Big Bikes

2012-01-16T15:13:00.001-05:00

The new Big Bikes is officially live at BigBikesMedia.com! We're kickin' things off with a GoPro Helmet Hero video taken from the perspective of USA Cycling Cyclocross National Champion Jeremy Power's personal mechanic: Tom Hopper during the Elite Men's race. CHECK IT.

BigBikes p/b Cyclingdirt Is Live (ish)

2011-12-26T16:41:00.002-05:00

It's still under construction, the banner images look like they were designed by a drunk eight-year-old, and the blog doesn't work yet, but still...it looks and works a whole lot better than Facebook's new Timeline system. Oh, and the URL will likely be changing, but here it is...

The new Big Bikes p/b Cyclingdirt!

Got a bunch of Pro Bike vids up there and a nice thing about Boyd Cycling's affordable carbon CX wheels. I'll be heading to CX Nationals where I will be shooting TONS of material, so get really excited about that, because it is totally happening.

If you'd like to suggest content — shop visits, factory tours, interviews, or other weirdness...hit the contact button (upper right, under 'Tell me why I'm a big, fat jerk). Or, screw it, hit me at this email address: wellonabigbikeya at gmail.

Hang on, this is gonna be fun.

Something Wicked Awesome This Way Comes

2011-10-31T23:53:00.000-04:00

"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

OK fine, Big Bikes is not being struck down, it is just being re-invented. I just really, really like that quote from Star Wars.

Listen!

Big Bikes is about to be reborn with the help of the good folks at an evil umbrella corporation called Flocasts. (As a former bike messenger I think that all umbrellas are evil — all they do is get caught by the wind, fly into the street, and poke your eyes out with their pointy, pointy spines.) You may be familiar with some of the sites that take shelter under their evil umbrella — sites like Cyclingdirt, Flowrestling, Gymnastike, and FloFerret-Legging (last one...totally made up). What's that? You're not familiar with the latter (not made up) two. Well, I guess you've been living under a rock and not hanging out under the same evil umbrellas I have.

The new site will use all the tools in the Cyclingdirt arsenal but it will have a distinctly Big Bikes flavor — heavy overtones of coffee, notes of hops, and a bitter, perhaps, Red Bully finish. Altogether a BIG taste.

Big Bikes 2.0

First thing we're going to do at Big Bikes 2.0 is stop calling it "Big Bikes 2.0." Basically because I have no clue what placing "2.0" after things means. Maybe we'll call it Big Bikes Too, like Teen Wolf Too. But probably not. Big Bikes Not-2.0 is going to be all about exploration. In the future, when I'm sent to do a race coverage by Cyclingdirt, the area of the race will be explored, sort of like the classic E! show Wild On with Brooke Burke, with less bikinis and more Lycra.

Or not.

Maybe more like Anthony Bourdain's The Layover.

Although that may be too sophisticated a comparison. Perhaps Man Vs. Food...but with bikes would be more accurate.

Damn, it's gonna be really hard to eat all those freakin' bikes.

You're going to see classic Big Bikes stuff on the new site, all sorts of goofy blog posts and weirdness, PLUS, you are going to see race coverages, gear reviews, shop visits, factory tours, interviews, Pro Bikes, and god knows what else. We're going to make it up as we go along. And while I can't promise the content will always be accurate or at all good, it will be constant and somewhat entertaining.

The new site will also be a collaborative type thing, so if you want to suggest content, request a tour or a race coverage...do it!

The launch of this alleged new site is imminent...don't touch that browsah baah!

Not That Strong A Planner

2011-08-04T13:49:00.000-04:00

There are stories clogging up the pipes here at The BigBikes, blocking other, better stories from coming out. Story-constipation. It's a real problem. Time to put on the arm's length latex glove and reach up the story pipe's ass and pull that shit out.

What a charming image.

I'm not that strong a planner. I don't plan. I bought a plane ticket, one way, to Bend...Redmond actually, for the High Cascades 100, which I was covering for Cyclingdirt. The idea was to make my way over to Missoula, MT sometime after the race. The race was covered. Tons of sweet helmet cam "footie" was taken of fast riders on amazing Oregon trails. Then my favorite Ozzie, this side of Nick Cave showed up after the race with a friend of hers. Beers were left unfinished that night as Deschutes Public House. My excuse? The 3:30AM wake up call for the 5:30AM race start (ya, the one I missed. Suck it.)

But the next day, Sunday, we did (eventually, after way too much coffee at Thump) make it to the Niner demo not far from downtown Bend. There we met up with a most majestic Fuzzy John Mylne. One of the most terrifying single speeders on the planet. He doesn't shave his legs...or his chin. I think it's a religious thing.

I opted for the R.I.P 9, a 4.5" bike. Unfortunately, the trails near the demo were smoother than Massachusetts pavement, so they were unable to put the R.I.P. to the test. I could feel it chomping at the bit, talking to me, going "Mommy, can I go out and kill tonight?" but I couldn't offer up any victims.

It looked good though. Even if it was a gun at a pillow-fight.

CGW really putting the Jet 9 through its paces on the road back to the demo spot. We got a little turned around. The road was not in the plan. Only bad plans involve roads. I'm finished with drop bars, did I mention that?

Simone was too fast to keep in the frame. Seconds after this photo was taken, frustrated with our road grind, she rolled right the fuck over that loader. That's what happens when you put an Ozzie on a 29er. "This thing would be great faah runnin' ovah wallabies!" she concluded at the end of the ride. Then she chugged a can of Foster's and let a Vegemite burp go in my face. (I have known Simone for almost a day...we can joke like that).

Not a strong planner...right. So I thought I had booked a flight through Travelocity just before we left Thump for the Niner demo. I hadn't. When I called (while we were already en route to the airport) to confirm, they told me that my transaction had been canceled three minutes after I made the reservation. WTF? I would have said, if I said such things. "OK, well book me another seat on that flight please." "Nope, all the seats are taken." "All right, the next flight then." "At 11AM?" (it was 5PM). "What's another word for WTF?" At that point I told the Ozzies to turn the car around and that I'd spring for tubes and beers so we could float the Deschutes in style. Of course the tube rental place closed at five (Planning! Yes!) and we were left to drink really cheap, really good beer at a party attended by kayakers and stand up paddlers and their ripped abs. It wasn't too too bad.

Plan...where were we? B? (I don't know) was devised: I would rent a car at Redmond Airport and drive it to Missoula (10 hours according to Googly Maps). And...go! One problem — I didn't pass the credit check. What can I say? I'm a fucking mess. And none of the sketchy companies I normally rent from would do a point to point from that location. But that was when CGW stepped up and overtook Nick Cave for the title of "Thom P.'s favorite Australian." She offered to put the car on her card if I promised not to get in a drunk-texting accident or hit a bull elk on purpose. I also took back everything I ever said about Cadel Evans being a hobgoblin with the voice of a little girl.

It's 581 miles to Missoula, I got a full iced coffee, a half a night's sleep, it's dark...and I'm wearing flip flops.

Hit it!

Just after I saw what I am almost positive was a wolf, I nearly ran out of gas. I'm not afraid of wolves. I'm not afraid of anything. (Except for great white sharks in fresh water rivers and lakes and C.H.U.D.s under the stairs.)

The cruise control was set at 83 for about 7 hours. I hardly stopped to pee (which is a great sign after exerting yourself in the heat for two days), but, when I was within less than an hour of Missoula, at 6AM, I hit construction. It was almost more than I could handle. I pulled off for a coffee, pulled back on and was promptly instructed to stop. "We got a wide load comin' through...gonna be a while." "About how long?" "Oh, about a half hour." "Just take that stop sign and beat me to death with it please. Seriously" I proceeded to turn off the car and fall asleep, waking up to the stop sign being tapped on my window. Shaking off the drool and cobwebs, I saw that two large pick up trucks were waiting patiently behind me, not honking. That never would have happened in Boston. I mean, Missoula is the town where I saw a meter-maid approach a guy at a cafe: "John, is that your truck?" "Yes, yes it is." "Meter's up. Didn't wanna just nail ya." "Why thank you, can I buy you a cup of coffee?"

Absolutely surreal.

We'll get down to talking about the riding in Missoula and Bozeman soon...

Bend Dude...Bend (High Cascades 100)

2011-07-27T18:13:00.002-04:00

First off, let's get one thing perfectly straight, I did NOT do this race, I merely covered it for Cyclingdirt. I have determined that both racing and covering a hundred miler is...fucking stupid. Or, if you want the PG version, not feasible. Several people have said "Aw come on! You gotta race it." None, I say none of those people have ever ridden a hundred miles on their mountain bikes, never mind raced a hundred miles and then had to stay up all night editing "sweet footie." What I did do was hop on a demo Niner Jet 9 furnished by the awesome guys at WebCyclery and chase the leaders on different, generally pretty exciting sections of the course. It was, in a word, rad. This method of coverage left me with plenty of energy left over for post race interviews. (Check out the coverage page on Cyclingdirt for that stuff.)

There are some great stories from the race — Tostado's saddle-breakage and Troy Barry's incident involving a confused recreational rider sitting on his wheel. Not like drafting off him and not pulling through, but literally sitting her butt down on his wheel as she fell over for no apparent reason. There's also a bunch of great helmet-cam footage over there, including ten minutes of me chasing Tostado, feeling very pleased with myself...until I realized he HAD NO FREAKING SADDLE. I was like "damn, this dude rides like a single speeder." Ya, when he has two saddle rails sticking up like the prongs of a broken trident where his saddle should be! Be careful watching the helmet-cam videos, you may end up booking a flight to Oregon before you know it.

I am taking all photos with my iPhone these days...

Jeff (I think...I'm horrible with names) from WebCyclery set up my Jet 9 pro style. (There may be a review of that thing on this site soon. I really liked it.) Jeff, if that is his real name and I'm not a total idiot, was racing the HC100 the next day. He wasn't exactly chilling out, drinking coconut water with his feet up here. I also bought a pair of XT pedals from these guys, they took great care of me.

Friday night before the race I found myself in need of a pub in Bend to do some "internetting" where I wouldn't look like a total knob sitting in the corner with my computer. (As my buddy Aaron said, "It's not the computer...") I found a yuppie hell-hole called 900 Wall. "900 Wall...a great place to not look like a knob while sitting in the corner working on your laptop!" They did have Ninkasi Brewing's Tricerahops on tap, to their credit. After getting my work done, I rolled over to what is definitely my favorite pub-spot in Bend — Deschutes Bend Public House. Had myself a couple Inversion IPAs and an elk burger. I recommend both. They were out of the Brewery Pretzel, but I would recommend that too, based on prior experience.

The 3:30AM wake up call came like a hard slap to the face delivered by a juiced out grizzly bear wearing a chain-mail shark mitt. It was dark, it was cold, and, having left Boston in a sweat-soaked T-shirt on a sickeningly humid 100° day, I had neglected to pack anything like the appropriate clothing. There had been a miscommunication about transportation (my fault, of course) and I was left without a ride to the venue. So I hit the road in my flip flops and shorts (it was in the 30s) and began trying to thumb a ride to the the race start. Of course, by then, the race had already begun and I'd missed my establishing shot of the rollout (so pro). After what seemed like an eternity of having huge pick up trucks blow by me at 70mph with no intention of stopping, I threw my bike shoes and helmet on and began pedaling in the general direction of Wanoga Snow Park. It was only about eight miles but I was wearing shorts and not wearing gloves (another item to be added to the long list of "things that Thom forgot"). "This isn't so bad" I thought as I pedaled along on the relatively flat road toward Mt. Bachelor...then the first hill hit and I went "Your honor, I move to have my previous statement stricken from the record." Between my full Osprey hydration pack, my camera equipment, and other assorted gear, I was easily packin' thirty extra pounds on my back. Did I mention it wasn't warm?

I mean, look...it's late July and this dude is walking over a snowbank. While it may hit 80° during the day, the nights and mornings in Bend are no-joke-cold.

Finally a couple in a Subaru picked me up. "We were pretty sure you weren't an ax murderer...the bike was kind of a give away." They made my morning exponentially less miserable. When I got to the venue, I loaded up on coffee and hardboiled eggs until a lost sweep-rider came along. We headed back up the Tiddlywinks trail going against the race direction with the idea that I would turn around begin filming when the leaders came along. It worked out great.

I'd had some experience riding the Niner Jet 9, but not like 50 miles of experience doing intervals behind some of the best endurance riders in the country. I'll just say this: I did not want to give it back.

The first rider to come through was ski-mountaineer-turned-sick-mountain-biker Cary Smith, last year's winner. I followed him for a bit. His pace was shocking. The way he was just ripping through the corners on his hardtail 29er was impressive. I did feel like the Jet 9 helped level the playing field, but the way this one was set up was not exactly race-style. Anytime pedaling was involved, Cary gapped me good. This would become a theme of the day. The next riders to come through were Josh Tostado and Clint Muhfeld. As "mentioned-afore," Josh was riding saddle-less. He rode like that for 13 miles over 3,000 feet of climbing before the folks from Sagebrush Cycles hooked him up with a new saddle at the start/finish. On a side note, I learned that, although he is now associated with Colorado, Josh is a Mainer by birth. And he's one of the nicest, most down to earth dudes you'll ever meet. On the bike though...alien creature from space sent to suck the souls out of bike-riding humans.

I wasn't racing, but that didn't stop me from taking advantage of some of the best aid stations I've ever seen — PB & J on high-end multi-grain bread, peanut M & Ms, twizzlers, Cokes, chips, string cheese! It was nuts dude.

Here's a video of a stoked rider at this aid station talking about "Sector 16," one of the highlights of the race. And here's 2nd place Alice Pennington chasing winner Amanda Carey down the lower portion of said trail, and footage of Eddie O'dea shredding the upper section. The soundtrack for Eddie's piece was a no-brainer...those were the songs that were in my head while I was chasing him. And, if I have those songs in my head, it means we were ripping the shit. Warning: do not have Kayak.com open in your browser as you watch this video.

Don't tell promoter Mike Ripley, but this is where I got in a fight with a group of recreational riders. I can't help it...I got some Boston in me. Most of the time I can be all "Totally sweet, ya bro!" but, if someone acts like a dick in front of me...the mouth, the mouth can start going and there's not all that much I can do about it. At the spot in the course pictured above, riders still on loop 2, like the guy above, were coming up a hill (South Fork?), gasping for breath, then turning blindly around that snow hut. I was waiting for the leaders on loop3 to come up another trail from the direction I took this photo from so I could chase them down the descent.

As I was standing there, a large group of recreational riders came up from the direction both streams of racer traffic would be going. None of them were wearing helmets and they were on department store bikes. It was weird...they were weird. I have no idea how they got out that far, it was frightening. It's always the people who most need helmets that don't wear them.

