Look Ma, No Bike #4 Who needs an anvil anyway?

Really not sure when Homie Fall Fest is going down this year, and my liver would like for my brain to remain ignorant of the date, but my heart says it would be awesome cool to see something like this down at the River Bottoms.

With the age of steel frames and cotter-pin cranks a thing of the past, who needs an anvil anymore anyway?

Also this: When, where, and why is the World Anvil Shooting Championship?

CX References

Yikes! A week has gone by, and in the meantime we had some fun at the Wirth "Classic" Cyclocross race, didn't we? Not sure what makes it classic, other than the fact that it was the 2nd Annual (though Geno tells me there used to be a semi-regular outlaw cross race there back in the day), that the course made zero use either of the annoying new paved path running through the heart of our beloved singletrack, nor the singletrack, that it contained three too many 180-degree hairpins in loose hummus (or was it babaganoush?) that the roadies simply could not negotiate, but geeze I sound like I'm complaining, when in fact it was an awesome good time, and a fun challenge -- especially the stairclimb up out of Bareass Beach, which finally made me feel like my absurdly long stair repeats at MHaHa make some sense. To top all of that, I finished about mid-pack (granted, in the C race for biggest loser) and that's more soothing to my fragile ego than finishing last in the B race, plus racing for 30 minutes -- while admittedly being totally gay -- was awesome. Plus, most excellent ride Miss KellyMack.

That all said, I wanted to post this funny Times typo. Given Michi Kakutani's vicious nose-holding flush of Jon Lethem's new novel "Chronic City," it seemed a most delicious Freudian slip. Bye Bye, indeed. When will we see another novel as good as Fortress of Solitiude, or even Motherless Brooklyn? I mean, I was willing to forgive "You Don't Love Me Yet" as a placeholder, but it looks like Lethem is well past sophomore slump with nothing to show for it.



I do feel sorry for him. But I feel more sorry for myself, because Fortress was one of my favorite books of the last 10 years or so.

Dude looks a bit like Paul Westerberg, dunnee? Let's hope this nasty review doesn't drive him to the same level of agoraphobic underachievement.

(That would be mean, if it wasn't coming from an agoraphobic underachiever like myself.)

A whole new approach to breaking away

Pretty! And if you get lost at Ice Man, you can build a fire with it!

In honor of Pinchie's 25th High School Reunion....

Well, you know, this is about 20 years before the first Bailey Works messenger bags, so Charlie Chaplin can be forgiven for racking his — uh... laptop computer.




Do click on the image for full sized -- the copy is a priceless trip down memory lane (for us old farts who remember a time when amber 9" monitors and 256K of memory were fucking mint).

But this ad from a 1984 issue of the New Yorker strikes a perfectly anachronistic note. In 1984, Dutch-style commuter bikes with Brooks seats were about as culturally relevant as Charlie Chaplin was. Which is to say: Not at all. If IBM were trying to be totally hip they'd have put Boy George on a first-generation Rock Hopper.

Chuck Norris is cool. If you're an earthling

The cosmic soup, set to vocoder and tunez. Carl Sagan will get his revenge!

Think Carl was worried about whether or not anyone showed up to the race in Lycra? No fucking way!

• If Carl rode a bike, it was a Nishiki Cresta with a dark-matter basket on the front.
• Carl dated your mom, and he said she was post-doctoral but not, like, fellowship material.
• When Carl was a child, he carried the one-- a trillion digits.
• Carl met you in a parallel universe, and still kicked your ass on the NYTimes crossword.
• Carl's dog swam to the Galapagos Islands backwards, and ate a tour group of Creationists. When he shit them out, they became mild-mannered tortoises.
• Carl rode the first Dakota 50 and slept in Perry's yard. He rolled a joint with Strontium 235.
• Carl rode a tandem at the Chequamegon Fat Tire 40 this year, but the stoker was in 1995.
• Carl digs Gatorade and Clif bars, but he thinks Cytomax and Hammer Gel are "irrational."
• All of Carl's turtlenecks are New Zealand Merino, bitch.
• When Carl was born, your great-grandmother punched your great-grandfather for having shitty stupid sperm.
• God said Jesus could have the past, but Carl gets the future.
• The "Horsehead Nebula" was named after Carl's penis, which is roughly the same size.
• Carl has so many honorary degrees that the boiling point is now 230F
• .The Nobel people were so humiliated when they met Carl that they changed the name of their award to the Nobel Piece of Shit Prize.
• When Carl takes out his garbage, the Universe digs through it to try to figure out what he's all about.
• Carl's brain is so big that it's actually been declared the 10th planet in the solar system.

