Big Bikes

Like a April Fool

Last Thursday's post was not an April Fools joke, but it was, however, the result of one. You see, it's become somewhat of an annual tradition around here that my wife plays a massive April Fools joke on me. Last year it involved a bogus recall of my Superfly Single Speed frame, this year she manged to outdo herself, which was impressive...and traumatic.

A while back I submitted an entry for the Breck Epic Blogger grant contest. The contestants were supposed to be posted on March 1st, but that date came and went...which I mentioned to my wife. So the other day when I received the following email I got all excited:


Dearest Breck Epic Blogging Grant Hopefuls (hereafter refered to as BEBGH):

We over here at race promoterville have screwed the pooch so to speak and were not able to get the contestants applications up by March 2nd, like we stated on our website. We won’t bore you with the details, but will simply leave it as every day life found its way into messing with some of our time and our priorities needed to be recalibrated. You guys are important to us, but when push came to shove, we were banking on the hope that you are a laidback group, or at least know how to act patient when you are secretly pulling the hair out of your heads, thinking, “Those bastards!” Either way, we appreciated not getting slammed with emails about why we haven’t met the deadline for our grant. One of the issues that has come up this year is that there are more BEBGH than ever. We went from a manageable 20 or so last year, to over 100 for 2010. Due to some of the polling “challenges” we encountered last year, we are very hesitant to put that many BEBGH up to the poll. So, in a stroke of genius or was it strokes of Guinness, we have come up with a self serving plan to whittle down the 100 GH to a more manageable 10 for the final reader poll. Here’s the deal. We are giving you one more opportunity to show your brass (and make us laugh. We need some good laughs right now. Hence the self serving part). Those of you who receive this letter were our top 30 applicants (Note this is not going to everyone on the breckepic list…so don’t go rubbin’ their faces in it just yet). We want each of you to post an absolutely Foolish picture or video of yourself on your Blog on April Fools day (Yeah, that’s this Thursday). We will pick the top 10 most ridiculous bloggers and those will go straight to the polls where the readers will decide. Your April Fools post will be included in your poll bio. Here are the rules:

•The picture/vid has to be taken after you receive this email and be posted to your blog no later than 12:00 pm MST April 1st. The video of you falling out of a tree drunk in ’93 won’t cut it.
•The post must remain up all day. No taking it down before grandma reads your blog with her afternoon tea.
•You may not mention the BEBG in your post in any way (not even to excuse away the absurdity of the entry). You can (and we encourage you to) make up some other story about why you are posting it. The more plausible the story, the more we will laugh, the more the good things happen

Good Luck. We’ll be checking back in on the 1st.

BEBGTeam
The Greenspeed Project, Inc.
60 Bridge Street, PO Box 4648
Breckenridge, CO 80424
http://www.breckepic.com

I pity the fool

Now, I'd had a few email exchanges with Mike Mac from the Breck Epic, and this email sounded like him, and it came from his email address, I was in no way suspicious. I was also not suspicious when I mentioned this email to M and began telling her about my "awesome plan" to "win this thing!" "Let me see the email" she asked. "Aren't you at all suspicious? — it is April Fools y'know." In retrospect it's obvious that she was nervous that I was going to take things too far (good thing thing she was so wrong on that one) and she was trying to steer the crazy train back onto the tracks.

Of course if I had any inkling that this thing was a put on, any doubt in my mind was vanquished by the email I got from Dicky:


Dicky: Did you get an email from the BE folks about putting up photos on facebook? My buddy (BW) got one, and he thought that was weird. Granted, I wouldn't put it past Mike Mac to do something like this. Glad I got in last year when it was easy.

Me: Yup,

I got a plan though. I guess it could be an April Fools joke,

but the punchline would be -- "Ha-ha, you didn't have to post the photo...you were already in!"

Dicky: Mike does some weird shit, but since he has yours and Bill's contact info it must be for real. I imagine the timing is due to him wrapping up his Sea Otter responsibilities.

People say I have too much time on my hands.
That's not accurate. All my blogging time comes directly out of my sleeping time.
As near as I can tell, it's had no ill effect on me.

But as you've probably guessed by now, the whole thing was a hoax. The email was not from Mike Mac, it was Miriam, my wife, who had poured over Mike's blog, and in an incredibly adroit act of written-character-acting, adopted his writing style. And it did come from "his email address," only he hadn't sent it. An evil genius by the name of Column Rooter had manufactured a fake email header using some high-tech Voodoo shit.

Evil Genius in training Kevin had tried to help Miriam with the fake email header problem, but the best he could come up with was that she should buy a domain name that looked vaguely like "breckepic.com," something like "breckepic.poop." But Miriam knew that I wouldn't fall for an email that emanated from the address "info@breckepic.poop." "Kevin, he's wicked dumb, but he's not...wicked frickin' dumb."

Thursday night at the benefit for MM Racing, at The Ride Studio Cafe, one of the questions I was asked repeatedly was: "Did it come off easily?" The answer was "No, not at all. It involved a shop-vac, a long, hot shower, and repeated applications of witch hazel."

I wonder what Mike Mac's reaction was when he received an email "from himself" Wednesday morning. That's right, Miriam, in an effort to make the email to me look like a legit, big, bulk email, had CCed info@breckepic.com, thereby sending a copy directly to Mike. I guess you're not supposed to do that when you're messing around with fake email headers.

In reality, although I did perform my Extreme-Kimbo-Make-Over as the result of Miriam's joke, the joke was really just a catalyst...and there's no way Miriam could have know what she would be catalyzing.

Like Gollum Reuters said: "You were just blogging with 20% more motivation." Now if only I could figure out what would provide that 20% more motivation on a regular basis. I could quit my day job...and sleeping altogether.

This is where the madness happens