Thanks to Pat for passing this along: John Prine performing an NPR Tiny Desk concert for us.
The 15-minute set includes a couple new tunes from “The Tree of Forgiveness,” which is due out next month, and a couple oldies, one of them from those long-gone days when I still had hair on my head and not much on my mind.
Fuck a bunch of Daylight Saving Time.
Take my column. Take the White House. Take my girlish laughter.
But please, don’t take that hour of sleep from me on a brisk Sunday morning in March.
No, goddamnit, I mean it this time. I refuse to participate. I will be an hour late for everything until the nation (save for Hawaii and parts of Arizona) comes to its senses.
You don’t see the Turk getting up an hour early just because the tyrannical feddle gummint controls the nation’s time zones, do you?
You do not, and I have the photographic evidence to prove it.
• Extra Credit Tales of Daylight Saving Time in Crusty County and Elsewhere: And you think you had it rough, resetting your bedside alarm, oven clock and wristwatch. Harrison Walter has a whole room full of clocks that require his attention.
With spring on the horizon seasonal allergies have me by the snotlocker with a downhill pull. So it’s probably not smart to spend a couple hours daily pedaling briskly among the junipers.
But as you know, I will never be smart.
The bikes of choice lately have been a pair of fat-tired 29ers, the Jones Steel Diamond and Co-Motion Divide Rohloff. And I’ll concede it’s been a pleasant change to have smaller gears and bigger rubber — 2.4 and 2.1, respectively — on the dry, sandy trails.
That said, both bikes also weigh around 30 pounds with pedals, seven more elbees than either a Steelman or Voodoo, and thus there is something of a trade-off involved here. Bigger cushion, harder pushin’.
And it’s not as though these more trail-friendly setups give me mad skillz. I still can’t clean the rock garden on Trail 341, just below the wilderness boundary at the Pino Trail. And if you think I’m gonna shoulder either of these beasts to run the sucker you’re not any smarter than I am.
Still, fat tires or thin, it’s all good fun. Especially if you don’t get skunked, as an off-leash dog did the other day a little further down the trail. Would’ve been nice if the owner had mentioned it before I reached down to scratch the little stinkbomb’s ears.
The Innertubes are a marvelous thing.
I was noodling around online, checking the availability of campsites at McDowell Mountain Regional Park (no room at the inn), when I noticed an alert about “a special event” taking place there this weekend.
It’s the Specialized Cactus Cup.
No, really.
I think I last covered a Cactus Cup back in 1999. Once the unofficial kickoff to the mountain-bike season, an all-hands-on-deck deal for staff and contractors from VeloNews and Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, it had been eclipsed by the Sea Otter Classic (which I also attended that year) and devolved into more of a regional gathering of the tribes.
It was still a giggle, though, and I expect it remains so, especially with temps in the mid-70s and a bit of cloud cover in the forecast.
The Competitive Track, built for the Cup when it moved from Pinnacle Peak to McDowell in 1998, is big fun, and the rest of the more than 40 miles of trails in the park are top-shelf, too. You can ride most of them on a cyclocross bike, if you’re insane, but a mountain bike works pretty well too for anyone who suffers from mental health.
It’s nice to see that the Cup runneth over again, even if I can’t be there, dammit.
Hasta la Vista, baby?
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