I was already on edge because moments before, two dudes had come up, one with a huge board with a map and compass jutting out from his handlebars, like a diving board. When I informed them that the race was coming up South Fork (I think that's what it is called), he said "That's fucking stupid, that's a downhill!" I pointed out that we were at the top of a hill so every trail was, in fact, a downhill. And then I bit my tongue before I went on to point out how douche-baggy it was to sit there whining about what over three-hundred brave souls were out there doing on his trails while he was out on a fifteen mile ride with a navigational diving board attached to his bars.

Then these...what's the politically correct term? — helmet-less fucking freaks on Magnas came up the trail and parked their weird asses all over the place, around a blind corner where two streams of racer traffic were converging...just as race leader Cary Smith came barreling up to the intersection like a runaway crazy train. At first I was polite: "Hey guys, we got the race leader coming up, please move to the side." But they didn't move...at all. Then Cary, confused by the fact that these knuckleheads were obscuring the trail markers and blocking the trail, took a right turn into loop two racer traffic (you following this? Fuck, I'm lost). "No dude! This way!" I yelled. He was over 70 miles in and visibly confused. He began sort of riding off into the bushes, "This way?" he asked. "NO! This way...right through the HUGE GROUP OF HELMETLESS RIDERS BLOCKING HE TRAIL!" He got it that time.

One of the riders (with nothing protecting his chicken brain but an ill-fitting ball cap) took offense at my course directions, "Hey, now cut the crap! I know who you're talking about...helmetless riders, that's us." He astutely observed. And that's when Boston-Tommy emerged, "Dyude, I was just being descriptive, if you don't want to be described as 'helmetless riders blocking the trail, then don't be helmetless riders blocking the trail!'"He babbled something about how I had to "Share the trail with everyone..." as I sprinted through him and his crew with the Parthian shot: "Not with helmetless fucking morons I don't!"

And that's not all! We've got tales of Niner demos, missed flights, and overnight drives to Missoula coming up.

Out of Re-Missing In Action (We Think)

2011-07-22T23:32:00.006-04:00

I have been remiss. Maybe re-missing in action. I've been doing too much stuff, crazy stuff, to be blogging it up all the time. But balance must be found.

No, not "re-missing in action" like that.

Like this. The other day I lead 35 inner-city kids through The Fells. Did it go really, really well? Depends on what your definition of of "well" is. Did we have fun? Hell yeah! It was awesome. We've got insurance, so fuck it. That's my new motto, "fuck it." That, of course, is not the official Roll It Forward/Youth Cycling Program motto. But it should be.

Then there's the Thursday Night MTB Championships of The Universe. It has to be the hardest MTB group ride around. It's so hard that people who like hard rides are totally freaked out by it. I live in Wrentham now, it totally sucks for me to get to this thing, but it's worth it and I make it...most of the time.

Know what else sucks? Packing your bike for a trip to bend, getting there, and then realizing that you:

Left your saddle and seatpost in the workstand
Your left XTR pedal in self-destructing
And you forgot your mini-USB cord for your Contour HD (not bike-related but still sucky)

Having to pay retail for bike parts'll learn ya to be more fastidious right quick! And you know what else? The remembering to stand all the time when you don't have a seatpost isn't the issue...it's the remembering not to sit down.

Yes, I live in fucking Wrentham now, it's a long story. I am in the process of exploring various modes of getting to Boston from there. Some days I ride my Schwinn Varsity to the train and then hop on a stylin' Raleigh I've left at South Station. My buddy Seth shows me just how stylin' I might look riding the Raleigh. And yes, that's Boston Harbor there.

Conversely, Seth shows me how lame I look when I ride the folding Chinese "Komda" to the train during peak hours. It is truly horrible. The sub-5-mile spin to the train is like water boarding.

I've recommissioned the Fisher Ferrous I call "Dunderchee" as a trailer bike. I ride it over to White Barn Farm, home of The Ice Weasels for veggies, the market, and the liquor store. It is cracked, but I will ride it until it fails catastrophically.

I live a 35 mile ride from Boston, but this is where I live. It's a nice ride, and it might be worth it. Scott Brown is my neighbor. He drops grass clippings in my neighbor's yard, shows photos of himself in his underwear to teenage babysitters, and still doesn't have lake front property. The douche.

Sometimes I ride this, "The aThomination" to or from work. It's a single speed and I have given up and put panniers on it. We're through being cool.

Of course I did walk into JRA Cycles a couple days ago and buy this:

It's a Kona Major one in a 56cm. They still have a 54cm in stock. It's a rad bike, I have no idea why they didn't produce them for 2011. I did restrain myself from buying the Stan's No Tubes Flow/Industry Nine Wheelset they had in stock, even though my rear wheel was thrashed. I still have time to make that mistake.

Hey! Hey! Easy guy, we're just easing back into this stuff here alright dyude. There are plans for The Big Bikes to go way more legit. It may all begin with a kickstarter campaign where readers get to decide just how much of my bodily hair gets waxed.

And that, is where I end it.

Thursday Night Championships of The MTB Universe

2011-07-11T11:05:00.001-04:00

What can I say? There's been more doing things than talking about doing things here at The Big Bikes lately. For instance, the NEMBA Burlington Landlocked ride has been GOING OFF. It has effectively become the Thursday Night Championships of the MTB Universe, with local killers, assassins, and smooth criminals coming out of the woodwork to blaze watts and crush souls.

Last week we had Colin Eggleton from Wheelworks leading it out. Resultsboy was there, as was Pete "Mad Alchemy/Dad-Power" Smith. Kevin "K-Sweat/Squirtgunshow/I blog less than BigBikes Thom" Sweeney graced us with his presence yet again. GTL (Greg "The Leg," not "gym, tanning, laundry") came out to kick ass and take names, but his plan was derailed by a SRAM XX malfunction...his chain became a work of modern art for seemingly no reason. MKR, who has been our guest local ride leader/torture artist missed this ride unfortunately. Here's his take on these rides. Steve "Party At The Back" Hopengarten was doing just that, playing caboose with an exhausted-from-his-mega-commute Harry Precourt. Marty "TorolocoCycling" Allen was a little too comfortable going balls to the wall for what felt like way too long. He may be the silent killer in the bunch. He's like radon gas on a bike. (Ooh, that sounds wicked scary!)

I'm just playing rope-a-dope here...things are about to pick up.

What Goes Down at The Thursday Night NEMBA Burlington Landlocked Ride

2011-06-28T17:28:00.000-04:00

I've been going out semi-sporadically with some consistency to "lead" the NEMBA Burlington Landlocked Ride (Thursdays, 6PM Estabrook School, Bedford). The past couple rides have actually been lead by Mike Rowell, a supah-fast local. He's fast anywhere, but this stuff is his backyard, and no matter how hard you fight, he will win. You think you're fast? Come out and play with Mike. You a 'crosser who wants to get some intensity with a bunch of cornering practice thrown in (before you flat, get devoured by mosquitoes, and have to walk home) come out and play with Mike.

Of course there are several other-paced rides, including a women's ride that go off at the same-ish time. So even if you don't want to come out and play with Mike on the, as Adam Glick calls it: "Left For Dead Ride," come out and play nice with others.

I'll be riding the Niner One 9 from South Boston to Burlington at about 4:30 Thursday night, right up Mass Ave. If you're in Somerville, Cambridge, or Arlington, hop on the crazy, 15mph, green train.

- t

Pivot Cycles Demo Wednesday at The Fells

2011-06-20T20:07:00.000-04:00

On Saturday night I was lucky enough to be part of a stealth, little Pivot Cycles demo up at Harold Parker put on by Pivot dealer, JRA Cycles. The bike I rode was the above-pictured Firebird, a 170mm (6.7") travel bike meant more for hucking at highland Mt. than plowing through the flatland rock gardens of HP. But hey, it was still wicked fun. Three of us were on the Firebird, the rest were on 429s or Mach 5.7s. All the riders there were happy with whatever they rode.

Out of all the 6" plus bikes I've ridden, I liked the Firebird the best, by far. The DW Link is awesome. It takes awhile for an XC douche like myself to get used to a bike like that, but once I got it...

I was just lifting the front end and bee-lining through rock gardens like Harold Parker was a huge luge track, which it it's really not. It's a bumpy, bony, mess. Me, Tom Greene, and Aaron from JRA were carving through rocky corners and blasting through root fields like it was nothin'. Always fun to play tag with riders like those guys.

If you want to demo a Pivot too, and you know you do, you can do so at the Middlesex Fells this Wednesday between 3-7PM at the Flynn Rink. If I were free, I would be all over that Firebird again like a vegan on a banh mi sandwich.

Josh from Pivot is the man. He drives around the country ceaselessly, hooking people up with sweet bikes to ride. He was hooking us up on his day off. The man.

Me, Josh, and Brian McInnis getting our asses bit off by mosquitoes in-between getting rad on big bikes.

I nearly needed a blood transfusion after waiting for Greg to fix his flat.

A bucket of Crank Bros and Time pedals.

And a bucket of Shimanos to replace them when they break.

Of course I had to be the one wearing lycra at Bertucci's after the ride. That's my M.O. dude, that's my frickin' M.O..

Bicycle Yard Sale

2011-06-18T13:07:00.000-04:00

I'm having a bit of a bicycle yard sale today and tomorrow in Somerville. The featured items are definitely the ones pictured here — the Superfly Singlespeed and the Sawyer. The Superfly is new, out of the box. It's a 19". The Sawyer is also a 19" but it is lightly used. The thing can be run single, geared, even belt drive. I'm asking $1500 for the Superfly and $550 for the Sawyer. The Sawyer comes with a headset and carbon seatpost. The Superfly comes as pictured.

I'll be posting more stuff as the day progresses, but not here. Check out all the ACTION on Facebook and Twitter.

G Spot Ride With Gerry And Crew

2011-06-14T14:22:00.002-04:00

(Vimeo version at bottom of post)

My internetting time is meager these days, so I'll have to make this quick and typo-ridden.

It was my birthday the other day, I think I turned 26...but I'm not really sure. Not too good with numbers. I hid my birthday info on Facebook because, as I see it, there is nothing more meaningless than a Facebook birthday wish. I went to dinner with the family at Washington Square Tavern. The owner, Gerry Finnegan is a small, very solid planetoid around which fun gravitates. The moons that orbit around this planetoid, which I will call "Gerranus," are named "Beer" and "Bikes." During our dinner, Gerry tried to convince me to go ride a trail called "G-Spot," up in the north shore of Massachusetts (ya, we got a north shore too). I told him I only had my Niner One 9, and that it wasn't the appropriate bike for those trails. "I'll get ya a bike!" he said. And five minutes of texting later, he had. "I got ya a Santa Cruz Nomad, yer gonna love it!"

But late Saturday night I realized that I had no way to get there other than getting up butt-ass early and getting on a train to Beverly, then riding ten miles from the train to the trailhead...on a single speed with trail gearing. I used to ride 100 milers. Now I'm just a fat, lazy, fuck. I started texting with Gerry..."I'll get ya ride!" he texted. And he did. His buddy Rob showed up at my door the next morning at 9AM in this...

While Rob was driving me to G-Spot, Gerry was driving back from Ashland with "my" bike. The crazy bastard had gotten up before anyone in our group to go get the bike from Johhny "Cougs." I had thought about bailing on this ride...that would have been a bad idea. Gerry had gone all out to make sure I got there and that I had...

The right equipment for the job.

Francois was there. He is a bad man on the bike. Apparently he's a bad man behind the wheel too. Or horribly inept.

After the ride we were debating where to go for a beer. It was a tight race between Hooters and Charlie's Kitchen beer garden in Harvard Square. Charlie's won out. Not exactly near Manchester By The Sea (If it were they'd have to change the name of the town to "Manchester By The Charlie's Beer Garden") but a great place to be on a Sunday afternoon. Gerry's wife showed up with their dog Bruno, an English Bull Dog puppy. Basically the canine equivalent of Gerry. Bruno is very popular with the ladies...

So much so that Gerry's considering starting a puppy rental service for single men.

Watch out, hatchet chop segue!

I've been leading some rides for NEMBA out at Burlington Landlocked Forest. I'm doing one this Thursday, and there's a possibility that I will be riding out there, hitting stuff along the way. Like telephone poles. No silly, more like hidden singletrack. Details to follow. Or not.

Should have a video from the last ride up soon. Heh...

I'm also leading a Bike Friday ride this Friday at 6:30 AM from the Ride Studio Cafe to City Hall.

I have no idea why I have no time to blog. No idea.

Thanks for checking in to see if I'm still alive, we'll talk soon.

G Spot Ride With Gerry And Crew from thom parsons on Vimeo.

Why I'm Not Here

2011-05-25T20:38:00.001-04:00

I'm over HERE. Ah, not really even. I'm mostly out in the world and not at my computer. Of course you can always find me on the Twitters.

The New Ride: Niner One 9 "Green Machine"

2011-05-17T05:30:00.001-04:00

I'm suffering from a bad case of black lung from the Boston Bike Mines, but I wanted to share this: I got a new bike from JRA Cycles. And apparently posting photos of your new bike on the Facebooks is about as exciting as posting pictures of your new kid. The outpouring of enthusiasm was as staggering as...me, after three Irish Car Bombs at The Cellar.

There is no need for me to play the naming game, like some guy who I shall only refer to as George Wisell. My friend Erich busted out "Green Machine" immediately, and it stuck. What better name for a bike ridden by a douche bag who writes a blog named after a Kyuss song?

More on this later. Probably not sooner.

Rainbow/Unicorn Bikes And Kool-Aid Pickles

2011-05-13T23:55:00.001-04:00

Today's post will be short on words, but with photos of a bike like this, who needs words?

"It is like looking into the face of God and seeing Him smiling back and saying, "You are my most wondrous creation."

Next to this thing, Vanilla Cycles' bikes look like crap.

Seriously. This bike has more style in its banana seat than Sacha White has in his whole body.

Right now it's hanging above my workbench so I can bask in its scrumtrelescent glow all day, but I would gladly trade it for a headset press and a headset cup remover for the Roll It Forward shop. That is true.

No free association fest regarding rainbows, unicorns, and bikes would be complete without the inclusion of Spooky Bikes' amazing jersey.

Nor would it be complete without the embedding of the critically acclaimed Candy Mountain video. Candy Mountain does to Broke Back Mountain what the Unicorn/Rainbow Murray does to Vanilla Cycles, i.e.: makes it look like a piece of total crap created by a crack baby.

Fun fact: The video is based on the life of George Wisell.

And this is somewhat related.

It's a Fernet Branca bike. And speaking of alcohol companies putting their logo on bikes...ever notice how high end car companies like to slap their names on horrible, cheap bicycles? How come a bicycle manufacturer never commissions a maker of horrible, cheap cars to make a car for them? What, you wouldn't buy a Chevy Aveo with a Colnago logo on it? What about a Pontiac Aztek with a De Rosa logo?

