Moment of Zen

An oldy but goody.

This is a .50 cal. The projectile makes the round trip b/t/w the gun, a steel target 1000 meters downrange, and the shooter's ear protection. Out and back, and if it'd been an inch to the right homeboy would be dead or breathing out of a tube.

Danger close with the .50 cal is anywhere within earshot - and some places out of earshot. Pretty hella sick invention for a pacifist mormon dude.

Public Service Announcement Involving Your Junk

Fatty's recent post on Power Faces, and the strain & hurts that come with riding real hard, put me in the mind to post a Public Service Announcement on a very important topic: how not to blow a testicle with an internal firehose gout of misdirected urine as you ride a mountain bike.

I ride with this guy, Earl (not his real name), who is a really nice guy. He's a faithful family man, devout Christian - in the good good way, not the Jimmy Swaggart send-money-for-hookers-and-blow way; he's a strong triathlete, a real straight arrow, and strong like an ox on a mountain bike. What he may lack in skill as a relatively new mountain biker, he makes up in sheer power and determination. He is a guy I like and generally respect, and I love riding with him because he's always pretty good natured, even when the going is very tough. So naturally I bust his balls constantly. And on that same topic, bad things seem to happen to his junk while riding.

Earl had suffered from significant pain all summer from "stemming" his Robert "Purple Guitar Neck" Johnson really hard on this epic ride we did in July. So it's not unusual to see him grasping his ham & eggs with his face showing a mixture of moderate pain and deeply philosophical thoughtfulness.

Then a couple weeks ago we were going out for an early AM ride with the Diesel, the Beard, Smooth Sven and some other folks, and as we were strapping the lights on Earl mentioned that he had to go see the doctor a couple days earlier.

Earl had noticed some unusual lumps on his testicles during a regular self-exam. Unlike everybody else I know, i.e. all my pervy friends, when Earl says he checks his pants yarblies regularly due to a family history of cancer, and not just as an excuse to Juggle The Boys, I believe him. Shoot, if I had a family history of cancer, I'd be locking myself in the bathroom twice a day just to, um, check. Not that I'd be using that as an excuse to fondle myself or nothin'.

I think Earl was having some trouble peeing too, and other unusual pain in the Hobo Bag. You know, beyond the pain you get from ramming your junk into a 100mm 6 degree Thomson mountain bike stem at 20 MPH. (Official Thomson Advertising Slogan: your bike will break before the stem does. Unofficial Mountain Biking Reality: so will any part of your body that hits it).

So Earl went to the DownUnderOlogist, who did the requisite 'ow's yer father?' on him. Earl was sure that he'd be referred to another NetherRegionOlogist for a consultation about testicular cancer, but as it turns out there was an innocent explanation for the lumps and peckerwreckage, besides his predilection for slamming his stemmage into his stem at 30 MPH.

The doc asked Earl if he'd been "lifting something really heavy lately." Earl hadn't, but he told the doc about bashing his Wedding Tackle off of a 100mm 6 degree Thomson mountain bike stem at 40 MPH. he also mentioned something about doing some really gnarly climbs a few weeks earlier on our rigid singlespeeds, stuff that takes a maxed out, full body effort to clean. It's like deadlifting on the bike, and sometimes your hands hurt, the knees get tweaked, the forearms burn, you burst blood vessels in your eyes, get twinges in the arms and the lower back, and you get the very unsettling feeling that somebody is removing stitches (without cutting them) from some unspecified locations in your gizzard. So Earl told the doc about that and the doc asked a few more questions. In particular, he asked whether Earl had been riding on a full bladder when he made these exertions.

As it happened, Earl had been doing so. Unlike the rest of my reprobate friends, who are probably in a state of near collapse from dehydration due to constant boozing and other forms of dissipation, Earl stays well hydrated and sober, drinking the government-recommended six to eight glasses of water daily, and an extra glass or two on hot days. Nor does he take joy in pissing in public; he holds his water until it's possible to discreetly offload. In fact it’s amazing that he tolerates us because he’s fundamentally moral, sane, well-mannered and tasteful. In other words, he’s completely freaking nuts.

