not bad at all...

A flurry, I guess. Not sure where the week went.

Got a new bike. Er, frame I mean. "...and why do you need another bike?" you ask. "dude... shut up" I say. Had parts around so I only had to buy a couple things - stem and brake levers, maybe some pedals in the future. Haven't exactly "finished" it - still intend to make it a fixed-gear, but need to decide on a hub. In the meanwhile it's a singlespeed that I took for a ride last night, and it's kind of fun. It's really quiet... kind of eery.

It's Burns Night tonight over at Andre's. Looking forward to it - not only was it fun last year, but it marks something of an anniversary. It was at that party a year ago where I met a lot of people that, in the time since, I've come to call good friends. There'll be haggis (veggie, but I hope someone makes some of the real stuff), Scotch (duh), and the poetry of Mr. Burns. Who doesn't love centuries-old scottish poetry that includes such chart-toppers as "Ode to a Haggis"? I'll be bringing some variations on Rita's Rum Cake (recipe below) - one traditional, and one fucked-with. As in, with different stuff in it - chocolate and cherries. And then there'll be the testers made with 12 year-old Isle of Islay Scotch instead of rum. We'll see how those turn out. I'm verrrry curious.

Bought a BOB trailer today from Ben. It's a Yak trailer, but I don't plan on taking it to the coffee shop like the dude in the BOBgear ad. (And I'm sure as hell not going to sip coffee out of a silly-shaped cup like that, either.) I was thinking something a little more blue-skies-and-scenic-vistas.

Ran the re-use/thrift/gauntlet today searching in vain for a proper pepper mill. One with a crank that sticks out. Not a knob that you twist - a crank that you spin. When I want to grind pepper into something I'm cooking, I want it now, and I want a bunch of it. And twist-twist-twist/squeeze-squeeze-squeeze isn't doing it for me. The Re-Use Center, which is right down the street from the PTO thrift store, which is right down the street from the Salvation Army store, poses a tough problem for folks like me that can find something to do with this, that, or another thing (or at least think we can). Everything seems like a good idea. But I know that I don't have room or follow-through enough for everything, so I restrained myself. Pretty wacky place, that Salvation Army. Huuuuge place. Tons of clothes, all seemingly in pretty good condition. Grey flannel suit for $8? Sure, why not. I realized my eyes were too big and my apartment too small, so I put shoes to pavement and left empty-handed.

Tomorrow's the Worst Day of the Year Ride, and we have some snow, so that's appropiate for the day. Monday is the Bike Ypsi meeting and the logo competition. Tuesday, I think I'll go to Arizona - Matt has an extra bedroom down at the proving grounds and extended the invite, so who am I to refuse a place to sleep and recreate where there's sunshine and shorts weather? And, I get to check in with the desert (howyadoin'?). Ride the bike a bit. Tromp around in the wild. Let the sun shine on in and have my skin make me some Vitamin D.

While the continuing list of not-bad-at-all things extends all the way down to the Rita's Rum Cake Recipe, in the meantime there's this surprisingly effective sitar rendition of a tune we all know and... uhm... well, we all know it, right?

Rum Cake
4 eggs
1 box yellow cake mix
1 pkg french vanilla instant pudding
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup dark rum (maybe 1/3 or 1/2 cup if you want)
1/2 cup chopped pecans or walnuts

Rum Sauce
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
1/4 (or 1/2) cup dark rum

Grease a bundt cake pan VERY well and sprinkle nuts into the bottom of the bundt cake pan. Mix the ingredients and pour over the nuts. Bake directly on the oven rack at 325 for 45 minutes.

Combine the ingredients for the rum sauce and bring to a boil. After the cake is done, pierce the top of it with a toothpick or fork or whatever you've got, and pour the sauce over the cake.

Important: Let sit for at least 2 hours before turning it out of the pan. Then call your cardiologist and make a reservation before tucking into this cake. Because you seriously just used 2 (or more if you're adventurous) sticks of butter (not margarine, you sissy) in this and will probably have a second piece of cake each time. What were you thinking? Ah, well it's good, isn't it?

the question that won't go away

Exactly when did I eat corn?