At least this bike has a sweet cup holder...for a giant shot of — weird, black, medicinal, oh god this night is about to go horribly awry — Fernet.

Right, nights gone horrible awry. That is a jar of pickles pickled in fucking Kool-Aid by a madman. Did I try one?

We were drinking miniature High Life ponies out of giant buckets, what do you think?

If Hieronymus Bosch ate some bad shellfish, he might have a nightmare about something worse than this, but I can't think of anything nearly as abhorrent at the moment.

Time is short and I'm out a feeble segues. But hey! That's Big D Robb, the new manager of the Putney West Hill Shop up in VT. You might recognize him from other photos in this post...ones with buckets in them. He's moved all the way out from S.F. to take over up there, so stop by and say hi why don't ya? I also hear he's looking for a super-good wrench, so if you know anyone...aye.

And for all the few Big Bikes readers who aren't from Romania, there's a trail building day at Burlington Landlocked Forest this Saturday. If you haven't ridden the BLL, you should check it out, it's some of the best stuff around. And we're gonna make about a mile more of it, hopefully with your help.

Oh, and this is going on this Sunday:

I won't be able to go because I'll be picking through a container over at Bikes Not Bombs, looking for more donation bikes for Roll It Forward, but if I weren't, I would almost definitely be watching the crazy, downhill sickness. If you go, watch some sickness for me and then come over to my house and cough on my face so I can catch some sickness too. It won't be any weirder than that time I ate a Kool-Aid pickle.

New England Bicycle Expo The Final Chapter: Igleheart vs. Geekhouse vs. Budd Bike Works vs. Silky Cycles...In Space

2011-05-11T05:00:00.005-04:00

This is the third and final installment in the New England Bicycle Expo series here on the Big Bikes. I probably could have nursed it for a couple more days, but I have a feeling that more stuff is going to come pouring in....more really awesome stuff. It might be that it's just a feeling.

The big dog heavy hitter at NEBEs was Christopher Igleheart. He loves it when I call him that...big dog heavy hitter. His flagship at the show was a big ass randonee bike for a guy who's riding Paris Brest Paris. Or, as I say,

Paree Brest Par-iss. I only have the patience to pronounce Paris correctly once in a sentence.

Big guy on a big bike is still no match for fat guy in a little coat.

Although big guy does have a big button on his stem that operates a headlight which runs off a generator hub.

Chris machined out the King headset top cap perfectly to accommodate this one-off-brilliant-weirdness. I want a button like that, but I want it to operate a death laser. Commuting into the city is bringing my inner bike messenger back out. I took my hands off the bars and held my arms out to a group of jaywalkers doing their lemming-like death march into an intersection this morning and bellowed "WHO WANTS A HUG?" No one did. Jerks.

Geekhouse was in the...house with their new team-edition mountain bike. Word is that Marty is going back to mountain bike racing this summer. He's even talking about buying an old Intense...I think it's an M-1 and racing downhill again. He has to be careful though. The man is so influential, he might cause an avalanche of hipsters to follow him down the mountain on their brakeless fixed-freestyle bikes. He would be responsible for more deaths than the sick fuck who invented lawn darts.

Geekhouse always has something slick to show off.

And then.

Snikt!

Brad and Greg from Geekhouse scrutinize the work of Matt Budd.

Greg explores the many positions of the Budd Bolt Bar.

The man on the right is either about to sneeze or he is saying "Aw fuck yeah dude!" I'd lean toward the latter.

Like Niall from NFG Cycles, Matt Budd rode to the show with all his stuff. But unlike Niall, he rode only from Medford, not 100 miles from Easthampton. Of course he did actually bring some bikes in his massive Gentle Giant trailer.

Karl Lee blew my god damn mind with his god damn Silky Cycles minimalist wooden fenders. I know Karl through my friend Dan. I knew that Karl worked with wood, I knew he messed around with metal in his basement, I even knew he could swing a pair of nunchucks after a few High Lifes better than most, but I didn't know that he made wooden fenders worthy of NAHBs-type-bikes (or that he spelled his name with a K).

Wintah Hill Pumptrack from thom parsons on Vimeo.

I also knew him as the guy who rips the world's smallest pumptrack in Winter Hill like no other man.

His stuff looks good. How good is it really? Well shit...it's good enough for Drew from Engin to use it.

One really impressive aspect of Karl's work is the attention paid to the brackets and mounts.

Check it.

Seriously dyude.

You can mount the fuckers right to your axle on any bike.

Did I already use the Wolverine deploying his claws sound effect today? Crap. I got nothin'.

Remember when I said "I have a feeling that more stuff is going to come pouring in....more really awesome stuff," but "it might be that it's just a feeling." Well, there's a pretty good chance that it could be...

New England Bicycle Expo Part Two: Royal H., Icarus Frames, Folk Engineered, And Honey Badger

2011-05-10T05:30:00.005-04:00

Ever heard of Folk Engineered Custom Handmade Bicycles? Well screw you know it all, I hadn't. That is until I attended the New England Bicycle Expo. While most frame builders came to the expo from across the street, the kids from Folk Engineered came all the way from

Newark, New Jersey. They didn't ride all the way there like some crazy-broken-car-havin' bastards...but still.

If Calfee built this frame it would be lugged with real leather and the tubes would be made out of real Smurfs.

And speaking of stuff that's made out of weird...uh, stuff.

LiveProud was at the expo showing off their wicked-freakin-green wares. They had some garments made out of bamboo. Sounds like a great idea...until you forget what you're wearing and walk into a god damn giant panda exhibit and get your legs eaten off. The world has gone insane and, as I mentioned yesterday, animals are attacking humans with zero provocation right in my neighborhood:

Man nearly blinded by hawk attack: MyFoxBOSTON.com

This is no time to be walking around wearing clothing made out of animal food.

Of course Honey Badger needs no excuse to attack you. Honey Badger don't give a shit...look at this crazy fuck. (Thanks GW.)

Another one from Folk Engineered.

This is the reaction people generally have upon seeing an Icarus Frames frame for the first time: "Oh...my...god."

Ian makes Icarus Frames, he's around them all the time so his reaction is more like: "Oh...my...I think I'll eat this burrito."

The other half of the Somerville bike building Wonder Twins was in the house as well. Bryan from Royal H. was sharing center stage with Ian and his burrito. I didn't really get to look at their stuff because I was too busy answering questions about the Boston Bike Share program with total gibberish and outright lies.

I still have a few more things to get to regarding the New England Handmade Bicycle And Hat And Fender show, but again...it will have to wait for another day.

New England Bicycle Expo Part One: Belle Helmets, NFG Cycles, and 2nd Suit

2011-05-09T05:00:00.004-04:00

The New England Bicycle Expo went down this past Saturday at The Armory in Somerville, Mass. I was there tabling for Roll It Forward...and every other program and initiative of Boston Bikes. It looked like something like this:

My coworker Mo Mo and I sat there and mostly answered questions about Boston's upcoming Bike Share program. I have no idea what I said to people, because I don't actually know anything about the Bike Share, and what I do know I gleaned from this article on Boston.com halfway through the day.

At one point, my ex coworker Jose came up and told Mo Mo that she looked like "That actress, you know..." She finished his sentence "Lucy Liu? Never heard that one before." Then I said to him "Hey Jose, you know who you look like?" "Who, killah?" he asked. "Luis Guzman."

"You know what you're doing kid?"

(That will be very funny to about six people who probably don't read this blog.)

Danielle Baskin from Belle Helmets (that's right "Belle" not "Bell") was there with her freaking gorgeous hand-painted helmets.

A little event-specific model.

A phrenology chart model. (That stuff really works y'know?).

And the rest were from her tarot card collection.

If I had had a hundred-ish bucks on me and I wore BMX helmets, I totally would have bought this. Hindsight being 20/20, I should have mugged someone, bought it, and then hung it on my wall.

I don't know about wearing headwear that looks like food. I mean, dudes are getting their heads attacked by animals in my neighborhood, and they don't even have heads that resemble food.

Matt from 2nd Suit was showing off his handmade from thrift store materials cycling caps. Look for him at the North American Handmade Bicycle...Hat Show or NAHBHS. I actually bought one of these hats, it's sick. I kept my own cap on throughout the day, but the second I got outside I threw my 2nd Suit cap on so I could look wicked, wicked cool while having beers with Christopher Igleheart at Flatbread in Davis Sq. And wouldn't you know, who comes walking in? Matt Reineck himself, the maker of these fine cycling caps. "Nice hat" he said. Fucking busted.

Niall from NFG Cycles (stands for Niall Francis Gengler) rode his god damn bike 100 miles from Easthampton, MA for the show. Nutter. His car wouldn't start so he said fuck it and hopped on his bike with a couple panniers full of photos and custom stems.

He's collaborating with a BMW Ironworks to do cool stuff. Stuff like this:

That's a sweet bridge.

Niall also creates stems with an integrated brake cable stop. I have stood witness to the drilling of super-lightweight stems that no one has any business drilling to accommodate cyclocrossing types who insist on having their stems slammed, leaving no room for a stop below. This is way less terrifying.

Terrifying. That is what my day is going to be like tomorrow if I don't cut this short and go to sleep instead of yammering on about Christopher Igleheart's custom headset-cap-button for a hub generator on a crazy randonee bike or the brilliantly innovative wooden fenders I saw. That, will have to wait for tomorrow or the next day or the next day.

In the meantime you can watch this horribly offensive Mother's Day video (it's still Mother's Day while I'm writing this dammit) brought to you courtesy of Squirtgun Show. I am Thom Parsons and I did not approve this message...Squirtgun Show did. I am merely a very amused messenger.

Friday Fizzle Out

2011-05-06T08:22:00.001-04:00

It's Friday morning, I'm up an hour before I should be, and I'm sitting here drinking a coffee I probably shouldn't be. It has soy milk in it and it's been sitting out since 8:30 AM...yesterday. But I microwaved it, so that'll kill any bacteria or mold, or whatever stuff that was in it that could have killed me or given me explosive diarrhea. I figure insomnia is nature's way of telling me I should go blog about something. Of course what I should really be doing is working on SECRET PROJECT #2 for CycloWhat?

but that would take time, creativity, and actual brain power, things I have a dearth of right now.

Geek out...

Thanks to fucking Vampire Weekend, every time I use an Oxford comma, I think of this song:

I never had watched the video though. Kind of nice in a Wes Anderson sorta way.

Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma Vampire Weekend? I do, that's who. I give a fuck.

Dicks.

If I Tweeted something like that on my Twitters, without fail, one of my 20-something "tweeps" would reprimand me for mentioning a band or album that came out over three years ago. I've said it before (I think) and I'll say it again: art and music have no expiration date. If you're not retarded or from Bolivia, you'll get that by the time you're thirty.

Bolivia? I was going to use the name of some U.S. state where no one looks at the Big Bikes blog, but, for the first time ever, I checked out the map overlay of the site traffic and every state was represented. I was going to rag on North Dakota or Louisiana because I assumed they wouldn't be listening, but no...had to take it to Bolivia. Apparently people in Bolivia are too busy riding llamas through their cocaine fields to stop and smell the Big Bikes.

Those are my only two stereotypes about Bolivia — coke and llamas. And half of what I know about Bolivia is based on Wu-Tang Clan lyrics.

Wu-Tang Lego: Da Mystery of Chessboxin' from davo on Vimeo.

Raw I'm gonna give it to you, with no trivia

Raw like cocaine straight from Bolivia

You can learn a lot from The Wu.

One last point on the played out music thing...it's gonna be really funny in ten years when a bunch of twenty-somethings are listening to bands like Vampire Weekend as part of some demented retro movement, causing the now-twenty-somethings (who will then be thirty-somethings) to pull their hair out and scream and kick shih-tzus into wood-chippers.

I am already out of time, but I will risk running late to tell you guys firstly about what I did last weekend and secondly, about what I'm doing this weekend.

Last Saturday I lead a ride at the NEMBA Fells opening day kick off. Rachel and...I have no idea how to spell his name because I can barely pronounce it...Mozee? It's French. He used to come out on my NEMBA rides down in the (Cutler) Park.

MTB Tom was out on his Igleheart with the new Igle logo.

Brian from JRA Cycles was there spending a rare Saturday off his feet.

I forget this guy's name but he was shreddin' on our ride.

The guys from Cycleloft were cooking up brats and sausages. Fearing that I would come back from ride and find them all packed up, I chose to eat a brat twenty minutes before my ride. And yes I just posted a picture of me wearing a new kit astride a little-wheeled big-squishing bike. We'll get back to that next week...talk amongst yourselves.

The bike is a Rocky Mountiain Slayer. It's not mine, it was a demo, but it was sweet. A bike like that makes mountain biking more like snowboarding. It tells you to do stupid shit. It's rad. Holy crap...I just realized that Rocky Mountain has rights to the domain name: "www.bikes.com." That is incredible.

The top cap on the Slayer. Don't really know what's going on there.

But I do know what's going on this weekend in Somerville...

I'll be there Saturday AM tabling for Roll It Forward. At 1:30 I'll be heading out on a tour of local frame builders. If it's not raining.

And, if it's not raining, there may be a little post-builder tour, um...this:

The insomnia's back and so am I.

The Dog Shit on My Homework: A POO Story (Re-Published)

2011-05-05T06:30:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I lamented, on the Twittter, that there is too much of talk of cyclocross (in fucking May) and way too little talk of poop on my Twitter feed. It got me thinkin'...when I run into Big Bikes readers out in the real world, they tell me "Ya, your blog pretty much sucked before the Kimbo Slice post, and it has definitely sucked every day since the Kimbo Slice post. I keep coming back in hopes that you'll maybe, just maybe, do something close to that good, but all I am met with is disappointment." Which is awkward. Then they tell me that, next to the Kimbo post, "The Dog Shit On My Homework: A Poo Story," a tale of how I fell in dog poop on my way to class, is the best thing they've seen on the Big Bikes blog here. Yet somehow it does not show up in the top ten most-viewed posts list over on the sidebar there, and that stupid post called "Straight Outta Brompton" does (I'm not even gonna link to it because the post already gets more traffic than it should just because of the fact that it has made the top ten list.)

I have re-published "The Dog Shit On My Homework: A Poo Story" below in hopes that it will rise up the ranks of best viewed Big Bikes post and grace the top ten list on the sidebar. Being on that list is like being born rich — chances are you're gonna stay that way.

So here it is BAM!

The Dog Shit on My Homework: A POO Story

Most people have had that dream where they find themselves at school, wearing nothing but their underwear. Now have they had that dream because someone said to them at some point: "it's like that dream, y'know the one where you're at school in your underwear" ? Maybe no one had ever had that specific anxiety dream but one day some wise ass decided it would be funny to sort of plant it. Up until then anxiety dreams may have contained an entirely different metaphor.

Well I have a new anxiety dream to plant: finding yourself at school — covered in shit.