Add your Carl Sagan insights in the comments....

Cross Training Begins!

Just recieved: a tape of Pinchie's top-secret Cyclocross Training regimen, scheduled for Tuedays at Minnehaha park.

All I can say is: Dude, that's some pretty radical dryland training. But I think maybe you're confused about the whole mount/dismount thing. You need a bike for that.

The cause of -- and solution for -- all the world's cycling problems

With Chequamegon in the bag, the inevitable question comes up: Will you be crossing this year? First, I'll have to go into a longwinded soliloquy about how the Fat Tire 40 comes at a bad time in my natural cycle, how I'm on the backside of a good August, although this August wasn't that great either, and I'm just not sure whether I raced stupid, or whether I'm getting a lot slower for no obvious reason other than maybe pancreatic cancer or something (not to make light of serious health issues; quite the contrary, once you pass about 40, we're all hypochondriacs in direct proportion to the number of funerals we are obliged to attend). So with all that in mind -- suffering, pain, medication -- the Pinch Flat News Team brings you this delightful message from the makers of SKOL beer (courtesy of cveloca, thanks rogerson! Send more, you lazy duffer!)

Bike in A Box

Whoa! I almost let the week get away from me there, and we know what a slippery slope that can be. Anyway, earlier this week I was puking my guts out and pretty much crapping out all the liquid that used to be trapped in my cells, so now that I'm feeling a bit dried out, I can relate to you the following datum: Performance Bike, the mail order cycling supplier that I feel guilty about patronizing instead of my local bike shop, but fuck it I'm really lazy and occasionally just want to look at internet porn and buy a new drive train without even standing up to scratch my nuts... anyhoo! Performance Bike is launching a new campaign to capture holiday shopping for kids bikes. They'll send you a fully assembled bike in a box. What do you think they call that? Right! "Kids Bike In A Box," which reminds me vaguely of the Onion headline "Denny's new breakfast: Just A Big Bucket of Meat And Eggs." Now normally I'd be against such a thing. Patronizing the local bike shop is the thing! Mail order to someplace in freaking South Carolina, NOT the thing. BUT! If this means fewer clueless parents shopping the Dynacrap aisle at Target or Walmart, so much the better. AND! This is a wakeup call to the LBS. Why not carry more, better kid's bikes? Why not kick it up a notch and carry USED kids bikes? Huh? Huh???

What the nation needs is a whole lot of chamois butter

David Byrne is a freakish fellow and a bike nerd who's not afraid to talk about his testicles.

"Only once in a rare while have I had numb nuts," reveals David Byrne at the end of his new book, Bicycle Diaries. The observation happens in the most boring chapter, an appendix about padded shorts and bike safety.

And it's true. If your nuts are numb, you're probably riding your bike wrong. Or else you've been teabagging a bit too much.





And if you were freaked out by Frank Zappa in 1963, check out Led Zeppelin in 1957.

Mother of Invention

This is pretty creepy. A clean-shaven, crew-cut Frank Zappa. Playing the bicycle!

Watching this footage may well be what caused Zappa to come up with the title "Weasels Ripped My Flesh."

Sorry about the quality, but this is from a time when pictures were printed on thin sheets of highly flammable film, and then run through a machine with lightbulbs inside a "projector."

Hard to believe that in less than ten years, Frank would be singing, "Don't fool yourself, girl. It's going right up the poop shoot."

Bike Love

This is why you don't want to have your bike saddle up too high.

Or maybe you do.

Better safe than sorry: PR edition

SRAM is recalling a whole shit-heap of chains with its PowerLock masterlink, saying that the clever little link is susceptible to cracking on chains sold from March to August of 2009.

Pinchie just rebuilt his whole drive train, and he bought a SRAM chain, so I'm sure he's checking into this.

But so you're wondering: How and when does a company like SRAM decide to recall 25,000 chains? There have so far been four reports of a cracked masterlink.

I'm not sure about you, but I saw at least a dozen broken chains during the Dakota 50. That's undoubtedly about par for the course, and broken chains -- while they're a drag and can occasionally result in a streak of bad language, a bruised knee or an uncomfortable meeting of testicles and stem-- it's hardly one of the more catastrophic failures that a bike can suffer.

So a recall seems a bit zealous on the part of SRAM, but of course in this day and age you gotta stay ahead of the press and the negative publicity -- and the eventual golddigger who'll jump on a trend, blow a masterlink, and try to sue for a lifetime supply of Bugles.

If you're worried about your brand-new SRAM drivetrain, you can checkout the deets here.