No, seriously. I don't remember eating corn. But yesterday I looked down, and there it was. Today I look down, and there it is again. I must be sleep-eating or something.

Was I abducted and the corn implanted?

I'm blaming the reptoids.

the making of sausage

There's those old sayings about making sausage - about how, like laws, you shouldn't learn what goes into it or how it's made. About how much less attractive it is the more you know about it.

Well, it seems I (metaphorically) don't agree. I mean, I know that politics and law are complicated and thorny bits, but the more I learn about my local government, the more intrigued I am. Lots of people get turned off the by the amount of bureaucracy and red tape that goes into even local government. I, for one, am ok with it.

It's easy to lean back on one's Libertarian Lounger or Republican Rocker or Democrat Davenport and snipe about the waste of time and energy and money that goes into government. Bound to special interests, lazy, corrupt, shallow, whatever you want to call them.

But here in Ann Arbor, I'm left with the overall feeling of a fairly well-run city. Sure, there's rough spots here and there, but that's the nature of compromise. And like the old saying goes: a decision that satisfies everyone's needs, but makes no one happy, is probably the fairest compromise possible.

No one gets exactly what they want, so everyone is unhappy in at least one way or the other. But that also likely means that it compromise serves the needs of the largest number of people.

Make no mistake - governing/government is a perpetual exercise in compromise (unless you live in a totalitarian dictatorship, incendiary criticism about the Bush administration ignored for now). It wasn't until recently that I saw the elbow grease/dirty fingernails of the workings of that at the Parks Advisory Commission meeting a couple weeks ago. The point of going was to show support for the Ann Arbor Skate Park, but watching the rest of the meeting was... interesting. It would seem that decisions made have reasons, and data to back them up (go figure!). Proposals in front of even modest groups like the Parks Advisory Commission still get bounced back when there's no data to support claims. There were multiple times I heard comments, criticism, discussion from commission members that showed that they did indeed have the interest of park users, taxpayers, and the future welfare of all of the city in mind.

Yes, I know... that's what they're supposed to do. I shouldn't be surprised when it happens. But still - it's nice to see that it actually happens in real life.

helllooo out there in TV land...

Well, not having had anything to rant about for a while, I guess I'm overdue. Today's topic of annoyance: morning TV culture.

I had the uhm... opportunity... today to sit in a waiting room while a friend went to to the doctor, and the waiting room TV had some apparently typical morning programming on. Regis and whoever, or Dr. Phil, or who knows what. I couldn't see it, just hear it, and I have to say that I was really kind of amazed at how much of it is essentially a full-length commercial. Commercials for other TV shows (with clips of the previous day's TV shows), promotion of fucked-up body image stereotypes, telling you who to trust and how to spend your money, accentuation of unnecessary anxieties. It's torturous. I don't know how people can watch it. And no, I'm not ranting from the high-and-mighty holier-than-thou perspective of the TV-free. I'm just reacting as someone who hasn't adopted this into their life. If it's not already something you do all the time, it is a weird-assed thing to see the constant performance of fake laughter.

Hours and hours of labor, millions of dollars worth of equipment to bounce a signal back and forth to satellites, all of it about... nothing. No wonder it's just one big ad.

It gets me all twitchy.

before I put it back on the shelf...

It's somehow appropriate for the weather - finish a book about the desert, and 6 inches of snow fall on Michigan. Just finished reading Edward Abbey's book Desert Solitaire. Abbey is controversial all by himself. In wilderness preservation radicalism, he's the arche-, proto- and stereotype. He maintained unflinching views of what wilderness is and should be, and wasn't hesitant to say what he meant. And while his politics developed over the years to be even more controversial, this book stays more or less in the desert.