I hopped on my bike this morning to ride the hour up to school, rolling up the totally sick Minuteman Bikepath on my Cross bike. It's plowed through Lexington, after that things can get dicey (emphasis on the "icey" without the E). The plan was to peel off in Lexington center and head up Page Hill Rd. to school. But I ran into another rider coming the opposite way, "ahoy there matey! Is she clear to Bed-ferd?" (That's what I said, because that's how I talk in real life). "Ya, it's in great shape," he replied. "Aye, so ye arrr-en't goona play the talkin' like a pirate game arrr-e ye? Screw you then." And I pedaled away.

And the path was clear, at least was until I hit the Bedford line, then it went all to hell. I cursed the man who wouldn't play the talk a like a pirate game. He was no fun and he was a liar.

Inevitably I went down. Wicked hard. But I picked myself up, got back on my bike, and kept on riding. I stopped to take a photo of the ice, and that's when I saw it — poop on my handlebar. I grabbed some snow and wiped off the bar. Then I noticed my glove, it had poo on it too. I wiped my gloves off with snow as well. But the smell of poo remained. I felt like lady Macbeth, (mostly because I'd completely spaced it and had left the house still wearing my ruff). Then I noticed more poop on my ipod headphone cord, my eyes followed the trail of poop down to my hip, and to my horror, this is what I saw:

F— My Life

What the hell to do? I had tacked a 15 minute "eating breakfast buffer" to my commute time, but there I was, disrobing on the side of the path (it was 100% uninhabited) trying to get all this dog poop off my clothes. I was going to be late for sure. And when I got there I was going to smell like shit. Not the best way to show up to the first day of class, "Hi, I'm Thom, you already think I'm weird because I'm twice your age and I'm wearing a skin-tight-biking-faggot-suit. Oh, did I mention that I like to roll in shit on the way to school? It's better than coffee, it really gets me all jazzed up! Why are you looking at me like that? Is it because it's not cool to say 'jazzed up!' anymore?"

Luckily (I can't believe I'm using that word in a story that involves me slipping on ice and falling in shit) I had decided to do something kind of weird this morning. I knew it was going to jump from the low thirties to over 40° by the time I had to ride home. I wanted to have the most versatile outfit possible, so I had donned two sets of shorts and leg warmers. Normal. Hey, the two chamois pads stacked up like that...great way to ease your backside into the base miles.

Double Shorts

I took off my second, outer shorts and stashed them behind a cylindrical concrete thing (pictured above at the top there) so I could pick them up later. I thought about what someone might think if they happened upon the shit-covered shorts. Would they think that a cyclist had crapped his pants then ridden home naked from the waist down? I hoped so.

It seemed like I had done a fairly good job of eliminating all shit-covered materials. There was no visible poop on my person, so I spun the rest of the way up to school. Somehow I wasn't all that late, walking into an almost full classroom. I bee-lined it for a desk in the far, front corner, as far away from the rest of the students as possible. Just as I had settled in, a big waft of poo-smell hit me. Oh god. I subtly checked to see if there was any poo on my Craft outer layer, deciding to take it off and chuck it in the corner with my vest, gloves, and helmet just in case. But still — poo smell. I watched the kid next to me for any kind of reaction, a telltale sign of acknowledgment, like the pulling up of his shirt over his mouth and nose...he appeared oblivious.

Still it was difficult to concentrate on anything but the fact that I was sitting in a packed classroom, reeking of dog shit. Whether the kid next to me noticed or not didn't matter, I was convinced that I was destined to become "that kid," you know, the one who comes to school smelling like pee or ham sandwiches.

"Thom P?...more like Thom Poo."

Fool Of Chains/Buy My Trek Fisher Collection Sawyer

2011-05-04T04:26:00.004-04:00

It's late and that crappy title was all I could come up with. Well, the "Fool Of Chains" part...that part's stupid and, as you'll see, wicked literal. The insomnia's back I figured I'd get out of bed, drink some herbal sleepy tea or some shit, watch some Lost and babble at you guys for a bit. Lost has uh...lost me. Once the show went into flash forward instead of backward mode things just got too depressing. I like real magic and lack of metaphor. You know that movie The Quest, starring the kid from E.T., where it turns out that the dinosaur in the rock quarry is really a steam shovel or something? I HATED that shit. It was the worst. All I know is that, if I get to the end of the series and realize that the final two seasons were as worthless as valve caps, I am gonna be pissed. I mean, if I'd known that the first two seasons of The Sopranos were the only ones worth watching, I could have added days to my life. But that's not important right now and I doubt it ever will be.

Of course, if level of importance determined what got printed on Big Bikes well...

So ya, wreckin' shit, that's what we're gonna talk about today.

On the way home from the Bike Mines, I ripped my pants. I didn't just rip them, I tore them from just behind the knee up to my butt...and then I took this photo, which illustrates none of that. I didn't rip them myself either, the Schwinn Varsity tore them for me...because it was pissed. It was payback for what I'd done to it. You see, I actually performed service on the thing, it doesn't like that. Since I received the bike from the Todd Downs collection, I don't know...six years ago, I have done nothing but fix three flats. Todd warned me that I was playing with fire because I'd gone ahead and used presta instead of schrader tubes. Incredibly, all three of those flats occurred on my porch overnight. Never have I been left stranded by this bike. But I couldn't leave well enough alone could I? I had to go and repack the hubs and replace the chain and install new tires without huge gashes in the sidewalls with bits of tube sticking out. Hey, at least I didn't replace the two missing spokes in the rear wheel. Give me some credit here.

So riding home tonight, the Varsity bit me...with its seatbinder bolt. Repeatedly. This has never happened before. It was some Siegfried and Roy shit. We'll see if I so much as lube the chain any time in the next six years.

Which leads me to my next tale of poor bicycle maintenance biting me in the ass. (See, very literal on lack of sleep. This is not good.)

After NEMBA's Fells opening day kick off party on Saturday, I was all amped up to ride, so I headed out for a little rip on the Sawyer (which is for sale) Sunday AM. I took a flyer at a steep little bastard of an uphill, something I can hardly make on the geared bike, but my gear was low and I was feeling like a fucking ninja. About three quarters of the way up — BLAM! — my chain popped and I went flying. Knee into carbon bar, shoulder into pointy rocks, profanity spewing into warm, spring air. It was ugly.

My knee went pretty cantalouped by the evening, could have been worse. Could have gone watermeloned.

I saw that the chain had broken at the Powerlink, a first for me. No matter what I say, someone out there's gonna say "Oh, that's what you get for running SRAM chains. You shoulda been runnin' a blahhdity blah chain." But y'know what? Someone out there's broken a blahhdity blah chain too. Fact is, I've never broken a SRAM chain until now. And I don't blame SRAM one bit, I blame...Osama Bin Laden...I mean me, I blame me. Since I haven't been racing all that much (at all) I have not been keeping my equipment up like I used to. I'm generally supah-fastidious about replacing my chains, I do it at least once a month whether I need to or not. Between that practice and my mojo, I've had good luck with chains.

My mojo, that was the other issue.

For as long as I can remember I've been zip-tieing a few chain links connected with a Powerlink between my saddle rails to ward off chain breaks and to remedy one should it occur. These links have come in handy for fixing other people's mechanicals, but never my own. Saturday morning I was working on a bike for a BBMBR client and it turned out he had a stiff link in his chain. I couldn't find a Powerlink anywhere in my shop, so I clipped the one off my saddle rails and was done with it. That's another issue — I'd been reusing Powerlinks for a while, the one that broke was probably ancient. Wicked smaaht.

The chain break sucked, but what sucked worse was that, without the links, I was screwed. This being a first, I was unprepared — I had no 8mm wrench to undo the set screws on the dropout. (I'm so glad my new bike will have an eccentric BB.) The sliding dropout was far enough back that I might have had a chance to throw the chain back together with the existing links and then slide the dropout forward, but with the set screw inhibiting that process, like I said...screwed.

Ah, not that screwed. I scooted my bike downhill to Medford Square, got a strawberry frappe at Colleen's and awaited rescue.

Did I mention I'm selling my Sawyer? I think I did, but I definitely didn't mention that I'm selling my Superfly Singlespeed frame. It's new and it's a 19" and yes, the price is actually negotiable.

There about three days in late April when Somerville and Medford don't look like total crap.

No, There Are Limits

2011-05-03T10:42:00.004-04:00

The sad truth of the matter is...the more I have going on, the less I write. I have done much of my finest literary work when there has been absolutely nothing going on in my life. And now here I am with so much to show and tell and what do you get? Radio silence. So I'm going to do the lay down a bunch of photos and then talk about them thing here, it will get us

part way caught up at least.

The Roll It Forward Boston Bicycle Mines are starting to look more like a bike shop every day. Our cage is a constant source of fascination for other people in the building — "So what...youz guyz sell the bikes or what?"

One bonus of working in downtown Boston is that I get to eat at places like Chacarero. It's a ridiculously good Chilean sandwich shop that I hadn't really eaten at since I stopped messengering about nine years ago. I used to grab a sandwich (back then it was veggie...had no idea what I was missing) in the AM, before the massive lunch rush that resulted in a line around the block. I would keep the foil-wrapped piece of culinary brilliance in my bag until I got hit with some wait time at a courthouse or something.

Ya it looks weird. But I dare you try it once. You'll be hooked like it was made out of heroin.

A good portion of my job involves driving around in Penske rental trucks, delivering bikes to various locations. I did a donation bike pick up over in Somerville a couple weeks back which provided me with an opportunity to stop at Pini's Pizza in freakin' Magoon Square kid! It's one of the best spots around, North End not excluded. That slice is two bucks and it's basically a quarter pie. I have no idea why my man boobs are growing larger.

The donation bike pick up was at my former place of employment — Ace Wheelworks. There I encountered a man I call "Turkish Matt." His name is really Memet but that name is hard for many Somerville townies and other assorted stupid fucking white men to process. He'll introduce himself as Memet and the customer will often reply "Hi Matt!" And Memet will correct them, "It's Mem-et." "Oh...why that's an unusual name!" "Not in Turkey it isn't." Once a customer asked Memet his name, Memet told him and the man said "My Man...well OK, I'll call you My Man!"

Then there's Didi. He was pissed I didn't bring him any Hennessy...so he gave me a "Rosette," which is the way a Haitian starts a fight — he smashes the area between his thumb and index finger against your trachea. A move that either kills you or severely incapacitates you.

Back when I worked at Ace, in my twenties, I would attack Didi like Cato did Clouseau. I would wind up with bruises in the shape of fingerprints from his vise-grip like hands. Then I started watching MMA and learned about arm bars. I saw 170 lb Royce Gracie submit that fat, 500 lb bastard Akebono with an arm bar.

I was convinced I could finally best DiDi with a surprise arm bar. Everything was going well, he put me down on the ground as usual, but I was ready, I held onto his wrist and scissored my legs over his throat as I levered his arm back over my hip, a perfect arm bar. Thing is...arm bars are a dumb move in a street fight. DiDi was strong enough to lift me off the floor and then slam me so hard that all the wind shot out of me and I let go of my arm bar. I may have lost the fight but I won DiDi's affection — "OH! That's good Tommy...I think you bwake my arm! But then I fucking SLAMS YOU!"

But there's more to Ace than belligerent Haitians and guys named Memet who don't like being called Matt...the place is full of celebrities. Celebrities like local frame builder Matt Budd. Oddly enough, he insists on being called "American Memet."

The streets of Somerville are awesome too. The way the trees overhang the road...so moving van friendly.

And this guy? This is the baddest dude in Revere. There is only one way to look like the ultimate badass while riding in the back of a Geo Prizm with a "Baby On Board" sign in the window — you gotta get "REVERE" tattooed on your arm in big, honkin' gothic letters.

Or you can get a Jack Chop pumpkin carving kit.

I can't really ride my mountain bike with any kind of conviction right now, but this is what I get to see on my ride home at night. Could be shabbier.

CommonWheels Bike Co-Op

2011-04-27T00:13:00.004-04:00

Tonight on the way back from the Roll It Forward bike mines, I stopped by the Commonwheels bike co-op over in Allston to pick up a bike from a BigBikes Mobile Bike Repair client. It was awesome. I got a little turned around on my way in, I was standing in a dark parking lot, calling Chris Ditunno to have her talk me in. Unlike an air traffic controller she was...awake and able to make sense of my garbled coordinates. "Ya, I'm standing in a kind of courtyard next to a...dune buggy with a...deer head on the hood, and I can hear a band." "I can hear a band too" Chris said and two seconds later she walked out the door.

What I found inside was a little oasis filled with people eating pizza and working on bikes.

Chris gave me the run down about all the stuff that was going on in the building and explained the constantly morphing nature of the space. I couldn't come close to keeping it all straight.

I'm prepping Chris' bike for the NEMBA Fells kick off this Saturday. I'll be down there hanging out with the guys from JRA Cycles and leading a beginner ride at 1:30. Maybe sweeping some other rides too, so come down if you want to ride slow and jump over logs.

These are sketches of bikes parts. I'm not sure which ones. They look too edible to be bike parts.

I think this is a motorized bike designed to pierce shields with dollar signs on them.

I hope they'll let me try it out next time I'm there.

You can find Commonwheels on the Facebooks. If you live in the Allston area and you need a place to work on your bike and drink beer, you should check them out.

SingleSpeed-A-Palooza Cyclingdirt Coverage Is Up!

2011-04-25T13:09:00.000-04:00

Watch more video of 2011 Single Speed-A-Palooza on cyclingdirt.org

It took me a while but it is done. This video sort of captures the fun, flow, and fucking magic of Stewart State Forest and the SingleSpeed-A-Palooza course.
You'll have to sit through the end credits of the highlight vid if you want to witness perhaps the best karaoke version of ABBA's "Dancing Queen" ever performed.

The rest of the vids, including one of a not-so-magnificent karaoke version of Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child O mine are RIGHT FREAKIN HERE DUDE.

Putting The 'Looza' In Single Speed-A-Palooza 2011

2011-04-18T12:11:00.006-04:00

When people say they have not been riding their bikes, they are generally full of shit, like Mark "The Shark" McCormack. Back when he was our Shimano rep at IBC, he would come in at some point in the early spring and go on about how he'd only been riding a half hour a day on the trainer and that he was totally out of shape. Then he'd go out that weekend and win Charge Pond or be ripping legs off at Marblehead. He was executing a calculated misinformation campaign in order to catch his rivals off guard. The Shark is a smart man and an immensely successful bicycle racer; I am a stupid man who has stumbled into a good result here and there along the way. I don't have the capacity to pull off calculated misinformation campaigns.The night before Single Speed-A-Palooza, I was telling my drinking mates (Kerry Combs, Matt Myette, Ronnie Steers, and Matt Aumiller) at Irish Eyes that I really hadn't been riding and how I've basically devolved into some kind of

mutant that is entirely incompatible with a bicycle. They laughed and dismissed my claims of devolution into mutanthood, but, about ten seconds into the race on Sunday, Matt Myette became a believer. He expressed his shock and awe at my incredible slowness as he passed me while we were all rolling along on a flat section of pavement. Matt, it was not an act. No Ali rope-a-dope then go for the knock out during the Rumble in The Jungle tactics going on here.

