Interbike 2013: Shopping list

September 26, 2013September 26, 2013 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 32 Comments

The Klatch is an all-day endurance machine, made of Reynolds 853 but with a carbon ENVE disc fork.

BIBLEBURG, Colo. (MDM) — Selling shit is what Las Vegas is all about.

There are no drinking fountains, just $6 bottles of water, and the only chairs to be found sit in front of slot machines and gaming tables, or in bars and restaurants, where thunderous “music” discourages unproductive conversation while encouraging speedy consumption and departure, thus clearing a space for the next sucker … er, customer. What stays in Vegas is mostly your money.

If you’re not spending, Sin City has no use for you. Move along, move along.

My room at the Luxor was unexceptional, though I will say that unlike Mike Creed’s squat at the Excalibur it lacked burglars. It also lacked HBO (“Quit watching “Breaking Bad” and buy a ticket to Carrot Top!”) and wireless Internet (“Quit downloading porn and rent a hooker!”).

As befits a shopping-mall food court, the eats were overpriced and underwhelming, and I never got out of Starbutt’s for less than 12 smacks. (that’s the tab for a grande Americano, a fruit cup and a tip, in case you’re wondering). A short chat with Scot Nicol of Ibis Cycles added value to one of those purchases. For me, anyway. I’m never sure how the other side of a chat with me dollars up on the hoof.

But bitching about Vegas is pointless. Anyone stupid enough to bunk in a casino hotel deserves everything he gets and then some, as I learned back in 2006 while rooming at the Riviera on Bicycle Retailer‘s dime. That pushed me over the edge, and I skipped the show for the next four years.

The Cinelli Bootleg Hobo just jumped out at me on the last day of the show. If the price is right, we should all buy at least two of them.

I’ve enjoyed myself more since returning to Interbike under the aegis of the Adventure Cycling Association, mostly because I no longer have to help produce BRAIN’s Show Daily. Instead of cranking out the word count in some windowless concrete cell I get to wander the show floor, ooh-ing and ahh-ing at all the toys and asking may I play with same, please.

And with that longwinded introduction, allow me to present my top three bikes from Interbike 2013: the Co-Motion Klatch (mentioned previously); the Cinelli Bootleg Hobo; and the Chris King Cielo Tanner Goods Edition.

Of my top three, the Klatch may be the bike best suited to the type of riding I do here in Dog Country. It’s a gravel grinder — or as we oldsters might call it, a “bicycle” — with a Shimano drivetrain. The Reynolds 853 frameset is capable of running 40mm rubber, and Co-Motion’s jet-black show model was nicely spec’d; among the goodies was TRP’s dual-piston Spyre mechanical disc brake, a stopper I have yet to try but have heard nothing but good things about, if you happen to like disc brakes, which I don’t, much. Expect to pay $2,195 for frame and fork, $4,460 for a Shimano 105-equipped bike, and $4,995 for an Ultegra machine. Co-Motion is taking orders now, and lead time is six to seven weeks.

The Chris King Cielo Tanner Goods Edition is a lovely bit of bicycle. Total eye candy.

The Bootleg Hobo, meanwhile, looks like just the ticket for the adventure-cycling crowd. You’ve got to love PR copy that draws a pair of Jacks — Kerouac and London — when pitching a product. Columbus Cromor tubes, triple crankset, bar-end shifters, bosses for three bottle cages. Tubus racks, fenders, clearance for 45mm rubber, spare-spokes holder, and (gasp!) cantilever brakes! What’s not to like? Santa Fe’s Bicycle Technologies International (BTI) has ordered the Hobo in limited quantities, and I expect it will be an insanely popular piece of machinery with the go-anywhere, do-anything crowd, if only because of the price: $1,850 complete. Yeah, I don’t believe it either. But that’s what the man said. …

Finally, the Chris King Cielo Tanner Goods Edition (man, is that ever a mouthful) is a beautiful commuter-slash-bikepacker, with Tanner Goods saddlebag, handlebar bag and frame bag, the last of which doubles as a shoulder bag. The $2,895 price includes frame, fork, bags and Honjo fenders; the show bike was tricked out with Chris King headset and hubs (duh), Thomson seatpost and stem, and Paul’s Neo-Retro and Touring canti’ brakes. It’s a goddamn work of American art on wheels, is what.

Other bikes worth a look:

• Tern Eclipse S18

• Norco Indie Drop

• Surly Straggler

• Redline Metro Classic

• Raleigh Tamland 2

• Jamis Bosanova

Bikes, bikes and more bikes

April 4, 2013 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 34 Comments

Jeff Jones bikes — The Jones Steel Diamond in its road and off-road configurations. Photo courtesy Jeff Jones

Lately I’ve been enjoying an interlude between bike reviews, which has been nice, as it gave me a chance to get reacquainted with my own fleet of two-wheelers.