The doc was relieved to find out that Earl drinks a lot of water and regularly rides with a full bladder.

He said that under a severe strain, urine can be forced down the wrong tubes into the testicles. This causes inflammation and pain in the Asparagus and Broccoli, and that sort of thing was completely consistent with Earl's symptoms.

That, and slamming his junk into a 100mm 6 degree Thomson mountain bike stem at 60 MPH.

The doc said that this is a fairly common condition, but I suspect he only said that to get Earl to stop crying.

So as it happens, when Earl makes a Power Face, it is only a prelude to super-pressurizing his bladder and blowing the stuffing out of a ball valve in his kidney plumbing. Earl's superhuman climbing efforts are obviously fueled by shifting urine around at high speed, in the same way that you could get a Chevy Nova to go real fast by rolling hand grenades out the back window and having three of your fat friends sit in the back seat and rock forward and back in unison. Yeah, it'd go fast. But it would be mighty tough on area around the exhaust pipe and possibly even damage the whole back end.

Earl is now undergoing treatment with various drugs that are fixing the problem. He can even ride a mountain bike again, but the doc advised him to make sure his bladder is empty when he rides. Apparently, if he doesn't do this, his testicles could blow up just like balloon animals, except they wouldn't be as much fun.

So when we ride now, I stop about every half hour remind Earl to go water the trees before he blows a testicle, shatters a bladder, or pulverizes a pipe. Contrary to what you might think, I don’t remind him about this constantly to bust his balls. My goal is solely to help Earl out and make sure that he stays in peak condition.

I don’t do this just for the Lulz. I do it, because I care so much. Seriously. You people know me better than that.

New Horizons

I'm still buzzing a little from the Singlespeed Punk Bike Enduro at the 'Shed last weekend. Riding up there - and getting broke in with a lot of super strong folks on singles - pretty much blew me away. There were more rocks than I could have imagined. Given that rocks and hills are kryptonite to my weak-ass Superman impression, I was over my head pretty much all day. It was good though. I spent most of the spring and summer pushing my limits outwards just a little bit at a time. Each ride usually had a little feature or two where I stretched just a touch. By diving so far into the deep end in the company of excellent riders, most of whom ride the 'Shed constantly, I had to stretch hard all damned day. No crashes, even rode decently in a few places. A couple times, on some very long twisty descents, I had to stop though - just to let my mind unspool a bit. Technical mountain biking is only a little bit difficult physically. Mentally though... it's hard. It's all about reading the trail, processing your options, picking lines, and putting all those inputs into context using the feedback that the trail and bike are giving you.

"Skill" on a mountain bike does have a physical component to it, but it isn't really a physical thing. It is mentally being able to process all the inputs, make good choices, and to be able to adjust on the fly dynamically as the bike slides or the trail throws you into different places or as trail features get closer and become clearer and more detailed. Each time the bike or trail adjusts your trajectory, the thousand little calculus operations performed by your brain have to be re-run to reflect the new angle of approach. After a while this becomes mentally exhausting and on a twisty, rocky trail strewn with babyheads, sharp rocks, logs, drops, trees and tight turns, you can feel the formulas and vectors backing up in your head the way the keyboard buffer on your old computer would fill up when you typed too fast. You have to pause for 30 seconds, let the buffer empty, then begin again with a clear head.

Mountain biking skill, in some ways, is nothing more than having ridden enough features to have built up a ready vocabulary that allows to you intuitively read the trail. A "skilled" rider glances down the trail and quickly understands how particular little chunks of the trail will ride, where the front wheel will get tossed to the left a few inches, where the rear will slide out a bit, which line looks good but will ride bad and throw the bike into the weeds, which pile of rocks looks deadly but actually offers three or four good angles of attack. I am not a skilled rider.

I'm looking forward to riding some rocks at Patapsco tomorrow. Should be a lot easier in a lot of ways than it has been in the past. The flowy easy bits will seem exceptionally easy in comparison to most days.

It's good to blow through your limits once in a while. It opens up new horizons. I'm definitely going to make it a priority to spend more time at the 'Shed and Gambrill.