Ah yes, the Irish Eyes. We were five skinny bike racers looking for IPAs in a place where one might get called a faggot for ordering a Smithwick's, sitting with our backs to a bunch of pissed drunk, gigantic firemen telling tales of being dragged out of barroom brawls by the police.

Hey, say what you will about the clientele and the beer selection at Irish Eyes, the food at this place is really...

fucking horrible.

When I took a bite of this sandwich it bit me back. Now I need a tetanus shot. Huh, never noticed until this moment that you can't spell "tetanus" without "anus."

Oh, and remember not to confuse tetanus the medical condition with the extremely offensive French insult "tête anus," which translates literally to "asshole head."

I feel like we've all learned something here today.

Given the potentially ugly scene at Irish Eyes, George W. Bike 29 and Dough had no trouble convincing us to go over and party at the Comfort Inn. On any other night, that might have seemed insane.

And apropos of seemingly insane things...

I never did get a chance to follow through on my threat of only shaving the area between my shorts and my huge-freakin' Swiftwick Endless Bike socks. The Sharpie-drawn cut lines are still there, it will be done.

My training for SSAP was solid — I spent two days moving bikes around for Roll It Forward. Friday we received 50 brand new boxed bikes from Giant Bicycles. They were kids bikes too.

We work in a building where use of the two freight elevators is already a contentious issue, and it happened that on the day these bikes arrived one of the elevators was down. When the guys on the upper floors call the elevator and it doesn't come, on a day when both lifts are working, they wait patiently...while leaning on the buzzer. The truck driver took fifteen minutes moving the bikes to the lift with his hydraulic dolly. That only got them on there, I still had to get them off the lift in the basement. It would take me half an hour...with the buzzer going the whole time.

All I had to move the bikes from the lift to our work space with was a rickety dolly. It's an awkward little thing to move around, but my dormant skateboarding skills came in handy, making the return to trip to the lift go a lot faster.

After my own, personal strong man competition for total weaklings I was feeling good — like I'd spent two days wrestling 'roided out orangutans. The fact that it was pissing rain all night before Single Speed-A-Palloza had me feeling...not good. I'm not a bike racer right now, I'm barely a bike rider. The prospect of getting up to ride in the 50° rain was about as appealing as sitting on a hornets' nest while watching a Rachel Ray marathon.

Dejay Birtch rolled into town from Tucson just for SSAP. That's how good it is.

But it cleared up by morning, the only reminder of the previous evening's deluge were the huge puddles of standing water and the lava-flow-like mud slides coming down a few of the hills. There was some discussion of peeing in your/my pants during races at the Comfort Inn on Saturday night. With the amount of mud getting thrown around at this race, one could have shit his pants and no one would have noticed (until you got close enough to smell him and then you would have been like "Oh dude! You shit your pants, that is fucked up!").

Mike Montalbano won SSAP for the third time, and he doesn't even ride a single speed anymore. But Stewart Forest is his playground and if there's a fight in his playground, he is gonna win it. Look at his face, the dude is mean... he took me out with a straight right seconds after I took this photo.

I rode Shredward Van Halen, George's Niner Jet 9 single speed. George is probably three or four inches taller than I am, but somehow his bikes fit me better than my own. Maybe I'm much taller than I think I am; my wife does tell me I have body image issues. Shreddie was dope! I couldn't pedal to save my life but I "shredwarded" the downhills, jibbing and bonking my way around the course. I spent a good amount of time riding with women's winner Rebecca Tomaszewski. She had enough stokedness to go around for everybody‚ she was hooting and hollering her way around the course, cheering everybody on. I think I'm a positive person on the race course, but she made me look like a total dick.

The Yess tensioner worked wicked good, no problems there. I guess fixing a flat is a pain in the tet-anus, but luckily I didn't have to deal with that. Keeping the tires at George "The Manimal" Wissel pressure didn't hurt.

In my frazzled state after the race...the hardest 25 miles I have ever ridden, I was not prepared to be confronted with confusing signs in Dunkin Donuts bathrooms. Wash your hands "after using the restroom" AND "after touching body parts." Because the latter wasn't covered under the heading of the former. This implies that Dunkin Donuts employees are prone to sticking their hands in their pits or scratching their nuts or other forms of genitalia while in places other than the restroom. It was too much for me to take.

Alright, that's more than it for today...take us out Shreddie:

Gravel Grinder Wrap Up Or The Beast With A Million Photos

2011-04-15T10:38:00.002-04:00

I'm tired. I mean, my fingers and hands hurt too much to write in any kind of vigorous way. I would never use the word "vigorous" in speech, in that context. The blog-o-verse version of me is such a douche. The new job is the ultimate excuse for getting out of blogging...or anything. It's like having a kid or a dog, but it's not...because people only have a small number of kids or dogs; I have hundreds of kids I have to put on bikes. It is literally like I am raising hundreds of children, so all parents and pet owners can pretty much suck it, because I am a better, cooler, harder working person than all of you motherfuckers put together. Even if you had mutant powers and Nobel Peace Prizes, you still wouldn't have shit on me.

See, what did I tell you? Blog-o-verse me...such a douche.

I Rolled It Forward today, I rolled it backward today, I rolled it every which way, and now I am just going to lay down some photos, lots of photos, and talk about them.

Sometimes I start talking about something to someone and find myself getting the blank, "I have no idea what the fuck you are talking about" stare. I realize that I have not filled in the Five Ws and The H. I just assume everyone reads Big Bikes, so I don't have to waste my time putting stuff in context. But, as my grandmother often reminds me: "T-Homas (that's what I get called when I'm in trouble) not everyone in the world reads your stupid fucking blog, you dipshit." Hey, she's 88-years-old and she can basically do and say whatever the hell she wants. These days when she belittles my only joy in life and calls me a dipshit, I don't take a swing.

My point...my point...ah yes, these are all photos from the Gravel Grinder, if you don't know what that is, here you go!

(Note: I wrote the first part of this post at night and now I'm sitting here in the AM, with coffee, going "Should I really keep that stuff? I sound like a dick." Eh, it works for Chandler.)

I forget what this guy's name is, but he killed the Gravel Grinder not-race on this cargo carrying rig. Two things about him: 1.) He was supposed to be running tech support, sort of like a follow car, but he was too freakin' fast, so he dropped most of the people in the race. 2.) He lets people surf on the back of the thing. Which is up there on the same level of sketchiness with a similar form of cargo surfing:

TCB BULLITT CARGO SURFING from Storts on Vimeo.

This is great, I have eight thousand photos to talk about and now I'm throwing videos in as well. This could take all day.

"How did this come out of my body? There's pieces...there're banana pieces...OK I know I chewed it."

Oh, what's that? You don't get the reference? Guess I have to embed another video:

4:12 in, it will all be explained. Although about 2:30 in is really the best part. "I'm inventing electricity and you look like an asshole...you look like a fucking idiot." And by the way, yesterday I was having issues finding Youtube's embed button. That's because they hid under the "share" button. Dicks.

Living on the east coast, we rarely see Soulcraft bikes. If we lived on the west coast, we'd all go on road trips with Soulcraft Sean all the time. It would be awesome. We should all move to the west coast.

Rockin' the shit at the whiskey aid station.

George W. Bike 29's addition to his Niner Air 9 Carbon.

Pete-tare Kee-lair's (that's how he pronounces his name with his French-Canadian accent) take on the Niner motto. As seen on Dicky's bike.

Seamus, A.K.A. "Shameless." I slept on George's incredibly comfortable couch. I would be woken up during the night by Shameless' face licking. It would become incorporated into horrible nightmares that I will never forget.

George's friend Rosey's car. A diesel, patchwork VW with bike racks. This epitomizes Vermont for me.

Yess tensioner. It's what makes the single speed Jet 9 called Shredward Van Halen that I will be riding at Single Speed-A-Palooza work.

At one point during the weekend, I started talking to George's friend Drew (or at least that's what I'm going to call him...not very strong with names) about Black Swan. I told him that Vincent Cassel was in it, "You know, that creepy French dude who looks like Craig Gaulzetti?" He didn't know who Craig Gaulzetti was either, so that didn't help.

This is Craig:

He resembles Vincent Cassel much more in real life and in other photos (that are no longer available since he deleted his Facebook profile for some reason).

George has the Apple TV, so, undaunted, I brought up a Youtube video (above) of Cassel on some awful, low budget web show with some guy called Stephen Holt. This still didn't help Drew, he'd really never seen a Cassel film, even a classic like La Haine.

See, now I'm just adding photos and videos on top of an already massive pile of photos and videos. Guess I'm making up for lost time.

The truly crazy thing is that Drew ducked out to the other room and came back wearing glasses and a fedora, wowing us all with his prop-driven Stephen Holt impression.

Uncanny. Shameless is completely freaked out.

This dude is 13. He rode the Gravel Grinder. Isn't that a good story?

And this guy brought a shot glass to the whiskey station to add some semblance of civility.

I contracted a new name in VT, and so did the cyclist formerly known as Doug. He is now "Dough."

Five Hills Bikes is George's brick and mortar place in Waterbury.

Frida's catered the Grinder. Decent Mexican food in a state full of really, really white people...who knew? If you're in Stowe, check 'em out.

Geekhouse sighting.

George and Shameless.

When I showed up at Five Hills Saturday night I was charged with the task of riding every bike in the store around a circuit. It was all fun and games until I started doing burn outs on a training wheeled 16" bike. George realized that his method of torture would lead to a whole lot of linoleum mopping and pulled the plug on the project.

This photo sums up the weekend for me. That doesn't mean we're done yet. Sit down!

Drew was literally shaking by the second time he got to the aid station. I pushed him back into the not-race like I had just done a wheel change for him at the Tour De France.

Hey! More whiskey.

G-Eunich gets a little massage at the Black Back Pub post-Grinder.

Mustache ride.

This OG Karate Monkey weighs as much as those two Air 9 Carbons...combined. And all of them belong to George.

The rider of this bike swore that this is just a sticker of Bruce Lee, but I beg to differ. I think it's Grace Slick's head (with a short hair cut) stuck onto Bruce's body. Freaky.

Don't you want somebody to nunchuck

Don't you need somebody to nunchuck

Wouldn't you love somebody to nunchuck

You better find somebody to nunchuck

When I left Waterbury on Monday AM at eight, it was as dark as if it were eight at night. It looked like the world was going to end. Which reminds me of the time I started a blog post in the morning and spent so fucking long pasting photos and videos into it that it became nighttime before I finished it.

Now I'm tired and you're bored, let's do it again Monday!

What's My Name And Wookie Bean Bags

2011-04-14T10:21:00.001-04:00

See all those bikes there behind my oddly shaped head? Those are what's inside my head these days as well. I've been working with Roll It Forward and Boston's Youth Cycling Program, which are both initiatives of Mayor Menino's Boston Bikes. I split my time between plowing through the repair of 100s of bikes, ranging in quality from Magnas with rusty, angular chains to classic GTs hooked up with all the sweet upgrades the 90s had to offer. Roll It Forward procures bikes from various places and distributes them to people in need of bicycles through programs like Boston Bicycle School and the Boston Center For Youth And Families.Youth Cycling Program goes to schools and provides kids with bicycle safety training, utilizing a fleet of bikes donated from places like International Bicycle Center, Wheelworks, EMS, and Giant Bicycles. I fix most of the bikes for RIF and manage the fleets for YCP. I get some help from other RIF and YCP employees, and from volunteers, like the ones who are coming down this Saturday from 10-5. Hey, if you want to come down and volunteer, we'd be glad to have the help. You don't even need to know how to work on bikes, I'll teach you. I'm serious here. Contact link on the sidebar. Seriously.

I'll talk more about all that later and give updates as things go on in that realm, but we have much more important things to discuss today.

When I posted the photo at the top of this post on my Facebook profile, I got a comment saying "What's up Little Lord Fauntleroy?" This is what Little Lord Fauntleroy looks like in real life:

While I was flattered by the comparison, I have a ways to go before I truly resemble LLF. But I did think it would be funny to start a new Twitter hash tag, so I actually just tweeted this:

So whenever you see a picture of someone with Little Lord Fauntleroy hair, tag it #LLF. Screw those guys at Live Literature Funding, we are going to co-opt their fucking hash tag. And yes, I deleted that tweet immediately after I took the screen capture. I'm not completely insane.

And speaking of not being completely insane....anyone else notice that Youtube's Embded function is down today? I hope it's not just me. I wanted to embed Upper Crust's video for the song "Little Lord Fauntleroy" but no dice. You'll have to click on the link or the image to get taken to the rock. Sorry.

My "new look" is really just a result of not shaving my head for a couple months, not a conscious effort to attempt a makeover, my new name, however, is the product of a violent hatred fueled re-branding campaign spearhead by the Magnatron Corporation and Bike 29. I arrived in Waterbury, VT last Saturday night and was immediately told that I had a New name...

T-Hom.

The added hyphen renders the silent H not so silent. Unlike the very clever act of pronouncing the silent H in my name, or, even better, pronouncing the H and adding the P from my last name "THOMP!"or even better still, calling me "Tommy," I actually like this new name. I will feel much more at home racing in single speed races, races like Single Speed-A-Palooza or SSUSA against guys with names like Fuzzy and Dejay and Dax.

I'm running out of time fast here, I'll see if I can't squeeze in a couple more things...

A while back I ran a thing about a Chewbacca on a fixed gear T-shirt over on BikeRumor. And while that is cool, because Chewbacca is cool and fixed gears are cool because they are not-not-bikes, and even a lame bike is better than a not-bike, I gotta say, Mike Joos' version is way better:

I want to make a T-shirt with this image that says:

"Hey, Chuck Norris can kiss my hairy fucking bean bag, I'm Chewbacca and I'm riding a fucking bike with fucking Millennium Falcons for fucking wheels."

And you know what would be really funny about that? Chewbacca literally has a hairy fucking bean bag...because he's a wookie. Hairy beanbags beat beards every time. Maybe the shirt should just say that:

"Hairy beanbags beat beards every time."

Maybe I should go Tweet that too. Like my two Twitter followers aren't confused enough this morning.

This crazy Paris Roubaix video has made the rounds, but it is something everyone should see, so I'm doing my part by posting it. The fact that two people dislike the video on Youtube is confusing to me. Why would you dislike this video? Because you hate awesomeness? "Screw you awesome Paris Roubaix video maker guy, I came down to Youtube today to watch total, stupid crap, not awesomeness. Thanks a lot...pff!"