In the past week I’ve ridden my trusty Voodoo Nakisi drop-bar 29er, one of my two venerable Steelman Eurocrosses, and the only truly custom bike in the Mad Dog garage, a nifty Nobilette that’s something of an all-rounder, a cyclo-cross-slash-touring bike that’ll take a rear rack and fenders.

This weekend, all that ends with an invasion from Oregon.

Review bikes are en route from Co-Motion (a Divide Rohloff), Jeff Jones Bicycles (Steel Diamond) and Bike Friday (Silk Road Alfine).

I’ve ridden a Bike Friday before — you can read my review of the New World Tourist Select in the archives at Adventure Cyclist — but the Silk Road Alfine is something of a step up, with Shimano’s Alfine hub, Gates belt drive and Avid BB7 disc brakes. Should be a giggle.

The Co-Motion is likewise a belt-drive bike, but with big wheels and the Rohloff hub, which I’ve ridden before on the Van Nicholas Amazon Rohloff (yes, I reviewed that one too). I’ll get to spend a bit more time with the Co-Motion than I did with the Van Nicholas, and I’m very much looking forward to it, as the Co-Motion seems (on the Innertubes, anyway) more or less ideal for the sort of riding I do around Bibleburg.

The Jeff Jones bike, meanwhile, looks like the sort of machinery we all could use come the Apocalypse. That’s it up there at the top of the post, the red bike next to the otherworldly black beast with the tractor tires. I’ll confess to a mild yearning for a fatbike — as in, if somebody gave me one, I’d ride it — but until some product manager loses his or her mind, the Jones bike looks to be about as close as I’m gonna get to that little fantasy.

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.

Apple of my eye

September 14, 2012September 14, 2012 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments

A tale of two MacBooks — At left, the 2012 MacBook Air. At right, the 2006 MacBook.

Well, shit. After railing against Apple in comments for relentlessly driving us toward machines we can’t repair, upgrade or otherwise alter without a visit to the Genius Bar and/or the Devil, I’ve gone and bought myself a 2012 MacBook Air, the top-shelf 11-inch model.

So, yes, I’m a hypocrite. But I’m also the new owner of a pretty cool mini-laptop.

Longtime consumers of the DogS(h)ite will know that I manage a road trip about as often as does Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Still, I do manage to slip the leash from time to time, and when I do, my companion generally is my most “modern” laptop — a 6-year-old, 13.3-inch Intel MacBook that has already blown one hard drive, smells worse than Mister Boo on a hot day and weighs as much as a WorldTour pro’s bike (with the WorldTour pro sitting on it).

I can wrench a bit on this old black MacBook. Change batteries, upgrade RAM, swap hard drives and perform other basic tasks. But it’s not exactly cutting-edge technology.

And as the road test dude for Adventure Cyclist (harumph), with Interbike looming on the horizon like a carbon-fiber meteor from Hell, I do have a certain responsibility to embrace new technology, no matter how ridiculous and/or expensive. Right? Right.

Plus I had the money and Herself said OK.

So, yeah. I have a new laptop. It’s bound to make me smarter, funnier, thinner. Ask anyone in Cupertino.

Black Friday reds

November 26, 2010November 26, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Cowgirl up — No, Herself did not just win the Kentucky Derby astride a midget horse. We paid for the wreath and got the photo op' for nothin'.

OK, so we finally surrendered to the Dark Side, taking a huge gulp of the Konsumerist Kool-Aid intoxicating millions of our fellow citizens as chronicled by The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Californian Derrick Love was clearly under the influence of something. He and lifelong pal David Martinez spent nearly two days camped outside an Oakland Best Buy so he could get a $600 Toshiba laptop for $349.

“We’re on a huge adventure,” Mr. Love told The Times. “One day I’m going to tell my grandkids about this, how we were the first.”

Ai, Chihuahua. If only John Steinbeck were still alive to chronicle this epic tale. Call it, “Toshiba Flat.”

Alas, we proved no more resistant to the siren song of shopping. At the crack of noon Herself and I ventured out to a local nursery, where we ordered up a Canadian red cherry tree to replace the defunct apple trees in our now-treeless back yard. In an orgy of extravagance we added a holiday wreath to the tab. Then Herself posed for a photo with a horse that someone had apparently washed and then popped into an overly hot dryer for an alarming period of time.

We overextended ourselves further by purchasing a couple sandwiches from a downtown eatery and taking them home for a gourmet lunch, after which Herself toddled off to the Humane Society to help a few fuzzy little faces find new homes for the holidays.

As for me, I Vespa’d down to the grog shop for a couple jugs of brain eraser and then spent the afternoon plinking away at the keyboard, composing a hymn to capitalism, American style. Dirty work, but someone has to do it.