Not It

Once, back when I was a stupid kid living in Boulder, after a long night of partying, I thought it would be a great idea to pick up a cooler full of empty beer and liquor bottles, raise it right up, high over my head and slam it on the floor. My logic: the cooler would stay latched and its fragile contents would shatter inside, it would be f—ing brilliant! But it wasn't really. Mainly because the cooler didn't stay latched, it exploded open, spewing shattered glass all over the carpet. A half-conscious hippy who was lying on the floor with his greasy head resting on the bottom step of a staircase slurred: "Not it!"

And that, is what this post is destined to be — thoughts and ideas scattered all over the place. I'm going to start with a sort of "what I did this past weekend" section and then move into a NEWS section, there's so much stuff coming up right now. Here we go...

Saturday was pretty action packed. In the morning I lead a kids ride at NEMBA's National Take A Kid Mountain Biking Day. It was rad. I had some real rippers in my crew, GB NEMBA president Adam Glick's son Sam was one of the more impressive riders.


Check him out cleaning a sick rock-lunge move above. I'll have a full write up and the whole photo sequence of Sam's move up on the International Bike blog sometime this week.


I got out for a little post kids ride spin. I've been enjoying riding around The Fells, basically my back yard. There are actually a lot of similarities between the trails of Pisgah and Massachusetts. Only difference is the total lack of extended climbing or protracted descending in Mass. That, and we don't have rhododendron groves like they do. The bruise I got on my ass from the above bobble is deep and causing bio-mechanical disruption. I sat down on the pointiest rock I could find from about three feet up. It was great.


Saturday night we did a little bicycle pub crawl down to Harpoon's Octoberfest. OK, not much of a crawl...we stopped at exactly one bar because we were running late. We got to Harpoon an hour before last call. At that point there were hundreds of people lurching down the street like zombies, heading away from Harpoon. There were police everywhere, they were trying to coral the inebriated masses into shuttles. It's always good to show up to the party just as martial law has been declared.


Octoberfest is one of those things people get really excited about and then, once they get there, they go "what the hell am I doing here?" You pay $20 to get in, which gets you one beer ticket. Then you have to wait in long lines to pay bar prices for beer (unless you've got a sweet hook up like I do). Then you stand in a beer and puke covered parking lot drinking your beer while listening to horrible music and repeatedly getting bumped into by glassy-eyed, drooling dudes who want to fight anything that moves. It's awesome.

That said, I will no doubt get bamboozled into going to the thing next year.

Above: Christopher Igleheart and Gerry Finnegan

Sunday I made it up to Gloucester for the big cyclocross race. I did more walking around and talking to people than I did actual race-watching, which is usually the case at these sort of events.


I talked to local frame builder Matt Budd about getting together to ride the mountain bikes and his crazy shifter mounts.


I did get some spectating in. Seeing Tim Johnson win at his "hometown throwdown" is always nice.

And now...
Here's The NEWS:

Some of you may have noticed that I began contributing to Bike Rumor last week. It's a challenge, I can't just go over there and talk weird like I do over here. I have to throw some facts in there as well. I do try to bring my "voice" into the stuff though. Here's a list of the posts I've done thus far:

• Celtic Ray Allen's Custom IF Corvid
• Custom Trek Speed Concepts for Kona Ironman
• G-Force Gel Brake Hoods and Killer Mutant Poly-Mermen
• Review: Ergon GR2 grips vs. Pisgah Stage Race
  

The Ergon thing and the G-Force thing have a good amount of silliness in them. Definitely more silliness than I have going on here today, that's for sure. I've been shamelessly bugging all of my "industry insider" friends for hot tips. If you, Big Bikes reader-person, have anything you think I should write about, hit me at wellonabigbikeya at the gmails with the dot com.

In an attempt to be more inter-netty, I have re-joined the Twitter. My handle is "BigBikesThom" because some undeserving prick had already taken BigBikes. I was shocked to find that Twitter has a blog. I wish I could think of a good analogy for what that's like. Is it more like a kangaroo wearing a front-facing fanny pack or buying the Cliff Notes for a book only to find they are longer than the book itself? Or is it nothing like either of those things? We'll never know.

So you can follow me on the Twitters but I'm not sure where you'll be following me to. If I could find that scene from Animal House where the dude grabs the marching band leader's baton and leads the band into a dead-end alley on Youtube, I would link to it. Because that would be very accurately illustrative of people following me on Twitter.

If you live under a rock (you obviously don't live under the same rock I do, otherwise we probably would have bumped into each other at some point) there is a f—ing massive cyclocross race this Wednesday NIGHT up in Shrewsbury, MA: The Night Weasels Cometh. It's brought to you by some of the same people as The Ice Weasels Cometh, along with some different people. My only real involvement with the thing was the doodling of the above logo. I went to art school, I used to know how to draw, I don't know what happened. I'll also be covering it for Cyclingdirt. Hey, I gotta earn my FREE, sexy Crossresults kit somehow.

Alright, that's all the news that will fit today, I got a couple more things but they can wait until tomorrow or the next day or the next day.