“Una michelada con clamato, por favor”

The asses have spoken (hmm, I meant to say "masses" but spellcheck doesn't catch that sort of thing, oops) and it seems that the Next Big Bikes Single Speed Worlds Fund-raising event will inevitably involve "Chelada." Not familiar with what exactly Chelada is? Well check out the Boozin' Blog for an explanation (thanks Cary). I snagged the official type promo photo above from that site. We see an idyllic portrait of a glass of Chelada surrounded by the items which give it its unique flavor. We have the limes, the spicy salsa! The guacamole, the tomatoes of course (you know that I Hate, capital "H" tomatoes, which makes this thing so much more abhorrent from the get go) and the...tortilla chips. OK. But what I noticed was conspicuously absent from the depiction of this Clam-Tomato-and beer beverage was, you didn't guess it, but I'm going to tell you — the clams.

No clams are shown. Why? Don't people want to think about drinking clams? Mmm, clam juice! I fill my Camel-Bag with it.

So I took the liberty of embellishing the photo and adding some much needed clams. What better figure to represent the clam species than the grotesquely prodigious Geo-Duck (pronounced Gooey-Duck. Really). It is nicknamed "The Giant Clam," "The Mirugai," and "The Horse Clam."

Although "The Horse's Penis Clam" might have been more to the point.

Oh ya, pour me a tall cold glass of I think I'm gonna puke.

Hey look at me! I'm a miniature jockey riding a giant horse's penis yay!
That's not weird at all.

And what did you think this awesome dude was gonna do when he got a hold of a Geo-Duck? "Huh, huh look, it's a big wang! Get it?" Wow Chad, we didn't see that one coming. Hey guys check out the vivid imagination on Chad!

To drive home the utter, outright disgustingness of this concoction I will now copy and paste text from Booze Blog's site and replace all appropriate words with the words "poop" and "pee". I took a comedy for kids class at The Boston Center for Adult Education. I learned that when you are dying on stage you jump right for the "poop and pee net." No you do not literally hurl your body into a net covered with urine and fecal matter (however close at hand it may be), you just say anything, anything at all utilizing the words poop and pee. It kills.

I had this one bit that went something like this:

"So any of you guys ever notice that pretty much all animals and people have their bums on their backsides? Seriously. I mean like what if they were like on your head? That would be NUTS. You're over talking to Scotty by the monkey bars and all of a sudden he's like 'oh man, I shouldn't have eaten all those prunes — BWOOT! (motions with hand to pantomime poop coming out of Scotty's ear) He starts pooping out of his ear! Pee-pee-poo-poo thank you good night!"

That stuff was pure gold.

I'm pretty sure this kid was wasted

Anyway, on with the illustration of the grossness.

From Booze Blog:

"Latinos, specifically those of Mexican descent, have been mixing pee-pee with poop for decades. Pee & Poop Chelada and Pee Light & Poop Chelada honor that tradition by combining Anheuser-Busch’s classic American-style pee-pee with the spicy, invigorating taste of Clamato Tomato Poop Cocktail, made by Cadbury Schweppes Americas Pee-Pee-Poo-Poo Beverages (CSAB)."

“One look at the can and you know that this Pee-Pee-Poop Beer is the real thing – Pee and Pee-Pee Light mixed with authentic Poop,” Vitrano said. “This is a savory Pee-Poop beer that will appeal to adult Pee-poop-beer drinkers, particularly those who enjoy Pee mixed with Poop.”


Is the point driven home yet? Somebody take away its keys, cuz it ain't driving itself home.

While I can't really commit to drinking a six-pack of Chelada during the Single-Speed race at The Ice Weasels perhaps (for the right price, donate button upper right) some sort of accord can be worked out. I can't possibly, as the race promoter, get that drunk while there's so much race promoting left to royally screw up.

We'll think of something, we have to. OK, no we don't but let's do it anyway.

Battle of The Bulge Road

First things first, I have to get my excuses out of the way...er, I mean "further hype" the Thom Parsons (Bacon Egg & Cheese on a Boston Cream) Project. Despite the fact that I received a generous donation from an anonymous donor, I was not able to schedule the execution of the gastronomically dastardly deed over the weekend. On what I call "Normal People Thanksgiving," morning I met up with fellow Ice Weasels co-promoters Rooter and K-Sweet for brunch to discuss how we can design the most horrible course ever. The plan was to have Rooter film "the event" after brunch...after brunch...at Soundbites. Awesome plan, great job. For some reason, after ingesting enough calories to sustain Dicky for three weeks in one sitting, I wasn't feeling the Bacon egg & cheese on a Boston cream thing.