In honor of Joe Whitehair and the whole crew on the SS Punk Bike Enduro, Watershed Edition... Have Some Punk.

A Lisa Salerno Fb comment put me in mind of this one.



The Minutemen are a band that just doesn't get as much respect as it deserves. RickyD was playing this on the boom box during the ride and I immediately recognized it... So nice. A little chunk of the mid-80's in the middle of a very tough ride. So comforting.



This is a pretty good song too. I have no idea what it's supposed to mean, but it's tight.



Then you got Black Flag. I have no idea why I liked this so much at the time, but I really likede it. It's possible that as a young man I had some issues with rage.



I liked the Ramones a lot too. They had a different sort of energy, a little more upbeat.



Then there's one of the more underrated punk bands of all time - the Dead Kennedys. Listening to these guys now, I realize that they are really tight musically. This song is a pretty good example of it. Looks like they were 25 years too early for the Occupy movement, but a bunch of dudes who toured in a van would have fit in better with (upper middle) class warrior protestors than that rich cockroach Zack de la Roche.



They weren't just transgressive. The DK's had a fine sense of humor, and they were pretty happy to skewer political correctness wherever they encountered it. In addition to Penis Landscape - a scatological album cover (then insert) for their Frankenchrist album, they came up with this little video - an all midget version of Rawhide.



Yeah, that's a tall glass of WTF right there. Here's something that's a little more conventional, and a version of a classic song that fits the amped-up version of Las Vegas that we're familiar with.



There is other good music lurking around there in the punk movement. Seminal garage punk / psychobilly band The Cramps were pretty good. I think that most of the early rockabilly stars would have been surprised to find a groundbreaking punk act relying on their stuff. But hey, you get good music where you find it, and you shoudln't discriminate against genre. If you like it, you like it. Be happy.



You know who they remind me of a little bit? These guys:



Wait, am I saying The Trashmen invented punk? Maybe. And I have The Authorities on my side.



Maybe Dick Dale had something to do with it. That California surf music scene was pretty dynamic. It's really not fair to call it surf music - that ghettoizes it. The influence of songs like Dale's "Nitro" was much more widespread. You see the roots of LA punk, speed metal, hardcore, all sorts of modern musical forms in his driving guitar riffs.



And check it out - a 1960's version of a mosh pit.



And with that I'm outta here.

Draw Your Own Conclusions

You're grown ups. I don't need to tell you what to think. Draw your own conclusions.

Bread and Circuses

So first the glorious life of a promoter. I spent some time tonight sorting out emails and getting an accountability of who is owed T-shirts. A bunch of folks failed to pick their pre-paid shirts up at my race. The T-shirt guy may have lost accountability of some, and in either instance some fucker lifted a dozen of them. Nice. So anyhow this is all a mess for a dozen or so people and the losses come out of the club's pocket, or at least half of it does, and we need to make some additional T-shirts to hook up a number of people who bugged me afterwards for shirts. The fuckin' headache that these shirts represent is incomprehensible to me. It's something I spend more time on, for less gain in terms of improvement of the quality of the race, and the profits are functionally nil once I'm done making up for theft loss, and cutting checks to the racers who are now apparently ueber pissed at me for getting T-shirts stolen and not mailing them or whatever after they failed to make the pickup while they were at the race...and now they want refunds and I suck.

I told you it's glamorous.

So anyhow, on to other professional items.

I noticed some comments from a prominent New England crosser ranting on Twitter last week about one of their races not getting UCI C2 status, while the Nacht van Woerden earned top tier status. This struck him as unfair.

If you aren't familiar with it, they raced Nacht van Woerden last Wednesday. Loosely
translated, I think the names mean Night of Scaring the Shit out of Pro Crossers. The course is largely semi-groomed, ill-lit singletrack, where the racers have to bomb out of the groomed grass and light into ill-lit drops terminating in sharp 180's at full speed. The pros find it scary as hell, but sort of exciting. Daphny van den Brand (sigh...) nipped Helen Wyman in the women's field, and Sven Nys took the men's race (with Jonathan Page in 7th).