Last night, after the Rolling It Forward, I went over to JRA Cycles for the NEMBA ride leaders meeting. I have offered myself up as a ride leader for Fells and Burlington Landlocked Rides. One thing to know about my rides: they don't end in the parking lot; they end at the pub. If you only make it back to the parking lot, your ass got dropped. Those will be starting in May some time.

And as I trail off incoherently here, one more thing. After yesterday's BikeRumor post about a single earbud that provides stereo sound...or plays both channels anyway (not sure what the difference is), I got a call from Master Of The Cycling Blog Universe Rich "Dicky" Dillen. He told me that he is deaf in one ear and that this magical earbud is going to change his life. He was crying and it didn't sound like he was wearing pants, which made me uncomfortable, but I was touched by his heart felt thank you nonetheless.

It's really the least I could do after I said that he had "homonculean stature" in my write up about his beautiful Canadian bicycle on the BikeRumors.

OK, show of hands, who wants a "Hey, Chuck Norris can kiss my hairy fucking bean bag, I'm Chewbacca and I'm riding a fucking bike with fucking Millennium Falcons for fucking wheels." T-shirt. It would be a great ice breaker at parties. Probably not at children's birthday parties though.

I Went To Vermont And All I Got Was This Stupid New Name

2011-04-12T11:47:00.001-04:00

Saturday afternoon I was feeling a little lost. I haven't talked a lot about it here, but I basically can't ride a bike to save my life right now. Can't train in any kind of serious way anyway. I'm a mess. So I was driving around, doing work-related things (we'll talk about the new work, i.e.: "my good excuse for not blogging" later this week). I was thinking about how the Ronde De Rosey was the next day, and how, if I rode it, I would destroy my knee for the entire season and how that would suck more than the big suck I am experiencing currently. I thought about how the Gravel Grinder charity ride was going down in Waterbury, VT the next day as well, and how I was really sad that I wouldn't be riding bikes and drinking beer up there. But then I got a call from Gravel Grinder organizer George W. Bike29 and he was like "Aah! Come up and drink beer and hang out, you don't need to ride bikes to have fun!" And I said
"Eh, let me think about th—YES!" I scrambled to get ready, left an hour late, but, after 2.5 hours of above and beyond the speed limit driving, I arrived in Waterbury, VT just forty minutes later than originally planned.

When I showed up, the lights from within Five Hills Bikes were like a beacon in the night, beckoning me toward them.

This is just one photo amongst the many photos I took of people drinking whiskey at the Gravel Grinder aid station. Maybe two people out of 150 were bummed that there was no water at the aid station, just three types of fine whiskey.

Wow, it sounded like I was actually going to write a proper post for a second there, PSYCHE! I have to roll away to work, but let's treat this as a preview, a trailer of what's to come. I do have bike-related things to talk about this week, and it looks like I will have further bike-related things to talk about over the coming weeks. Exciting!

That's funny, I didn't even come close to getting to the part of the story where I talk about my new name, my new associates (I don't have sponsors this year, maybe we can talk about that some time too), or anything important really. I will say that I have been informed that I will be riding the Single Speed-A-Polooza race (note the use of the verb "riding" in place of "racing") next Sunday down in New York. I will be riding a single-speeded out Niner Jet 9 from George W's personal fleet, which will provide me with something cool to babble about.

That is, when I hack out a chunk of time to babble.

Barry Roubaix Highlights Video and Very Pro Sports Reporter-Type Write Up

2011-03-29T15:58:00.000-04:00

This is what I spent most of my day doing. Well that, and writing the Barry Roubaix report. If you watch this and read the report it will all make sense. I think.

Watch more video of Barry-Roubaix: The Killer Gravel Road Race on cyclingdirt.org

Barry Roubaix, The Killer Gravel Road Race

2011-03-28T11:48:00.001-04:00

Got too much video to edit and words to write about the Barry Roubaix race to sit here babbling about myself today. Of everything that happened out in Michigan, probably the most exciting thing was getting to ride on the back of a follow moto for the first time. Eh, the fact that it was 17° out...could've maybe done without that, but it was awesome nonetheless. More on that tomorrow or later in the week, for now I've got some of my favorite videos from the weekend. Oh, and pardon the shakiness of the camera; it took six hours for my core temperature to come back up to normal.

Watch more video of Barry-Roubaix: The Killer Gravel Road Race on cyclingdirt.org

What is this Barry Roubaix race? Super-cool promoter Rick Plite schools us.

Watch more video of Barry-Roubaix: The Killer Gravel Road Race on cyclingdirt.org

The race was won by a darkhorse: the incredibly-modest Erik Box of Ontario.

Watch more video of Barry-Roubaix: The Killer Gravel Road Race on cyclingdirt.org

If you've ever wondered how to pronounce Tristan Schouten's name, watch this. Sounds more like "Scoutin'" than "Shoutin'."

Watch more video of Barry-Roubaix: The Killer Gravel Road Race on cyclingdirt.org

And while we're on the subject of oft-mispronounced names: Brian Matter...not pronounced like it looks. It's Motter people. Like Welcome Back Kotter, but with Matter replacing Kotter.

Watch more video of Barry-Roubaix: The Killer Gravel Road Race on cyclingdirt.org

Mike Anderson is 22-years-old, he rides outdoors year round in Michigan's upper peninsula, and he is really laid back for a dude as fast as he is. I think he's gonna go places.

Operation Rescue (The Schwinn Varsity)

2011-03-24T17:34:00.001-04:00

No, I'm not talking about the fundamentalist anti-abortion/anti-gay group now known as Operation Save America, what I'm talking about is an operation to rescue my Schwinn Varsity from Boston City Hall, where I abandoned it on Monday after an incident involving a broken brake cable, some inclement weather, and me being a wuss-bag.

Wait a second, shouldn't Operation Rescue And Save America support gayness? More gay people mean fewer abortions. It is very hard for gay people to get pregnant, and if they do manage to get pregnant, they've usually thought about it first, and they've usually passed through some kind of screening process which has deemed them fit to raise a child. Gay couples don't really have "accidents." But that's beside the point (and the point is trying as hard as possible to appear as though it is not associated in any way with it.) Just remember what Operation American Rescuing Savers Who Save Things say:

"The opposite of homosexuality is not heterosexuality, it is holiness!"

That rant is probably not going to help with the not-getting the death threats.

But, as Results-Rooter (who we will talk more about in a moment) would say:

"Hey Guys, Bikes!"

My plan was to take the T to Government Center, fix the bike, then ride the bike down to the Roll It Forward out on Seaport Blvd. I had all the tools and fixins I needed...or so I thought.

I got to work removing the old cable and housing at ninja-pace.

But it wasn't too long before I hit a snag-fu. Snag-fu? It is either a combination of a snag and a snafu or it is the deadly martial art practiced by Snagglepuss.

"Ki-ya! Even."

And you know what? I am going to go out on a limb and say that Snagglepuss and his partner never had any "accidents." You hear that Operation Save America With The Rescuing? Leave Snagglepuss alone!

Wow, I am good at this. I should really hit up Park Tool and see if they want me to do some how-tos for them.

The snag-fu was that I had neglected to think about the fact that the ferrule had surely flown off the brake housing when the cable snapped. It is not your common ferrule either; it is a huge, old school ferrule that Sheldon Brown alone knew the name of. But, only slightly daunted, I came up with a solution: remove the adjuster barrel from the brake caliper and use that as my upper ferrule. The standard ferrule on the other end of the cable, at the caliper, would be adequate to provide a stop.

While I was doing all this, a few people gathered to watch me like I was a street performer, like some kind of totally inept mime, grunting and sighing through my craptacular act. So I put my helmet out to see if anyone would throw change in it. All I got was a crumpled up Dunkin Donuts wrapper and a half-eaten egg salad sandwich.

The standard ferrule was of a large enough diameter to provide a stop at the caliper. I guarantee that this hack-fix will remain just as it is until my cable snaps and almost causes me to die (again).

When I got back from Roll It Forward or, as we call it "The R.I.F," my work was not done; I still had to work on Colin "I've Got More Money Than Time (And God)" Reuter's sweet fixie commuter. Lucky for me, another BBMBR client, Robert Hale, had furnished me with a liquid tip for installing a Yokozuna cable kit on his Time road bike.

The Yokozuna she is nice. She make-ah the SRAM components, um...work even better!

Column Roofer's philosophy on bicycle maintenance? Ride it into a rusty nub and then replace everything at once. Column Reuter's philosophy on parties in his pants?

Damn, I think I just went from making Calhoun Router like me again, right back to having him want to have me killed. Hey, if he can pay someone to fix his bike, he can also pay someone to kill the person who fixes his bike.

Oh, and hey, I am at the airport right now on my way to cover the Barry-Roubaix somewhere in Michigan for Cyclingdirt. Some other person might have thought that something like that would be worth talking about at more length. But no, I used my time and space here today to talk about hack-bike-fixes, Snagglepuss, and abortion.

Normal.

And now! Some good Bad Religion.

Robocop Vs. Terminator Vs. Paul Revere Vs. Jack Black

2011-03-23T13:00:00.001-04:00

This is going to be a speed blog, so please excuse typos, left out words, and trains of thought that go off the rails, fall into gorges hundreds of feet below, and burst into flames. I've thrown some images up here...I'm going to talk about them, and then I'm going to get the hell out of there and do lots of stuff. Real cool stuff.

One of the cool things I'm doing today is starting work with Roll It Forward. I went down to Boston City Hall for my first meeting with the RIF guys Monday. I like that acronym — RIF...sounds a lot like RAF. And that's a cool acronym. Not like LOL, I hate that acronym. If I worked for a company with a name that broke down into that acronym, I would wake up in the morning and try as hard as I could to jam my head into the garbage disposal. I will not be applying for a job at Landscaping Of Leominster any time soon.

My job at RAF is Bicycle Mechanic/Operations Coordinator (I think). I'll be managing a massive fleet of donation bikes. And hey, you know what's awesome? On my way down to City Hall Monday, I'm rolling up to an intersection on my Schwinn Varsity, which has had zero maintenance done to it ever (we're talking years and years here), and POP! my front brake cable snaps. The bike is a fixed gear but it has flat pedals, not exactly the best set up for leg-locking to a stop. I stood up and awkwardly arrested the motion of the bicycle, thankful that I hadn't been rolling down a hill at 20mph, and thought to myself "oh this is why people think that fixed gears wreck your knees...because they do (if you don't have a brake)."

At that point I though of ditching the bike and getting on the T, but I didn't have enough time, and besides, I thought, if the sweet fixie kids can do it, so can I. Even if I didn't have toe clips and straps. I also thought of Ted Riederer, one of the oldest school Boston bike messengers (now retired) and how he would roll on a brakeless fixed gear with flat pedals, he just went really, really SLOW. So I went for it, riding into downtown Boston brakeless. I can't say that it wasn't incredibly sketchy, but I made it. Of course when I got out of the meeting and it was snraining (snow/rain) and I had to get over to Central Square, I used the fact that my cable was busted to wuss out and take the train. "That wouldn't be safe" my wuss-brain said, and I complied.

And I'm the guy who's managing a fleet of bikes, the guy whose bike can't make it from Somerville to Boston in one piece.

And then this happened yesterday. Out for a ride with M, I'm wailing down a gravelly descent, playing the "I have no brakes" game, and when I got to the bottom it wasn't a game anymore. The pivot on my brake lever had ejected. Fucker.

Oh ya, it was on my T ride home from City Hall that I noticed this:

Paul Revere bears a striking resemblance to...

Jack Black!

Has anyone noticed this? Does Jack Black know this? Well, now I do, and you do too, we've both learned something. Aren't you glad you came down here today?

OK, I gotta go be late for some appointments, you can stay here, hang out, get high, and eat all the cookies in the house while you watch this a-freakin-mazing video of a Senegalese dude absolutely ripping it up on a bike that any douche bag in my neighborhood would leave on the curb.

Jesus Christ! I almost forgot...

The photo at the top of the post — when I saw that I was like "Sweet! Robocop Vs. Terminator, now that is a movie I will watch!" But no, it's Robocop WITH Terminator. I think it's a musical or a rom-com and I am still going to go see it.

Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Reactor Situation Explained With Poop And Farts

2011-03-22T23:23:00.001-04:00

Whoa dude, I got a whole lot of stuff piling up here and no time to post it. This half-assed post has nothing to do with cycling but everything to do with poop and farts, which are really the number two and three subjects we talk about here, so it's not like we're that far off theme.

Get it, number two subject? It's late.

I really enjoyed this Youtube video explaining the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor mess as it relates to poop and farts, and I didn't want anyone to miss it. If you are a Big Bikes reader, you deserve to see this. And who knows, maybe if you're like me and you'll actually find it somehow comforting.

Of course the real value of this post is that I took the time (time that I should have used to work on the Thom Parsons Cyclowhat? Project) to take a few screen captures of the key moments in the video for you to share with your friends an relatives. I'm pretty sure your grandmother would be elated if you posted one to her Facebook page.

That's it for today, we'll come strong tomorrow dreadlocks.

Utter Thomination Of Otis AFB And The Rock

2011-03-21T01:43:00.003-04:00

Somehow, throughout the course of my longer-than-I-care-to-think-about life, no one had ever struck upon the magnificently clever artifice of replacing the "dom" part of a word with "Thom." That was until this past Saturday when I went for another ride at Otis Air Force Base with a posse of fit racer types who nearly rode me to death like I was a pony at a birthday party for clinically obese octuplets. I was completely shelled and Results Rooter, taking pity on me, decided to take us down a technical trail so I wouldn't get so horribly dropped. He said "We're gonna do that techy trail again so Thom can dominate it." And, come to think of it, I guess it was me who said "Nah dude, I'm gonna Thominate it." Wow, I thought, no one's ever gone there...what are the possibilities? All we could come up with in the following minutes were "Thominatrix" and "Thom Deluise." But the second one doesn't really count. I can't even think of any now...oh wait: athomination. Different switcheroo, same idea. Come on, whaddayagot? Let's hear it.

I hitched a ride down to Otis with Mo Bruno Roy. One thing that Mo and I have in common is our love of Dunkin Donuts, particularly Big And Toasty sandwiches (see photo at top of post). Alright, that's made up, Mo hates Dunkin Donuts. Well, maybe not hates it so much as she is disgusted by it. What we do have in common is our appreciation for the various and nuanced Massachusetts accents. We can both easily lapse into the accents of respective towns of origin. I had just seen The Fighter, so I spent a lot of time talking up Christian Bale's nailing of the Lowell accent. Not only the nailing of the accent, but of the body language and facial expression of a skinny-ass, townie tweaker. The guy is a total dick of a human being, but man can he act. He made Wahlberg sound like he was the one faking it.

Out on the trails we ran into Gerry Finnegan and his buddy John. John was all geared up with a full face helmet and a long travel bike. I think it was Kevin Sweeney who asked me why those guys were so geared up (Otis ain't all that technically demanding). "Because there's a secret stash of super-kindy gnar you don't know about brah" I told him.