Hey, did I ever say I was really, really smart?

No. But maybe I did say that sometimes when I ride I like to rock out
wicked, wicked haaahd to Judas Priest. Families walking down the Battle Road on Thanksgiving morning love it when some guy in a black leotard rolls by singing "Turbo Lover." A disapproving scowl is a New Englander's smile.

Why do I call it "normal people Thanksgiving?" Because my family has Thanksgiving on Saturday. This, despite the fact that Abraham Lincoln's 1863 proclamation calling for a national day of thanksgiving was pretty much directed at my ancestors who had a habit of scheduling their thanksgiving to conflict with other holidays which were popular in the middle part of the 19th century in America — like Administrative Professionals Day (known then as "Secretary's Day) and Yom Kippur .

An excerpt from Lincoln' proclamation:

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People (the WHOLE American people, that means you, you crazy Raymonds you). I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part (especially Massachusetts and especially Wrentham Massachusetts)of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them (you know who I'm talking about) that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness (I'm talking to you Auntie Neil) and disobedience, blah, blah, blah.

Sometimes, just randomly our family's Thanksgiving fell on the last Thursday of November, until Thanksgiving 2003, when cousin Sam stood up in the middle of dinner after a few glasses of hard cider, threw a blueberry muffin at my grandmother's head and slurred "I have a proclamation...I proclaim that from this day forward the last Thursday of November shall be known as 'Abraham Lincoln is a dick day, ' and we're gonna have our Thanksgiving on frickin' Saturday."

It is funny that Lincoln's proclamation from earlier that same year never caught on as well as Thanksgiving — the one calling for "a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer." Can't figure that one out. Americans love holidays that call for not eating and not buying a ton of crazy crap. That's why they're so thin and have piles of money in their savings accounts.



I'm out of time, guess I will never get to explain the title of this post or talk about the great ride Miriam, my brother-in-law and I had on Thanksgiving.

100 Times Faster Than Me

Bacon Egg And Cheese on a Boston Cream Donut Challenge Total = $10.69

Thanks to Charlie for the sixty-nine cents.

See, now if you donate, as an added perk, I will link to your blog and you will experience "the Big Bikes bump." How do you think Fat Cyclist, Bike Snob, Perez Hilton, The Huffington Post, and Dicky got their starts? — The Big Bikes bump, that's how. Somehow since I initially gave Fat Cyclist that bump he has increased his traffic to 100 times that of Big Bikes.

If blogging were a race I would be a HUGE loser. When it comes to mountain bike racing, even the very best riders in the country are only about twice as fast as me. Just twice as fast. If I were a fisty-fighting-wrasslin' type guy, that would be like me taking on a 340 lb. dude (that's right, I weighed in at a solid 170 lbs. today...and we haven't even hit Thanksgiving and Christmas yet). But if Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski were 100 times faster than me...I'd probably quit this sport and take up competitive eating.

Just like an NPR fund drive, the sooner you go click that donate button (sidebar, upper right) the sooner I shut up about The Bacon Egg and Cheese on a Boston Cream Challenge. Shut up about how I'm going to make a helmet cam video of the ordering process and then subtitle it.


Sponsor Thank you: GARY FISHER.

I honestly believe Fisher had the 29er geometry thing worked and dialed out before anyone, and they continue to produce the best handling 29ers on the market. The release of the Superfly Single-Speed frameset in 2010 is HUGE. I don't know how many people asked me about where they could get a Superfly SS. I had to tell them that I wasn't special, that my shop sent me to Trek World so I was lucky enough to get offered a deal on a bike which didn't exist. I had been drooling over Jesse's bike for a year. It was literally a dream come true. There might not be luck in bike racing, but there's definitely luck in bike-getting. Things are moving forward with Fisher going into 2010 and I'm looking forward to spending another season atop a carbon fiber-gleaming-black-death-machine. Thanks Fisher!