Some of it flits by in graceful imagery "I was still young myself, or thought I was, enjoying good health, not quite to the beginning of the middle of the journey," and some of it becomes clunky, overstated, and absurd "Civilization is mutual aid and self-defense; culture is the judge, the lawbook and the forces of Law and Ordure; Civilization is uprising and insurrection, revolution; culture is the war of state against state..."

But before I start sounding like an armchair book-jacket copy writer - some of the things that caught my attention or got me nodding.

On Wilderness and Parks, Accessibility, and Roads

"What about children? What about the aged and infirm? Frankly, we need to waste little sympathy on these two pressure groups. Children too small to ride bicycles and too heavy to be borne on their parent's backs need only wait a few years... The aged merit even less sympathy: after all they had the opportunity to see the country when it was still relatively unspoiled... "

"A man on foot, on horseback, or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles. Those who are familiar with both modes of travel know from experience that this is true; the rest have only to make the experiment to discover the same truth for themselves."

On Population and Water (particularly in the West and California):

"Water, water, water... There is no shortage of water in the desert, but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, or water to sand, insuring that wide, free , open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities... There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be."

On Population:

"It will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. This is true. Unless a way is found to stabilize the nation's population, the parks cannot be saved. Or anything else worth a damn."

In a section about the Navajo, he makes a point applicable to broader populations

"In the long run, their economic difficulties can only be solved when and if out society as a whole is willing to make an honest effort to eliminate poverty. By honest effort, as opposed to the current dishonest effort with it's emphasis on phoney social services which benefit no one but the professional social workers, I mean a direct confrontation with the two actual basic causes of poverty: (1) too many children and... (2) too little money... Social justice in this country means social surgery - carving some of the fat off the wide bottom of the American middle class."

It's something I keep coming back to over and over. Overpopulation. Why are we humans consuming ever more and more energy? Creating more and more garbage? There's this competition to out-breed other religions (the real motivation behind Roman Catholic bans on condoms, etc.), out-breed other cultures, out-breed other nations. We're guilty of the shortsighted inconsiderate greed of believing that we are right and everyone else is wrong. Whether it's neighbors, cities, nations, or entire cultures. We might see the effect and want for a better world, but we need to act our beliefs and not just give it lip service. Not succumb to the gleeful Fuck Yeahs of the Biggest Lawnmower On The Block, or Shiniest Granite Countertops, or Little League MVP. And where does that all come from? Conformance to an image of an ideal our parents or grandparents were sold while they weren't watching. We need to not be afraid to be who we are - who we were before we let someone else convince us to be ashamed of ourselves for not being like them. Whether that's buying a Toyota Prius, or breeding buckets of children.

And lastly, while I'm an amateur careerist navel-gazer, some observations are refreshingly familiar

".. my theory is that solipsism, like other absurdities of the professional philosopher, is a product of too much time wasted in library stacks between the covers of a book, in smoke-filled coffeehouses and conversation-clogged seminars. To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealists all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he's a liar. His logic may be airtight but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic."

Dominic Wilcox

Some good pieces I like, but can't remember how I found... check out Switch, War Bowl ... heck, Ivy Shelf would be pretty easy to do at home.

alternatives in time for the holidays

From Sabrina Abbott, via McSweeney's: alternatives to "... and they lived happily ever after."

And they barely tolerated each other.

And they stayed together because of the kids.

And their contempt for one another occasionally spilled over at family gatherings, prompting moments of uncomfortable silence.

And they expressed their unhappiness through passive-aggressive toilet-seat positioning.

on what planet?

Spats are back. Apparently. According to some. A tip o' the helmet to BikeSnobNYC for not only the continuing chuckles at the expense of hipster-diculousness, but the timely fashion news.

Some years ago in a store I saw spats on some basketball shoes, but I thought it might have just been a momentary blip in the Footlocker Fashion. Apparently they made their way into football too.

Sheesh. When the High School marching band uniform had spats included, I sure wish I had scammed me a pair. I'd be stylin' now. Fo' sho'.

just because

I can't remember where I saw this, but it seemed pithy enough that I wrote it down... if only now I could remember.