Bob Morgan had some killer socks.

Colin and Greg Whitney enter the octagon. Two men enter, one man...falls off the side and faceplants into a pile of pine needles.

Rooter shows us which line not to take.

And, believe it or not, this was the line to take.

Squirtgun Show performing some kind of weird bike ballet. Keith (right) rethinking the wisdom of bringing his girlfriend on a ride where the conversation topics ranged from bodily functions to poop. What's that? Since when is poop a bodily function? Keep your science out of my classroom!

Rocked the VOmax Celtics kit. The jersey is club cut, good for accommodating my still off-season-sized physique.

After the ride I could barely walk, but I had promised, scratch that: made a blood oath, that I would be at the Motherboar show at P.A.'s Lounge Saturday night. It had been on my calendar since the Superbowl (whenever that was). There was no way I was blowing it off.

I don't see nearly enough rock. Good thing Motherboar packs an above average amount of rock into their set. They are like the grain alcohol of bands — 95% rock by volume. Just check out the video for "Croctosquatch" below. Pat Benatar may have pioneered the narrative music video with "Love Is A Battlefield" but Motherboar perfected the art form with their video about a man hunting for the part crocodile, part octopus, part sasquatch creature that killed his brother.

This video will make you think. What it will make you think is "Wow, I didn't know they could show boobies on Youtube."

I bet when you read the title of this post you thought I was going to talk about how I utterly Thominated the trails of Otis AFB and the affable Samoan-American actor Duane "The Rock" Johnson in hand to hand combat (again). You were wrong (again). I was speaking of utterly Thominating the rock as in the rock n' roll.

A Colombian Necktie For Facebook

2011-03-18T01:05:00.001-04:00

Remember yesterday when said I was all show and no tell but it turned out I was full of shit...lots of shit. Well today I really am all show no tell. I'm basically going to babble about a couple videos and then fuck off. I have a couple very stressful deadlines to meet, real crazy stuff. One deadline involves a super secret project I'm working on with CycloWhat?

Came across the above video over on Tomi's blog yesterday. As visually striking, fun, and hilarious as it is,
I was also taken with the excellently rockin' song by Guidance Counselor. It's called "I Don't Wanna Speak" and you can find more songs like it over on their Myspace page. I could take a dig at Myspace because that's an obvious thing to do, but let me ask you this: back when you were all up on Myspace, did you ever think that it was going to end? Not just end but end the way it did, with a totally aseptic social networking site with a stupid name like "Facebook" coming along and totally eclipsing it? Someday another site will come along, maybe one with less of a propensity for sharing personal information, and that site will slit Facebook's throat and pull its tongue out through the gaping hole and let it hang there like a macabre necktie just as Facebook did to Myspace. Then we'll all be making jokes about how lame and creepy and full of pedophiles Facebook is. "Oh, Facebook, that thing is just for bands and pedophiles...and pedophile bands* now." What, you've never heard of pedophile bands? Anti-gay pastors are really into them.

Think it can't happen? One made up word for you: Friendster.

Whoa, way off the cupcake cannon track there. If you want to learn about cupcakes and cannons and things of that nature, go ahead and read the excerpt I snagged from beneath the video on Youtube:

The Johnny Cupcakes Suitcase Tour stop at Kamp Grizzly was epic. Johnny brought a great crowd, his limited edition tour gear and the inspiration for Kamp's Cupcake Cannon. Portland's Kamp Grizzly developed a steam-punk style pneumatic cupcake cannon and set the stage for eating frosty delights at 120psi. The blasting buffet was documented in at 700fps coming off the Phantom HD Gold. As the evening shook down, cupcake enthusiasts continued to step in front of the cannon and camera. Some shaking in their boots, others perched in zen-like states, ALL were covered in delicious frosting, spongy cake, and showered in a mist of sprinkles.

Mountain View from BLTN on Vimeo.

And this video...I don't know. It's not that extreme or nutty, but it depicts a normal human rider, not some mutant with Red Bull for blood and genetically engineered clones of Evel Knievel's balls for...balls. It's just a well shot video of a dude riding in the sun. Winter has almost left us here in the New England (where we spell "carbon fibre" more like "carbon fiber") but the weather still isn't anywhere near as nice as the weather in this video.

You know Evel got rad on this thing. At least I hope he did. It would make me feel less like crying.

The Last Descent from Ed Oxley on Vimeo.

I've become a big fan of Ed Oxley's Great Rock - Mountain Bike Skills over in the old England. He seems to know his stuff and he has a good time conveying his knowledge of said stuff. I always find it entertaining anyway. I can't say that I have ever ridden a trail with such meticulous rock-armoring as the one shown in this video. It's like riding a roughly built stone walkway the whole way down the hill.

OK, so really now, I will fuck off until Monday. Oh man, I feel like a deadbeat dad, like you guys are all nodding your heads going "Ya...ya, we'll believe this talk about the Monday post when we see the Monday post." I promise it won't be like that time I showed up to your birthday party after the cake was gone, fell asleep on the couch, and pissed my pants. Unless, of course, you would find that entertaining. Then I will totally do that. What's that? Stop talking. Alright fine, see you Monday...I promise.

* Can't wait until that one shows up in the keyword searches.

All Show No Tell

2011-03-17T00:59:00.003-04:00

It seems that yesterday's incredibly well-viewed video post was not all that much of a puzzler. Dicky was able to make short work of the question: Whose blog is Ultra Endure Guy really reading from? Dicky is very small and like all very small animals, not very smart. You ever meet a smart tree shrew? A marmoset? How about a smart bumblebee bat? Didn't think so. I rest my case. Next time (ya right!) I will have to try harder and avoid stating the name of the victim's website in the closing seconds of the video. (But it was just too fun to say Cycle-hyphen-Smaaht-dot-cawm.) Adam Myerson did not make a peep about the post anywhere throughout the vast expanse of his social media empire yesterday, which means he is either a.) Thoroughly unamused b.) Totally fucking pissed c.) Unaware of it d.) Trying not to give it any attention for fear that it will spread faster than herpes at a boarding school for the arts.

He can't be madder at me than he is at the dude who made this:

And I'm not sure who did make it either. I was alerted to it by Gewilli who linked to the blog: Flemish For Poser by Doucheblogcycling. But Flemish For Poser by Doucheblogcycling posted the photo in a post dedicated to All Hail The Black Market. So I have no idea who is responsible for this deeply offensive affront to my friend Adam Myerson. Maybe Mr. Doucheblog, maybe Stevil, maybe neither, but if I meet the guy who made it in a dark alley, ooh, I swear to god I am gonna turn off the Death Cab For Cutie On My headphones, put down my yoga mat, and smack the fucker with the block of tofu I have in my hand.

Now Dicky gets to choose UEG's next subject. I can't wait to waste hours creating another video that no one will watch. That is gonna be swell, it will do wonders for my self-loathing. How am I going to be the next Antoine Dodson if you guys don't share my videos huh?

Hey look! Up there! At the top of the post! A unicorn-pegasus-dolphin! Bet you never seen one of them before. That's some real cool shit from a guy I have raced mountain bikes against for years, Mike Joos. Check out more of his art HERE. He has one piece depicting Boba Fett on a jet ski...you know you wanna peak.

And speaking of unicorn-pegasus-dolphins...or not. Mickey out at Spooky Bikes has got a bunch of sweet new shirts to sell. So when you're done looking at Boba Fett on a jet ski and touching yourself, check out Mickey's wares. You know, I was supposed to go out to Spooky's shop to do a tour like I did with Geekhouse, but I didn't realize that Spooky is way out in fucking Greenfield. Where do you live? Think of a town within your state that is as far away from yours as possible. That's Greenfield for me. So San Diego-ranians, Greenfield is my Crescent City OK? Same exact thing. Shut up.

"He is like a mountie, he always gets his man and he'll zap you any way he can...ZAP!"

This comes to us via Unlikely Words. I have never questioned my atheism...until now. Now might be a good time to start believing in god, even if he is Glenn Beck's douchegod that causes earthquakes to punish people for doing "stuff" that is "Not really working out real well." If I can pray to god, any god even if it's a Flying Spaghetti Monster, and get him to protect me from the Air Jellies in the terrifying video below when they become self-aware, then I will do it. Where do I sign?

And in a brilliant example of segueing...

Gilbert Gottfried got fired from his prestigious job as the voice of the Aflac duck for making insensitive Tweet-jokes or "twokes" (nah, that won't stick) about the situation in Japan. Am I surprised he got fired? Hell no. Am I surprised he got hired in the first place? Fuck yes. This is is the guy who made a 9/11 joke at Hugh Hefner's Friar's club roast — he said he was trying to get a direct flight to Los Angeles but he was nervous because his flight had a connection with the Empire State Building. That was about a month after 9/11. The joke bombed but he went on to salvage the night with the following amazing-ness:

So Aflac hired that guy and expected him to keep it in his pants. And by "it" I mean his mouth. Keep his mouth in his pants. That's right. Hey Aflac, need a new voice for your duck? I'm your guy.

Remember that time I titled this post "All Show No Tell?" That was funny. Guess there was a little bit to tell. Hopefully there's something left in the crack pipe for Friday.

Ultra Endure Guy II- Hey PEZ Cycling Look At You! (You Sexist Douche Bags)

2011-03-16T01:53:00.000-04:00

Finally, the long awaited sequel to the immensely popular and well-viewed Ultra Endure Guy Navigating The Mystery video. As always (always? like the past...one times we've done this) the first person to guess whose blog UEG is really reading gets to choose the next blog he reads. (Did I ever even mention that the last blog UEG read was Willow Koerber's? Did I?) If you're looking to read something today...not that I'm saying you shouldn't watch the video, because it's pretty sweet, but if you're say, at work and can't watch a video with sound, then you could check out the post about the hipster traps in NYC I did over on BikeRumor. It might be the best-viewed post I've done over there, and what's encouraging about that is that it is almost entirely made up. No drooling over useless gadgetry, no "hey look at this $20,000 carbon bike!" Just a bunch of crazy-make-em-uppers and weirdness.

Like That Time Tom Cruise Finally Admitted That He's Gay

2011-03-15T09:39:00.002-04:00

Alright, so there's maybe gonna be a little period of undirected babbling before I get down to the very serious business of producing proper Big Bikes type posts I'm afraid. Right, because Big Bikes usually has so much direction. That's what you come down here for: direction. There's a lot going on...lots of changes. You may have noticed the disappearance of a couple logos on the sidebar, and if you check back sometime soon, you may see the appearance of a couple new logos. It's gonna be huge, like that time Tom Cruise finally admitted that he's gay.

The mobile bicycle repair business is picking up a little steam. I went over to Mission Hill last week to pick up Kevin Porter's bike. KP is legend. Check out Lucas Brunelle's video of Kevin from a few years back.

KP wears long tights almost year round. He always has huge headphones and an even huger smile on. He rides big gears but makes it look like he's spinning a compact crank. How huge? When I went to pick up his bike, he was sitting in his living room, putting his chainrings back on, "Am I putting this thing on right? I can never tell" he asked. "Um ya, but you want it on the other side of the spider, that's the big ring" "NO man...this is my big ring" he said as he held up a 56t chainring that was the size of a freakin' hubcap. His "small ring" is a 52t. Hey, he says he needs to spin more.

KP can be tough to get a hold of, he doesn't answer his phone if it's an unidentified number and he doesn't answer his door, pretty much period, because he's afraid of getting robbed. Man, Mission Hill is rough — robbers...oil spills caused by morons...who knows what's next.

KP's ride is a Somerville made Royal H. Cycles steel, lugged road frame, very nice.

But he rides Shimano 550's, one of the biggest pain in the ass wheels to true ever. Especially when the last mechanic to touch them replaced some of the proprietary nipples with standard nipples, rendering them even more untruable than they are on a good day. Glenn Beck thinks god is causing earthquakes and wrecking Japan because:

"Hey, you know that stuff we're doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.' I'm just saying."

I think god is causing earthquakes and wrecking Japan because Shimano makes wheels that are really annoying to true.

I'm a dick and I'm kidding. Glenn Beck is insane and he is serious.

The Sawyer had its first non-snowy trail ride. I'll say this: trying to assess the ride characteristics of a bike while riding in the snow is about as effective as trying to figure out how well a pair of running shoes work by crushing grapes in them. And yes, that is my saddle height, I have the inseam of Zdeno Chara. Speaking of Chara...

That's right. This is just a teaser, more on the VOmax Bruins kit later.

This bike has been ridden outside about a half dozen times. Apparently Tacx Dynamic Carbon Assembly Paste doesn't do much to prevent rust in a steel frame.

Saturday I got out for a ride in Wompatuck with Jane Hayes and Doug McFadd. Crazy thing is, I had never been to Wompy other than the five or whatever times I've raced it. The place is alright. Wide open speed sections interspersed with technical, rocky sections. Doug caught the first rocky-section-caused-flat of the day and Jane fell soon after. Flats we could deal with, it was just a good thing none of us were riding geared bikes...so much blow down.

Jane's Independent Fabrication 29er single speed.

Sunday I did a big group ride down at Otis Air Force Base. I ride Otis exactly once a year, I think of it as a winter riding spot, but it's legitimately pretty sweet — real fast, real flowy, real fun. It's more west coast than anything else around these parts. Of course if you did hit Otis during the summer it would be horribly hot and miserable and you'd be so traumatized, you'd never want to go again.

Why didn't I get any action shots? Eh, mostly 'cause I was off the back half the time. I blame The Sawyer. Switching from the Superfly to that thing...it's like having someone holding on to the back of your shorts the whole time you're riding. Could be the bike, could be the 15 lbs of superfluous flesh I'm carrying around these days. We'll have to wait for the lab results to come back before we know for sure. The following song describes how I found myself in this state and explains what I'm going to do about it in very specific terms:

I know I had previously promised that Ultra Endure Guy would be paying Big Bikes another visit. What can I say? He's a sketchy motherfucker, he didn't show. But I can promise that he will be dropping by tomorrow to read another excerpt from his blog.

Now, be honest, how many of you actually went Googlin' around trying to find out if Tom Cruise actually admitted that he's gay?

Local Warming

2011-03-14T13:54:00.000-04:00

This isn't a real Big Bikes post, I'm just half-assedly setting the pick in hopes that I can break out of this paralyzing case of blogger's block I've been suffering from for the past couple months and actually do something over here.

Yesterday I met up with a big group of folks to ride Otis Air Force Base down on the Cape. I cannot remember the last time I got so shelled on a group ride.