Then Sunday they raced the SuperPrestige Zonhoven. Zonhoven loosely translated means "like storming the cliffs of Utah Beach except sandy-er and without being raked by machine guns." If we amateurs could recognize 6 nutty features via streaming media, then you can bet there were a dozen heart stoppers on that course.

There's huge irony here and maybe some bitterness as we in the US are reaching for technical excellence, as the Europeans, even in the C2 and higher races, are reaching for circus-like spectacles. So why is that? Why all the insanity in top tier races, when we have technically excellent races that can't get a comparable level of UCI sanction?

I have a theory that this is a bit like what what we faced in rugby about 7-8 years ago (roughly 7-8 years after the sport recognized a full time professional tier). It has to do with growing the TV market, and how that warps decisions about what is permissible, and impermissible on the field of play. Bear with me here.

At the top tier domestically in the U.S., semi-pro clubs with maybe a handful of scantily paid chaps, the refs were damned pedantic about what we did at the tackle - the ballcarrier goes down, then has to release the ball immediately. We didn't get a lot of slack.

How you're supposed to behave at the tackle, in the "ruck," is explained here and demonstrated with crystal clarity:



Notice how fast the ballcarrier puts the ball out once he's on the ground. That's what is expected at the lower level - tackle, set, release. Just fast like that and a failure to get your hand off the ball toute suite results in a quick penalty. That is exactly how the laws of the game are written.

Now watch what a pro can do in an international test match, and focus on what the Welsh player (in red) does at 13 seconds, and how long he takes to produce a set ball:



First, the Kiwis (in black) do a really good job of producing cleanly set ball, real fast. But then did you notice that the Welsh player goes down on the ball, regains his feet, is in the midst of contact, goes down again, and then the ball seems to roll back over 2-3 seconds, and Wales maintains clean possession of the ball? Did you also notice the result of that "cheating" - that Wales were able to launch a scoring attack?

Why are the technical standards looser on the pros - where you'd think tech standards would be tight - than on amateurs?

Treating some top tier events differently under the same set of rules creates different modes of play, and some of those modes of play are more telegenic than others. The amateur style ruck, with quickly set ball, is often disorderly. It is scrupulously fair - and it's a damn sight harder to hang onto the ball because a quick "set" often means the ball is bouncing around and not really still on the ground. It's hard to mount an attack when the thing you need to move and throw and chase, will not hold still long enough for you to place hands on it. In contrast, allowing the player a few seconds to place the ball back in a "continuous motion" permits the tackled ballcarrier to carefully set the ball, resist initial efforts by the defense to steal or poach the ball, and it leads to a more organized, neater, and more effective offensive attack by the ballcarrier's team. And scoring.

So WTF? Where is this going?

It's pretty simple. In allowing the top tier players to "cheat," the officials help create a product that sells well on TV, and to casual fans who aren't as hung up on the rulebook as serious fans.
More telegenic, of course, means more pleasing to the crowd. Allowing slack standards at the ruck is the kind of idea, like the proposal to eliminate offsides penalties in hockey, aimed at convincing casual fans to watch and get invested in the sport. I know a fair number of you are hockey fans, but can you imagine regularly watching 12-10 hockey games? You probably can't, but a lot of casual fans might find it pretty interesting. Purists wouldn't like it but maybe it would draw in more casual fans looking for a diversion, who aren't wise to a more traditional 2:1 defensive battle. In the search for telegenic sports action, the rules aren't the only thing that get crushed. The NFL has singlehandedly destroyed proper form tackling with it's high impact shoulder charge "tackles" and the NBA allows traveling in direct proportion to the marketing power of the star who is walking with the ball. It's all about the Benjamins...

That brings us back to cyclocross.

I suspect that part of the motivation for some of the crazy, mountain bikey features in top level cross (as in these two races, or the whoop-dee-doos at Ruddervoorde) is that perhaps top tier courses feature some unfair, spectacle-creating aspects to create interesting visuals that televise really well. Of course part of the deal is that when you have the best racers in the world collected in one place, you need to have a somewhat selective course - but that only explains basically hard courses, it doesn't explain gimmicks like the 60 foot sand dunes that caused tons of spectacular (but basically safe) endos at Zonhoven or the insane night riding at van Woerden. What explains them, is the need to create a scene that is a little different from the ordinary amateur race vista, to engage the fans and build the business of the sport.