"Congress does not pay attention to the NRA because they are full of wisdom, they pay attention because the NRA is full of money, influence, and trouble."

For some reason, it's the "trouble" part of it that I like. Maybe because I don't have money or influence like the NRA does, but I'm full of trouble. Makes me feel like if I just work a little bit harder at being a prickly curmudgeon I could make Congress pay attention to me.

...alright, maybe I'll need the money and influence first.

because it's there?

Why do we create? I mean, as a species.

I look back to this summer while backpacking out in the desert and the encounter and small talk with the lone German Tourist on the trail. She had a wooden flute with her. It's clear it was her self-defense flute. When crossing paths with strangers far from civilization, apparently having a cudgel (musical or otherwise) at hand gives some comfort. But let's assume that she didn't carry it around solely for self-defense. Assume for the moment that she was hiking in the wilderness without water, food or extra gear. Shorts, T-shirt, sneakers, flute, camera. She wasn't planning on staying overnight.

So she consciously packed her flute. To play it out in the desert. Why? What does that mean to her? She's the only one who will hear her. And she's not the only one . There are visual artists or writers who never exhibit or publish in their lifetime. Their works are found only after their death.

"It's just a part of the human spirit - to create" is too easy an answer. To what end do we do? If we have free will, that conflicts with compulsion by some extra-corporal forces like environmental/evolutionary pressures to create art. If it were some complex form of sub-/pre-/meta- mating ritual performance, the solo artist would be an evolutionary dead end. It would have been eliminated from our genetic repertoire long ago.

It is an act of anthropological vandalism? Make a mark on the world to prove we were here. Not wanting to feel alone in the world. For some taggers, spray paint on a boxcar that travels across the country takes them to places they never otherwise would go. For some breeders, their children are the "me I never was".

On the desert trail, rock cairns mark trails, but when you come across an alcove filled with them, it's not just marking the path. It's a statement. The first cairn marked a path. The second one wasn't redundant - is said "Kilroy was here". After the 20th or 30th, maybe it becomes a competition. Creation as a competitive act?




Or is it just boredom? Too simple there, too. Sure, in boredom, idle tapping can become a rhythm, a beat, a song. Doodles become an image. But the intentional, planned, staged effort of sculpture or performance? That's not boredom. Boredom with the addition of a competitive streak, evolved beyond its source or origins, maybe.

I don't get it... I usually get off things like that

No surprising admission here - I use Wikipedia. I use it, you use it, he/she/it uses it, we use it, they use it, they use it. In the nature of giving back to the community, I figured I'd do a little work for them, and along the way, maybe learn something new. Particularly, I wanted to have an excuse to learn/use Inkscape. (I gushed over GIMP, but it isn't a tool for vector graphics manipulation. Which I have occasion to do. And Inkscape is, like GIMP, pretty good at it. Again... full-featured, open source/free, multi-platform, etc.) To kill two birds with one stone, I'll learn a bit about Inkscape, do something with what I learned, then learn a little about Wikipedia contributions and then do something with what I learned.

Along the way creating/uploading derivative work I want to be sure I'm attributing properly and editing/linking cleanly in Wikipedia, and thus I find myself in a morass of legalese and wikitext/links that baffle my normally tenaciously inquisitive mind. (I mean, we're talking about a bloke (me) who willingly spent hours digging through web pages and on the phone to figure out exactly how to know whether you're standing on federally/publically-owned land, or if you're on Billy-Joe-Jim-Bob's little patch of privately-owned meth lab heaven.)

Most of the time my overanalysis nit-picking engine kicks in and I can't be disengaged without a pry bar. But the Wikicheese just is too much. I took the easy way out. Made a good faith effort, stuck the new image up, think I covered everything and I'm done. Usually figuring out the "right" way to do something, especially when firmly embedded in the morass of bureaucracy, is something I engage in and relish for relishing's sake. What happened to me?