I upgraded to the new Blogger editor, and while it is kinda buggy and weird (cursors disappear, text gets linked for no apparent reason) it does have a few sweet features. My favorites being the photo uploader that allows you to upload as many photos as you want all at once. You used to have to upload five at a time. This still beat Wordpress. With Wordpress you have to upload one photo at a time and it is not a streamlined process. This sucks when I have to say, do a BikeRumor post that requires a bunch of photos. Another sweet feature is the insert jumpbreak function. Now I can be all AHTBM and do a "read more" type thingy. Sorta like this:

The rest of the sequence of Will Crissman riding the most insane stunt at Otis AFB after the break. Does he crash because his cell phone went off in his pocket just as he was at the most deadly point? Do rabid coyotes burst forth from the bushes and eat him alive, soft bits first? I don't know, you'll just have to jump past the break to find out.

Hold It Now

2011-02-20T01:00:00.002-05:00

Damn, can't remember the last time I didn't update the blawg for 18 days...maybe never. What can I say, I've been scrambling: trying to survive, painting, working on a bunch of bikes with the whole mobile bike repair thing, trying to get a "real" job, not-blogging, well no here-blogging, I have been blogging on the BikeRumor...big time.

I basically came over here today to announce that I'm going into 8 days of total radio silence, but 18 days without a peep...shit, like anyone would have noticed. Eh, I'd rather not come down here every day just to make excuses. I'll be back when I'm ready, hopefully that'll be soon.

Thanks to The Original Big Ring for reminding me that Big Bikes exists (that's his awesome sticker above). And thanks to Shanna at Endless Bikes for her continued support (and the huge socks that I can't wait to rock). She even threw a bag of Mountain Air Roasting beans in the box.

Oh, during radio silence there will be daily Race To NAHBS! interviews scheduled to go up on BikeRumor, so check those out. The interview with Mickey from Spooky Bikes will be up Monday AM...it's a good one. Craig Gaulzetti might be the only guy in the same league. If you haven't read his interview...wow, you should check it out.

So ya, 8 days of radio silence, which may be followed by a yet to be determined period of further radio silence...or not, we'll see.

Flyin' Bryan Philbrook Builds "Thom's Sawyer"

2011-02-02T12:42:00.000-05:00

Thom's Sawyer Built By Bryan Of International Bicycle from BigBikesShow on Vimeo.

As previously stated, I don't even like Rush, but setting this video of Bryan building "Thom's Sawyer" to "Tom Sawyer" was unavoidable. I didn't bite 21st Avenue Bikes "air compressor to the face" schtick, but I did develop my own using Bryan's beard as a prop.

And please share the living hell out of this thing so I can get paid to make more.

Oh, and I spoke with Ultra Endure Guy, he'll be paying Big Bikes a visit Thursday or Friday. He also said something about a future project that may involve Chelada.

Gary Fisher Collection Sawyer: It's Light, It's Racist, And It Has A Split Dropout So You Can Clean Your Chain

2011-02-01T15:45:00.003-05:00

My new bike is named after a Rush song…and I don't even like Rush. Alright, the Rush song is named after a book by Mark Twain, but who thinks of Twain before they think of Rush when they hear "Tom Sawyer?" It's sad. Sad like the fact that a half-assed blog about bikes and, and…who knows, shows up before its namesake in a Google search. But, nonetheless, I'm going to go with "Thom's Sawyer" as the name for the new, big, gray beast. It just fits. I walked into the shop on Friday, pulled the thing out of the box, and Erich Leas started singing "Tom Sawyer," and that was that. Boom! Bike named. I knew I was getting the bike for weeks…months even, but this connection had never occurred to me: a.) because I'm dimwitted and b.) because I don't think about myself in the third person, so it was "my Sawyer;" not "Thom's Sawyer." And ya, the H thing threw me. Rush's Tom Sawyer doesn't have a
silent H.

Did you know the Sawyer has a split drop out? Amazing. I think it's so you can install and then remove your chain for cleaning without breaking it.*

By the time I dragged my ass over to IBC, it was late, I probably wasn't going to have time to build the bike….unless I had help. So I enlisted Bryan Philbrook, who is not married to help me.
Just wanted to clear that up. " Bryan Philbrook married?" has got to be the weirdest keyword search that has brought someone to Big Bikes. OK, wait, I lied, I'm totally wrong. The weirdest search
has got to be (aside form all the porno craziness that is too gnarly even for BigBikes) "Pocket bike leakin nd bubbles." That would make "Bryan Philbrook married?" the second weirdest search. A very distant second.

I bartered my slightly perturbed video skills for a banzai bike build — Bryan would swap the parts from my Superfly SS to the Sawyer - I would just film the event. The video was inspired by 21st Avenue Bikes' bike-build time-lapse piece. If mine comes out 1/100th as good, I'll be stoked. And that may be your entertainment for tomorrow — my 1/100th as good as 21st Avenue Bikes' bike build video. I'd be a great Hollywood ad man: "If you liked the original Death Race 2000…and you have always thought to yourself 'hmm, I would even watch a film that is 1/100th as good as this,' then you're
gonna LOVE Death Race 2000: The Remake!"

21st Avenue Bicycles - Family Fun Bike Build! from James Wilson on Vimeo.

The build went well. And I'm glad it did. International is ten miles from my house and that bike was my only way home. That's why Erich, Bryan, and I did the "three brains are better than
one mind meld" before embarking on the frame swap. "Will all the things on that thing work on the other thing?" "Yes…except for the headset." The Superfly uses an integrated headset, the Sawyer
uses a segregated headset because it is a racist. And by that, of course I mean: The Sawyer uses a traditional headset. And one of the traditions of a traditional headset is to be totally fucking racist.

The Sawyer and I have some stuff to work out.

The only thing about the Sawyer more shocking than its racist-ness is its weight. It is incredibly light. You'll see Erich's reaction in the video as the bike hits the scale — he is dumbstruck by the incredible lightness of the Sawyer. **

For actual facts about the Sawyer, you might want to check out Guitar Ted's article on Twenty Nine Inches, I don't think it's called "Fisher Collection Sawyer: It's Light, It's Racist, And It Has A Split Dropout So You Can Clean Your Chain."

*I'm laying bait to see if and BikeRumor readers followed me over here…out yourselves!

** It's like spilling a glass of blood in front of a vampire as he tries to conceal the fact that he is a vampire from the other dinner guests.

Thom's Sawyer/Day and Night, Night and Day (At Ride Studio Cafe)

2011-01-31T05:30:00.002-05:00

Um ya, I haven't exactly been forthcoming in the "reality and bikes" department lately. And during this non-communicative period, the tiny pupa that was my Superfly Single Speed has transformed into a beautiful...hulking gray Gary Fisher Collection Sawyer. I have no idea how this happened really. It may have involved my Ferrous (Dunderchee) in some way. But today's post isn't really about that...I'm speed blogging, with very little WiFi time left this evening. There's just way too much fascinating stuff to talk about when it comes to the new addition to THE STABLE...THE QUIVER. (Excuse me, I had to pause briefly and punch myself in the nuts for using those terms.)

My new thing is doing semi-longish road rides on a single speed mountain bike with 2.25 knobbies and a 33 X 19 gear. It's just the kind of training that Lance won all those Tours De France on. Saturday night Matt and Mo had their end of cross season party out at The Ride Studio Cafe in Lexington. I had plans to ride out with K-Sweat (pronounced K-Sweet), but, by the time go time rolled around, I had amassed a mountain of excuses for why I had to drive. One excuse was that the crank on my commuter was falling apart and all I had to ride was a 26 lb single speed mountain bike with a 33 X 19 gear on it. K-Sweat texted me "Let's ride mountain bikes up the minuteman path in the snow!" or something like that anyway. I said (quite possibly to myself) in the words of Shanna Powell "Hell YEAH!" and met up with K-Sweat.

We found that the bike path was not all that clear. We were doing the pedal, pedal, weave, swerve, ditch, walk dance the whole way up to Lexington. At one point we became so bogged down for such an extended period of time, that we opted to break out a couple Sierra Torpedo IPAs and drink them while we walked and talked.

I hope K-Sweat found it as romantic as I did.

The journey took way longer than anticipated. Due both to the depth of the snow and the depth of the flab around my mid-section. I am far from in shape — I was breathing hard and sweating and hurting. K-Sweat wasn't even living up to his namesake (that is, his name sake if he didn't insist, for whatever fucked up reason, on pronouncing it "sweet").

Did that make sense? Ah, I don't really have time to go back and make it work. This blog post is like a snow-clogged one way Somerville street tonight — no going back.

We got to Ride Studio in time to see the end of the musical video/photo MO-tage that Matt Roy had worked up to showcase some of Mo's exploits throughout this cross season. If you ever want to see a good example of how to rock the sponsorship thing: look no further than Matt and Mo Bruno Roy. Those guys do so right by their sponsors, it's insane.

You know what else is insane? The fact that I walked in the door and pretty much got handed a jar of Mo's signature Mad Alchemy embrocation. I never win raffle items, I was baffled. And I have no idea what to do with it. I might carry it like mace..."hold still you would be man-rapist, I am going to rub this pepper-spray ointment in your eyes!"

Ack! They're shutting us down. Quick! Look at this photo of Matt O'Keefe...he has a magnificent beard.

The turnout for the cross party was solid, it was still raging when I spun off down Mass Ave. on my slow-motion mobile. "K-Sweat, try to keep for fuck's sake. I can't go any slower, I gotta stay on top of this gear!"

The truly incredible thing is that there was actually a crowd back out at Ride Studio at 5 AM Sunday, to watch the women's Cyclcross World Championships, live from Belgium. And Mo was back there too, serving up Bob's Red Mill waffles with fruit and syrup (remember what I said about doing right by her sponsors?). Rob Vandermark of Seven Cycles was there too, acting as a barista, pouring individual cups of Terroir coffee. (Speaking of coffee...can you tell I've had a couple?) I barely made it for the men's race at 8 AM. 8 AM is my 5 AM. By then the place was packed.

Alright, that's it. Excuse all the typos and left-out-entirely words (more so than you usually do). We'll talk more about "Thom's Sawyer" tomorrow.

Ultra Endure Guy - Navigating The Mystery

2011-01-27T21:26:00.001-05:00

Ultra Endure Guy reads from his blog.

An excerpt:

"Y'know in The Matrix when Neo plugs into the back of his head to download new info? Well that's what I'm practicin' through guided meditation."

Got any requests for blog posts you'd like Ultra Endure Guy to read? Hit that contact link in the sidebar and send me an email. I'll talk to UEG and see if he'll fahkin' read it for ya.

Frame Building Videos: Like Porn For Men Without Penises

2011-01-26T03:13:00.003-05:00

FROM STEEL: The Making of a Soulcraft from michael evans on Vimeo.

Not a title I could have used on one of my BikeRumor posts. Unless I wanted to get fired. I guess going into jobs with the intent of getting fired worked for Ricky Gervais with his Golden Globes hosting gigs. But me, I gotta play it safe. For instance, I pulled punches on the "PiCycle" electric "bike" post. Of course I hadn't yet seen the video below where the creepy cartoon Xtranormal woman talks about her coworkers thinking she was "using her pants as a potty" because she rode to work on a bike that actually required her to put out some effort, which resulted in a sweaty bum-bum.

"PiCycle: Because real bikes make it look like you've pissed yourself!"

And I put "bike" in quotation marks back there because this thing is not a bike; it's an electric scooter with pedals. There are those who say that the term "marriage" should only be applied to the statistically-destined-to-fail-union of a man and a woman, and that gay marriages should be called "civil unions." I know how they feel — my main issue with electric "bikes" is terminology. Call them bikes and next thing you know, they'll be flying down bike paths, mowing down toddlers and puppies at 25 mph. Call them electric pedal-assisted scooters and then people won't be so tempted to ride them on bike paths, or down sidewalks, and if they do, they will be arrested and hopefully Tased.

Stop calling these scooters "electric bikes" and I'll stop hatin' on them. Sort of like the civil union crowd will stop hating gay people if they don't call their marriages "marriages."

Why I didn't use any of that material on BikeRumor, I have no idea.

And now...some photos.

As I may have mentioned, I have started a mobile bicycle repair service. Above you will see a before photo of Big Bikes Mobile Bike Repair World Headquarters. It doesn't look like that anymore, but I forgot to edit the after photo, so you'll have to use your imagination. Just imagine lots of diamond plate and orange shag carpet. It's a nice time to get your bike worked on, wherever you take it. The bike mechanics, they give your bike extra-special love in the boring winter time. That was a hint.

There's another kids bike donation in the works over at International Bike. I hobbled my crippled ass out to Newton through the slush today, to assess the masses of kids bikes in the attic. A stop at The Coffee Corner is obligatory. I hadn't been there in so long, the owner had forgotten my drink. Which reminded me of every time I've been to a Starbucks.

And speaking of coffee hashish...oh, we weren't speaking of coffee hashish? Why not? While cleaning up Big Bikes Mobile Bike Repair Command Center of The Universe, I found this ancient mug of coffee. Do you realize the street value of that shit?

The Ferrous, A.K.A. Dunderchee, is looking kind of "Lone Wolf" (to use the BSNYC idiom) these days. With its Toby Henderson front fender, Topeak X-Blade rear fender, and its seven blinky lights, it really has a — What? You want me to talk about the SEVEN FUCKING BLINKY LIGHTS? Whatever for? Isn't that 100% normal. It really is...for a Lone Wolf.

The Bike Snob talks about The Lone Wolf's bike:

"It will feature some aberrant element that make's it clear it's a Lone Wolf's bike. If its a road bike, that element might be giant gel saddle and a suspension seatpost. If it's a dual suspension mountain bike, that element will probably be a pair of slick tires or an abundance of rear view mirrors."

The book is a good read, but that Lone Wolf bit got to me — I know that guy. I know several of those guys. And more to the point, today I was that guy. Riding around on my mountain bike with its fenders and seven blinky lights. But the blinky lights I can explain. I'm testing some Taiwanese Owleye lights for BikeRumor. I mounted them all up to see how the brackets work and then pretty much said "fuck it" and left them on there for kicks.

That guy in the photo, looking at my bike like he wants to kick it to death like a mildly annoying Pekingese? That's Dan. It just dawned on me today that one can replace the word "man" in any song with the word "Dan." To think of all the time I spent working with Dan, not annoying him by serenading him with songs like "Dan Eater," "Piano Dan," "Magic Dan," and "Iron Dan."

Oh, and this is related to things I've been talking about!

Saturday I went to brunch at Renee's in Teele Square, Somerville with my niece, she had the cocoa. The real Colin Reuter was there with a date. My sister and I were trying to get Lyla to go up to Colin and say either "you're cute" or "are you my daddy?" As if Benderboy hasn't taken enough abuse lately.

If you're still here, then you should go here this Saturday, the 29th (did I get that right Zen?). You gotta buy your tickets online by Thursday, as in tomorrow. I won't be able to go, but that only gives you more incentive to do so. You don't want to sit behind me at the movies.

And now, a little song to take us out:

"Oh no no no I’m a rocket Dan
Rocket Dan burning out his fuse up here alone"