In Ice Weasels news. We're up to 52 Pre-registered riders. This is a problem, I'm beginning to get worried about all that FREE BEER Harpoon is donating. So stop telling people how fun this event was last year or we might not have enough FREE BEER to go around. What? I'm not advertising that we've got FREE BEER. I'm telling people NOT to come and drink all the FREE BEER. How the hell could you possibly describe that as advertising?

Bryan, Kevin (the guy who needs to update his damn blog and tell us how he went about killing it at the Lowell Cross race Saturday), and I were down in Wrentham today, doing a little prep with help form Christy and Chris from White Barn Farm. We put a bench cut in where last year we had a bumpy, precipitous drop. We put a BERM in where once there was only a pile of uninteresting dirt. There will be a few less twisty turns this year (we had a few to spare) and some more straightaway (but not too much). Ultimately, no matter what we do, the race will be 90% more horrible and you should skip it and let me, Colin, and Kevin sit around drinking all the FREE BEER by ourselves while watching a live Webcast of Cross Nats.

And now...Ice Weasels Course Prep photos.

Or what? You'll release the dogs?
Or the bees?
Or the dogs with bees in their mouth
and when they bark they shoot bees at you?

-Homer

Bees. We have added Africanized Killer Bees to the course. You'll be OK, just don't cause any vibration around their hive. Or breath loudly. Or sweat. They love sweat. They want to lick it up...then sting you to death when they are finished.

And we added a bench cut descent to cut down on injury and death. We have to make sure you're nice and safe...so the bees can get you. We have a deal with the bees. It's us or you.



Bryan packed some stuff down with the big-ass heavy roller. Kevin and the dog with the bees in its mouth survey their work. Farm Bike Yeah! And Farm Bike takes the plunge.

Chris moves some leaves to make for more course options. Bryan and Kevin gesticulate wildly and make chimpanzee noises at Chris (somehow he deciphered their gibberish and sculpted a great berm with the tractor). Me and Kevin fine-tune the BERM. Bryan takes a run at the berm well on a big farm bike YA!

Mis-re-direction and Sponsor Thank you #1

The main story is over on the 29er Crew Blog today. Did a write up of my Bay Circuit Trail scouting mission yesterday and posted some photos, RIGHT HERE.

The above photo is from the NYCMTB Highbridge Classic from earlier this summer. It was one of the highlights of the season for me, riding with Jurgen Beneke and all that. The shot was taken by Roger from Spectrum Imaging and I think it stands out in the realm of event photos. These are true, dynamic action shots with an eye for composition. Not your average "Hey look at me, I'm on a bike...in a field...with my race number fully visible to make for easier cataloging" shots. God forbid the photographer should have to go out in the woods and risk getting a frickin' mosquito bite while taking a decent action shot. I almost never buy event photos, but I bought this one and some others from Spectrum.

Sponsor Thank You.

International Bicycle Center. They are my employer and my sponsor. Unlike some other bike shops where "everybody works all the time," IBC is good about giving their employees the time to race. I probably get too much time to race, if they said no to my insane schedule requests once in a while I might be less crazed. They are responsible for connecting me to Fisher and for the furnishing of the parts which grace my bike. They are an awesome shop with great sales and service staff. Thanks IBC!

And in other gastronomically appalling news: we are 10% of our way toward the goal of raising $100 for the Bacon Egg & Cheese on a Boston Cream Challenge. The entire 10% was donated by a generous philanthropist who probably wants me to eat the thing so I just get more fatter and more slower so he can beat up on me some more next season. That donate button is still over there on the right sidebar, I even moved it up so it's easier to locate. If we don't start making progress toward the goal soon I may have to up the ante.

Heading out to see about building a BERM for the Ice Weasels course tomorrow AM. We've got tractors, ex-military personnel, and computer programmers coming out to consult on the project. The only member of our course design team (besides Rooter) who couldn't make it was the Techno Viking. More on that maybe Wednesday. Not Techno Vikings, The Ice Weasels...more on the Ice Weasels.

P.S. - I've added links to the Blogs, Trogs, and Glogs list. The only way I could make that work was to limit the list to 25. It's not organized by any kind of favoritism based hierarchy; it's ordered by most recently updated (as it was before). I don't use one of them consarned RSS readers. The only way I know if people have updated is from that list. Primitive.