The fine folks at Voler are beavering away at our little Old Guys Who Get Fat In Winter jersey project.
The original artwork for versions 1 and 2 has been unearthed, some minor alterations in design are being made, and before you can say, “No, really, honey, this is every bit as important as a donation to Habitat for Humanity, Greenpeace or Doctors Without Borders,” an online store will be up and running.
And shortly thereafter I will be doing my best Scrooge McDuck imitation, rolling around in my private vault piled high with greenbacks.
Well, you’ll have some jerseys, anyway. The vault project may take a little more time to get up and running.
Phil Austin popped round the blog a few years back to say, “Thanks for the insurrection.”
It had completely slipped my mind, but Phil Austin actually dropped by the blog back in 2009 to squeeze the wheeze (honk honk) and tip us off to a quartet of shows The Firesign Theatre had scheduled in Hollywood.
He will be missed. And thanks to Mike Deme for sending me to Doctor Memory with this remembrance from Mike Tiano.
What this sucker needs is a sprinkler system that comes on when you cycle through.
It’s the longest day of the year, and is it ever a scorcher. Ninety-nine in the Duke City at the moment. A tip of the sweatband to Willis Haviland Carrier, who gave us air conditioning.
Got a couple nice rides in recently as part of a concentrated effort to (a) not read every word written online about the Charleston massacre, and (2) not apply for emigration to Mars.
On Friday, Adventure Cyclist contributor Merrill Callaway and I rode down to Two Wheel Drive on Central to chat a while with owner Charlie Ervin. If you’re ever in Albuquerque make sure you pop into Charlie’s shop. Lovely people, a friendly dog, and bike stuff, too. If TWD had a taqueria, bar and swimming pool the place would be perfect. But then pretty much anyplace would be, que no?
On Saturday Herself and I rode out to Tijeras and back. She claimed afterward that she would have ridden faster without me. I proposed that she get in line with all the other people who are faster than me. That would be quite the paceline.
The underpass above is about the only shade between here and there and back again, so it seems that I must become an early riser if I’m to be cycling up to Madrid, Santa Fe and points north in this brand-new summer.
But I’d have to get up very early in the morning to even come close to thinking about maybe, possibly, approaching the marker that our most recent guest at Chez Dog has laid down.
First, he cycled from Las Vegas to Bibleburg for a nephew’s wedding. Then he rode up Pikes Peak.
A fragment of the Firesign collection here at Ed Siegelman’s Ground Zero Equal Opportunity Apartments, purchased from the fine folks at Giant Toad Supermarkets.
I stumbled across Firesign in high school, years before I ever heard of Monty Python, and snapped up almost every bit of work that they did, either as a group — a collective self-dubbed “Four or Five Crazee Guys” for the invisible fifth person that arose from their collaboration — or as fragments thereof.
The collection includes the widely known (“Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers,” “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him,” “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus”) and the less so (“Everything You Know Is Wrong,” “In the Next World You’re On Your Own,” and “The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra”). I got ’em all, on vinyl, CD and occasionally both.
Some friends and I had the good fortune to catch their act in Denver once, Back In the Day™. You can keep your Beatles, Stones, and Dead, thanks. I got my Firesign, and that’s better than a pile of groatcakes soaked in 30-weight with an entrenching tool within easy reach.
Fellow Firesign Peter Bergman beat Austin out the door in 2012. Or maybe he’s on the other side of the album! I’d better check. …
• Late update: Any Firesign fans out there packing iPhones? Tell Siri, “This is Worker speaking,” or ask her, “Why does the porridge-bird lay its eggs in the air?” I’d forgotten that Austin did some voiceover work for Apple commercials, and it seems that “Bozos” may have struck a chord with the Black Turtleneck Mob.
Remember the large friendly letters inscribed on the cover of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?”
DON’T PANIC.
The Old Guy jersey wheels, they turn.
Voler and I are setting up a Produce On Demand partnership deal in which they will do all the work, you will get all the jerseys, and I — I will get a couple pennies for my trouble, which should be hardly any trouble at all, which is just the way I like it.
At the moment it looks as though we will revive Old Guys Jersey v2.0 first, and then add Original Old Guys to the catalog shortly thereafter. Fabric will be AMP; the cut, club; the zipper, full hidden; and the price, around $77, which includes shipping direct to you (untouched by the baby-soft hands of shovel-leaning Irish-American artistes).
Once everything is ready to rock you’ll see a link to my Voler.com partner page up there at right, under the jersey pix. Click that bad boy, give the nice peoples your credit-card number and delivery information, and you should have fresh kit in your hot little hands about seven working days later.
While all these multicolored Lycra balls were floating merrily in the air I took a short ride down memory lane, better known as Old Route 66 (NM 333), to Tijeras and back. I hadn’t gotten my kicks out that way since I last raced the Watermelon Mountain Classic, maybe 1990 or thereabouts, and a very nice ride it is, too, especially if you’re not headed in the other direction, chasing fast dudes to Duke City after climbing seven switchbacked miles of unimproved dirt Forest Service road between Bernalillo and the Sandia Ski Area.
I thought about continuing past Tijeras through Cedar Crest to the Triangle at Sandia Park, but Mister Boo has been experiencing a bout of intestinal distress, and I wasn’t eager to come home to a house that smelled worse than me. And there was all this damn’ jersey stuff needed doing, too.
So, yeah, my suffering knows no bounds, etc., et al., and so on and so forth. First thing I’m gonna do with the proceeds is get a new shovel to lean on between poop-scoopings.
The fine folks at Voler are beavering away at our little Old Guys Who Get Fat In Winter jersey project.
Mad Blog Media 