Am I losing my overanalysis fetish? Hopefully it's just a temporary thing. What would my navel do without me to gaze at it?

new for the ears and the toes

Been having a hard time with descriptions... trying to pick out words that describe well (but not tritely or predictably) this band I saw Wednesday at TC's for She Bang night... The Shondes The best I can come up with? I felt ridden hard and put away wet.

Sure, the music reviewers have compared them to Sleater-Kinney and Rasputina, and while they've got hints of those, (if Sleater-Kinney had richer instrumentation, if Rasputina didn't have the goth/vintage aesthetics) they're definitely themselves.

Bassist/frontwoman Solomon has a huuuge voice - a big hand that grabbed on and shoved into my head in about 3 seconds. Punchy, full... niiice.

Georgina (who speaks from the experience of having been to lots and lots and lots of shows) commented "she sounds great, but there's no way she can keep that up the entire set." ... which Solomon then went and did, and then some. Sure, it was a school night and not a long set, but .... damn.

I could say more here gushing on and on, but I'll just stop after saying that they're my latest most delicious new ear thing. Check 'em out... they have two songs on their myspace page. "Let's Go" is not exactly they best example - the live show and the CD are better represented by "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow".

Better yet, go see 'em live. In St. Paul, MN this Sunday, Dec. 2 and in Portland, OR Dec. 8 next weekend.

"everything?" "Everything." - redux (amended)

There a saying out in The Land - one I generally ascribe to: "Everything Is Better With Bacon - Including Bacon." I've espoused the merits and pleasure of bacon before, and I'll do it again...

For my birthday celebration recently, Ypsipearl got me (along with the Stone 11th Anniversary Ale) a Vosges gourmet chocolate bar. A BACON chocolate bar. I'd been holding off for just the right opportunity to crack it open and have some nibblin's, and that day was today. And no, I have no idea why I held off this long.

Well, the verdict is in: everything IS better with bacon. Including chocolate. Granted, some of the delightful pleasure has to do with the bonus inclusion of some smoke-flavored salt in the chocolate, but I'll give it an unrestrained thumbs-up in general.

As for the Stone 11th Anniversary Ale, it's big, roasty, a little sweet, and with a medium linger. Leans towards a Scotch Ale on the nose and tongue but not as sweet, tangy like a black beer, and a little heady. Good thing I don't need my car keys to get to my couch tonight.

... mmm, nummers.

Everything Better With Bacon Amendment (EBWBA) - talking with Daye at Punkin Fest, the notion of a bacon Immersion Garnish in a cocktail might not be the best idea. The bacon would probably get soggy and the salt would disappear. But if the bacon isn't IN the cocktail, maybe just a twist on the rim or something, then it would be OK... right?

driving while _____ing

Came across this tidbit, which had a couple thought nuggets associated...
- It's not the hands that are to blame when drivers crash/wreck/kill because they were on the phone. It's that they are distracted from the spatial reasoning required to pilot a vehicle because they are engaging the verbal centers of their brain. The distraction is because of the conflict in attention, not because their hands are occupied. And if you think it's easy to synthesize motor skills and language centers, try rubbing belly/patting head while simultaneously memorizing a few sentences of written text. You can do one or the other effectively, but both of them only poorly.
-The study is inherently flawed... they were studying the first driver stopped at a line of cars at an intersection. Only the first one. Stopped. At an intersection. If you want to see what people are doing while driving, it should be...(wait for it...) ... While They Are Driving. [sheesh] You know... like in the middle of the block. Of course people unwrap their burgers or dial their phones or sort their playlists when they get to a stop light. They aren't driving. They're stopped.
- A good point or two... that hands-free kits aren't the solution to anything (other than to boost flagging sales of hands-free kits). They free up your hands so you can drive, talk on the phone, masturbate AND eat at the same time.

Been away a while with the Cranksgiving, but now that's over. Back to the regular shenanigans. Check out xkcd:

gushing over _____ today

I'm not much of a photo/graphic manipulator/maker myself, but I do always like to keep my eye out for good tools.

