cousin to my Sandvik-built road bike, and spent 90 minutes fooling around in Palmer Park, riding some bits that stymie me on the ’cross machinery. There’s something to be said for big fat tires and a cushy suspension fork in certain situations, and Palmer Park has many of them.

This bike is as wild a hodgepodge of components as its road cousin. It still has much of the original drivetrain — eight-speed XT derailleurs front and rear, OE bottom bracket, industrial-looking AC crankset, Tioga Alchemy headset — but the rest of it is from all over the place. The bike is so old I can’t remember the original spec’, though I do still have the original wheelset; Mavic 217 SUP UB Control hoops laced to Hügi Compact hubs.

Today the bike sports a set of Mavic CrossMax tubeless wheels, but I dislike tubeless and run ’em with tubes inside some burly Panaracer 2.1 knobbies. The RockShox Judy SL is courtesy of the fine folks at Hippie-Tech. There’s a Sachs front twist-shifter and a SRAM Rocket rear, XT V-brakes and Avid levers, Easton EA70 bars and stem, RavX bar ends, a USE seat post topped by a Flite saddle, a Cateye Enduro 8 computer and a little brass bell to startle the mortal shit out of the clueless.

The latest addition to this rig is a pair of XT pedals for style’s sake and because I had run flat out of Time ATACs. I like the cheapo SPD pedals on the road, and these XTs treated me just fine in the sand of Palmer Park, but I still prefer Times or Crank Brothers in the mud.

When do I ride in the mud these days? Uh, never, is when. Is there anything sadder than a retired cyclo-crosser?