A rake’s progress

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
The DBR has yet another new stem — and a new fork to go with it.
The DBR has yet another new stem — and a new fork to go with it.

Busy, busy, busy. Deadlines, chores, exercise. There just ain’t enough hours in the day. I don’t know how people with real jobs and children ever get a damn’ thing done. I’m a free-lance rumormonger, a professional slacker with two cats, and I spend most of my time with my head jammed firmly up my ass, cursing the darkness.

Herself brought some class of a bug home with her the other day and feels puny, yet must suck it up and deal with her real job, which can be a lulu at times. I thought I was catching it yesterday, but all I had to do was decide whether it was smart to ride the bike for an hour or so (turns out it was, as I feel much better today).

Speaking of which, the road bike has a new fork, a Ritchey Comp Carbon Road with an alloy steerer, so I’ve been able to give the cockpit a slightly less geezerly appearance through many spacers and a stem with a tad less rise than the average flagpole.

The Ritchey site only mentions one rake option for this fork — 45mm, the same as my old Wound-Up — but the fork that showed up on my doorstep had 43mm of rake. Screw it, I had the guys at Old Town Bike Shop install it anyway. I’m into instant gratification and bad surprises. Gives me something to write about.

The new fork seems to damp the unpleasant feedback from our crumbling roads better than its predecessor, and the bike’s overall handling seems slightly improved, so this morning I checked the rake on the DBR’s stock alloy fork from the mid-1990s, and lo and behold, it was 43mm. Go figure.

Today I’ll give it another test ride around the AFA with Big Bill McBeef and Deb, assuming I can keep up. Gravity seems awfully strong lately, but I am not.

Up in the air, Senior Birdmen

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

Big Bill McBeef swept me up once again this morning and dragged me out to the Air Force Academy for a chilly group ride, and this time I remembered to bring some ID, more’s the pity. The AFA is a hilly place that once hosted the world road championships, and as a consequence I spent more time dangling off the back than a dingleberry on a fat dog’s ass.

Oh, the shame. I had a 39×25 … and I used it. Me, the guy who climbed everything in the 19 back in the day, a day that like me is very far back indeed in 2010.

Happily, I was able to catch my breath at the periodic ID checks. There were three of them — one at the south gate, another just short of the B-52, and a third on the backstretch by the visitors’ center — so I had a couple moments to suck it up and pretend that I wasn’t really about to blow partially digested oatmeal all over my new Ritchey stem and fork.

And despite my suffering, it really was a good thing that I’d remembered my driver’s license. Several of our number had not, and one of them was caught between checkpoints, with no way to get past the guards to his car.

For all I know Bob may still be there, oscillating back and forth between coppers like a tennis ball between the Williams sisters. No wonder the guy climbs like a meth-addled monkey.

He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
"Catcher In the Rye": A gateway drug to the hard stuff.
"Catcher In the Rye": A gateway drug to the hard stuff.

J.D. Salinger has finally gone where nobody can bother him.

“Catcher in the Rye” may have been the first real book to capture my attention. I had read a ton of crap — both my parents were fiends for education, never having had much themselves, and I had a library card about 30 seconds after exiting the womb. But “Catcher” really spoke to me, as it did to about a jillion other teen-agers who thought they were the only people alive who knew the world was full of phonies, morons, bastards and slobs.

Salinger sent me shambling down the dark alleys of American literature, where I made more strange friends — Jack Kerouac, Ed Abbey, Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Jim Dodge and Charles Bukowski. I never really made it back to Main Street.

The New Yorker has slapped up 13 Salinger stories on its website, and The New York Times has a long obituary. Rest in peace, Holden Caulfield.

Couldn’t Apple have called it the MaxiTouch?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

The long-awaited Apple tablet was announced today, and the name — iPad — is apparently causing much snickering for perfectly predictable reasons. Hell, I snickered myself when I glanced at the live-bloggery surrounding what appeared to be an iPod Touch on growth hormone.

The iPad: Insert your favorite sanitary-napkin joke here.
The iPad: Insert your favorite sanitary-napkin joke here.

“That’s fuckin’ stupid,” I thought. “Who wants one of those?”

Later in the day I took a look at David Pogue’s first impressions and visited Apple’s iPad site, and I thought again.

It’s actually a pretty nifty idea.

As Pogue notes, the iPad seems aimed more toward consumption than creation, which means it’s not intended for the likes of me. When I go somewhere I need a full-featured laptop, with Photoshop, Office and other bells and whistles (like an actual keyboard). I’m driving, not flying, so I’m not interested in watching movies, streaming video or reading an e-book. What I want to be able to do on the road is pretty much what I do at home — write, edit, take photos, wrestle with race results (which show up in everything from Excel to PDF to Cretan Linear B), download really filthy porn and hack into the FBI database to see what they’ve got on me this week.

But for the gadget geek who simply must stay wired on the go, it’s a pretty damn’ smart little piece of whiz-bang — and dirt cheap for an Apple product at $499 for the basic model.

Aftermarket add-ons include a smart, foldable carrying case, which both protects the iPad and lets you angle it for more convenient movie-watching or typing on the virtual keyboard, and an actual keyboard-slash-dock that charges the iPad and lets you add a camera connection kit and output audio to a stereo or powered speakers. So nobody is gonna get away with paying half a hundy for this thing. The add-ons will add up.

And once enough hipsters break out their iPads at the local java stop, people will forget the risible connection to sanitary napkins and the snickering will cease. It will be replaced, as per usual, by drooling.

• Late update: One of the Twitterati says that “MaxiPod” would be a better name. I can’t imagine how I missed that one. I must not be drinking enough.