Sometime you want photo tweaking, sometime you want vector graphics creation, sometimes you want a universal translator to turn those EPS files into JPGs. There's times when you want CAD-like functionality without the CAD overhead. Times when MS Paint just doesn't do the trick. Times when iPhoto sucks (almost all the time).

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I recommend... The GIMP.

I've known about it for a while, but haven't yet had to reason/opportunity to play with it. While the interface is a little unfamiliar and overall conceptual structure takes a little adjusting to, it's a fantastic piece of software. Especially when you consider that it's free. Yes, Free. No guilty complex about that copy of PhotoShop that you "borrowed" from the office or "are evaluating" way past the trial period. It's got tons of capabilities, and it's cross-platform and multi-lingual, so Mac/Windows/Linux zealots don't have anything to bitch about. The UI layout is consistent across OSes (unlike Mac apps on Win or Win apps on Mac).

I'm not going to lie to you... in order to do even medium-complexity stuff, you have to get used to the concepts of layers, paths, channels, and selection masks, which can be a little strange. But once you're beyond that, it's pretty sweet. Keyboard shortcuts, scripting features... etc. etc. I could go on, but you should give it a try yourself.

busy boy

Haven't been posting much lately - been spending that time working on getting Cranksgiving organized. I'll be sure to rant and blather more soon, mmmkay?

Cranksgiving Ann Arbor

Alrightey folks, it's ON.

Come one, come all to Cranksgiving... bring your bike, a bag, some cash, and a lock (helmet be a good idea too) and come on out.

Rain/shine/snow there'll be prizes in all sorts of categories and probably some sort of raffle - everyone has a chance at winnin's.

how sadly ironic

I help out with a local volunteer organization called Neighborhood Senior Services. The crux of the organization is to have volunteers to help seniors who live in their own homes with minor tasks (grocery shopping, help around the house, etc.) and in the case of those who are single, widowed, widowers, or otherwise living alone, provide some companionship in the form of coming by for an occassional visit. Basically, a Senior Citizen version of Big Brother/Big Sister.

So the irony here... I'm taking this very nice lady to the eye doctor for outpatient laser surgery (15 minute procedure... for surgery! wacky.) I wheel her into the opthamology office, take her up to the desk, and after talking with the receptionist, she's handed the check-in paperwork that has medical release blahblahblah at the bottom in fine print.

WTF? This lady who is obviously 80+ years old, with imperfect eyesight, who IS HERE FOR SURGERY TO IMPROVE HER VISION, is supposed to be able to read the fine print? Are you kidding me?

Among my many gripes with our health care system is the clickwrap (or contract of adhesion) that applies to the fine print. You agree to give up all claims of liability, and permit the health care megaplex to do whatever they want with your personal information, or else they won't touch you with a ten foot pole. Same goes for credit card companies, cell phone service providers, ISPs (you know, those "addendums" you get in the mail that change the terms and conditions of your service plan every month).

But seriously, folks... I can understand when people who are able to read the fine print choose not to be bothered by it, but giving fine print to a woman whose vision is poor and is seeking surgery to correct it? And expecting her to just sign it? She signed it, but obviously had no idea what it read.

Does this bother anyone else? It bugs me, that's for sure.

it's wednesday already, ain't it...

Yesh. Overdue happenings. Action-packed weekend.

Start with a trip out to Grand Rapids for the IMBA trail school thingie. Pretty cool, actually. For 3 hours they talked about all kinds of things like Fall Lines, Grade Reversals, Outslope, and los of other stuff. Making good trails and trail systems to ride bikes on, that last a long time, that are copacetic with hikers and equestrians, don't need much maintenance... and are fun to ride on. Gotta say, those Trail Care Crew folks have a pretty cool job. Drive back and forth across the country showing people how to build trails, and along the way getting to ride all those trails too.