Bart Aernouts (U-23 winner at Nacht van Woerden)
Struggling Through The Ill-Lit Places

Pauwels Makes Like Superman
at Zonhoven

That's my theory anyhow. There could be really petty reasons or maybe substantively good reasons that technically excellent US courses get the cold shoulder from the UCI while technical nightmares in Europe get warmly welcomed into the brotherhood... but it sure looks to me (an admittedly ignorant, total outsider) like somebody is taking TV marketing into consideration.

Some Random Music

Appropo of nothing... The Rev. Horton Heat with one of the better rockabilly / metal mashups. Very clever lyrics here.



Tom Waits has more cool in his cigarette butts, than any of us have in our whole selves.



Oddly enough, that lead to this:

You Don't Know Jack

Ultimately, we don't know jack about what's in another human's heart. We can think we do; they can share stuff with us and we can feel at home with them. But we just don't know what's in the heart's dark corners. I've recently come to grips with a couple of my own dark corners; I can talk about them now. It's not the end of the darkness in me. There are some places you don't want to go. Shit, there are places I'd rather not go right now. The dude that lives in there ain't so pleasant. But sometimes shining the light into those little corners makes us feel better. Maybe in doing so we can help out a friend and let them know they aren't alone, that others have struggled with something like they are facing. Then again, maybe it's a huge buzzkill for the share-ee.

You just never can tell. So if you're one of the friends who shared a deep-dark with me this week, or if I unloaded some of my load of venom on you... thanks for being a part of the week, I owe you one.

Here's a good secret.

There used to be a really great band out of Syracuse called Little Georgie and the Shuffling Hungarians. It is probably the greatest blues/jam ensemble you never heard of. George Rossi featured on the keyboards, and as I recall they had an interesting assemblage of guys and sometimes gals who would play horns and other instruments and provide swinging background vocals. Think Blues Brothers, but without all the comedy. They used to play around the northeast a bit, maybe got down Cajun way (there's a major Syracuse/Cajun connection for some reason...see, e.g. Benny Mardones). I also seem to recall them having a sort of regular gig at Styleen's Rhythm Palace, a place comparable to the Black Cat Club in D.C. or Chapel Hill's Local 509, just more locally focused (more like 509). They weren't cut out for fame & fortune; they didn't fit an easy record company mold. I think they'd do a lot better now with the iTunes Store... but there's no way of knowing.

Li'l Georgie has been out of circulation for a while. I don't know what his deal is but I miss his music badly. He's just good for the soul, right? But lately, it looks like maybe he is going to come out of his cave and share his considerable gifts with us. Gary Frenay - a NY pop legend - has talked him into playing a show at the Auburn Theater on November 24th. Funny, I'll be in the neighborhood around then... I may have to catch it.

[UPDATE: through the magic of Google-fu, I located Li'l Georgie. Here's his blog, and here's the story of what happened to him b/t/w the early Y2Ks, and now. Damn, he's had an interesting life in music; and I'm glad he's playing gigs again. I'll let you know if I hear about any albums.]

So here's what you missed if you never heard Li'l Georgie play on his first go-round, right after the band stood up:



This is what the band sounded like in barely-rehearsed, early, guitar shop-show form:



So-so video, mediocre sound quality... but you can just tell, cant you? If you're feeling a little Doctor John there, I'm with you.

There's a little bit of soul in this impromptu piece recorded a few months ago - maybe there's hope for a full time working reunion?:



Here's what George sounds like now - not sure where this is but he's getting the pump primed for sure:



Damn that's good stuff. And here's a good audio-only sampling. The Ballad of Li'l Georgie may be the best thing on here, but it's all good.



If you like that, there's a lot more here.



So not all my secrets are a buzzkill. Have fun this weekend, and if you're going to be racing cross, I *strongly* encourage you to legit freakout, and Unleash the Fury!

Watch more videos on Cycling Dirt