So the presentation is over, and they lunch gets put out on tables, but I have to bail because I've got a 2 hour drive back before PunkinFest, and I head out to the parking lot. Realizing that I left some swag inside, I go back, and when I walk out again, there's a couple people on the way in from the parking lot chatting near the sidewalk. Double take. Triple take. Holy shit... that's... that's... I know who she is, but brain not working... I just watched Off Road To Athens last week, and she's an Olympian and a pro and National Champ, and World Champ and an ass-kicker and .... I was caught so off-guard I could not think of her name. GAH. It escaped me. I felt ashamed, but I managed to eek out a starstruck "uhm, Hi. you're... uhm... pretty cool." She's there with her husband and a friend and asks if I know these trails, and of course I'd never been there before today, so I feel sillier, even.

In the car 2 minutes later, names come easy: Allison Dunlap. I'm such a dweeb. Apparently she's in town because her husband's family lives nearby, so visiting and all. Anyway, so that's my star-sighting/feeling like a dork moment for the month.

So then I drive back to AA in time to get a quick disco nap before heading out to Pete & Wendy's PunkinFest (Barn Christening) Party. Good times, there. Tons of food, drink, and merriment. Union Pulse was going to Canada for a gig, but got turned back at the border, so they came to the barn instead and played a set for the partiers. After the live music, some 80's tunes made their way into the audio and Brooke and Shawn were killin' it on the dance floor with their mad breakdance extravaganza. Yes, they have skills.

So as all good parties should have, there was the starting of the fire (camp-, not barn-) and the gathering there-round. And then Garth gets out his spears, sets up a couple pumpkins, and while I never would have predicted it, apparently throwing spears at pumpkins is a crowd-pleasing activity. It went long into the night. And while those pumpkins 30 ft away were fairly safe for most of the time, a couple people did indeed hit them. You'd think it's easy, but spear-tossin' (accurately) is pretty tough. Drinkin' and sittin' by campfire rounded out the evening, and then off to bed.

Sunday... well, Sunday is turning out to be a regular gig... the local boys from the couple of alleycats I've been to have been gathering on Sunday afternoons for bike polo. Fun, that be.

So Matt and I met up for some trail riding beforehand just because, and then looped back to the park where people were starting to gather. The other Matt brought mallets and stuff, the cones came out, and the hijinks ensued. After a couple times trying it, I'm starting to notice some subtleties. I wouldn't go so far as to say strategy or tactics or anything like that, but I can see some normal patterns of play now. When it comes to ball-handling style, there's dribblers, long-bombers, blockers, sharp-shooters, all kinds of strengths. All I know at the moment is that if I have the ball, I'm the dribbling, between the legs, tongue-out-Jordan-style, take-it-to-the-hole type. I can't make a long shot to save my life, but I'll juke a muthafucka all day like some Harlem Globetrotters ('n' shit, yo).

Pete seemed to take the hockey enforcer style, using his charging and coaster-brake cruiser skids and rattling chain guard to intimidate the dudes on the shiny fixies. Gotta say, if you love a bike too much, don't bring it to polo. Silly shit happens. Low speed crashes, multi-bike entanglements, and dudes like me happen too (if I'm rubbing wheels with someone while scrabbling for the ball, my wheel pushing on theirs in the hope of forcing them to put a foot down... is a good strategy).

But in the end, Pete was getting ridiculous with his bullying and no one would take him on. The best thing I could do for my team was to share my elbows with him, and going for the ball on the breakaway was a good excuse. Didn't even get near the ball, just putting him into the grass was what was needed. Sorry Pete, but you bring that cheese, you're gonna get the shoulder every time.

Last night (tues) was the Halloween alleycat, and while it wasn't freezing, I did get a little chilly. G came out and staffed a checkpoint, but realized that there's stretches of boring in that - and didn't bring a book or anything. I raced and had a modest 10th, but I'm gonna blame the fact that one checkpoint wasn't set up or visible when I got to it (I had to go back and do it later). Probably was there, I'm just whining. Had a bad case of the Post Hard Riding Coughing afterwards, but whatever.

Ok. mmph.

All I got right now. Happy Halloween, y'all.